Folly is inhabiting man as well as the divine. They compensate each other but they struggle and fight at the same time. This is what is bringing about the human drama of homo interior.
Dostoevsky is the author who best depicts madness in man, which suffocates the vitalism of homo interior (where the equipoise between madness and divine is perfectly working) to such a point that puts him in a cramped corner of his soul, the underground, where folly is taking the upper hand in man.
In the incipit of Notes from the Underground, the main character describes his folly as, initially, an illness which then transforms into pleasure for illness and finally he savours it as a sweet and rewarding pleasure of his folly.
"I am a sick man…. I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. But I don’t understand the least thing about my illness, and I don’t know for certain what part of me is affected. I am not having any treatment for it, and never have had, although I have a great respect for medicine and for doctors. I am besides extremely superstitious, if only in having such respect for medicine. (I am well educated enough not to be superstitious, but superstitious I am.) No, I refuse treatment out of spite. That is something you will probably not understand. Well, I understand it. I can’t of course explain who my spite is directed against in this matter; I know perfectly well that I can’t ‘score off’ the doctors in any way by not consulting them; I know better than anybody that I am harming nobody but myself. All the same, if I don’t have treatment, it is out of spite. Is my liver out of order? – let it get worse!
I have been living like this for a long time now – about twenty years. I am forty. I once used to work in the government service but I don’t now. I was a bad civil servant. I was rude, and I enjoyed being rude. After all, I didn’t take bribes, so I had to have some compensation. (A poor witticism; but I won’t cross it out. When I wrote it down, I thought it would seem very pointed: now, when I see that I was simply trying to be clever and cynical, I shall leave it in on purpose.) When people used to come to the desk where I sat, asking for information, I snarled at them, and was hugely delighted when I succeeded in hurting somebody’s feelings."
And it is in this acceptance of being mad and rejoicing in their own madness that people gain a new status where they believe that everything is possible. Because they cancelled the homo interior, they suppressed the divine and chose the route of delirium where the folly of believing in a man harnessed by his own power (intelligence, blood skin and bones) is the only logically consequential reason that drives him to his destruction.
For the same reason, the oligarchs who rule the world are not so far from the conclusions of Dostoevsky's Man of the Underground: "The main point, and the supreme nastiness, lay in the fact that even at my moments of greatest spleen, I was constantly and shamefully aware that not only was I not seething with fury, I was not even angry; I was simply scaring sparrows for my own amusement."
Dostoevsky is the author who best depicts madness in man, which suffocates the vitalism of homo interior (where the equipoise between madness and divine is perfectly working) to such a point that puts him in a cramped corner of his soul, the underground, where folly is taking the upper hand in man.
In the incipit of Notes from the Underground, the main character describes his folly as, initially, an illness which then transforms into pleasure for illness and finally he savours it as a sweet and rewarding pleasure of his folly.
"I am a sick man…. I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. But I don’t understand the least thing about my illness, and I don’t know for certain what part of me is affected. I am not having any treatment for it, and never have had, although I have a great respect for medicine and for doctors. I am besides extremely superstitious, if only in having such respect for medicine. (I am well educated enough not to be superstitious, but superstitious I am.) No, I refuse treatment out of spite. That is something you will probably not understand. Well, I understand it. I can’t of course explain who my spite is directed against in this matter; I know perfectly well that I can’t ‘score off’ the doctors in any way by not consulting them; I know better than anybody that I am harming nobody but myself. All the same, if I don’t have treatment, it is out of spite. Is my liver out of order? – let it get worse!
I have been living like this for a long time now – about twenty years. I am forty. I once used to work in the government service but I don’t now. I was a bad civil servant. I was rude, and I enjoyed being rude. After all, I didn’t take bribes, so I had to have some compensation. (A poor witticism; but I won’t cross it out. When I wrote it down, I thought it would seem very pointed: now, when I see that I was simply trying to be clever and cynical, I shall leave it in on purpose.) When people used to come to the desk where I sat, asking for information, I snarled at them, and was hugely delighted when I succeeded in hurting somebody’s feelings."
For the same reason, the oligarchs who rule the world are not so far from the conclusions of Dostoevsky's Man of the Underground: "The main point, and the supreme nastiness, lay in the fact that even at my moments of greatest spleen, I was constantly and shamefully aware that not only was I not seething with fury, I was not even angry; I was simply scaring sparrows for my own amusement."
And when you get to this point there is nothing that has a logical ground, everything is done just for your own madness.
And what we are living in now is, in fact, a world where folly has reached its highest pitch in human history.
No comments:
Post a Comment