Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics

Dostoevsky and Kant Dialogues on Ethics

VIBS Volume 206 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Leonidas Donskis Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno George Allan Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum Harvey Cormier Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Malcolm D. Evans Daniel B. Gallagher Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon William Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling

Matti Häyry Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Michael Krausz Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Adrianne McEvoy Peter A. Redpath Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Emil Višňovský Anne Waters James R. Watson John R. Welch Thomas Woods

a volume in Social Philosophy SP Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Editor

Dostoevsky and Kant Dialogues on Ethics

Evgenia Cherkasova With a Foreword by George L. Kline

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover photo: andrea Wiggins Cover Design: studio Pollmann the paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “Iso 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. IsBn: 978-90-420-2610-0 e-Book IsBn: 978-90-420-2611-7 © editions Rodopi B.v., amsterdam - new york, ny 2009 Printed in the netherlands

To my parents, with love and admiration.

If you feel jaded, great philosopher, because no endeavor is lofty enough for you, plant a little tree or teach a small child to read. And if you wish to serve God, comfort and care for the child. Fyodor Dostoevsky Notebooks to The Brothers Karamazov.

CONTENTS EDITORIAL FOREWORD ANDREW FITZ-GIBBON

ix

FOREWORD

xi GEORGE L. KLINE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii

INTRODUCTION

1

ONE

The Deontology of the Heart 1. Introduction 2. The Heart: Mythology, History, Philosophy 3. The Ways of the “Living Life”: Dostoevsky’s Rhetoric of the Heart 4. The Commandment of the Heart 5. The Commandment of Practical Reason 6. Can Reason Understand the Reasons of the Heart?

TWO

Freedom: Adventures of the Will 1. Introduction 2. Kant on Free Will and Arbitrariness 3. The Underground World as Will 4. The Specter of Kant in the Underground 5. Good Will, Rude Will, or Both? 6. Losing Oneself: Arbitrariness and Corruption of the Heart 7. On Human Nature 8. Following the Heart: Is There a Way Out of the Underground? 9. The Unwritten Message

THREE

Evil: Adventures of Seductive Spirit 1. Introduction 2. Kant’s Conception of Radical Evil 3. On the Boundary of Intelligibility: Evil and the Limits of Ethical Discourse

7 7 8 11 15 22 26 29 29 29 31 34 36 38 43 45 48 53 53 55 59

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DOSTOEVSKY AND KANT: DIALOGUES ON ETHICS 4. Dostoevsky’s “Demonology” 5. The Grand Inquisitor Dons the Mask 6. Temptation by Good and Paradoxes of Freedom 7. Evil by Nature?

FOUR

Community 1. Introduction 2. The Unbearable Other 3. Love, Sympathy, and Respectful Distancing: Kant’s Stoic Response to a Misanthropist 4. Suffering and Responsibility 5. Joining of Hearts: Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone 6. “A Bit of Melodrama”

61 64 69 73 77 77 78 80 86 93 97

EPILOGUE

101

NOTES

103

BIBLIOGRAPHY

113

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

119

INDEX

121

EDITORIAL FOREWORD In 1998, the Philosophy Department at State University of New York at Cortland took the innovative step to create a program focused on social philosophy. The key components of the program are social and political philosophy, ethics, and applied philosophy. In 2007, following the successful implementation of the program, the department formed the Center for Ethics, Peace, and Social Justice to extend the outreach of philosophy through publications, conferences, a summer ethics institute for faculty, and philosophical practice and activism. As part of that outreach, we are delighted to co-sponsor the VIBS special series, Social Philosophy. Evgenia Cherkasova’s Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics is the first in the series and is an important addition to the literature. Cherkasova uses the Kantian conception of deontology and redraws the landscape of duty using the Dostoevskian category of the heart, rather than reason, as morally foundational for ethics. This significant contribution will be of interest to ethicists generally and particularly to those who desire to see Kant through a new lens. Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Director Center for Ethics, Peace, and Social Justice Philosophy Department State University of New York at Cortland

.

FOREWORD Immanuel Kant and Fyodor Dostoevsky, two of the most imposing and influential figures in the brilliant history of European thought and culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have seldom been treated together. The first book-length comparative study of the thinker and the novelist, published in Russian by Yakov Golosovker, dates from 1963. There are, of course, a great many separate studies of Kant and of Dostoevsky. As it happens, some of the most perceptive and illuminating of them, in the case of both Kant and Dostoevsky, have been published during the past two decades. Also, the fine critical editions and new translations of Kant’s principal works by Mary Gregor, and the superb translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky of Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov—the first English versions to do full justice to these three towering masterpieces—have appeared during this same period. In her Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics, Evgenia Cherkasova has made full, discriminating, and intelligent use of all of these invaluable resources. She treats Kant and Dostoevsky with great respect and deep sympathy, although not uncritically. Her writing is admirably clear and forceful, exhibiting a strong sense of dramatic development, especially in the final chapter. As she convincingly demonstrates, Kant, by means of philosophical argumentation, and Dostoevsky, by means of imaginative narrative, both focus intently on the central questions of human freedom, moral choice, individual responsibility, the absolute and irreducible character of moral obligation, and the possibilities for “radical evil” in human nature and conduct. Both decisively reject not only the utilitarian stress on future consequences as determining the moral quality of present actions; but also, they reject, with equal decisiveness, what Dostoevsky called the “environment doctrine,” the claim that social or psychological factors can legitimately be invoked to explain, and even excuse, criminal acts. In certain respects, the approaches of the two are disparate: Kant’s stress on the rational autonomy of the individual will stands in sharp contrast to Dostoevsky’s stress on zhivaia zhizn’ (“living life”), the “community of loving hearts,” and sobornost’ (“conciliarity,” or, as Cherkasova puts it, “the mystical communion of believers”). Yet, by closely examining Kant’s later, less studied works, Cherkasova is able to show that Kant, in those works, approached a Dostoevskian “deontology of the heart” and developed a sense of genuine human community. However, he tended to formulate it in the rationalistic terms of a “kingdom or realm of ends” (Reich der Zwecke). Both Kant and Dostoevsky insist on the central importance of individual human responsibility. But Dostoevsky goes further, famously claiming that responsibility is essentially communal, that “all are guilty for all.”

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A related point is the significance of suffering and compassion or sympathy (in Russian sostradanie, literally “suffering-with”). In the three works mentioned, Dostoevsky paints a vivid and unforgettable panorama not only of the varieties of human evildoing but also of the varieties, and the spiritual significance, of human suffering. Here again, Kant is too much the rationalist, too much the “nominalist,” claiming that in the phenomenon of compassion the negative value of the sufferer’s experience is added to the negative value of the compassionate person’s experience, thus “increasing the amount of evil in the world.” In sharpest contrast, Dostoevsky sees compassion as involving a genuine communion of human hearts, one that is sustained—as Cherkasova expresses it—“by love, compassion, and forgiveness.” As a novelist, and a “depth psychologist” of extraordinary powers, Dostoevsky, of course, has resources not available to Kant. He is able to show in three exemplary cases the dramatic tension between pride, solitude, and contempt for others, on the one hand, and love, compassion, and a powerful sense of communal responsibility, on the other. These cases are that of the spiteful and arbitrary “underground man,” that of the proud, self-sufficient, and solitary Raskolnikov (whose name derives from the Russian raskol’nik, “schismatic,” and suggests a divided personality), and that of the brooding intellectual Ivan Karamazov, who “turns back his ticket” to God’s world, because he simply cannot accept the fact of the hideous suffering of innocent children. Thomas De Quincey, who knew whereof he spoke, tells us (in a delightful passage that Cherkasova quotes in her Epilogue) that the guests at Kant’s frequent “Platonic banquets,” many of them young and all of them drawn from diverse social backgrounds, rose from Kant’s dinner table—to their host’s immense satisfaction—“with exhilarated spirits.” I am confident that the readers of Evgenia Cherkasova’s fine book will come away from the lively philosophical conversation she has presented—a conversation among Kant himself and some of Dostoevsky’s seminal characters, along with Dostoevsky himself, and certain of the “critics and admirers” of both Kant and Dostoevsky—in a state of comparable exhilaration.. George L. Kline Bryn Mawr College and

Clemson University .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my mentor and friend, Emily R. Grosholz, for her generous support and guidance at every step of my philosophical career, for sharing her erudition in philosophy and literature, and for inspiring me to pursue this project. I am deeply grateful to George L. Kline, whose penetrating comments and recommendations have made this a better book. Over the years, professor Kline’s encyclopedic knowledge, rigorous scholarly standards, and superb multilingual skills have been a continuous source of inspiration and learning. I also thank my dear friends and scholarly companions, Heidi Marx-Wolf and the late Laura Canis, who supported me in more ways than I can express here. I thank my former teachers Daniel Conway, Pierre Kerzsberg, Carl Vaught, and Charles Scott, who helped me refine my ideas at the early stages of this project. I extend my sincere gratitude to Dostoevsky scholars, who not only shared their expertise but also provided practical assistance and advice: Deborah Martinsen, Robert Louis Jackson, Linda Ivanits, and Predrag iovaki. Many thanks to colleagues and friends, Rebecca Wayland, Lara Trout, Henry Piper, Michael Jarrett, Claire Katz, Catherine Kemp, Joshua Hall, Alejandro Vallega, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Donna Giancola, Karen Gover, Gregory Fried, Nir Eisikovits, Maria Granik, and Montgomery Link for their support and encouragement. I greatly profited from the suggestions and critique made by professor Pavlos Kontos (University of Patras, Greece), VIBS Social Philosophy Editor Andrew Fitz-Gibbon (State University of New York at Cortland), and from the three anonymous readers of the manuscript. Special gratitude is due to Elizabeth D. Boepple, the line editor, for her invaluable assistance with the manuscript revisions and preparation of a camera-ready copy. I also thank Brian Kiniry, Brittany Hoxie, and Alisa Cherkasova for their extraordinarily diligent proof-readings of the manuscript. I thank them in particular for their patience with my chronic misuse of articles in English. Alisa Cherkasova also helped with copy editing and substantive revisions; her careful page-by-page criticisms resulted in many conceptual and stylistic changes. I would like to thank Suffolk University College of Arts and Sciences for the financial assistance in the form of Summer Stipend Faculty Research Award which allowed me to complete the manuscript and submit it for publication. At the early stages of research and writing, the financial support and vote of confidence from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship was also crucial. Two scholarly journals, The Review of Metaphysics and Philosophy and Literature granted permission to use previously published material: “Kant on Free Will and Arbitrariness: A View From Dostoevsky’s Underground,” Philosophy and Literature 2004, 28 (2): pp. 267–278; “On the Boundary of Intelligibility: Kant’s Conception of Radical Evil and the Limits of Ethical Discourse,” The

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Review of Metaphysics 58 (March 2005): pp. 571–584. The revised versions of these two articles are incorporated into Chapters Two and Three of the present book. My deepest gratitude is due to Ilya, Alisa, and Alyosha for their love, patience, and unconditional support of my philosophical endeavors. Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents, Elena and Valentin Govorov, who embody the virtues of the heart and reason that this book explores.

INTRODUCTION Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics comprises a series of philosophical essays, which bring together two major thinkers—Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Commentators’ opinions vary about whether Dostoevsky ever studied Kant’s critical philosophy. While some argue that Kant’s influence is conspicuous in Dostoevsky’s late novels, especially in The Brothers Karamazov, others insist that no sufficient historical evidence for such an argument can be identified.1 We know that, while in exile, the novelist requested a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in an impassioned letter claiming that his whole future depended on that book. What we do not know is whether Kant’s opus magnum ever reached Dostoevsky in Siberia or back at home upon his return. It is an established fact, however, that, as an active participant in many intellectual and literary circles, Dostoevsky was well acquainted with the tradition of German idealism in general and with Kant’s metaphysical claims in particular. We also know that Dostoevsky learned about Kant’s ethical system from the work of historian Nikolai Karamzin, who interviewed Kant in 1789 and faithfully reproduced his conversation with the philosopher in the Letters of a Russian Traveler.2 At the time of the interview, Kant had just recently published his Critique of Practical Reason 3 and was happy to discuss questions of moral philosophy with his Russian visitor. Given the exceptional intellectual and historical quality of Karamzin’s book, the fact that his Letters were read aloud and discussed in the Dostoevsky family circle, and that Dostoevsky himself claimed that he “grew up on Karamzin,” it is reasonable to assume that the novelist had a sense of what Kant’s moral project was about.4 Despite many scholars’ acknowledgement of thematic links between the novelist and the philosopher, no systematic studies have been done that compare their ethical views. Alexander von Schönborn’s strong statement sums up the situation: “unfortunately, the secondary literature linking Dostoevsky and Kant is exceedingly sparse. What little there is does not prove helpful.”5 Dialogues on Ethics not only fills this gap in scholarship, but also synthesizes the insights of both thinkers into a unified ethical perspective. In this book, I will lay aside the question of whether the philosopher directly influenced the novelist. Instead, this study begins with a historically grounded assumption that Kant was one of Dostoevsky’s significant philosophical interlocutors and focuses on the striking parallels in their ethical views. In their respective explorations of the fundamental moral questions, the two thinkers often appear engaged in a complex, multifaceted dialogue concerning moral duty and virtue, reason and feelings, freedom and evil, individuality and community. A careful reconstruction of this intellectual inter-

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change shows that the philosophical problems and moral issues that preoccupied Dostoevsky and Kant are still relevant today. Brought together, their ethics offer a fresh and powerful alternative to overly determinist, hedonist, and relativist moral theories. For the reasons discussed below, I propose to call this alternative “the deontology of the heart,” where I use “deontology” in a broad sense to indicate a moral theory centered around the idea of unconditional, duty-based commitment. What do I mean by the deontology of the heart? In trying to find the key to the nature of ethics, we may stress the primacy of virtue, happiness, autonomy, or self-esteem; we may appeal to reason or feelings, to the purity of our intentions, or to the consequences of our actions. Yet when we are confronted with an irreducible moral dilemma, no justification appears to cut deeper than an unconditional inner commitment: “I ought to do this.” Traditional deontology (from the Greek , “that which binds or necessitates”) addresses this irreducible aspect of ethics. It claims that acting ethically means acting unconditionally, while taking full responsibility for our actions and our character. Even though Kant is justly credited as the first serious advocate of a deontological theory of ethics, he himself never used the term “deontology.” Ironically, it was Jeremy Bentham, the father of modern utilitarianism, who first introduced deontology into philosophical discourse, defining it as a theory of “that which is proper” or “what ought to be.” 6 In contrast to Bentham’s utilitarian ethics, Kant developed a deontology proper—a comprehensive rational doctrine that seeks to articulate the unconditional ingredient of morality without any appeals to religious considerations. According to Kant, the unconditional rests solely on pure practical reason. In this context, some puzzling issues arise: Is it possible to speak deontologically without falling into a Kantian bifurcation between the world of ethics and the so-called natural world, to which our intentions, passions, and aspirations belong? What could be the link between the unconditional “ought” and our lived experience of the doubts and agony of human existence? It will become clear in the interchange between Dostoevsky and Kant that the notion of the heart offers a unique resolution of these issues. As a universal symbol of life and love, energy and empathy, “the heart” is central to the mysticism, the religion, and the poetry of all peoples. In the great literature of the world, we find extensive and deep expressions of the spiritual work of the heart. Dostoevsky, whose stories abound with fascinating rhetoric and ethics of the heart, takes center stage here. The novelist does not demand the completeness and universality of a moral system, but artistically depicts the life of ethical consciousness. At the same time, his ethics is deontological in spirit because it emphasizes duty and the unconditional character of moral decision. It stands in strong opposition to utilitarianism, social and psychological determinism, and paternalism. Dostoevsky’s ethical perspective shares with Kant’s ethics its deontological orientation and enthusiasm

Introduction

3

but depicts the nature of moral obligation differently. Where Kant claims that pure practical reason is the ultimate source of moral commitment, Dostoevsky insists that moral imperative comes from the heart. In short, for Kant, the unconditional is grounded in rationality, for Dostoevsky, in love. This does not mean that Dostoevsky’s ethic is an irrational or antirational counterpart to Kantian moral philosophy. Just as a careful reading of Kant can counter the frequently made accusations against his ethics as a cold and unsympathetic theory of the categorical imperative, deep engagement with Dostoevsky’s art serves to defy his notorious reputation as a hard-core anti-rationalist. “A realist in the highest sense” as he once characterized himself, Dostoevsky was by no means a dilettante in thinking. As Ellis Sandoz rightly notes: the intellectual content of [Dostoevsky’s] work is informed by a sophisticated theoretical literacy that finds expression in the existentially analytical dramaturgy of tragic-epics in the major novels. Not only does Dostoevsky tell a good story; his astonishing artistic creativity is matched by the acuteness of a great and educated mind.7 Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics brings together Dostoevsky’s philosophical dramaturgy and Kant’s critical philosophy to provide an exciting material for an exploration of the moral phenomenon of reason and the heart. This exploration, in turn, creates a unique context for reintroducing deontology. Throughout the Dialogues, in addition to the sharp contrasts between the two perspectives, we will discover crucial thematic links: similar descriptions of duty and virtue, skepticism concerning the moral worth of empirical reason, acute psychological observations concerning freedom and will, and strong emphases on the cultivation of moral receptivity, just to name a few. In the postmodern world, an attempt to reintroduce unconditional ethics may appear out of place. Quite to the contrary, this book shows that a conjunction of Kant’s extraordinary deontological experiment with Dostoevsky’s far-reaching psychological and philosophical insights provides a fruitful way of thinking about the good. This way of thinking—the proposed deontology of the heart—leaves behind the archaic distinction between the allegedly superior powers of reason and inferior primal emotional energies. Instead, it emphasizes the interplay between reason and the heart in all its subtlety and richness. Deontology of the heart accounts for the dark and destructive, as well as creative, traits of human character. It draws from the intricate existentialist insights about the nature of freedom, choice, will, and their attendant anxiety and responsibility. This version of deontology celebrates the ethical ideal of “wholeheartedness” and views human beings, qua moral agents, as irreducible to the sum of their social, historical, physiological, and genetic factors. Finally, by defending a phenomenological account of an individual as a shared self,

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embodied and rooted in a community, the deontology of the heart seeks to overcome the abstractive dualisms of reason and passions, the spiritual and the mundane, the individual and the communal. The dialogue between Dostoevsky and Kant gives us exceptional resources for addressing these themes. Before commencing the dialogue, here is a note on methodology. The following chapters join two major thinkers who represent literature and philosophy of two cultures, two centuries, two philosophical traditions, two distinct attempts to capture the core of moral experience. Kant’s moral project is based on and conveyed through rational arguments while Dostoevsky’s ethical reality is revealed by storytelling. In both cases, the form of writing is an essential part of its meaning: Kant’s rigorous style is a reflection of his thought, just as Dostoevsky’s lacerated prose is an artistic expression of his pondering the “cursed questions” of humanity. The continuity of form and content allows the philosopher and the novelist to address moral issues in a unique way, which, in turn, calls for distinct interpretive responses. One of the major challenges of this book is how to combine imaginative story and formal philosophical argument without violating their internal coherence. What complicates the picture even more is that Dostoevsky’s oeuvre contains a plurality of perspectives or “polyphony” of voices.8 His moral philosophy reveals itself as a cluster of stories carrying multiple arguments, convictions, and destinies. Consequently, my interpretive and philosophical tasks multiply as I aspire to preserve the polyphony of Dostoevsky’s art in its intellectual, personal, cultural, and dramatic context on the one hand, and do justice to Kant’s thought and strict philosophical method on the other. To address these challenges, I present this book as a collection of diverse philosophical essays, which comprise the chapters. While connected by the theme of the deontology of the heart, each of the essays is structurally and stylistically different. The leading chapter, entitled “The Deontology of the Heart,” outlines major deontological insights of Dostoevsky and Kant. It gives a phenomenological account of the intuitively familiar, yet elusive, phenomenon of the heart and shows its philosophical and ethical significance. The chapter explores Dostoevsky’s ethics of the heart, describes the nature of the heart’s unconditional commandment, and contrasts it with the commandment of practical reason, as developed by Kant. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the possibility of a harmonious union of reason and the heart in ethics. Kant’s interlocutors in this essay are Ivan Karamazov, his younger brother Alyosha Karamazov, and the spiritual elder Zosima. In the second chapter, “Freedom: Adventures of the Will,” Kant meets Dostoevsky’s celebrated anti-hero, the underground man. The philosopher and the self-proclaimed “paradoxalist” engage in a debate about the nature of human volition, freedom, arbitrariness, tyranny, order, and chaos. While Kant defends the view that freedom, rationality, and morality are intrinsically connected, the underground man insists that freedom’s very nature is transgres-

Introduction

5

sion, which often means a leap beyond rationality and ethics. At the same time as the paradoxical nature of human will and self-destructive powers of freedom are being exposed, the stage is set for the whole cluster of questions concerning the genesis of immorality or corruption of the heart. In the following chapter, “Evil: Adventures of Seductive Spirit,” the discussion of moral degeneration is taken to a new level. It begins with an exploration of ethical and methodological aspects of Kant’s doctrine of radical evil and shows that the problem of evil marks the boundary of intelligibility in Kant’s ethics. Such a boundary is drawn where the possibilities of rational theorizing are exhausted but “practical” (moral) issues and dilemmas persist. At this point, we turn to Dostoevsky, who does not submit to the unintelligibility of the boundary themes but instead embraces the philosophical task of narrating them. Dostoevsky’s monumental canvas of evil, which contains an incredible assortment of characters, addresses the crucial questions of human wickedness that are destined to remain obscure in Kant. Some of these questions are: How can the depth of the corrupted heart be reached? Are we evil by nature? If so, how can we be responsible for our wickedness? Why would anyone ever choose spiritual freedom over universal happiness, peace, and prosperity? In this chapter, two of Dostoevsky’s unique fictional characters—the devil as the ultimate tempter of humankind and the Grand Inquisitor, its self-proclaimed benefactor—add their voices to the dialogue. The concluding chapter focuses on the idea of ethical community in Dostoevsky and Kant. It contrasts two visions of community: Kant’s “kingdom of ends” and Dostoevsky’s family of the living hearts. I begin with an analysis of Kant’s controversial concept of “unsocial sociability”—our tendency to seek a place among others whom we “cannot bear yet cannot bear to leave.” The chapter addresses Kant’s relatively optimistic response to the problem of unsocial sociability by examining his perspective on love, sympathy, and respect. In response to crucial issues overlooked by Kant, I engage Dostoevsky’s eloquent depictions of life in society, its threats and rewards. The last three sections present the novelist’s philosophy of love and compassion, his views on the importance of suffering, and his all-encompassing conception of communal responsibility. Each of the essays brings Dostoevsky and Kant into dialogue in a different way. In contrast with a philosophical treatise or a novel, neither a centralizing argument nor a narrative develops through Dialogues on Ethics. The central theme of the book emerges in a creative juxtaposition of Kant’s systematic philosophy with Dostoevsky’s imaginative art. The flexibility of the essayistic style not only allows me to explore the unconditional dimension of the human predicament within the context of the two utterly distinct genres, but also makes it possible for my writing to reflect the interchange between story and argument.

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DOSTOEVSKY AND KANT: DIALOGUES ON ETHICS

Finally, my interest in bringing together Dostoevsky and Kant’s ethics is not merely academic. Addressing the experience of the unconditional is an existential task, an opportunity to approach philosophically the mystery of the human heart and to investigate the possibility of a genuine harmony between reason and the heart.

One THE DEONTOLOGY OF THE HEART 1. Introduction In the Preface to Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant writes: Since my aim here is directed properly to moral philosophy, I limit the question proposed only to this: is it not thought to be of the utmost necessity to work out for once a pure moral philosophy completely cleansed of everything that may be only empirical and that belongs to anthropology?1 To this question, Kant answers in the affirmative, stressing that any ethical consideration, which rests on empirical grounds, “can indeed be called a practical rule, but never a moral law.”2 Kant’s ethics, which scholars later dubbed “deontology,” emphasizes the gap between “is” and “ought” at every juncture: what people ought to do—their moral duty—cannot be derived from what they happen to do. We find a similar division in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s reflections on ethics: the novelist describes moral duty as transcendent, going beyond the specifics of a person’s situation or internal psychological limitations. The reader of Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary may recall that this book is replete with attacks on the so-called environment doctrine, quite prevalent in the novelist’s time, which seeks to undermine persons’ responsibility for their actions and justify them by the pressure of the milieu. For Dostoevsky, a true moral attitude, while taking into account grave social pressures and injustices, must “mark the line where the environment ends and duty begins.”3 Dostoevsky the humanist sympathizes with the poor and disadvantaged; yet for him, individual responsibility is not relaxed in the least by a person’s physical and psychological weaknesses or unbearable social conditions. Coming from two different, yet interrelated perspectives, the philosopher and the novelist “meet” at the point of an unconditional, duty-based ethic, which emphasizes the intrinsic worth of humanity and rejects the promises of social conditioning, moral relativism, and utilitarianism. Yet the differences between the two ethics are also vital. Kant builds his moral theory on pure practical reason, the alleged impartial arbiter in the moral realm. Dostoevsky locates the origin of the unconditional commitment in the depth of the human heart and its inalienable ability for love, not in the dispassionate counsel of reason. But what is the heart as an ethical phenomenon? What role does it play in Dostoevsky’s novels? And what exactly does Kant mean by pure practical rea-

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son? Should reason and the heart be opposed? This chapter addresses these and other pivotal questions which Dostoevsky’s novels and Kant’s critical philosophy pose for us. 2. The Heart: Mythology, History, Philosophy If one day the heart could have been opposed to reason, it was not because it was irrational—according to Pascal, the heart even apprehends the first principles—but because it does not proceed by means of analysis and argument, rising as it does from the depth of life toward the absolute pole in a single movement. –Paul Ricoeur The heart—this universal symbol of humanity honored by civilizations around the globe—plays only a marginal role in the history of Western philosophy. The discriminating intellect may mention heart here and there, but rarely does it treat this phenomenon as seriously and with the same philosophical attentiveness as it treats “reason,” “spirit,” or “mind.” Does this mean that the heart cannot be considered as a proper philosophical category? The notion of the heart does resist clear-cut distinctions and definitions; but in many cultures, the rhetoric of the heart engenders intuitive impulses, indefinable, yet communicable. The variety and richness of connotations associated with “the heart” make it possible to describe the depth of a person’s inner life without violating its transcendent, enigmatic nature. In the world’s great literature and poetry, the most intense, emotionally charged moments are often marked by a metaphorical portrayal of the hero’s heart. Philosophers and writers resort to the powerful symbolism of the heart while speaking about the inscrutable in human nature, the immediacy of moral experience, the role of intuition and imagination. Suspicious for the most part of “matters of the heart,” Western philosophical tradition nonetheless could not remain entirely indifferent to this phenomenon. Aristotle viewed the heart as the perfection of the whole organism, responsible for a concrete organic unity of nature and consciousness.4 In Timaeus, Plato presents the heart as a mediator between desires and reason in the three-leveled structure of the psyche. Blaise Pascal famously praised the supreme wisdom of the heart.5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau reintroduced the ancient controversy between reason and passion by declaring the primacy of the heart’s feeling over the detached logic of the head.6 Søren Kierkegaard explored the formation of the heart through the “works of love”7 and even Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel devoted several paragraphs in his Phenomenology of Spirit to the mysterious “law of the heart.”8 Perhaps the time has come for philosophers to become reacquainted with the intricate humanitarian symbol of the heart and recognize its proper place in our philosophical and ethical vocabulary. We may not be able to find a fixed identity of the heart in the boundless region of meanings ascribed to it. Yet we

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can effectively introduce the heart phenomenologically, through its immensely rich “world history” which comprises ancient rituals, religious beliefs, startling mythology, scientific discoveries, moral codes, and commandments. For the purpose of this book, it will be a brief, nodding acquaintance.9 The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh and Egyptian Book of the Dead, Hebrew Torah and Hindu Upanishads, Greek mythology and Confucius’ Analects, the Bible and the Koran, Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths, and Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching—all accord a very special place to experiences of the heart. In the colorful mélange of images, symbols, and expressions of the heart favored by different civilizations we can find a common thread: everywhere the heart is viewed as the vital center of a person’s body and at the same time as the core of a person’s emotional, spiritual, and moral life. From Egyptian papyri, we learn that the ultimate value of human life is determined in the symbolic “trial of the heart,” during which the gods weigh the heart of a deceased person against the feather of truth and justice. A pure heart would balance with the feather and its possessor would enjoy the gift of eternity in the company of gods. In another part of the world, we encounter the belief in the heart’s mystic life-giving energy, revealed in Aztec public sacrifices of their enemies’ bleeding, pulsating hearts to the Sun. In Greek mythology, the heart is a mighty fountain of passions and affections—Odysseus’s stormy heart, the heart of Agamemnon black in rage, Minerva’s bleeding heart, the heart of the “twice-born” Dionysus—while for the Stoics, the heart signifies the governing source (hegemonikon) of the human being from which all thinking, willing, and feeling proceed. Chinese sages, whose language marks the inseparability of the heart and mind with an expressive symbol (transliterated as xin or hsin), treasure the rare quality of the “middle-heartedness” and honor “the thinking heart.” The Hebrew Torah alludes to the heart—lev—as the seat of wisdom, the inner personality, and, ultimately, a shared self of the Israeli people. The ethical teaching of Confucius articulates a similar communal sentiment: righteousness of the heart creates a beautiful character and, in turn, harmonious relationships which lead to stability in the nation and peace in the world. In the Bible, where the heart is mentioned more than a thousand times, it reveals itself as “the main organ of psychic and spiritual life, the place in man at which God bears witness to Himself.”10 Conscience is the “law written on the heart” and the true “Kingdom of God” is in the heart seeking God. The motif of the heart desperately searching for “the treasure of God” is echoed in Sufism, in St. Augustine’s Confessions, in the teachings of medieval Christian mystics, and in the writings of the Orthodox theologians. The “heart concordance” reaches across literary, linguistic, historical, and anthropological boundaries. Poetic texts offer a myriad of profoundly emotional, romantic, and erotic connotations of the heart; different languages provide suggestive idioms; visual arts present intricate symbolism. Reflecting the transitory and the transcendent dimensions of human experience, the heart embraces a

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whole spectrum of meanings from that of bodily organ to haven of love. If in religious and poetic contexts, “the heart” often coincides with “spirit” or “soul,” it is by no means reducible to these two notions. Unlike the disembodied “spirit,” the living, beating heart has a rather concrete physical reality. We directly experience the heart’s organic life: an elated heart “jumps,” a scared heart “sinks,” a compassionate heart aches, and a stressed heart suffers or fails. And so, any “phenomenology of the heart” would be incomplete without a chapter on the literal heart—the beating muscle in our bodies. Historically conceived, the life of the heart as a bodily organ is almost as turbulent as its metaphorical life. The ancients revered the heart as a mysterious source of life energy and often perceived it as the body’s “sun.” Then in the modern period theorists offered the first scientific definition of the heart as a “pump” which quickly acquired the status of a universal medical truth. The story of the heart as a pumping device began in seventeenth-century England with William Harvey’s (1578–1657) famous public autopsies. When Harvey demonstrated to his audience an excised human heart, gave its precise scientific description, and formulated its purpose: to produce “a perpetual circular motion of the blood,” it was a solemn moment. The metaphorical heart was sacrificed to the god of science, and the new heart, a mechanism with specific technical characteristics, was introduced. By being subjected to scientific scrutiny, the heart lost its spiritual aura and became alienated from its mythological past. From that point on, the history of the heart split into two divergent paths: the scientific and the metaphorical. For modernity, the heart is either a rich allegory, or a complex biological entity, but never both. During the last three hundred years, scientists have learned to jump-start the heart, transplant it, listen to it, record and interpret its rhythmic contractions. The heart-mechanism has been, and continues to be, thoroughly studied by reason. Faithful children of the Age of Reason, most people would rather trust doctors, who literally hold the human heart in their hands than some obscure mystic. At the same time, the latest advancements in cardiology suggest the possibility of reconciling the two paths. Based on clinical observations of heart transplant patients and research in psycho-neurology, scientists have introduced the hypotheses that the heart may store information about a person’s temperament, that it may have its own form of “memory,” and, as the body’s organizing force, it may be able to send and exchange information with other hearts and brains.11 Perhaps the older views of the thinking, remembering, communal heart are not so far from the truth after all. As one researcher eloquently puts it, it could be that scientists and philosophers, in their search for the “mind,” failed to see the possibility of a triune structure of consciousness, made up of a “heart that energetically integrates the brilliantly adaptive brain with its miraculously self-healing body.”12 The question is not whether the ancient allegories can be shown to be literally true. If we learn one thing from the world history of the heart, it is that to approach this phenomenon philosophically, we must challenge the traditional

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dichotomies of feeling and thinking, body and spirit, nature and consciousness. Taken literally and metaphorically, the heart manifests itself as the primal organic bond which holds these alleged opposites together. Irreducible to abstractions of reason, philosophia cordis, the philosophy of the heart, suggests its own rules and its own lexis. It does not preclude the clarity of thought, but it does require attunement to life’s ambiguity and innuendo. An ethical ideal of wholeness, or wholeheartedness, requires a shift from the arguments of the discriminating intellect to creative engagement with the fullness of lived experience. In Dostoevsky’s novels, we find such genuine philosophia cordis, sensitive to the harmonies and discords of life; a philosophy which willingly appreciates, listens, and responds to the primal “songs of the heart.” Unprecedented openness to the abyss of life, where no question is answered once and for all, and where “all contradictions live together,” is Dostoevsky’s golden signature. The human heart is one of the most enigmatic of these contradictions and Dostoevsky invites his readers to join him in artistic exploration of this enigma. 3. The Ways of the “Living Life”: Dostoevsky’s Rhetoric of the Heart Love, to be sure, proceeds from the heart, but let us not in our haste about this forget the eternal truth that love forms the heart. –Søren Kierkegaard The complex rhetoric of the heart has deep roots in Russian thought. It descends from the earliest writings of the Greek and Eastern Orthodox Church fathers and continues through the teachings of Russian theologians and religious elders (startsy) up to the twentieth century. In particular, wisdom of the heart is one of the beloved themes of Orthodox theology. For example, St. Makary of Egypt (301–391) characterized the heart as the expression of the “inner person” and the center of one’s “wise (or reasonable) essence.” Eastern Fathers and later Russian startsy articulated this ideal of spiritual perfection in the maxim “one must stand with the mind in the heart.” The mind-heart unity finds its expression in the art of so-called wise prayer and the “prayer of the heart.” Nineteenth-century Slavophiles developed this theme philosophically while Russian writers, notably Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, employed it artistically. To a significant degree, the Russian religious and intellectual tradition is the tradition of the heart and Dostoevsky’s work is undoubtedly one of its creative expressions. The novelist acknowledges the primary role of the heart in moral conduct, expresses skepticism concerning the moral worth of speculative reason, and passionately searches for the harmonious communion of human hearts flourishing in love. But Dostoevsky’s rhetoric of the heart is not a repetition of a certain religious creed or philosophical theory. Instead, it is an artistic fusion of the most cherished convictions of the Orthodox spirituality within the rich texture of the novelist’s heart-felt experience.

