Terrorists: analogies and differences with mental diseases. A phenomenological-metaphysical perspective

Are islamic terrorists insane? International scholars generally concede that Al Qaeda members are not mentally ill. But, until now, there has not been a shared consensus and a strong argument that can prove it. This paper intends to throw light on the specific dehumanization of terrorists and to show that they are always responsible for their acts, unlike those who are affected by mental diseases. The members of Al Qaeda deny the world of life and take the distance from its sense and value: in their perspective only subversive action makes sense. However they always maintain a transcendent relation with the world (I-you; I-it). Persons with serious mental diseases have generally lost the sense of their self and the transcendence with the world. Terrorists and people with mental illness share a common separation from the world of life: one is voluntary, the other is the consequence of a number of factors (biological, social, etc.). Terrorists and psychotics have nevertheless something in common: the deprivation of the self. A loss of being that--I argue--is at the origin of the ordinariness of terrorists and the experience of void in psychotics. Two symptoms that reveal the condition of an intimate dryness, from a phenomenological and a metaphysical point of view as a consequence of a distorted relation with the world of life. I shall discuss how ordinariness is strictly related with the blurring definition of terrorism.