Madness in Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy: Between the Breakdown of Identity and Survival

Abstract

This article examines the conception of madness in Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy through the lens of the structural limits of self-knowledge and the problem of personal identity. It argues that subjective identity lacks stable unity due to a constitutive split between what is apprehended through intellectual consciousness (Vorstellung) and what is immediately felt through the self-consciousness of the will (Selbstbewusstsein), the latter remaining inaccessible to representational cognition. Confronted with this limit, the continuity of the self is not given but constructed in the form of a narrative identity sustained by memory, which retrospectively organizes lived experience into a coherent temporal sequence. When memory fractures and loses its integrative function, the narrative coherence of the subject collapses, giving rise to madness. From this perspective, madness does not amount to a deficit of the understanding (Verstand), but rather to a pathological reconfiguration of memory under the primacy of the will (Wille), whose ultimate aim is the preservation of life. The article concludes with a bioethical reading that seeks to depathologize madness by interpreting it as an extreme strategy of survival in the face of otherwise intolerable suffering.