Presentation Too Mad To Be True Gent, 14-15 mei 2026
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sounds of silence
1. Fallling out of the Cogito
In this preliminary paragraph I will repeat with some different phrasings and accents the story I told in my book De overtocht: Filosofische blik op een psychose – a translation into English of the title would give The Crossing: Philosophical View on a Psychosis. What I want to describe is how, with what thoughts, I fell out of Descartes’ Cogito. This fall worked out as a psychotic launch of a long journey in which I – I can say now, having recently retired from working life – never seriously managed to return to the Cogito. At the end I will say a few things about how I see life in this state of affairs.
As in my book, I have to begin my story by mentioning the fact that I was a very talented student at high school. To deserve grade 9 for a mathematical exam to me was usually a disappointment. For math and the exact sciences I went for grade 10 and often got grade 10. I even once got to grade 11 when I managed to mathematically prove in a math exam that the input data were inconsistent. This being the smart guy also brought me to the idea that Descartes’ Cogito was incoherent. If you submit the Cogito to one of the most basic logical transformational rules it produces nonsense.1
Another genius that was very much on my mind in my early adolescence was Albert Einstein. Some of the other students sometimes said to me: in the future you’ll maybe refute Einstein’s Relativity Theory. If Einstein had discovered the 4th dimension, I might be the one who would discover the 5th dimension. The more I relished this vision of myself as a successful scientist, the more I got submerged in fearful thoughts about what this would mean – discovering the 5th dimension or something of the kind… If Einstein’s discovery had led to nuclear weapons, then my discovery would lead to something even more frightful than nuclear weapons. So I started wondering – if Einstein would have known what would become of his discovery on beforehand, would he still have pursued his intellectual quest? Would he have made it public? What would I have done if I had been in his place? And what will I do when the great moment of my scientific discovery will arrive in my life?
Ultimate truth in my mind became linked to global disaster, to apocalyptic outcomes. This linkage in me really started to set off when I wrote a short story about René Descartes. Descartes was a genius, he was a mathematician and had deep knowledge of logical transformations and of course, I assumed, he would have foreseen my counter-argument. Also he had a sense of ultimate truth and so what Descartes already had figured out down in the 17th century was the apocalyptic outcome of the quest for truth. In my story Descartes had an apocalyptic vision and chose to keep this secret, offering to the world, instead of his true vision, a silly, fallacious idea, in order to keep the ultimate insight hidden. This silly idea was the Cogito.
So, being still very young, and without substantial philosophical knowledge, I came to a position in which I did not believe in the Cogito, and had created a small fiction in which neither did Descartes. With Descartes I shared a metaphysical secret about the apocalyptic outcome of ultimate truth. My four-page story proclaimed me to be, in the final paragraph, a secret sharer. Descartes was a true visionary genius, he had foreseen the 4th dimension, he even had foreseen the more dangerous 5th dimension. The Cogito was a stupid little sophism he had thrown into the world to put mankind off track and any philosopher taking the Cogito was led off trail. This early adolescent bravado story may all still be funny – or not so if you don’t like it – but things really started to get eerie and irksome when I realized also Einstein was in the conspiracy. Suddenly I realized also Einstein had foreseen the 5th dimension and maybe he even knew how to present this truth in physical statements and mathematical formulae. But he had refrained from doing so for the very same reason Descartes had. And so know I knew the secret of the world: it contained five dimensions and only a few geniuses, me being one of them, knew.
A kind of logical exercise with the Cogito had brushed away my belief in this theorem, had also brushed away Descartes’s belief in the Cogito, had brushed away the Cogito as a serious philosophical statement and had delivered me to a group of inside geniuses who were terrified by apocalyptic visions and had to safeguard humanity by keeping the ultimate truth secret.
2. Doubt and grace
If psychosis is an attempt to incarnate in your own dreamworld, I must say it soon came out I could not sustain this phantasy of being part of an insider to a group geniuses. Also I want to emphasize it is incorrect to say I did design or concoct this phantasy: somehow it grew in my mind out of a number connections that could have value on their own. Being a secret sharer of a vision appealed to my desires – in The Crossing I employ the notion of Girard’s metaphysical desire to account for the energy drive that sustained and expanded my psychosis.2 I was in heaven now, and nobody was going to throw me out.
