Dostoevsky and Existentialism: Religion and Human Life

(1821-1881)

By: Seyed Javad Meynagh

If it is still impossible, even for an artist of a Shakespearean scope, to discern any normal laws or guidelines in this chaos in which our public life has existed for a long time, and now in particular, then who will describe at least part of this chaos, even if he will not even dream of establishing any guidelines? Who will spot them and point them out? Who will attempt to define and explain the laws of this dislocation and reconstruction? Or is it too early yet?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Writer's Diaries for 1877

It seems to me that the meaning of a person's life consists in proving to himself every minute that he's a person and not a piano key. F. Dostoevsky

Abstract

The role of Dostoevsky within general field of human sciences is indisputable but this unique position has not found its right place within social theory and sociology yet. There are great many reasons for the absence of Dostoevsky and his sociological project within modern academic social sciences and one of the most important factor is his epistemological insistence upon intuition and his ontological orientation towards God as an intellectual premise and not only a matter of belief. These factors when considered in relation to the metatheoretical dimensions of modern academic sociology would leave us with no doubt that as long as epistemology, ontology and background assumptions are not of naturalistic characters the significance of theories per se are not of great value. In this brief essay we have attempted to approach Dostoevsky as a social theorist who’s main concerns are human life within the parameters of religious canopy.

Introduction

Opinions about Dostoevsky being an existentialist or not are diverse and vary from one writer to another. For instance, Walter Kauffman, a long time researcher on Existentialism has this to say about Dostoevsky:

I can see no reason for calling Dostoevsky an existentialist, but I do think that Part One of Notes from Underground is the best overture for existentialism ever written. With inimitable vigor and finesse the major themes are stated here that we can recognize when reading all the other so-called existentialists from Kierkegaard to Camus. (1956. p 24)

Many students of literature would state, with confidence, that Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of the first of The Existentialists. As students of philosophy know, this classification is problematic, as Dostoevsky's writings include characters with existential natures, but some argue that Dostoevsky could not be an existentialist as he was dedicated to religious mysticism.

On the other hand, there are others who think that Dostoevsky had a keen eye on dark side of human personality and assume that existentialism is about human tragedy. Existentialism should not be interpreted to mean mere despair or fascination with the dark aspects of being and Dostoevsky's work should not be reduced to his interest with the dark side of human will. Because if these are what makes an intellectual an existentialist then one should not count him as an existential writer but the question is more problematic than these categorical pronouncements which lack substantial metaphysical grounds. As a matter of fact the mainstream treatments of Dostoevsky do lack a proper metaphysical ground as the latter has been reduced to Metatheory and the ontological textures of metatheory has no essential connection to transcendental theophany.

According to some biographers Dostoevsky was prone to drink and a gambler who wrote about men with even more anti-social tendencies than himself. According to these accounts, he more closely resembles the orgy-loving father Fyodor Karamazov in Dostoevsky's last novel than the religious and pure son Alyosha in the same novel. Other biographers insist Dostoevsky remained true to his Orthodox religion -- and indeed developed what came to be known the tradition of ‘Religious Intellectuals’, who seem to have their counterparts in Russia’s neighbour namely Iran, where they are called ‘Motefakeran Deeni’. It is up to historians and biographers, aided by whatever records exist, to determine what made Dostoevsky so powerful a writer but one fact is undeniable about him and that is his vividly disciplined imagination in depicting various layers of complex issues by brining them into a comprehensible level as a thought, plot, idea and even as a pictorial story in the form of a persona.

It is possible that his life made him what he was: bitter, cynical, miserable and so on and so forth. Any number of negative adjectives can be applied to Dostoevsky but they cannot reveal the substance of his existential concerns wrapped in religious philosophical frame of reference. He is concerned not so much with the facts as with human nature. Even the seemingly unrelated and particular issues that may happen to anyone or in any society turn in the probingly imaginative intellect of Dostoevsky into universal problems that could not be understood when they are only treated as facts. Each fact or the collection of facts divorced from the metaphysical reality that alone could make them comprehensible is worthless and would have in the long run disabling effects upon the scholar’s mind qua a scholar as well as a human person who may be able to comprehend the wholeness of life. The defining moments in Dostoevsky's life were the murder of his father and his own imprisonment for treason. But even these moments intrigued in him a process of self-realization and food for thoughts and ways of approaching complex reality of human existence.

