"The "idiot," I have said, is at times close to that boundary line where every idea and its opposite are recognized as true. That is, he has an intuition that no idea, no law, no character or order exists that is true and right except as seen from one pole – and for every pole there is an opposite pole. Settling upon a pole, adopting a position from which the world is viewed and arranged, this is the first principle of every order, every culture, every society and morality. Whoever feels, if only for an instant, that spirit and nature, good and evil are interchangeable is the most dangerous enemy of all forms of order. For that is where the opposite order is, and there chaos begins.
A way of thought that leads back to the unconscious, to chaos, destroys all forms of human organization. In conversation someone says to the "idiot" that he only speaks the truth, nothing more, and that this is deplorable. So it is. Everything is true, "Yes" can be said to anything. To bring order into the world, to attain goals, to make possible law, society, organization, culture, morality, "No" must be added to the "Yes," the world must be separated into opposites, into good and evil. However arbitrary the first establishment of each "No," each prohibition, may be, it becomes sacrosanct the instant it becomes law, produces results, becomes the foundation for a point of view and system of order.
The highest reality in the eyes of human culture lies in this dividing up of the world into bright and dark, good and evil, permissible and forbidden.
For Myshkin the highest reality, however, is the magical experience of the reversibility of all fixed rules, of the equal justification for the existence of both poles.
The Idiot, thought to its logical conclusion, leads to a matriarchy of the unconscious and annihilates culture. It does not break the tables of the law, it reverses them and shows their opposites written on the back."
--Thoughts on The Idiot, by Dostoevsky
--Hermann Hesse, 1919
http://www.gss.ucsb.edu/projects/hesse/works/idiot.pdf
Are we there yet?
