Quotation
If there is no God, everything is permitted.
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ResearchLecture: Notes from the Underground
Lecture: Crime and Punishment
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Biographical
Dostoyevsky grew up in a middle-class family in Moscow. His father, a doctor, was a tyrant toward his family, and his mother was a mild, pious woman who died before Dostoyevsky was sixteen. Partly to escape the oppressive atmosphere of his father's household, the boy acquired a love of reading, especially the works of Nikolai Gogol, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Honore de Balzac. At his father's insistence, Dostoyevsky trained as an engineer in St. Petersburg. While the youth was at school, his father was murdered by his own serfs at the family's small country estate. Dostoyevsky rarely mentioned his father's murder, but Oedipal themes are recurrent in his work, and Sigmund Freud suggested that the novelist's epilepsy was a manifestation of guilt over his repressed wish for his father's death.
Dostoyevsky graduated from engineering school but chose a literary career. His first published work, a translation of Balzac's novel Eugenie Grandet, appeared in a St. Petersburg journal in 1844. Two years later, he published his first novel, Bednye lyudi (1846; Poor Folk), a naturalistic tale with a clear social message as well as a delicate description of life's tragic aspects as manifested in everyday existence. The twenty-four-year-old author became an overnight celebrity when Vissarion Belinsky, the most influential critic of the day, praised Dostoyevsky for his social awareness and declared him the literary successor of Gogol. Dostoyevsky joined Belinsky's literary circle but later broke with it when the critic reacted coldly to his subsequent works. Belinsky judged the novel Dvoynik (1846; The Double) and the short stories Gospodin Prokharchin (1846; Mr. Prokharchin) and Khozyayka (1847; The Landlady) as devoid of a social message.
In 1848 Dostoyevsky joined a group of young intellectuals, led by Mikhail Petrashevsky, which met to discuss literary and political issues. In the reactionary political climate of mid-nineteenth-century Russia, such groups were illegal, and in 1849 the members of the so-called Petrashevsky Circle were arrested and charged with subversion. Dostoyevsky and several of his associates were imprisoned and sentenced to death. As they were facing the firing squad, an imperial messenger arrived with the announcement that the Czar had commuted the death sentences to hard labor in Siberia. This scene was to haunt the novelist the rest of his life. Dostoyevsky described his life as a prisoner in Zapiski iz myortvogo doma (1862; The House of the Dead), a novel demonstrating both an insight into the criminal mind and an understanding of the Russian lower classes. While in prison the writer underwent a profound spiritual and philosophical transformation. His intense study of the New Testament, the only book the prisoners were allowed to read, contributed to his rejection of his earlier liberal political views and led him to the conviction that redemption is possible only through suffering and faith, a belief which informed his later work.
Dostoyevsky was released from the prison camp in 1854; however, he was forced to serve as a soldier in a Siberian garrison for an additional five years. When Dostoyevsky was finally allowed to return to St. Petersburg in 1859, he eagerly resumed his literary career, founding two periodicals and writings articles and short fiction. The articles expressed his new-found belief in a social and political order based on the spiritual values of the Russian people. These years were marked by further personal and professional misfortunes, including the forced closing of his journals by the authorities, the deaths of his wife and his brother, and a financially devastating addiction to gambling. It was in this atmosphere that Dostoyevsky wrote Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; Notes from the Underground) and Crime and Punishment. In Notes from the Underground Dostoyevsky satirizes contemporary social and political views by presenting a narrator whose notes reveal that his purportedly progressive beliefs lead only to sterility and inaction. Dostoyevsky's portrayal of this bitter and frustrated Underground Man is hailed as the introduction of an important new type of literary figure. Crime and Punishment brought him acclaim but scant financial compensation. Viewed by critics as one of his masterpieces, Crime and Punishment is the novel in which Dostoyevsky first develops the theme of redemption through suffering. The protagonist Raskolnikov, whose name derives from the Russian word for schism or splitis presented as the embodiment of spiritual nihilism. The novel depicts the harrowing confrontation between his philosophical beliefs, which prompt him to commit a murder in an attempt to prove his supposed superiority, and his inherent morality, which condemns his actions.