Within a couple of weeks my initial delusion spawned other, more strange delusions and the final outcome was a kind of descent into utter chaos from which I was delivered with the help of medicine. In the hospital, with my brain circuits having been slowed down to normal pace, I could start working on integrating all the strange memories of the past few months. Most of the psychic material of the middle and later phase of the psychosis I could just throw away, but as to my initial vision things were different.
In this process, the short story about Descartes – within the psychosis I had received a command to burn all my writings, and so the text of the story has gone into the fire – could return to the status of a mere fiction. I don’t know whether I myself came to believe in the Cogito again, but I certainly returned to the assumption that Descartes did. I did not know anything about the life of Descartes, and so if there was any sense in my fiction, I could take the time to find out
Many people who have gone through psychosis feel the urge to explain to the world and to themselves that there was ‘method in their madness’, that there were germs of genuine creativity and meaningful intuition. Many psychotics feel the urge to retrace their reasonings leading up to madness. The best example is probably Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and this cult novel also evokes the dangers of following this course. The more you are able to prove that your early psychotic ideas are valuable, the closer you get to becoming psychotic again.3
Apart from the trash belt of wild psychotic ravings in the later periods, a number of questions lingered on in my mind. What was the value of my refutation of the Cogito? Could it be worked out in a philosophical article? And what about my speculation about Einstein keeping things secret? In the last three decades of his life Einstein created thought experiments trying to disprove quantum mechanics. All the Gedankenexperimente proved to be mistaken. Why is there so little success in the second half of Einstein’s career? Was he hiding something? And if so, what was it?
The question about Einstein could also be raised to a more general level. Have there been scientists who had withheld their discoveries to the public? And here the answer must be positive. I think it is possible to write a History of Discoveries Kept Secret. Maybe such a history already exists. Maybe in history I could find a case that resembled my adventure with the 5th dimension. And if I was not able to find such a case, I still might gather enough material for writing a novel in the style of Dan Brown.
I certainly felt the lure to enter into an intellectual enterprise like that, but I did not dare do so. Frankly, I was afraid. I was following the advice psychiatrists had given me, keeping the diet psychiatrists had prescribed. Sleep well, don’t take drugs, develop your social life, try to find a girl, and keep it cool in intellectual space. Life can be satisfying without solving its secrets.
The fact that I did not start immediately retracing my thoughts did not necessarily mean I never would. Maybe I was just waiting and needed some time before venturing on a reexamination of my initial vision. After all, it had taken Robert Pirsig some fifteen years before he completed his novel. But before I seriously came to consider reentering these apocalyptic intuitions, a second crisis brought me close to a new psychosis, a crisis which was not a straightforward follow up of the first one, but a new adventure that nevertheless was somehow related. The starting point this time was C.I Dessaur’s The Dream of Reason.
The enormous appeal of this book is proof that I still had not found my way back to a secure and reliable Cogito. Dessaur’s is a lament on the narrowing of the view on humanity. Maybe she did not arrive at five dimensions but her complaints resonated with Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man.
About René Descartes Dessaur writes:
When Kant posed questions like ‘How can great philosophical systems by Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza be justified, what is their truth value?’ – one could, instead of these, or alongside these, deliver a psychological criticism: ‘What does it mean for people to imagine the world, in Cartesian fashion, as material extension on the one side and thought on the other, forbidding them, despite laborious speculations about the pineapple gland, to find a bridge between the elements of their own dualistic representation?’4
In her book Dessaur examines, among other things, the tension between psychohygienic (spiritual) questions and sheer truth-quests, that is scientific questions. The questions she raised caused strong resonances in my mind and a lot of spiritual energy that had been closed off for five years became rekindled.
This second crisis lead to a religious conversion, a conversion to christianity. What I can say about this conversion is that it has proven to be stable and that it has governed the whole of my adult life. This conversion was also a very psychotic process, reembracing some of the visions from my first crisis, visions I had learned to dismiss as hallucinations and which now could be rehabilitated as genuine religious experiences. The God that intervened in my life could be seen as a premodern God, a God who just appeared as a sense of presence without being mediated by a Cogito.
On a psychological level, this experience became the fundament, the carrying ground of my christian faith. Actually, faith is not the proper word, because the experience was a memory – there was nothing to ‘believe’ in, it was something that really happened. I did not opt for God as a way out of a troubled mind, but God chose to deliver me from my deepest existential doubts. I felt I had gone through something that was more radical than Descartes’ radical doubt. It was a process in which, several times, my ego had become suspended for a longer period of time. After God had made his presence felt in this second crisis the period of doubt was over. All through the ages many people have gone through a process like this, part of which takes place outside of the ego and outside of the Cogito. The usual christian word for this proces is ‘grace’.
