Audio: Pop Apocalypse Episode 14: Madness, Mysticism, and Philosophy – A Talk with Wouter Kusters

Wouter Kusters, PhD, is a linguist and philosopher based in the Netherlands. Two of his books received the Dutch Socrates Award for the best and most inspiring philosophy book of the year: Pure Madness (2004) and A Philosophy of Madness (2014). The English version of this latter work was released in 2020 by MIT Press. In 2022, an Arabic version was released, and a Chinese translation is expected this year. Kusters writes on a range of themes in various outlets that explore perennial questions of meaning, madness, mysticism, and language.

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MATTHEW J. DILLON: Greetings, listeners, and welcome to the Pop Apocalypse, a podcast brought to you by the Center for the Study of World Religions right here at Harvard Divinity School. So as we wind down our second year of shows on the Pop Apocalypse, I'm in a reflective mood. And we've discussed mystical currents at this point in music, painting, literature, film, and other media. And often the issue of madness or even psychosis has been there somewhere in the background. 

We can go back to the first show. Alex Grey discussed how his own struggle with mental illness was there before his first big LSD experience. Victoria Nelson helped us look into how the repressed supernatural throughout Western history, primarily in the modern period, led to a trope which he identifies as, is this real, or am I crazy, in films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which, if you haven't seen it yet, you need to, or the stories of HP Lovecraft. 

Jennifer Higgie guides us through the work of the painter Richard Dodd, who went incredibly mad and ended up murdering his father. And then Whitley Strieber explored his abduction experiences, first, through psychoanalysis and neuroimaging, to see what he thought he experienced was just a psychotic episode or not. 

So we can go on and on. Pretty much, it's come up in each of our episodes so far. And that's because questions of madness have trailed the mystical, at least as far back as the Oracle at Delphi. Probably earlier, probably much earlier. 

So I can think of no better guest to discuss this relationship between madness and the mystical than Wouter Kusters, the author, linguist, and philosopher who is best known for his magisterial book A Philosophy of Madness-- The Experience of Psychotic Thinking, which was first published in Dutch in 2014 and then translated into English in 2020. 

So A Philosophy of Madness is 700-page masterwork. So it's going to be a fool's errand to try and capture it in this short show introduction. And regardless, Wouter does a much better job than I could within the interview. Still, I'd want to highlight a few things that make this book so generative and important. 

It's a philosophy of madness in the sense of trying to capture what madness is and then what it can tell us about being human. Kusters does discuss psychological and psychiatric diagnoses of madness. But he's much more concerned with illuminating the inner life of the psychotic person. 

In doing so, he draws from his own experiences of madness, which he describes at length in the book and then also in this interview, as well as the phenomenological tradition in psychology, like Binswanger, that emphasized description and understanding of what's happening in the mind of the patient over explanation or diagnosis. 

Kusters explores how madness refracts our understandings of time, language, or experiences of our senses, the imagination, our understanding of other persons, and even our relationships to nature and to the cosmos. Throughout it all, Kusters brings descriptions from the experiences of mad persons into dialogue with sources from classical mystics, such as Meister Eckhart and Plotinus, among many, many more. 

In doing so, we get to see how mad persons and mystics, or as he likes to use the terms "mad mystics" or "mystical mad-ness"-- the hyphen is important-- are wrestling with similar existential concerns and then often land on similar metaphysical answers. Finally, we should note that this book is not just some sort of objective account that describes psychosis from the outside, looking into its safe little glass box. 

Kusters writes the book in such a way that reading it gives a sense of the experience of psychosis. It can feel contagious in a way. The result is that many people, including, importantly, mental health professionals who have not had an insider's experience of madness, are now gaining new understanding of what it is they're diagnosing and the people that they work with. 

Now, to be very clear here, Kusters does not romanticize madness. He recognizes as well as anyone that it is often very horrible. But the experiences of psychosis can tell us an enormous amount about the human mind and what it means to be human, insights that can help everyone, from psychiatrists to those who study ancient mystical texts, like many who listen to this program. So it's a great talk. And without further ado, let's get to the interview. 

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It is my great honor to welcome to the show Wouter Kusters, philosopher, author, and linguist. So Wouter, how are you doing today? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah, I'm fine. It was a nice day here in the Netherlands, where I live. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: The land of Gouda, as you told me, land of Gouda cheese? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes, yes. In fact, I work in, as we Dutchies call it, a [DUTCH]. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: [DUTCH]? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: It is like [DUTCH]. So that's the etymology.

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Interesting. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: [DUTCH] 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: [DUTCH]. Well, I will have to-- next time I'm ordering it at the grocery, I'll be sure to give it the Dutch spin. So yeah, it's wonderful, as we've talked. It's wonderful to have you on the show. 