In 1867, Dostoyevsky fled to Europe with his second wife to escape creditors. Although they were distressing due to financial and personal difficulties, Dostoyevsky's years abroad were fruitful, for he completed one important novel and began another. Idiot (1869); The Idiot), influenced by Hans Holbein's painting Christ Taken from the Cross and by Dostoyevsky's opposition to the growing atheistic sentiment of the times, depicts the Christ-like protagonist's loss of innocence and his experience of sin. Dostoyevsky's profound conservatism, which marked his political thinking following his Siberian experience, and especially his reaction against revolutionary socialism, provided the impetus for his great political novel Besy (1871-72; The Possessed). Based on a true event, in which a young revolutionary was murdered by his comrades, this novel provoked a storm of controversy for its harsh depiction of ruthless radicals. In his striking portrayal of Stavrogin, the novel's central character, Dostoyevsky described a man dominated by the life-denying forces of nihilism.
Dostoyevsky returned to Russia in 1871 and began his final decade of prodigious literary activity. In sympathy with the conservative political party, he accepted the editorship of a reactionary weekly, Grazhdanin (The Citizen). In his Dnevnik pisatelya (1873-1877; The Diary of a Writer), initially a column in the Citizen but later an independent periodical, Dostoyevsky published a variety of prose works, including some of his outstanding short stories. Dostoyevski's last work was Bratya Karamazovy (1880; The Brothers Karamazov), a family tragedy of epic proportions, which is viewed as one of the great novels of world literature. The novel recounts the murder of a father by one of his four sons. Initially, his son Dmitri is arrested for the crime, but as the story unfolds it is revealed that the illegitimate son Smerdyakov has killed the old man at what he believes to be the instigation of his half-brother Ivan. Ivan's philosophical essay, The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, is a work now famous in its own right. Presented as a debate in which the Inquisitor condemns Christ for promoting the belief that mankind has the freedom of choice between good and evil, the piece explores the conflict between intellect and faith, and between the forces of evil and the redemptive power of Christianity. Dostoyevsky envisioned this novel as the first of a series of works depicting The Life of a Great Sinner, but early in 1881, a few months after completing The Brothers Karamazov, the writer died at his home in St. Petersburg.
To his contemporary readers, Dostoyevsky appeared as a writer primarily interested in the terrible aspects of human existence. However, later critics have recognized that the novelist sought to plumb the depths of the psyche, in order to reveal the full range of the human experience, from the basest desires to the most elevated spiritual yearnings. Above all, he illustrated the universal human struggle to understand God and self. Dostoyevsky was, Katherine Mansfield wrote, a being who loved, in spite of everything, adored life, even while he knew the dank, dark places. [Adapted from Andreas Teuber]
Notes from the Underground
Russell McNeil, PhD (Copyright 2005)
[Logos Great Books Exclusive]
Is the Underground man an anti-hero? He is certainly a creep. He is inconsistent. He is friendless. He is loveless. He is two-faced. He is contradictory. He is drawn in two directions at once. When he admires all that is lofty and beautiful, he acts in ways that are lowly and ugly. When he acts is ways that are lowly and ugly, he is drawn to all that is beautiful and lofty. He is drawn at once toward the polarities of existence. The sauce of his life is contradiction and suffering, of tormenting inner analysis... His philosophy? is grounded on wet snow. The main thing for him is to be not the first to arrive. The main thing for him is the huge yellow spot on his trowsers. The main thing for him was the fact his meeting was to be commonplace. The real main thing about our anti-hero is that he is a fragmented, vascillating creep. But perhaps it's not his fault? On Tuesdays he embraces the whole of mankind. On Wednesdays he revels in debauchary. He lectures Zverkov by revelling in his admiration of truth, sincerity and honesty. He acts in his relationships with others with lies, insincerity and dishonesty. He demonstrates a knowledge of real love, real intimacy with Liza -- he treats her with brutality, hate and distain.