*****
My turn to religion had as a consequence that I did not need the Cogito any more. One could say I sank back into the Augustinian variety of the Cogito and started to care less about Descartes’ metaphysical extensions.5 Nevertheless you can imagine I was very much excited when I, more or less by chance, discovered that Descartes had gone through a serious spiritual crisis. When he was in Bavaria in 1619, Descartes had three dreams which shook his life. My source is J.H. van den Berg’s Metabletica of God who also writes about contemporary mystics like François de Sales and Pierre de Bérulle. About the relationship between the latter and Descartes, van den Berg writes:
The dreams had impressed Descartes very much. He feels insecure and promises to make a pilgrimage to Loreto. Maybe on that moment he already intends to visit his most famous pastor, cardinal Pierre De Bérulle, from the Oratoire at Paris. Probably Descartes also went to Loreto in Italy. And he did visit De Bérulle. He chose De Bérulle to be his directeur de sonscience, or confessor. One has to come to the conclusion, taking this all into consideration, that Descartes had become religiously fearful by his discovery. Or to put it better, his mystical rapture had led to theological anxiety.6
In the story of Van den Berg Pierre de Bérule, a catholic supporting counter-reformational currents in the then theological debates, approved of Descartes’ ideas and even stimulated him to make them public. Van den Berg writes about the revolutionary insights in the workings of the human body, and also pays attention to the stories of sexual licentiousness as part of the climate of the 17th century. All in all, Van den Berg provides sufficient material to at least write a Dan Brown-kind-of-novel about Descartes that could accommodate my early vision.
However, when I read about Descartes’ dreams I was already working on a different novel which I managed to complete but failed to get published. This novel was called ‘The Skyline of Hillegom’ and was about an apparition of the Virgin Mary. At the end of this novel, which was situated in Hillegom, the village where the apparition had taken place, a cathedral arose as high as the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Lourdes. The apparition was not a miracle, but a physical event which affected the protagonist of the novel and took on emotional momentum of its own.7
3. Modernity and the Cogito?
My personal story seems to suggest that the question of the Cogito is intrinsically related to my problems with the secularization and a desire to return to the catholic faith of my youth.8 But the question of how the Cogito is related to the secularization is very complicated. First of all Descartes was a faithful man and part of his philosophical enterprise involves a prove of the existence of God. Actually, when I had started reading philosophical handbooks in adolescence, I was surprised and disappointed to find out Descartes still believed in God. Though atheism existed in his time, philosophy still had to wait to the 18th century to see full atheistic ideas entering the philosophical curriculum.
Reading in Wikipaedia, I came across the next description of the Cogito and modernity:
Central to modernity is emancipation from religion, specifically the hegemony of Christianity (mainly Roman Catholicism), and the consequent secularization. […] It all started with Descartes’ revolutionary methodic doubt, which transformed the concept of truth in the concept of certainty, whose only guarantor is no longer God or the Church, but Man’s subjective judgement.9
This seems to be a good assessment of the Cogito in philosophical historical perspective. It is not about the existence of God, it is about finding certainty and the ground on which this certainty is finally based. I already had encountered this thought before in the writings of Martin Heidegger, who manages to dis-involve the reader from Descartes’ quest for certainty. When reading Heidegger, you are not invited to participate in Descartes certainty, as in many descriptions of the Cogito, but to look at it as a philosophical question in its own right.
Reading Heidegger about Descartes feels like sitting in a therapeutic group and singling out a figure who has the peculiar need of a strong sense of certainty. Other members of the group don’t share this need, like St. Augustine who can cope with quite some insecurity. Also Heidegger himself, philosophically, but to my mind also psychologically, disengages from the Cogito-desire, which seems to point at a more specific mindset of someone who finds it very hard to make a statement without sufficient scientific backup.
The next passage from Heidegger, taken from his Nietzsche-essay in Holzwege, is a description of the role of the Cogito in the history of metaphysics.