We start each show the same way because it frames where we're going in an interesting way. And we're literally in the shadow of Harvard Divinity School across the street. So we have to wriggle the religion in here. So what was your exposure like to religion growing up? Were you raised in a church? Were you raised atheist? Where did you fall on that spectrum? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: I was raised not really atheist, but more agnostician. Atheist is a denial of theism, I would say. But I was raised just at secondary school and at university, well, that the default thing to believe was not to believe. And those who believed were kind of special guys who got it from the family who had some ideas which they developed into church. So mainly atheist, but not that explicitly. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: I see. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: And in my family, there have been also some religious thinkers, so to say. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Oh, really? Like pastors and ministers? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah, no, well, my first interest in philosophy was when I was at a secondary school. And I saw those two. Perhaps you know them. Well, it's from a German author, [INAUDIBLE], history of philosophy. That was the standard about 50 years ago in European philosophy as a kind of introduction. It's very compact. 

And I saw those two books at my grandfather. And he did have a kind of religious ring around him, but not explicitly. It was just an intellectual culture of thinking, experiencing, and well, I think quite in that sense, mainstream in Western Europe. I think it's different in the US. But in Netherlands, Scandinavia, Germany, with respect to religion, I think it is quite similar. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Interesting. Yes. For the most part, the US, for a long time-- maybe it's changing over the last 20 years or so-- has been spared a lot of the secularization and agnosticism. Now, it's boomed over the last, again, 20, 30 years. So we're catching up with the world in certain ways. 

So you started reading philosophy in high school, as you say. But you did not end up studying philosophy right away in college. You studied linguistics. What drew you into the world of linguists or the study of language? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes, yes. Well, I was hesitating when I had to choose, I had to select a specific study. And I remember that I thought, well, philosophy is perhaps the most interesting thing to study because it is about all possible questions you can question about. But then I was 18 years old, and I thought, well, with philosophy, you also has to read all those old canonical texts by Plato and Aristotle. 

I want to do something that is more catchy, that is more of today, so to say. And my strong motivation to enter linguistics was I thought when I learned the word, when I learned the structure, and when I learned how texts are built up, then I can discover what is beyond the text, what the world is like without text. 

So I used linguistics as a kind of means for another end. And it was only later that I discovered that there are other methods to approach that so-called end or purpose apart from studying linguistics. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah. So-- 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Like the university of life, so to say, the experimental method into having friends and going to parties and using licit or illicit drugs a bit and all those kinds of things, well, that's also something we can do here on Earth, I think. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, very much free to do so. And so one thing that I would have talked about in the introduction, but to bring up here, so you are the author of A Philosophy of Madness. And we're going to be getting into that. So your first experience of madness, if I remember right, you were like 19? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: 20, 19, 20, yes. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah. So just as a way of getting that ball rolling, in your first experience of psychosis, did it generate any sort of philosophical explorations for you? Was it something that you thought through that way? Or was it more something that you just needed to get out of? So how did you experience madness that first time? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: I was a student in linguistics at that time. And indeed, I was taken to the hospital, and I was hospitalized for about two or three months. And the experiences I had in that hospital were different from normal experiences. 

And I was about around 19, 20 at a time. And for me, this was a kind of break in my so-called career. But I just left it as it was, a break. And I went back into a university career, the academic career. And I followed linguistics much farther. I also did PhD in linguistics. 

And all those years, I had such a break in my life, rupture or crack. And for me, always, when I look back at that period and I look back at those memories, it were not only memories of misery and not only memories of-- illness also not, but it was different from normal experience and from a normal use of language and from a normal perspective. It was all abnormal, so to say, or not normal. 

And I just left it in my brain somewhere until the day came that a friend of mine said to me, well, always when we have talked much after three or four beers, so to say, you are telling these stories about your episode in psychiatric hospital. Why don't you write a book about it because what you say is so interesting? And it is so different from what the stigmatizing way of looking at it is. 

Just, yeah, write it down. And tell it to other people why it is interesting, why it is fascinating, why it is drawing us towards that point. And so I did. 

And then I wrote my first small book, Pure Waanzin, Pure Madness. And to my surprise, it won the national Dutch contest in philosophy books. And yeah, that was great news. But that was already in 2004-- 2004. So it was smothering on a low fire for 17 or 18 years. And then I came with that book. 

And then what I had done in that book was digging up the memories and structuring the memories, my memories, but also scrutinizing and examining other autobiographies, but not only from a so-called first-person perspective, but also reports and stories about madness and about psychosis. 

So I gathered a lot of information from the inside and the outside at the same time, so to say. And I tried to weave a story. And I did in that book-- the story was that in one kind of letter type were my memories. Then in a second kind of letter type was the so-called official reports by the nurses and the doctors. 

And then a third layer of text was my attempt to philosophize and to weave the first-person mad perspective through the third-person descriptions. And that book was a success in the Netherlands. And because of that success and because I thought, well, this was only an attempt, it was literally an essay in French that means an attempt, [FRENCH] of Dutch. 

It was only an attempt to describe madness that I thought, well, this was so interesting to do, and it was also nice to do. It was good to do. I felt at home when writing about this stuff. And it was not just working according to a plan on some outside subject. 

Then I decided to stop my academic career and linguistics. I had already a PhD, and I was in a postdoc position. And I stopped it, and I went back to school, so to say. And I went, and I did. And I thought, well, now is now the time has come to do a real study of philosophy. 