I think Dostoevsky illustrates an important idea. The idea is that reason, that grand and uniquely human power -- worshipped so much during the enlightenment - is limited in reach and scope. Social critic Friedrich August von Hayek commented once that, ...the toughest task for reason is to see its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that we should bow to external forces and to obey principles we cannot understand ... but on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization may depend... Such limitations imply that on life's most important questions - especially those of a moral or ethical nature -- unguided reason alone can (and has) produced chilling consequences. Without adequate or any moral illumination, reason alone, when pushed to its limits, can produce consequences which stand dramatically opposed to those moral demands.
Without direction - the source of which is ultimately beyond rational understanding - in the domain of the meta-rational -- reason-as-reason will, sooner or later, run aground, or better yet, underground. Directed reason, on the other hand provides an orientation - an orientation that gives purpose and direction to inquiry -- by allowing us to select from an infinite range of possibilities the right path - the right reason. Our anti-hero struggles for guidance -- from all that ius beautiful and lofty in books -- but is drawn equally it seems by forces from within -- forces that simultaneously deny all that is beautiful and lofty.
The rational and the meta-rational must operate symbiotically: one pointing the way, the other uncovering the Truth.
Political theories, scientific theories, medical theories, anthropological theories, psychological theories, as theories are nothing more than intricate exercises in calculus. Each applies a coherent set of rules to the objects they reference. Like arithmetic or calculus this involves plugging in values, applying the rules, and observing the consequences. Theories as calculus have no moral content. Whatever moral framework we as humans use to regulate the operation of theories comes from a domain outside of the calculus. This all seems so obvious.
But is it? Our century seems a poor test case for the symbiotic and morally illuminated application of theory. Global wars, genocide, environmental decay, and massive economic disparity are but a few examples of theories running aground in our century. We seem no better that our ancestors.
We may be worse off. Not just because the consequences of unguided applications of reason are more far reaching now - global population is large and our technologies powerful. We may be worse off now because of the emergence of theories that not only deny the importance of a symbiotic relationship between the rational and meta rational, they deny the meta-rational altogether. These theories enable their practitioners - like the anti-hero in our story - to sometimes cross over the barriers erected by traditional morality, by denying the barriers. They are not meta-rational to the anti-hero; they are irrational. Hence they are destructible. In crossing those barriers the anti-hero is in a position to act outside the constraints of good and evil.
This is not true for physics or biology or political science generally. None of those systems make explicit moral demands as such - but nothing in those sciences as traditionally articulated expects their practitioners to be blind to the moral universe.
I'd like to offer three contemporary examples. While each of these streams offers differing approaches, they are similar in this respect to the specific form of pure rationality Dostoevsky warns about: none of these systems are open to, make reference to, or are guided in any meaningful way by reference to externals. Universes onto themselves these systems attempt to capture the universe and make it their own.
The first of these ideas is called historicism. An underpinning principle of the approach is that Truth with a capital T or Truths have no enduring meanings in human cultures In fact, the claim is that all historical ideas and arguments and moralities are relative only to the times in which they were developed. No amount of dissection, interpretation or critical analysis of the past can provide us with anything other than a measure of Truths as they once were. There may be nothing rationally wrong with such a claim. What is morally Truth for the anti-hero on Tuesday is not necessarily Truth on Wednesday.
If we deny the main claim of historicism and accept a priori that truth does endure we must draw on a belief which really can not be established rationally. To believe that Truths are intelligible and invariant is to believe something about the universe we can not establish with certainty - except as a kind of faith.
A second modern purely rational stream is represented by an approach from within the positive sciences. It's called scientism. Not all scientists think this way. In fact scientism isn't particularly scientific - it is more an attitude toward the positive sciences held by some both in and out of the sciences. The basic contention - and it may account for the disdain many of us have for modern science - is that the only knowledge in the would that has any validity is knowledge derived from the positive sciences. Scientism as scientism would claim that all ethical, moral, aesthetic, or metaphysical statements are meaningless. The only real meaning is that which can be attached to technical feasibility. If something is technically possible - it is morally admissible. We don't need Dostoevsky to respond here - Mary Shelley has already done so. What's wrong with building a monster, detonating a hydrogen bomb or cloning a George Bush? Nothing - from the perspective of this purely rational approach.