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The incarnations of the heart in Dostoevsky’s writings are virtually endless. They range from the very straightforward (“frantically beating heart”) to the highly metaphorical (“the human heart is a battleground where God and the Devil struggle for mastery”). Also, the allegorical and physiological images often merge when Dostoevsky speaks about the heart. In Notes from Underground, we see how the protagonist’s unbearable humiliation induces “convulsive pains” in his heart and heat in his back.13 In Crime and Punishment, the main character, Rodion Raskolnikov, after having a prophetic dream about a horse being beaten to death, feels as though “the sore that has festered in his heart for a month has burst at last.”14 The numerous faces of the heart, literal and figurative, perpetually mirroring one another, form a unique psycho-physical picture that brings the reader to the blood-level depth of human existence. Crime and Punishment is replete with startling images of the murderer’s heart “rising,” “jumping,” and “banging so hard it is difficult to breathe.” In the ugly scene of the murder, the real physical presence of the painfully and loudly beating heart intensifies Raskolnikov’s suffering and horror. Climbing upstairs to the old woman’s apartment he has to “hold his heart”—so violently does it beat. Before ringing the bell, he waits for the heart to stop its feverish cacophony, but alas, the heart does not stop. Throughout the novel, Raskolnikov’s spiritual torment always goes hand in hand with physical suffering. He “wanders around like a drunkard,” stumbles, feels nauseous, struggles for breath, and constantly experiences fits of emptiness and paralysis of the heart. At the same time, the heart emerges metaphorically as a core of his moral awareness: Raskolnikov, frightened by “the vileness his heart seems to be capable of,” confesses to Sonya that he has “an evil heart” and constantly tries to fight “old, sore questions, lacerating his heart.” In Dostoevsky’s writings, the corrupted heart is often linked allegorically to feelings of suffocation, darkness, noise, and lack of space, while the heart seeking purification and spiritual freedom is accompanied by lively images of clear water, fresh air, light, and tranquility. Biologically and spiritually, the human heart is a conduit for mysterious life-giving forces, which sustain persons’ vital connections to their loved ones, the world, the earth, and all nature. The heart appears simultaneously as a giver and a receiver of life. One of the distinctive features of Eastern Orthodox spirituality is its focus on the preservation of the unity of nature and grace.15 According to Orthodox patristic teaching, persons coming to God do not thereby turn their back on nature because “God is the reality that sustains both man and nature.”16 This theme is not only embedded in Dostoevsky’s vision of the heart, but is also carried further to suggest that if a person renounces belonging to the earth, other people, and nature, that person’s heart “grows dim” and becomes increasingly susceptible to evil. At the same time, the opposite movement, toward openness to the “living life” (zhivaya zhizn’), exhibits an immense spiritual power to heal the sores of the heart. Let us recall the detective’s advice to Raskolnikov:

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Don’t be too clever about it, just give yourself directly to life, without reasoning; don’t worry—it will carry you straight to the shore and set you on your feet. . . . Be of great heart, and fear less. . . . I know you don’t believe it, but, by God, life will carry you. . . . All you need is air now—air, air!17 Raskolnikov needs a long time to appreciate the meaning of this prophetic saying. According to Dostoevsky’s design, he who “kills life” by committing a murder has to go through a grandiose torment before he can “come back to life.” The reader witnesses how, during the painful process of purification, the character’s contaminated heart simultaneously resists “the living life” and is drawn to its salutary sources; step by step, diffidently, his sense of belonging is restored. Guiding currents of life, which he tries to ignore, often reach his heart through irresistibly physical encounters. When the little girl Polechka spontaneously hugs and kisses Raskolnikov, he feels “as if he were on the moon and came back to people.” “What happened?” asks Dostoevsky in one of the notes for the novel; and he answers: “Nothing more than a sense of life. It is possible to live, then, live the same life as others live, live for others and with others.”18 This and many other flashes of life gradually lead Raskolnikov through the murk of his cultivated separation to the very end where he suddenly finds himself at Sonya’s feet, his heart overflowing with love. Some readers may question the credibility of Raskolnikov’s moral resurrection in the Epilogue of Crime and Punishment. Regardless of whether one finds the ending compelling, Dostoevsky’s moral message is unambiguous (the novelist states it explicitly in a letter to his editor Katkov, while outlining the pivotal conflict of the novel): truth and justice are the matters of the heart and they claim their rights, so that the criminal himself accepts suffering to atone for his deed.19 At the end of the novel, Raskolnikov and Sonya are triumphantly raised from the “dead” and “the heart of each [holds] infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.”20 “The living life” theme is one of Dostoevsky’s favorites and extends all the way through his post-Siberian novels. The underground man praises life, but is terrified by its persistent claims. Raskolnikov eventually comes to terms with life, but not until his heart passes through all the circles of spiritual and physical agony. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky devotes much care to developing this theme in a still broader context.21 Here, the dynamic of the human heart and its unique receptivity to the living life evolve on many different levels— personal and communal, religious and secular. Virtually all major characters in The Brothers Karamazov contribute the voices of their hearts to the ecstatic hymn of life orchestrated by the novelist. In Book Six, devoted to the life and teaching of “the Russian monk,” Zosima, we find a series of highly symbolic stories recounting radical personal conversions from cynicism and alienation to love and forgiveness based on a new appreciation

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of the fullness of life. These stories form an integral part of elder Zosima’s religious message which passionately upholds the love of “all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand.” This teaching resonates in the elated heart of Zosima’s young disciple, Alyosha Karamazov, when he, alone in the woods and devastated by the infamous “smell of corruption” at the elder’s funeral, cries and kisses the earth and eventually discovers spiritual strength in the grandeur of Life. Toward the end of the novel, the older brother, Dmitry Karamazov, pours out his zeal for life in an unparalleled confession of the “passionate heart.” Within the peeling walls of prison, the Cartesian “I think, therefore, I am” is countered by Dmitry’s euphoric: I am! In a thousand torments—I am; writhing under torture—but I am. Locked up in a tower, but still I exist, I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, still I know it is. And the whole of life is there—in knowing that the sun is . . . . 22 These words capture one of Dostoevsky’s most treasured beliefs: the spirit of life is prior to and infinitely more precious than so-called logic or dialectic. The tragic conflict between the heart’s primal attachment to life and the head’s logic is the pinnacle of the famous dialogue between Ivan Karamazov and his younger brother Alyosha. “There is still an awful lot of centripetal force on our planet, Alyosha,” confesses Ivan: I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic. Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one’s heart, out of old habit. . . . Such things you love not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts, you love your first young strength . . . . 23 In this declaration, Alyosha hears the strongest signals of Ivan’s future redemption: “I’m terribly glad that you want so much to live. I think that everyone should love life before everything else in the world.”24 The appeal to the life affirmation appears again in the next chapter, when Alyosha, frightened by Ivan’s rebellion against God’s world, exclaims: And the sticky little leaves, and the precious graves, and the blue sky, and the woman you love! How will you live, what will you love them with? Is it possible, with such hell in your heart and in your head?25

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Ivan’s verbal disclosure and Alyosha’s desperate questioning immediately reveal the dynamic, reciprocal relations of life and heart. By virtue of its ability to love, the human heart becomes an inexhaustible source of life; because of its organic attunement to the living life, the heart is capable of loving. Alyosha senses that the beginning of Ivan’s salvation is his love of life. This reflects Dostoevsky’s conviction as well: for him, an individual’s redemption is always manifested in love, whereas the inability to experience love is indissolubly linked to evil. In Dostoevsky’s poetics, the heart is not just an artistic device that helps the novelist to describe the deeply hidden aspects of human nature. For Dostoevsky, the heart is a unifying motif that joins the palpable, sometimes acutely physical, rhythms of life and its spiritual melody. Here, the artist moves beyond many religious and philosophical creeds that postulate a radical gap between the spiritual and the bodily, nature and grace, reason and the heart. From Dostoevsky’s novels, we learn to appreciate the heart as a center in which life dwells, to which God speaks, and which embodies the agony, doubt, and resoluteness of moral consciousness. His philosophy of the heart is an artistic perspective that expresses, through an intricate psycho-biological imagery, a genuine concern with the tragic disintegration of human nature, and a quest for harmonious, loving communion of humanity, nature, and deity. We now turn to the specifics of his ethics and its relation to Kantian deontology. 4. The Commandment of the Heart I do not derive these rules from the principles of the higher philosophy, I find them in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. –Jean-Jacques Rousseau If asked to define the heart, a proponent of rational deontology would likely characterize it in terms of feelings and inclinations. Based on this definition, the expression “deontology of the heart” would appear oxymoronic. Characteristically, Kant stresses that the idea of duty involves absolute necessity, to which the movements of the heart (he mentions grace and love) “stand in direct contradiction.”26 In the subsequent chapters, we will see that Kant’s peculiar understanding of “the heart” proves to be a much richer concept than that of a mere collection of feelings. Yet with regard to the moral obligation, the philosopher insists that duty is apprehended by reason, not by the heart, however broad and inclusive our understanding of the heart might be. By contrast, Dostoevsky’s ethics focuses on the duty of vital, active love and the duty of genuine trust, free from social conditioning and the constraints of rationality. While Kant’s ethics is detached from nature, the human body, and emotions, Dostoevsky’s moral imperative refers to the entire person in the midst of the “living life.” Through the portrayal of the human heart, the novelist con-

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veys the vitality of the unconditional “ought.” Let us explore the unconditional obligation that springs from the heart in contrast to the one dictated by reason. Kant claims that ethics must be derived from reason and reason alone, for “all moral concepts have their seat and origin completely a priori in reason.”27 He continues: it is not only a requirement of the greatest necessity for theoretical purposes, when it is a matter merely of speculation, but is also of the greatest practical importance to draw [these] concepts and laws from pure reason, to set them forth pure and unmixed, and indeed to determine the extent of this entire practical or pure rational cognition, that is, to determine the entire faculty of pure practical reason.28 Kant’s unambiguous emphasis on the rational character of his moral philosophy has raised several crucial objections in the history of philosophy. Such intellectual giants as Friedrich Schiller, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and John Stuart Mill, among others, brought different charges against Kant’s moral philosophy, including quite legitimate accusations of its being unrealistic, psychologically naive, too formal, and too rational for its own good. Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals made their impassioned contributions to this criticism. One of the main streams of Russian thought (to which Dostoevsky’s art partially belongs) characterized Kant’s moral philosophy as an exceedingly abstract (otvlechennaya) system, whose primary focus is the “cold and detached” idea of the categorical imperative. Vladimir Soloviev’s and Pamphil Yurkevich’s interpretations of Kantian ethics as the theory of an apathetic apprehension of duty by pure practical reason, as opposed to the warm and vital command of love, are just a few symptomatic instances of this perspective.29 Not only does Dostoevsky join his contemporaries in their struggle against the Western “kingdom” of abstract principles and rational morality, but also, his novels became one of the leading forces in this effort. Thus, philosopher and literary critic Lev Shestov famously characterized Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground as a much more decisive “critique of pure reason” than Kant’s.30 What Shestov understands by “critique” we would better call an antagonism, and that is why we may accept his interpretation only with serious reservations. Contrary to Shestov-like characterizations of Dostoevsky as a hard-core antirationalist (unfortunately common among Russian and Western commentators alike), the novelist does not oppose reason as such. Instead, he rejects the hegemony of detached reasoning—or what he calls the “three-dimensional, Euclidean mind”—which tends to reduce all the paradoxes and controversies of human existence to the laws of necessity and universality. For Dostoevsky, an ethical decision must be blessed by the heart; otherwise, it is a mere idea, however “sensible,” intellectually sophisticated, or aesthetically enticing it may be. He

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eloquently proves that heartless ideas are often a source of immorality: they bring with them destructiveness, hatred, cynicism, and misanthropy. The novelist also carefully examines moral indifference and corruption which leads him to the questions: “What if reason takes the side of evil?” “What if evil is done for the sake of Good?” Where reasons for good and reasons for evil clash, the ultimate verdict can only come from the heart. Recall Raskolnikov’s thoroughly rational speculations that justify the murder of the “ugly old hag” in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov’s mind is feverishly conjuring up philosophical theories of spiritual superiority, intellectual domination, and practical benefaction of humankind. Meanwhile, his heart is lacerated with pain. Not until Raskolnikov goes through all the torment of his heart does he become free from the “deadly temptation.” In The Brothers Karamazov we encounter another “benefactor of mankind,” the infamous Grand Inquisitor, who proposes brilliant arguments in favor of totalitarian rule of the chosen few over millions of the “weak and pitiful.” The Inquisitor’s sinister rationality appears to prevail; yet at the end of his speech, Christ, to whom the Cardinal’s monologue is addressed, responds with a silent kiss which “glows in the Inquisitor’s heart.” As a symbol of unconditional love and compassionate acknowledgement of the old man’s suffering, Christ’s silent gesture speaks directly to Inquisitor’s suppressed humanity and puts into question the alleged truth of his arguments. Let us now look again at the conversation between Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov, in which the complex dynamic of reason and heart unfolds. The two brothers have their first heart-to-heart talk in a tavern and they “get to know each other” by discussing “the eternal questions”: the existence of God, God’s creation, immortality, freedom, and the suffering of the innocent. Says Ivan to Alyosha: I humbly confess that I do not have any ability to resolve such questions, I have a Euclidean mind, an earthly mind. . . . And I advise you never to think about it, Alyosha, my friend, and most especially about whether God exists or not. All such questions are completely unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions . . . . 31 While advising Alyosha to stay away from thinking about “the offensive comedy of human contradictions,” Ivan is deeply engaged in it; he even says that being concerned with these “cursed questions” about divine purpose, human suffering, immortality, and the existence of God, is his very essence—it makes him “the sort of man he is.” Ivan is not a disinterested spectator of the “comedy”—to the contrary, these unresolved questions bring him to despair. He is tormented, but not because his “Euclidean mind” finds his rebellion against God’s creation selfcontradictory; the pain comes from his heart, which is capable of superior spiritual torment and cannot live in peace with the destructive conclusions of his mind. Elder Zosima’s prophetic words directly capture Ivan’s predicament by

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pointing out the emptiness of his philosophical arguments and social diatribes. He says to Ivan: For the time being you, too, are toying, out of despair, with your magazine articles and drawing-room discussions, without believing in your own dialectics and smirking at them with your heart aching inside you. . . . But thank the Creator that he has given you a lofty heart, capable of being tormented by such torment . . . . 32 Ivan claims that he chooses not to listen to his heart, whose “child-like convictions” do not make sense in the “three-dimensional” world of his mind. Even if, he says: the suffering will be healed and smoothed over, [if] the whole offensive comedy of human contradictions will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man’s Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom, and [if] ultimately, at the world’s finale, in the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and be revealed something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed; it will suffice not only to make forgiveness possible, but also to justify everything that has happened with men—let this, let all of this come true and be revealed, but I do not accept it and do not want to accept it! Let the parallel lines even meet before my own eyes: I shall look and say, yes, they meet, and still I will not accept it. That is my essence, Alyosha, that is my thesis.33 Ivan’s idea to set the limits within which his Euclidean mind can work and his choice to live by these limits sound very Kantian. No wonder he dreams of going to Europe to weep over the stones of “the precious dead;” judging from Dostoevsky’s own frequently expressed intellectual nostalgia, one of these “precious dead” must be the sage of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant.34 Yet Kant, as we know, chose to deny knowledge to make room for faith.35 By contrast, Ivan firmly rejects any leap of faith and decides to stick with what he can know. It appears that on merely empirical or logical ground any attempt to justify the world and the necessity of moral choice leads to the complete victory of the “three-dimensional mind” over the convictions of the heart. Dostoevsky is well aware of this difficulty. In one of his letters, he expresses uneasiness about his reply to Ivan’s arguments, which “was not presented point by point, but as an artistic picture.” If the heart and empirically-oriented reason speak two different languages, the danger always exists that they will never be able to communicate. Perhaps Pascal was right: the heart has its reasons that reason cannot (and we can add “does not want to”) know.

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Yet Dostoevsky believes that some communication between reason and the heart is possible, if not at the intellectual level, then on the level of heart-felt conviction. As elder Zosima says at the beginning of the novel, “one cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced.” How? Through the work of the heart, active vital love, answers the elder. He speaks: Brothers, do not be afraid of men’s sin, love man also in his sin, for this likeness of God’s love is the height of love on earth. Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love.36 To a skeptical reader, Zosima’s message may sound like another exalted utopia, overly naive and sentimental. But Dostoevsky does not answer the skeptic, either in his reader or in his characters, by constructing an argument. Instead, he calls upon the hagiographic tradition of recounting a life (zhitie). Zosima’s word is zhitiinoe slovo—a word that arises from the depth of his life, as the etymological link between “life” and “hagiography” in the original Russian suggests. Literally and allegorically, Zosima’s speech bears witness to his life and the lives of those who contributed to the conception of the word in his heart (his dying brother Markel, his meek servant, and the “mysterious visitor”). The reader receives the word from Alyosha, Zosima’s “dear, quiet boy,” who does not merely record the teaching of the starets, but bears witness to his love. In one of his letters, Dostoevsky predicts that some people would shout at Zosima’s words and call them “absurd, since too elated.” But, he continues, “they are of course absurd in the everyday sense, but in another inner sense, they seem justified.”37And they are indeed internally justified, for they are the living words of love, the testimony of the elder’s heart. Some melodramatic and sentimental motifs might be found in Zosima’s speech; but the love of life, people, and all nature of which he speaks are not merely matters of sentiment. They represent the unconditional values for which every human heart must strive. This is not an easy path, and a person must be ready for the hard work of the heart. Zosima describes active love as a harsh and fearful thing; unlike love in dreams which “thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching,” active, humbling love requires “labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.”38 Love is also a teacher, but “one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time. Because anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance.”39

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Zosima urges his followers to recognize love as a precious gift. But more than that, he insists that a warm and vital commandment to love is the core of all human responsibility; it is the highest expression of what it means to be human and fully alive. This implies that as ethical creatures human beings are under an obligation to love. Strictly speaking, is not a duty to love internally contradictory? Our philosophical interlocutor, Kant, puts this problem in a straightforward way: “Love is a matter of feeling, not of willing, and I cannot love because I will to, still less because I ought to (I cannot be constrained to love); so a duty to love is an absurdity.”40 Ivan Karamazov would applaud this statement and append to it a further empirical observation: not only is the imperative to love theoretically selfcontradictory, it is practically hopeless. He shares his doubts with Alyosha: I never could understand how it’s possible to love one’s neighbors. In my opinion, it is precisely one’s neighbors that one cannot possibly love. I read some time, somewhere about “John the Merciful” (some saint) that when a hungry and frozen passerby came to him and asked to be made warm, he lay down with him in bed, embraced him, and began breathing into his mouth, which was foul and festering with some terrible disease. I’m convinced that he did it with the strain of a lie, out of love enforced by duty, out of selfimposed penance. If we’re to come to love a man, the man himself should stay hidden, because as soon as he shows his face—love vanishes.41 In response to this radical statement, Alyosha, who was listening carefully to his brother’s confession, remarks that Ivan was speaking as yet “inexperienced in love.” Alyosha mentions that for people like Ivan, a man’s face (or any other unappealing features he may possess) often prevents the inexperienced from loving him. Alyosha says that he knows that much love still abounds in mankind “almost like Christ’s love,” but Ivan cuts him off: “Well, I don’t know it yet . . . .” Both brothers speak from experience; Alyosha speaks of something he has witnessed, while Ivan makes a negative statement: “I don’t see it and therefore it does not exist.” Although Ivan stresses that he is the kind of man who always sticks to the facts—and he does have an overwhelming collection of facts that allegedly prove the absence of active love and sincere forgiveness in the world— even he seems vaguely aware that this “empirical evidence” need have no bearing on the question of whether human beings must try to be loving. The deontology of the heart does not rely on rational justification, but appeals to the convictions of the heart. The intricacies of choosing active love and gradually becoming convinced of its power is precisely what Dostoevsky struggles to communicate. According to his design, Ivan’s empirical realism is destined to surrender to the no less real spiritual experience of active love. For Ivan, such transformation is a possibility partly because he is not a complete stranger to love as is his deeply despised half-brother Smerdyakov. Ivan experiences a

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love of life, loves his younger brother, and perhaps remembers his mother’s meek, affectionate image.42 What he is lacking is ethical resolution to follow the commandment of love. This brings us back to the Kantian question, namely, “How is a duty to love possible if love is not a matter of willing?” True, nobody can force another person to love. Yet love is a matter of choice. Choosing here does not mean meticulous rational deliberation, sticking to the facts, weighing the consequences, or making a formal, categorical decision to love. Choosing love is choosing to learn the language of the heart, to be receptive to its expressions. Ivan may make the conscious choice to listen only to his “three-dimensional Euclidean mind” and remain deaf to the voice of his heart, whose “childlike convictions” cannot be rationally verified. Meanwhile, his most profound tragedy and his deepest personal fault lies in neglecting the sobbing and stirring of his heart, while being perfectly aware of it. Consequently, the only responsibilities Ivan assumes with respect to himself and other people are formal, rationally, or legally relevant. He says that if Dmitry bursts into the house and tries to kill their father, he will try to stop him. In the realm of his thoughts and aspirations, however, he reserves the absolute freedom to wish that Dmitry and the old Karamazov would “eat each other alive.” For Dostoevsky, this understanding of duty is not just limited; it does not deserve the name of an ethical commitment at all. By choosing not to fight his hatred and inner repulsion toward his father, Ivan inspires Smerdyakov, a heartless degenerate who physically kills the old man. When this happens, Ivan has no choice but to accept full responsibility for his corrupted thoughts. He sincerely recognizes the damaging implications of his programmatic statement, “everything is permitted,” and even calls himself a murderer. This recognition is a cathartic moment for Ivan’s heart that awakens him to a new ethical receptivity. The crowning theme of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “each is guilty for all,” is also fleshed out through the dynamic symbol of the heart, which is the center of an individual and the bearer of transpersonal ethical relations. Each human heart is part of the circulatory system of life, a denizen of the community of living hearts. Our thoughts, words, and actions pass through the arteries of this system and often exhibit a tremendous power to injure or heal, degrade or nourish other people’s hearts. The novelist urges us to take responsibility for this power. In Dostoevsky’s moral universe, our duty is first the duty of taking care of our hearts; this implies learning to take our inner life and that of other people seriously, to love others and trust them, to listen to the summons of the living life, and develop a sense of belonging to the world. These obligations are unconditional, they do not depend on a person’s situation and they do not guarantee any gratification. We must only remember that evil dwells and flourishes where the heart’s life-giving sources are contaminated, where its essential bonds to the hearts of other human beings are ignored, and where love is forgotten.

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With regard to Kant’s categorical statement that love is a matter of feeling, not of willing, and that this is why it cannot belong to deontological ethics, we will see that first, Kant’s own ethics is not simply a matter of willing. Second, willing itself is intimately connected with the emotional realm (or in Kant’s terms, to the faculty of desire). Finally, that duty, “that sublime and mighty” concept, plays a much more refined role in Kantian ethics than that of a sheer constraint. But before we can speak about the meaning of obligation and its “willful” component in Kant’s ethics, we need to examine briefly the main feature of his ethics—its celebrated rationality. 5. The Commandment of Practical Reason Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe— the starry heavens above and the moral law within. –Immanuel Kant The activity of Kantian pure reason (in its theoretical or practical manifestations) is by no means limited to understanding or formal logical inference. Neither speculative nor practical reason can be reduced to the “three dimensional Euclidean mind,” which is only concerned with analyzing the data of experience and finding the means for a desired end. To understand and appreciate fully the merits of Kant’s moral project, let us first ask what Kant means by pure practical reason. A term originated by Aristotle, practical reason first appears in Kant’s philosophy as an opposition to the sensuous in human nature on the one hand, and as a contrast to the intellectually ambitious pure theoretical reason on the other. Although Kant insists elsewhere that theoretical and practical reason are one and the same, he is quick to point out that practical reason has primacy over theoretical reason. The discussion of whether these two statements are compatible lies beyond the scope of the present study, but it has received much attention from Kant scholars.43 A crucial point in understanding reason’s moral vocation in Kant’s writings has to do with the complex relation between rationality and volition. According to Kant, in its “practical” role of guiding intentional behavior, reason is intimately connected with the will. Practical reason does manifest itself in the understanding of moral requirements, but more importantly, its role is to inspire the will to act in accordance with the moral law.44 In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant offers us the initial formula for the relation between practical reason and will. He writes, “Since reason is required for the derivation of actions from laws, the will is nothing other than practical reason.”45 But does this mean that practical reason and will are identical? Herbert James Paton notes that while at times Kant does identify practical reason with the will, at other times, he speaks of reason as determining the will. Paton argues that identifying practical reason with the will is “more satisfactory”

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because “it suggests that our willing is as rational as our thinking and is not merely something blind and unconscious which—per impossibile is causally affected by our conscious thinking.” Paton continues: Nevertheless, when we speak of reason as determining the will, we indicate that volition has a cognitive aspect, which can be considered in abstraction. Similarly, thinking has a volitional aspect which can also be considered in abstraction.46 Yet not long after the publication of his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant reconsiders the idea of the reason-will conjunction and re-evaluates his views about how reason determines the will. In this context, he acknowledges the essential difference between reason and will, and the problematic nature of the will itself. Both these discoveries find their full expression in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Aloneand in The Metaphysics of Morals, which I will discuss at length in the following chapters devoted to the questions of will, arbitrariness, freedom, and evil. I will analyze Kant’s struggle to describe the nature and the process of volition through the concepts of Wille (will, volition in general) and Willkür (arbitrary will). At this point, let us note the obvious: “will” and practical reason are not one and the same. In our attempt to understand what practical reason means, we run into a problem similar to the one that we faced earlier in trying to depict the nature of the heart. Let us clarify what practical reason does and hope that this will bring us closer to the understanding of what it is. Interestingly, this is precisely the strategy that Kant chooses in the Critique of Practical Reason.47 Nowhere in the book does he define pure practical reason straightforwardly, but offers numerous descriptions of the activity of practical reason instead. According to Kant, practical reason gives us normative guidance in the realm of our deeds and our intentions; it legislates the moral law and derives actions from that law, thus realizing the ideal of autonomy. Practical reason alone is capable of determining the will to act out of duty. It is responsible for providing us with sufficient motivation to follow the moral law and not allow us to be misled by feelings and inclinations. With respect to feelings, we observe one of the more important characteristics of pure practical reason, its opposition to self-love, and its unconditional commitment to “humanity” (or moral worth) in human beings. Practical reason, though “practical,” is not at all pragmatic or comforting: one of its key roles is to put forward and promote an often uncomfortable but elevating moral alternative to utilitarian, prudent, and selfish reasoning. For Kant, this alternative is free submission of the will to the moral law. He writes: The consciousness of the free submission of the will to the law, yet as combined with an unavoidable constraint put on all inclinations though on-

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DOSTOEVSKY AND KANT: DIALOGUES ON ETHICS ly by one’s own reason, is respect for the law. The law that demands this respect and also inspires it is, as one sees, none other than the moral law (for no other excludes all inclinations from immediate influence on the will). An action that is objectively practical in accordance with this law, with the exclusion of every determining ground of inclination, is called duty, which, because of that exclusion, contains in its concept practical necessitation, that is, determination of actions however reluctantly they may be done. . . . As submission to a law, that is, as a command (indicating constraint for the [sensuously (sinnlich)] affected subject), it therefore contains in it no pleasure but instead, so far, displeasure in the action. On the other hand, however, since this constraint is exercised only by the lawgiving of his own reason, it also contains something elevating . . . .48

Through the practical law, Kant continues, reason not only “absolutely commands” a dutiful action, but is also capable of producing it in every particular case. It is precisely its actively determining the will to act out of duty that makes reason “practical.” Kant stresses repeatedly that the morality of an action is rooted in its “necessity from duty and from respect for the law.” Without respect, without a person’s consciousness of his or her free submission to the law, no such thing as moral personality could exist. The moving force and the inspiration of every moral action is, therefore, nothing but a special feeling of respect for the law, which Kant is at pains to distinguish from all other so-called “pathological” feelings. Along with his struggle against “pathological”—emotional or sentimental—feelings and inclinations, Kant strongly advises us against contagious “moral enthusiasm,” which is characterized by overstepping the boundaries of reason. Kant dedicates a few long passages to proving that moral enthusiasm must be abandoned as an inadequate basis for moral conduct. Ironically, after razing “moral enthusiasm” to the ground, Kant exclaims in the very next paragraph: Duty! Sublime and Mighty name that embraces nothing charming or insinuating but requires submission, and yet does not seek to move the will by threatening anything that would arouse natural aversion or terror in the mind but only holds forth a law that of itself finds entry into the mind and yet gains reluctant reverence (though not always obedience), a law before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly work against it; what origin is there worthy of you, and where is to be found the root of your noble descent which proudly rejects all kinship with the inclinations, descent from which is the indispensable condition of that worth which human beings alone can give themselves? 49 We would be hard pressed not to interpret this impassioned praise of duty as an example of moral enthusiasm. Yet the question here is not whether we want to call Kant the fanatic of duty. What matters is that despite all Kant’s efforts to ex-

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plore morality from the standpoint of a disinterested spectator, the rhetoric of his moral writings shows that in the depth of his ethics there lies, not an apathetic apprehension of duty, but an almost religious belief in the noble and sublime ability of people to master themselves. Here we find the key to the activity of pure practical reason and can finally say a few words on Kant’s behalf with respect to the common criticism of his moral theory as being formal, cold, and unsympathetic. These accusations do have grounding in Kant’s work, for they reflect his struggle elsewhere with feelings and inclinations as the main hindrances for bringing moral conduct under a single rational principle. However, there could be no doubt that Kantian ethics is built on practical reason’s unlimited and passionate (no matter how much this type of passion may differ from a “pathological” passion) commitment to the moral perfection of a human being. Kantian reason is practical because it not only advises but also commands a person to rise “more and more toward humanity,” making him worthy of the humanity that “dwells within him.”50 If we look more closely at Kant’s rhetoric in the second Critique, and especially in the Metaphysics of Morals, we can see that one of the crucial roles that the philosopher ascribes to the practical reason is that of strengthening the heart. Though, as we may suspect, Kant does not explain what the heart means, the context suggests unambiguously that by the heart he understands the inner core of the personality. Kant proclaims: the pure thought of duty, and in general of the moral law, has by way of reason alone an influence on the human heart so much more powerful than all the further impulsions capable of being called up from the field of experience that in the consciousness of its own dignity reason despises these impulsions and is able gradually to become their master.51 Further, in describing the process of moral perfection in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant articulates something similar to Zosima’s stress on the hard work of the moral personality as opposed to its immediately appealing romantic image. Kant writes: “one must call attention not so much to the elevation of soul, which is very fleeting and transitory, as to the subjection of the heart to duty, from which a more lasting impression can be expected, because this brings principles with it (but the former, only ebullitions).” Kant continues, “tender feelings or high-flown, puffed-up pretensions” only “make the heart languid instead of strengthening it.”52 From these and similar passages in Kant’s later moral writings, we may conclude that we should not conceive the relationship between practical reason and the heart in terms of a strict dichotomy. We can find many parallels between the activity of Kantian practical reason and “the work of the heart” because, in our hope to embrace the whole spectrum of the possible meanings of moral experience, we cannot help but operate in the field of different philosophical con-

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notations of reason and the heart. Also, while we sort out these connotations and shades of meaning, we inevitably find overlapping regions. This approach facilitates a non-confrontational comparative study of the two deontologies: if we do not reduce reason to the three-dimensional mind and the heart to a mixture of mere feelings, the interplay between them proves to be intricate and illuminating. 6. Can Reason Understand the Reasons of the Heart? The heart has reasons that reason cannot know. –Blaise Pascal By staying on the side of “dry and earnest representation of duty, which is more suited to human imperfection,” Kant’s ethics articulates only one possible approach to the unconditional ethical commitment. Dostoevsky’s “deontology of the heart” draws its vital force from all the torment and agony of human imperfection and yet conveys the possibility of a free, unrestrained ethical choice capable of overcoming psychological and social constraints. Kant believes that a priori moral principles discovered and willfully promoted by practical reason form the core of an authentically moral action. Acting out of duty requires complete independence from pragmatic considerations or emotional preferences; often, persons can achieve such independence only by acting in direct opposition to their inclinations. By contrast, Dostoevsky believes that the apprehension of the eternal law of good and evil emanates from the depth of human experience, internal and external. For the novelist, cultivation of moral sensibility—which Kant would describe as sharpening a person’s “attentiveness to the voice of the inner judge”—begins with a person’s sense of belonging to nature and community, and from its individual heart-felt experience. In short, it springs from the living life itself. Despite the essential differences in content, style, and fundamental existential commitments, a crucial thematic link exists between Kant’s deontology and Dostoevsky’s ethics of the heart. Kant would obviously agree with Dostoevsky’s suspicion about the moral worth of the “three-dimensional, Euclidean mind.” In his introduction to the Critique of Practical Reason, he makes clear that “empirically limited” reason cannot form the ground for morality. Kant says that the goal of his Critique is to “prevent empirically conditioned reason from presuming that it, alone and exclusively, furnishes the determining ground of the will.” 53 Only pure practical reason—free, powerful, capable of inspiration and commitment, as Kant envisions it in his second Critique—can participate in the spiritual work of the heart and “strengthen” it. Paraphrasing Pascal, we can say that perhaps an empirically limited reason cannot know the reasons of the heart, but Kant wants to urge that his pure practical reason can. After all, both have the same goal: gradually raising human beings toward the ideal of humanity.