His father was an army doctor, who demanded order and morality. While Dostoevsky was studying at an army school, his father was killed by serfs on the family estate. This murder made no sense to Dostoevsky. He never escaped a fascination with murder and crime, trying to understand why the poor might be illogically violent. Most of Dostoevsky's writings deal with bereavement as a consequence of his fascination to comprehend it.

In 1846, after serving in the army, Dostoevsky wrote Poor Folk, a psychological novel. It was recognized as a masterwork by many, and secured an excellent income for the writer. It would be virtually two decades between this achievement and his next popular novel. One explanation for this dramatic gap in creativity is Dostoevsky's involvement in the political upheavals of Russia.

With money came access to Western European ideas and culture. Dostoevsky, like many of the Russian middle-class, found himself wanting Russia to adopt Western political structures. He began writing and publishing calls for democratic reforms, an illegal and precarious task. Because of such activities, Dostoevsky and other writers were arrested, tried, and convicted as traitors to the tsar. On the day of his planned execution, Dostoevsky was bound and blindfolded, waiting to die. Then, a messenger came to deliver word of a commuted sentence from the tsar. The writer was exiled to Siberia, and there he was transformed to what the world came to know as Dostoevsky the intellectual that by great many giants of 20^th century came to be considered as the sole modern seer who not only could foresee but shed light on how to be redeemed out of this modern plight. He demonstrates his concerns in the way he makes his characters and displays the issues and ways he thinks we may be able to overcome the disabling effects of modern plights. For Dostoyevsky, Ivan Karamazov, for instance, is a metaphysical protagonist who plays out his personal existential-metaphysical drama as he retreats far away from the vanity of the world into the realm of "last questions". Life without engaging with that realm is barren as man would lose the very fountain which keeps the desert-like soil of his existence alive.

While in Siberia, Dostoevsky's political and philosophical views changed radically. Dostoevsky became a nationalist; he believed that Russia would become the primary world power within his lifetime. More importantly, he believed that Russia was a chosen nation, with a sacred future blessed by God. Dostoevsky became a religious devout, telling all who would listen that suffering as the only way to purify a sinful soul. Russia's suffering made the country pure.

Notes from Underground, published in 1864, reflects the pain and suffering of a man -- but not Dostoevsky, as is often assumed. The narrator is fictional and the values expressed in contrast to the writer's own religion. It is a study of what Dostoevsky thought the human condition was creating, not what humanity should become.

Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment in 1866 to illustrate how suffering leads to redemption of a lost soul. The book's anti-hero, Raskolnikov, commits an irrational murder. Dostoevsky did not want to trivialize the crime, but instead wanted to explore the process of redemption and not only settling with the question of rehabilitation or socialization which always miss the point about the individual person and his soul. Unlike Camus' The Stranger, Raskolnikov's crime is meant from the beginning to test his beliefs. For Raskolnikov, murder is an experiment in morality.

Sometimes, Dostoevsky gave little thought to what he wrote, especially when writing merely to settle gambling debts. Dostoevsky could write novels at incredible speeds, when he had to pay bills. At other times, he gave a great deal of thought to philosophy and human nature. Some critics wrongly argue that the existential ideas presented in Dostoevsky's works are not his own, in fact they conflict with his beliefs. They are unable to approach Dostoevsky in a holistic manner as he poses a challenge for modernist optimist philosophers who view the world in terms of Enlightenment tradition. But he, on the contrary, argued that at its peak, modernism (extreme rationalization where God and Man namely compassion and humanity are totally banished) will demonstrate not heavenly city on earth by devilish genocide on an unprecedented fashion and it does not take a genius to see that Dostoevsky is right and architects of godless humanity profoundly wrong even now that religion is used instrumentally against Deen, namely the religiosity whereby the human person can feel the debt (deyn) to the Holy as a great responsibility which comes about by being a human.

The Core of Dostoevsky’s Philosophy

One of the best works written on Dostoevsky not exclusively as a literary man but Dostoevsky as a philosopher is James P. Scanlan’s Dostoevsky the Thinker. In this work Scanlan by drawing on Dostoevsky’s novels, essays, letters, notebooks and nonfiction pieces concludes that the core of Dostoevsky’s thought is his struggle to define the essence of humanity. All of the subjects Dostoevsky addressed - including religion, ethics, aesthetics, history, the state and the Russian nation - provided clues to the mystery of what it means to be human. Scanlan demonstrates that Dostoevsky's philosophical views were more solidly grounded and systematic than have been imagined and cannot be dismissed as the notions of an irrationalist. (Scanlan, 2002)

The problems Dostoevsky was wrestling with could be summarized as following:

· significance of the individual

· importance of passion

· mystic aspects of life

· importance of human freedom.