The metaphysics of modernity begins with and has its essence in the fact that modern metaphysics seeks the absolutely undoubtable, what is certain, certainty. According to Descartes’ words firmum et mansurum quid stabilere, it is essential to bring something firm and lasting to a stand [zum Stehen]. As object [Gegenstand], this standing [das Ständige] satisfies the essence of beings that has prevailed since antiquity: beings are that which are enduringly [beständige] present, which are everywhere already available (hypokeimenon, subiectum). Descartes, too, like Aristotle, inquiries into the hypokeimenon. Descartes seeks this subiectum in the course laid down for metaphysics, and as a result he (thinking truth as certainty) discovers the ego cogito as what is constantly [ständig] present. So the ego becomes the subiectum, i.e. the subject becomes self-consciousness. The subjectivity of the subject is determined out of the certainty of this consciousness.10
Here the word ‘hypokeimenon’ appears, which has ‘subiectum‘ as its Latin translation. What makes this passage problematic and even confusing is that the French word ‘sujet’ both can be translated as ‘subject’ and ‘subiectum’. It is important to distinguish these two words and it helps when we stick to the Greek term hypokeimenon or use a different translation – like ‘carrying ground’ or ’that which carries’ or the ‘carrier’.
So what is happening in the Cogito? The hypokeimenon of scholasticism which was found in God is displaced to the subject. God is still around but he has lost his founding role of reality and subjectivity. The displacement of the hypokeimenon is a philosophical move at the most fundamental level, something for which we today usually employ the term ‘paradigm shift’.
Íf we equate the ego with the subject, as Heidegger does, we can notice the differences between a modern and a premodern hypokeimenon. If somenone had been suffering from an ego falling apart before modernity, it still could have been caught in the safety net of God. In modernity, with subjectivity that is not carried by God anymore, but which is carried by itself, the falling apart of the ego is at the same time the falling apart of the subject, leaving nothing underneath which could function as a safety net or safety ground. Which is to say, the falling apart of the ego based on the Cogito is a falling into the abyss.11
4. Marc De Kesel’s close reading of mystical texts
The passage I just quoted from Heidegger I had already read a couple of times before focusing in on the notion of the hypokeimenon. In my experience Heidegger’s language is so rich and dense one has to have a certain perspective in order to be able to bring out its treasures. The notion of the hypokeimenon was brought home to me by the work of Marc De Kesel, philosopher and emeritus professor from the Radboud University in Nijmegen, specialized in, among other things, Continental Philosophy, Theory of Religion and Mysticism and Freudo-Lacanian Theory.12 What particularly impressed me was his close reading exercise of texts by Meister Eckhart and François de Fénelon in his Selfless: The Mystical Abyss of the Modern Ego.
Marc De Kesel has a sound knowledge of the philosophical tradition and has an extensive knowledge of the French intellectual climate in the 17th century – the world where the word ‘spirituality’ in its modern usage actually sprang from. He is an avid reader of mystical texts and tries to bring out philosophical and textual peculiarities that point to a specific philosophical-historical background. In his Selfless he writes:
Mysticism may said to be of all times, but it surely does not escape history. Countering the idea that mysticism is a universal phenomenon looming above historical and cultural contingencies, the thesis emerging from the various chapters of this book is that it is a thoroughly contingent, historical phenomenon.13
Instead of the binary universal/contingent I would prefer a view in which mysticism can be seen as syncretic14, but when it comes to comparing different mystical texts De Kesel does a great job in explaining how a pre-cartesian mystic like Meister Eckhart differs from a post-cartesian mystic like François de Fénelon.
In De Kesel’s explanation the notion of the hypokeimenon or the subiectum plays a crucial role and this is already suggested in the very title of his book. In mystical texts we often find ways leading to an abyss, but the abyss is particularly prominent in post-cartesian mysticism because the hypokeimenon has been changed. So it is particularly the post-cartesian self, the modern self that is, the self without a religious carrier, that is prone to falling into the abyss. If psychic life is carried by subjectivity in Cartesian fashion, than a mysticism in which the ego has to be overcome inevitably leads to an abyss that is not the same abyss when the hypokeimenon is related to a religious entity. To put it differently, if our ego or subjectivity is ‘carried’ by something else, then the dissolution of the ego does not lead to an endless abyss, but falls into another type of abyss, an abyss with a bottom so to say. In a world where the hypokeimenon is subjectivity, there is no visitable extra-egoïcal space, whereas this is not the case in other cultural arrangements where subjectivity itself is grounded in an underlying principle.