And then I went through the bachelor of philosophy, the master of philosophy. And I read, yeah, what was taught here in the Netherlands as all the classics of philosophy. And all the time, while I was reading all those philosophers, those philosophers, they expose something, they show something. 

And at the back of my head was always the question, OK, we have this metaphysical system, or we have this kind of anthropological thoughts about what anthropos might be or what the body-mind difference might be, et cetera. And in the back of my head all the time, what does this philosopher-- what are the implications for description of psychosis or madness? 

And then I did my master's thesis. And now it was my bachelor thesis. And I had subsumed, submitted my bachelor thesis. And I thought, well, I've written it down. I've written about the four possible views, four perspectives on time. And I gave it to my supervisor, Antoine Mooij, and a psychoanalyst into Jacques Lacan. 

And with some other so-called triggering factors, I became psychotic again. And then I was there in the hospital. And then people approached me, nurses approached me because they wanted to have a signature because I had written a book. And now the author was present, so to say. 

Yeah, that is how it all started with my writing, because only after that, after that second episode, I started to write the text that has been translated into English, this A Philosophy of Madness. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: So thank you. There's a lot to unpack in there. So one of the first things, have you been in discussions for Pure Madness to be translated into English? Or is that sort of on a back burner at this point? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: I've shown it once to-- I don't know his name anymore. No. But if you know a publisher who would like to have it-- who would translate it into English and put it under a copyright number, et cetera, then be my guest. I'd love to have it in English. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, I mean, there's just this missing link for those of us who don't know Dutch. We appreciate the description. But as I understand it, this is the beginnings of your philosophical approach to madness. And as you just reflected, you started to get into phenomenological psychiatry at this point as well? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Well, in fact, in my Pure Madness book, called Pure Madness, I did that more from a linguistic point of view. And I used Ferdinand de Saussure a lot. And I know him very well, because in the history of linguistics, he's a main figure. And in the history of philosophy, he is used and transplanted into-- Jacques Lacan has used him. Lévi-Strauss has used him. 

So de Saussure is used in other contexts. But I used de Saussure to say something about this signifier, signified relation within science. And I used it to show how the signifier, signified levels could switch over each other. 

And that's not yet the phenomenological approach, because the phenomenological approach, I began that after having studied philosophy. It was more Saussurean, but also, in that time, I read the Deleuze. 

In the end, there are some indications that deterritorialization of Deleuze could have been applicable to becoming mad. Well, I think that is indeed very apt, Deleuze, in this whole domain. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Absolutely. So you're back. You're studying these philosophical texts very closely and as you're writing your bachelor's thesis, which, by the way, when reflecting to my master's students about, yes, this began as a bachelor's thesis. It blows all of their minds. But anyway, neither here nor there. 

So one of the things you reflect on quite a bit in A Philosophy of Madness is the ways in which these forms of thought, this discipline formed of thinking that we get in philosophy strongly resembles and can lead to similar places as mad thinking. So the obvious question is, what were you reading at the time as you were leading into 2007, your second hospitalization? What was it that had grabbed you and you started to reflect on thinking in that way? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Well, it is a very good question because I also think that that influences each other, because when I would have been psychotic after 2007, in say, 2014, perhaps it would be Alain Badiou all over the place because he has this systematic mathematician approach to which I also feel very much related, this playing with numbers. Then it would be Alain Badiou. 

But Alain Badiou was not in my picture when I wrote A Philosophy of Madness. And what was in my picture was I had indeed done these standards in Utrecht at least, University of Utrecht standard traditional courses on Plotinus, on German idealism, Hegel, Schelling, and quite a lot of Kant, Immanuel Kant, and some of the 20th-century analytic philosophers. 

But what was gripping me was that I gave a summer school somewhere at the International School for Philosophy to be exact. And that summer school was about Charles Taylor. Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self was-- and I read Sources of the Self. 

And parts of what Taylor discusses in Sources of the Self, I've used that in the fourth part of A Philosophy of Madness, the notion of the sacred versus the profane. I came upon phrasing that notion via Charles Taylor.

And then I also discovered, of course, Mircea Eliade. And yeah, of course, there's lots of literature. I left that literature aside because I wrote my own, so to say. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: I mean, the book is filled with these interlocutors, these sort of intellectual interlocutors. And so much of it is about dialoguing with them and putting things in side-by-side in perspective. So before jumping into the book itself, just curious. So you've been studying philosophy. Then you have the hospitalization. 

Are you starting your philosophy-- are you starting the book while you are in the hospital? Are you thinking through it as you would as a philosopher at this point? OK. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes. I remember so well that when I-- in 2007, I was there at the corridor of the psychiatric ward. And then I knew, I was so convinced that everything I had written in Pure Madness was so utterly true that I thought, well, I can write it again, but with much more sharpness, delicateness, much more colored. So I was then already kind of philosophizing. 

