Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Shestov. Three Russian Apostles of Freedom. Daniel Francis McNeill
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world is full of symbols of this transcendent world. All philosophers and scientists and some religious men believe this world, this other world, exists even though they never find it. But the quest for it is satisfying. It delights them that their petty human nature has a kind of divine globe, the mind, and they enjoy knowing that their minds give flashes at times of a world beyond our senses but not beyond our minds. No enemy lives within such men. They delight in thinking. Thinking leads to an absence of life that their ideas magically transform to the illusion of a presence. They think and think but it produces only more thinking not more life, not a release from the burden of life, but just more thinking until , as Lev Shestov wrote, they are not thinking in the categories where they live but living in the categories where they think.
In the tavern a man over fifty with a look in his eyes “as though of intense feeling” and perhaps “of thought and intelligence” but also with “a gleam of something like madness” begins talking to Raskolnikov. He moves to a seat at his table to engage him in conversation. He is dressed slovenly and is bloated with drink. He has been drinking for five days and sleeping on hay barges at night on the Neva river. His madness however is real. It is not at all like Raskolnikov’s insanity of living as exclusively as possible in his mind. Marmeladov’s madness comes from living blind to any thought about his welfare. He has given up everything. He is out of his mind because he has thrown away all interest in any thought that might lead him to some kind of normalcy by thinking and acting rationally. His madness is the kind of Russian madness that Dostoevsky loved. It is the kind that bravely throws overboard completely, as completely as possible, the regular rational thoughts of the mind. Dostoevsky loved such madness. Madness has driven Marmeladov to give up working and providing for his wife, three young children and a daughter of eighteen. Instead he uses what money they might have used to ease their starvation for drink. Living only where you think, or at least living as best you can where you think, is profitable. It is positive. It produces results. Marmeladov mentions, as he begins a long description for Raskolnikov of his sufferings, most of them caused by himself, that a certain Mr. Lebeziatnikov “who keeps up with modern ideas” explained to him the other day “that compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and that that’s what is done now in England, where there is political economy.” Compassion is forbidden by science itself and this produces political economy. Political economy, science and rational behavior rule the world outside the tavern and produce positive results but inside the tavern in a world hidden from the ordinary world, what is truly alive is Marmeladov’s madness, a madness that has its roots in the agony of remorse and human feelings caused by suffering.
Raskolnikov will carry out his idea. He will live ruled by an idea that will result in his murdering the old pawnbroker. His logic is that if one is forced to live where one thinks, then thought can produce an action totally devoid of human feeling. And if this is so, then even an extreme act like killing an old pawnbroker can be done without feeling. A human ruled completely by an extreme idea and willing to carry out the logic of his idea by a concrete action will become necessarily a human more than human, a superman. But testing this logic will happen in Raskolnikov’s future. For the present, in our tavern, Marmeladov relates to Raskolnikov an act carried out by his young eighteen-year-old daughter Sonya not because of an idea but by compassion. Compassion, feeling, in the case of Sonya motivates the idea and then the act and not the other way around whereby some inhuman idea produces an act.
Sonya has once lived with Marmeladov and her stepmother, Katerina Ivanova, and her two stepbrothers and stepsister in one room in extreme poverty. They were starving because of Marmeladov’s failings and in a rage caused by her extreme sufferings, Katerina Ivanova drove her pure and meek eighteen-year-old stepdaughter Sonya, who can find no legitimate work, to begin selling herself on the streets of Petersburg. In the tavern other men, listening to Marmeladov’s conversation with Raskolnikov, laugh from time to time at what he relates. But when he speaks with deep feeling about what will be the ultimate fate of his daughter, strangely those listening are moved. But before we hear what Marmeladov says, inspired by religion, we should examine Dostoevsky’s general point of view.
For Dostoevsky Raskolnikov, dressed carelessly, brooding alone day after day in his room barely bigger than a closet, eating little, avoiding human contact, despising the life going on around him, is a pastiche, carried to an absurd degree, of an eastern holy man. He wants to go beyond the life around him by using his mind so exclusively that he loses touch with regular life. He denies life to find life like some eastern holy man and this direction for Dostoevsky leads to nothing, to a transcendence of normal life that is empty and worthless and destructive. For Dostoevsky, all of Western European culture goes in this direction. The mind dictates in Europe how life should be lived. It is the source of truth and goodness. Even refined poetic and aesthetic experience is fashioned into cultural objects by the mind and all scientific and mathematical products are always the result of rational thinking. The Western European ideal of blessedness is the state of the perfectly indifferent mind thinking about itself. Thinkers like Aristotle and Plato and others in the ancient world along with medieval European scholastic thinkers of the Catholic Church as well as renaissance thinkers down to the rule in Dostoevsky’s time of European thinkers who exclude experience that does not fit within the boundaries of bourgeois rationalism have fallen all of them into the mind’s fatal trap. European thought has led Europeans to live in the categories where they think. Dostoevsky will have none of it. For him Raskolnikov is searching for a separate superior state of being that does not exist except as an illusion created by the power of his mind. Only Marmeladov’s madness can lead to real spirituality because it is profoundly human.
At this point in his novel Dostoevsky throws out to us bits of Christian religious truth as an example of truth totally beyond the vision and the soul of his main character, Raskolnikov. He knows that we as well as Raskolnikov will pay no attention to what Marmeladov says. We all live in the categories where we think and we are too fascinated, as we read along, with young Raskolnikov’s adventure inspired by his mind. It is where we ourselves look too for adventure and we pass quickly over what Marmeladov says. It is the raving of a madman. It has nothing to do with rational people like Raskolnikov and ourselves.
Marmeladov’s daughter Sonya has gone out to the streets to earn money to feed her stepmother and her stepbrothers and stepsister. She even is so humble and self-sacrificing that she gives some of the money so fouly earned to her father to continue his five-day drunk. “He will pity us Who has had pity on all men,” Marmeladov says with genuine human feeling to young Raskolnikov sitting across the table in the tavern listening. “He will come in that day and he will ask: ‘Where is the daughter who gave herself for her cross, consumptive stepmother, and for the little children of another? Where is the daughter who had pity on the filthy drunkard, her earthly father, undismayed by his beastliness?’ And He will say, ‘Come to me! I have already forgiven thee once…I have forgiven thee once… Thy sins which are many are forgiven thee for thou hast loved much…’ And he will forgive my Sonya, He will forgive, I know it…I felt it in my heart when I was with her just now!” But Dostoevsky does not end Marmeladov’s passionate words here. He does not let those who live by rationality and without compassion and have achieved “political economy” slip away without throwing them a punch. For as he continues his passionate outpouring of his feelings Marmeladov speaks of what will be said at the final judgment to “the wise ones and those of understanding” and he explains why the meek and the humble and weak will be accepted by Him. “This is why I receive them, o ye wise,” Marmeladov goes on with feeling, “this is why I receive them, o ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.”
Two days later, Raskolnikov will hammer the blunt backside of an axe onto the head of a sixty-year-old woman, a pawnbroker, killing her. A few moments after the murder, while he searches in the dead woman’s bedroom for valuables, the pawnbroker’s half-sister, Lizaveta, comes in the main room of the apartment and discovers the dead body of her half-sister on the floor bloodied. Raskolnikov already knows about Lizaveta and she knows a little about him from the comings and goings of people in that area of the city. Dostoevsky describes her, “She was a single woman of about thirty-five, tall, clumsy, timid, submissive and almost idiotic. She was a complete slave and went in fear and trembling of her sister, who made her work day and night, and even beat her.” Lizaveta sees the dead body on the floor and then Raskolnikov comes out of the bedroom. “And