Transcendent Love

Dostoevsky and the Search for a Global Ethic

Leonard G. Friesen

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780268079857
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Letteratura e arti nel cristianesimo

In Transcendent Love: Dostoevsky and the Search for a Global Ethic, Leonard G. Friesen ranges widely across Dostoevsky's stories, novels, journalism, notebooks, and correspondence to demonstrate how Dostoevsky engaged with ethical issues in his times and how those same issues continue to be relevant to today's ethical debates. Friesen contends that the Russian ethical voice, in particular Dostoevsky's voice, deserves careful consideration in an increasingly global discussion of moral philosophy and the ethical life. Friesen challenges the view that contemporary liberalism provides a religiously neutral foundation for a global ethic. He argues instead that Dostoevsky has much to offer when it comes to the search for a global ethic, an ethic that for Dostoevsky was necessarily grounded in a Christian concept of an active, extravagant, and transcendent love. Friesen also investigates Dostoevsky's response to those who claimed that contemporary European trends, most evident in the rising secularization of nineteenth-century society, provided a more viable foundation for a global ethic than one grounded in the One, whom Doestoevsky called simply "the Russian Christ." Throughout, Friesen captures a sense of the depth and sheer loveliness of Dostoevsky's canon.

CHAPTER I

Why Dostoevsky? Why Now? Why Here?

This study gives Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky a voice in the ongoing discussion about what it means to be ethical. I argue that this great nineteenth-century Russian writer has much to contribute to that conversation in our time even though he died in 1881, and even though his cultural milieu seems vastly different from our own. How is that possible? This chapter lays the foundation required to answer that question.

We will look at a fragment from one of Dostoevsky’s great novels to examine how he engaged with ethical issues in his time and how those same issues continue to be relevant. Then we review how today’s moral philosophers suggest we respond to the various ethical conundrums we face, from whether violence can be justified for noble ends to whether we are obligated to care for the stranger in our midst. Until recently, scholars maintained that the Western philosophical tradition offered sufficient guidance for us to determine the ethical life, and I explore how that argument has been made. After that I discuss how scholars have begun to challenge the West’s assumption that its own traditions are sufficient to develop a comprehensive moral philosophy. I also identify several other ethical traditions that have recently attracted scholarly attention—in particular, those of the Crow of the North American plains, medieval Islamic ethicists, and twentieth-century ethicists Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas. I contend that the Russian ethical voice—Dostoevsky’s voice in particular—deserves careful consideration in this increasingly globalized discussion of moral philosophy and the ethical life.

But before all that, and before we can begin to hear his voice, we need to know who Dostoevsky was. So we begin with his birth in Moscow in 1821 and his education at St. Petersburg’s elite engineering academy. Dostoevsky was never drawn to engineering, but he was to writing, and he enjoyed spectacular early success with it. But he soon shifted his focus, immersing himself in revolutionary activities against the tsar. He was arrested for that involvement in 1849 and sentenced to death by firing squad. His life was spared at the last moment and his sentence commuted to a prison term in Siberia. He wrote his greatest works in the two decades that followed his return from exile, and I will introduce each in its turn. Scholars have rarely agreed on how to “read” Dostoevsky’s novels, much less on his deepest convictions about modernity and the ethical life. I will introduce that broader debate and discuss how I arrived at my own position. Put another way, I will be taking sides in this vibrant debate, so it is best that I make my position clear at the outset. In this chapter’s penultimate section I outline four ways in which Dostoevsky’s ethical critique of the West was based on his intimate knowledge of it. Only with that solid background will we be ready to enter the heart of this study. This chapter concludes with anticipatory comments on the remainder of this monograph.

A Son’s Murderous Outrage:
An Ethical Dilemma

In The Brothers Karamazov, Mitya loathes his father to the point of wishing him dead, and understandably so. As the eldest of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov’s three sons (more likely four, if the claims concerning the bastard son proved true), Mitya was conceived within a hate-filled marriage only to be relegated by his father to an orphan-like existence. Left to his own devices while his father lived a life of a debauchery, Mitya survived thanks to the goodwill shown to him by Grigorii and Martya, Fyodor’s faithful servants. Mitya grew up in a house “full of eternal scenes” and frequent arguments that ended in physical assaults. Fyodor, who entered the marriage full of empty bravado, had shamelessly laid claim to all of Adelaida’s considerable wealth after their dramatic elopement (Adelaida’s parents had opposed any union between their daughter and the reprobate Fyodor). Fyodor seized everything and left her with mere kopecks. Eventually, Adelaida abandoned both child and husband for a lover and new life in St. Petersburg, where, soon after, she died. Three-year-old Mitya found himself tossed between members of Adelaida’s extended family.