But what I also say in the introduction to my book in a very wild way, not that temporalized step by step by step, but in different changes of the mood and of the [INAUDIBLE] and of the pitch. So chaotic philosophy it was. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: So interesting. So as we turn into the book, there's no-- so it's a dense and beautiful and contagious 700-page book. I don't pretend that you're going to be able to give a book report on it. But before we dive into how you work with particular thinkers and then especially the way in which you work with mysticism, because this is, well, the two parts-- part II, part III. 

Those of us who are scholars in that area have just been sharing this book back and forth because of what's happening in Via Mystica Psychotica in part III. But first, for those who haven't read it, could you just give just general introduction or encapsulation of the book? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes. Well, indeed, this notion of mysticism, whatever it may be, it came to me after that period in 2007 in the institution. But it was a notion that I thought when I was writing the book, and I had set up part I-- well, part I is a kind of classical. There are the data, and here is the philosopher discussing those data. 

Part I is a bit more traditional. But I wanted to go further into those data while being a philosopher, so kind of merger between the description and the experience. And for that, I found all kinds of texts, texts and thoughts within this tradition of mysticism. And while working on my book, I was reading quite a lot of mystics. 

But yeah, it would have been a much smaller book when I would throw all kinds of mysticism onto the same level. What I needed to express the florosity, how florid, how flowery psychosis can be in its richness and also in its nastiness, I needed distinctions between different kinds of mysticism. 

So what I did in part II, the Via Mystica Psychotica, that's a kind of jump off from the normal terrain of philosophy and show that when we de-exinct, delanguize, or deimagainze, et cetera, when we cut all those binds to the Earth and we flew towards the sky without there being a sun yet like Icarus, but when we detach ourselves from our environment, that is a movement that could be called a mystical movement. 

And what I do in part III was differentiate between different kinds of mysticism. And this differentiation is in four parts, mysticism of the one. And then I use Plotinus, mysticism of being. And then I used quite a lot of philosophers. I use Aldous Huxley there, among others. And then mysticism of infinity-- and then I use Nicholas von Cusa and also Henri Michaux and others also. And the mysticism of nothingness-- and that's the fourth chapter of this third part on mysticism. 

So I have this number 4, which is playing a role in my book. And I consider it as a kind of mandala with four sides, a square or like chessboard. There are A1, A8, H1, and H8. I hope that's the notation you use in the US, because I know-- 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: That's right, yeah. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: OK, the English do it different. They imitate the chess different, but like a chess board. And there are towers on every corner. And my way to bring content within this mysticism was to say, well, those four towers, I used the age-old metaphors of Earth in part I of the book, of water, part II of the book, air, part III of the book, and fire, part IV in the book. 

So those four elements correspond to the four parts. And in a way, this numbering of 4 is also the numbering of the one, the many, infinity, and nothingness. So that's the basic structure of the book. 

And to put another layer of structure, which is a kind of the secret of the book, the secret of the book is I have called it crystal, that is, the thing when we see a pyramid-- pyramid like in Egypt. It has also four corners and this top of it or secret in the center of it. And that secret, I call it crystal. 

And crystal is also in my story, the love I'm looking for or the love that I've lost, et cetera. So it plays also on another level. It's also kind of detective novel where A3 becomes A4 by way of crystal. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: So wonderful encapsulation. Thank you. And if the audience is not jumping on to buy the book by now, I don't know what they're thinking. So there's a number of different directions to go here with this. 

But the first thing I wanted to talk about, so the choice to write in this-- phenomenology uses the term performative way, this way of not just describing the states or making an argument, but bringing about the experience of that, sort of trying to-- go ahead. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes, also, because my-- well, I sketch now how the number of 4 is put into my book. But my book is also about the relation between philosophy at one hand and madness at the other hand. 

And for me, there are three possible relations that philosophy is different, and there's a gap with madness, and that is more or less part I, where I show and where I argue that it is not psychology, that it is not psychiatry, but that it is philosophy that has the best means to say something about madness, because philosophy is a tradition where prejudices of the psychological theory are put aside. 

So what a normal human being is, in philosophy, there is no normal human being. There's always questioning the common ground, questioning the common sense. So that's one line. Philosophy is the best means to say something about madness at the other hand. There's one line of my book. 

But the other line, what you are referring at is that what I also experienced and what I describe in my book is that when you philosophize consequently and you are grabbing off, you're digging into the ground, and you're making this, and you're making that, then it is very well possible that you discover that there are rabbit holes all over the place, and that like in Alice in Wonderland, suddenly, you are in a completely different world. 

And well, what is the moment that Alice-- and how did she get into Wonderland? That is the fall, by the way, fall into the rabbit hole. Well, it's only a metaphorical fall. 

But that is how I think about when you do too much philosophy, you may philosophize yourself and the whole world. And you can become mad with-- unclear whether that is satisfying or not, because now our interview stresses-- I stress all times that it is kind of an interesting story. 