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In subsequent chapters, we will see that Kant’s exploration of the relationship between reason and will brings him to a philosophical path where he actively employs the notion of the heart. In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, “the heart” (Herz) appears to represent the depth and the ultimate ground of moral choice, instead of a mere conglomerate of feelings. Although Kant’s discourse leaves the phenomenon of the heart empty of descriptive content, it plays an irreducible role in his theory of free will and moral conduct. Kant’s rational deontology and Dostoevsky’s deontology of the heart operate on the basis of rich and complex understanding of “reason” and “the heart.” If we were to describe their meeting point in a sentence, the saying of the Eastern Orthodox sages “stand with the mind in the heart” would fit best. Kant puts an emphasis on the rational part of this process, while Dostoevsky concentrates on the deepening of the heart. At the same time, the philosopher and the novelist alike stress the cultivation of moral receptivity. Whereas Kant would say: listen to your practical reason whose “heavenly voice” is “so distinct, so irrepressible, and so audible,” Dostoevsky would urge you to listen to the voice of your heart and its all-encompassing command to love.54

Two FREEDOM: ADVENTURES OF THE WILL Man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being. –Jean-Paul Sartre 1. Introduction What makes deontology possible? What is the most fundamental existential presupposition that permits Immanuel Kant to ask his moral agent to overcome the principle of self-love and follow the universal moral law unconditionally? What is the presupposition that allows Fyodor Dostoevsky to believe in his heroes’ ability to overstep not only social and psychological conditioning but also their destructive nature? For the philosopher and the novelist, this presupposition is an unreserved belief in human freedom. While their philosophical and existential commitments to freedom are similar, the differences in their respective approaches to the problem of free will are striking. This chapter will examine these differences and similarities as they pertain to the questions of human volition, freedom, rationality, and arbitrariness. Kant’s main interlocutor here will be Dostoevsky’s celebrated “anti-hero,” the underground man. 2. Kant on Free Will and Arbitrariness Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals offers us a memorable formula for the relationship between rationality and volition: “Since reason is required for the derivation of actions from laws, the will is nothing other than practical reason.”1 Kant’s moral project begins with an identification of practical reason and the will. While some commentators argue that, by interpreting practical reason as will, Kant revolutionizes the notions of volition and rationality, others seek to prove that such identification does not hold up to scrutiny.2 When in his Critique of Pure Reason Kant defines “the practical” as “everything that is possible through freedom,” he acknowledges that autonomy or freedom of moral choice is the essence of the activity of practical reason and the core of the moral personality (Persönlichkeit).3 In the Groundwork and in the second Critique (with some variations in method and terminology), Kant attempts to demonstrate that an active expression of moral autonomy, namely, the functioning of the human will, is precisely what makes one a “person.”

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Yet this position, according to which moral personality, free will, and rationality always—by definition—go hand in hand, raises several questions. The most disturbing of them is the problem of choosing contrary to the moral law: if a person chooses not to listen to the wise heavenly voice of practical reason, does this mean that such a choice is either irrational or not free? When, in the Groundwork, Kant approaches this question by labeling the activity of such a will “heteronomous,” he creates a further issue, namely: if heteronomous means “not free,” then it also means “not responsible.” In repudiating the moral law, human beings cease to be “persons” in a Kantian sense because, allegedly, they reject their “humanity.” Since “humanity” stands for the inner expression of autonomy, individuals who repudiate the moral law cannot be held responsible for their immorality. Frederick Rauscher argues that Kant could have avoided this problem by “distinguishing more clearly the functions of the will and the functions of pure practical reason implicit in his moral theory”;4 as we will see, Kant himself chose an alternative route. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant tries to deal with this problem by stressing the alleged spontaneity of heteronomous conduct.5 This implies that a person’s choice to remain deaf to practical reason’s advice and command is no less free than the choice to follow the moral law. Immorality does not deprive human beings of their personality, provided the choice to ignore the moral law is made consciously. Kant’s struggle, in the Critique of Practical Reason, to understand the complex relation of the moral law, freedom, and personality is interpreted comprehensively by John Silber: In the second Critique by defining heteronomy as a mode of freedom, Kant faced the dismaying consequence that a person is still a person in possession of his freedom even if he rejects the law. Thus the law no longer appears to be related to the will as a condition of its being. The categorical imperative seems to resolve itself into a hypothetical one: if one wishes to be moral he must obey the moral law; if, however, one is not dismayed by the disapprobation of the moral law and superior moral beings, he can still be a person and indulge his subjective fancies. Unable to anticipate his own later discoveries, and unwilling to accept such a conclusion, Kant occasionally reverted in the second Critique to his earlier position and defined freedom as action determined solely by the moral law.6 What are these later discoveries to which Silber is referring? First, a new approach to the nature of human will is central to Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone and the Metaphysics of Morals. Whereas in the Groundwork, Kant’s main concern is with the fight between duty and inclination, in the Religion, Kant recognizes the urgency of speaking about the will endowed with freedom for good or evil.7 He occasionally associates freedom itself (Freiheit) with the “absolute spontaneity of arbitrary will” (absoluten Spontaneität der

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Willkür).8 Arbitrary will—or what Kant calls Willkür—becomes the starting point of his speculations about the very ground of good and evil in human nature because this will manifests itself simultaneously as a generator of moral personality and a vehicle of moral corruption and decline. But Kant’s reader may wish to push the issue further by pointing out that just as free will must be capable of subjecting itself to, or rebelling against, the moral law, it also must be capable of altogether ignoring the necessity of choosing. Would Kant’s conception of freedom then imply the possibilities of moral indifference and caprice? Henry Sidgwick summarizes some responses to these questions raised already in Kant’s time: “If a man could not act without a motive,” says Reid, “he could have no power”—that is, in Reid’s meaning, no free agency “at all.” This is the kind of freedom which [some contrast] with good freedom as “unintelligible caprice,” and to which Green . . . refers in a similar tone as “some unaccountable power of unmotived willing” whose manifestations would be “arbitrary freaks.”9 Sidgwick dismisses such implications of Kant’s theory of freedom and insists that “‘capricious freedom’ is . . . certainly not Kantian: not only does he expressly repudiate it, but nowhere—so far as I know—does he unconsciously introduce it.”10 Sidgwick argues that Kant’s “neutral freedom” has nothing to do with “capricious freedom” or “arbitrariness.” Perhaps the problem of arbitrariness had never been among Kant’s pressing philosophical concerns. As we will see, arbitrary (capricious) freedom is the immediate and inevitable consequence of any conception of freedom as “freedom for good or evil.” The conception of freedom is not just tacitly present in Kant’s later moral writings; it undermines the structure of his theory of freedom from within. But before we discuss Kant’s possible reaction to this problem, the role of Willkür in his system and the inner dynamic of the will in general, I propose to turn to Dostoevsky’s underground man—the expert on arbitrariness and the chief among the “arbitrary freaks,” who offers us a unique and powerful argument here. 3. The Underground World as Will Two such opposed kings encamp them still in man as well as herbs – grace and rude will. –William Shakespeare Unlike Ivan Karamazov, the underground man is not going to weep on the graves of European sages. He is quite proud of being able to contribute something radically new to the centuries-long development of human ideas—

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something that “those stupid, translunary Germans” do not see. Among the many themes of his speech, which is a peculiar blend of confession, deep psychological struggle, buffoonery, and theoretical dispute, one is of central importance for our investigation of the problem of volition. This theme is the underground man’s unsurpassed glorification of “the most profitable profit” (samaya vygodnaya vygoda) for which he claims he is ready to act in opposition to reason, honor, peace, and prosperity. This so-called profit, is none other than volia—the Russian word that means at the same time “freedom,” “liberty,” “spontaneity,” “unfettered will,” and “arbitrariness.” Speaking about volia and using other words synonymous with it—khotenie (wanting, desire), svoevolie (arbitrariness, capricious exercise of will)—the underground man is referring to what medieval scholastics would call liberum arbitrium indifferentiae (free will); German “Willkür” is quite close to its meaning, while English does not offer anything closer than the Shakespearean “rude will.” Wherever possible, I will use the original Russian volia to preserve its range of connotations. The underground man speaks: One’s own free and voluntary wanting, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, though chafed sometimes to the point of madness—all this is that most profitable profit, the omitted one, which does not fit into any classification, and because of which all systems and theories are constantly blown to the devil. And where did all these sages get the idea that man needs some normal, some virtuous wanting? What made them necessarily imagine that what man needs is necessarily a reasonably profitable wanting? Man needs only independent wanting, whatever this independence may cost and wherever it may lead. . . . I believe in this, I will answer for this, because the whole human enterprise seems indeed to consist in man’s proving to himself every moment that he is a man and not a [piano key]! With his own skin if need be, but proving it.11 As we can see, the underground man’s passionate cry for volia is not just aimed against different philosophical views of freedom and virtue. Instead, it claims to uproot the very system in which his imaginary opponents think. He proposes an ostensibly innocent addition to the list of all human profits known thus far, namely, he wants arbitrariness to be recognized as one of the “profits.” But being included in the list, his “most profitable profit” immediately turns the very idea of a profit upside down. Hence, the underground man’s version of Gödel’s theorem: either our system of “profits” is incomplete, or it must include arbitrariness, which may very well go against all profits. In addition, if arbitrariness is the core of human freedom and individuality, then freedom and human nature are somehow ontologically opposed to any hierarchy of values. No wonder Dostoevsky calls his hero a “paradoxalist.”

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The underground man’s disturbing statements led some commentators to the conclusion that the Notes represent a “perverted” idea of freedom. This point of view presupposes that another, “normal” idea of freedom exists, which the protagonist misinterprets. His “declaration of independence” usually provokes two kinds of responses. While some readers dismiss the underground man’s rebellion as pathological, having nothing to do with “true” freedom, others see his speech as a proof of freedom’s capricious and unpredictable character. To approach this problem, we must keep in mind that the Notes are the swan song of volia and volia is not merely perverted freedom. Freedom (svoboda) and volia are qualitatively different, even though their respective ranges of meaning occasionally overlap. But I am not concerned with linguistic perplexities here; the difference between svoboda and volia that the Russian language recognizes has significant philosophical, political, socio-historical, and cultural implications. In his article “Russia and Freedom” (“Rossiia i svoboda”), historian George Fedotov observes: To this day the word svoboda seems to be an adequate translation of the French liberté. At the same time nobody would argue against the essentially Russian character of volia. This makes it all the more important to realize the difference between svoboda and volia for the Russian ear. Volia is first of all the possibility to live, to “live by” (pozhit’) and under one’s volia, not limited by any social bonds, and not only chains. Volia is constrained by both our peers and the world itself. Volia is triumphant both in escaping from society, in the expanses of the steppe, or in exerting power over society, in violence over people. Whereas personal freedom is unthinkable without respect for another person’s freedom, volia is always only for oneself. It is not opposed to tyranny, for a tyrant is also a vol’ny creature. A brigand is the ideal of Muscovite volia, just as Ivan the Terrible is the ideal of a tsar. Since volia, like anarchy, is impossible in a civilized community, the Russian ideal of volia finds its expression in the cult of the desert, of wild nature, nomadic life, gypsying, wine, orgy, self-forgetting passion, villainy, rebellion, and tyranny. Rebellion is a necessary political catharsis for the Moscow autocracy, a source of lingering, unruly energies and passions . . . . Once in a century, the people of Moscow celebrate the feast of their wild volia, after which, resigned to their fate, they return to their prison. This happened after Bolotnikov, Rasin, Pugachev, Lenin . . . .12 At the end of the twentieth century, we witnessed another Russian “celebration of volia” degenerating into political and economic debauchery. The beginning of the twenty-first century now prominently features an autocratic regime enthusiastically supported by the general population and some of the former rebels.

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The main philosophical characteristic of volia is that it is utterly unpredictable; it overflows all boundaries and does not assume any responsibility. It is outside law and ethics, it is anti-social and uncultivated. Svoboda (freedom, liberty), on the other hand, presupposes some social reciprocity and structure. Such concepts as “freedom of speech,” “freedom of conscience,” and “freedom of thought” can only arise in a social context that recognizes the flaws and advantages of a community and struggles to reconcile individual and communal interests and aspirations. Yet what sense does freedom of speech make at the height of a wild orgy? Svoboda differs from volia as a nicely arranged cocktail party differs from an unrestrained, drunken bacchanalia. It is not merely a difference in degree. Instead, svoboda is self-reflective, self-determined liberty that involves some respect for, and recognition of, the other participants’ way of being. Svoboda is neither foreign to the hierarchy of values per se, nor opposed to a sense of social form and propriety. Volia, on the other hand, is a purely Dionysian phenomenon, disorderly and chaotic; it recognizes neither limits nor rules, neither law nor social contract. Volia could be the attribute of a genius or that of a criminal, for its very nature is transgression and it does not discriminate between creation and destruction. Literally, volia also means “will.” Arbitrary, indiscriminate, rude will is the congenital wild force that finds its expression in anything from the most sublime human deeds to the most base and cruel. Volia is “will” in the Schopenhauerian sense: all encompassing, chaotic, striving, blind. With this description in mind, we can return to the underground man’s praise of volia and his attacks on “reasonable” conceptions of freedom, specifically Kant’s. 4. The Specter of Kant in the Underground Kant, though his name is not mentioned by the paradoxalist, is undoubtedly among the “statisticians, sages, and lovers of mankind” to whom the underground rebellion is addressed.13 The underground man is up in arms against Kantian philosophical ideals on all fronts: he does not want to hear about “arranging it somehow so that his will (volia), of its own will, coincides with the normal interests,” much less about subjecting his will to the moral law—“As if that were any will of one’s own!”14 He rebels against “the beautiful and the sublime” and their supposed elevating and dignifying influence. He successfully resists becoming “practical” in the purest sense that Kant ascribes to this term; in addition to all this, he is an incarnate antipode to the Kantian moral hero mentioned in the second Critique. There Kant exclaims, “before a humble, common man (niedrigen, bürgerlich gemeinen Mann) in whom I perceive uprightness of character in a higher degree than I am aware of in myself, my spirit bows.”15 We should find it difficult to imagine a character more distant from the “bürgerlich gemeinen Mann” than the underground man, for whom the lofty virtues of deci-

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siveness, uprightness of character, and respect for the moral law are no more than meaningless, if quite annoying, phantoms. One crucial detail: as we remember, for Kant to be morally worthy (to be practical) means first being able to fight one’s “pragmatic nature.”16 The underground man takes this fight to the extreme by mercilessly trampling on all “normal interests” and “human profits”; yet he is as far from the Kantian “practical” pattern as he can be. His struggle demonstrates convincingly that self-interest is not the only (and definitely not the most powerful) obstacle for practical reason. The underground man does not ignore the practical out of prudence or self-love, since he is imprudent and self-loathing; he rejects it in the name of arbitrary will, which for Kant is supposed to be the moving force of any moral (practical) endeavor. The underground man sets the radical opposition between ethics and human will in a manner that would undoubtedly puzzle the Königsberg professor, who believes that “man (even the most wicked) does not, under any maxim whatsoever, repudiate the moral law in a manner of a rebel (renouncing obedience to it.)” 17 Yet not only does the underground man repudiate the moral law, he takes the very idea of a law (any law) as a personal offense and as a threat to his individuality and freedom. He challenges his imaginary audience: “Man loves creating and the making of roads, that is indisputable. But why does he so passionately love destruction and chaos as well? Tell me that!”18 For the underground man, a human being is not merely an arbitrary creature; he is a creature that possesses the power of arbitrariness, which allows him, being “predominantly a creating animal,” at the same time to “swerve aside” and do something completely unfitting, unreasonable, and destructive. This power is his will, his volia. But the originality of the underground man’s message consists not in his asserting the existence of volia (although this is still something that some determinists and some rationalists would wish to dispute), or in his vivid description of its unique qualities, but in his prescriptive claim: not only do human beings act out of their volia, they sometimes “positively must” live solely by volia, be it against reason, security, or even happiness.19 For the underground man, arbitrariness is a creative force of self-expression and self-assertion. It is what makes us human beings and not “piano keys” played upon by the laws of nature. The underground ideology of personhood runs counter to Kant, for whom to prove that I am a person and not a thing I must do the exact opposite of exercising my arbitrariness. In his Metaphysics of Morals the philosopher writes: A human being’s duty to himself consists in what is formal in the consistency of the maxims of his will with the dignity of humanity in his person. It consists, therefore, in a prohibition against depriving himself of the prerogative of a moral being, that of acting in accordance with principles, that is, inner freedom, and so making himself a plaything of the mere inclinations and hence a thing.20

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I will not engage in a discussion about which is more “decent”—exercising arbitrariness, or acting in accordance with principles. Both contentions may be arbitrary and there can be no satisfactory answer to the underground man’s snide question: “How do you know that a person’s volia not only can but must be rationalized?” My present aim is to find out how the war against moral principles can be declared under the motto liberum arbitrium indifferentiae and to describe the consequences of this war for Kant’s doctrine of free will. 5. Good Will, Rude Will, or Both? In an often quoted passage, which opens Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the philosopher declares: “It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation, except a good will (guter Wille).” From good will Kant’s deontology starts and to good will it returns in his latest writings. In the beginning, good will emerges victorious as rational, universal, and free (autonomous). It is the highest expression of the moral personality and is the prime element in homo noumenon. It exhibits no sign of being related to the faculty of desire. Yet this triumphant situation cannot be sustained for long. When arbitrary will (Willkür) sneaks through the back door and claims its family rights, the question of the genesis of good will, its connection to reason on the one hand and to arbitrariness on the other, becomes unavoidable. In Religion, Kant takes this “family quarrel” seriously for the first time. In this book, Kant acknowledges that liberum arbitrium (Willkür) is a necessary component of the process of volition by virtue of which a person perceives himself as free. But since Willkür is an incarnation of spontaneity, to sustain the moral order of reason a force must exist, which would confront Willkür with the moral law and insist on recognizing it as in itself the sufficient determining grounds (Bestimmungsgründen) of all maxims. This noble force, always attuned to the moral law, is what Kant calls Wille. Wille is a necessary rational constituent of the process of volition and Wille is what grants the successful “willfulness” of pure practical reason. The question of the precise technical meaning of Wille and Willkür in Kant’s discourse and the question whether Kant ascribes any technical meaning to these terms are still unresolved in the philosophical literature.21 In some contexts, the two German words can be used interchangeably, which often happens in Kant’s earlier writings. In Religion, however, Kant is involved in a structural analysis of the phenomenon of volition: without undermining the essential unity of the will, he tries to describe its distinguishable parts. Thus, Wille stands for “will” in general and, in a narrow sense, for practical reason (according to Lewis White Beck) or for the legislative component of the will, which legislates in accordance with the moral law (according to Henry Allison).22 Willkür, I believe,

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must stand for arbitrary will and not merely for the executive component of the will, as Allison claims; neither does Willkür signify the “power of choice” exclusively, as Beck claims. The moral order of reason is established if an interplay between Willkür and Wille results in Willkür’s free recognition of the moral law and adoption of it as a supreme maxim of conduct. Wille’s primary tool in dealing with Willkür is the feeling of respect for the moral law. If Wille succeeds in promoting this moral feeling and Willkür—a faculty of desire—adopts it, then the salutary free rational moral choice follows. If, contrary to this scenario, Wille fails and the choice is made either against, or with no respect for, the moral law, the resulting choice is immoral, since it springs from a “reversed moral order.” (Whether either of the two dispositions eventually leads to a morally acceptable action is another matter. Kant’s excursion into the profundity of volition is primarily concerned with the intelligible character of a person, not with empirical expressions of that character.) If we accept the common interpretation of Kant’s concept of will according to which Wille and Willkür represent the legislative and executive components of the faculty of volition respectively, then good will, according to Kant, must be nothing else but a harmonious unity of the two. We may suppose that this unity can be achieved by cultivating the congruous relationship between Wille and Willkür. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant speaks about the intricate process of mastering and rationalizing the will and even insists that carrying the cultivation of the will up to “the purest virtuous disposition” is one of the major duties of a human being to himself. Notably, what a person cultivates here is Wille, not Willkür. The universal moral law and the feeling of respect that is inseparable from it encourage will to start cultivating itself. By means of reason as its representative, moral law commands human will (Wille and Willkür taken together) to engage in serious self-discipline and self-development until will and practical reason become one: a powerfully willful reason (Kant’s celebrated “pure practical reason”) or sublimely reasonable will (Kant’s celebrated “good will”). For Kant, precisely in the will’s immediate and unconditioned motivation to perfect itself can we see the most eminent expression of human freedom. As he puts it, homo noumenon can be known “only in morally practical relations, where the incomprehensible property of freedom is revealed by the influence of reason on the inner lawgiving will.”23 Kant uses homo noumenon as a synonym for “a being endowed with inner freedom” and retreats to his earlier conviction that “freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each other.”24 Yet if freedom is revealed by the influence of reason on the will, as Kant claims, what is revealed in the apotheosis of arbitrariness (volia) to which the underground man draws our attention? Although occasionally—mainly in Religion—Kant shows his awareness that Willkür gives us a sense of freedom that has nothing to do with either practical relations or moral law. He nonetheless never explains how this peculiar sense of freedom fits into his philosophical system.25

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What is missing from Kant’s picture of human will (and what the underground man generously supplies) is the recognition of the real power of Willkür. Kant appears to be unaware of, or intentionally overlooks the possibility that uncultivated, dynamic Willkür may manifest itself in unruly actions, wild desires, and caprices. He does not account for Willkür’s ability blatantly to ignore Wille, moral law, and reason, though he senses that Willkür must be capable of doing so if it is absolutely and unconditionally free. Among other things, this implies that Willkür cannot be just an “executive” in the faculty of volition, as some Kant scholars wish to believe. If Willkür is indeed free and spontaneous, it may—and often does—choose to play the role of a legislator-sovereign, who issues arbitrary rules and feels free to violate them at any time. Although Kant made a few significant steps in uncovering the risky character of the arbitrary will (reflected in particular in his discussion of the inscrutability of the deepest depth of Willkür’s orientation toward good or evil in Religion), in the end, he retreats to his initial position according to which freedom, reason, will, morality, and personality define one another. He welcomes Willkür as a free, spontaneous, and at times irrational element and yet, paradoxically refuses to recognize its tacit ability to do whatever it wishes, irrespective of causes and consequences.26 In short, Kant tries to ignore the most obvious, blatant expression of freedom because it exhibits destructive power. This allows him to remain true to his fundamental belief in the inseparability and interdependence of human freedom and moral law. In his Metaphysics of Morals, we see that this is the solid ground to which Kant’s seasoned moral thought returns. 6. Losing Oneself: Arbitrariness and Corruption of the Heart I would let my tongue be cut off altogether, from sheer gratitude, if only it could be so arranged that I myself never felt like sticking it out again. —The underground man Willkür (volia) is what the underground man praises and Wille (“virtuous wanting”) is what he despises and actively rejects. This extravagant move deserves careful attention for it not only challenges the basis of Kant’s moral project, but necessarily destroys its own bases as well. The underground man does not merely reverse the moral order of incentives; he knowingly throws any order out the window by giving an unlimited license to chaotic Willkür. No “translunary” moral system can survive this turn, but neither can his anti-system. In this sense, paraphrasing Lev Shestov’s famous characterization of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground as “the most effective critique of pure reason,” we can call the Notes the most consistent—self-destructive—philosophical pursuit of arbitrariness. Kant, as we have seen, underestimated the destructive potencies of arbitrary will. This does not imply that the philosopher would have nothing to say

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had he happened to face the underground apotheosis of arbitrariness. His discussion of radical evil and “the perversity” of the will in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone offers some insights into the anti-hero’s predicament. I will explore Kant’s doctrine of radical evil in the next chapter. For now, let us focus only on those aspects of this doctrine that are immediately relevant to the underground man’s condition. Kant starts his section called “General Observation Concerning the Restoration to its Power of the Original Predisposition to Good” with a categorical claim: “Man himself must make or have made himself into whatever, in a moral sense, whether good or evil, he is or is to become. Either condition must be an effect of his free will (freien Willkür).”27 We may give priority to self-love over the moral law, observe the letter of the law with no attention to the motivating forces of our choices, or misleadingly blame “unfavorable” circumstances. All of these cases represent elements of moral evil in human nature. According to Kant, evil manifests itself not so much in the wrong maxims, but in the refusal or the inability to recognize the moral law as in itself a sufficient ground for all maxims. This degradation of the human ability to preserve the moral hierarchy is what Kant marks as the main characteristic of radical evil, or what he calls an “evil heart.” He defines this condition succinctly: “Willkür’s capacity or incapacity to adopt or not to adopt the moral law into its maxim, may be called a good or an evil heart.”28 Kant distinguishes three degrees of evil: there is the weakness of the human heart in the general observance of adopted maxims, or frailty of human nature; second, the propensity of mixing immoral with moral motivating causes, that is, lack of integrity (Unlauterkeit); third, the propensity to adopt evil maxims, that is, the wickedness of human nature or of the human heart (Bösartigkeit des menschlichen Herzens).29 The deeper Kant goes into the questions of human nature, good and evil, freedom and will, the more frequently “the heart” (Herz) and its derivatives appear in his discourse. The philosopher does not use the word “heart” per accidens, even though he may not be completely aware of its philosophical connotations. From a Kantian point of view, Dostoevsky’s anti-hero, who chooses to ignore the moral law and inaugurates Willkür as the absolute sovereign, must represent an extreme case of moral corruption. Kant proposes revolutionary changes for a man corrupt in the very grounding of his maxims. He says, “man’s moral growth of necessity begins not in the improvement of his practices but rather in the transforming of his set of mind and in the grounding of a character.”30 Such grounding would necessarily involve resisting “the first and second degree” evil of the heart—its moral weakness and confusion. Yet why would someone, who values arbitrariness, spontaneity, and unpredictability more than

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anything else in the world, ever want to undergo such transformations? This is certainly true of the underground man, who is convinced: even if you had enough time and faith left to change yourself into something different, you probably would not wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you would still not do anything, because in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into.31 Curiously, this deterministic statement is itself an expression of sheer arbitrariness: arising from “hysterical cravings for contradiction,” the anti-hero’s chaotically twisted thought constantly turns against itself (which, in this passage, is exemplified by his simultaneously using “in fact” and “perhaps”). We should not find it surprising that in this swirl of denial, the anti-hero travels from boundless caprice to the most hopeless determinism in the blink of an eye. If we follow Kant’s clever prescriptions aimed at the restoration of the original predisposition to moral good, we can see that none of them can sustain the perpetual turning of the underground world where everything degenerates before it can stand on its feet. Kant’s moral system presupposes a measure of stability and seriousness in the world—intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally. This does not exclude the spontaneity of the will and the contingency of human behavior. But it demands the possibility of “a single unchangeable decision,” from which a person’s moral awareness would spring.32 For example, before I can consider the prospect of “grounding” my character, I should be able to make a decision to participate in the process of moral development. The problem is that the underground man is incapable of making any decision, much less changing his mind-set, and establishing a new personality trait. He complains: In order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain. Well, and how am I, for example, to set myself at ease? Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought.33 Philosophers from Socrates to David Hume share the anti-hero’s obsession with questioning and doubt. Yet none of them takes doubt so close to heart. For example, Hume claims that he had an overwhelming experience of groundlessness akin to the underground man’s, but was able to find the right means to overcome it. In his Treatise of Human Nature, he asks himself, “Where am I or what? From what causes do I derive my existence and to what condition shall I return? Whose favor shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings

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surround me?” 34 Then he reports that the same day, after he writes these desperate lines, his “most deplorable condition imaginable” effectively vanishes after having spent three or four hours having a good time with his friends. For Hume, life goes on and “nature herself” takes care of all philosophical chimeras. But if we recall the disastrous consequences of the underground man’s outing with his “friends” in the Hôtel de Paris, the difference between his condition and that of Hume becomes strikingly clear. In no philosophical treatise do methodical doubt and skepticism rise to the level of existential despair that we find in the underground man’s Notes. He pushes thinking and questioning to their ultimate limits where they threaten to swallow him alive. For the anti-hero uncertainty is genuinely painful, and “the more uncertain you are, the more it hurts!”35 The ubiquitous doubt turns his profound existential suffering into travesty and farce: “I did suffer, gentlemen, I assure you. Deep in one’s soul it’s hard to believe one is suffering, mockery is stirring there, but all the same I suffer, and in a real, honest-to-God way.”36 Dostoevsky’s unparalleled literary experiment with the underground man reveals the most disturbing consequences of self-paralyzing consciousness and radical doubt: they eat away the remaining crumbs of stability and respect for a person’s inner life. As a result, neither the world around a person, nor the person’s existence deserves to be taken seriously. “How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?” asks the underground man.37 He confesses shortly thereafter: Oh, if I were doing nothing only out of laziness. Lord, how I’d respect myself then. Respect myself precisely because I’d at least be capable of having laziness in me; there would be in me at least one, as it were, positive quality, which I myself could be sure of. Question: who is he? Answer: a lazybones. Now, it would be most agreeable to hear that about myself. It means I’m positively defined; it means there’s something to say about me.38 To be “positively defined” means to have at least some ground on which to stand. But when someone’s actions, thoughts, and feelings are pierced with doubt and mockery, when his very identity is questioned, the ground gives way underfoot. We can imagine the underground man’s parrying René Descartes’ solemn cogito ergo sum with the desperate: “I am thinking, therefore, I’ve no idea who I am and where and why.” Someone, who truly doubts, has no way out of the underground. The quest for independence turns into tyranny; the apotheosis of Willkür turns into impotence; arbitrary freedom turns into determinism; and the struggle for individuality turns into its loss. These intellectual, psychological, and volitional convulsions are precisely what Kant’s moral system (or any rational system for that matter) cannot survive. The question is whether the anti-hero is truly lost in the swirl of arbitrariness. Can his freedom and personality ever be forfeited completely? The under-

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ground man claims that no answer exists to the question of who he is. His experience ostensibly supports Kant’s insights, according to which conscious selfmastery provides a necessary determining ground for personality. Ironically, the underground man, who “can no longer control himself” and feels that he is nobody, is quite a character. 39 Out of all his hysteria and constant self-denial arises the paradoxalist, who is no less a person than Kant’s “niedrigen, bürgerlich gemeinen Mann.” The case of the underground man illustrates that regardless what we think, feel, say, or do, our “personality” is always present by virtue of its agony of choice and indifference, power and impotence, hope and despair, decisiveness and doubt. In the case of Dostoevsky’s protagonist, he is the underground man (podpol’ny chelovek), whose psychological and philosophical profile provoked a resonance all around the world. The inhabitant of the underground became a prototype for hundreds of characters in Russian and Western literature and one of the archetypes of modernity. Joseph Frank thus characterizes the appeal of the underground character: The term ‘underground man’ has become part of the vocabulary of contemporary culture, and this character has now achieved—like Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Faust – the stature of one of the greatest archetypal literary creations. No book or essay dealing with the precarious situation of modern man would be complete without some allusion to Dostoevsky’s explosive figure. Most important cultural developments of the present century—Nietzscheanism, Freudianism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Crisis Theology, Existentialism—have claimed the underground man as their own or have been linked with him by zealous interpreters; and when the underground man has not been hailed as a prophetic anticipation, he has been held up to exhibition as a luridly repulsive warning.40 Today the phenomenon of the “underground” still feeds countless artistic, philosophical, and psychoanalytical endeavors.41 Undoubtedly, Dostoevsky’s depiction of the unfortunate and wicked “anti-hero” constantly playing hide and seek with his consciousness, feelings, and imaginary audience is an adequate— and ingenious—portrait of the underground character, with whom many readers, reluctantly or proudly, identify. The next question we have to ask concerns the moral status of the underground man, who obviously assumes no responsibility for his “position.” If, as the protagonist insists, he never wanted and never “managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” what kind of moral being is he?42 Is he a moral being? To what extent do his psychological and intellectual contortions reflect his freedom? Dostoevsky as well as Kant would insist that none of the underground man’s claims about his situation, state of mind, or ideas exempt him from being

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a moral “agent.” He does make himself into something, good or evil. The novelist and the philosopher would agree that, as a moral being, the paradoxalist fails miserably, even though their assessment of the origins of this failure would be different. We have discussed the immoral or, using a Kantian term, “anti-practical” qualities which, according to Kant, must contribute to the anti-hero’s moral shortcomings: they are his self-paralyzing will, unstoppable reflection, doubt, and lack of stability. Besides making a fetish of his Willkür, the underground man disregards the moral order and is unequivocally guilty of the “third degree” of evil, or what Kant calls “corruption of the heart” (Verkehrtheit des Herzens). As we will see, the intensity of the heart’s corruption and the possibility of overcoming it is what Dostoevsky struggles to portray in his Notes from Underground. In a purely deontological manner, Kant claims, “it must be possible to overcome evil, since it is found in man, a being whose actions are free.” He occasionally specifies how persons are supposed to overcome first- and second-degree evils: they must begin by mastering and cultivating the will and grounding their character.43 With respect to the “corrupted heart,” the philosopher admits that nothing can be done unless an evil person changes “by a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation and a change of heart (Herzensänderung).” Does Kant have anything more to say about Herzensänderung? Apparently he adds no comment to his enigmatic statement. At this point, Dostoevsky unquestionably surpasses Kant’s rational deontology with a deontology of the heart, for he devotes great attention to the theme of the purification and liberation of an evil heart and the ways in which moral rebirth and resurrection can occur. This theme starts unfolding in the Notes from Underground, dominates Crime and Punishment and finds its culminating expressions in The Brothers Karamazov. 7. On Human Nature Introducing his unusual protagonist, Dostoevsky observes, “such persons as the writer of such notes not only may but even must exist in our society, taking into consideration the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed.” We can generally characterize the spirit of the epoch to which Dostoevsky is referring by its bitter disillusionment with romanticism and rationalism. The underground man, a well read and intellectually agitated loner, describes himself as “the man of heightened consciousness” in striking contrast to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s romantic homme de la nature et de la vérité and to Kant’s “rational moral agent.” He is painfully aware of the existential angst that accompanies self-reflection. He is also highly suspicious of the popular projects of social engineering based on simplistic, reductionist approaches to the problem of the human condition. He masterfully depicts the precarious situation of a modern individual, who finds himself in fatal confrontation with a world that defies rational explanations. As an intellectual, he has interesting, radical things

