The Wilds, Untamed, and Spontaneity

Chapter 4 discusses a “positive” account of madness. The Zhuangist, among others, focuses on the way we can understand an inherent value in madness depending on how we conceive of situations in given perspectives, and that we have reason to resist understanding particular people as mad or disordered objectively. The idea here is to include any mental state that is regularly seen as problematic or getting in the way of efficient or proper human functioning. This chapter also discusses a host of mad or mentally disordered individuals found in early Chinese texts, with the aim of understanding how they fit into the structure built thus far, and how various appearances of these characters (such as the “Madman of Chu”) in different texts will often serve to illustrate the divergent messages about mental disorder we find in these texts.