He does not talk about existentialism as a movement but Dostoevsky displays a ‘sensibility’ that could be traced in the soul of any human individual even the criminals as he portrays them in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky attempts to re-examine existence most fundamental questions of individual responsibility, morality, and personal freedom throughout his work by asking:

· What is life?

· What is my place in it?

· What choices does this obligate me to make?

How does Dostoevsky display his existential concerns in his literary work? The Brothers Karamazov is one of the best examples of Existentialism in general and Dostoevsky’s existential sensibility in particular. In The Brothers Karamazov, a father struggles with his sons where each of whom has a specific universal trait. Ivan possesses intellect, Smerdayakov represents ugliness of mind, body, and spirit, Alyosha represents saintliness, and Dmitri represents passion. The characters in this novel always seem to find themselves in extreme situations. Dostoevsky shows men attempting to make rational decisions in an irrational reality. Their reality is absurd, yet they believe that they are making completely rational decisions. Another one of Dostoevsky's existentialist works, Notes from Underground, also depicts this theme. This set of essays is about the experiences of a bitter recluse from St. Petersburg. The notes are exceptionally illustrious and are a uniquely great monument of Existentialist thought. The notes are one of the first works to depict an extreme reality, which is all we share (and less reflect upon), namely the human life. To be human poses certain challenges which display themselves at different levels of consciousness and Dostoevsky without giving them exacting idiomatic names tried to illustrate them: dread, angst, despair, authenticity and choice.

Religion and Human Life

We have grown to think of religion within modern frame of reference where religion should, regardless of virtue or vice and the disastrous outcomes, adopt to our desires, wishes, whims, demands, and so on and so forth whether private or public. But this is a much distorted view of religion as the Religion of God is ‘Revealed’ to redeem us and the revealed notion of redemption is not only a rational problem to be engineered but a spiritual question to be discovered and lived. A great religion is a fundamental critique of human conduct, not just urging mere "good behaviour" as the human life is not a technical problem but a spiritual one. This epitomizes the very kernel of Dostoevsky’s view on religion in relation to human existence as he did not view human life as a ‘social’ narrative which could be written arbitrarily without any cul de sac. On the contrary he assumed that what we call human existence is not a ‘given’ but a desired state of being which needs to be ‘chosen’ consciously and strived towards until to be realized, which, again, it would be impossible, taken secularization into consideration, if God is banished from our lives.

For Dostoevsky, the question of human existence seen within the frame of religious metaphysics is related to the problem of evil and the question of human liberty, which are, in turn, profoundly joined: our answer to one predicament determines our answer to the other. Freedom and suffering are interstitial realities, as the Grand Inquisitor understands, even if he understands them wrongly.

Secular readers of The Brothers Karamazov have remained virtually oblivious to Dostoevsky’s critique of the Grand Inquisitor. (Dostoevsky, 1993) The reason is that Ivan’s vision of human freedom is so very near to contemporary secular notion of liberty, and thus to modernist increasing relegation of religion to the private sphere of mere preference. To understand Dostoevsky one really needs to be familiarized with Orthodox Russian spirit in relation to God and the world, of good and evil, of the sacred and the profane. We cannot appropriately appreciate his treatment of these matters, therefore, until we understand his Orthodox reading of them. Thus we must examine his parable of the Grand Inquisitor vis-à-vis the Orthodox doctrine of human freedom as being founded not on autonomous choice but on communal dependence on God. To be honest the very idea of freedom without God or the quest for liberty without religious tradition (not vis-à-vis Political Power or Governments) is nothing but a very ingenious restatement of Luciferian notion of being, namely while being conscious that the parameters of self is limited and meaningful only when it is cast within the infinite ground of Divine one desires non-existence or what is not real but fantasy (another name for realizing Luciferian modality).

Dostoevsky analyzes the question of religion in a very profound fashion through the characters that he molds masterfully by expressing trends and streams which have been unfolding or sometimes have come to unfold a century later due to the projective nature of modernity as a secular project. Ivan Karamazov is, for instance, no straw atheist. He gives voice to the philosophical problem of evil perhaps more clearly and cogently than any other speaker or actor, any other philosopher or theologian, in the whole of global literature. Yet he is also a very Russian atheist. He is passionately intellectual. Ivan does not pose the question of theodicy as a philosophical challenge, that is to say how to think through the contradiction that stands between the goodness, omniscience, and omnipotence of God, on the one hand, and the considerable misery and undeserved torment that characterize God’s world, on the other.