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to say. As a human being, he embodies the vices of his turbulent, nihilistic epoch. Recall the opening lines of the book: “I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man. An unattractive man.” Dostoevsky’s underground man is corrupt and his heart is “darkened by depravity.” Kant would claim that this is due to the incapacity of the underground man’s will “to adopt the moral law into its maxim.” For Dostoevsky, what makes his anti-hero morally deprived is not the malformation of his will but his personal failure to take the life of his heart seriously—“the heart” here, as elsewhere in Dostoevsky’s work, stands for the whole person and for the unity of a person’s inner life. Like Kant, Dostoevsky wants to believe that no “zeropoint” exists in ethics and that the innate sense of the good never disappears without leaving a trace. In a sense, even the anti-hero exhibits his peculiar kind of ethical awareness. This awareness cannot be a function of his chaotic will; instead, his heart’s sensibility—albeit almost completely withered—is a vestige of what philosophers call sensus moralis (moral sense). What can possibly awaken the underground man’s dormant sensibility with respect to the good? We can begin to answer this question by examining his rhetorical style and character. The anti-hero cannot take one issue or hold one perspective at a time; he must speak about everything at once. To follow his verbal disclosure is to be sucked into the whirlpool of his self-contradictory rhetoric. This rhetoric, in turn, is symptomatic of something much more profound than a mere inability to think systematically. While the underground man’s ideas are intellectually challenging, his brilliantly disjointed speech reflects his perpetual internal conflict. Such a personality cannot be neatly divided into different faculties, but emerges as an endlessly perplexing amalgam of truth and falsehood, pleasure and pain, dreams and reality. According to Dostoevsky, this random perplexity is one of the features all human beings have in common, regardless how diversely it manifests itself in different people. The underground man is an extreme case, but in his extravagance, we see flashing reflections of our knotty nature. Consequently, Dostoevsky’s ethics is designed to address the tangle of our personality in its arbitrary, disintegrating, fragmentary wholeness. His approach differs radically from that of some of his philosophical interlocutors—especially proponents of “rational egoism”—who start with a self-serving rigid definition of a human being and proceed to build a whole worldview on that artificial construct. If any of Dostoevsky’s characters claims exclusive knowledge of human nature, they usually present their claim in a highly polemical or brusquely satirical manner. The underground man mockingly offers his: “a human being is an animal on two legs and phenomenally ungrateful.” But Dostoevsky himself never attempted to define humanity because he deeply appreciated the immense complexity of a quest to comprehend human nature and the human condition. As a young man, the novelist writes to his brother, “Each human being is a riddle, it needs to be solved and if you are trying to solve it all your life, don’t

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say you wasted your time; I am trying to solve it because I want to be a human being.”44 Wrestling with the riddle of human nature is Dostoevsky’s artistic and personal undertaking, in which he reveals himself as a careful observer, impressive psychologist, and, as he once put it, a “realist in the highest sense” when it comes to portraying “all the depths of a human soul.” Dealing with a person as a whole, even if this “whole” strives toward disintegration and contradiction, is one of the key features of Dostoevsky’s ethics. In this, he differs radically from Kant, who meticulously separates the morally significant constituents of human nature—good will, practical reason, conscience, and the feeling of respect for the moral law—from allegedly neutral or unethical ones—anything passionate, emotional, or bodily. According to Kant, no attribute of a “natural being” (homo phenomenon) can make a significant contribution to this being’s ethical development. On the contrary, our “natural” faculties are often antagonistic to our moral calling and “secretly work” against it. If this is so, what does Kant mean by the corruption of the human heart? Is it a natural deficiency or a moral one? If moral, then which moral attribute is at fault here— Reason? Will? Conscience? (With respect to the corruption of the heart, Kant has already ruled out the possibility of its arising from natural sources.) We may also ask what good will could be without inbred arbitrary will; conscience without a profound sense of guilt; practical reason without ambition; and respect for the moral law without passion. Even these fundamental psychological intuitions aside, we should find it hard to conceive of the possibility of approaching the problem of the corruption of the human heart philosophically while remaining consistent with the demands of Kant’s “faculty psychology.” I believe that Dostoevsky, to whom it never occurs to divide human nature into the attributes of homo noumenon and homo phenomenon, is in a better position to discover the root of moral corruption and to look for the vital sources of rejuvenation and spiritual transformation of the human heart. 8. Following the Heart: Is There a Way Out of the Underground? Though you r mind works, your heart is darkened by depravity, and without a pure heart there can be no full, right consciousness. —The underground man’s imaginary opponent Being concerned with matters of the heart, we should no longer listen to the underground man’s theoretical and ideological whining, which occupies the first part of his Notes, but turn to his personal story in the second part instead. The narration takes us two decades back to the underground man’s early days. He is twenty-four years old, but his life is already “gloomy, disorderly, and solitary to the point of savagery.”45 Bilious pride, heightened consciousness, and acute literary sensitivity rules the underground man’s existence, filled with misanthropy and self-contempt. His

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story unfolds as a tragicomedy of a “trembling chicken heart”—revengeful and futile, trifling and despotic. It is a story of a disastrous atrophy of the heart accompanied by a grotesque self-reflection. To the anti-hero, all creatures are as sub-human as he is, only they are not so painfully self-conscious. This makes their existence much more bearable and at times even pleasant, but by no means more meaningful or “real” than tarrying in the underground. Viewed from the underground, reality is ugly, heavy, and bloodless; it knows no sincerity, no trust, no lightheartedness, no love. In the underground, the question—“Shall the world go to hell, or shall I not have my tea?” has only one answer: “Let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.” Apparently, nothing can shutter the underground image of the gloomy and inert reality; nothing can penetrate the anti-hero’s moral indifference. Yet Dostoevsky wants to show that a power exists that could have such an impact on the underground man: the living experience of the heart, in its unity of the physical, the spiritual, and the emotional. Such an experience would affect his whole person, pull him out of his misanthropy and “cultivated bookishness,” and would inescapably put him face to face with the living life, with himself and others. The climactic story of the underground man’s last interaction with the prostitute Liza embodies a few glimpses of this kind of purgative moment of the heart. Here his narrative unquestionably rises to the level of earnest confession: “My whole breast was tearing apart, and never, never will I recall this moment with indifference.”46 The lacerating suffering of his heart tells us that some hope remains for the unfortunate denizen of the underground. But even the moments of genuine suffering, as opposed to the masochistic pain inflicted by the underground man’s “heightened consciousness” of which he speaks with unveiled enjoyment, are insufficient for bringing the anti-hero out of his mouse hole. Years in the underground have done the trick: the strongest demands of life do not last long enough to make a difference. When Liza withstands the torture of his beastly confessions and finds the strength to understand and console him, his heart indeed “turns over” and he bursts into tears. A few moments later, however, he is overcome by repulsion and jealousy when he realizes that she, a creature infinitely more vulnerable than himself, turns out to be the “heroine.” With Liza’s selflessness the “living life” enters the underground, but as “unaccustomed to life” as he is, he tries and succeeds in driving it away forever. He knows that he raped a woman, who trusted him and who came to his stinking corner not to hear “pathetic words,” but to love him. To finish off the battle with the “living life,” he presses a five-ruble bill in Liza’s hand. When, after Liza’s departure, the underground man notices the same bill on the table, he is completely crushed and races headlong after her to “fall down before her, to weep in repentance, to kiss her feet, to beg forgiveness.”47 Needless to say, all of these prospects turn out to be no more than an echo of the artificial, “bookish” romanticism on which he grew up.

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Upon returning to his room, the underground man occupies himself by constructing theoretical justifications for his monstrosities. To stifle “the living pain in his heart,” he quickly develops a theory of the purifying power of insult, which is supposed to elevate Liza, “however vile the dirt that awaits her.” He reports: Such were my reveries as I sat at home that evening, barely alive from the pain in my soul. Never before had I endured so much suffering and repentance; . . . Never have I met Liza again, or heard anything about her. I will also add that for a long time I remained pleased with the phrase about the usefulness of insult and hatred, even though I myself almost became sick then from anguish.48 The underground man never experienced moral rebirth. He did feel the desperation of the heart, but he used all his power to deaden it with mockery, doubt, sarcasm, rationalizing, or any other means that may have come to mind. For Dostoevsky, the underground man’s moral deficiency consists in neglecting his heart and with it, the call of the living life. As an intellectual, the anti-hero can eloquently explain what is going on; as a human being, he cannot deal with his moral deficiency. After recounting his cruelty toward Liza, he offers the reader nothing less than a vivid exposé of the power of the living life and our inability to submit to it. As usual, his accusations are keen and poignantly describe his terror in the face of life: at times we feel a sort of loathing for real “living life,” and therefore cannot bear to be reminded of it. For we’ve reached a point where we regard real “living life” as almost a labor, almost a service, and we all agree in ourselves that it’s better from a book. . . . Take a closer look! We don’t even know where the living lives now, or what it is, or what it’s called! Leave us to ourselves, without a book, and we’ll immediately get confused, lost – we won’t know what to join, what to hold to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. It’s a burden for us even to be men—men with real, our own bodies and blood; we’re ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace, and keep trying to be some unprecedented omnimen. We’re stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers, and we like this more and more. We’re acquiring a taste for it. Soon we’ll contrive to be born somehow from an idea.49 In these tragic words, we unmistakably hear Dostoevsky’s voice and his adamant diagnosis of his society and his century. The novelist considered estrangement from life one of the most dangerous diseases of his time. The underground man, who for forty years was actively cultivating “bookishness” and detachment from life, is clearly an expert on the issue. But what does the anti-hero know about the healing powers of the living life—“a labor” of which he cannot bear to be re-

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minded? And how are we supposed to extract Dostoevsky’s ethics from the scattered Notes of an unreliable narrator, who constantly contradicts himself, accuses himself of lying, and immediately cries that he just lied about lying? Notes from Underground indeed resists a direct approach or linear interpretation. To revive its ethical subtext, let us look at Dostoevsky’s personal struggle that takes place in the background of his hero’s contradictory rhetoric and re-read some of the passages with that struggle in mind. 9. The Unwritten Message Dostoevsky was precisely one of those “extinct” persons of flesh and blood, over whom his anti-hero is grieving. He was a man condemned to death and pardoned at the last moment, a convict who spent years in a hard-labor camp and exile. When he was a young boy, his father was brutally murdered. As an adult, he lost many people he dearly loved, among them his first-born baby daughter and his four-year-old son, who died of epilepsy allegedly inherited from his father. Against all the odds—chronically poor health, non-ending financial troubles, political persecution, personal tragedies—Dostoevsky always treasured the ideals of love, faith, and care. He discovered these ideals by truly living his life, not by fabricating them as his heroes often do. The period when the novelist was working on the Notes from Underground was darkened by the death of the two people closest to him—his wife Maria and three months later, his brother Mikhail. “I suddenly found myself alone and simply terrified,” Dostoevsky recounts a year later: My entire life at one stroke broke into two. In one half, which I had lived through, was everything I had lived for, and in the other, still unknown half everything was strange and new, and there was not a single heart that could replace those two. Literally—I had nothing left for which to live . . . What remains from all the reserve of strength and energy in my soul is something troubled and disturbed, something close to despair. Worry, bitterness, a completely cold industriousness, the most abnormal state for me . . . . And yet it still seems to me that I am just now preparing to live. Funny, isn’t it? The vitality of a cat.50 Dostoevsky has nothing to live for, but he rises up from the ashes of his wretched being and keeps on living. Meanwhile, his anti-hero simulates and exaggerates his suffering to exalt his invented drama; he appears to be incapable of pulling himself out of his artificially constructed corner; instead, he retreats further and further into it. True, in order to depict the fatal alienation of modern consciousness from its vital sources, Dostoevsky had to ascribe to the underground man “some of his

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deepest and most intimate feelings.” 51 But as much as it may be fruitful to rummage in Dostoevsky’s purported “undergroundedness,” we need to distinguish between the novelist’s life full of real pain and compassion, suffering and overcoming, and his multiple literary projects, one of which was Dostoevsky’s ongoing attempt to depict characters who consciously renounce life. This project commences with the cry from the underground. By virtue of his extraordinary vitality and his ability to recognize the lack of life, Dostoevsky was able to hear the cry and narrate a fascinating underground story. Although Dostoevsky’s ethical stance with respect to his paradoxalist is not presented directly in the Notes, several interpretive paths lead us to the author’s missive. Some commentators have focused on Dostoevsky’s famous complaint about the crude censorship of the work, which resulted in the removal of crucial passages, in which a need for faith had been “deduced” from the underground blasphemy. Since no traces of these passages have been found, we can only speculate as to how they would have affected the ethical framework of the book and whether a hidden religious message is still discernible in the Notes.52 I propose to take an alternative textual path and look at the following speech of the underground man’s imaginary opponent: You thirst for life, yet you yourself resolve life’s questions with a logical tangle. And how importunate, how impudent your escapades, yet at the same time how frightened you are! . . . You may indeed have happened to suffer, but you do not have the least respect for your suffering. There is truth in you, too, but no integrity; out of the pettiest vanity you take your truth and display it, disgrace it, in the market place . . . . You do indeed want to say something, but you conceal your final word out of fear, because you lack the resolve to speak it out, you have only cowardly insolence. You boast about consciousness, yet all you do is vacillate, because, though your mind works, your heart is darkened by depravity, and without a pure heart there can be no full, right consciousness.53 This merciless self-reproach captures the essence of the underground man’s predicament. Unless his heart is genuinely involved in resolving “life’s questions,” unless he strives to embody his knowledge and his truth, the anti-hero will not be able to overcome his moral deficiency. In the moral realm, the only truth that matters is the embodied, existential truth, sustained in the living individual’s committed, heartfelt relation to it. To be able to live with himself and with others—not just speculate about life—the underground man needs to start taking his destitute heart seriously. Yet Dostoevsky would not be himself if he did not allow this very truth to be subverted as well. The underground man remarks snidely: “To be sure, I just made it all up. This, too, is from underground.” Before we know it, the apparently genuine, living words about truth and integrity are dropped like lifeless fos-

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sils. Dostoevsky intentionally allows this to happen to his moral message to show that bloodless moralizing cannot bring the darkened heart back to life. Purification and liberation of the corrupted heart is not something the underground man could consciously achieve even if he wanted to. The anti-hero, a King Midas of the underground, touches the living, and they are immediately petrified. He does this first to his inner life: his disabling self-reflection stiffens his feelings, intentions, desires, and even his suffering. He, whose insides are objects of endless intellectual scrutiny, doubt, mockery, and verbal “solidifying,” deprives them of life; he deprives his heart of being immediately and spontaneously receptive to its sources. If we now ask whether the underground man is free, the answer would have to be “no.” Never mind his burning quest for volia. Anything, volia included, is buried alive in the underground. The more conscious he is about volia, the less volia is there, and he is well aware of it. The anti-hero is not free unless he is freed from constant self-petrifying—unless one day he learns first hand “where the living lives, what it is, and what it’s called.” Yet the story of a consciousness that does not know any better than preying on itself goes on and on, the protagonist keeps on writing. At this point, we leave the anti-hero self-exiled in his stuffy corner creating endless Notes in the name of freedom and living life without the slightest chance to experience either. The time has come for us to move deeper than the underground and to take issue with freedom and evil on a level beyond the selfparalysis of the will and self-negating consciousness. Before we take the next step in our investigation of the relationship between freedom and evil, let us recall the results of our journey underground. We have seen that the anti-hero’s cleverly set up opposition between free will and moral law presented a serious challenge to Kant’s belief in their inseparability and interdependence. An attempt to apply Kantian analysis to the underground character also pointed to crucial limitations of Kant’s enlightenment ideals: for the anti-hero, who is committed to arbitrariness at any cost, the advice to “ground his character” or “transform his set of mind” proved to be incongruous. According to Kant, the ultimate ground of moral personality is located in Willkür’s ability to adopt or reject the moral law. The underground man, who consistently abuses this ability, appears to personify the utmost degree of evil in Kant’s classification of the stages of moral corruption. But does the antihero really fit the profile of a quintessential moral degenerate? For Dostoevsky, he certainly does not, if only because he is incapable of completely shutting off the voice of his aching heart. In Dostoevsky’s artistic universe, the underground man is just a precursor and the first sketch for a whole series of brilliantly portrayed amoralists. In subsequent works, the novelist continues to explore the phenomenon of moral degeneration, envisioning increasingly dreadful and sinister characters. Such figures as Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, Stavrogin and Peter Verkhovensky in

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the Demons, and Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov, just to name a few, indeed appear to have no hearts at all. As Dostoevsky’s experiment with evil, absolute indifference and non-living deepens, his characters are no longer paradoxalists; they are harbingers of death and destruction—sadists, murderers, and rapists. The next chapter will focus on the elements of Dostoevsky’s “demonology” vis-à-vis Kant’s controversial doctrine of radical evil.

Three EVIL: ADVENTURES OF SEDUCTIVE SPIRIT 1. Introduction When, in 1792, Immanuel Kant published his essay, “On the Radical Evil in Human Nature,” in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, it had the effect of an exploding bomb. Many of those who previously embraced his ethics were shocked and bewildered. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s well known metaphorical statement sums up the reaction: Kant required a long lifetime to purify his philosophical mantle of many impurities and prejudices. And now he has wantonly tainted it with the shameful stain of radical evil, in order that Christians too might be attracted to kiss its hem.1 The deep emotional disappointment of Kant’s followers aside, we have little reason to believe that Kant’s alleged sharp turn regarding the problem of evil was dictated by any political considerations.2 Instead, it was Kant’s conscious decision to face philosophically his inner conviction of “the insuperable evil of our hearts,” which before the essay on radical evil, had only appeared—quite implicitly—in his personal correspondence.3 Eric Weil demonstrates that the problem of evil preoccupied Kant for years. Weil supports this conclusion by pointing to both Kant’s acknowledgment of the reality of radical evil in a letter to J. C. Lavater as early as 1775 and the content of Kant’s philosophico-religious and anthropological writings over the seventeen years that separate the letter and the publication of the essay on evil in 1792.4 Whether we interpret Kant’s introduction of the doctrine of radical evil in 1792 and his consequent detailed treatment of the matter in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone in 1793 as a philosophically justified move, we cannot fail to notice that this doctrine creates a serious tension within Kant’s moral project. The emphasis on the inextirpable propensity to evil in human nature, for which at the same time each person is fully responsible, introduces a major paradox into Kant’s ethics and thus merits careful attention from both ethical and methodological perspectives. As such, it provoked many diverse critical responses.5 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone is generally considered the most unorthodox of Kant’s writings and is undoubtedly the most existentially charged. Whereas Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason mostly advocate the view that human will is free only insofar as it is determined by the moral law, Religion introduces a radical conception of

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freedom for good or evil. Throughout the book, this conception goes hand in hand with the idea of unconditional personal responsibility for the very ground of character. In Religion, Kant no longer attempts to identify free will with practical reason; instead, he acknowledges that Willkür, or arbitrary will, is the necessary constituent in the process of volition and the grounding of the human perception of freedom. Religion recognizes the mystery of the human heart and the inscrutability of the ultimate determining ground of the will; it poses the question of the origin of evil and points to ways of moral regeneration. While Religion strives to open up new horizons, it also, as its title suggests, marks the boundaries of intelligibility in the sphere of what Kant calls “moral religion.” It is precisely with the fundamental existential questions—specifically, with the problem of evil and the mystery of the “depth of the human heart”—that Kant’s discourse reaches its ultimate boundary. In his article, “The Inscrutability of Moral Evil in Kant,” Gordon Michalson notes: The deepest part of Kant’s analysis [in Religion] is not a response to [the] question [of the origin of evil], but a link between moral evil and human freedom, and this link is utterly inexplicable, for the same reason that freedom itself is, for Kant, ultimately inexplicable. Thus, . . . we are not finally led to comprehend Kant’s view of evil. Instead, we are reminded of the contingent nature of the exercise of freedom, the unfathomable quality of the process of character-building, and, finally, the sheer inscrutability of moral evil itself. Kant is theorizing about human nature in a way that gradually discloses the futility of domesticating this topic conceptually or rationally. 6 In Religion, Kant finds himself confronted with what Søren Kierkegaard later dubbed “the ultimate paradox of thought,” that is, the urge to uncover something that thought itself cannot think.7 Ironically, Kant’s philosophy, so much concerned with establishing the boundaries within which reason can legitimately work, is now being torn between the urgency of accounting for the inscrutable in human nature and the recognition of the impossibility of such an account. This paradox of Kant’s thought, the ways in which it delineates the boundaries of ethical discourse, and the consequences it creates for his deontology, are some of the themes I will explore in this chapter. In the 1793 Preface to his Religion, Kant writes that he starts with his essay on radical evil “because of the close coherence of the subject-matter in this work.”8 The explication of radical evil is indissolubly connected with the main task of the Religion, namely, exploration of the possibility of moral faith, or what we might also call ethico-religious consciousness “within the bounds of reason.” Insofar as the content and style of Religion is concerned, we must address a few problems from the outset. First, Kant makes a philosophically problematic claim that morality inevitably leads to religion. Next, his allusions to Biblical stories and his unorthodox approach to Scripture appear inconsistent

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with his commitment to strictly rational methodology. While some critics expressed disappointment that Kant reduces religion to morality,others asked whether the argumentation and methodology of the book is capable of living up to, or even is compatible with, Kant’s own high critical standards.9 Contrary to both these accusations, I argue that the unorthodox orientation of this work allows Kant to deepen his moral study and consider some problems—the chief of them the problem of radical evil—that before Religion had to fall outside the scope of his inquiry and methods of philosophical investigation. In what follows, I discuss Kant’s “existential” statements and allusions, their place in his deontology, and their limitations. I then turn to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s artistic exploration of the questions of freedom and evil in order to show that the novelist’s moral insights and revelations—and consequently, his deontology of the heart—enrich our ethical inquiry at those very junctures where rational deontology openly admits having reached its ultimate limit. 2. Kant’s Conception of Radical Evil Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone consists of four essays, which deal respectively with the following questions: radical evil in human nature, the conflict between good and evil principles, the “founding of a kingdom of God on earth,” and the relationship between religion and clericalism. The main focus of our discussion will be on the first essay, in which Kant addresses the question of the origin and functioning of evil. Religion opens with the dramatic description of two commonly accepted but incommensurable points of view. According to the first view, human existence began in a good estate (the Golden Age, life in Eden, an idealized state of nature) but humanity’s moral fall hurried it “from bad to worse with accelerated descent” so that now—and Kant stresses that this “now” is as old as history itself—the whole world “lieth in evil.” The second view is more optimistic and holds that the world steadily moves in an opposite direction, from bad to better, or that at least “the predisposition to such a movement is discoverable in human nature.”10 Kant is emphatically skeptical about this picture of moral progress. He explains that such a belief is at odds with our everyday experience and the “history of all times cries too loudly against it.”11 Kant’s philosophical stance on the issue accidentally coincides with the keen observation of Dostoevsky’s underground man who vehemently opposes theories of moral progressivism: What is it that civilization softens in us? Civilization cultivates only a versatility of sensations in man, and . . . decidedly nothing else. And through the development of this versatility, man may even reach the point of finding pleasure in blood. Indeed, this has already happened to him. Have you

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For Kant, the conflict between the two extremes—the idea of the moral fall and that of moral progress—“is based on a disjunctive proposition: Man is (by nature) either morally good or morally evil.” He adds that experience appears to support the middle ground between the two extremes: perhaps by nature human beings are neither good nor evil, or they are both at once? Having laid down these logical possibilities, he proceeds with a serious “anthropological investigation” of the moral vocation of humanity. First, Kant uncompromisingly rules out the possibility of moral indifference (being neither good nor evil) and the possibility of being in some respects good and in some evil.13 The philosopher seeks the basis for his position, which he identifies as moral rigorism, in the nature of the relation between freedom, Willkür, and respect for the moral law. He starts with a crucial observation according to which “an incentive can determine Willkür to an action only so far as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim (has made it the general rule in accordance with which he will conduct himself).”14 Elsewhere Kant argues that respect for the moral law is an incentive. Any decision of Willkür in the moral realm must occur as a result of Willkür’s actively incorporating a certain incentive into its maxim. If this incentive is respect for the moral law, the maxim is morally good and a person adopting this maxim is good. But if the law does not determine Willkür, this, for Kant, necessarily means that “an incentive contrary to it [moral law] must influence his Willkür.”15 In short, any morally related act of the will either is caused by respect for the moral law, or otherwise necessarily is the movement against the moral law, namely evil. This shocking moral rigorism provoked a cluster of critical responses which, for the purposes of our discussion, need to be set aside.16 The bottom line is that Kant rejects the possibility of a middle ground between good and evil principles in Willkür and boldly puts the key question of ethics in disjunctive terms: “Is a human being by nature good or evil?” “Nature” in this context is not opposed to freedom, in contrast to Kant’s other writings. Instead, what Kant means by “nature” is human moral nature which he defines as “a good or evil disposition as an inborn natural constitution” grounded in freedom.17 Kant contends that the ultimate ground of such a disposition is an innate property of Willkür, which belongs to it innately, before any external exercise of freedom.18 In two subsequent sections entitled, “Concerning the Original Predisposition to Good in Human Nature” and “Concerning the Propensity to Evil in Human Nature,” Kant attempts to uncover this complex property of Willkür. By distinguishing “propensity” (Hang) from “predisposition” (Anlage), Kant seeks to explain how human beings can possess an innate “propensity to evil”—which alone is the source of evil maxims—while being personally and

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unconditionally responsible for choosing evil and doing evil. This is how he defines these obscure terms. By “predisposition,” Kant means “not only [a being’s] constituent elements which are necessary to it, but also the forms of their combination, by which the being is what it is.” Predispositions are “original,” Kant continues, “if they are involved necessarily in the possibility of such a being, but ‘contingent’ if it is possible for the being to exist of itself without them.”19 The focus of Kant’s discussion in the Religion is only those “original” dispositions that have immediate reference to the faculty of desire and the exercise of Willkür. Propensity, on the other hand, is defined as “the subjective ground of the possibility of an inclination . . . so far as mankind in general is liable to it.”20 According to Kant, “a propensity is distinguished from a predisposition by the fact that although it can indeed be innate, it ought not to be represented merely thus; for it can also be regarded as having been acquired (if it is good), or brought by man upon himself (if it is evil).” 21 Michalson argues that this obscure terminology of propensity and predisposition enables Kant to walk “the fine line between attributing moral evil to something naturally given in human nature and attributing it to some force or capacity utterly irrelevant to basic human nature.”22 Whether Kant succeeded in avoiding these extremes is a debatable point. I concur with Henry Allison, who claims that Kant’s perspective on will is sufficiently nuanced and does not necessarily lead to a bipolar moral rigorism.23 Kant divides the original predisposition to good in human nature into three groups with respect to their function: (1) The predisposition to animality in man, taken as a living being; (2) The predisposition to humanity in man, taken as a living and at the same time a rational being; (3) The predisposition to personality in man, taken as a rational and at the same time as accountable being.24 In the subsequent discussion of these three predispositions, the critical turn in the development of Kant’s moral thought is apparent: the focus of his ethics shifts from rationality to the properties of free will (freien Willkür). In the first essay of the Religion, Kant not only concentrates on Willkür, but also admits that rationality, though necessary, is by no means sufficient as a constituent of a human being qua moral agent. Here he straightforwardly claims, perhaps for the first time in his career: [F]rom the fact that a being has reason it by no means follows that this reason, by the mere representing of the fitness of its maxims to be laid down as universal laws, is thereby rendered capable of determining Willkür unconditionally, so as to be “practical” of itself. The most rational mortal being in the world might still stand in need of certain incentives, originating in objects of desire, to determine his Willkür.25

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Kant demonstrates further that what he calls “the original predisposition to personality” is rooted in Willkür’s attunement to the noble incentive of the moral law and therefore the moral personality comes into being in and through Willkür. At the same time, the radical freedom of Willkür means that Willkür has an innate ability to deviate from the moral law, which, according to Kant, constitutes the human propensity to evil.26 Thus, in Religion, Willkür becomes the starting point of Kant’s speculations about the beginnings of good and evil in human nature, for it is free Willkür that manifests itself simultaneously as a generator of moral personality and as a vehicle of moral corruption and decline. While examining the profundity of the will endowed with freedom for good or evil, Kant is steadily moving toward the dangerous territory of unintelligibility. By posing the question about the ground of Willkür’s ability to follow or deviate from the moral law, Kant establishes the first boundary beyond which nothing can be said with any degree of certainty. The deepest depth of Willkür’s initial orientation toward good or evil is inscrutable. This is the unfathomable depth of human nature that in this and other contexts Kant calls “the heart.” Interestingly, Kant never suggests that we should turn our back upon the terra incognita of our inmost being, or that we should passively accept its inscrutability. As moral agents, we must actively and ceaselessly examine ourselves and try to learn as much as we can about that mysterious internal soil on which the seeds of good and evil are sown. In Metaphysics of Morals, Kant claims that self-scrutinizing is the first and the most important duty of a human being to oneself: know your heart—whether it is good or evil, whether the source of your actions is pure or impure and what can be imputed to you as belonging originally to the substance of a human being or as derived (acquired or developed) and belonging to your moral condition. Moral cognition of oneself, which seeks to penetrate into the depths (the abyss) of one’s heart which are quite difficult to fathom, is the beginning of all human wisdom. For in the case of a human being, the ultimate wisdom, which consists in the harmony of a being’s will with its final end, requires him first to remove the obstacle within (an evil will actually present in him) and then to develop the original predisposition to a good will within him, which can never be lost. (Only the descent into the hell of selfcognition can pave the way to godliness.) 27 While speaking passionately about descent into the hell of self-cognition— an evocative phrase Kant borrowed from theosophist Johann Georg Hamann— the philosopher refers to an inquiry into the very substance of personality and volition, the ultimate source of persons’ decisions and actions. For Hamann, the descent had a distinctly religious, supernatural meaning, pointing to the miracle

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of spiritual rebirth. By contrast, Kant finds in the image of the descent a way of articulating the ultimate responsibility of human beings for their self-cognition and rebirth. In Religion, Kant makes a bold attempt to look into the abyss and record his observations. What does Kant see in the inscrutable depths of the human heart? The Religion tells us that along with the inextinguishable spark of goodness, he sees in the heart the seeds of evil growing into dangerous fleurs du mal. He describes different stages of the malignant growth of evil as frailty, impurity, and corruption of the human heart. He speaks about the insidiousness of the heart (dolus malus), which deceives itself in regard to its good and evil dispositions. He speculates about the moral transformation of an evil person, and whether the rebirth of the human heart (Herzensänderung) can occur.28 He also raises the unanswerable question regarding the origin of evil. How are we to understand Kant’s speculations about these themes, which he describes as inscrutable, in the context of his self-proclaimed “religion within the bounds of bare reason?” A key can be found in one of Kant’s earlier writings. 3. On the Boundary of Intelligibility: Evil and the Limits of Ethical Discourse In Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Kant asks: How does our reason relate to the connection of that with which we are acquainted to that with which we are not acquainted, and never will be? Here there is a real connection of the known to the wholly unknown (which it will always remain), and if the unknown should not become the least bit better known—as in fact is not to be hoped—the concept of this connection must still be able to be determined and brought to clarity.29 According to Kant, the multiple junctures of the known and the unknown define the boundaries within which reason can legitimately work. Yet Kant also believes that reason can and must undertake the task of operating on the boundary, the task of joining what it can know and what it never will. “Boundaries,” Kant writes, presuppose a “space” outside them; this “space” cannot be explored by reason but it can be pointed to and brought into relation with both moral intuition and experience. In Religion, the boundaries of ethical discourse are consciously drawn where the possibilities of rational theorizing are exhausted but “practical” (moral) issues and dilemmas persist. The Prolegomena offers a crucial methodological clue to Kant’s Religion. As we have seen, despite its descriptive title, Religion fails to stay within the limits of reason alone; at the same time, it does not pretend to go utterly beyond these self-circumscribed limits. Instead, the book dramatically unfolds on the boundary between the intelligible and the unintelligible. At the same time as Kant

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speaks about the human will and its ultimate ground, freedom for good or evil, the human heart and its corruption and rebirth, he also acknowledges their ultimate inscrutability. On the other hand, he bases his thorough theoretical speculations on direct moral experience, history, and anthropology, appealing to vivid examples of both primitive savagery and “civilized” atrocities.30 As Emil Fackenheim points out, at these crucial junctures, Kant embraces a radical perspective on freedom and evil and consciously takes the risk of leaving them philosophically unintelligible.31 These radical existential themes we may call “boundary questions,” for they are intricate interlacings of the knowable (empirically given, rationally analyzable) and the completely inscrutable. We should not be surprised that Kant’s discourse on radical evil—the focal point of Religion—is also a “discourse on the boundary”: it arises from an overwhelming human experience of the reality of evil, and it acknowledges the necessity of giving a moral account of it and the unintelligibility of its origin. Kant argues that neither our reason nor our sensuous nature can be the source of moral evil, since the first comprises too much and the second too little. This implies that evil could have sprung only from a morally corrupt being. Kant writes: the original predisposition (which no one other than man himself could have corrupted, if he is to be held responsible for this corruption) is a predisposition to good; there is then for us no conceivable ground from which the moral evil in us could originally have come. This inconceivability, together with a more accurate specification of the wickedness of our race, the Bible expresses in the historical narrative as follows. It finds a place for evil at the creation of the world, yet not in man, but in a spirit of an originally loftier destiny. Thus is the first beginning of all evil represented as inconceivable by us (for whence came evil to that spirit?); but man is represented as having fallen into evil only through seduction, and hence as being not basically corrupt (even as regards his original predisposition to good) but rather as still capable of an improvement, in contrast to a seducing spirit, that is, a being for whom temptation of the flesh cannot be accounted as an alleviation of guilt.32 The myth about the seductive spirit appears to support Kant’s conviction that neither from our sensuous nature, nor from reason per se, does moral evil originate. But the nature of this support is peculiar. Kant’s reader may wonder how seriously his insights should be taken and how revealing and edifying his presentation (or misrepresentation) of the myth is. Readers may also question the appropriateness of the religious narrative in any philosophical discussion,—a concern that Kant addresses in the preface to Religion. His selective references to the Bible and his unorthodox interpretations of the selections may appear unjustified from an exegetical point of view; Kant is well aware of these problems. In a lengthy footnote to the above passage, he stresses that we should not take the myth lit-

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erally and that the moral insight of the narrative, not its historical validity or theological status, is what counts. Kant deliberately chooses to use Biblical narratives for the practical purpose of approaching “boundary questions” philosophically. Kant’s resort to the Bible in Religion is neither accidental nor dogmatic; as Yirmiyahu Yovel demonstrates, in Kant’s later works, Biblical references comprise an integral part of philosophical praxis.33 The myth does not explain evil, but neither does it simply serve to illustrate Kant’s point about the inconceivability of its origin. In the second book of Religion, after employing another “evil spirit” metaphor, Kant reiterates, “this is an expression which seems to have been used not to extend our knowledge beyond the world of sense but only to make clear for practical use the conception of what is for us unfathomable.” 34 In the Prolegomena, we find another relevant methodological consideration, namely, the idea that when we search for a means to express the connection between the knowable and the unknowable, it may be instructive to think and speak in terms of “as if” (als ob). We can employ myths, narratives, and metaphors as symbolic representations of moral ideas. Such representations facilitate “cognition according to analogy,” the kind of cognition we need on the boundary of intelligibility.35 Throughout Religion, Biblical narratives function precisely in this manner, as auxiliary fictions, or so-called as-if stories. As expected, Kant is not entirely comfortable with relying on fictions, dismissing, throughout his writings, fictional accounts of moral problems. Yet his attitude toward narrative discourse is ambivalent: he claims that while figurative representations are as such “disturbing,” they could be “philosophically correct in meaning.”36 As Kant leaves the readers of Religion balancing on the boundary, they may inquire about the possibility of a qualitatively different ethic, which would unite the power of “bare reason” with the power of imaginative story, without being apologetic or evasive about it. We now promptly turn to Dostoevsky, who does not submit to the unintelligibility or unspeakableness of the boundary themes, but instead embraces the philosophical task of narrating them. The novelist does not try to “explain” how the seductive spirit became corrupt. An astute observer and thinker, he tells powerful stories penetrating the depths of the human heart in its intimate encounter with the divine and the diabolical. Through artistic exploration of the phenomena of the heart, freedom, evil, and temptation, Dostoevsky addresses questions destined to remain obscure in Kant. Dostoevsky’s story takes place precisely on that border beyond which Kant resists looking. 4. Dostoevsky’s “Demonology” An expert on matters of evil and human destructiveness, Dostoevsky provokes quite distinct reactions to his powerful work. Some critics perceived personal instability and even artistic deficiency in the novelist’s fascination with the dark side of humanity. Such literary giants as Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov

