Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Shestov. Three Russian Apostles of Freedom
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‘To kill? Have the right to kill?’ Sonya clasped her hands.
‘Ach, Sonia!’ he cried irritably and seemed about to make some retort, but was contemptuously silent.”
Sonia argues that he must go to the police and confess his guilt. But he has doubts about doing what she wants because at bottom he does not believe he is guilty. He has done the murder so intentionally, so rationally that guilt is impossible and redemption and divine forgiveness just as impossible. Sonya haunts him, following him in his movements around Petersburg whenever she can. Dostoevsky thus reverses the usual kind of haunting. Instead of the devil haunting a good soul, a good soul haunts a devil. She will not leave him ever. When Raskolnikov enters the police station finally to confess, he has second thoughts and leaves the building. Outside he sees Sonya standing not far from the entrance, “pale and horror-stricken. She looked wildly at him. He stood still before her. There was a look of poignant agony, of despair, in her face. She clasped her hands. His lips worked in an ugly, meaningless smile. He stood still a moment, grinned and went back to the police office.”
At his trial he expresses no remorse or guilt for his crime. He is condemned to penal servitude in Siberia for eight years. Sonya follows him to Siberia and lives in a town near his prison. She lives only for him and does not bother him with thoughts about religion. Raskolnikov himself asks her after a year to lend him her copy of the New Testament. “It was the one from which she had read the raising of Lazarus to him.” But he does not take it up and start reading it right away. Its influence may be in his future but only his imprisonment is now sure and Sonya haunting him and waiting for him nearby with nothing to sustain her except her secret treasure.
6
A main character in Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov, says that if there is no God then we are free to do anything. The European existentialist philosophers took up this idea and held that all human acts must result from free choices since in a godless universe human being has no foundation. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre went so far as to say that man is “condemned to be free”. Dostoevsky held that freedom must be the supreme human value, but instead of denying the existence of God in order to act freely like some existentialists, he reasoned that finding God is possible if we reach a state of spiritual and intellectual freedom. The groundless freedom Dostoevsky felt in himself inspired him to create any kind of character ready to think or to do anything at all. Logical thought and free will result in human choices that create a world where human behavior is forced to follow a premeditated pattern dictated by reason. The more man accepts to live a life ruled by his reason and a knowledge arrived at using the same logic used by scientists, the less able he is to discover the world within him of God’s divine grace which has nothing to do with reason and knowledge. God can control everything but he will not. He will not interfere with man’s freedom to do and think whatever he wants. For Dostoevsky grace is a divine gift, a secret treasure, but total freedom is also a divine gift, perhaps a more important one. God gives humans his divine grace freely but he can not give it or he will not give it to people who live enslaved by a rationalized intentional way of living. Dostoevsky’s rootless creations are enslaved by a power that does not originate in God.
Raskolnikov fascinates us because he appears free in a way that is far beyond normal freedom. But his thoughts are transitory and negative. They rise up but are soon gone replaced by new thoughts and new ideas. His freedom grounded in his mind leads him nowhere, to an unreal inhuman state. He ultimately reveals that he is a fiction, a self freely created uselessly by a mind based on nothing. Sonya is free because the cruelty and the injustice of the world force her to be free. Insults, suffering, loathsomeness do not allow her mind to create for her some comforting fictitious but practical self based on nothingness. Everything has been taken from Sonya. The hatred and cruelty around her in the world have stripped her of normal human falsity and forced her to retreat into her soul. Because she must give up everything, she finds everything. The meek and the suffering inherit the world because the powerful of the world despise them and crush them. The world forces Sonya to flee into the nothingness in her soul where she discovers miraculously a secret treasure.
Some of Dostoevsky’s other characters, like Sonya, give evidence of secret treasure within them but most of them are groundless, on their own, disconnected from the normal world and also from the world of God. He constructed characters from nothing and delighted in watching them try to assert their extreme individuality among regular, normal people. He created a comedy so divine that the more he created living beings from nothing, the more he became sure that God was helping him create them in order to show the world that nothing can ever be as vital as a divine presence in the human heart. For Dostoevsky life for humans must be free and without any foundation because there is a God.
