Beyond Embedded: The History of "The Ecstatic"
Mos Def's music, comedic, and movie influences are possibly a few of the “ecstatic” minds that he looks up to, a concept often discussed by existentialist thinkers like Heidegger and Sartre to refer to transcendent ecstasy or a euphoric hysteria leading people to feel “outside oneself” brought on by various activities and ideas.
In James Cowles Prichard’s book A treatise on insanity and other disorders affecting the mind, penned during the early 1800s, he links the connection between ecstasy and insanity back to Greek mythology and the cult of Dionysus. He also suggests that daydreams might even be a form of ecstatic madness, where people willingly give themselves over to glorifying unreal circumstances. Prichard was a senior physician and ethnologist who specialized in “mental maladies” during his time. He coined the term “moral insanity” to describe the paradox that existed when a person of otherwise undamaged intellect fixated on wild, unrealistic ideas that could eventually lead him or her to depraved behavior and an incapability to function in ordinary society.
For his album "The Ecstatic," Mos Def has re-contextualized these old theories to point out that sometimes the supposed bouts of insanity and/or flights of fancy are exactly what lead to social progress as well as innovation in entertainment and all other aspects of life.
Fantastic ideas that seemed impossible when The Wright brothers or Alexander Graham Bell first thought of them have now become significant and common products in modern society. And while “moral insanity” is now obsolete, some have also suggested that refined versions of this concept now describe antisocial personality disorder.
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- Music
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- Philosophy, Mos Def, The Ecstatic, greek mythology, 2 more