But we must not forget that this crystal, this center may also be a black hole, may also be the horror, may also be the place where we do not want to be, to which we do every means to escape from it. That's also madness. So I don't want to romanticize madness or psychosis at all. Same applies to God when we talk about the mysterium tremendum. God is not, by definition, good. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, that's a very important and honest point. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: And I think it's also one of the reasons why those of us who are, again, in this sort of field of mysticism are so drawn to the book. So there's both the contagion of language, but there's also that fullness and honesty about the mysterium tremendum [INAUDIBLE]. 

The mystical isn't always nice. It's not always lovely. Oftentimes it's terrifying. And that's something that we need to be more and more honest and forthcoming about. So that's the sort of thing that I know that certain members in the audience might not follow right away. 

So if we could, could we look at the ways in which the via mystica psychotica seems to work similarly between a mystical thinker of your choice and within madness? So you could choose any particular one. But the one that really struck me was delanguization. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: So we have this whole history of apophatic discourse within Christian mysticism, monotheistic mysticism. But it's so interesting to see you unpack that and describe the ways in which it works in madness. So if you could just give us a little taste of how you're putting those things in dialogue or putting them in comparison. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Oh, this is difficult. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: I know. It's a big question. Hey, could you describe apophasis? Yeah. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah, that's indeed the question. That is a Saussurean connotation there as well and also a, yeah, kind of destructuring of language, because to express certain things, some things cannot be expressed, and some things cannot be said. Yeah, I don't know what to say about that, but-- 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, that's OK. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: This via linguistica, that is important. I also used the word a "scratch language." 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Ooh, scratch language? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Scratch. In Dutch, it would be [DUTCH]. And then you only have to change the vowels. And it is [DUTCH]. So [DUTCH] and [DUTCH] are related to each other. 

And I think that is something when you are ploying or when you are playing or ploying with language. That's what we see all the time with-- when there's someone psychotic at your department or in the street or in your family, the conversations and the discussions, they do not follow the plan you think they would follow because the psychotic person not only notes the implied message, but also notes the form of the message. 

And that can be a poetic form, and it can be a metalingual form. And he or she starts to what they call freely associate onto that form. But it is not like a random machine that has just gone wild, but it is loaded with a certain energy to deconstruct the language in order to find out what is left when we deconstruct all language. 

And that movement is also a movement we see in language itself. Like in the Semitic languages, we have these core of consonants, and we have vowels that give a certain flavor, a certain inflection to the core consonants. Well-- 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Interesting. Yeah, the different ways of thinking and associating out of language but through language that are in there it is so fruitful for going back through historical texts as well, as one of the things that's really, really fun about it is it that particular reading, if I remember right, primarily comes-- go ahead. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes. And I must also say that that's a reason why I am so tremendously thankful that in the Arabic world, they have also translated my book. I can show it. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Oh, wow. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: It's like this. Yes. And in Arabic language, things work differently because they-- yeah. And at this very time, a Chinese translation is being worked on, and that it should be published in the autumn somewhere. 

And that makes me and others think about, yeah, what is language? And what is the difference between spoken language and written language? And that's also very important. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: So as a linguist, do you take a more hands-on approach to the translations of your work? So I know we've talked before, you have familiarity with Arabic. So-- 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes. Well, the English translation, it wasn't going to and back with the translator, Nancy Forest-Flier. We work together on ambiguities in the text, of course. She's from United States. And she has been living in the Netherlands. She has a Dutch background as well. So that was very fruitful discussion. In the Arabic translation, I only knew it would be translated into English. And bam, one day, it was into Arabic. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Oh, wow, OK. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah. And probably they translated it from the English edition. And in the preface to the English edition, I make the joke that the Dutch edition is already a translation of something that cannot be said in language. So we are like in a circle around this Holy Grail of crystal somehow. 

And we write texts on the wall to know, or we complain at the wall because we cannot go through the wall. And we try to make the wall transparent and to see something. But we do see nothing else than glass or crystals in the glaciers. So that's-- 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: That's one of the lovely things about the book is it's filled with these very poetic images, turns of phrase. It's not just captured in denotative language. It's very illustrative. It's very evocative. 

So if you don't mind, I'd like to-- there's so many thinkers that you work with throughout the course of the book. But I just want to put a few on the table to see how you ended up approaching them. 

So just being a historian of religions, I couldn't help but seeing Eliade pop up everywhere, both primarily his shamanism book and his yoga book. So what was it that you found so fruitful about bringing Eliade into the conversation here? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: I think it started with other books by him. He has written a book, Two and One, which, as a title, says very much about my whole book. And well, he was, for me, the first serious scholar that I read about comparative religion. 

So when I had formed my thesis that within madness there is something sanctified, holy, or religious, or whatever you call it-- well, I do not come from a particular religious background. So I did not immediately run to the Quran or to the Bible. But I started to study comparative religion with Eliade. 

And then I saw, wow, that he had written a whole book on yoga and also on shamanism. And I plucked the fruits from those books indeed. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it could be that I think about shamanism. Much more can be said about shamanism and madness than I do in my book. That is for sure. 

