Human Nature: In the first part of this wise and subtle book, Adam Phillips asks himself in remarkably repetitive fashion why it is that sanity is so unsexy.
It is madness we find glamorous, whereas sanity is so drearily normative that it seems impossible to define. Phillips in fact comes up with a whole clutch of definitions of it later on in the book, thereby rather undermining his own point; but he seems reluctant to explore in any depth the possibility that the unobtrusiveness of sanity, like that of a skilled waiter, is part of its nature. Just as the body only thrusts itself upon our awareness when it goes awry, so sanity is the invisible colour of everyday life, the taken-for-granted background to our lives which only becomes perceptible when it breaks down. On some rather dispiriting theories, you're only sane or happy when you don't know it. Sanity is meant to be unsung.
Even so, sanity isn't quite so elusive a phenomenon as Phillips thinks. He tells us, for example, that there are no famously sane poets, forgetful of Dante and Goethe. It is Goethe's luminous health of mind, his monumentally well-balanced personality, which makes him seem so freakish in a postmodern age. If you want a vivid record of soundness of mind, go to Chaucer, Jane Austen or Thomas Mann. No one, Phillips riskily claims, is famous for their sanity - but for the great Enlightenment sages from Spinoza to Voltaire, rationality is a revolutionary adventure and madness an uninstructive deviation. (Phillips, incidentally, sometimes says "insane" when he means "irrational"). The twitching, shambling, neurotically compulsive Samuel Johnson was hardly a paragon of mental stability; but as a good 18th-century rationalist he was enthused by normality and bored by eccentricity. In any case, Going Sane, as an engagingly sane account of a supposedly insipid sanity, is what the philosophers call a performative contradiction, meaning that what it says is at odds with how it's done.
How sexy sanity is, then, may be more historically variable than this book imagines. The same goes for the boringness of virtue - the fact that the devil, like the crazy, has all the best tunes. This wasn't the view of Aristotle and Aquinas, for whom virtue was all about energy and fullness of life. Like sanity, virtue for these thinkers was meant to be invisible: it was a spontaneous habit rather than a laborious acquisition. Once, however, the middle classes got their grubby paws on virtue, redefining it as thrift, abstinence, prudence, meekness and chastity, the result was bound to be the romanticisation of evil. "Evil", like "mad", is a compliment in youth clubs as it isn't in corporate boardrooms.
Perhaps, Phillips reflects, sanity is as slippery as it is because it is not our customary condition. Perhaps it is just a fearful fending off of a madness which is natural to us. If we were to know ourselves as we really are, we might have to confront our innate lunacy, which is not exactly what the humanistic champions of self-knowledge have in mind.
There is a case for seeing infants as mad, driven as they are by ruthless appetite; and infancy, like malaria, is a disorder from which none of us ever entirely recovers. On this view, Phillips remarks, "we are born insane fantasists who have to learn to temper fantasy with reality."
We are only really happy, Freud considered, when we fulfil a childhood wish; and since babies don't wish for money (not even in Celtic-Tiger times), this is one reason why riches generally fail to bring us fulfilment. In a wonderfully perceptive account of adolescence, Phillips shows how the adolescent is driven by the overwhelming onset of sexuality into asking whether life is worth living or whether it is unbearable - an eminently sane inquiry in the author's view. And there is perhaps always a part of this pubescence which stays with us, continuing to find life intolerable.
Going Sane has some superbly suggestive things to say about childhood, depression, autism and schizophrenia, all of which Phillips in his psychiatric wisdom recognises as distinctive ways of being in the world and strategies for coping with its importunity. Yet when the book comes to deliver its own blueprint for sanity, the sane sound remarkably like middle-class liberal humanists such as Adam Phillips - sensitive, sceptical, post-political souls who prefer confusion to conviction, balance to partisanship and pleasure to truth. Islington Man, in effect. And Islington Man isn't the most plausible candidate for the political task of creating a reasonable, sane world. The book doesn't consider the cultural variability of sanity - the possibility that what constitutes soundness of mind in Dublin 4 might look like utter lunacy to the Nuer or Dinka. For all its well-groomed sensitivity, it is an oddly parochial investigation.
Phillips is that rare species of writer, a specialist in human life. As such, he is an heir to the Victorian sage and man of letters, a 19th-century moralist in less oracular style. Just as these thinkers brought a certain technical expertise, whether literary or philosophical, to bear on matters of urgent public concern, so Phillips translates a literary and psychiatric background into a general wisdom. But he rejects the tragic insight that to find your life you must first lose it - or as Yeats put it, that nothing can be whole or sole that has not been rent. And this constitutes a serious limit on even his sagacity.
Going Sane, By Adam Phillips, Hamish Hamilton, 245pp. £14.99
Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His book, After Theory, is now out in Penguin paperback