One has to take care not to substantialize the hypokeimenon. The hypokeimenon is not the thing, the principle, the entity underlying both subjectivity and the Judeo-Christian God as well as all the other religious varieties. The hypokeimenon is the deepest of deep and just that – there is nothing underneath, which means there are abysses in pre-cartesian mysticism as well. Only those abysses lead to a undifferentiation which still rests in something transcendent.
In Meister Eckhart this undifferentiation is the world before creation, before subjectivity and God existed, and in which the self is still empty of will or desire, and in which in the words of Eckhart, ‘I wanted what I was and was what I wanted’.15 In this world primordial undifferentiation resembles fulfillment of desire. When all depth, and all differentiations disappear, the subject still rests in the love of God. De Kesel quotes the famous passage from Meister Eckhart about living without a why:
… all things within time have a why. For instance: ‘Why do you eat?’ ‘In order to gain strength.’ ‘Why do you sleep.’ ‘For the same reason.’ And so it is with all things that are in time. But a good man does not know a why. ‘Why do you love God?’ I don’t know, for the sake of God.’ ’Why do you love truth?’ ’For the sake of truth.’ ’Why do you love justice?’ ‘For the sake of justice.’ ‘Why do you love goodness?’ ‘For the sake of goodness.’ ‘Why do you live? ‘ ‘Really, I don’t know, I love to live.’16.
And then he adds:
Something like this last phrase you will never find in Fénelon and his contemporaries. They love God for the sake of God himself, but to equate this with the love of life, with love for life for the sake of life: that idea is no longer finding favor in 17th century France.17
In the book Selfless François Fénelon (1651-1715) is singled out as the 17th century mystical writer to be contrasted to Meister Eckhart. There are many resemblances and they both are keen on picturing an ego which is a hindrance towards coming into a state of communion with God. When discussing Eckhart, De Kesel quotes a passage from the sermon Beati pauperes spiritu, which is a comment on ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit , for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’, from Matteüs 5:3. It is a very basic passage which closes off the possibility to reach God as part of an ego-directed enterprise:
In the first place we have to say that the one being poor is the one who does not want anything. What this means many people don’t really understand. Those are the people who stick to their own ego when doing acts of penance and outward exercises, what they all find very important. Let God have mercy on those people who have so little understanding of the divine truth! Those people give the impression to be holy men, but inwardly they are donkeys, because they don’t understand the exceptional of the divine truth.18.
We will find the same logic in the writings of François de Fenelon, and here I would say – this a basic idea one can find in many texts about mysticism. To get into a mystical state is not a goal-oriented enterprise. It is the ego which thinks in terms of aims and purposes, and when its aim becomes to fulfill the desire to move into a mystical state, it will remain – whatever it undertakes – just inside egoïcal space as long as the goal-oriented mindset prevails.
When Meister Eckhart can let go of his subjectivity this will become far more difficult if the ego is grounded in subjectivity itself. About Fénelon Marc De Kesel writes:
Also Fénelon loves God only for the sake of God himself, but his love is no longer of such a nature that it can be expressed as the spontaneous love for life that is inherent in all creatures. For Eckhart, there is indeed an abyss between creation and God, but that abyss is at the same time the true ground—the ground insofar as it speaks from every fiber of creation—if only we are willing to listen carefully, that is to say: to listen beyond the vanity that characterizes our mortality, to the eternity to which creation bears witness. Fénelon, too, sees an abyss between creation and God, and he, too, believes that this abyss is the ground of reality; but unlike Eckhart, he can no longer assume that this abyssal ground simply speaks from creation to everyone. And this is because he himself no longer speaks from out of that ground. He surely would like that, but Modernity prevents him from doing so. It are not his modern ideas which prevent him from doing so (for modern they are not), but it is the position from which he entertains his ideas, the point out of which he stands before creation. That point – the modern, cartesian subject – is separated from creation.19
So we find in Fénelon a subjectivity which keeps on reinstalling itself in the process of reaching out for union with God.
What is missing in Fénelon is a benign carrying ground that can make the ground of the abyss a place of beatitude, a place of bliss. Eckhart can rest in this beatitude, as a state of having reached genuine selflessness, whereas for Fénelon any state of beatitude or bliss resurges as carried by a subjective will. Fénelon’s circular chasing of undoing the self in its final phases, evoking extreme suffering, death and annihilation, starts to resemble the dark vortices of psychotic disorientation. Although De Kesel does not follow this path, we could say that in Fénelon we see how positive undifferentiation can move into or even flip over into negative undifferentiation.
