The madness of unrestrained reason: Reason and madness in Molière's Le misanthrope

Abstract

In Molière's celebrated Le misanthrope, the spectator is witness to an immensely funny, albeit profound staging of the limits of rationality. The comedy exhibits how an idealist idea of the pure sovereignty of reason is ridiculous, self‐contradictory, and mad, since the distinction between ideality and reality, the universal and the particular, the social and the individual, is ignored or even dissolved. The comic art of literature steps forth as a joyous purging and corrective of the highly seductive, but essentially delusional appeals from philosophy and idealism to absolutize reason and thus render oneself sovereign. A totalized reason that nonetheless cancels itself and becomes madness.