O Alienista

Last year,  Dunder gave us a short story, O Alienista by Machado de Assis (Portuguese students will remember), to read for an in class analysis. Centred around a doctor named Dr. Bacamarte, a stoic and studious but peculiar man with peculiar habits (he chose his wife based on her physical ability to bear him strong and intellectual children), the book serves as a criticism towards the Scientistic movement (a movement where reason and science were the only means through which knowledge could be achieved).

In the story, Dr. Bacamarte, a studious man with various accolades and degrees and highly respected by all, settles down in his hometown and builds a mental institute, seeking to use the interns as experiments in order to find the origin of madness. There, he admitted those he deemed as “irrational”, “delusional”, and “crazy”, such as a superstitious bar owner, a vain barber, and an indecisive shopkeeper. Anyone who showed any instabilities or irrationalities in their actions or emotions would be forcefully admitted. Soon, though, more and more people were admitted for the smallest of reasons, such as a woman who had a fit of hysterics after she discovered she lost her baby, or the painter who painted the madhouse’s windows a ridiculous shade of bright blue. By the end of the year, half of the town had been locked inside the madhouse, even his wife, who was checked in after spending an entire night fretting over which dress she would wear for a ball. Enraged, the citizens got together, and rioted in front of the madhouse, demanding the release of their friends and family members. Soon, those protesters found themselves hauled and locked inside the madhouse as well, for acting violently and loudly, a true sign of madness for Dr. Bacamarte. After admitting almost every single person into his madhouse, he realised that not one person he knew lived in a purely scientific, logical, and rational matter as he did, and that what made people “sane" or “normal" was the very presence of these small irrationalities and anomalies in their behaviour. No one but himself, who behaved strictly according to logic and reason rather than emotion, was perfect, therefore he was the odd one out. In the end, after freeing all the patients, he locked himself in, never to be seen again. 

Written in the late 1800's, during the emergence of Scientism in Brazil, O Alienista is a brilliant piece, where Dr. Bacamarte’s town becomes a microcosm of Brazil, or even the entire western world. Using Dr. Bacamarte as a symbol of the scientistic thought, Machado de Assis’ references to movements within scientism, such as the explanation of why Dr. Bacamarte chose his wife (a reference to eugenism), transform this book into a harsh criticism towards the radical beliefs gaining popularity during that time. Scientism, centred around objectivity and rationality, rejecting anything related to empiricism, emotion, or faith and relying purely on science and logic, had become the fad of century. Much like what happened in Dr. Bacamarte’s town, O Alienista warned that the utter reliance on reason would never be enough to explain the world around us, nor would it be the cure to all its problems. Natural human behaviour, it argues, is irrational and many times, purely driven by emotions. It is something that cannot be explained or solved (if there is anything to solve) by science. Human nature is no disease, it’s what defines us. 

This book establishes strong connections with today's class’ introduction to reason as a way of knowing, for as both the book and the course suggest, reason is one of the various ways. O Alienista was written over 100 years ago, and the Scientistic movement has passed, but the messages and themes in this book are still extremely relevant. Even today, to many, science and logic are the equivalents to truth, and many seem to forget that even it has its own flaws. Although, technically, science can explain life, thought, emotion, and most things imaginable, it does so only in its own terms. The human experience is far too complex to be explained with words, thoughts, equations, diagrams, whatever. We (humans) are not purely rational creatures, nor should we be. <- knowledge claim, open to debate.