7
In one of his early novels published in 1846, The Double, his hero Mr. Golyadkin, a minor government official, discovers the appearance of another Mr. Golyadkin, another being exactly like himself. At the beginning of the novel before his double appears, he consults a doctor because he feels mentally unbalanced. It is natural to think as his strange story develops that he loses his reason. In reality he never loses his reason and he becomes more and more unbalanced and delirious because he is horrified that he is losing not his reason but his self. His self appears to him in a form exactly like himself in every detail, as a living foreign himself exactly like himself. His double arrives on the scene and this other alien self that is also himself becomes more dominant in their relations with one another than himself. Reason is always able to guide us to some logical and practical end. We feel it is a necessary integral part of our normal behavior that helps us directly. But when our imagination runs wild for some unknown reason, when our emotions start going berserk and we appeal to our reason, we find that our reason is still present but is indifferent to our trouble and of no help. Mr. Golyadkin’s reason tells him with indifference that he is the real Mr. Golyadkin and that the other Mr. Golyadkin is also the real Mr. Golyadkin. Reason does not abandon the poor man at all and merely remains a useless presence in his mind indifferent to the delirious state of his feelings. As the other false Mr. Golyadkin becomes more and more dominant and as the reason of the real Mr. Golyadkin is without any power to distinguish between the two and establish who is real and who is unreal, the feelings of the original Mr. Golyadkin go more and more berserk as he begins doubting that he is in fact real. He is forced to enter a mental hospital. His double walks behind the carriage bringing the original Mr. Golyadkin to his new home and as he arrives there, disappears. Dostoevsky’s message is that Raskolnikov’s self, Mr. Golyadkin’s self, our selves may not be real. Our reason allows our imagination to create a self for ourselves and on our journey through life we must carefully keep presenting our invented self to others in a conventional package with few deviations. We feel comfortable with ourselves because other selves around us accept our invention of our self as real. Poor Mr. Golyadkin can not feel authentic facing his double’s invention of himself because it is in fact himself and only he should have the right to invent himself! By way of contrast, Sonya’s self is barely imaginable to herself. The self she constructed for herself naturally has been humiliated, crushed, destroyed. The world will no longer let her invent, it will only let her be. But normal being causes her suffering that is relieved only by the secret treasure she feels living in her heart. Unfortunately Raskolnikov and Mr. Golyadkin, who care nothing for the life of the heart, must rely only on themselves for strength and they discover that their inventions of themselves are not as reliable as they think.
The young Dostoevsky wrote The Double around the age of 25, two or three years before he received his second pair of eyes. As he stood before rifles pointed at him waiting for death, his reason at last allowed his imagination to abandon completely its duty to invent a self adapted to the selves of our world and let it go free to invent a self suitable to any world at all. A self for any world! But why not a self that did not fit in any world and that did not even need to make rational sense as a self? Bullets would fly at him in a few moments and when they arrived he would no longer have time or being or mind. The ground below his feet in seconds would no longer feel like ground. He would be timeless and groundless and his mind would no longer be able to pretend that rational forms of behavior were the only true basis of his true self.
8
Eighteen years after The Double, after four years of imprisonment at hard labor in Siberia, he wrote the short novel, Notes From The Underground, in which he takes up for treatment the subject of groundlessness. A man from the underground, from a corner of a room where he lives, like Raskolnikov, in self-isolation from the outside world, addresses us in a way that is extremely egotistical, proclaiming his complete freedom and his right to be irrational. He declares himself against not only all the normal customs of social life but also against all the natural laws of science and of mathematics. Unlike Raskolnikov, he uses his reason against reason, his logic against logic. “Merciful heavens!,” he shouts at us, “But what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic when, for some reason, I dislike those laws and the fact that two times two makes four?” In other words, to hell with all laws! He lives in a corner of his room hidden away underground for forty years from the world outside. He has difficulty explaining to normal people the “strange enjoyment” that results from his lonely struggle. “But it is just in that cold, abominable half-despair, half-belief, in that conscious burying of oneself alive for grief in the underworld for forty years, in that acutely recognized and yet partly doubtful hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined for ever and repented of again a minute later – that the savor of that strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies. It is so subtle, so difficult of analysis, that persons who are a little limited, or even simply persons of strong nerves, will not understand a single atom of it.”
They will not understand that their selves hang floating in nothingness and that they can, like the man in the underground, strip themselves of every normal and decent and rational mental structure that creates for themselves and for others what they are. But the nothingness that the underground man opens up within himself when he kicks away both his normal invented self and the normal way people live does not fill up with some sort of blessed goodness. No, it fills with “half belief, half despair” and a “hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward”. If you throw away the structures that make you yourself, you become defenseless. You become morbid and the world outside you that you despise and reject starts kicking you in the face because it no longer recognizes you as a normal person like all the normal persons around you who all resemble one another. Keep working at making your self yourself intentionally! It is what your mind tells you you must do!
The man from the underground shouts at us from Dostoevsky’s pages daring, irrational, extremely egotistical thoughts. He hates the people around him and wants nothing to do with their normal, practical lives. “Advantage! What is advantage?” he asks us defiantly. “Can you possibly give an exact definition of the nature of human advantage? And what if sometimes a man’s ultimate advantage not only may, but even must, in certain cases consist in his desiring something that is immediately harmful and not advantageous to himself?” There are some things, some experiences that escape all possible rational classification and when modern life will be so rationalized that all experience will have been rationally determined in advance, even then the man from the underground will not do automatically what he is supposed to do. He will not only not do what is to his advantage but he will seek what is not to his advantage. Against the whole world, against all the laws of society and science, against the power that tells us all you must do this, he, in his corner, he in his self-imposed prison, he will hold out against the power of two-plus-two-makes-four. He, when everyone else in the universe is doing only what reason tells them they must do, he will act willfully. He will will what he wants even if it is not to his advantage. Especially when it is not to his advantage because only then does he find a “strange enjoyment”!