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mocked Dostoevsky’s preoccupation with the gloomy and the distorted, while Maxim Gorky openly accused him of a perverted obsession with sadism and glorification of senseless suffering. Other luminaries, among them Nikolai Berdyaev, Albert Camus, and Hermann Hesse, praised Dostoevsky’s genius in depicting both the psyche’s diabolical element and its infinite capacity for spiritual regeneration. Notes from a Dead House, for example, is a thrilling fictional account of the novelist’s Siberian impressions, offering unique insight into the criminal soul, its violent and self-destructive impulses, and its all-too-human longing for appreciation.37 The book constitutes a veritable encyclopedia of criminal transgressions. Yet Dostoevsky is not merely a literary chronicler of evil: his anthropological notes and observations, his journalistic involvement in contemporary criminal cases, his intense focus on the “lives of the sinners,” and his alleged “cruel talent” all form the basis for his thorough philosophical investigation into the very nature of evil. Many of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries argued that the only way to tackle the problem of evil socially and philosophically is to demystify it—only then can we intelligently and efficiently address the issue of human destructiveness. Some even suggested that the very words “evil” and “crime” are misleading. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, one of Dostoevsky’s prominent ideological adversaries, insisted that human nature is just a sum total of social, psychological, and physiological factors and that we can unambiguously trace people’s so-called goodness or wickedness back to their specific circumstances. Criminal intention and behavior have nothing mysteriously evil about them. Any transgression, however hideous, is a predictable outcome of a whole cluster of unfortunate events. Chernyshevsky advocated a simple solution: improve social and economic conditions and people will change. Dostoevsky vehemently opposed this point of view— dubbed “the environment doctrine,”—which dominated the intellectual scene at the time. He also repeatedly attacked the ideological underpinnings of social engineering—vulgar scientism and determinism. He argued that “evil lies deeper in human beings than socialist-physicians suppose;”38 and devoted significant energy to prove it. In striking parallel to Kant’s account of radical evil in the Religion, Dostoevsky insists that evil resides in the depths of the human heart and is inextricably linked to human freedom. Further, as an ultimate boundary theme, the study of evil requires careful attention to the mythological roots of humanity’s collective ethical consciousness. Hence Dostoevsky’s metaphysics of good and evil is infused with a strong sense of the divine and the diabolical. His monumental canvas of evil features a creative fusion of Romanticism, Christianity, and Russian folklore. It welcomes Biblical allusions to the satanic and the demonic, Romantic visions of the dark side as beautiful and intelligent, and the rich and vigorous imagery of the “unclean force” which comes from Slavic pagan tradition.39 Of recent scholarly works, William J. Leatherbarrow’s A Devil’s Vaudeville stands out as an extensive exploration of the demonology that fueled Dos-

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toevsky’s work. It recreates the vivid folk settings where crossroads and moral transgressions share common linguistic and ethical connotations, where superstition offers an illusion of safety from the devil’s clever tricks, where the very concept of masquerade takes on a distinct diabolical function, and where characters confronted with the archetypal “father of lies” straddle the threshold to the world in which the “unclean force” engages in perpetual mimicry. The force and the insight with which Dostoevsky penetrates the devilish consciousness on a personal and a global scale has even led some of his readers to the disturbing conclusion that his art is a tribute to Satanism. L. A. Zander characterizes Dostoevsky’s crowning novel: In The Brothers Karamazov, evil speaks without a mask. The devil says openly what he thinks. He no longer tries to tempt man with the beauty of his ideologies; he no longer summons him to earthly paradises; calmly, logically, conscious of his power, he develops the grand image of a satanocracy. This is a diablodicy. It is the justification for Satanism.40 The question of whether Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is a “diablodicy” or a theodicy has been debated for more than a century.41 Zander’s farfetched conclusion aside, he is clearly wrong when he claims that Dostoevsky’s devil no longer tries to tempt. Nothing can be further from the truth. In all Dostoevsky’s writings, the diabolical consciousness enters the world by way of temptation, and whether it uses sensuous, intellectual, or spiritual channels, it reaches the human heart through trickery and manipulation. This evil is radical, for no human being can avoid seductions and the desire to seduce. Temptation, in its primordial sense of a “test” or “trial” becomes the epicenter of the struggle between good and evil in Dostoevsky’s art: the human heart is tested as to whether it will succumb to the seductive spirit or is capable of rejecting the spirit’s offers. Just as Dostoevsky’s diabolical figures vary from the handsome noblemen and infernal women to the pathetic little demons with runny noses, the seductions also differ widely. They range in complexity and scale, encompassing Raskolnikov’s Napoleonic fantasies, Dmitry Karamazov’s struggle with the “ideal of Sodom,” Ivan’s rebellion against God’s world, and the Grand Inquisitor’s fateful confrontation with Christ. Among many seductive motives and strategies, one deserves special attention: self-tempting consciousness—a form of ideological enslavement, or “possession,” one of Dostoevsky’s favorite psychological and political metaphors. Temptation is a theme that guides the reader with a subtle, but masterful stroke through the intricate labyrinth of Dostoevsky’s fiction, where the faces of evil mimic the faces of good.

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The prophetic “poem” about the Grand Inquisitor—a story which speaks about and embodies temptations—is a culminating point of Dostoevsky’s life-long preoccupation with the human quest for freedom. Ever since the publication of The Brothers Karamazov in 1881, the central figure in the story, the ninety-yearold Cardinal of the Spanish Inquisition, remains one of the most powerful fictional interlocutors for generations of philosophers, literary critics, theologians, and political scientists. In Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Ellis Sandoz eloquently characterizes Dostoevsky’s hero as “a millennial figure created upon a Biblical foundation”: Into him, Dostoevsky has woven all of the ancient representations of evil from Ahriman and Prometheus onward. He has brought together a monstrous synthesis in epic proportions of sectarian Christs and [G]nostic New Men in his chthonic hero. Among much else, the Inquisitor is also one of the “clever people” (umnye liudi) whom Dostoevsky often mentioned in correspondence and publicist writings . . . those whose agony in existence breeds impatience of Providence: why, indeed, as [Vissarion] Belinsky asked, perfection and happiness tomorrow and not today? The Great Questioner, of illustrious lineage, stands as the symbol of perennial arrogance, negation, and lust—and as the emblem of man’s earthly destiny. The rebellion is Ivan’s, the prophecy, Dostoevsky’s.42 The fictional author of the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor is Ivan Karamazov, a passionate young philosopher-dilettante, who recounts the story in a conversation with his brother Alyosha, an aspiring monk. Set in the dark days of the Spanish Inquisition, the legend imagines the second coming of Christ. In the hot streets of Seville, where hundreds of heretics are burned every day, the Grand Inquisitor recognizes Christ and orders his guards to take Him to prison. Their conversation—or the Inquisitor’s monologue, for Christ is silent throughout the poem—takes place in the dungeon of the Sacred Court. The story of the three temptations of Christ in the desert becomes the pivot of their encounter. The Grand Inquisitor questions Christ: The great spirit spoke with You in the wilderness, and it has been passed on to us in books that he supposedly “tempted” You. Did he really? And was it possible to say anything more true than what he proclaimed to You in his three questions, which You rejected, and which the books refer to as “temptations”? 43 The story of Christ’s ordeal, the Inquisitor’s story, and their setting within Ivan’s conversation with Alyosha reveal a cluster of seductions: the Grand In-

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quisitor seduces people, but is himself seduced by the same spirit who questioned Christ. At the same time, his speech, the aim of which is to tempt Christ, is itself a reflection of Ivan’s tempted consciousness. Ivan’s poem becomes an epicenter of his larger argument, whose seductive power is eventually turned on Alyosha. Finally, undergirding all of these layers is Dostoevsky—the tempted and the tempter. In confronting his heroes with the “cursed questions,” with which he struggled all his life, he also invites his readers to share the struggle and question their own deepest commitments. The Grand Inquisitor dramatically asserts that in the three questions posed by the wise spirit in the desert: all subsequent human history [was] as if brought together into a single whole and foretold; three images [were] revealed that will take in all the insoluble historical contradictions of human nature over all the earth.44 The lines describing the other-worldly nature of the spirits’ questions are among the most powerful ones written by Dostoevsky: if ever a real, thundering miracle was performed on earth, it was on that day, the day of those three temptations. The miracle lay precisely in the appearance of those three questions. If it were possible to imagine, just as a trial and an example, that those three questions of the dread spirit had been lost from the books without a trace, and it was necessary that they be restored, thought up and invented anew, to be put back into the books, and to that end all the wise men on earth—rulers, high priests, scholars, philosophers, poets—were brought together and given this task: to think up, to invent three questions such as would not only correspond to the scale of the event, but moreover, would express in three words, in three human phrases only, the entire future history of the world and mankind—do you think that all the combined wisdom of the earth could think up anything faintly resembling in force and depth those three questions that were actually presented to you then by the powerful and intelligent spirit in the wilderness? By the questions alone, simply by the miracle of their appearance, one can see that one is dealing with a mind not human and transient but eternal and absolute.45 This passage reveals Dostoevsky’s own perception of the “scale of the event.”46 For him, the three questions represent, in the most forceful and concentrated form, the three ultimate challenges of the human condition: the need for material comfort and security, a longing for spiritual guidance, which would alleviate the existential anxiety associated with freedom of choice, and a quest for universal harmony and unity of all people on earth. All three are also the supreme expressions of the human search for happiness: what could be better than a prosperous, care-free existence under the tutelage of a benevolent leader? The temptation to

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“turn stones into bread” symbolizes the burning need to address the problem of poverty and social injustice, while the temptation to demonstrate superhuman power by performing a miracle questions the legitimacy of faith. It caters simultaneously to the spiritual indolence of the “masses” and the intellectual arrogance of the “elect.” Finally, the third temptation calls on the strongest and most talented to take charge of the kingdoms of the world to lead the nations to solidarity in prosperity. The Grand Inquisitor powerfully questions the motivation of his prisoner, who apparently was given the opportunity to address these needs on behalf of humanity but rejected the offer. How could Christ, who loves people and knows their aspirations and weaknesses, refuse to alleviate their physical suffering and their spiritual angst? The Cardinal accuses Christ: Instead of taking over men’s freedom, you increased it and forever burdened the kingdom of the human soul with its torments. You desired the free love of man, that he should follow You freely, enchanted and captivated by You. Instead of the firm ancient law, man had henceforth to decide for himself, with a free heart, what is good and what is evil, having only Your image before him as a guide—but did it not occur to you that he would eventually reject and dispute even Your image and Your truth if he was oppressed by so terrible a burden as freedom of choice?. . . Is it the fault of the weak soul that it is unable to contain such terrible gifts? Can it be that you indeed came only to the chosen ones and for the chosen ones?47 Initially a follower of Christ, the Grand Inquisitor spent years in the wilderness preparing for the spiritual ordeal. Unlike Christ, he “awoke” and refused to “serve madness.” The Inquisitor’s monologue deepens into an almost Biblical rhetoric wherein he accuses his prisoner of not loving humanity at all. What people need, according to the Grand Inquisitor, is not freedom, but an illusion of freedom; radical freedom for good or evil not only demands too much, but also it breeds anxiety, uncertainty, and misery. Even for God’s elect, a quest for spiritual freedom proves to be a double-edged sword: the stronger they become, the more susceptible they are to the ideas of spiritual superiority and domination. To complete the grandiose task of the wise spirit, the benevolent Inquisitor must speak on behalf of Christ and deceive people so that they can live in childlike joy, peace, and prosperity. The Grand Inquisitor proudly reclaims the three ultimate powers—miracle, mystery, and authority—and promises to put them to work for the good of the people. He effectively replaces otherworldly ideals with lofty humanitarian goals, sensible and realistic; and he is eager to assist humanity to reach these goals smoothly and efficiently, using the best instruments available. If some manipulation or coercion is necessary for such “effective cultural design,” so be it.

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Even the most sophisticated of readers find themselves swayed by the tempting power of the argument. D. H. Lawrence, who initially dubbed the Grand Inquisitor story a cheap “showing off in blasphemy,” confessed: Now I read the Grand Inquisitor once more, and my heart sinks right through my shoes. I still see a trifle of cynical-satanical showing off. But under that I hear the final and unanswerable criticism of Christ. And it is a deadly, devastative summing up, unanswerable because borne out by the long experience of humanity. It is reality versus illusion, and the illusion was Jesus’, while time itself retorts with the reality.48 After the collapse of several sinister totalitarian systems and dictatorships, people may appear to be less likely to forfeit their freedom in favor of economic security and peace of mind. Perhaps some are also better prepared to recognize cynicism and brazen contempt for humanity disguised as love and care. Yet we consistently side with “reality,” oblivious to the threats it may pose to our freedom. Despite shifts on the political stage, this reflects our continued inability to unmask the Grand Inquisitor. Dostoevsky clairvoyantly predicted the rise and fall of totalitarian regimes; most importantly, he spoke of the totalitarianism of the mind, which, in its many forms, ranges from banal domestic despotism and degrading paternalism to the sophisticated operation of self-tempting consciousness that acts on behalf of all suffering humanity. We, as individuals and as a community, must still face our susceptibility to the totalitarianism of the mind (whose paradoxical manifestations include combative “liberalism” and military exportation of “freedom” and “democracy”). Dostoevsky lamented that after eighteen centuries, the overwhelming questions contained in the temptations of the devil remained unanswered. As an artist, he deliberately provided the devil with the most compelling rhetoric precisely because he understood the importance and power of his seductive message. In his book Dostoevsky, Nikolai Berdyaev writes: [I]t is noteworthy that the extremely powerful vindication of Christ (which is what the Legend [of the Grand Inquisitor] is) should be put in the mouth of the atheist Ivan Karamazov. It is indeed a puzzle, and it is not clear on the face of it which side the speaker is on and which side the writer; we are left free to interpret and understand for ourselves: that which deals with liberty is addressed to the free.49 The dialogue between Ivan and Alyosha, which serves as a foil for the legend, contributes significantly to the open-endedness of the narrative. Ivan is eager to share his rebellion against God’s world with his brother and challenges Alyosha’s faith by putting forth the undeniable claims of the “Euclidean mind.”

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He recounts terrifying newspaper stories of torture and abuse of little children and asks Alyosha to judge for himself whether the tormentors and murderers deserve forgiveness. When Alyosha impulsively cries for revenge, Ivan yells “Bravo!” in exaltation and continues: “If even you say so then . . . . A fine monk you are! See what a little devil is sitting in your heart, Alyoshka Karamazov!” Alyosha, terrified and disoriented, asks why his brother is testing him. The answer comes from Ivan the tempter: “You are dear to me, I don’t want to let you slip, and I won’t give you up to your Zosima.”50 In desperation, Alyosha appeals to the image of Christ. This move provokes Ivan to present his brother with an alternative image, that of the Great Questioner and the benefactor of mankind, powerful enough to replace Zosima, and ultimately, Christ. Can Alyosha’s image of Christ survive Ivan’s poem? Can it withstand other temptations that await him? Throughout The Brothers Karamazov, the question of the viability of the sacred image in a person’s heart arises repeatedly: how do we protect it in the midst of a trial that renders our most treasured beliefs groundless and destructive? If we trace the narrative of temptation back to the Old and New Testament, we find that temptation is always marked by an irreducible internal struggle, which cannot be alleviated by an appeal to reason, custom, virtue, or the consequences of a person’s choices. The tempter creates the situation in which the tempted has to move beyond all human concerns and to make an unconditional choice between God and the devil. We witness the terror of such a choice in the superhuman testing of Job and Abraham, and Christ’s ordeal in the desert. In a similar manner, Dostoevsky leads his heroes to the edge where they must “decide with a free heart” whether they are with Christ, or the wise spirit who questioned Him in the desert. “We are not with You!” says the Cardinal to his prisoner and his words echo in Alyosha’s frantic inquiry to Ivan: “Are you with the Inquisitor?” What about Dostoevsky’s own answer? While the “three colossal questions” are not to be resolved within Ivan’s poem, The Brothers Karamazov on the whole is supposed to function as a response to the Grand Inquisitor. Dostoevsky worked on this response with “fear and tribulation” and commentators still debate whether the artist succeeded in this task. Despite all the complexity and ambiguity of the question, it is clear that the unconditional choice between the Cardinal and his prisoner, which Dostoevsky so powerfully presents to his readers, was made long before his work on The Brothers Karamazov began. In a famous letter of 1854 from the Siberian prison camp, addressed to Natalya Fonvizina, he writes: I am a child of the century, a child of disbelief and doubt, I am that today and (I know it) will remain so until the grave. How much terrible torture this thirst for faith has cost me and costs me even now, which is all the stronger in my soul the more arguments I can find against it. And yet, God sends me sometimes instants when I am completely calm; at those instants

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I love and I feel loved by others, and it is at these instants that I have shaped for myself a symbol of faith where everything is clear and sacred for me. This symbol is very simple, here it is: to believe that nothing is more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, courageous, and more perfect than Christ; . . . [e]ven more, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.51 Many years later, Dostoevsky re-affirmed his unconditional commitment by declaring, on different occasions, that his heart would always remain with Christ, not with the Grand Inquisitor.52 The Cardinal’s sophisticated arguments may represent the undeniable truth of earthly realism (recall D. H. Lawrence’s analysis) based on centuries-long empirical observations of human rebelliousness, wickedness, pitiful dependence, and the overwhelming longing for childlike happiness. Perhaps the Grand Inquisitor speaks the truth; this simply means, Dostoevsky tells us, that we must make the choice against this truth. Meanwhile, in Ivan’s narrative, the terror of the choice is pushed to the limit when the very identities of Christ and his questioner are blurred. Dostoevsky granted so much to the Grand Inquisitor and his creator, Ivan Karamazov, that the roles of the Cardinal and his prisoner appeared to have been effectively reversed. At this point of critical complexity, the established link between temptation and evil is granted a new dimension. Temptation at its most dangerous, appealing to human longing for the good and the virtuous, is set to make its fateful appearance. 6. Temptation by Good and Paradoxes of Freedom There are crude temptations, . . . easy to recognize; such are temptations by evil. Much more dangerous, however, are subtle temptations by good. —Anna Gippius, St. Tikhon Zadonsky The seductive spirit so vividly portrayed by Dostoevsky does not stop at the “crude temptations”; its cleverness rests precisely on its ability to present the most alluring promises of apparent goodness. These are visions of happiness and justice, intellectualism and devotion, virtue and honor—the more complex the human soul, the more sophisticated the challenge. By weaving appeals to a person’s deepest feelings, principles, and commitments into his narrative, the tempter gains access to spiritual allegiances he seeks to destroy. This motif resounds powerfully in all Dostoevsky’s major novels. In The Brothers Karamazov, it reaches a dramatic crescendo. Scholars have done perceptive studies of the temptation theme in Dostoevsky. Notably, Nadine Natov’s work provides a comprehensive genealogy of the novelist’s artistic appropriation of the Biblical story of the three temptations and carefully traces the struggles of all three brothers, Dmitry, Ivan, and Alyosha

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in their respective confrontations with the tempter.53 To highlight the subtleties of temptation by good, I will only focus on the striking episode from Book Seven, in which Alyosha faces the dismaying events surrounding the death of his beloved elder Zosima. As the news about Zosima’s departure goes around, the whole town is overcome by meddling anticipation of a miracle, which is supposed to reveal the elder’s sanctity. Instead, Zosima’s corpse decomposes just like any other person’s does, perhaps even faster, so that the solemn service for the deceased is tainted by the “odor of corruption.” At this unbearable moment, Alyosha is left in a state of ultimate abandonment, intensified by the providential injustice he witnesses. The narrator comments on the inner state of the young hero: He could not bear without insult, even without bitterness of heart, that this most righteous of righteous men should be given over to such derisive and spiteful jeering from a crowd so frivolous and so far beneath him. Let there be no miracles, let nothing miraculous be revealed, let that which was expected immediately not come to pass, but why should there be this ignominy, why should this shame be permitted, why this hasty corruption, which “forestalled nature,” as the spiteful monks were saying?54 Unlike the townspeople, Alyosha does not aspire to a faith founded on miracles and tangible proofs of religious truth; but he cannot accept public defaming of virtue. Alyosha’s sense of moral justice is severely violated and it happens at the time when his heart is the most vulnerable, overcome by grief and loss, inconsolable. As his whole being rebels against the desecration of his revered mentor, “some vague but tormenting and evil impression” begins stirring in him. He recalls his conversation with Ivan the day before. Indignation and doubt planted by the older brother burst out from Alyosha’s heart when, in response to sneering provocations by the cynic Rakitin, he impulsively exclaims: “I do not rebel against my God, I simply ‘do not accept his world’!” Alyosha’s rebellion presents an “opportune moment” for Rakitin to lead him astray. Silently but resolutely, Alyosha follows Rakitin to the house of seductress Grushenka, over whom his father and his brother Dmitry are engaged in a deadly fight. But Rakitin’s sinister hopes for the downfall of the virtuous youth are sorely frustrated when Grushenka unexpectedly responds to Alyosha’s woe with kindness and compassion. Rakitin’s last words to Alyosha are highly symbolic, coming from the petty demonic figure that he is: “Why the devil did I have anything to do with you! I don’t even want to know you anymore. Go by yourself, there is your road.” Alyosha walks away, out of town, across the fields, back to the monastery. His life path is still undetermined, but he knows that he has to find his inner ground for faith, independent of any external influences and justifications. We begin to glimpse the inception of this process in Alyosha’s dream of Cana of Galilee and his rapturous vision of the grandeur of life. The nocturnal harmony of the silent

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earth and the stars reveals to him the inner truth of Zosima’s mystical teaching about universal forgiveness, “prayer, love, and touching of other worlds.” Alyosha’s spiritual journey beautifully illustrates the dangers of temptation, which speak to a person’s inner sense of justice and adoration of virtue. Alyosha’s indignation on behalf of his beloved elder appears the most natural, human response to the ignominy of the situation. But his impulsive rebellion against the order of things defeats the very ideals he holds dear. Alyosha is able to overcome the temptation because he intuitively senses that neither Zosima’s spiritual legacy, nor his message of active love, can be served by exasperated demands for justice. Dostoevsky often presents temptation by good as an attractive offer to take the fastest route to the fulfillment of an ideal. The three questions posed by the wise spirit in the desert, for example, point to apparently sensible, efficient ways to address the pressing needs of humanity. Meanwhile, the path suggested by the tempter contaminates the vital sources which sustain both humanity’s efforts and its goals. Temptation by good rests on a radical, albeit carefully concealed, discontinuity between means and ends. Regardless of how realistic a shortcut may appear to be, it betrays the end by betraying a required path. Most importantly, the means offered by the tempter seek to compromise individuals in such a way that they cannot partake in the good end. Disguised as a humanist, the tempter appeals to people’s inclination toward utility and practicality, transforming spiritual ideals into workable surrogates: active love is exchanged for abstract humanism, inner truth—for empirical evidence, spirituality—for a system of practical principles, and the ideal of brotherhood—for productive coexistence in a human “anthill.” Dostoevsky, whose own thirst for faith, love, and genuine community went through a “crucible of doubt,” urges his heroes and readers to be suspicious of anyone who proposes to open a fast track to these eternal values. He insists that no ultimate resting point exists in the pursuit of goodness but that it requires constant work, engagement, and sacrifice. Dostoevsky poignantly expresses this conviction in a letter to his friend, Nadezhda Suslova: You have youth now, the springtime of life—what a happiness! Do not lose your life, guard your soul, believe in truth. But search for it meticulously all your life, otherwise it is too easy to get lost. But you have the heart and you will not get lost.55 Dostoevsky’s exploration of the problem of temptation is closely linked with his overall perspective on self-knowledge, fulfillment, and spiritual freedom. The human heart is the locus of freedom for it is the heart that recognizes temptation and struggles to break free from it. Freedom of the heart—ultimate spiritual liberation—is experienced in a victory over temptation and a desire to deceive, manipulate, and exploit, which is why, in Dostoevsky’s work, Christ is

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the symbol and the ideal of freedom: not only did He uncompromisingly reject Satan’s offers, He also refused to enslave people by means of seductive rhetoric and actions. Dostoevsky’s answer to the Grand Inquisitor, who insisted that Christ’s divine gift of freedom is too much for humans to handle, is unconditional: no matter how indisputable the Inquisitor’s observations concerning human nature, or how weak, petty, and worthless people are, they must continue to learn how to be free. Nikolai Berdyaev offers an eloquent summary of this idea, central to Dostoevsky’s worldview: Dostoevsky attributed to man the ability to tread the road of truth which would lead him through the darkness and horrors of division and catastrophe to a definitive freedom. The way is neither direct nor clear and man will go astray on it, deceived by phantasms and will-o’-the-wisps. Doubtless this long passage through the experience of good and evil could be made much shorter and easier by limiting or even entirely suppressing human liberty. But what is the value of men coming to God otherwise than by the road of freedom and after having experienced the harmfulness of evil? . . . The grace which God gives us is not irresistibly imposed, but is a helping and sustaining grace, and every time people have tried to make of its strength an instrument of force and coercion they have erred toward the path of Antichrist.56 The road to freedom is not easy even for those fully devoted to it. In the beginning of The Brothers Karamazov, the narrator describes a thousand-yearold practice of the Orthodox religious elders aimed at elevating their disciples from slavery to freedom and moral perfection. He notes that even this elaborate spiritual apprenticeship is a double-edged sword that may “lead a person not to humility and ultimate self-control but, on the contrary, to the most satanic pride—that is, to fetters and not to freedom.”57 On its way to freedom and goodness, the human heart becomes increasingly susceptible to deception and evil, a pattern which Dostoevsky portrays with courage and subtlety. He also convincingly argues, through his tormented characters, that the “cursed questions” of humanity can only be “resolved” by the hearts open to genuine suffering and compassion. Recall Zosima’s answer to Ivan Karamazov, who asks the elder whether a “positive resolution” to his intellectual struggle is possible: Even if it cannot be resolved in a positive way, it will never be resolved in the negative way either—you yourself know this property of your heart, and therein lies the whole of its torment. But thank the Creator that he has given you a lofty heart, capable of being tormented by such torment.58

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Human beings can attain neither freedom nor goodness completely; they will never be confident in them. To strive for freedom is to continue being tormented, but in this torment lies the possibility of the heart’s regeneration and rebirth. As Berdyaev notes, God’s grace is not irresistibly imposed, but, Dostoevsky tells us, neither are the devil’s clever tricks. Having discovered the workings of the seductive spirit we are now prepared to revisit the main tenets of the idea of “radical” evil in Dostoevsky and Kant. 7. Evil by Nature? Mephistopheles, when he comes to Faust, testifies of himself that he desires evil, yet does only good. Well, let him do as he likes, it’s quite the opposite with me. I am perhaps the only man in all of nature who loves the truth and sincerely desires good. —The devil to Ivan Karamazov The fictional devil, who visits delirious Ivan Karamazov, appears in the midst of Ivan’s intense moral struggle: his father has been brutally murdered, his brother Dmitry is under investigation, while Ivan himself faces the devastating consequences of his proud refusal to be “his brother’s keeper.” Ivan is annoyed by the devil’s petty appearance and his tendency to “philosophize.” Only once does he commend his shabby interlocutor, when the devil sarcastically claims, paraphrasing Roman playwright Terence, “I am Satan and nothing human is foreign to me.” The original aphorism, a classic justification of unbridled self-indulgence, goes “I am a man, nothing human is foreign to me.” Satan’s clever little remark, linking the human and the demonic, suggests that the “flowers of evil” have their roots in the souls of human beings, whose crimes do sometimes reach truly diabolical proportions. Besides, nothing human is foreign to the devil, including humanity’s longing for the Good. The devil’s self-introduction as a lover of truth and goodness encompasses one of the defining features of demonic consciousness, as portrayed by Dostoevsky: the devil preys on utopian dreams of humanity, on the fervent pursuit of truth and happiness. He is busy befriending those who aspire to “save” or “benefit” humankind, and he is especially fond of young idealists, “trembling with the thirst for life.” Meanwhile, the devil does not need to assist human beings at all when it comes to unthinkable acts of destruction and sadism. He may even learn a thing or two from the landowner, who sets his dogs on a naked eight-year-old boy in front of the boy’s mother; or from “the honorable, educated and well-bred” Russian couple who torture their five-year-old daughter; or from the Turkish soldiers in Bulgaria, who entertain themselves by tossing babies up in the air and catching them on their bayonets. These, and many other examples of atrocious crimes against the innocent, diligently documented by Ivan Karamazov, prove that we have no need to look for the supernatural origin of evil in the midst of our own

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“human” reality. The twentieth century, with its homicidal and genocidal anamnesis, confirmed and strengthened Ivan’s empirical argument, so much so that maintaining any “progressive” optimism regarding the human race became nearly impossible. The devil, if he existed, would have been especially pleased to see how much energy and creativity human beings devote to the advancement of hell on earth. Sadly, Ivan’s rebellion, and with it, Dostoevsky’s prophesy, rings true as ever in the third millennium. Many readers view Dostoevsky’s novels, especially The Brothers Karamazov, as the last word on the subject of evil and human suffering. How radical would a philosopher’s conception of human wickedness have to be to do justice to the earth, which is “soaked in tears from core to crust”? Scholars raise this very question with respect to Kant’s doctrine of radical evil and his categorical denial of the possibility of human “devilishness.” Not surprisingly, Dostoevsky’s insights are often quoted as indisputable evidence against Kant’s alleged psychological naïveté. For example, John Silber effectively invokes Ivan Karamazov’s argument in his discussion of the limitations of Kant’s conception of radical evil, while another prominent Kant scholar, Henry Allison, surmises: “Kant remains very much a child of the Aufklärung (The Enlightenment)—or Plato— and, as such, is incapable of recognizing the Dostoevskian depths to which humanity can sink.”59 To be sure, Kant does seriously address numerous “crying examples” of despicable conduct of individuals and entire nations, primitive and civilized.60 Many critics note the almost “existential” overtones of Kant’s Religion, and some convincingly argue that Kant’s purported “optimism” is a gross overstatement.61 Still, in many respects, Kant does write in the spirit of the Enlightenment, especially because his critical philosophy was one of its defining forces. Dostoevsky’s art, on the other hand, responds to and gives dramatic expression to the anxious, turbulent era of modernity. His exploration of human wickedness surpasses the rationalistic or secular-skeptical Enlightenment approaches, and while the novelist effectively utilizes Romantic flirtation with the devilish and the demonic, he boldly moves beyond that tradition as well. Despite the differences between the two thinkers and their intellectual milieu, we learn as much from what Kant and Dostoevsky would agree on as from where their views diverge. Both thinkers insist on the innate propensity to evil and on unconditional personal responsibility to struggle against it. They emphasize the inscrutable mystery of evil and its irreducibility to external circumstances. Interestingly, Kant’s denial of human devilishness reflects two important beliefs, fundamentally shared by Dostoevsky: every person, even the most righteous “continues to be exposed to the assaults of the evil principle,” 62 while no person, by virtue of being free, can possess a purely diabolical will, however hideous his crimes and sinister his intentions. Such a will would be completely closed off, eternally enslaved to what Kant calls the “sovereignity of evil.” For Dostoevsky, human reality is open-ended and carries with it multiple possibilities, some latent, some overt. In the realm of individual choices, inten-

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tions, and actions, there always remains, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s words, “an unrealized surplus of humanness.” Following Bakhtin, Gary Saul Morson in his study of narrative and freedom elaborates on Dostoevsky’s view of the inexhaustibility of free choice: He was particularly concerned with discrediting what he called “linear” accounts, in which an ironclad chain of events leads (in principle) directly from intention to action. Dostoevsky objected that in such accounts intention is understood simplistically because it is closed off, made immune to the effects of changing circumstances, and, above all, insulated from the process of ongoing choice. 63 This philosophy of choice is at work in all of Dostoevsky’s novels and he defends it consistently in his journalistic analysis of contemporary public life. In his passionate commentary on the tendency of the newly-established jury trials in Russia to indiscriminately acquit the offenders, regardless of the severity of crime, Dostoevsky urges the public to reconsider its motives for acquittal and clemency. The 1873 installment of A Writer’s Diary, entitled “Environment,” takes issue with the popular social determinist view, which excuses every crime by shifting the blame to a “faulty social structure.” Dostoevsky’s critique of the “environment doctrine” goes hand in hand with his broader view of the moral significance of calling evil by its proper name and not hiding behind pseudopsychological or deterministic explanations of human behavior. The novelist’s repeated warnings that such views lead to the point where crime will be considered “a duty, a noble protest against the environment”64 were confirmed by many court cases and, much more drastically, by the ideologies of the Russian libertine terrorist movement in the second half of the nineteenth century. A brief excerpt from Dostoevsky’s extensive commentary on one such case, where a young woman, Kairova, was acquitted and proclaimed not guilty of an obvious murder attempt, captures his position perfectly: I was very, very happy when Mrs. Kairova was let off. I whisper to myself the majestic words: “For they bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne.” But He who said those words, also added, when He forgave the guilty woman, “Go forth and sin no more.” That means that He still called the sin a sin; He forgave it, but He did not justify it. But Mr. Utin [the defense attorney] says, “She would not have been a woman but a stone, a creature without a heart,” so that he does not even understand how she could have acted differently. I merely timidly venture to observe that evil must still be called evil, despite any humane feelings, and must not be raised almost to the level of a heroic deed.65

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Dostoevsky vehemently objected to legal, political, and psychological strategies aimed at diluting individual responsibility for criminal actions and intentions. Such strategies, Dostoevsky claims, “[deprive] people of their human image, [remove] their very selfhood and life and [reduce] them to the level of a tiny bit of fluff whose fate hangs on the first breath of wind.”66 He also urged everyone to share responsibility with the transgressor, to enter the courtroom with the recognition of one’s own moral fallibility.67 Dostoevsky and Kant are partners in their struggle for freedom and dignity, in their uncompromising insistence on human agency, and reverence for the unfathomable depth of human nature. Their respective treatments of the problem of evil highlight these affinities and point to a further issue, central to their ethics: the problem of individual and communal responsibility.