5. Benefiting from mystical literature
Finally, I am not reasoning as a mystic, but as a survivor from a mad journey. My question is not how to reach selflessness but how to navigate extra-egoïcal space. Utter selflessness, unqualified selflessness or total undifferentiation to me is – I’m speaking from experience – uninhabitable territory. But this does not mean I can only live with a firm cartesian ego in place. Being born as someone with a kind of porous ego – what in psychiatric language is called ‘having a vulnerability’ – I have to deal with inadvertent extra-egoïcal moments anyway. And having learned to some extent to do so, the desire to expose myself to, or even to consciously reach out for extra-egoïcal space, grows accordingly. More than an autonomous subject, I would describe myself as a navigator, sailing on a river that is embedded in a larger spiritual tradition, which in my case is ecumenical Christianity.
In spiritual literature one often comes across references to a ‘carrying ground’. Often the language is a bit vague, as if one is floating around in poetic images. Spiritual literature, esoteric literature, religious literature, and also personal stories from people who have gone through psychosis often remain – however much resonance it may inspire – separated from philosophy. The notion of the hypokeimenon however, can be seen as a linkage pin between philosophical works and other genres.
Let me give one example from the work of Willigis Jäger (1925-2020). Willigis Jäger is a Benedictine monk who later in life went to Japan to become a Zen Master. He is the founder of the Würzburg School of Contemplation, for practicing contemplative prayer and mysticism. In one of his compendiums of sayings Jäger states:
What matters is to discover the wisdom of our deepest being, which is stored in our body. This deepest being is the divine dynamics itself. The divine, the void, the primordial ground, Brahma—there are many names for it—is the urge to return to unity and at the same time the urge for creative diversity. This is not about doing something, but about opening oneself to something that is already there. It is the breakthrough of life that one relies on in mysticism.20
Here it is said that the mystics rely on a breakthrough of life, which is possible because there is a carrying ground, an Urgrund. It is modern in the sense that it refrains from identifying its true nature and feels content with an array of words that might point at a diversity of religious traditions. Willigis Jäger here is talking about the hypokeimenon in a modern, pluralistic way resembling the interreligious dialogue.
With texts like these we are moving out of scientific, rational and cosmological concerns, entering into a more psychological universe where you can experience moments of extra-egoïcal presence. The fact that it is possible to sojourn outside of the ego is more important than the specific religious context. The lesson one might learn from a teacher like Willigis Jäger is that one can grow into trusting the ‘divine dynamics’ mystics rely on, that one can learn to remain in or traverse extra-egoïcal space without coming close to thoughts and behaviour people easily would judge as psychopathological.
In other words, this would mean settling on a hypokeimenon available in one of the many spiritual traditions, instead of harking back to a cartesian ego. My first advice for anyone dealing with a psychosis in his or her past, anyone who wants to a certain extent to keep in touch with some of the more exhilarating aspects of his or her adventure, would be to find a belonging in a spiritual tradition. I am not talking about reading a few books an shopping around in the spiritual market place but about serieously working on getting embedded in the tradition of one’s choice – partaking in its rituals and practices, studying its philosophy, conforming to its ethics and also extending one’s social life to the communities living that tradition.
The state of having fallen out of the Cogito, having gone through a longer period of ungroundedness, having been exposed to doubts more radical than Descartes’ doubts, doubts that also undermine the ego of the ego cogito – does not force one to return to the confines of the Cartesian ground. Post-psychotic growth may result into another grounding that allows one to endure, yes, even to enjoy moments of being outside oneself.21 My book The Crossing describes my peculiar journey from falling out of the Cogito to become grounded again in Christianity. In a more general or abstract way one can think of psychosis as part of a journey from one carrying ground to another.
In the description of this conference, we find under the heading ‘Madness in religion’ the sentence: ‘From a developmental perspective, an episode of religious mad experiences may appear both in a context of a conversion away from, as one towards and into religion.’ I will not protest against this statement, but I would like to add – whichever course one is taking, be it upstream or be it downstream, one surely has to learn to navigate and how to find solid ground. Modernity as a vestige of subjectivity is certainly not the only available anchoring place, and even we could add it is a anchorage place which has its peculiar disadvantages.