Introduction to Part I
What are we looking for when we search for the meaning of life?
A novelist may say that we are looking for something like glue. We need a kind of glue that would hold together an enormous swirl of individuals and events, all of which partake in the drama we call reality. We need something that would make sense of the world’s past, present, and future.
A philosopher, who aspires to be more precise than a novelist, would argue that we are searching for something akin to the purpose of life. Life has meaning if it has purpose, which gives every person a sense of direction and helps her figure out her role and place in reality. Being a lover of distinctions, our philosopher would point out two distinct senses of the word “purpose.” According to its ancient meaning, to have a purpose is to be made or used as a means toward the achievement of some objective. In the modern and quite contrary sense, to have a purpose is to choose a goal toward which a person’s efforts and activities – perhaps her entire life – are directed.
The difference between these two meanings of purpose is based on where the glue of life comes from: Is it supplied from the outside, by some transcendent source, or does it emerge from within, from an individual or his social group? Who or what is the source of purpose which gives meaning to our lives?
This difference is reflective of two alternative conceptions of life and its meaning. We will call one of them metaphysical and religious, since it assumes that the purpose and glue of life is supplied by a divine Creator, or at least by something bigger than and independent from the human world. According to the second, humanistic and typically secular approach, human beings create meaning for themselves and the world around them.
We must also take into account a third viewpoint to the issue of meaning of life. Although this approach has never been dominant – except perhaps in our own time – it has always lingered in the undercurrents of the Western culture and has occasionally erupted to its surface as a violent, destructive force. We are talking about a skeptical and pessimistic approach to life, which sometimes takes on the form of radical nihilism.
How are these three approaches related and how are they important for our understanding of Dostoevsky? The metaphysical and religious approach has reigned the longest, and it is by no means without significant influence even today. This is not accidental, for this approach may be the one that most reassures our deepest existential anxieties. It leaves us believing that we are in the hands of a benevolent Creator, a caring, protective, and wise parent who will always be there for us.
The problem with this viewpoint is that, in the face of the harsh reality we experience, it requires a significant leap of faith into something intangible and mysterious. The glue of life is supposed to come from a transcendent Creator, but the experience of life often leaves us dumbfounded as to what the Creator’s plan may be. This viewpoint tells us that something is meant by being human which involves more than sheer existence. Life is a task of a certain kind, yet what exactly is at stake in being human remains impenetrable. Man is an obscure text to himself, often left in doubt as to his purpose in life.
The Enlightenment breaks away from such wonderings. As Dostoevsky’s contemporary Alexander Herzen puts it in his book, From the Other Shore, “Human history has no libretto: The actors must improvise their parts.”1 Not transcendence but immanence is the source of values and normativity. The self-aware individual must confront the world with his own indomitable will and critical reason, the only two capacities which humanity can trust.
As it develops throughout several centuries, the twin project emerges from the European Enlightenment: the death of God and the deification of reason. The death of God does not leave man as an orphan but as a master, a potential mini-god. As Dostoevsky’s character Kirillov expresses it, we have advanced from God-man to Man-god (The Possessed, Pt. II, Ch. i, 241).
The excitement of the Enlightenment epoch has passed, and it has turned out that man is not such a great master, after all. The purposes we set for ourselves time and again result in consequences we do not expect or welcome. The improvisations of the actors of our history without libretto turn too frequently into a nightmare of incompetence and inhumanity. The Enlightenment is motivated by the idea that as human beings we cannot and should not trust anything but what we make ourselves. Our repeated individual and collective failures undermine that trust as well. No small wonder that, not only in our times but already in Dostoevsky’s nineteenth century, the voices of some of the smartest and most concerned human beings had begun assuming skeptical, pessimistic, even nihilist tones. Their criticism of the entire Western tradition is based on what Isaiah Berlin calls the three-fold dreadful and eye-opening humiliation. The first of them is the recognition that man is not the purpose of creation, preceded by the realization that the earth is not the center of the universe. The second humiliation is that rather than being created in the divine image, man is a creature of nature, just as any other animal. The third humiliation, directed more against the humanistic approach than its religious counterpart, is that human reason is not as autonomous and objective as previously believed: Reason is subject to passions and subconscious urges.
The picture of humanity that emerges from such humiliations is, indeed, a humbling one. The human being appears to be a confused, superfluous creature that cannot control even its own thoughts and decisions, much less the destiny of the entire world.