Ivan does not make his case against God’s goodness in an intellectualized fashion. He is not a philosophical thinker who abstracts ideas from experience in order to assess their logical precision and scholarly consistency. Dostoevsky’s Ivan really lives his problems. They are matters, fairly unfiguratively, of life and death, of eternal life and eternal death, of ultimate bliss or final misery. Ivan is willing to face the anguish and terror inherent not only in thinking but also in living without God.

One of the great problems that has been haunting modern mentality is the split between reason and heart that is not only confined to the public sphere (in terms of rationality and life-world) but even within the very persons whose personality is not anymore anchored in the soil of Prophetic Tradition but hooked up to the value system of the society they happen to be. In other words, modern man has grown to believe that life is a matter of reason and reason is what rationality of economic forces that are constructed as an interaction between labour and capital does dictate on the fabric of society. But Dostoevsky mocks this absurdity and slavery of soul by demonstrating that reason is not the only reason for human existence as each human faculty is expressing a specific need within human soul and as a collective whole they express our humanity and not one at the expense of others. As one who knows the truths of the heart, Ivan also knows that reason alone cannot fathom the deepest things. On the contrary, reason can be put to nefarious uses: "Reason is a scoundrel," he confesses. Ivan is willing, consequently, to live "even . . . against logic." (Dostoevsky, 1993)

Dostoevsky belittles the modern secular notion of freedom and personhood, dismissing it scornfully, as socialism (but not in the sense of distributing the wealth of society and finding a just balance between capital and labour but in the sense that our human reality should be an epiphenomenon of the fluctuation of economic-social indices). Astounded by the Inquisitor’s similar idea of liberty as absolute autonomy, Alyosha cries out to Ivan: "And who will believe you about freedom? . . . Is that the way to understand it? It’s a far cry from the Orthodox idea." It’s also a far cry from sacred ideas of freedom as expressed in all sacral traditions. In all sacred traditions, we are not made into free persons by becoming autonomous selves who have been immunized from all obligations that we have not independently chosen. Our freedom resides rather in becoming communal selves who freely embrace our moral, religious, and political obligations. These responsibilities come to us less by our own choosing than through a thickly webbed network of shared friendships and familial ties, through political practices and religious promises. In a very real sense, such "encumbrances" choose us before we choose them. There is no mythical free and autonomous self that exists apart from these ties. There are only gladly or else miserably bound persons—namely, persons who find their duties and encumbrances to be either gracious or onerous.

The idea that the ‘social’ is opposite or even distinct from the ‘religious’ is totally (and totalitarian as it does not follow a nomos but wills of the powerful and these wills are not necessarily expressions of the intelligence but most of the time direct reflection of whims) modern as in the whole history of humanity communal has been religious and community an expression of communion with the Holy through the revealed tradition and whenever it has not been so the demise of that or this nation has been inevitable. Dostoevsky is conscious about this mistaken distinction and addresses these concerns through Alyosha. Alyosha’s idea of freedom is, for example, communal because it is first of all religious. The central Orthodox doctrine is called theosis or theopoesis—the divinizing or deifying of humanity. The Eastern Church does not call for believers to imitate Jesus through the exercise of moral choice as this idea of distinguishing between morality and religiosity is a very recent fabrication and founded upon the market economy of goods and has nothing to do with the perfection of spirits. The Eastern Church summons them rather to participate in the life of Christ through the transformative power of the liturgy and sacraments of the Church. To become persons in the sacred sense is to become what the New Testament calls "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). For Dostoevsky the modern secular notion of freedom articulated by the Grand Inquisitor is the very definition of slavery. As Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky observes, the Eastern Church regards choice as the mark not of freedom but of fallenness, as a debasement of true liberty, as a loss of the divine likeness. (Lossky, 1968)

The existence without God, freedom without curbing of passions, reason without guiding of intellect, heaven without the holy and man without God is not going to bring peace but unprecedented violence that humanity has never experienced before. Dostoevsky expresses his view on a civilization without God in an extremely accurate fashion (in the person of Grand Inquisitor) by arguing that

Freedom, free reason, and science will lead them into such a maze, and confront them with such . . . insoluble mysteries, that some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves; others, unruly but feeble, will exterminate each other; and the remaining third, feeble and wretched, will crawl to our feet and cry out to us: "Yes, you were right, you alone possess his mystery, and we are coming back to you—save us from ourselves." . . . Yes, we will make them work, but in the hours free from labor we will arrange their lives like a children’s game, with children’s songs, choruses, and innocent dancing. (1993. p 258)