A third example arises from a position that argues that moral decisions should only be based on pragmatic considerations and that practical concerns should always prevail over theory or ethics. From a purely rational point of view - if we deny the universality or existence of external forces, we are rationally bound to follow such a course. In fact, the very word rationalize has come to imply the kinds of consequences flowing from this sort of reasoning. If you think about it, pragmatism - in this guise - taken to extremes can be used to rationalize just about any action any one or any nation has ever taken. Think Iraq.
The rational ideologies that were capturing the imaginations of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1860's were a blend of ideas influenced by an intermingling of the currents of English Utilitarianism (Mill), Utopian Socialism (Marx and others), and Social Darwinism: all of these are reflected in some way in the Dostoevsky's character. For example, the notion that superior individuals had the right to act independently for the welfare of humanity reflects an influence of Social Darwinism. But Dostoevsky's main target seems to have been what has come to be known as Russian Nihilism - a rather negative doctrine which found nothing to approve in the established order of anything: morality, religion or politics.
Wordsworth's poem The Prelude addresses this:
This was a time, when, all things
tending fast to depravation, speculative themes -
That promised to abstract the hopes of man
Out of his feelings, to be fixed thenceforth
For ever in a purer element-
Found ready welcome. Tempting region that
For Zeal to enter and refresh herself
...
Where passions had the privilege
to work,
And never hear the sound of their own names.
Critic Joseph Frank argues that Dostoevsky's writing plays on these themes: The anti-hero operates on the basis of a Utilitarian or pragmatic calculus. His reason can overcome the most deeply rooted human feelings. Ordinary people break down when they cross certain barriers because conscience (coming from outside reason) interferes with purely rational actions. Conscience - which after all is a product of some mythological conditioning in the anti-hero's mind -- could not be allowed to distort his reason.
Dostoevsky's procedure was to take such an ideological theory and show how -- when pushed - it would generate distasteful contradictions. The contradictions that emerge are in the form of a clash between meta-rational values: love, altruism, sympathy vs. the amorality of ideologies. Under the influence of Liza - the anti-hero's project eventually falters - or seems to.
My starting point works like this. I freely acknowledge that these meta-rational forces are not subject to rational analyses. But, when I ask myself this question: Can Truth present itself to me via a meta-rational path? I cannot say no. I can't say no because my reason alone can not negate the transcendental. Reasoning - as I understand reasoning - can not rule out the possibility that there are regions where conventional human reasoning is inoperative.
The best way I understand to express this is to say that it is not irrational to be receptive to the meta-rational. This in no way proves the meta-rational - it simply declares that to be open to the idea that we can know that some paths are better than others is not forbidden.
That sort of knowledge is fundamentally different from rational knowledge because it is experiential and interpersonal. It may be analogous to the knowledge that we experience of love or friendship when we enter into human relationships. Loving relationships generate awareness and sensibility that purely rational analyses of such relationships can never adequately explain. The anti-hero talks the talk on his need for love and friendship, but whenever he walks the walk -- we are never sure -- and neither is he ever sure -- that his desire for love or friendship is anything other than a pragmatic desire to remove the itch of whatever pain he presently endures. He is always putting on an act, but (ironically) never really sure if he is putting on an act. These mysterious understandings of real love or friendship or beauty emerge when we surrender to the idea of love -- accept the notion as somehow sublime, mysterious, or transcensent. Plato alludes to this sort of thing in the Republic and the Symposium when he references the domain beyond the divided line.
For reasons this seems to work best when we divest ourselves of arrogance, egoism and pride -- something of which the anti-hero seems incapable. That of course is a painful thing to do. Any such surrender is painful and humiliating. We suffer. Yet the anti-hero worships suffering -- revels in suffering -- on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
This notion that there are unverifiable universal principles that all philosophic systems share is sometimes also called right reason.
The abandonment of the idea that there might be common references (or more significant references) shared by all philosophies leads invariably to confusions and fragmentation. Each system of thought then claims ownership of the all. This is sometimes called philosophic pride.
