Dostoyevsky and Existentialism
Posted: Sun May 01, 2011 4:43 am
Dostoyevsky and Existentialism
Existentialism is a word that I have long found puzzling, despite studying it in depth for many years, and writing extensively on it. Reading The Brothers Karamazov helps to see how existential thought relates to scientific reason. Existentialism assumes that existence is the only truth, but expands on the psychology of science in asking how existence relates to faith as the expression of the human condition.
Walter Kaufmann is the author of Existentialism from Dostoyevesky to Sartre. I have just checked the index of my copy of another of Kaufmann’s books, From Shakespeare to Existentialism and found some comments that illuminate why people call Dostoyevsky an existentialist. Heidegger, the most systematic existentialist philosopher, had a bust of Dostoyevsky on his desk. Kaufmann presents an elegant definition of existentialism as Goethe’s ‘reflective wit which does not halt before the numinous’, an attitude that expressed the modern response to Dostoyevesky’s problems of miracle, mystery and authority as the heart of delusion. The idea of the numinous is central to the existential attitude, as a standing forth into ultimate reality, unwilling to accept lies.
The problem, identified by both Dostoyevesky and Nietzsche, is that human attempts to engage with the numinous are often delusory. Kaufmann observes that Nietzsche puts it eloquently in his Antichrist where he says ‘in the son that becomes conviction which in the father was still a lie’. What this means is that the evolution of culture typically sees one generation who use stories for social purposes, conscious that the stories are invented, but their successors increasingly find that admitting the invention is harder than pretending the stories are true, and so the fantasy petrifies into ideology and dogma. For Dostoyevsky this rampant psychological problem of entrenched delusion is expressed in the views of the Grand Inquisitor that Christ overestimated human capacity for truth. The church, in its focus on miracle, mystery and authority, is responsible for entrenching delusion as a primary means of social control, rationalized as a way of saving people from freedom.
Kaufmann describes the individuality of Dostoyevsky’s characters as tormented, like the existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, limited, poor, infinitely pathetic and upsetting. He says Dostoyevsky was like Kierkegaard in being a man of faith, but “his psychological insight was unclouded by any illusion.” Such clarity of insight is the mark of existential openness to reality. Kaufmann says the heart of Dostoyevsky’s work is that we can no longer be sure we love the loveable and detest the detestable. Openness to all reality is the piety of poetry, a reverence not for tradition but for experience, impressed by the disjunction between experience and custom.
Disjunctive thought finds a center in interpretation of Christ. Kaufmann observes that Nietzsche pictured Jesus as Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin from The Idiot, as psychologically incapable of resistance, and so sharply distinguished from the heroic, but able to experience blessedness. Celebrating blessedness, a term routinely disparaged as imaginary, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche seem able to imagine grace unclouded by illusion.
Kaufmann finds another intellectual center in Freud, who remarked that things that seem fantastic to many have long been known by existential thinkers. The central theme of The Brothers Karamazov, parricide, expresses a psychological portrait of the dysfunctional and undiscussed nature of cultural transmission across generations, marked by resentment, rejection, and desire for upheaval. So Freud sees a continuity of the Karamazov predicament with the greatest works of literature, Hamlet and Oedipus. Dostoyevsky’s existential outlook emerges in the unwillingness of the Karamazov sons to crystallize the lies of their father as convictions, even while they are condemned to continue inherited behaviors, as their instincts control their reason. Existence provides the horizon of reality. Alyosha, the saint, is in the end the great existentialist, the most honest and coherent of all, a man of rational faith.
Existentialism is a word that I have long found puzzling, despite studying it in depth for many years, and writing extensively on it. Reading The Brothers Karamazov helps to see how existential thought relates to scientific reason. Existentialism assumes that existence is the only truth, but expands on the psychology of science in asking how existence relates to faith as the expression of the human condition.
Walter Kaufmann is the author of Existentialism from Dostoyevesky to Sartre. I have just checked the index of my copy of another of Kaufmann’s books, From Shakespeare to Existentialism and found some comments that illuminate why people call Dostoyevsky an existentialist. Heidegger, the most systematic existentialist philosopher, had a bust of Dostoyevsky on his desk. Kaufmann presents an elegant definition of existentialism as Goethe’s ‘reflective wit which does not halt before the numinous’, an attitude that expressed the modern response to Dostoyevesky’s problems of miracle, mystery and authority as the heart of delusion. The idea of the numinous is central to the existential attitude, as a standing forth into ultimate reality, unwilling to accept lies.
The problem, identified by both Dostoyevesky and Nietzsche, is that human attempts to engage with the numinous are often delusory. Kaufmann observes that Nietzsche puts it eloquently in his Antichrist where he says ‘in the son that becomes conviction which in the father was still a lie’. What this means is that the evolution of culture typically sees one generation who use stories for social purposes, conscious that the stories are invented, but their successors increasingly find that admitting the invention is harder than pretending the stories are true, and so the fantasy petrifies into ideology and dogma. For Dostoyevsky this rampant psychological problem of entrenched delusion is expressed in the views of the Grand Inquisitor that Christ overestimated human capacity for truth. The church, in its focus on miracle, mystery and authority, is responsible for entrenching delusion as a primary means of social control, rationalized as a way of saving people from freedom.
Kaufmann describes the individuality of Dostoyevsky’s characters as tormented, like the existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, limited, poor, infinitely pathetic and upsetting. He says Dostoyevsky was like Kierkegaard in being a man of faith, but “his psychological insight was unclouded by any illusion.” Such clarity of insight is the mark of existential openness to reality. Kaufmann says the heart of Dostoyevsky’s work is that we can no longer be sure we love the loveable and detest the detestable. Openness to all reality is the piety of poetry, a reverence not for tradition but for experience, impressed by the disjunction between experience and custom.
Disjunctive thought finds a center in interpretation of Christ. Kaufmann observes that Nietzsche pictured Jesus as Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin from The Idiot, as psychologically incapable of resistance, and so sharply distinguished from the heroic, but able to experience blessedness. Celebrating blessedness, a term routinely disparaged as imaginary, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche seem able to imagine grace unclouded by illusion.
Kaufmann finds another intellectual center in Freud, who remarked that things that seem fantastic to many have long been known by existential thinkers. The central theme of The Brothers Karamazov, parricide, expresses a psychological portrait of the dysfunctional and undiscussed nature of cultural transmission across generations, marked by resentment, rejection, and desire for upheaval. So Freud sees a continuity of the Karamazov predicament with the greatest works of literature, Hamlet and Oedipus. Dostoyevsky’s existential outlook emerges in the unwillingness of the Karamazov sons to crystallize the lies of their father as convictions, even while they are condemned to continue inherited behaviors, as their instincts control their reason. Existence provides the horizon of reality. Alyosha, the saint, is in the end the great existentialist, the most honest and coherent of all, a man of rational faith.