- by the emperor, always carrying his pocket-knife in his pocket
In another post I have already related Koenraad
Elst's short
history of the prophet's madness, which to some extent was based on facts
taken from a book by Herman
Somers, "Een andere Mohammed" (1993), but was otherwise simply
based on facts from scripture. I haven't done any work at all to verify these
facts, I only have done some more reflective reasoning on it. Which means that
if these facts aren't accurately described here, but similar facts can well be
established, so that the reasoning is not invalidated by my carelesssness with
the facts, then this carelessness is totally irrelevant for my result.
In truth,
it would even be better to say from the beginning that the facts of the
prophet's madness do not matter at all, because he is in any case free to be
mad; as long as he respects other people's right to make another choice and not
to follow him in his madness. Because that's what the natural law says, we
already know that, even before wrapping our head around the prophet's madness.
First
step: the prophet has experienced his first visual and auditory hallucinations
and reflects upon them in his mind; he comes to the conclusion that he is in
danger of becoming a madman, because he cannot very well reconcile his
experience of the hallucinations with his idea of a healthy state of mind as he
had experienced it before the hallucinations started. He may have made
additional reflections to himself, such as: it's not healthy, but these
hallucinations are transitory events, they go away again and then I feel quite
OK; so if I just lock myself up in my house during these unhealthy phases, I
will be fine and nobody will notice.
Rational
conclusion of the first step: the prophet appears to be a soundly reasoning man
(i.e. fully using his capacity for reason).
Second
step: as is already clear in the first step, he must of course worry about what
his fellow men will think of him once they start to notice that he is regularly
the victim of transitory hallucinations. In this second step he starts to worry
that his fellow men will not be very tolerant of the transitory derangement of
his otherwise healthy mind, and will not just let him lock himself up in his
house for a while and continue to take him seriously as their fellow man when
he comes out of his unhealthy state of mind again; he finally convinces himself
that his fellow men will definitely not be tolerant and simply condemn him as a
madman when they find out about his hallucinations. That's a prospect of life
he finds so despairing that he seriously contemplates suicide.
Rational
conclusion of the second step: the prophet still appears to be a soundly
reasoning man, but he has started to include projections into his reasoning
instead of facts, projections mainly about what other people will think of him
and of how that will affect his future life in the society of his fellow men.
Third
step: he has a wife and he goes to inform her of his state of mind and to find
out what she thinks of his suicide plans. I do not know what his wife thinks,
but she submits him to her feminine test ("let's fuck"), and when
that helps to make the visions go away, she probably concludes that he is not
really dangerous to herself. So his wife does not conclude that he is simply
becoming mad, she tells him that he should go on living with his transitory
hallucinations and that everything will be fine. She may have made other suggestions to him
about the meaning of the hallucinations, but I do not really think that they
matter all that much. What matters is what the prophet thinks. And the feedback
he gets from his wife completely changes his mind: that is the important point
to grasp. He completely changes his mind although there is not much new
evidence contained in the exchange with his wife. He already knew that the
hallucinations were transitory before having the more precise experience that
he could make them go away by pleasuring his wife. In fact, the only new
insight he can draw from the exchange with his wife he doesn't seem to realise:
that his initial idea of transitory hiding periods from his fellow men can be
abandoned in exchange for the far more pleasant idea of transitory love-making
sessions with his wife in order to bring the hallucinations under control and
to actually make them go away by his own and his wife's initiative. So he doesn't
chose this new pleasant option available to his thinking. He choses instead to
completely change his mind about the hallucinations themselves, and rather than
understand them as hallucinations, as he has done so far, to understand them as
messages coming from God.
Rational
conclusion of the third step: the prophet still appears to be a soundly
reasoning man, but on top of the non-factual elements in his thinking coming
from the second step (the fear of his fellow men's misunderstandings), he has
now started to discard factual new elements (his wife's healthy sexual
influence on him) that he could have used very logically for his initial
purpose, in a way that is moreover naturally positive, namely to decide whether
to go on with his life as a transitory madman or not: yes, I can go on with my
life, the trouble with the hallucinations can be kept under control with my
wife's help far better than I thought initially, and there is no need to be all
that afraid of my fellow men misunderstanding me, because they'll just think
that I have fallen in love again with my wife. One cannot say that he has
simply become unsound and illogical in his reasoning. But one can say that he
has made a surprising and individualistic choice among the various options
available to him. He has chosen to let himself be encouraged by the fact that
his wife is not afraid of him becoming a madman to start to like his
hallucinations and to see them in another light than he was doing initially. He
has started to see himself not as a victim of unhealthy transitory
hallucinations, but as a prophet receiving God's regular messages.
Fourth
step: his more or less sound individualistic reasoning during the first three
steps is transformed into a paranoid and dominant wish not only to prevent his
fellow men's misunderstandings of his hallucinations, but to impose on his
fellow men his own understanding of his hallucinations as God's messages. From
now on, he wants his fellow men not just to accept him as their fellow man, he
wants his fellow men to accept him as God's prophet and to accept the messages
he receives from God as divine revelations.
Rational
conclusion of the fourth step: he may still be a soundly reasoning man, but in
his practical dealings with his fellow men he has clearly veered off towards a
mythomaniacal or simply opportunistic manipulation of his fellow men's thoughts
and actions, which is a clear case of disrespect of their natural right to make
up their own minds and lead their lives accordingly.
What has
all this to do with Friedrich Nietzsche and natural law? It shows how natural
law ('to each his own') is the underlying logic by which an individual's
thinking is constructed in exchanges with other people who are different from
him and make their own choices. And how an individual's reasoning in these
exchanges with other people can be at the same time logical and
individualistic, i.e. an expression of his freedom to make up his mind in a
logically sound manner no matter what other people do or think. This was
Friedrich Nietzsche's discovery of the individual, of the individual's freedom
to make his own choices in a rationally sound manner. It is the insight that
human reason is certainly constraining, but it is never constraining in a way
that reduces the degree of rational freedom available to the individual to
zero. There is no 'single solution' that imposes itself rationally on all men
in the natural order of human conviviality. There are only individualistic
solutions as chosen by each man for himself.
Where it
all gets out of hand is when the individualistic choice made by the prophet to
become a prophet in his own mind translates into disrespect of other people's
right to make their own individualistic choices. That is a clear disrespect of
the natural law.
The same
individualistic choice to believe in the prophet is of course available to
Muslims, but for them as well as for their prophet, that individualistic choice
cannot translate into disrespect of the natural law, i.e. disrespect of other
people's right to make a different individualistic choice.
People
are indeed individualistically free to make up their own minds. But in order
for all of them to be equally free, the natural law must be respected in all
cases. Not a single instance of disrespect of the natural law can be tolerated
if individual freedom is to survive for all.
"It
is needful to kill the enemy, whether a wild or creeping thing or a human
being." - Democritus
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