With this background, it is perhaps no surprise that Mitya becomes a man of superficial desires, a sensualist without moorings, much like his father. Indeed, father and son soon find themselves pursuing the same woman, Grushenka, and this pathetic melodrama only fuels the hostility between them. No less important, Mitya is convinced that his father is refusing to give him the inheritance due to him from his late mother’s estate. Mitya desperately needs that money in order to woo Grushenka.

He can hardly be expected to endure such outrages indefinitely, or to repay a lifetime of neglect and abandonment with anything but hostility. In fact, Mitya has been musing for months about murdering his father. Many witnesses have heard him wonder aloud “why such a man should even be alive.” And he has already physically assaulted his father in a public setting. Now, in the chapter titled “In the Dark,” he suddenly believes that his father has succeeded in claiming Grushenka’s affections. This, for Mitya, is the final outrage. So he rushes madly to his father—his “tormenter”—who has destroyed his life so utterly. Surely the son now has murder on his mind, for he arrives at his father’s estate under cover of darkness, carrying a pestle, which he has just seized from an acquaintance. What other purpose could it possibly serve than to strike his father dead?

Mitya later confesses that he felt a “sudden, vengeful, and furious anger” at Fyodor Pavlovich in that dark moment as he gazed up at his father through the bedroom window. Suddenly his father, not sensing that he was in imminent danger, leaned out the window and into the darkness, within easy striking distance of his concealed son. In that moment the son reached for the pestle in his pocket and brought it out. The reader knows that Mitya must decide instantly: will he murder his father, the person who had essentially orphaned him so long ago?

Just moments later, Mitya faces another decision. He runs from his father’s estate, utterly certain that he has just killed a man he has known all his life. What to do next? He knows the answer to that, or at least thinks he does. With his world now in shambles, he reclaims a gun he had recently pawned to an acquaintance. With the loaded gun firmly in hand, and certain his own life is ruined, he sets out for one more night of wild partying, after which he intends to end his own life. But will he?

Just this one fragment from The Brothers Karamazov suggests how many layers of ethical decision making are found within its pages. Does Mitya have the right to murder his father? If not murder, does he have the right to at least ignore him, or discard him in his old age? Does he in fact owe his father anything? Is it unethical for father and son to woo the same woman? And what about the ethics of self-inflicted wounds? Does Mitya have the right to take his own life, and if he does, are rights the same as ethics? How might we go about answering these questions?

We, like Mitya, are awash in ethical choices. We may not directly confront the question of murder, though all of us have accepted some level of force in exchange for personal protection (our nations are defended by armies, our cities by police and the courts). Looking further afield, what ethical choices are involved in the so-called War on Terror? Who gets to make those choices? Who decides whether violence can ever be justified, and if so, when?

We might also look beyond the violence done to others and consider instead the violence we do to our world. The earth is warming, its glaciers melting, its lakes evaporating. What are our ethical choices concerning that? What are our obligations to the world itself? And what about the ethics of consumption, especially in a world of gross inequality where, paradoxically, those least in control already bear the greatest burden of climate change? At the dawn of the twenty-first century, people in the developing world are facing their own war against drought, floods, disease, and starvation.

According to a recent UN development report, the average American uses about 575 liters of water a day, compared to less than 10 for a citizen of Mozambique. And Mozambique is hardly unique—one-fifth of the world’s people lack access to clean water, and half the people in developing countries lack adequate sanitation.¹ This may be unfortunate, but is it an ethical issue? Should we be concerned about who is responsible for drought and poor sanitation in places such as Mozambique? When does watering my lawn become an ethical decision? Do countries own water, and should companies be able to buy water rights in distant lands at the expense of the local people?

Leaving aside wars on terror and environmental ethics, what does it mean to be ethical in our more immediate and quotidian existence? What does ethics entail in terms of our own daily choices as individuals? Do I have rights and ethical obligations when it comes to my children, or my parents or neighbors, or the stranger who approaches me on a city street asking for spare change? A problem confronts us when we set out to live ethical lives, one that concerns which questions are ethical ones and how we are to go about answering them. How are we to determine ethical content?