Four COMMUNITY Until you yourself become the brother of all, there will be no brotherhood. — The Mysterious Visitor to Elder Zosima 1. Introduction The ethical issues related to coexistence in a society are manifold. They include grave clashes of conflicting interests, limitations of individual freedom, aggressive impositions of strong personality, and the search for the best social conditions for development of human talent and skill. Immanuel Kant identified the task of attaining a civil society, which can administer justice universally as “the greatest problem for the human species.” 1 For Fyodor Dostoevsky, the tension between individual freedom, happiness, and equality was similarly a life-long concern. In their respective visions of ethical community, Dostoevsky and Kant stress that there is no “ought” without some sense of “we.” Yet when it comes to the specifics of each community, the ways of Dostoevsky and Kant diverge. Kant puts forward an abstract idea of humanity—the kingdom of ends (Reich der Zwecke)—analogous to an ideal state whose citizens are equal and fully autonomous. Dostoevsky’s moral community, by contrast, is primarily an organic unity, or “a family” of living hearts. These two paradigms—kingdom and family—suggest fundamental differences in the meaning, structure, and purpose of each community. Kant’s ethics is driven by the ideal of the autonomous moral self, emancipated from the fetters of body and emotions, physical limitations and the imposing wills of other people. The trajectory of the ethical individual self in Kant’s philosophy begins with an imperfect empirical self endowed with reason and therefore conscious of the universal moral law of which it is simultaneously the subject and the author. For Dostoevsky, the movement toward the moral ideal occurs in the deeply interconnected world where the self, always already immersed in its community, is engaged in a never-ending balancing act of separation and connectedness. These two ethical paths suggest complementary patterns of moral development. Both thinkers take very seriously the immanent dangers of communal life in their explorations of the possibility of reconciliation of the individual and the social. Many vices of individuals are magnified within social interactions; many others have exclusively communal origin. Dostoevsky and Kant offer intricate insights into the workings of human society, its threats and rewards. In a communal theme, all questions discussed earlier—evil, freedom,

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will, goodness—come together in a dynamic union because our community is the testing ground of our essential ethical commitments and abilities. 2. The Unbearable Other In a short essay entitled, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” Kant describes a regrettable dynamic inherent in any human community as “unsocial sociability.”2 People cannot avoid huddling together, yet the proximity of their peers is rarely peaceful: if, in a primitive state, the “savages” tend to be quite literally at each other’s throats, in relatively more civilized societies, the inner antagonism expresses itself in more subtle ways and may even be concealed as virtue. As Kant notes in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone: we shall have enough of vices of culture and civilization (which are the most offensive of all) to make us rather turn away our eyes from the conduct of men lest we ourselves contract another vice, misanthropy.3 What Kant laments is all too familiar. Wherever we turn, from the earliest mythological accounts of fratricide, to the most recent examples of domestic violence and xenophobia, we find endless confirmations of Jean-Paul Sartre’s acidic: “Hell is—other people.” 4 Kant’s description of the problem in “Idea for a Universal History” takes a characteristically dialectical turn: an individual is destined to seek his place among others “whom he cannot bear yet cannot bear to leave.”5 How does Kant propose to solve the problem of antagonism among human beings, whom he describes elsewhere as creatures “intended for society”? 6 Kant suggests that unsocial sociability is a powerful force of nature, which exists to challenge initially inert humans and create an environment for the enhancement of their talents and rational capabilities. An individual’s desires for honor, property, and power, transformed into vigorous competitiveness, pave the way to excellence and self-expression. Human beings, Kant claims, should be grateful to nature for: fostering social incompatibility, enviously competitive vanity, and insatiable desires for possession and even power. Without these desires, all man’s natural capacities would never be roused to develop. 7 According to Kant, the existence of “unsociableness” and continual mutual resistance indicate the “design of a wise creator—not, as it might seem, the hand of a malicious spirit who had meddled in the creator’s glorious work or spoiled it out of envy.”8

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If social antagonism were to disappear, people would live in “an Arcadian, pastoral existence of perfect concord, self-sufficiency and mutual love.”9 As desirable as such utopian life may appear, it is not, according to Kant, in humanity’s best interest because it reduces human beings to good-natured sheep. Along the same lines, Kant expresses aversion to people’s sheepish tendency to huddle together. The properly human, ethical community is to be made up of equal, autonomous, strong individuals who find creative ways of benefiting from the necessary evils of social resistance. Once sufficiently developed in the competitive environment, human reason will seek peace and reconciliation at a new level of understanding. Rationality will eventually prevail over the negative forces that initially served its development and will channel these forces towards constructive productivity. In the “Idea for Universal History,” Kant sketches possible approaches to this problem—which he dubs the most difficult task for the human race—while in Part Two of the Metaphysics of Morals, known as “The Doctrine of Virtue,” he discusses the practical applicability of the ideal ethical community and the corresponding duties of human beings destined to strive for it. Before we proceed with the discussion of Kant’s idea of ethical community, let us dwell on his concept of unsocial sociability and its repercussions. While Kant’s meticulous critique of social vices is impressive, his analysis of the causes and consequences of antagonism is far from adequate. The roots of unsocial sociability are deeper than Kant supposes and the problems it presents for the human community are hardly reducible to the conflict of interests removed by the eventual progressive development of a species endowed with reason. I will address these and other shortcomings of Kant’s analysis of social coexistence in the following sections, in the discussion of attraction and repulsion in human society. In the present context, Kant finds codependence (most common form of sociability) and animosity (unsociableness) equally distasteful, but allots a more prominent place for animosity in the communal economy. The reason for this preference lies in Kant’s consistent aversion to neediness—also related to his deeply problematic skepticism of closeness—irreconcilable with the ideal image of an autonomous rational agent. Susan Meld Shell, in her comprehensive study of Kant’s idea of community, fittingly places Kant among the “masters of suspicion” when it comes to his critique of sentimental (in Kant’s terminology “pathological”) bonding: [Kant’s] insistence on a certain “pathos of distance”—even, and perhaps especially, within the bonds of friendship—provides a sort of anticipatory, democratic answer to [Friedrich] Nietzsche’s later animadversions against the “last men,” who like “to rub against one another for warmth.” Indeed, there is in Kant’s and Nietzsche’s common fastidiousness a curious aesthetic convergence; both are nauseously repelled by common intimacies— Nietzsche, in the name of “aristocracy,” Kant in the name of a nobility consistent with equality.10

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Where Nietzsche interprets human feeble attempts at closeness as an unwelcome weakness of spirit, Kant posits the Christian commandment of love as an ultimate moral ideal. No matter how insurmountable the obstacles created by the ubiquitous antagonism, individuals have a moral duty to strive toward the ideal. As we will see in the following sections, for Kant, common intimacies and natural compassion, far from being helpful, lead us away from the ideal. The requirement of love is understood in Kant’s system as a commandment to recognize each human being’s unconditional humanity and dignity. Consequently, Kant insists that true love of neighbor is an expression of moral steadfastness and resolve, purified of innate sympathetic inclinations. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov would join Kant and Nietzsche on the issue of the pathos of distance combining the powers of aristocratic aestheticism with social egalitarianism in his critique of society. Contrary to Kant’s idealism, Ivan would also claim that the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself can produce nothing but frustrated attempts, performed out of “self-imposed penance.” Pure loving closeness, untainted by doubt and resentment, is beyond human nature. Whoever claims to have loved a stranger as himself is trading in empty metaphors, for the most intimate encounters inevitably magnify the unbearable features of the other. “If we were to come to love a man, the man himself should stay hidden, because as soon as he shows his face—love vanishes,” says Ivan to Alyosha.11 When Alyosha suggests that such misanthropic sentiments, although common and understandable, indicate spiritual immaturity, Ivan retorts that he, and a numberless multitude of other people, cannot fathom what a completely selfless, Christ-like love among humans would amount to: “Christ’s love for people is in its kind a miracle impossible on earth. True, he was God. But we are not gods.”12 Given human nature and the human condition, the prospect of building a genuine community based on love appears beyond our reach, for our pathetic need for each other and our mutual repulsion work together to undermine both individuation and unity. Philosophers and political theorists who downplay one side of the dilemma and overemphasize the redeeming qualities of the other, be it the dignity of the individual or the healing power of connectedness, at best prove to be psychologically shortsighted. We have no way out of this quagmire unless we are willing to begin to look the dismal human reality in the face. Does this mean that an honest inquiry into the complexities of human relations would inevitably lead to hopelessness and misanthropy? Not necessarily, as the juxtaposition of Dostoevsky’s and Kant’s accounts of community reveal. 3. Love, Sympathy, and Respectful Distancing: Kant’s Stoic Response to a Misanthropist Kant’s treatment of the problem of moral community, just as his whole system of ethics, is informed by the fundamental distinction between “is” and “ought.” As

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Kant puts it in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, “all moral concepts have their seat and origin completely a priori in reason . . . they cannot be abstracted from any empirical, and therefore merely contingent cognitions.”13 Likewise, the concept of a genuinely moral community can never be derived from anthropological observations of what human beings usually do, what they desire to do, or what they fail to accomplish; instead, it should be deduced by reason a priori. Partnerships, institutions, societies, and states we form inevitably reflect our hybrid nature, which combines our animal innocence and brutality, human benevolence and malice, and finally, our sublime rational ability to set our goals and rise above the existence of gullible brutes. Our empirical communities always fall short of the ideal, just as our individual projects aimed at the advancement of virtue could never reach the ultimate state of pure autonomy, rationality, and goodness. But the validity of such projects, whether individual or communal, can only be judged from the perspective of unconditional moral commitment required by the universal law of reason. Kant’s a priori approach does not suggest that the disturbing observations of the misanthropist are irrelevant to an ethical inquiry. It only points out that we must seek the guiding thread, which is supposed to lead humanity away from depravity toward virtue, from the sources unaffected by human vice. Neither our sentiments nor our “Euclidean mind,”14 because of the inherent limitations of their perspectives, can discern the right path out of the labyrinth of unsocial sociability. Kant famously proclaims that practical reason (good will) is the only uncorrupted foundation on which pure morality should be built. Pure practical reason draws a sharp line between self-interest and morality; it unconditionally commands to act in such a way that an individual’s maxim could also become a universal moral law.15 Generations of scholars have contributed expositions and critiques of Kant’s theory of the categorical imperative and his discussion of pure practical reason’s inquiry into the source of its own principle. In this section, I focus on just one aspect of Kant’s ethical theory: the ideal moral community famously presented as “the kingdom of ends” and, most importantly, the applicability of this ideal to the messy empirical world governed by unsocial sociability. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant introduces the kingdom of ends as a union of rational beings under common laws. The kingdom then is a systematic conjunction of all ends—of autonomous law-making agents as ends in themselves and their personal ends, which they set before themselves. Members of such an ideal community have intrinsic worth, or dignity, which springs from their obeying “no laws other than that which [they themselves] at the same time [give].”16 Kant states: “morality is the condition under which alone a rational being can be an end in itself; since only through this is it possible to be a lawgiving member in a kingdom of ends. Hence morality, and humanity insofar as it is capable of morality, is that which alone has dignity.”17 The kingdom of ends is an ideal that can only be used as a regulative principle for testing practical maxims. The question of how this principle can be ap-

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plied to imperfect individuals and their communities remains, by design of the Groundwork, outside the scope of its study. Kant tells his readers that it is not the task of the metaphysics of morals, which is concerned with the a priori moral principles, to conduct an empirical study of human nature and relations. He relegates this task to what he calls “practical anthropology,” a realm to which, according to many critics, the philosopher paid insufficient attention. Contrary to this common line of criticism, Allen Wood argues that Kant’s perceived lack of attention to the question of applicability of a priori principles to empirical reality is overstated. For one thing, Kant was deeply interested in the possibility and the limitations of a systematic study of human nature; in his popular lectures on anthropology, as well as his lectures on ethics, he continuously stressed the link between the two and the importance of a close examination of the earthly creatures to whom ethical principles are to be applied. Yet Kant is realistic about the immense difficulty of the task. Wood writes: Kant’s various remarks about the present state of our sciences of human nature show him to believe both that . . . there are severe limitations on our capacity to treat it scientifically, and also that the present state of the study of human nature is very poor even in relation to its limited possibilities.18 Kant not only acknowledges the importance of an ethico-anthropological investigation, which would deal with “the subjective conditions in human nature that hinder people or help them in fulfilling the laws of a metaphysics of morals” but also, at the end of his philosophical career, offers an examination of such conditions in the Metaphysics of Morals.19 The two major divisions of the Metaphysics of Morals—the “Doctrine of Right” and the “Doctrine of Virtue”—establish that in practical terms, community involves a set of duties legislated by reason, which take into account forces of attraction and repulsion working in unison so that the dignity of an individual is preserved and advanced. At the same time, the communal relations strengthen the bonds of humanity and guarantee equality of moral subjects. The practical difficulty consists in identifying and fostering moral practices which help individuals overcome self-centeredness, isolation, and animosity while preventing the potential loss of individuality in a tight embrace of the society and its institutions. Kant attempts to strike this balance by tirelessly emphasizing the unconditional dignity of humanity, which consists in personal freedom, defined as “independence from being constrained by another’s choice.”20 Freedom is the only innate right that human beings possess from which follows “innate equality,” that is, “independence from being bound by others to more than one can in turn bind them.”21 The division of the book into the “Doctrine of Right” and the “Doctrine of Virtue” signifies two distinct but interrelated projects: exposition of the system of duties that can be given by external laws (“duties of outer freedom”) and the

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system of self-determined duties that never fall under such jurisdiction (“duties of inner freedom,” or ethical duties).22 With respect to the question of community, therefore, the “Doctrine of Right” contains Kant’s reflections on the external relationship of the individual and the social, while the “Doctrine of Virtue,” on which we will focus, exposes the internal dynamic between the two. The two eponymous parts of the “Doctrine of Virtue” deal respectively with human beings’ duties to themselves and their duties to each other, or two related systems of “self-constraint” designed to address the moral challenges of humanity. Virtue in Kant’s system amounts to “a moral strength of the human being’s will in fulfilling his duty,” an “aptitude” resulting from “considered, firm, and continually purified principles.”23 Allen Wood notes that this conception of virtue is tied to Kant’s theory of human nature: According to this theory, in society our inclinations, as expressions of competitive self-conceit, are inevitably a counterweight to the moral law, which requires strength to overcome it. Therefore, there can be no reliable fulfillment of duty without (some degree of) virtue. The theory of ethical duties is called a “Doctrine of Virtue” only because human nature is such that virtue is the fundamental presupposition of all reliable ethical conduct. In the civilized condition, where our feelings and desires are corrupted by social competition and self-conceit, it would be not only dangerous, but blatantly irresponsible, to rely (as [Francis] Hutcheson and [David] Hume would have us do) solely on non-rational feelings and empirical desires as the motives for morally good conduct.24 Consequently, because of the resistance of human nature to the demands of the moral law, individuals have a “duty to virtue,” a moral obligation to strengthen their moral resolve.25 Clearly, holiness (complete virtue) is unattainable for human beings. Therefore, virtue is, according to Kant, “always in progress and yet always start[ing] from the beginning.”26 So where does Kant propose we start, as far as our collective existence is concerned? His answer to this question is both illuminating and problematic. Kant maintains that individuals’ duties to themselves imply their obligation to be “useful members of the world,” since their personal worth belongs to the worth of humanity and ought not to be degraded. With respect to their duties to others, human beings are bound by two “great moral forces”—love and respect— akin to the forces of attraction and repulsion in the physical world. Kant writes: The principle of mutual love admonishes [human beings] constantly to come closer to one another; that of the respect they owe one another, to keep themselves at a distance from one another; and should one of these great moral forces fail, “then nothingness (immorality), with gaping throat,

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DOSTOEVSKY AND KANT: DIALOGUES ON ETHICS would drink up the whole kingdom of (moral) beings like a drop of water” (if I may use Haller’s words, but in a different reference).27

Kant’s analysis of the “forces of attraction and repulsion” in the Metaphysics of Morals differs from that in the “Idea for Universal History.” We have seen that in the earlier essay, Kant focused on the dynamic between destructive animosity and pathetic neediness. The “Idea for Universal History” establishes that, to overcome their unfortunate hybrid existence, human beings need to learn to tame these forces of nature, which in the end serve human progress. By contrast, in the Metaphysics of Morals, the forces of attraction (love) and repulsion (respect) are positive and directed towards common moral goal. Love and respect are not forces of nature but moral predispositions, which belong to the intelligible world. As such, they drive the development of imperfect empirical community towards the ideal commonwealth, the kingdom of ends. Kant is quick to point out that the real “other” may be neither loving nor lovable; neither respectful nor inspiring respect. Yet cultivation of love and respect is one of the most important moral duties. By contrast, with an empirical community, in the kingdom of ends, love and respect are always in perfect equilibrium. This delicate balance of closeness and distancing guarantees honoring agents as ends in themselves, their personal ends, their individuality, and commitment to others. In this context, love and respect connote pure disposition, devoid of all passion. It is love as agape or caritas—charitable, practical love, or benevolence—and respect as recognition of the dignity of the other, “of a worth that has no price, no equivalent for which the object evaluated (aestimii) could be exchanged.”28 Of the two forces, Kant clearly favors respect because recognition of human dignity is the primary condition for the possibility of the kingdom of ends. Kant’s analogical pairing of love with attraction, and respect with repulsion, appears awkward because it suggests that they are necessarily pulling us in opposite directions. The opposition of love and respect appears not only counterintuitive, but also contradictory given Kant’s system where all duties, including the duty of benevolence, are ultimately grounded in respect. Some scholars questioned Kant’s idea that love and respect are somehow reversely directed, or that they can function independently of one another. Others expressed additional doubts that the two forces are even powerful enough to dispel the curse of “unsocial sociability.”29 Robert Johnson, in his essay “Love in Vain” writes: It is [not] at all plausible that respect and love in any sense are “opposed forces” woven into the fabric of our social lives, keeping immorality at bay. Were it true! Our social lives lack either force in sufficient amount to have any such effect. And, indeed, it is only when “considering ourselves in a moral (intelligible) world” as members of a realm of ends, that for Kant respect and love create a stable moral bond, each keeping the other in check.30

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I concur with the conclusion of Johnson’s essay, which demonstrates that Kant’s opposition analogy appears less puzzling if we realize that what Kant calls “love” is itself a form of respect. This again confirms that Kant takes every precaution in his system to avoid anything emotionally charged. In the Metaphysics of Morals, we see two moral forces—technically, two versions of respect—at work, one of which fosters closeness, while the other demands proper distancing. But neither could be based on emotions or else it would no longer be a moral force. Fittingly, Kant’s conception of “love” welcomes agapic connotations while keeping Eros out of the picture, as far away from the moral realm as possible. This approach takes grotesquely austere forms in Kant’s comments on the morality of sexual relationships and marriage. Even the depiction of true friendship suffers from the same detached attitude, reaching its peak in Kant’s peculiar treatment of sympathy —one of the major “duties of love.” The discussion of sympathy and compassion is one of Kant’s clearest, unambiguous statements on communal responsibilities and their limitations, a statement that effectively frames the differences between his conception of community and that of Dostoevsky. As soon as Kant introduces sympathy, he divides it into two distinct forms: a “capacity and a will to share in others’ feelings” and mere “receptivity, given by nature itself, to the feeling of joy and sadness in common with others.”31 Only the first one is free and truly belongs to the moral realm, while the other is akin to susceptibility to a contagious disease, “since is spreads naturally among human beings living near one another.”32 Compassion is an example of this impure type of sympathy. According to Kant, to be compassionate is not a moral duty. Further, he proposes a kind of economy of sympathy, where our feelings for others should be proportionate to our capacity to share their predicament. In a situation where a sufferer is beyond help, the proper attitude is a stoic emotional detachment from the affliction. I quote these striking passages at length: It was a sublime way of thinking that the Stoic ascribed to his wise man when he had him say “I wish for a friend, not that he might help me in poverty, sickness, imprisonment, etc., but rather that I might stand by him and rescue a human being.” But the same wise man, when he could not rescue his friend, said to himself: “what is it to me?” In other words, he rejected compassion. In fact, when another suffers and, although I cannot help him, I let myself be infected by his pain (through my imagination), then two of us suffer, though the trouble really (in nature) affects only one. But there cannot possibly be a duty to increase the ills in the world and so to do good from compassion. This would also be an insulting kind of beneficence, since it expresses the kind of benevolence one has toward someone unworthy, called pity; and this has no place in people’s relations with one another, since they are not to make a display of their worthiness to be happy.33

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These passages, unambiguously symptomatic of Kant’s overall ethical project, highlight his unconditional commitment to the purity of moral conduct. The question is whether in his pursuit of purity Kant is willing to sacrifice too much of what makes life worth living. Much is at stake here insofar as moral community is concerned. Kant’s introduces love and respect as two forces, which could counter “unsocial sociability.” But can the truncated version of love and the allencompassing, yet abstract notion of respect have any such power? Is not compassion—suffering with and for others—the best indicator of moral awareness? Kant’s emphasis on strict proportionality of empathetic response to suffering casts doubt on his claim about the importance of cultivating moral receptivity. Applying Ockham’s razor to interpersonal relations, Kant instructs an aspiring moral agent not to multiply “unnecessary” suffering. But does anybody’s pain ever really affect only one person? Do we not get a glimpse of a true moral communion precisely at those moments when we, despite our inability to help, wholeheartedly share the pain of the other? Among Kant’s compatriots, great poets—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and later Friedrich Hölderlin—would reproach the philosopher for his conscious disregard of the crucial role that suffering and compassion play in moral experience.34 As we are about to see, on this issue Dostoevsky definitively sides with the poets (not coincidentally, Goethe and especially Schiller, in whom the novelist found a kindred spirit, were among his favorite writers). Not only does Dostoevsky—the artist—paint an overwhelming picture of human suffering and explore a broad spectrum of responses to it, Dostoevsky— the thinker—offers his readers unique insight into the cognitive, ethical, and spiritual significance of suffering and compassion. Dostoevsky’s novels demonstrate that by suffering with others, we do not increase the ills of the world, as Kant wants us to believe, but enter a genuine communion of hearts, sustained by love and mutual responsibility. 4. Suffering and Responsibility Cultural historians and theologians observe a tendency in the Russian spiritual tradition to ascribe profound significance to the experience of suffering. Allegedly, this is a tradition that praises voluntary acceptance of suffering, irrespective of its causes and consequences. Some overzealous interpreters tend to extend this attitude to the so-called Russian national character: ostensibly, Russians are gloomy creatures who tend to glorify their misery and derive pleasure from it. In particular, many readers routinely attributed the famous “psychologism” of Dostoevsky’s novels to the novelist’s alleged sado-masochist leanings. To understand the novelist’s views on suffering, we need to look at the broader philosophical and religious context. Dostoevsky’s radical perspective primarily reflects the richness of his life experiences but also draws on cultural sources, such as the Orthodox kenotic tradition, which urges believers to em-

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brace suffering as a genuinely Christian way of life. The term “kenoticism” derives from the Greek word kenein, which literally means “empty,” and is reminiscent of Christ’s “emptying himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”35 Likewise, the tradition of Russian ascetic monasticism, well familiar to Dostoevsky, focused on the kenotic Christ in his earthly incarnation as a poor, suffering, humiliated human being. The founder of Russian monasticism St. Theodosius, in his teaching and monastic practice emphasized, above all, the self-offering of the believer and readiness to undergo severe hardships as a way of life in Christ. Beginning with Theodosius, the ideals of simplicity and humble service to all people, strong rejection of social hierarchy and independence from the worldly power became the hallmarks of kenoticism in Russia. Outside of the official religious institutions, this tradition was most dramatically evident in the culture of the holy fools (yurodivy), or, as they were sometimes called, fools for Christ’s sake. Yurodivy commanded significant respect of people from all social strata despite having no roof over their heads, hardly any clothes to cover their bodies, and no possessions whatsoever. They often performed absurd, offensive public acts and spoke openly to anyone, be it a beggar or a monarch. An extreme form of kenoticism, holy foolishness stands for radical asceticism, rejection of earthly ambitions, chastity, and purity of intention (bordering on insanity), and tireless challenging of the status quo. Russian literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth century responded to this phenomenon with many memorable characters, the most famous of whom is Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, the protagonist in The Idiot. Dostoevsky was fascinated with the social and moral phenomenon of holy foolishness, a blend of insanity and saintliness, abject poverty and charisma.36 The character of Myshkin, which is supposed to represent a perfectly good human being, combines traditional features of a martyr-prince and a holy fool, an artistic choice that appears natural in the context of a culture where moral perfection is strongly associated with the image of the humiliated, suffering Jesus Christ. This broader cultural context helps explain Dostoevsky’s tenacious attempts, from the earliest novellas of the pre-Siberian period to The Brothers Karamazov, to capture the meaning of suffering, its creative and destructive potential. “Suffering and pain are always obligatory for a broad consciousness and a deep heart” ponders Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.37 The underground man takes it further: suffering, he says, is the sole source of all consciousness. Ippolit, a terminally ill youth in The Idiot, speaks of himself as “unworthy” of his affliction, while Ivan Karamazov bases his rebellion against God’s world on the irreconcilable suffering of innocent children. Dostoevsky’s heroes suffer with and for others, seek suffering for its own sake, suffer to expiate their guilt, accept punishment for crimes they did not commit, prostrate themselves before a sinner, who represents suffering humanity, and even offer false confession in pursuit of the purifying power of hardship.

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The actions and words of Dostoevsky’s characters often suggest that suffering is good not only as a means for spiritual transformation, but also as an end in itself. This stance appears even more radical in light of Dostoevsky’s welldeserved reputation as an advocate of the “insulted and injured.” The novelist was among the first intellectuals in Russia to draw public’s attention to outrageous cases of domestic violence and crimes against children. He assiduously commented on contemporary court cases and even took active part in some of them, meeting personally with abusers and their victims. Further, Dostoevsky’s speech about the unavenged tears of a little child, put in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov, is undoubtedly one of the most powerful in world literature. In the twenty-first century, as in Dostoevky’s time, the question remains: who would dare, in a world torn by wars, crime, cruelty, and violence, to speak of the positive value of suffering or, even worse, glorify painful experiences and promote self-inflicted torment? James Scanlan, in his book Dostoevsky the Thinker, attempts to dispel the apparent ambiguity of the writer’s views on suffering by emphasizing that Dostoevsky never viewed all suffering as good; instead, he “excluded whole classes of it from the moral sphere, including some of the suffering most common in human life.”38 Summarizing Dostoevsky’s perspective, Scanlan writes: Suffering serves to counter egoism, humbling the individual and enlivening conscience, and in that respect it is instrumentally valuable as promoting observance of the moral law. But suffering has a more intimate connection with the law when, in Christlike fashion, it is freely accepted for the good of others. Then it is itself a manifestation of the law; it is not an aid to altruism but an active instance of it in its most sublime form, the paradigm of which is Christ’s suffering for the good of all.39 Scanlan’s analysis implies the connection between choosing suffering as a terminal good and kenoticism. For Dostoevsky, Christ always remains an ultimate spiritual example of selfless sacrifice and compassion, whose suffering is a supreme expression of love. Compassion plays a crucial role: the Russian word, sostradanie, literally translates as “co-suffering,” or “suffering-with.” The positive value of suffering could make sense only in the context of an individual’s voluntary acceptance of it, never as projected on the suffering of the other. Accepting suffering has nothing to do with remaining indifferent to human affliction, or with affirming it on the grounds that such experience is beneficial to the sufferer. In accepting their suffering, human beings (however modestly) liken themselves to Christ; in prescribing suffering to others, they liken themselves to Christ’s tormentors. The underground man’s last interaction with Liza contains an intricate depiction of this conception. Liza responds to the anti-hero’s abuse with love and understanding, showing penetrating insight into his unhappy, bitter, excrucia-

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tingly self-conscious personality. But he for whom all human relationships are power struggles chooses to see Liza’s compassionate gesture as a strategic move in a game. In a desperate attempt to take revenge, he adds insult to injury but feels crushed when she leaves him quietly, without reproach. This moment, filled with “the living pain in his heart,” prompts his twisted musings about the purifying power of abuse. His sinister justification of Liza’s suffering, which he caused, highlights his wickedness, which springs from a grievous inability to love and co-suffer. For Dostoevsky, the key to the underground man’s predicament lies in his active resistance to the call of his aching heart. In his refusal to open himself to a loving relationship with another human being, the anti-hero condemns himself to hellish existence, which elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov aptly defines as “suffering of being no longer able to love.” The underground man reasoned that suffering is the root of all consciousness but his pettiness and pride tragically overturn the moral potential of his torment. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky develops many interesting variations of this theme. The two main characters, the murderer Raskolnikov, and his unlikely companion, prostitute Sonia, whose character combines features of a sinner and a holy fool, are both sufferers. However, while Sonia’s pain originates in love and compassion for her family and results in self-sacrifice, Raskolnikov’s torment initially comes from his wounded pride when he fails to prove that he could place himself above the law. Raskolnikov’s struggle with the consequences of his crime reveals that, despite his conscious pursuit of spiritual superiority, he cannot avoid the torment caused by the shedding of blood. He discovers that he can only address his torment by admission of guilt and voluntary acceptance of punishment. Raskolnikov is portrayed as a person capable of deep feeling and it is this sensibility that guides him throughout his ordeal. Sonia’s example, her refusal to judge Raskolnikov, and her infinite patience and kindness all play a crucial role in Raskolnikov’s moral resurrection. Vyacheslav Ivanov’s penetrating analysis of the sinner’s suffering in Crime and Punishment sums up Dostoevsky’s view: She who brings salvation to the murderer, the teacher of repentance, the meek-hearted Sonia, who becomes a prostitute in order to save her parents, brothers and sisters from starvation, is also a victim for the sins of others… Sonia is at the same time herself a great sinner; for, albeit to save others, she deliberately and overweeningly takes upon herself not only suffering, but also the curse of another’s deed, by making it her own. In the sinner who expiates his sin by suffering, there is an antinomy of curse and salvation—unless it happens that love has not been extinguished within him; unless, like Svidrigailov [the novel’s ultimate villain] he has not become incapable of loving. For inability to love is Hell itself, as Zosima teaches; and he who is incapable of loving breaks away entirely from the partnership of all men in both sin and salvation.