Whenever we abandon external reference our inquiries are subject to caprice and their achievements judged by pragmatic criteria (pragmatism) or empirical data alone (scientism). The neglect of right reason leads to agnosticism and moral relativism and skepticism and undifferentiated pluralism -- the malaise of modernity. In effect all positions are equally valid and everything becomes reduced to opinion. In his specific critique of the anti-hero Dostoevsky shows how all of the above may emerge when any proudful attitudes rule our thinking.
You might maintain that dismissing right reason is a sign of rational maturity - a liberating decision as we free ourselves from the chains of irrational mythologies.
My only response to that is to offer that it is NOT freedom to decline to be open to the transcendental. Right reason may be seen as the key that can liberate reason - by enabling reason to attain correctly what it seeks.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition - the context of external reference in this novel - the first man and woman in the allegory of Genesis - had no need for reason - represented in Genesis by the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Human pride caused man to seek unreferenced knowledge. He did not need God.
The Fall meant that from that point forward the path to Truth would become strewn with obstacles - reasoning would become inclined to falsehood. The coming of Christ was the saving event which redeemed reason from its weakness - in effect setting reason free. Faith for the Christian became the external reference and provided the orientation in the seeking of Truth through reason. Such faith is not grounded on rational evidence because it indeed is based on an interpersonal relationship which in some way is deemed richer than evidence.
The Faith/Reason model in Truth seeking abandons the elitism attached to the purely rational Russian ideologies Dostoevsky is challenging in the novel. Truth is NOT something accessible only to the privileged few. The elitism of reason worship suggests that to know truth requires intelligence -- and of course it is intelligence our character admires most -- above all else. Truth is somehow a function of IQ. Something about that grates. The irony of course is that as intelligent as our anti-hero may be, his Truths are as permanent and opaque as wet snow.
Crime and Punishment
Russell McNeil, PhD (Copyright 2005)
[Malaspina Great Books Exclusive]
Crime and Punishment illustrates an important idea. The idea is that reason, that grand and uniquely human power, is limited in reach and scope. Social critic Friedrich August von Hayek commented once that, ... it may be that the most difficult task for human reason is to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles we cannot hopefully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization may depend. Such limitations imply that on life's most important questions - particularly those of a moral or ethical nature - reason alone can produce chilling consequences. Without adequate or any moral illumination, reason alone, when pushed to its limits, can produce consequences which stand dramatically opposed to those moral demands. Dostoevsky's narrative is directed as a specific critique of Russian manifestations of purely rational political theories current in the 1860's in his homeland. But the challenge he poses has meaning for us at the end of the 20th century.
Dostoevsky's parable focuses on a particular brand of 19th century Russian ideology, as it begins to crystallize in the mind of a young idealist. But the modeling procedure Dostoevsky uses in teasing out the contradictions of Raskolnikov's unguided application of a morally bankrupt theory, could equally well be applied to contemporary thinking around several important and equally bankrupt modern ideas - ideas harshly criticized by thinkers such as Hayek.
Without direction - the source of which is ultimately beyond rational understanding - in the domain of the meta-rational - reason-as-reason will, sooner or later, run aground. Directed reason on the other hand provides an orientation - an orientation that gives purpose and direction to inquiry - by allowing us to select from an infinite range of possibilities the right path - the right reason. Problems emerged for Raskolnikov then, and for us now when we deny the need to recognize, acknowledge and bow to external guidance. The rational and the meta-rational must operate symbiotically: one pointing the way, the other uncovering the Truth.
Raskolnikov rationalized murder. We are appalled. Why? Each of us will attempt to answer in a different way. Fundamentally though I think that most of our answers boil down to the same idea. We are appalled because it wasn't the right thing to do.
We know that - Raskolnikov himself eventually came to know that too. But the reason his crime wasn't right had nothing to do with Raskolnikov's rational theories. Political theories, scientific theories, medical theories, anthropological theories, psychological theories, as theories are nothing more than intricate exercises in calculus. They apply a coherent set of rules to the objects they reference. Like arithmetic or calculus this involves plugging in values, applying the rules, and observing the consequences. Theories as calculus have no moral content. Whatever moral framework we as humans use to regulate the operation of theories comes from a domain outside of the calculus. This all seems so obvious.