Dostoevsky struggled throughout his adult life with these competing viewpoints regarding the meaning of life. For him, however, they are not abstract or theoretical points of view, which we may or may not rationally adopt, but voices coming from within our souls. They represent the existential choices that haunt every human being. These voices are by no means as sharply separated in the depths of our souls as they look when presented as theoretical viewpoints. Perhaps they are not even fully separable. We waver between them, and at different crossroads of life either one of them may present itself to us as the voice of the ultimate truth.
But is there an ultimate, or at least objective truth?
Dostoevsky certainly wants us to believe that these choices are not equally valuable. There is no doubt that he has often struggled with the voice of the skeptic. “God has tormented me my whole life,” confesses Kirillov (Pt. I, Ch. iii, 115), and later, in a manner anticipating Ivan, points his finger toward the source of his agony: “All evil comes from the desire for immortality that Christ foolishly sparked in us.” Nonetheless, replies another of Dostoevsky’s alter-egos – Makar Ivanovich Dolgoruky from The Adolescent – “life without God is nothing but torture . . . a man cannot live without worshiping something; without worshiping he cannot bear the burden of himself” (Pt. III, Ch. 2, sec. iii, 373). Both of these voices represent Dostoevsky’s own trials, as he admits to his friend Strakhov: “It is not as a child that I believe in Christ and profess His teaching; my hosanna has burst through a purging flame of doubts.”2 How else but by purging his thoughts through the furnace of doubts would Dostoevsky be able to make Ivan sound so persuasive? Yet it may also be fair to say that Dostoevsky abhors nothing more than the resonances of that skeptical voice within his soul.
Dostoevsky also knows well the other two viewpoints. In his youth, at the beginning of his writing career and before the sentence that sent him to Siberia, the humanistic view appeals to him very much. This is not to say that in that period, or any other, he fully abandons the religious view which he firmly appropriated in his childhood, but only that it plays a secondary role. The years in Siberia, spent far away from the progressive intellectual circles of Petersburg, turned the tables. For the rest of his life Dostoevsky’s faith emerges as his dominant outlook. What is perhaps more surprising is that in some of his best novels after Siberia – Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, and partially The Possessed – he is strongly, sometimes unjustly, opposed to the humanistic outlook. Dostoevsky fights against it as a dangerous viewpoint that seduces us to identify with our rational capacities and moral autonomy. If it is correct to say that the religious and metaphysical view misleads us to ascribe reality to the creatures of our imagination, then it should also be admitted that the humanistic view denies reality to some aspects of human existence without which human life is impoverished beyond repair.
We will leave for the second part of the book a discussion of what Dostoevsky’s religious and metaphysical attitude is and how it differs from what usually falls under that name. After considering how he challenges the commonly accepted assumption that the meaning of life is related to purpose, plan, or anything similar, we will argue there that his outlook is not only far more original and viable but also less orthodox and dogmatic than usually assumed by numerous Dostoevsky scholars.
In the first part of this book, however, we need to prepare the ground for this central discussion. In Chapter 1 our intent will be to reconstruct Dostoevsky’s conception of realism and his general assessment of the direction which the modern world has taken. This assessment will be developed, challenged, and reevaluated in Chapters 2–4, where we will analyze his criticism of the humanistic and the nihilistic approaches. For Ivan, these two approaches are not fully separated. The humanistic approach creates high expectations which, when they fail to be obtained, lead to a sense of despair and meaninglessness. For Dostoevsky, the glue on which humanism relies is neither strong enough nor of the right kind.
Our central questions in the first part of the book will be the following: Why is Dostoevsky so utterly discontent with the human-istic and pessimistic viewpoints? What is the cause and what is the effect of the problem? Is the objective state of affairs in the world really the cause of the feeling of homelessness? Or is it rather that our inappropriate subjective attitudes toward life negatively affect the objective position of humanity in the world?
1 Herzen’s words are quoted from Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 201. For a valuable discussion of immanence as the source of values and norms, see Yermiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, vol. 2: The Adventures of Immanence.
2 This quotation comes originally from Strakhov’s biography of Dostoevsky; reprinted here from V.V. Zenkovsky, “Dostoevsky’s Religious and Philosophical Views,” in Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. Wellek, 130. See also Dostoevsky’s letter to A.N. Maikov of March 25, 1870.
1
Sorrow and Injustice
A World Delivered to Evil?
Dostoevsky’s Realism
In the Swiss city of Geneva, there is a small cemetery – Cimetière de Plainpalais. Located between the majestic old part of the town with its imposing cathedral above it, and the broad, calm Rhone river underneath it, the well-maintained cemetery welcomes random passersby. When you step in and walk along the first row toward the left, at its very end you will find a small, barely visible grave. A child – born on February 22, 1868, died on May 12 of the same year – is buried there.