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DOSTOEVSKY AND KANT: DIALOGUES ON ETHICS The act of suffering finds a recognition appropriate to its dignity in Raskolnikov’s prostration of himself before Sonia, and in the obeisance made by Father Zosima before Dmitry [in The Brothers Karamazov].40

“We’re cursed together, so let’s go together!” says Raskolnikov to Sonia.41While at that point, he is still unsure about where exactly they should go, his choice of Sonia as a confidant and companion indicates his desperate need for atonement. As Dostoevsky’s states in a letter to his editor, outlining the plot of the novel, truth and justice claim their rights, so that the criminal himself accepts suffering in order to atone for his deed.42 Suffering, love, and compassion form the system of coordinates in which Dostoevsky develops his perspective on community. Suffering’s regenerating power comes not only from repentance but also from a sense of belonging. Where a person cuts himself off from others, where love is no longer possible, suffering is unredeemable. The teaching of father Zosima ties together the ethics of suffering with the ethics of humility and love: If the wickedness of people arouses indignation and insurmountable grief in you, to the point that you desire to revenge yourself upon the wicked, fear that feeling most of all; go at once and seek torments for yourself, as if you yourself were guilty of their wickedness. Take these torments upon yourself and suffer them, and your heart will be eased, and you will understand that you, too, are guilty, for you might have shone to the wicked, even like the only sinless One, but you did not. If you had shone, your light would have lighted the way for others.43 Zosima’s words indirectly respond to Ivan Karamazov’s terrifying question about the tears of a little child. Ivan famously argued that God’s world is intolerable so long as innocent children suffer in it. Even if all torment is destined to disappear in the future, the pain and humiliation of children who suffer today and who have suffered in the past can never be justified by any impending harmony. Dostoevsky considered the question of his hero unanswerable; but through Zosima (and through Alyosha later in the novel) he offers an alternative to Ivan’s indignation. As Robert Belknap points out, instead of “answering” Ivan’s question, the elder redirects it to the questioner; instead of asking why God allows suffering, Zosima urges you to ask yourself why you allow it.44 Unlike Alyosha, who devotes himself to his family and community, Ivan holds on to his “drawing room discussions” of divine injustice and disowns the conflict between Dmitry and his father. Meanwhile, rowdy Dmitry, inspired by the mystical vision of the “suffering babe,” accepts punishment for the crime he did not commit. Alyosha befriends a group of schoolboys, who initially gang up on one of their classmates but, with Alyosha’s guidance, begin to learn the values of mutual love and compassion. Grushenka curtails her pride and self-

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centeredness and resolves to share Dmitry’s ordeal. These characters, themselves abandoned children in the past, transform their torment into healing relationships with others. Ivan’s mental anguish, on the other hand, is never relieved because he continues to treasure his acute sense of injustice at the expense of the real, heart-felt connections to people around him. His passionate search for the answer to the paradox of senseless suffering leads him into a deadlock. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, confirming the sheer destructiveness of undeserved pain. In Ivan’s world, suffering is purposeless and will always remain so. In Dostoevsky’s artistic universe, no one’s suffering is an isolated event that concerns only one person. Dostoevsky’s solitary figures, the underground man, Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, reluctantly discover that they are a part of unbounded relationships, which penetrate their personalities. Among them, only Raskolnikov proves to be capable of overcoming his aloofness. In the words of Vyacheslav Ivanov, Raskolnikov’s story confronts the reader with “a revelation of the mystic guilt incurred by the personality that shuts itself up in solitude, and for this reason drops out of the comprehensive unity of mankind.” 45 Dostoevsky’s carefully designed interplay of self-inflicted isolation and unrealized connectedness highlights, at every juncture of the hero’s journey, the irreconcilable tragedy of solitary pride and the healing power of communion. Despite Raskolnikov’s severe self-segregation, his every step is intimately linked to the lives of other people. The world from which he tries to escape is not an impersonal, abstract setting that can be thought away; it is populated by people whose vivid, palpable presence constantly disturbs his glorious illusion of self-sufficiency. While Raskolnikov edgily exclaims, “Let them all gobble each other alive—what is it to me?” he is nonetheless moved by people’s predicaments.46 He takes a stance against his sister’s engagement, gives money to Marmeladov’s beleaguered family, and helps a young girl on a boulevard to escape her abuser. His pursuit of superhuman indifference leads instead to a realization that he can never be exempt from the bonds of his heart. A Kantian stoic may argue that if only Dostoevsky’s heroes could learn to distance themselves properly from the ills of the world and respond impassively to the suffering of others, if only they could learn to see where their responsibilities end and other people’s responsibilities begin, they would be able to avoid the torment they unwittingly take upon themselves. But Dostoevsky’s ideal of moral community, contrasting with Kant’s kingdom of ends, is built on the allencompassing responsibility of everyone for everyone else. This conception grounds Dostoevsky’s response to rationalist-autonomous ethics. As we have seen in Chapter Two, the intricate unity of autonomous rationality and volition is the foundation of Kant’s ethics, on an individual and communal level. For Dostoevsky, the centripetal forces that bring hearts together are love, compassion, and forgiveness. It is a polyphonic community, which unites radical and sometimes rationally irreconcilable differences. Where “rational

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wills” negotiate their differences by appeal to reason, hearts reach their accord by way of loving understanding and tenderness, despite the clash of rational arguments. Aglaya, one of the heroines in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, sums up this perspective in her impulsive charge against Prince Myshkin: she claims that Myshkin has no tenderness, only bare truth, and that therefore he is unjust. In Dostoevsky’s ideal community, where love, tenderness, and care supersede rational considerations, a bipolar opposition of the “individual” and the “social” appears out of place. I believe that Mikhail Bakhtin is right when he asserts that in Dostoevsky: the very being of an individual (both external and internal) is the deepest communion. To be means to communicate. Absolute death (non-being) is the state of being unheard, unrecognized, unremembered.47 In one of his notebooks, Dostoevsky makes a provocative suggestion: Try to divide yourself; try to determine where your personality ends and another personality begins. Can you do it by means of science? This is exactly one of the promises of science. After all, socialism bases itself on science. For Christianity, the very idea of such division is unthinkable.48 Throughout The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky combines the Orthodox idea of sobornost’ (mystical communion of believers), the teachings of Orthodox theologians, and his own heart-felt convictions, creating a vision of ideal community where, as Zosima puts it, “all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.”49 Our empirical community obviously falls short of the ideal. We may misinterpret or destroy our relationships; we are sometimes hostile or indifferent to one another; we suffer from self-conceit or submissiveness. Attuned to these tensions, Dostoevsky brilliantly portrays the human craving for individuality “to the point of convulsions” and the overwhelming need for togetherness. His heroes’ journeys show the destructive nature of self-imposed isolation and indifference on the one hand and the leveling of a personality by faceless social institutions on the other. Through these struggles, Dostoevsky emphasizes that the communal project is never complete: it needs to be continuously upheld by the tireless work of the heart. At every rare moment of genuine contact between two hearts—in friendship, love, confession—a communion is re-created. No social contract or civic arrangement, no revolutionary ideology of liberty, equality, or fraternity can ever substitute for the living dialogue of two human hearts. Dostoevsky was suspicious of the contemporary utopian socialist movement because it claimed to have found a “scientific” solution to the incredibly complex problem of

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communication by shifting the focus from heart-to-heart communion to impersonal social constructs. 50 A conscious act of love and trust—a person’s willingness to share self with another— requires courage, openness, internal freedom, even self-sacrifice, whereas conformity is sufficient for a successful conventional way of life in “the human anthill.” Fully recognizing the self-defeating nature of doctrinal humanitarian ideals, Dostoevsky praises the search for a communion of hearts, which would encourage personal discovery and at the same time nourish people’s vital bonds to one another. Let us look at one example of Dostoevsky’s depiction of conscious recreation and preservation of community: the final episode of The Brothers Karamazov. 5. Joining of Hearts: Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone The Brothers Karamazov ends with the scene in which Alyosha Karamazov and the schoolboys he befriended return from the funeral of their mutual friend, nineyear-old Ilyusha. They stop at a large stone at which Ilyusha used to sit and talk with his father, retired captain Snegirev. The greatest misfortune of the captain’s already distressed family started from his being publicly defamed by Alyosha’s older brother Dmitry. Having learned that Snegirev assisted father Karamazov in a plot against him, enraged Dmitry found the captain in a tavern, took him outside, and beat him up in front of the gathered crowd. Ilyusha, present at the scene, begged Dmitry in vain to forgive his father and let him go. Deeply wounded by the insult, and having been teased and persecuted by his schoolmates because of it, the boy alienated himself from everyone. The situation was aggravated when, during a fight, one of the boys unintentionally injures Ilyusha. Snegirev’s family could not afford the necessary treatment and the injury eventually caused Ilyusha’s death. In Ilyusha’s tragedy, all the major characters of the novel are implicitly present. The ugly conflict in the Karamazov family destroyed the father and his sons—the old man is brutally killed, Dmitry is wrongly accused of murder and is sentenced to hard labor in Siberia, Ivan sinks into delirium, and Smerdyakov commits suicide. Their devastating excesses, cruelty, lust, and heartless indifference spill over the boundaries of their household and irreversibly damage other people. Elder Zosima’s words about universal interconnectedness assume a concrete, ethical meaning: one circulatory system joins all human hearts; good and evil travel through its arteries. The diseases of our hearts—pride, intellectual arrogance, misanthropy, insensitivity—are contagious. But the virtues of our hearts—love, compassion, acceptance, tenderness, and trust—are no less influential. Zosima’s teaching is a call to take responsibility for our contribution to the community of hearts. In a highly concentrated form, the elder’s teaching also contains a response to the entire set of problems of The Brothers Karamazov—mutual responsibility of fathers and

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sons, brother for brother, and ultimately everyone for everyone else. Zosima’s homilies stress that there are no outsiders in the field of ethical responsibility: See, here you have passed by a small child, passed by in anger, with a foul word, with a wrathful soul; you perhaps did not notice the child, but he saw you, and your unsightly and impious image has remained in his defenseless heart. You did not know it, but you may thereby have planted a bad seed in him, and it may grow, and all because you did not restrain yourself before the child, because you did not nurture in yourself a heedful, active love.51 Alyosha took the words of his teacher to heart and tried to provide his young friends with an ennobling example of love and goodness. Through Alyosha’s mediation, the boys, who once hated Ilyusha, became his friends. In the scene by the stone, we witness Alyosha’s interaction with the boys on the ruins of his community destroyed by the Karamazovs’ baseness. Inspired by the memory of Ilyusha’s courage and suffering, Alyosha stops the children and speaks: Gentlemen, I should like to have a word with you, here, on this very spot… we shall be parting soon. Right now I shall be with my two brothers for a while, one of whom is going into exile, and the other is lying near death. But soon I shall leave this town, perhaps for a very long time. And so we shall part, gentlemen. Let us agree here, by Ilyusha’s stone, that we will never forget—first, Ilyushechka, and second, one another. And whatever may happen to us later in life, even if we do not meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy, whom we once threw stones at—remember, there by the little bridge?—and whom afterwards we all came to love so much. He was a nice boy, a kind and brave boy, he felt honor and his father’s bitter offense made him rise up. And so, first of all, let us remember him, gentlemen, all our lives.52 Alyosha urges the children to remember the event of their communion in love. His passionate words seek to make the loving present conscious of its aggressive past for the sake of the future. He reminds them that hatred, mistrust, and violence overshadowed their first encounter. Alyosha’s crossing the little bridge that separated the fighting boys was symbolic: he made the first step toward reconciliation and understanding. When later Alyosha resolved to seek out the outcast boy and he learned about the torment Dmitry had brought upon his family, he took it upon himself not only to apologize for his brother but also to restore Ilyusha’s relationship with other children. The sacred memory that Alyosha emphatically creates in his listeners’ hearts is the memory of their friend, through which each one of them will remember himself as having overcome hatred and cynicism, learning to be kind and caring. Alyosha asks the boys to enshrine the event of their togetherness in their hearts and treasure this

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memory for years to come. Whether the future will bring happiness or misfortune, he says: all the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are.53 This one memory, Alyosha continues, is a spiritual treasure that needs to be preserved and cherished: You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.54 Moral awareness begins with and rests upon a beautiful experience of loving and being loved. Its recollection provides a guiding light and a genuine source of moral enlightenment. Neither the introduction of moral principles nor the formation of good habits can substitute for such a memory. Following Zosima’s example, Alyosha emphasizes that storing memories of love helps to dissolve evil and moral indifference in the future. Alyosha speaks from his experience as an abandoned child, who, despite having lost his mother at the age of four and having been mistreated by his reprobate father, still carries his mother’s loving image in his heart. From the faded picture of his early childhood he remembers the slanting rays of the setting sun in a quiet summer evening and his mother on her knees before the icon, crying and hugging him, holding him out toward the icon and pleading for him to the Mother of God. He remembers her face in tears, beautiful and meek; the mother’s venerated image, repeatedly called upon in recollection, itself became an icon for the son.56 Alyosha stops at Ilyusha’s stone to commit the spark of love and sincere compassion to his and his friends’ memory. He purposely transforms what may be for the children an accidental affection—“love by chance,” as Zosima called it—into active, self-conscious love. “Perhaps we will even become wicked later on,” he imagines: will even be unable to resist a bad action, will laugh at people’s tears and at those who say, as Kolya exclaimed today: “I want to suffer for all people,” perhaps we will scoff wickedly at such people. And yet, no matter how wicked we may be—and God preserve us from it—as soon as we remember how we buried Ilyusha, how we loved him in his last days, and how we’ve been talking just now, so much as friends, so together, by this

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An unassailable collective memory, which Alyosha creates, ties his heart to the hearts of the children, who may not yet be able to comprehend the meaning of his utterance, but will remember the event of their togetherness. Robert Louis Jackson, in his article devoted to this moving episode, contrasts Alyosha’s speech and his way of addressing his audience with Ivan’s rebellion. Jackson points out that while the pivotal point in both speeches is the suffering of a child, the distinct manners in which the two brothers approach it bring forth a crucial difference between them and their subject matter: Ivan takes his case to heaven, while Alyosha brings his case down to earth. Ivan seeks to split Alyosha off from the elder Zosima and his faith; Alyosha finds in the drama and death of Ilyusha a meeting ground for union and communion among the boys and himself.58 Instead of shielding himself from pain, Alyosha embraces the burning memory of the child’s suffering and invites his young followers to join him in the moment of compassionate remembrance. Jackson notes that almost all of Alyosha’s statements begin with “we,” while Ivan’s speech in punctuated by “I’s,” a difference in which Dostoevsky’s message is unmistakably discernible: while sharing Ivan’s concern for the suffering of children, the novelist reminds the reader “by the drumbeat of “I’s” that Ivan effectively barricaded himself from his own compassion.” Alyosha, on the other hand, wholeheartedly partakes in the suffering of the real human being. As Jackson puts it: Alyosha’s compassion is direct, comprehensible. Ilyusha’s suffering and sacrifice are presented as grounds for the moral and spiritual unity of the boys. In contrast to Ivan’s parody of the notion of “solidarity in sin,” Alyosha advances the idea of the suffering child as a basis for solidarity in love.59 In the final pages of The Brothers Karamazov—the title of which suggests the centrality of the problem of brotherhood—we witness a dramatic transformation of lacerated, accidental community into a genuine brotherhood. The scene by the stone reaches its climax with Alyosha’s solemn words: “You are all dear to me, gentlemen, from now on I shall keep you all in my heart, and I ask you to keep me in your hearts too!” 60 The boys respond passionately by promising to love and remember each other. The novelist leaves the world of “the Karamazovs” in a moment of perfect communion among young hearts striving for goodness.

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6. “A Bit of Melodrama” What harm is there in a bit of melodrama? Am I not being melodramatic? And yet I’m sincere, really sincere. —Dmitry Karamazov’s “confession of an ardent heart.” On 8 June 1880, a monument to Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin was ceremoniously unveiled in Moscow. Dostoevsky was invited, along with Ivan Turgenev and Ivan Aksakov, to be an honorary speaker to the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. Dostoevsky was at the zenith of his literary career; his grand novel, The Brothers Karamazov, was close to completion, most of the book had appeared in installments in a thick journal and was widely read and discussed in Russian intellectual circles. The writer received a warm welcome in Moscow and enjoyed tremendous public recognition. Readers approached him with enthusiasm, called him the great prophet, and testified that reading The Brothers Karamazov had made them better persons. But no one could imagine the triumph that was awaiting Dostoevsky’s speech in honor of Pushkin. It was one of those instances when reality exceeds our wildest dreams. Dostoevsky came up to the stage and began reading—slowly and quietly. He spoke about Pushkin’s universal genius, his prophetic gift, and his incredible poetic receptivity, which allowed him to incarnate diverse national and personal destinies. What other speakers had failed to do, Dostoevsky did with unprecedented force and conviction. In his literary tribute to Pushkin, according to populist author Gleb Uspensky, the novelist tied up in one indissoluble knot the problem of the national significance of Pushkin and the most burning contemporary questions—first of all, the question of the Russian liberation movement, its nature and historical destiny.61 At every page, and sometimes at every sentence, the elated audience interrupted his reading with bursts of applause. He spoke louder, with genuine emotion, fire, and exaltation. What happened at the end, when Dostoevsky proclaimed the universal unity of all humankind and called upon all political, ideological, and literary movements to make peace and embrace each other, astounds us even now in its telling. In Dostoevsky’s words: When I proclaimed at the end the universal unity of people, the hall seemed to go into hysterics, when I finished, there was—I won’t tell you about the roar, howl of elation: strangers in the audience cried, wept, embraced each other, and swore to each other to become better, not to hate each other anymore but to love. The order of the meeting was shattered: everyone rushed up to me on the stage: grand dames, female students, state secretaries, male students—they all hugged and kissed me. All the members of our society who were on the stage hugged and kissed me, and all of them, literally everyone, cried in elation . . . . suddenly two old men whom I had never known stopped me: “We have been enemies for twenty years, have not

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As the meeting broke up, Dostoevsky tried to escape back stage, but the crowd pushed its way in behind him. One student, in tears, tried to get through to the novelist but, having reached his idol, fell down on the floor and lost consciousness. Reportedly, a few other people also fainted. During a brief recess, a group of women crowned the novelist with a huge laurel wreath exclaiming: “This is for the Russian woman, of whom you said so many good words!”63 The mayor of Moscow thanked Dostoevsky in the name of the city and the chairman of the Society of the Lovers of Russian Literature announced that the society had unanimously elected Dostoevsky as an honorary member. During the next few days, all the newspapers and journals fought over the privilege of publishing Dostoevsky’s historic speech. It appeared in the Moskovskie vedomosti on 13 June 1880. By that time, passions had calmed down and some enthusiasts, including those who had shed tears at the renowned event, began to reconsider their hasty effusions. Dostoevsky’s ideological opponent Turgenev, who publicly embraced the novelist after his speech, had now written to one of his correspondents that Dostoevsky’s declamation was based on deceitful premises that flatter Russian nationalist vanity and that it was no more than mystical nonsense.64 The atmosphere of universal togetherness quickly turned into a routine political squabble, ugly and furious as usual. Critics accused the novelist of all the deadly sins. His words, formerly considered prophetic, were subjected to meticulous critical scrutiny. The opinion that the galvanizing power of the Pushkin speech was largely due to its emotional appeal instead of its intellectual merits spread quickly. Ironically, the situation was unfolding in a Dostoevskian manner: how often did the novelist depict people’s tendency to laugh at and dismiss their purest, most idealistic impulses and aspirations! Dostoevsky knew, perhaps better than anybody in Moscow literary circles, that an appeal to the moral ideal, and even an artistic depiction of goodness, provokes suspicion and laughter at best, hatred and contempt at worst. Admired and worshipped by some, condemned and ridiculed by others, the novelist left Moscow for his summerhouse in Staraya Russa, where he resumed his work on the last chapters of The Brothers Karamazov. No doubt, memories of both the triumph and the rout of his speech inspired the concluding episodes of the novel. This time, Dostoevsky chose a different audience for his message: through Alyosha’s mouth he spoke to children, not to keen literary critics. Characteristically, in his notes to the novel, Dostoevsky contemplated the possibility of sobering the scene with a few cautious remarks.65 But he eventually decided to leave the spirit of jubilation intact, as if exclaiming—like Dmitry at the begin-

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ning of the novel—what harm is there in a bit of melodrama? The point, we remember, is to be sincere. Dostoevsky’s decision to blend the religious spirituality and romantic exultation at the end of The Brothers Karamazov was deliberate. According to Dostoevsky’s plan, Alyosha’s speech at the stone was to set the stage for the new novel, with the tentative title “Children,” in which Alyosha and the boys of The Brothers Karamazov were to become the main characters. Dostoevsky’s design was not realized; the second volume was never written. But whether the moment of breakthrough to the good belongs to the middle of the Karamazov epic (as the novelist planned it) or to the end (as we know it), it is a sincere and artistically elaborate attempt to depict a celebration of a true communion. How successful was his depiction? Is the moment of the highest good, in contrast to the all-toohuman experience of evil and wickedness, communicable? Dante Alighieri’s metaphor is paradigmatic here: the poet, having gone though all the cycles of hell, catches a glimpse of the divine light, but realizes that no human words can carry his experience. Any message ignited by the ideal, to which Dostoevsky and many of his predecessors tried to direct the human spirit, is destined to be misinterpreted as “mystical nonsense.” In the last issue of A Writer’s Diary, 66 Dostoevsky wrote bitterly that after his speech at the Pushkin celebration, everyone heaped mud and abuse on him, “just as if [he] had done the most vile and disgusting thing by uttering [his] word.” 67 Yet he expressed hope that his word and his dream of the universal communion of hearts would survive, no matter how much it was degraded by his ideological opponents. “Perhaps my word will not be forgotten,”68 Dostoevsky wrote. He knew that the word lives as long as it speaks to someone’s heart.

EPILOGUE It was not only in the character of a companion that Kant shone, but also as a most courteous and liberal host, who had no greater pleasure than in seeing his guests happy and jovial, and rising with exhilarated spirits from the mixed pleasures—intellectual and liberally sensual—of his Platonic banquets. Thomas De Quincey The Last Days of Immanuel Kant This book has been an exciting adventure for me as its author. In the process of setting up a “dialogue” between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Immanuel Kant, I often felt as if I were arranging a virtual dinner party, not unlike those Kant regularly hosted. When considering potential invitees, the philosopher tried to follow two general rules: first, to ensure “sufficient variety to the conversation,” the guests had to come from diverse walks of life. Second, “to impress a movement of gaiety and juvenile playfulness on the conversation,” the company needed to include young, even very young, people.1 In keeping with the spirit of Kant’s banquets, I took the liberty of inviting Dostoevsky’s “fantastical” characters, accompanied by their creator, along with a few of his critics and admirers. Radically dissimilar participants, exalted and somber, respectful and rebellious, idealistic and cynical, joined the conversation at different junctures. They questioned, provoked, and incited their host and each other. Most of the time, as a master of ceremonies, Kant supplied themes for conversation and offered elaborate commentaries. The guests were quick to respond with philosophical conjectures and observations as well as anecdotes and personal stories. Thus, Ivan Karamazov readily accepted many of Kant’s theoretical challenges: he radicalized Kant’s critique of empirically oriented reason, effectively dismissed the suggestion that reason can be suspended to make room for faith, and contributed penetrating remarks on the problem of “unsocial sociability.” At the same time, the dramatic events of Ivan’s life unfolding before our eyes called into question his metaphysical rebellion and his detached intellectualism. The reader may also recall the intense dialogue of two brothers during which Alyosha sensed a fatal discrepancy between Ivan’s ideas and the calling of his tender, sensitive heart. Alyosha’s intuition led to a spontaneous articulation of Dostoevsky’s philosophy of life and its main principle—“love life before logic.” As Alyosha put it, because of Ivan’s primal thirst for life, “half of his work is done.” When Ivan inquired about the second half, the younger brother answered with the mysterious: “Resurrecting your dead, who may never have died.” 2 We know that Ivan’s “precious dead” are European sages—philosophers, scientists, mystics; we remember his admiration for

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their “ardent past life, passionate faith in their deeds, their truth, their struggle, their science.” 3 For Ivan, “resurrecting the dead” meant reclaiming the living legacy of European civilization, infusing old ideas with new energy, a sense of wonder, and passion for truth. The character here clearly echoes the novelist and his utopian vision of Russia’s role in the spiritual revival of Europe, which, despite his famous reservations, he conceded to be “the land of holy miracles.”4 Fittingly, the present book is a tribute to the lives and ideas of the two great thinkers who, despite their immense differences, remain mutually enriching interlocutors. I ventured to replay parts of their multidimensional conversation for my reader in order to test the new version of deontological ethics—the deontology of the heart. The unusual name I chose for this ethical perspective reflects the two of its defining features: on the one hand, this ethics is unconditional and duty-oriented; on the other, it springs from the heart and expresses itself through active, self-sacrificial, charitable love. I suspect that in the history of philosophy “deontology” will always remain associated with Kant’s name and the two central concepts of his moral theory: pure practical reason and the categorical imperative. Kant defined a moral duty as conscious, self-imposed constraint, the purpose of which is to counteract human flaws and imperfections. A series of dialogues with Dostoevsky’s characters showed this conception of duty to be severely limited. This book’s major themes—freedom, evil, temptation, suffering, community—all pointed in the direction of a moral imperative which draws its vital force from the depth of human nature and human condition. Surpassing the alleged objectivity of reason, the imperative of the heart directly responds to humanity’s failures and triumphs, suffering and joy. I do not pretend to have offered my readers a fully comprehensive treatment of any of the ethical and philosophical questions introduced in this book. My predictions regarding the book’s possible contribution to the formal academic discussion of the future of deontology are also quite modest. Yet I am delighted to have been able to claim, for myself and my readers, guest places at the intellectual feast inspired by the philosopher and the novelist. I rise from it with an “exhilarated spirit,” as Kant hoped his guests would. I would consider this banquet a great success if some of my readers shared my sentiment.

NOTES N.B. After first use (Chapter One, n18), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Complete Collection of Dostoevsky’s Writings in 30 volumes 1972–1990), ed. G. M. Fridlender (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990) will be annotated as PSS. Volumes 28, 29, and 30 were published in two separately bound parts, which will be indicated by the annotation, vol. X.1 or X.2.

Introduction 1. Yakov Golosovker, Dostoevskii i Kant (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1963), pp. 99, 100; Louis J. Shein, “Kantian Elements in Dostoevsky’s Ethics,” in Western Philosophical Systems in Russian Literature, University of Southern California Series in Slavic Humanities, no. 3, ed. A. M. Mlikotin, (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1979), pp. 59–69. 2. Nikolai Karamzin, Izbrannyia mesta iz pisem ruskago puteshestvennika (Letters of a Russian Traveler) (Moskva: v universitetskoi tipografii, 1838). 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 4. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 56–57. 5. Alexander von Schönborn, “Church and State: Dostoevsky and Kant,” in Cold Fusion: Aspects of the German Cultural Presence in Russia, ed. G. Barabtarlo (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), p. 127. 6. Robert B. Louden, “Toward a Genealogy of ‘Deontology,’” Journal of the History of Philosophy,34:4 (October 1996), pp. 571–592. 7. Ellis Sandoz, Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, 2nd ed. rev. (Willmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2000), p. xiv. 8. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics) (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1979); available in English as M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

Chapter One 1. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 44. 2. Ibid. 3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, vol. 1, trans. K. A. Lantz (Chicago, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1994), p. 136 (paperback version). 4. Aristotle, “On the Parts of Animals,” and “Concerning the Soul,” Aristotle Selections, ed. William David Ross (New York: CB. Scribner’s Sons, 1938). 5. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. William Finlayson Trotter (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), fragments 110, 277, 278. 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or, On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

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7. Søren Kierkegaard, The Works of Love, trans. Howard Vincent Hong and Edna Hatlestad Hong (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 29. 8. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Arnold V. Miller, with analysis of text by John Niemeyer Findlay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), chap. 5, pp. 367–380. 9. Frank Nager, The Mythology of the Heart (Basel, Switzerland: Editiones Roche, 1993); Noubar Boyadjian, The Heart: Its History, Its Symbolism, Its Iconography, and Its Diseases (Antwerp, Belgium: Esco Books, 1985); Stephan Strasser, Phenomenology of Feeling: An Essay on the Phenomena of the Heart (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1977), pp. 11–14. 10. Gerald Kittel, “Kardia,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 3 (Michigan: Grand Rapids, 1965), p. 611. 11. Paul Pearsall, The Heart’s Code (Broadway Books, New York, 1998). 12. Ibid., p. 5. 13. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993). 14. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 15. Sergei Hackel, “The Religious Dimension: Vision or Evasion? Zosima’s Discourse in The Brothers Karamazov,” in New Essays on Dostoevsky, eds. Malcolm V. Jones and Garth M. Terry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 146. 16. Ibid. 17. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, p. 460. 18. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment: Handwritten Drafts. (Prestuplenie i nakazanie. Rukopisnye redaktsii.) in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Complete Collection of Dostoevsky’s Writings in 30 volumes 1972–1990), vol. 7, ed. G. M. Fridlender (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973), p. 225 (hereafter PSS). 19. Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 272–273. 20. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, p. 549. 21. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 22. Ibid., p. 592. 23. Ibid., p. 230. 24. Ibid., p. 231. 25. Ibid., p. 263. 26. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 55; Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper, 1960), p. 19. 27. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 65. 28. Ibid. 29. Vladimir Soloviev, “Kritika otvlechennykh nachal” (“Critique of Abstract Principles”), in Sobranie sochinenii V. S. Solovieva (V. S. Soloviev’s Collected Works), 12 vol. (Brussels: Zhizn’ s Bogom, 1966), reprinted from the 1911–1914 ed., vol. 2, pp. 44–62; Pamphil D. Yurkevich, “Serdtse i ego znachenie v dukhovnoi zhizni cheloveka, po ucheniiu slova Bozhiia” (“The Heart and its Significance in Man’s Life in Accordance with the Word of God”), in Filosofskie proizvedeniia (Philosophical Writings) (Moscow: Pravda, 1990), pp. 86–91.

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30. Lev Shestov, Nachala i kontsy: sbornik statei (Beginnings and Endings: A Collection of Essays) Sochineniia v 2-kh tomakh (Writings in Two Volumes), vol. 2, ed. Anatolii Akhutin (Moskva: Izd-vo “Nauka,” 1993), p. 398. 31. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 235. 32. Ibid., p. 70. 33. Ibid., pp. 235–236. 34. Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, vol. 1, pp. 1067, 1372. 35. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 29. 36. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, pp. 318–319. 37. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letter to Pobedonostsev of 24 August 1879, PSS, vol. 30.1 (1988), p. 122. 38. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 58. 39. Ibid., p. 319. 40. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 161. 41. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, pp. 236–237. 42. Frank Friedeberg Seeley, “Ivan Karamazov” in New Essays on Dostoevsky, eds. Malcolm V. Jones and Garth M. Terry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 115–136. 43. Nancy F. McKenzie, “The Primacy of Practical Reason in Kant’s System,” Idealistic Studies, 15 (Spring 1985), pp. 199–217; Pauline Kleingeld, “Kant on the Unity of Theoretical and Practical Reason,” The Review of Metaphysics, 52 (December 1998), pp. 311–339. 44. Herbert James Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1967), pp. 81–82. 45. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 66. 46. Paton, The Categorical Imperative, p. 80. 47. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 48. Ibid., pp. 204–205. 49. Ibid., p. 209. 50. Ibid., p. 519. 51. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 78, 79. 52. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, pp. 264–265 53. Ibid., p. 148. 54. Ibid., p. 168.

Chapter Two 1. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 66. 2. Frederick Rauscher, “Kant’s Conflation of Pure Practical Reason and Will,” Proceedings of the 8th International Kant Congress, vol. 2 (1995), pp. 579–585; Yirmiyahu Yovel, “Kant’s Practical Reason as Will: Interest, Recognition, Judgment and Choice,” The Review of Metaphysics, 52 (December 1998), pp. 267–294.

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3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 632. 4. Rauscher, “Kant’s Conflation of Pure Practical Reason and Will,” p. 579. 5. Karl Ameriks, “Kant on Spontaneity: Some New Data,” in Akten des Siebenten Internationalen Kant-Kongresses: Kurfürstliches Schloß zu Mainz 1990 (Proceedings of the Seventh International Kant Congress: Electoral Palace at Mainz 1990), vol. 1 of 2, eds. Manfred Kleinschnieder and Gerhard Funke (Bonn, Germany: Bouvier, 1992), pp. 469–479. 6. John R. Silber, “The Ethical Significance of Kant’s Religion,” in Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper, 1960), p. lxxxv. 7. Henry Sidgwick, “The Kantian Conception of Free Will” in Immanuel Kant: Critical Assessments, vol. 1, ed. Ruth F. Chadwick (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 201–209; Nelson Potter, “Does Kant Have Two Concepts of Freedom?” Akten des 4. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses: Mainz, 6.–10. April 1974 (Proceedings of the 4th International Kant Congress at Mainz 6–10 April 1974) (Berlin: de Gruyter,1974), pp. 590–596. 8. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 19. 9. Sidgwick, “The Kantian Conception of Free Will,” p. 203. 10. Ibid., emphasis added. 11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp. 25–26, 31. 12. Georgii Fedotov, “Rossiia i svoboda” (“Russia and Freedom”), in Novyi grad: Sbornik statei (A New City: A Collection of Essays) (New York: izd-vo imeni Chekhova, 1952), pp. 151–152 (translation is the author’s). 13. George Krugovoy, “Kant’s Critiques and Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground,” Transactions of the Association of Russian American Scholars in the USA, 25 (1992–1993), pp. 103–109; David Goldfarb, “Kant’s Aesthetics in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground,” (presented at the Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference, Columbia University, 18 March 1995), Newsletter of the Society for Russian Religious Philosophy, 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 11–19. 14. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, p. 31. 15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary Gregor, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 202. 16. Ibid., pp. 154–156, 168–170, 198–200; Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 69–71, 154–156. 17. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 31. 18. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, p. 33.. 19. Ibid., p. 25. 20. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 545. 21. Ralf Meerbote, “Wille and Willkür in Kant’s Theory of Action,” in Kant (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1982), pp. 69–84. 22. Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1960) p. 35; Silber, “The Ethical Significance of Kant’s Religion”; Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 129–136. 23. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 544. 24. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 162.

Endnotes 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

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Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 17, 23, 24, esp. 19. Ibid., pp. 17–24. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid. Ibid., p. 43. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, p. 8. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 43. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, p. 17. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, reprinted from the original ed. in 3 vol. and ed. with an analytical index, L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), p. 268. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, p. 14. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 16 Ibid., p. 19 Ibid., p. 16. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 310. Roger B. Anderson, “Notes from Underground: The Arrest of Personal Development,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 24:4 (Winter 1990), pp. 413–430; Gary Rosenshield, “Rationalism, Motivation, and Time in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground,” Dostoevsky Studies, 3 (1982), pp. 87–100; Mark Spilka, “Playing Crazy in the Underground,” Minnesota Review, 6 (1975), pp. 230–243; James Lethcoe, “Self-Deception in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground,” Slavic and East European Journal, 10:1 (1966), pp. 9–12. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, p. 5. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 265; The Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 173–175. PSS, vol. 28.1 (1985), p. 63. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, p. 42. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 128–129. Ibid., pp. 129–130. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letter to A. Wrangel of 31 May, continued on 14 April 1865, PSS, vol. 28.2 (1985), pp. 116, 120; quoted in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 369–370. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865, p. 315. Carol A. Flath, “Fear of Faith: The Hidden Religious Message of the Notes from Underground,” Slavic and East European Journal, 374 (1993), pp. 510–529; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letter to Mikhail Dostoevsky of 26 March 1864, PSS, vol. 28.2 (1985), p. 73. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, p. 38.

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1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letter to Herder, 7 June 1793, in Goethes Werke, Weimar Edition, ed. Sophie von Sachsen (Weimar, Germany: H. Böhlau, 1887– 1919), sec. 4, vol. 10, p. 75, quoted in Emil L. Fackenheim, “Kant and Radical Evil,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 23 (1954), p. 340. 2. Fackenheim, “Kant and Radical Evil,” pp. 339–353, esp. 340. 3. Immanuel Kant, Letter to J. C. Lavater, 28 April 1775, in Philosophical Correspondence, 1759–99, trans. and ed., Arnulf Zweig (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 80–81. 4. Eric Weil, “Le mal radical, la religion et la morale” (“Radical Evil, Religion, and Morality”), in Problèmes Kantiens (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1982), pp. 143–174. 5. John Silber, “The Ethical Significance of Kant’s Religion,” in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper, 1960); Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Gordon E. Michalson, Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 6. Gordon E. Michalson, “The Inscrutability of Moral Evil in Kant,” The Thomist, 51 (1987), pp. 246–269, quoted on 246. 7. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments: Johannes Climacus, trans. and eds., Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 37. 8. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 10. 9. Rem B. Edwards, Reason and Religion (Washington D.C.: University Press of America, 1979), p. 46; Cf. C. C. J. Webb, Kant’s Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), p. 62; Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. J. Haden (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 385. 10. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 15–17. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 15; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 23. 13. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 18–20. 14. Ibid., p. 19. 15. Ibid., p. 11. 16. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, pp. 148, 270–271. 17. Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 210–213, esp. 220. 18. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 16, 17, 21. 19. Ibid., p. 23. 20. Ibid., p. 23–24. 21. Ibid., p. 24. 22. Michalson, “The Inscrutability of Moral Evil in Kant,” p. 253. 23. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, pp. 157–161. 24. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 21. 25. Ibid., p. 21n. 26. Ibid., p. 23.