But is it? Our century seems a poor test case for the symbiotic and morally illuminated application of theory. Global wars, genocide, environmental decay, and massive economic disparity are but a few examples of theories running aground in our century. We seem no better that our ancestors.
We may be worse off. Not just because the consequences of unguided applications of reason are more far reaching now - global population is large and our technologies powerful. We may be worse off now because of the emergence of theories that not only deny the importance of a symbiotic relationship between the rational and meta-rational, they deny the meta-rational altogether. These theories enable their practitioners - like Raskolnikov tries to do in our story - to cross over the barriers erected by traditional morality, by denying the barriers. They are not meta-rational to Raskolnikov; they are irrational. Hence they are destructible. In crossing those barriers Raskolnikov is in a position to act outside the constraints of good and evil.
Such theories (i.e. those of Raskolnikov) - unlike most ideas we draw on to shape our lives and give meaning to our existence - actively close off and deny mystery.
This is not true for physics or biology or political science generally. None of those systems make explicit moral demands as such - but nothing in those sciences as traditionally articulated expects their practitioners to be blind to the moral universe.
I'd like to offer three contemporary examples. While each of these streams offers differing approaches, they are similar in this respect to the specific form of pure rationality Dostoevsky warns about:
none of these systems are open to, make reference to, or are guided in any meaningful way by reference to externals.
Universes onto themselves these systems attempt to capture the universe and make it their own.
Historicism
The first of these ideas is called historicism. An underpinning principle of the approach is that Truth with a capital T or Truths have no enduring meanings in human cultures In fact, the claim is that all historical ideas and arguments and moralities are relative only to the times in which they were developed. No amount of dissection, interpretation or critical analysis of the past can provide us with anything other than a measure of Truths as they once were. There may be nothing rationally wrong with such a claim.
If we deny the main claim of historicism and accept a priori that truth does endure we must draw on a belief which really can not be established rationally. To believe that Truths are intelligible and invariant is to believe something about the universe we can not establish with certainty - except as a kind of faith.
Scientism
A second modern purely rational stream is represented by an approach from within the positive sciences. It's called scientism. Not all scientists think this way. In fact scientism isn't particularly scientific - it is more an attitude toward the positives sciences held by some both in and out of the sciences. The basic contention - and it may account for the disdain many of us have for modern science - is that the only knowledge in the would that has any validity is knowledge derived from the positive sciences. Scientism as scientism would claim that all ethical, moral, aesthetic, or metaphysical statements are meaningless. The only real meaning is that which can be attached to technical feasibility. If something is technically possible - it is morally admissible. We don't need Dostoevsky to respond here - Mary Shelley has already done so. What's wrong with building a monster, detonating a hydrogen bomb or cloning a Bill Clinton? Nothing - from the perspective of this purely rational approach.
Pragmatism
A third example arises from a position that argues that moral decisions should only be based on pragmatic considerations and that practical concerns should always prevail over theory or ethics. From a purely rational point of view - if we deny the universality or existence of external forces, we are rationally bound to follow such a course. In fact, the very word rationalize has come to imply the kinds of consequences flowing from this sort of reasoning. If you think about it, pragmatism - in this guise - taken to extremes can be used to rationalize just about any action any one or any nation has ever taken.
The rational ideologies that were capturing the imaginations of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1860's were a blend of ideas influenced by an intermingling of the currents of English Utilitarianism (Mill), Utopian Socialism (Marx and others), and Social Darwinism: all of these are reflected in some way in the character of Raskolnikov. For example, Raskolnikov's notion that superior individuals had the right to act independently for the welfare of humanity reflects an influence of Social Darwinism. But Dostoevsky's main target seems to have been what has come to be known as Russian Nihilism - a rather negative doctrine which found nothing to approve in the established order of anything: morality, religion or politics.
Joseph Frank who writes on this in the commentaries at the back of the Norton text draws attention to an interesting poem by Wordsworth, The Prelude which Frank says offers an essential commentary on Crime and Punishment. Here is the poem:
This was a time, when, all things tending fast
To depravation, speculative themes -
That promised to abstract the hopes of man
Out of his feelings, to be fixed thenceforth
For ever in a purer element --
Found ready welcome. Tempting region that
For Zeal to enter and refresh herself'
Frank says that these next and final two lines of Wordsworth's poem define the theme of Crime and Punishment with far more exactitude than the mountain of critical literature on Dostoevsky:
Where passions had the privilege to work,
And never hear the sound of their own names.
