THE MODESTY OF HISTORY

Michel Foucault's first book, History of Madness (1961), is slightly reminiscent of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges entitled ‘The Modesty of History’ (1952). The narrator in this work inquires into the more or less discrete nature of ‘historic days’, that is, moments that disrupt the course of history by opening a new era. Casting doubt on the role of great events in the appearance of such days, he suggests that history is actually modest, only revealing itself in minute changes, which can be identified in particular in a few apparently insignificant words. Foucault seems to provide the perfect example of this ‘modesty of history’ in his work on madness when he analyses a few words by Descartes as the sign of an epochal change. He pinpoints, in a few phrases of the first Meditation, an index of the historical event situated at the opening of the classical age: the exclusion of madness and its reduction to silence.

Let me cite the key passage where Foucault discovers the ‘advent of a ratio ’:

Foucault's reading depends on establishing a dividing line between, on the one hand, the errors of the senses and the illusions of dreams, and, on the other, the perils of madness. The senses are only deceitful when they confront very distant and scarcely perceptible objects, while dreams create their illusions without producing the material reality that serves as their source. In both cases, doubt does not reach its extreme point, for the truth of simple and universal things is never called into question.