Ethical Formation, Modernity, and the West

According to contemporary introductions to moral philosophy, the answer to this question ultimately depends on individual ethical predilections, which in all of us have been shaped by the Western philosophical tradition. Torbjörn Tännsjö’s Understanding Ethics is perhaps the best introduction to this field, though by no means the only good one.² Tännsjö offers principles for determining what it means to live the moral life. Several such principles stand out in his study and in a more recent one by Kimberly Hutchings. These include the following:

1.One need look no further than Western traditions in order to determine what is ethically normative for individuals in our world (and ethics are, first and last, an individual matter). In Tännsjö’s telling, this story begins with Aristotle and then fast-forwards to one German, one Norwegian, two American, and three English philosophers.³ Hutchings’s introduction to global ethics is also largely derived from the Western philosophical tradition.⁴ Much like Tännsjö, Hutchings follows a thread that includes Aristotle, Bentham, Mill, Hobbes, Rawls, Kant, and Habermas. Although Hutchings does allow for alternative approaches, she emphasizes that these are also grounded firmly in Western philosophical thought.⁵

2.Such a sampling is not narrow. Tännsjö maintains that his aforementioned philosophers, who account for all seven moral theories considered in his overview, are sufficient for us to develop our own moral theory in our time: “Are there other theories that we should have discussed as well? Although it may seem rash to say so, I think not! The ones selected for consideration are, as far as it is possible to tell today, the most plausible candidates for a true or reasonable moral theory.”⁶

3.Faced with the certainty that only selected Western theories need be considered in the search for a normative and global ethic, Tännsjö also stresses that each individual is required to develop her or his own ethical code. True, we must all seek to “eliminate inconsistent arguments,” but this task is a highly solitary one—which is not surprising, given the centrality of the individual in Western philosophical streams. So we each must “choose between the different theories. . . . We have to make up our own minds.”⁷

4.If the task of seeking out individualized and normative ethical systems seems daunting, Tännsjö offers at least some comfort with the assurance that no single ethical system is superior to any other. In this sense, he writes, “truth may be thought to be relative.” So if we cannot make the correct ethical choice in an absolute way, we can at least try to make the most reasonable choice, though even here he urges the reader to always be open to new approaches and new possibilities. Tännsjö does not think it possible for any one ethical system to be absolutely right; indeed, he dismisses that notion absolutely. He also dismisses any contention that religion and morality are linked, and he objects to the “rather pompous terms” by which various religions assert the absoluteness of their claims.⁸ (It is unclear whether he appreciates the irony of his own position.) Hutchings agrees with Tännsjö. She states that religions “do not provide us with shortcuts to answering the why, what, who, and how questions of Global Ethics, although they do certainly provide one way into those questions.” The way in question here is provided by Christianity, which Hutchings argues has played a pivotal role in shaping the Western philosophical tradition.⁹She sees no need to explore any religiously based ethic, Christian or otherwise, though she does acknowledge the role Christianity played in birthing Western secularism.

5.Tännsjö ends his introduction to normative ethics by encouraging individuals to think creatively within and between the various ethical theories identified in his overview (something that is easily done if none are absolutely correct). He wonders why we do not develop an ethic that will allow us to say and do the following: “Why not in general maximize the sum total of welfare, but allow that, when the cost is too high for an agent, the agent pays some special attention to his or her own interests? . . . Why not say that even though it is wrong to kill an innocent human being in order to save lives, if more than twenty-five innocent lives can be saved, it might be right to do so?”¹⁰

Lest he be seen as prescriptive, Tännsjö tells us it is up to the individual to think through “combinations of the sort mentioned.” Even then, he invokes yet another British moral philosopher, C.W. Ross, to remind the reader that even if murder might appear to be wrong all the time, we should always be open to the fact that it might be the proper thing for us to do if “a particular situation” arises.¹¹ So, one imagines, it might be wrong for the Mityas of this world to murder their fathers most of the time, but not always. In the end, it seems, Mitya will need to decide for himself. But how can he decide for himself what to do, especially in that very moment, in the darkness of a night that mirrors the darkness of his own heart? For, as I have noted, Mitya has clearly lost his moorings.

The rejection of certain and fixed moorings in favor of multiple ethical options is the logical endpoint of Western philosophical thought, according to critics as diverse as Zygmunt Bauman, Michael Gillespie, and Charles Taylor.¹² Alasdair MacIntyre’s summation of the contemporary moral opportunity or predicament this presents is worth citing at length:

All this of course does not entail that the traditional moral vocabulary cannot still be used. It does entail that we cannot expect to find in our society a single set of moral concepts, a shared interpretation of the vocabulary. Conceptual conflict is endemic in our situation, because of the depth of our moral conflicts. Each of us therefore has to choose both with whom we wish to be morally bound and by what ends, rules, and virtues we wish to be guided. These two choices are inextricably linked. In choosing to regard this end or that virtue highly, I m...