As much as the birth of this first-born brought joy to then-forty-seven-year-old Dostoevsky and his noticeably younger second wife, the child’s sudden death had a devastating effect on them. A few days after a modest, unceremonial funeral, Dostoevsky pours out his sorrow in a letter to his friend Maikov:
My Sonia has died, three days ago we buried her. . . . Oh, Apollon Nikolayevich, say, say my love for my first baby was comical, say I expressed myself ridiculously about her in many letters to many people who congratulated me. For them I was only comical; to you, to you I am not afraid to write. This little three-month-old creature, so poor, so tiny, was already a person and a character for me. She was beginning to know me, to love, and smile when I came near. When with my comical voice I used to sing songs to her, she liked to listen to them. She didn’t cry and didn’t frown when I kissed her; she used to stop crying when I came near. And now they say to me in consolation that I’ll have other children. But where is Sonia? Where is this little personality for whom, I say boldly, I would accept the cross’s agony if only she might be alive.1
We can trust what Dostoevsky tells his friend in the last sentence, for he knew what “the cross’s agony” was. His whole life looked like one nightmarish agony after another. From the premature deaths of his parents, of his first wife, of his beloved brother Michael, of his two children (first Sophia and later his three-year-old son Alexei), to his own trembling in front of the firing squad, years of penal servitude in Siberia, a gambling passion and devastating poverty, and often recurring epileptic fits, Dostoevsky experienced an enormous share of misery and suffering.
The agonizing litany of sorrow is all too familiar to Dostoevsky. He knows what irreplaceable losses, suffering, and evil are – not as abstract ideas or theoretical concepts, but as living experiences. The problem of evil is for him a matter of the most real confrontation with everyday life. Strakhov – his collaborator of many years – testifies that Dostoevsky wrote his works “with the blood of his heart.” Out of this “blood” emerged some of the most memorable characters in literary history: the underground man and Raskolnikov, Kirillov and Stavrogin, Dmitri and Ivan. Each one of them is echoing Dostoevsky’s agony: Where is justice in the death of an innocent child? Where is justice in this world?
Under the influence of Gogol, Dostoevsky’s early literary preoccupations are with the injustices committed against the weakest and most defenseless, as well as with their horrifying living conditions. “We have all come from under Gogol’s Overcoat,” admits Dostoevsky. Like Akaky Akakievich, a poor clerk from The Overcoat, Dostoevsky’s first hero, Makar Devushkin (Poor Folk), lives a life of humble resignation. Makar’s only bright spot, his only love, Varenka, agrees to marry a proprietor who is young and rich, but also coarse and tyrannical. Makar does not complain. Trying to be of use, he even participates in the preparations for the nuptials. Makar would recoil from any humiliating expedient if he could only preserve his modest place in the shadow of his adored Varenka. Cruel fate will not grant him even that.
Makar represents one type of Dostoevsky’s characters who can be called – to borrow Turgenev’s vivid phrase – “superfluous human beings.”2 They feel that nobody wants them or needs them, that their existence is dispensable and disposable, that they are individuals who do not make a difference, that it might be better if they were not alive, that they present a greater burden to others while alive than dead. Their suffering is the pain of poverty, of need, of being powerless. Can we comprehend what evil means to those who are oppressed? What do they think of the meaning of life?
Although the superfluous, “the insulted and the injured” human beings continue to crowd Dostoevsky’s writings to the end, after his penal servitude in Siberia, another preoccupation becomes more discernible in his novels: The powerlessness of those unfortunate creatures may provoke them to transgress the boundaries of the permissible. Gruesome crimes and violated taboos, such as atrocious murders and rapes of children, find their way into Dostoevsky’s pages and become the nightmares of his leading characters. The problem of evil gains thereby a different dimension. The emphasis shifts from the repressive social conditions to the transgression of boundaries, from the perspective of a victim to the perspective of a victimizer: What does evil mean for a tormenter? How can an individual who commits a horrible crime come to terms with his own evil? Through Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov, Stavrogin and Peter, Ivan and Smerdyakov, Dostoevsky expresses what he must have always intuitively felt – that the greatest moral struggles go on within people, not between them.
Dostoevsky’s fascination with appalling crimes, together with his incomparable ability to describe the dark side of the human soul, has always puzzled his readers and critics. Many have accused him of being sick, or insane, or a sadist, or a masochist, or a child ...
