16

NOT ENTIRELY INSANE: What is a 'madman' if not a being whose sanity/insanity duality has ceased to be of any use to society and become a hindrance rather than an aid? That we are all mad to some extent is, I trust, a proven if not self-evident fact. For even the most heroic of us are regularly susceptible to delusions, illogicalities, stupidities, idiosyncratic anomalies, obsessions, fears, perversions, passions, exaggerations, uncritical obedience, irrational conformity, etc., which rarely fail to puzzle or startle us when we regain our critical discernment.

Fortunately, however, we usually learn to live with our individual oddities, just as we learn to live with their several manifestations in other people's lives, to regard them as a fact of life, to forget about them whenever possible, and to get on with our daily tasks not only as a means of securing a living and keeping ourselves preoccupied, but also of regulating our actions and keeping ourselves on the rails, as it were, of society's track. The three things one doesn't do is to question their validity, worry about their consequences, or set about trying to regulate them in a manner guaranteed to disturb the natural polarity of sanity/insanity within. Living with the brakes on is like driving a car too slowly and carefully. Sooner or later there may well be a serious accident and a screaming neurotic will be dragged out from where, previously, there had been a stable, healthy and normal human being.

What, then, is this person who no longer is of any great use to society but must be kept under regular supervision or, alternatively, left to fend for himself in a world where, at best, he can only expect to do very menial jobs? Is he someone who is all insanity and no sanity, someone who has tipped the polar balance so far in favour of insanity that little or no sanity remains discernible? Could any man be all of one thing to the total exclusion of its opposite under any circumstances, that is to say under any permanent as opposed to transient circumstances? No, I do not believe so! For to be all of one thing would be to destroy it, to cancel the polarity and thereby render the remaining side without definition, substance, or reality as an integral component in a dual relationship.

Thus if, as generally understood, madness is essentially a question of degree, it is by no means a total obliteration of sanity but, rather, an expression of the basic duality in a manner deemed to be incompatible with average standards of behaviour. This, I believe, suffices to explain why those deemed to be insane are usually unaware of their madness, take matters for granted, and are more inclined to consider others insane by their standards than to accept the standards which have been imposed upon them by society at large.

Consequently, to remain sane in society's eyes one must play the game as broadly understood by the majority, no matter what that game may happen to be, in order to remain intelligible within the confines of a given context and thereby pass muster as a being related to others. A surrealist painter will be considered sane so long as he continues to function efficiently within his particular sphere of creative activity and doesn't foolishly encroach upon other, unrelated spheres. He may, for example, paint pictures of elephants with telephones on their heads, women with moustaches, beetroots with legs, or mice wearing pyjamas. But as soon as he seriously contends that people should dress their pet mice, bankers order telephones for lunch, or office clerks stand on their hands all day instead of doing any work, he is likely to be judged insane for having stepped out of his professional line and made a public nuisance of himself.

Now if it is perfectly natural to refer to a man who talks to himself or insults strangers in the street as a 'madman', it nonetheless ought to be understood that, in the final analysis, there is really no such thing as a mad man, any more than there is really such a thing as a sane man, a good man, an evil man, a happy man, a sad man, etc., since men are always a tension of polarities, a meeting-point of opposed though mutually interdependent tendencies, and therefore cannot be wholly one thing or another. Naturally, we are compelled to simplify things, to define them in a way that will be intelligible to the vast majority of people at any given time. But from a philosophical standpoint, wherein the mind is determined to make a conscious effort to get to the bottom of things, such pragmatic simplifications afford us a worthwhile vehicle for analysis - indeed, constitute the very justification behind our attempts, as philosophers, to investigate life in a more detailed, resolute, sincere, and profound manner. Consequently, we must not take them at face-value, like the majority of people, but should concentrate on digging beneath the objective surface of life, if only because we are intent upon 'unearthing' some unique revelation, lifting it clear of obscurity, and thereupon exposing it to rational investigation.

Now just as we contended that a man cannot be wise without also possessing a degree of folly, so we also contend, in inverting our thesis, that he cannot be mad without possessing a calculated degree of sanity, since a mad man per se is more a figment of the imagination than a genuine reality.