Frank argues that Raskolnikov's crime is planned on the basis of a rational Utilitarian calculus. Raskolnikov believes that his reason can overcome the most deeply rooted human feelings. Ordinary criminals, according to Raskolnikov's theories, are motivated by greed or viciousness. They break down when they do their deeds leaving all sorts of clues about, because inwardly they understand the justice of the laws they are transgressing. Conscience - which is outside rational framework - and after all a product of an irrational belief - interferes with such purely rational actions.
For Raskolnikov this crime was not really a crime. His reason had persuaded him that the harm - he accepts some harm - would be far outweighed by the good. That's the calculus. Raskolnikov had to show that he was indeed up to the task. This conscience thing had to be overcome. Conscience - which is a product of some mythological conditioning in Raskolnikov's mind - could not be allowed to distort his reason.
Dostoevsky's procedure was to take such an ideological theory and show how - when pushed to extremes - it would generate distasteful contradictions. The contradictions that emerge are in the form of a clash between Christian values - love, altruism, sympathy - and the amorality of his ideology.
Of course in the novel Raskolnikov is not successful. Under the influence of the meek and illiterate Sonya - an embodiment of wisdom of the meta-rational kind - Raskolnikov's project eventually falters - or seems to. What did the defeat mean? Has Dostoevsky demonstrated the necessity of a symbiosis between the rational and mystery (or the meta-rational)?
Let's examine the problem.
My starting point works like this. I freely acknowledge that these meta-rational forces are not subject to rational analyses. But, when I ask myself this question: Can Truth present itself to me via a meta-rational path? I cannot say no. I can't say no because my reason alone can not negate the transcendental. Reasoning - as I understand reasoning - can not rule out the possibility that there are regions where conventional human reasoning is inoperative.
The best way I understand to express this is to say that it is not irrational be receptive to mystery. This in no way proves the meta-rational - it simply declares that openness to mystery is not forbidden.
In Christian discourse the label attached to this act of receptivity to mystery or meta-rational knowledge is called Faith. Enormous tensions emerge when rational reason - in Raskolnikov - encounters Faith - in Sonya. For Raskolnikov life is a calculus. Sonya knows but cannot express rationally why that cannot be so. She says simply that, God has to be.
In Christian terms Faith provides the illuminating knowledge which guides reason. That knowledge - for Christians - as claimed in the gospels - is that Jesus Christ is, the way, the Truth, and the Life. But this knowledge is offered, in the gospels, not as a rational argument, but as a revelation - provided by God as a free gift to anyone who is disposed to receive the gift.
That knowledge provided through Faith is represented as fundamentally different from rational knowledge because it is experiential and interpersonal. It is analogous to the knowledge that we experience of love or friendship when we enter into human relationships. Loving relationships generate awareness and sensibility purely rational analyses of such relationships can never adequately explain. These mysterious understandings emerge when we surrender to the idea of love. Plato alludes to this sort of thing in a pre-Christian context in the Republic and the Symposium when he references the domain beyond the divided line. In the Christian context, this openness to Faith requires that we divest ourselves of arrogance, egoism and pride. That of course is a painful thing to do. Any such surrender is painful and humiliating. We must symbolically fall down, kiss the earth and accept the inevitable suffering - as Sonya urges Raskolnikov to do:
Go at once, this instant, stand at the crossroads, first bow down and kiss the earth you have desecrated, then bow to the whole world, to the four corners of the earth, and say aloud to the world: 'I have done murder...'
And that Raskolnikov does seem to do - albeit half-heartedly:
He knelt in the middle of the square, bowed to the ground, and kissed its filth with pleasure and joy. He raised himself and then bowed a second time...[but]... stilled the words: 'I am a murderer'...
The importance of grounding certainties derived from meta-rational sources which then serve as references for philosophic inquiry is not confined to Christianity.