But shamanism, that is such a thing used in so many different contexts that I would not want to-- well, I was shocked at what happened in the capital of the US. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Oh, are you referring to the Q Shaman? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Oh, yeah. Yeah. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Then I thought, OK, no more talk about shamanism. This is something that, well-- so with yoga, that is not so much the case. So I wrote some things about yoga, but I also used this Venezuelan who wrote about Tibetan Buddhism that I thought also interesting. And that is also a link with an author I often come back to, Peter Kingsley with, yeah, his funny take on Jung and on Parmenides, et cetera. 

But I think he has a very important point. I use Peter Kingsley also a lot. But yeah, he is a bit hardened, so to say, and is withdrawn into the only wise guys, the pre-Socratics. And then we had Parmenides. And then we had a bit Jung, and then we had Peter Kingsley himself, and wow. But he says also very apt things, I think. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah. So I noticed he's everywhere in the book. And-- 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Kingsley? 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, Kingsley. And Catafalque, I don't think, was out by this point. But the Dark Places of-- or sorry, Dark Places-- yeah. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Dark Place of Wisdom, yes. And-- 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Thank you. Sorry. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: So it is a reality book, yes. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, he's prominent. Another one I want to talk about, Husserl. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Husserl. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Husserl, yeah. He ends up-- 

WOUTER KUSTERS: There's this H. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: With the H, yes. Yeah. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Husserl, yeah. He's a man of war. Yeah, I've used Husserl's thinking about time in my water schedule, in the part of water and then about time. So yes, I studied also about time quite a lot. And that is my main entrance to phenomenology, indeed, Husserl himself. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: One way I've approached your book, I gather it's a subtheme, but so much of the book is just about time. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: And these different ways of experiencing time, the objective versus subjective, cosmic versus phenomenological, but also the different shadings of the phenomenological that comes out of madness that you're able to chart so beautifully. Yeah, it feels like a book to be reread for different themes throughout. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes, I do as well, yeah. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Let's see. Who else do I want to toss in here? So you had read Plotinus before 2007. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: So you're reading him just as the neoplatonic thinker, the systematic approach to the one, et cetera, et cetera. And then 2007 happens. And is there a clean break in how you read him, and now you read him more experientially through this sort of uni-delusion as it gets translated as? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, anyway. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yes, yes. That changes. The way books have meaning for me changes. Yeah, that depends on situation, so to say. Yeah. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: So the-- 

WOUTER KUSTERS: When we talk about Deleuze, that has changed very much for me. In 2007, I was psychotic. And later, I have gone through another psychosis. And after that psychosis, I looked at Logics of Sense by Deleuze. 

And I thought, well, indeed, that is what it is all about. We can number all those chapters, and we can say, well, that belongs there, that belongs there. And then I saw kind of-- I used Deleuze in the very beginning of my book, a quote by Deleuze about seeing through the crystal. 

And then I say, well, now I see the crystal. Now, I see it crystal clear and [? Hölderlin ?] et cetera, et cetera. But it was only after the psychosis that came after 2007 that I saw Deleuze himself within a crystal castle. And then I saw the crystal castle from within with Deleuze. And now, I experience and read Deleuze completely differently than as an authoritative author, but as someone who gives recipes or jokes or-- yeah. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Oh, that's interesting. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Also Thomas Pynchon, by the way. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah. The scene with Slothrop that comes about-- it's in part II of your book. So that comes from Gravity's Rainbow. Are you an avid Pynchon reader? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Uh-huh. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, he has a new book coming out. So that's-- 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Who? Who? 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Thomas Pynchon. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: He has a new book? 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, the new book is coming out shortly. It just has been floating around in those recommended, suggested readings. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: OK, yeah. Well, yeah, that's interesting. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: But he does capture this psychological terrain quite well. So you published, in Dutch at least, A Philosophy of Madness 2014. And it won awards. And then it was published into English in 2020.

I have my own sense of what the reception has been like among intellectuals in my field. But how has the experience been like for you in terms of its reception? Have you received a lot of emails? Have you been invited to give lots of talks? But what has it been like to put this out into the world and start to get the feedback? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: That has been very, very nice and warm. And yeah, grateful I am for that, that since 2014, indeed, yeah I gave many, many lectures in mental health care situations, because that is a very important application ground, so to say, that my book-- 

And also, people who say that they recognize something in my book, often they recognize that-- then they do not say it is true or not true, like some philosophers or psychiatrists themselves would say. But they recognize something. And those are my peer psychotic patients, so to say. 

And those patients but also the psychiatrists-- yeah, in the Netherlands, it has been sold well for print runs. For such a thick book, that is quite wondrous. And with this Philosophy of Madness book in Dutch, I also won again the prize for the best Dutch book in philosophy in 2015, it was. 

