Tuesday 26 February 2008

Dostoevsky on Possession

"It was not you that ate the idea, but the idea that ate you."

From Demons, also known apparently less accurately as The Possessed.

While in the territory, a great line from The Brothers Karamazov uttered as a throwaway by Dmitri Karamazov, and a kind of prefiguring on the philosophy of the societal mechanisms of control in the technological era:

"Man is broad, too broad even. I would narrow him down."

4 comments:

Neil Forsyth said...

There are no ideas any more. Where are all the ideas? If there are any, they are buried deep beneath a mountain of triviality.

Andrew said...

The very existence of immense souls like Dostoevsky striding the current landscape is anathema to the times. He would make the truth claims of the present seem so monstroulsy trivial( if you can put those two words together), that the CIA would probably have to assassinate him. Naturally using the lone gun nut device.

Though I recommend Pelevin for real scintillating ideas about the now. Try The Clay Machine Gun.

William Wren said...

i found some inteligent debate on straigtdope.com which reversed my opinions of the dumb masses of our time

Andrew said...

Though I'm saying that it is the intention of society's makeup to dumb down the masses, certainly not that this is the true way we are. We have to be forced into that defiled form, and simultaneous to the processes pushed from above, we have an enlightening ine from below.
Maybe it's like two pots of water coming to the boil; one artificially drivenby the elites leading to somewhere very unpleasant, and a degraded version of life.
And the other the natural uplift of life to greater depth & refinement. The celebrity culture, etc narrowing man down, while the other broadening him.
Thanks for the pointer; I'll check it out.