MENS INSANA IN CORPORE SANO

Mens Insana In Corpore Sano, is such a thing even possible? Or else, there might be two other possibilities: one, that the mind is in fact sane, although it appears infirm, and the other, that the body, too, is ailing, even though not yet realizing that such is the case!

A splendid Nietzschean aphorism confronts the logistics of human wisdom: “There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.” Can we push this point even further, to say that there is more sanity in the body than in the mind? (…Isn’t it true that quite often the people of a country possess more common sense than their government, which amounts to approximately the same thing?)

Examples of mens sana in corpore infirmo on the grand scale of world nations are numerous. One can point to Russia alone on several occasions over the centuries, when devastated by terrible calamities, both foreign in origin and domestically produced, she was lying battered beyond human comprehension, yet would arise even mightier than before, just on the strength of her national mind and spirit. At the other end, we find the United States of America, where, with the exception of the Civil War, the body has always been producing the impression of great health, yet, ever since the onset of the twenty-first century, something clearly must have gone wrong with the mind, as though the splendidly healthy body has been snatched by some creatures from another place, infecting the American brain with some dangerous foreign bacteria, and making it sick.

Now returning to the peculiar title of this entry let us ask ourselves this very pointed and pertinent question: What about mens insana in corpore sano? Can we be somehow mistaken about the soundness of the body, and, perhaps, its latent infirmity is the cause of the more apparent infirmity of the spirit? But this is already Marxism--- not that we wish to argue with it at the moment, but, having given a lot of our attention to Marx and Marxism already, in various places of this book, we are not inclined to go in that same direction here.

Our purpose is to capture two other possibilities. Number one here is that the national spirit of a reasonably healthy nation might catch an insanity bug from abroad. In practical terms, this means a theoretically rare disease, yet apparently manifest in today’s America, when an alien interest ingratiates itself into the national brain, to the point of completely suppressing the will to pursue its native interest, and thus a schizophrenic personality comes into being, already diagnosed by us as such, in its irreconcilable conflict of the capitalist and religious moralities.

The other possibility is that what we call mens insana in corpore sano is in fact a complete misstatement of the situation. The proper characterization ought to have been a spirit of revolutionary change in the body of status quo. Thus the revolutionary madness of the spirit has been mistaken for a disease inside a philistine’s psychology, whereas in fact the former is the necessary condition of a qualitative progress manifesting itself in any society ready for change.

Interestingly, it is only through a proper understanding of the last paragraph that we can come to the proper appreciation of the legitimacy of the totalitarian ideal, which, in a nutshell, represents a logical alternative to social philistinism. This intriguing and terribly important subject has been discussed at considerable length throughout this Collective section, to which fact many of my entry titles properly testify.