And so I went to all kinds of local libraries, philosophy debate clubs, all kinds of settings where people were interested in the word and the words that denied the word, so to say, and all kinds of-- yeah, well, we had a good time. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: And with 2021, because that was between 2014, 2015 I believe, until 2021, it was only in Dutch. So I didn't stretch further than half of Belgium, so to say. And when the English edition came out, then I suddenly got emails from all over the world, from Europe, from the United States, from Latin America, from India, Australia, et cetera. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, and is it similar in that it's mental health professionals and then those who see themselves or see others within it? And of course, we, as religion scholars, who reach out because I know you've also been in touch with [INAUDIBLE]. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah, with religious scholars, often I have-- yeah, sometimes a bit. Not with the scholars. I have no problems, but the representants of a particular religion, because in the Netherlands, health care is organized in different kinds of pastoral care, pastoral care according to the Catholic tradition, pastoral care according to the Hindu tradition, to the Islamic tradition. 

So religion has a clear form. And when I give a presentation and there are not religious scholars but pastoral caregivers in the room, they think that I am eating the bread that they should eat, so to say, and that I spoil the message with not the good message, not the [DUTCH] but with the bad message, and yeah, that I'm not religious, and that I mock religion. That is a kind of tension. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: I mean, that is a danger that anyone who is speaking to the mystical or the religious is going to confront in a certain way. But there's so many scholars and thinkers who would be on your side with it as well. Yeah, also, Boisen comes up. I am terrible at pronouncing things, by the way. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Boisen, yes. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Oh, yeah, he's everywhere in your books as well. And talk about pastoral care and chaplaincy, and he was a pioneer in this way. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: He's terrific. He's terrific. And well, in the Netherlands, someone wrote a PhD, a doctoral dissertation, [INAUDIBLE] about this Anthony Boisen from a religious perspective. And I read his dissertation, and I read Boisen. 

And I thought, well, that's OK. So I used that. But this [INAUDIBLE]-- well, I don't want to gossip about [INAUDIBLE] or to gossip about-- [INAUDIBLE] and me have a kind of tension because he feels responsible for the sheep who are in his church. 

And when I poke it up and I say, religion is not only in the church, it's not only in the books, there's not a clear difference between the transcendent and-- what do you call it-- the earthly life, when there are all kinds of interactions and interferences, the flock of sheep could become confused, according to [INAUDIBLE]. So we have to be careful with the fire, so to say, the hearth. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: So that makes me or that prompts me to ask-- it's a very basic question, but it's the one that I've been asked when I've taught the book. And so it would be good to hear you reflect on it, although you've started here. 

So parts II and III explore paths and destinations within the mystical and the mystical madness, mad mysticism. If any, what distinctions do you mark off between the mystical and the mad? 

So are these sort of-- sorry, let me get my terms right here. Would you see it as a matter of nomenclature, we're using one term or the other? Would you see it as a matter of fruits, to use the James term? Is it fruits and outcomes? Is madness leads to more breaking apart than coming together? Or is it somehow fundamentally different? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah. Well, I write exactly about that point in the introduction to part II, the Via Mystica Psychotica. And then I discuss it with a certain Caroline Brett and with some others. 

And I really don't know because there are quite a lot of people who have been psychotic who indeed say, well, there was something in my psychosis. It had something to do with spirits, with the spiritual, or the voices I heard. They have some reality, et cetera. So for some, it is indeed mysticism and madness quite close to each other. 

But yeah, when you look back at your own experiences, then you look back to those experiences, but you are also looking back from a certain position to your experiences. And then later, you can discover that the period you had always thought, well, that was so stupid, what I did. I'm glad that I know nothing anymore about it. That was psychotic. 

But you can reinterpret your history or your own history and then find out that what you went through and you re-experience it, you bring new language to the field, and you compare it with my descriptions or with any other description of things that may happen. And you can come up with a story that is clad in the cloth of mysticism. Why not? 

And also, the other way around. You can think, well, I've talked a lot about mysticism, but then nobody wants to hear it. I can keep it to myself. I write it in my diary. But well, it was just a psychosis. My brain was just a bit-- I got too much dopamine at that time. 

So in a way, I do indeed think it is a question of nomenclature, which does not mean that it is an unimportant question. It is an important question. But then to further delve it out, we should talk about, how do we do the nomenclatura? Who gives the names? 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah. And that's one of the things that's so generative about the book is just putting these things side by side, putting these accounts from phenomenological psychiatry or your own accounts right next to paradigmatic mystical authors. And you do that enough. 

And I think that's why everyone asks the question is because the similarities are so striking that then they walk away with it like, well, what is the distinction? Is there a distinction? I'm a little bit lost, which is especially true if you're a Divinity School student speaking to-- but it's very refreshing-- 

WOUTER KUSTERS: And the difficult-- 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Go ahead. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: And the difficult thing is also, when you zoom in onto all these mysticisms, there's not only one kind of mysticism. And well, yeah, when I would have to have a favorite author, it would be Gershom Scholem. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Oh, OK. Nice. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: His description also about nihilist mysticism, I think that's the kind of-- yeah, because, well, nihilism is also a kind of way of thought, but also a trap, which also runs through my whole book, nihilism or skepticism against all given truths. And that can be a quite, yeah, nasty sting when you are in this rabbit hole that you are turning your madness to yourself, and that you're stinging yourself. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: So as we start to come in for a landing, we spoke offline. And I can't let you go without talking about it. So a former guest of the show, also my PhD advisor, Jeff Kripal, has reached out to you. And you remarked how it wasn't until what happened in 2020, a more recent psychosis, that, all of a sudden, Jeff's books start to click. 