Alyosha, as Christ’s terrestrial embodiment, will not depart. Instead, he confronts Ivan with the moral and religious consequence of his atheism. If God is dead, Alyosha famously declares, everything is permitted or to put it differently every wrong act loses its ground of wrongness or even the very yardstick which makes the very idea of considering something wrong as utterly and wrongly obsolete. We must not misconstrue Dostoevsky’s characterization of Alyosha in his story. Alyosha does not rebuff that men can be moral without believing in God. He maintains, instead, that such morality has no ultimate basis, that freedom understood as self–construction hovers over an abyss of nihilism, and thus that all godless peoples and cultures await their inescapable plunge into the barbaric void. The opening epistle of John delineates sin specifically as lawlessness. Dostoevsky regards individualist autonomy not only as barbaric but also as luciferian. Possibly the chief of Ivan’s demonic deceptions is the pervasive acceptance of the Inquisitor’s argument that "miracle, mystery, and authority" are pathetic necessities for weak–willed men.

Dostoevsky maintains that demonic perversions of mind are no mere intellectual failings: they issue in demonic perversions of will. Philosophical deicide results in existential parricide. The mental killing of God breaks the deepest of human bonds. It is thus fitting that Ivan the perverted intellectual should end in madness.

To possess true freedom and personhood through love is, in Dostoevsky’s view, to suffer rightly. It is to accept responsibility, not only for one’s own sin, but also for the sins of others. For Dostoevsky, the gospel of suffering in communal love is the only lasting answer to the perennial problem of evil and thus to the perennial question of human freedom. It is a gospel peculiar neither to East nor West because it is centered in the common Christian ground of the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection or the sacred tradition of Prophethood.

The disciplinary social theory and sociologists such as Giddens has grown too oblivious to the evil facts of modern state that it is almost impossible to find a place for Dostoevskian analysis on the role of modern state within the parameters of social theory as the latter has grown into an obsolete style without any critical connection to the tremendous misery which humanity has enthralled at the hands of this totalitarian regimes of controlling human existence. The final prophecy of the Grand Inquisitor is perhaps the most alarming warning in the entirety of Dostoevsky’s work. With miraculous insight, Dostoevsky anticipates the rise of the totalitarian state that has dominated much of late–modern life, killing more people by violent means at home (in Fascistically colonialist states such as France, England, Russia, Germany and America) and abroad (in Iraq and Afghanistan by reactionary states such as America and England) than in all of the previous ages combined. This is the era of blood, and ours is the culture of death. Dostoevsky was correct to forecast that, if we commence (as Ivan does) with unlimited anti–communal freedom, we will end (again as Ivan does) with absolute anti–communal slavery, whether in its individualist or its totalitarian form. Were Dostoevsky living at this hour, he might well ask whether the secularist/liberalistic/capitalist reduction of nearly every aspect of human existence, including religion itself, to either entertainment or commodification constitutes a yet worse kind of herd–existence than the one Ivan portrays—a subtler and therefore deadlier challenge to relieve humanity of its suffering and sin, and thus of its real character and interest.

Finally Dostoevsky like two other contemporary Russian intellectuals Leo Tolstoy and Valdimir Solovyov believed that Religion should play a role in human life but the nature of its play and how to define this role are where the uniqueness of individual person arises. Dostoevsky, to conclude, is a religious existentialist thinker who, unlike Tolstoy that believed in the essential rationality of human life and the possibility of eliminating evil by freeing humanity to build the "Kingdom of God" on earth, accepted human evil and tragedy as the inevitable consequence of human freedom.

Reference

Dostoevsky F. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated with an introduction and notes by David McDuff. London: Penguin, 1993.

Kaufmann, Walter; Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian, Penguin; 1956.

Lossky, Vladimir. MYSTICAL THEOLOGY OF THE EASTERN CHURCH. Cambridge and London: James Clarke and Co., 1968.

Scanlan, James P. Dostoevsky the Thinker. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2002.

Interesting to note that from a filthy barracks room in Siberia, Dostoevsky begged his brother Michael to send him what he called absolutely necessary intellectual food, namely a copy of the Koran and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. (Lecture Notes, Philosophy 151 Dostoevsky as Philosopher November 28, 1995; June 2, 1998 Guest Lecture by Jay Gallagher accessible at http://hume.ucdavis.edu/phi151/PHI151.HTM; retrieved at 28022006)

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