Divested of the labels of religious terms, all Truth seeking can be seen as driven at its deepest level by what can best be described as a sense of wonder. That wonder itself may be seen as powered by a rationally unconfirmed and unconfirmable belief that the search itself is meaningful - that there is some purpose for the search, and that although the goal may be only dimly perceived - there is a goal and that the goal is enduring. This wonder driven impulse can itself be understood as the external reference necessary for any meaningful inquiry. Wonder is a kind of faith.
This notion that there are unverifiable universal principles that all philosophic systems share is sometimes also called right reason. The abandonment of the idea of common references shared by all philosophies leads invariably to confusions and fragmentation. Each system of thought claims ownership of the all. This is sometimes called philosophic pride.
Whenever we abandon external reference our inquiries are subject to caprice and their achievements judged by pragmatic criteria or empirical data. The neglect of right reason leads to agnosticism and relativism and skepticism and undifferentiated pluralism. In effect all positions are equally valid and everything becomes reduced to opinion. In his specific critique of Raskolnikov Dostoevsky shows how all of the above may emerge when any proudful theory rules our thinking.
You might maintain that setting faith aside, trivializing wonder, or dismissing right reason is a sign of rational maturity - a liberating decision as we free ourselves from the chains of irrational mythologies. My only response to that is to offer that it is NOT freedom to decline to be open to the transcendental. Faith, wonder or right reason may be seen as the keys that can liberate reason - by enabling reason to attain correctly what it seeks.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition - the context of external reference in this novel - the first man and woman in the allegory of Genesis - - had no need for reason - represented in Genesis by the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Human pride caused man to seek unreferenced knowledge. He did not need God.
The Fall meant that from that point forward the path to Truth would become strewn with obstacles - reasoning would become inclined to falsehood. The coming of Christ was the saving event which redeemed reason from its weakness - in effect setting reason free. Faith for the Christian became the external reference and provided the orientation in the seeking of Truth through reason. Such faith is not grounded on rational evidence because it indeed is based on an interpersonal relationship which in some way is deemed richer than evidence.
The Faith/Reason model in Truth seeking abandons the elitism attached to the purely rational Russian ideologies Dostoevsky is challenging in the novel. Truth is NOT something accessible only to the privileged few.
All of the above brings intelligibility to the novel.
What is the meaning and role of suffering? It is for Raskolnikov the experience of divesting himself firstly of his innate connection with external reference - that makes him ill. Redemption causes suffering too - Raskolnikov must abandon all he holds dear: that he is a superman, his pride, his arrogance, his despotism.
What lies beneath the unexpected and unbelievably tumultuous psychological struggle Raskolnikov experiences? I think Dostoevsky is showing us how difficult it is to abandon the external reference: that the demands of conscience are so harsh points to the Truth of the source. The psychological struggle is represented as a real spiritual drama between the protests of conscience and the justifications of reason.
In the same sense finally, the duality of motive throughout the novel is another manifestation of that spiritual drama. Far from being a flaw in the story the conflicting motivations become the devices Dostoevsky uses to portray the struggle between a rejected morality that refuses to go away and Raskolnikov's rational ideology. Before the crime Raskolnikov in the early tavern scene with Marmeladov characterizes his motive in his theory of the altruistic Utilitarian crime.
But the motive he confides to Sonya in his confession some time after the deed is far from altruistic. He admits that he committed the crime solely for himself - that is completely opposite to altruism. He killed to show that he was a superior being who - as such - stood outside of moral law - beyond good and evil. He did it to see if he was strong enough to have the right to kill - a kind of egomania. So what was it, egomania or altruism? The two motives seem mutually exclusive.
I take Dostoevsky's warning seriously. Human survival may indeed - as Hayek says - depend on bowing to principles which will remain a mystery. Individual or global refusal to do that is represented in the character of Svidrigaylov. For Svidrigaylov good and evil are completely equivalent. Murder or generosity are morally neutral. Faced with the meaninglessness of such a life, Svidrigaylov realizes - as we might one day - that there is at the end of the day but one option for such a life - annihilation - or, a trip to America.
Books from Alibris: Fyodor Dostoevsky
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