So could you describe that? Because I think, one, Jeff will be flattered to hear that in many ways. But also, what it was about that that turned those books so that they were illuminated in a way? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah. Yeah, well, I knew Jeffrey Kripal. I think I have a quote from him already in my book, in Philosophy of Madness somewhere, a quote about how you could define mysticism. So I already knew his articles or some of his work. 

But it was indeed only very lately after he had reached out to me that there was suddenly-- there was becoming a click. And this click was that I suddenly, yeah, went through a period in which it became clear to me that when we have various words for knowing, we have knowing. We have the Greek "noesis." 

But the Greek root of gnosis and Gnosticism says much more about my whole book than I realized before I had met Jeffrey Kripal. 

So for my last rewritings in my head of A Philosophy of Madness, Jeffrey Kripal is key figure, that he has supported me by writing now and then an email. And that was what kept me going in a way that my serpentine intuition was not off the road, so to say. That's why I love the work of Kripal. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, in a way, those of us who have read him a lot and were trained by him, this book could not fit that training more perfectly. In a certain way, it fills the certain-- The issue of relating madness psychosis to these sort of dramatic experiences but through modes of knowing, that's the thing. And that's the thing that you're putting your finger on there. This book does that with aplomb. 

So as a last question, the A Philosophy of Madness came out 11 years ago in Dutch. So that's a long time. What are you working on now? Well, how have your writing or your research has evolved into something else at this point? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah. Well, I have written in between A Philosophy of Madness and my today's situation. I've written another book. And that's called Shock Effects-- Philosophizing in Times of Climate Change. And that is quite different. 

But the last couple of months, I see the connection between them. In that book, I also use crystal. But then I use the crystal earth. And then I write about where energy comes from and how it gets spoiled in a way that it is-- used in a way that it is used against human and other life forms on planet Earth. But that is a kind of intermittent book. And well, I sent you my article, I think, about the-- 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Denizens of the Dark? The-- 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Deviations in the Dark. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Deviations. Yeah, yeah. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Was that an essay that you wrote on your own? Or was that solicited? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: I wrote it on my own. It was asked for by-- two years ago, whether I wanted to write a piece about things with madness, things with philosophy. And then I came up with this for a book, a book that has never come yet. 

So I had this text in Dutch. And then I translated it into English first, computer translation. And then the last couple of months, I have now and then gone back to this text. And there's a lot in it that has not been worked out yet, because what we haven't discussed so far, or perhaps we have, is we have discussed all kinds of binaries of dual constructions, the two in one, et cetera. 

But one thing, what really makes all this stuff really important is the difference between peace and war, so to say, between [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE]. And yeah. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: How so? So did it-- 

[INTERPOSING VOICES] 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah. So how is your recent more recent work exploring that beyond the binary between peace and war? 

WOUTER KUSTERS: By writing the piece I sent you, by examining some poets like Stéphane Mallarmé and by just living and seeing what happens and commenting on it in these new articles. I consider what I sent to you, "The Bad, The Refugee, and The Visionary," as a kind of new kind of text after A Philosophy of Madness. And so I have a couple of those new kinds of texts. 

But that is in development. I am, in fact, working with a researcher from Belgium with whom I've done lots of research. And what is interesting for you and everyone who would see this show is that these kind of investigations into madness, into philosophy and madness, we have a network in Belgium that we run. 

And every one and a half year, we have a conference. And students can send their papers. And there are four parallel sessions. It's two days. And there, we discuss more about these things. And people can join it. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: What was that called again? Sorry. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Too Mad to be True in Ghent. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: In Ghent, OK. So I didn't have this question prepared, but it popped in my head as you're talking about this conference. And so your work is really pioneering in a sense, this exploration of philosophy and madness, or at least it's the main voice in that. 

It's happening at the same time as the psychedelic Renaissance is happening, right? So do you get a lot of questions about how does what you do relate to this new exploration of psychedelics? Or-- 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah. Yeah, well, indeed, sometimes I say when people ask in the public, when there's an audience, and they say they want to know what madness or psychosis is, then I often say, well, just use LSD or mescaline or another kind of stuff. And then I say jokingly but still true, but you might also read my book. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Like, at the same time? Or-- 

WOUTER KUSTERS: At the same time? Yeah, whatever you want. 

[LAUGHTER] 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, no, I think those are two very perfect ways of encapsulating the experience of psychosis, your book and LSD. So if you put them together, that might be intense. But-- 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Indeed. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: But yeah, no, that's interesting. All right, so I think we can come in for a landing. I've taken up plenty of your time. But thank you so much for your thoughts and your reflections on this wonderful, wonderful book. 

WOUTER KUSTERS: Yeah, the pleasure was mine as well. So thank you very much. 

MATTHEW J. DILLON: Thank you so much. Take care. 

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