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27. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 191. 28. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 33, 42–45. 29. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, trans. and ed. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), §57, p. 108. 30. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 28–30. 31. Fackenheim, “Kant and Radical Evil,” p. 343. 32. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 38–39. 33. Yirmiyahu Yovel, “Biblical Interpretation as Philosophical Praxis: A Study of Spinoza and Kant,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, (1973), pp. 189–212. 34. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 52. 35. Kant, Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, p. 147. 36. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 53n. 37. Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (Notes from a Dead House), PSS, vol. 4 (1972). 38. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, vol. 2, 1877–1881, trans. K. A. Lantz (Chicago, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1994), p. 1071 (paperback version). 39. Linda Ivanits, “Folk Beliefs about the Unclean Force in The Brothers Karamazov,” in New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Russian Prose, eds. George J. Gutsche and Lauren G. Leighton (Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1982), pp. 135–146. 40. L. A. Zander, “La psychologie mystique de Dostoievski” (“Dostoevsky’s Mystical Psychology”), L’Age nouveau (New Age), 71 (March 1952), quoted in Robert L. Belknap, The Structure of The Brothers Karamazov (Paris: Mouton, 1967), p. 10. 41. Belknap, The Structure of The Brothers Karamazov, p. 10. 42. Ellis Sandoz, Political Apocalypse, A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, 2nd ed. rev. (Willmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2000), pp. 148–149. 43. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, Alfred A Knopf, 1990), p. 251–252 (capitalization of “You” and “Your” modified to conform to the Russian original). 44. Ibid., p. 252. 45. Ibid. 46. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letter to V. Alekseev of 7 June 1876, PSS, vol. 29.2 (1986), pp. 84–85. 47. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 255–256. 48. D. H. Lawrence. Preface to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, in Dostoevsky, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. René Wellek (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 90. 49. Nicholas Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, trans. Donald Attwater, (New York: Meridian,1957), p. 188. 50. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, p. 243. 51. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letter to N. D. Fonvisina of January–February 1854, PSS, vol. 28:1 (1985), p. 176. 52. Vstupitel’noe slovo, skazannoe na literaturnom utre 30go dekabrya 1879 g. pered chteniem glavy “Velikii Inkvisitor” (Foreword to the Reading of “The Grand Inquisitor,” in Literary Morning of 30 December 1879, PSS, vol. 15 (1976), p. 198; Zapisi literaturno-kriticheskogo i publitsisticheskogo kharaktera iz zapisnoi tetradi 1880–1881 gg. (Notes on Literary Criticism and Current Affairs from the 1880–1881 Notebook), PSS, vol. 27 (1984), pp. 56, 57, 86.

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53. Nadine Natov, “The Ethical and Structural Significance of the Three Temptations in The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoevsky Studies, 8 (1987), pp. 3–44. 54. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 339–340. 55. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letter to Nadezhda Suslova of 19 April 1865, PSS, vol. 28.2 (1985), p. 123. 56. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, p. 72–73. 57. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 29. 58. Ibid., p. 70. 59. Henry Allison, Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 176. 60. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 15, 25, 28, 29. 61. Pierre Kerszberg, “The Echo of Evil,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 21 (1999), pp. 195–216; Paul Formosa, “Kant on the Limits of Human Evil,” Journal of Philosophical Research (forthcoming in 2009). 62. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 85. 63. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 142. 64. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, vol. 1, trans. K. A. Lantz (Chicago, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1994), pp. 135–136 (paperback version). 65. Ibid., p. 485. 66. Ibid., p. 643. 67. Ibid., p. 135.

Chapter Four 1. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 44. 2. Ibid., p. 44. 3. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper, 1960), p. 29. 4. Jean-Paul Sartre, “No Exit,” in No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage International, 1989), p. 45. 5. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” p. 44. 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 1st ed., trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 176; Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 216. 7. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” p. 45. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 160. 11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, Alfred A Knopf, 1990), p. 237. 12. Ibid. 13. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 65. 14. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 235.

Endnotes 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

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Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 57. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid. Allen W. Wood, Kant (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), p. 132. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, p. 10. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 145, 165. Ibid., pp. 148, 164. Wood, Kant, pp. 149–150. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, p. 156. Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., pp. 198–199. (Kant’s emphasis). Ibid., p. 209. Marcia W. Baron, “Love and Respect in the Doctrine of Virtue,” in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretive Essays, ed. Mark Timmons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 391–408. Robert Johnson, “Love in Vain,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 35, Supplement: Spindel Conference on Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals (1997), p. 46. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, p. 204–205. Ibid. Ibid. Ernst Cassirer, “Goethe and the Kantian Philosophy,” in Rousseau, Kant, Goethe: Two Essays, trans. James Gutmann, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1961); Predrag iovaki, “Kant’s Ethics of the Categorical Imperative: A Goethean Critique,” Philotheos, International Journal for Philosophy and Theology, 8 (2008), pp. 259–274; Frederick Beiser, “Dispute with Kant,” in Schiller as Philosopher, A Re-Examination, pt. 5 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 169–190; Friedrich Hölderlin, “On the Concept of Punishment” in Essays and Letters on Theory by Friedrich Holderlin, trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); Jennifer Anna GosettiFerencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 165–166. Phillipians 2:6–7. Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992). Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1992), p. 264. James Scanlan, Dostoevsky the Thinker (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 110. Ibid., p. 117. Vyacheslav Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life (New York: Straus and Giroux, 1968), pp. 81–82. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, p. 329. Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. M. Minihan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 272–273. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 321. Robert L. Belknap, “The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel,” in Literature and Society

112

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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in Imperial Russia, 1800–1914, eds. William Mills Todd III and Robert L. Belknap (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1978), p. 186. Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life, p. 78. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, p. 50. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 287. F. M. Dostoevsky, Zapisi literaturno-kriticheskogo i publitsisticheskogo kharaktera iz zapisnoi tetradi 1880–1881 gg. (Notes on Literary Criticism and Current Affairsfrom the 1880–1881 Notebook), PSS, vol. 27 (1984), p. 49. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 319. Dostoevsky, Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh, (Winter Notes on Summer Impressions), PSS, vol. 5 (1973), pp. 80–81. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 319. Ibid., p. 774. Ibid. Ibid. Diane Thompson, The Brothers Karamazov and The Poetics of Memory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 82. Ibid. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 774–775. Robert Louis Jackson, “Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone: ‘The Whole Picture,’” in A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2004), p. 236. Ibid., p. 240. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 775. Georgii M. Fridlender et al., Primechania (Commentaries), PSS, vol. 26 (1984), p. 463. Dostoevsky, Letter to Anna Dostoevskaya of 8 June 1880, PSS, vol. 30.1 (1988), pp. 184–185. Ibid. Ivan Turgenev’s Letter to M. M. Stasyulevich of 13 June 1880, PSS, vol. 26 (1984), p. 461. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Karamazovy. Varianty chernovogo avtografa (The Brothers Karamazov. Draft variants), vol. 15, PSS (1976), p. 377. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, vol. 2, trans. K. A. Lantz (Chicago, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1994), January 1881 (paperback version). PSS, vol. 27 (1984), p. 36. Ibid. Epilogue

1. Thomas De Quincey, “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,” in The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey: Biographies and Biographic Sketches, vol. 4, compiled by David Masson (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2006) p. 335. 2. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 231. 3. Ibid., p. 230. 4. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, vol. 2, 1877–1881, trans. K. A. Lantz (Chicago, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1994), pp. 1066–1067; pp. 1371–1372 (paperback version).

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR EVGENIA CHERKASOVA is associate professor of philosophy at Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts. She holds a Doctorate degree in philosophy from the Pennsylvania State University and a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Moscow State University, Russia. Cherkasova is a generalist with a wide variety of scholarly and pedagogical interests, which include ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of art, modern philosophy, phenomenology, and existentialism. Her most recent publications include “Virtues of the Heart: Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Love,” in Virtues and Passions in Literature, A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Springer, 2008; “Rationality and Fiction: Kant, Vaihinger, and the Promise of ‘Philosophy of As If,’” Philotheos, 8 (2008). Cherkasova’s current projects focus on Kant’s moral philosophy, existentialism, and Russian philosophy and literature. She lives in the Boston area with her husband and two children. GEORGE L. KLINE is Milton C. Nahm Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College and Adjunct Research Professor of History at Clemson University. He is an honorary member of the Zenkovsky Society of Historians of Russian Philosophy in Moscow. Among his books are Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy (1952, rpt. 1981), Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia (1968), and translations of V. Zenkovsky’s A History of Russian Philosophy (two volumes, 1953, rpt. 2003), Boris Pasternak: Seven Poems (1969, 2nd ed. 1972), and Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems (1973, 1974). Kline was co-editor of (and contributed several translations to) the threevolume sourcebook Russian Philosophy (1965, 2nd ed., 1969, rpt. 1976, 1984). He received the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Slavic Studies from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 1999. Among his more than 150 encyclopedia entries, scholarly journal articles, and chapters in symposium volumes are studies of Spinoza, Vico, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Lukacs, and Kolakowski, and—among Russian thinkers—G. Skovoroda, P. Chaadaev, A. Herzen, K. Leont’ev, Vl. Solov’ev, S. Frank, G. Shpet, and A. Losev. Kline lives in South Carolina with his wife and daughter.

INDEX Abraham, 68 abstraction, 23 a. humani(sm)(ty), 71, 77 respect, a. notion of, 86 a. setting, 91 a. system (otvlechennaia) system, 16 accountable being, 57 affections, 9, 95 Ahriman, 64 Allison, Henry, 36, 37, 57, 74 Analects (Confucius), 9 angst, 43, 66 animality, 57 Anlage. See predisposition anthropology (anthropological), 7, 9, 53, 56, 60, 81, 82 anti-hero, 4, 29, 39–44, 46-50, 88, 89 anxiety, 3, 65, 66 arbitrariness, 4, 23, 29, 31, 32, 35–41, 50 a. will (Willkür), 23, 30, 31, 35–38, 45, 54 Aristotle, 8, 22 aspirations, 2, 21, 34, 66, 98 atrocities, “civilized,” 60 Aufklärung. See Enlightenment Augustine, St., 9 Confessions, 9 autonomy, 2, 23, 29, 30, 81 aversion, 24, 79 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 75, 92 Belinsky, Vissarion, 64 Bentham, Jeremy, 2 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 62, 67, 72, 73 Bible, 9, 60, 61 B. rhetoric, 66 B.stories, 54, 61 blasphemy, 49, 67 blood, 10, 18, 47, 48, 55, 89 b.less reality, 46 body, 15, 77 b.-spirit dichotomy, 11 self-healing b., 10

b.’s sun, 10 Book of the Dead, 9 bookishness, 46, 47 brain(s), 10 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 1, 13, 17, 21, 43, 51, 63, 64, 68, 69, 72, 74, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 96–99 brutes, gullible, 81 Camus, Albert, 62 Cardinal of the Spanish Inquisition, 17, 64, 66, 68, 69. See also Grand Inquisitor character, 2, 3, 9, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 43, 50, 54 Russian national c., 86 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 62 Chinese sages, 9 Christ, 17, 20, 63–69, 71, 80, 87, 88 anti-C., 72 Christianity, 62, 92 C. commandment, 80 C. mystics, 9 Church fathers, Orthodox, 11 civilization, 8, 9, 55, 78, 102 clever people (umnye liudi), 64 cognition, 16, 58, 59, 61 comedy, 17, 18 tragic c., 46 community, 1, 3, 26, 34, 67, 71, 82–84, 94, 96, 102 civilized c., 33 Dostoevsky vs. Kant on concept of c., 85, 90 empirical c., 84, 92 ethical/moral c., 5, 77–81, 86, 91 hearts, c. of, 21, 93 polyphonic c., 91 “Concerning the Original Predisposition to Good in Human Nature”(Kant), 56 “Concerning the Propensity to Evil in Human Nature” (Kant), 56

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concord(ance), 79 heart c., 9 Confessions (Augustine), 9 Confucius, 9 Analects, 9 consciousness, 2, 8, 10, 15, 23–25, 40– 43, 45, 46, 48–50, 63, 65, 67, 73, 87, 89, 98 ethical c., 62 religious c., 54 corruption of the heart, moral, 5, 12, 14, 17, 21, 31, 38, 39, 40, 43–50, 58–63, 70, 81, 83 crime, 62, 75, 88–90 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 12, 13, 17, 43, 50, 87, 89 Crisis Theology, 42 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 1, 23, 25, 26, 30, 53 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 1, 16, 29, 38 Dante Alighieri, 99 deity, 15 demonology, 51, 61, 62 denial, 40, 42, 74 deontology of the heart, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19–23, 25–27, 29, 36, 43, 54, 55, 102 depravity, 44, 45, 49, 81 Descartes, René, 41 desire (khotenie), 8, 22, 32, 36–38, 50, 57, 63, 71, 73, 78, 81, 83 devil(ishness), 5, 12, 32, 63, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74 A Devil’s Vaudeville (Leatherbarrow), 62 devotion, 69 diablodicy, 63 dignity, 25, 35, 76, 80–82, 84, 90 Dionysus, 9 discourse, philosophical, 2, 54, 59, 61 ethical d., 54, 59 Kant’s d., 27, 36, 39, 60 domination, 17, 66 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, passim

Crime and Punishment, 12, 13, 17, 43, 50, 87, 89 “Environment,” 75 Notes from a Dead House, 62 Notes from Underground, 12, 16, 33, 38, 41, 43, 45, 48–50 D.’s post-Siberian novels, 13 A Writer’s Diary, 7, 75, 99 Dostoevsky, Maria (first wife), 48 Dostoevsky, Mikhail, 48 duty, 2, 3, 15, 16, 20, 21–26, 30, 35, 58, 75, 83, 84 commitment, d.-based, 2 moral d., 1, 7, 80, 85, 102 Enlightenment (Aufklärung), 50, 74 enthusiasm, 2, 24, 97 “Environment” (Dostoevsky), 75 environment doctrine, 7, 62, 75, 79 Epic of Gilgamesh, 9 essence, 11, 17, 18, 29, 40, 49 eternity, 9 ethics, Kant’s vs. Dostoevsky’s, 1–11, 15, 16, 20–22, 25, 26, 34, 35, 44, 45, 48, 49, 53–57, 59, 61–63, 76–83, 86, 90, 91, 93, 94, 102 Bentham’s utilitarian e., 2 Confucius’ e., 9 zero-point e., 44 evil, 1, 5, 15, 17, 21, 23, 26, 30, 31, 38, 50, 51, 75–77, 93, 95, 99, 102 e.in Dostoevsky’s work, 62–64, 66, 69, 70, 72, e.heart, 12, 39, 43 e. in Kant’s work, 38, 39, 53–61 e. nature, 73 radical e., 5, 39, 51, 54 r. e. in Dostoevsky and Kant, 73, 74 Kant’s conception of r. e., 53, 55, 60, 62 existence, 64, 65, 84 coe., 71, 77, 79 collective e., 83 God, e. of, 17 hellish e., 89 human e., 2, 12, 16, 45, 46, 55

Index existence, con’t. person’s e., 41 volia, e. of, 35 Existentialism, 42 Expressionism, 42 Fackenheim, Emil, 60 faith, 18, 40, 48, 49, 54, 66–71, 96, 101, 102 fallibility, moral, 76 “Father of lies,” 63 Fedotov, George, 33 “Russia and Freedom” (“Rossiia i svoboda”), 33 feeling(s), 1, 2, 8, 9, 11, 15, 20, 22–27, 37, 41, 49, 50, 69, 75, 83, 85, 89, 90, 95 corrupted heart allegorically linked to f., 12 non-rational f., 83 “pathological” f., 24, 25 fictions, 61 Fonvizina, Natalya, 68 Four Noble Truths, 9 Frank, Joseph, 42 free will (freie Willkür), 27, 29, 30, 31, 36, 39, 50, 54, 57, 58 freedom (Freiheit, svoboda), 1, 3, 4, 5, 12, 17, 21, 23, 29–35, 37–39, 41, 42, 50, 54–56, 58, 60–62, 64–67, 71–73, 75–77, 82, 83, 93, 102 svoboda vs. volia, 33, 34 Willkür, relation between respect for moral law, f., and, 56 Freudianism, 42 fulfillment, 71 “General Observation Concerning the Restoration to its Power of the Original Predisposition to Good” (Kant), 39 Gnostic New Men, 64 God(liness), 9, 12–15, 19, 58, 63, 66, 67, 70, 72, 80, 87, 90, 95 choice between G. and Devil, 68 existence of G., 17 kingdom of G. on earth, 55

123

gods, 9, 10 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 53, 86 goodness, 59, 62, 69, 71–73, 78, 81, 94, 96, 98 Gorky, Maxim, 62 governing source (hegemonikon), 9 Grand Inquisitor, 5, 17, 63–69, 72 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant), 7, 22, 29, 30, 36, 53, 81, 82 Grushenka, 70, 90 hagiography (zhitie), 19 Hang. See propensity happiness, 2, 5, 35, 64, 69, 71, 73, 77, 95 Harvey, William, 10 heart, human, 6, 9, 12, 53, 69, 71–73, 75, 77, 86, 87, 89–97, 99, 101 Bösartigkeit des menschlichen Herzens (wickedness of the human h.), 39 corruption of h./evil h., 5, 12, 14, 17, 21, 31, 38, 39, 40, 43–50, 58–63, 70, 81, 83 deontology of the h., 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19–23, 25–27, 29, 36, 43, 54, 55, 102 Herz (heart), 27, 39 Herzensänderung (change of h.), 43, 59 lev (h.—seat of widom), 9 philosophy of the h. (philosophia cordis), 11 symbol of life and love, h. as, 2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 8, 16 Phenomenology of Spirit, 8 hegemonikon. See governing source heroic deed, 75 Herz. See heart Herzensänderung. See heart, human Hesse, Hermann, 62 homo noumenon. See self, rational honor, 32, 69, 78, 94 human condition, 43, 44, 65, 80, 102 human heart, the (das menschliche Herz). See heart, human

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human nature, 8, 15, 22, 31, 39, 43–45, 53–55–58, 62, 65, 72, 76, 80, 82, 83, 102 l’homme de la n. et de la vérité, 43 human(ists)(ism), 7, 71 human(ity)(kind), 4, 7, 8, 15, 23, 25, 26, 30, 35, 44, 55–57, 61, 62, 66, 67, 71–74, 77, 79–83, 87, 102 Hume, David, 40 Hutcheson, Francis, 83 ideals, 34, 48, 50, 66, 71, 87, 93 inclination(s), 15, 23–26, 30, 35, 57, 71, 80, 83 independence, 26, 32, 33, 41, 82, 87 injustice(s), 7, 66, 70, 90, 91 Inquisitor, Grand. See Grand Inquisitor “The Inscrutability of Moral Evil in Kant” (Michalson), 54 insights, 1, 3, 39, 42, 60, 63, 74, 77, 86, 88 deontological i., 4 moral i., 55, 61 philosophical i., 3 intellectual(ism)(s), 1, 3, 4, 11, 17–19, 22, 40–44, 47, 50, 62, 63, 66, 69, 72, 74, 88, 93, 98, 101, 102 Russian i., 16, 97 intelligibility, 5, 54, 58–61 Job, 68 Johnson, Robert, 84, 85 “Love in Vain,” 84, 85 judge, inner, 26 justice, 9 13, 69, 70, 71, 74, 77 inj., 7, 66, 70, 90, 91 Kant, Immanuel, passim “Concerning the Original Predisposition to Good in Human Nature,” 56 “Concerning the Propensity to Evil in Human Nature,” 56 Critique of Practical Reason, 1, 23, 25, 26, 30, 53 Critique of Pure Reason, 1, 16, 29, 38

“General Observation Concerning the Restoration to its Power of the Original Predisposition to Good,” 39 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 7, 22, 29, 30, 36, 53, 81, 82 Metaphysics of Morals, 7, 22, 23, 25, 29, 30, 35–38, 53, 59, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 59, 61 “On the Radical Evil in Human Nature,” 53 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 23, 27, 30, 39, 53, 55, 78 Karamazov, Alyosha, 4, 14, 15, 17–20, 64, 65, 67–71, 80, 90, 93–96, 98, 99, 101 Karamazov, Dmitry, 14, 21, 63, 69, 70, 73, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 98 Karamazov, Ivan, 4, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 31, 33, 63–65, 67–70, 72–74, 80, 87–91, 93, 96, 97, 101, 102 Karamzin, Nikolai, 1 Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1 khotenie. See desire, volia Kierkegaard, Søren, 8, 11, 54 knowledge, 18, 44, 49, 61, 71 Koran, 9 LaoTsu, 9 Tao Te Ching, 9 Lavater, J. C., 53 law, 16, 89 ancient l., 66 common l., 81 eternal l., 26, 82 l.giving, 24, 37, 81 l. of the heart, 8, 9 l.-making agents, 81 moral l., 7, 22–25, 29–31, 34–39, 44, 45, 50, 53, 56, 58, 77, 81, 82, 83, 88 nature, l. of, 35 practical l., 24, 37 universal l., 57 Lawrence, D. H., 67, 69

Index Leatherbarrow, William J., 62 A Devil’s Vaudeville, 62 Legend of the Grand Inquisitor (Karamazov), 64 Letters of a Russian Traveler (Karamzin), 1 lev. See heart liberalism, 67 liberty, 32, 34, 67, 72, 92, 101 liberum arbitrium indifferentiae (free will), 32, 36. See also Willkür life, 10, 14, 33, 45, 48, 71, 73, 76, 77, 88, 93–95, 101, 102 Alyosha’s vision of grandeur of l., 70 ambiguity/discord/innuendo of l., 11 Christian way of l., 87 Dostoevsky’s l., 49, 65 Dostoevsky’s analysis of public l., 75 Eden, l. in, 55 l. energy/forces, 9, 10, 12 l. experiences, 86 heart, l. of the, 44 inner l., 8, 21, 41, 44, 50 living l. (zhivaia zhizn’), 12, 13, 15, 26, 46–48, 50 love of l., 21 moral l., 9 recounting a l. (zhitie), 19 l. in society, 5 spiritual l., 9 value of l., 86 literature, l. linking Dostoevsky and Kant, 1 heart, l. addressing the, 2, 8 philosophical l., 36 Russian l., 87, 98 Western l., 42 living life (zhivaia zhizn’), 12, 13, 15, 26, 46–48, 50 Liza (in Notes from Underground), 46, 47, 88 logic, 8, 14, 101 love, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13–16, 21, 22, 27, 46–48, 66, 67, 69, 71, 73, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91–97, 101, 102 Christ’s l., 20

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God’s l., 19 human(kind), l. of, 34, 66, 80 moral ideal, l. as, 80, 83 mutual l., 79, 90 practical l., 84 self-l., 23, 29, 35, 39 “Love in Vain” (Johnson), 84, 85 Makary of Egypt, St., 11 memory, 10, 94–96 Metaphysics of Morals (Kant), 7, 22, 23, 25, 29, 30, 35–38, 53, 59, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85 Michalson, Gordon, 54, 57 “The Inscrutability of Moral Evil in Kant,” 54 Mill, John Stuart, 16 mind (mind-heart unity), 8, 10 educated m., 3 eternal m., 65 Euclidean (three-dimensional) m., 16–18, 21, 22, 26, 67, 81 m./heart unity, 9, 11, 27 peace of m., 67 terror in the m., 24 totalitarianism of the m., 67 Minerva, 9 misanthrop(ist)(y), 17, 45, 46, 78, 80, 81, 93 misery, 66, 86 morality, 2, 4, 5, 17, 24, 25, 26, 30, 38, 54, 55, 81, 83, 85 imm., 5, 17, 30, 83, 84 rational m., 16 Morson, Gary Saul, 75 mystics, 9, 101 myth(ology), 8–10, 61, 62, 78 seductive spirit, m. of, 60 Nabokov, Vladimir, 61 nature, 11, 12, 41, 55, 70, 73, 78, 85. See also human nature consciousness, unity of n. with, 8 forces of n., 84 Kant’s conception of n., 56 laws of n., 35 grace, relationship of n. with, 12, 15

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nature, con’t. pragmatic n., 35 wild n., 33 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16, 79, 80 Nietzscheanism, 42 Notes from a Dead House (Dostoevsky), 62 Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky), 12, 16, 33, 38, 41, 43, 45, 48–50 Odysseus, 9 “omnimen,” 47 organizing force, 10 pagan tradition, 62 paradoxalist(s), 4, 32, 34, 42, 43, 49, 51 Pascal, Blaise, 8, 18, 26 passion(s), 2, 3, 8, 9, 25, 33, 45, 84, 98 p. heart, 14 p. for truth, 102 Paton, Herbert James, 22, 23 perfection, 8, 11, 25, 64, 72, 87 imp., 26, 102 perplexity, 44 Persönlichkeit. See personality personality (Persönlichkeit), 29, 38, 41, 42, 44, 77, 91, 92 conscious p., 89 inner p., 9 moral p., 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 36, 50, 58 predisposition for p., 57, 58 p. traits, 40 phenomenology, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 8 philosophia cordis. See heart, philosophy of the philosophy, 10, 15, 102 Dostoevsky vs. Kant’s p., 1, 3–5, 8, 11, 15, 22, 54, 74, 75, 77, 101 moral p., 1, 3, 7, 16 Western p., 8 Plato, 8, 74 P. banquets, 101 Timaeus, 8 poetic texts, 9

Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (Sandoz), 64 pragmatic nature, 35 praxis, philosophical, 61 predisposition (Anlage), 56 profit, 32, 35 progressivism, moral, 55 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Kant), 59, 61 Prometheus, 64 propensity (Hang), 39, 53, 56–58, 74 prosperity, 5, 32, 66 psycho-neurology, 10 “On the Radical Evil in Human Nature” (Kant), 53 Rakitin, 70 Raskolnikov, Rodion, 12, 13, 17, 63, 87, 89–91 rationality, 3, 4, 15, 17, 22, 29, 30, 57, 79, 81, 91 Rauscher, Frederick, 30 realism, 20, 42, 69 reason, 1–4, 6–8, 11, 15–19, 22–27, 29, 30, 32, 35–39, 45, 53, 54, 57, 59–61, 68, 77, 79, 81, 82, 91, 92, 101, 102 Age of R., 10 rebirth, 43, 47, 59, 60, 73 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (Kant), 23, 27, 30, 39, 53, 55, 78 religious elders (startsy), 11, 72 remembering, 10. See also memory responsibility, 2, 3, 2, 21, 34, 42, 54, 59, 74, 91 communal r., 5, 76 ethical r., 94 individual r., 7, 76 mutual r., 86, 93 rhetoric, 44, 48, 66, 67, 72 heart, r. of the, 2, 8, 11 moral r., 25 rigorism, 56, 57

Index “Rossiia i svoboda.” See “Russia and Freedom” Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8, 15, 43 “Russia and Freedom” (“Rossiia i svoboda”) (Fedotov), 33 Russian thought, 11, 16 sacrifice(s), 9, 10, 71, 86, 88, 89, 93, 96 Sandoz, Ellis, 3, 64 Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, 64 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 29, 78 Satanism, 63 Schiller, Friedrich, 16, 86 Schönborn, Alexander von, 1 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 16 will, Schopenhauer’s sense of, 34 self, s.-control, 72 s.-love, 23, 29, 35, 39 rational s. (homo noumenon), 36, 37, 45 s.-reflection, 43, 46, 50 sensus moralis (moral sense), 44 Shestov, Lev, 16, 38 Sidgwick, Henry, 31 Silber, John, 30, 74 Slavophiles, 11, 62, 63 Snegiryov, 93–96 sociability, 5, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 101 society, 5, 33, 43, 47, 77–79, 82, 83, 97, 98 s. pressures, 7 Soloviev, Vladimir, 16 soul, 10, 25, 41, 45, 47, 48, 62, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 94 spirit(uality), 2–5, 8–10, 13–15 18, 26, 34, 43, 46, 53, 60–65, 68, 69, 80, 96, 98 Alyosha’s s. journey, 71 s. angst, 66 s. apprenticeship, 72 Europe, s. revival of, 102 s. freedom, 12, 66, 71 malicious s., 78 Orthodox s., 11 Raskolnikov’s s. torment, 12, 17

127

s. rebirth, 59 religious s., 99 Russian s.tradition, 86 seductive s., 53–75 passim s. superiority, 17, 66, 89 s.transformation, 45, 88 weakness of s., 80 wise s., 65, 66, 68, 71 spontaneity (Spontaneität), 30, 32, 36, 39, 40 startsy. See religious elders Stoics, 9 suffering, 5, 12, 13, 17, 18, 46–50, 62, 66, 67, 72, 74, 86, 89–91, 94, 102 s. of children, 96 Christ’s s., 87, 88 co-s./s. with, 88 existential s., 41 Sufism, 9 sun, 9, 10, 14, 95 Surrealism, 42 Suslova, Nadezhda, 71 svoboda (freedom, liberty). See freedom svoevolie (arbitrariness). See arbitrariness Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), 9 temperament, 10 temptation, 17, 60, 61, 63–71, 102 t. by Good, 69–71 terror, 24, 47, 68, 69 libertine t. movement, 75 Testaments, Old/New, 68 theodicy, 63 theologians, 64, 86, 92 Orthodox t., 9 Russian t., 11 thinking, 9–11, 23, 40, 41, 85 thought(s), 21, 40, 41 freedom of t., 34 moral t., 38, 57 paradox of t., 54 Russian t., 11, 16 Timaeus (Plato), 8 Tolstoy, Leo, 11, 61 Torah, 9 totalitarianism, 17, 67

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transplant patients, 10 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 40 trust, 10, 15, 21, 46, 93, 94 truth, 9, 11, 13, 17, 44, 63, 66, 69, 71–73, 90, 92, 102 existential t., 49 medical t., 10 religious t., 70 umnye liudi. See clever people uncertainty, 41, 66 underground(edness), 34, 35, 40, 42, 46, 49, 50 u. man, 4, 13, 29, 31–50, 55, 87–89, 91 u. world, 31, 40 unsocial sociability, 78, 79 Upanishads, 9 utilitarianism, 2, 7 virtue, 1–3, 32, 34, 36, 42, 68–71, 78, 79, 81, 83, 93 volia (arbitrariness, freedom, liberty, spontaneity, unfettered will), 32–38, 50 volition, 4, 22, 23, 29, 2, 36–38, 40, 41, 50, 54, 58, 91 weakness(es), 7, 39, 66, 80 wickedness, 5, 39, 60, 62, 69, 74, 89, 90, 99

will(ing)(ness) (Wille), 3, 4, 9, 20–24, 26, 27, 30–32, 34–41, 50 , 51, 53, 54, 56–58, 60, 74, 78, 85, 93 arbitrary w. (Willkür), 23, 30, 31, 35– 38, 45, 54 diabolical/evil w., 58, 74 free w., 27, 29, 30, 31, 36, 39, 50, 54, 57, 58 good w., 36, 37, 45, 58, 81 reason-w. conjuction, 22, 23, 27 rude w., 31, 32, 34, 36 self-paralyzing w., 43, 50 Wille (virtuous wanting). See will Willkür (arbitrary will). See will, arbitrary freien Willkür. See free will wisdom, 8, 9, 11, 58, 65 A Writer’s Diary (Dostoevsky), 7, 75, 99 xin or hsin (inseparability of heart/mind), 9. See also heart Yovel, Yirmiyahu, 61 Yurkevich, Pamphil, 16 Zander, L. A., 63 zhitie. See hagiography, recounting a life zhivaia zhizn’. See living life Zosima, Elder, 4, 13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 25, 68, 70–72, 77, 89, 90, 92–96

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Titles Published Volumes 1 - 169 see www.rodopi.nl 170. Eric Wolf Fried, Inwardness and Morality 171. Sami Pihlstrom, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values   172. Charles C. Hinkley II, Moral Conflicts of Organ Retrieval: A Case for Constructive Pluralism. A volume in Values in Bioethics 173. Gábor Forrai and George Kampis, Editors, Intentionality: Past and Future. A volume in Cognitive Science 174. Dixie Lee Harris, Encounters in My Travels: Thoughts Along the Way. A volume in Lived Values:Valued Lives 175. Lynda Burns, Editor, Feminist Alliances. A volume in Philosophy and Women 176. George Allan and Malcolm D. Evans, A Different Three Rs for Education. A volume in Philosophy of Education 177. Robert A. Delfino, Editor, What are We to Understand Gracia to Mean?: Realist Challenges to Metaphysical Neutralism. A volume in Gilson Studies 178. Constantin V. Ponomareff and Kenneth A. Bryson, The Curve of the Sacred: An Exploration of Human Spirituality. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 179. John Ryder, Gert Rüdiger Wegmarshaus, Editors, Education for a Democratic Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Three. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values   180. Florencia Luna, Bioethics and Vulnerability: A Latin American View. A volume in Values in Bioethics   181. John Kultgen and Mary Lenzi, Editors, Problems for Democracy. A volume in Philosophy of Peace

182. David Boersema and Katy Gray Brown, Editors, Spiritual and Political Dimensions of Nonviolence and Peace. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 183. Daniel P. Thero, Understanding Moral Weakness. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 184. Scott Gelfand and John R. Shook, Editors, Ectogenesis: Artificial Womb Technology and the Future of Human Reproduction. A volume in Values in Bioethics 185. Piotr Jaroszyński, Science in Culture. A volume in Gilson Studies 186. Matti Häyry, Tuija Takala, Peter Herissone-Kelly, Editors, Ethics in Biomedical Research: International Perspectives. A volume in Values in Bioethics 187. Michael Krausz, Interpretation and Transformation: Explorations in Art and the Self. A volume in Interpretation and Translation 188. Gail M. Presbey, Editor, Philosophical Perspectives on the “War on Terrorism.” A volume in Philosophy of Peace 189. María Luisa Femenías, Amy A. Oliver, Editors, Feminist Philosophy in Latin America and Spain. A volume in Philosophy in Latin America 190. Oscar Vilarroya and Francesc Forn I Argimon, Editors, Social Brain Matters: Stances on the Neurobiology of Social Cognition. A volume in Cognitive Science 191. Eugenio Garin, History of Italian Philosophy. Translated from Italian and Edited by Giorgio Pinton. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy 192. Michael Taylor, Helmut Schreier, and Paulo Ghiraldelli, Jr., Editors, Pragmatism, Education, and Children: International Philosophical Perspectives. A volume in Pragmatism and Values 193. Brendan Sweetman, The Vision of Gabriel Marcel: Epistemology, Human Person, the Transcendent. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 194. Danielle Poe and Eddy Souffrant, Editors, Parceling the Globe: Philosophical Explorations in Globalization, Global Behavior, and Peace. A volume in Philosophy of Peace

195. Josef Šmajs, Evolutionary Ontology: Reclaiming the Value of Nature by Transforming Culture. A volume in Central-European Value Studies 196. Giuseppe Vicari, Beyond Conceptual Dualism: Ontology of Consciousness, Mental Causation, and Holism in John R. Searle’s Philosophy of Mind. A volume in Cognitive Science 197. Avi Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 198. Randall E. Osborne and Paul Kriese, Editors, Global Community: Global Security. A volume in Studies in Jurisprudence 199. Craig Clifford, Learned Ignorance in the Medicine Bow Mountains: A Reflection on Intellectual Prejudice. A volume in Lived Values: Valued Lives 200. Mark Letteri, Heidegger and the Question of Psychology: Zollikon and Beyond. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 201. Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Editors, A New Kind of Containment: “The War on Terror,” Race, and Sexuality. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 202. Amihud Gilead, Necessity and Truthful Fictions: Panenmentalist Observations. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 203. Fernand Vial, The Unconscious in Philosophy, and French and European Literature: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 204. Adam C. Scarfe, Editor, The Adventure of Education: Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research. A volume in Philosophy of Education 205. King-Tak Ip, Editor, Environmental Ethics: Intercultural Perspectives. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 206. Evgenia Cherkasova, Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics. A volume in Social Philosophy