Karamazov⌗

In his last publication The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky writes about the murder of a debauched old man named Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov who begets three sons in the course of his lifetime. The story, for the most part, enunciates an elaborate drama involving these three brothers and intertwines Dostoevsky’s propositions about Religion and Existentialism in the dialogue between various characters.

The book containing about 800 pages of dramatic prose proves to be quite a laborious read but nonetheless offers extremely profound insights about the nature of human existence. Unlike philosophers who usually prefer to express fundamental truths about life in abstract parlance, Dostoevsky chooses to embody his opinions in the personality of his characters to achieve a much more nuanced and pragmatic orientation towards the problems he attempts to answer. Expressions of the former category, although might be deemed as a much more efficient way of communicating, will never be able to achieve the complexity of the latter kind of symbolic story telling and this I believe is one of the reasons for why Brothers Karamazov is regarded as a seminal work in the history of Russia.

In the course of my diligent perusal to understand this work of literature, I inadvertently also happened to notice how Dostoevsky introduced his ideas to the fellow reader. Around the last part of the book, one of the brothers called Ivan Karamazov is revealed to suffer from a mental delirium and experiences severe hallucinations.

The devil, masquerading as a well dressed noble figure, appears to Ivan and incessantly questions about his former choices. The conversation that ensues in the next 50 pages or so involves profound theological discussions about God and essentially presents us with the Devil’s side of the religious narrative. The devil proclaims that he was predestined to follow the path of abomination and construes his act of defiance as what constitutes reality that exists. He implores Ivan to question the very concept of free will within the religious framework and subsequently endeavors to illustrate how the morbid aspects of life are precisely from whence goodness draws its supreme value.

In spite of being overwhelmingly influenced by Dostoevsky’s supposition about the necessity of evil, I also realized that this attempt to expound one of the fundamental inconsistency within theology was at cross purposes with his own agenda. Dostoevsky always considered religious belief structures as indispensable in a stable society and regarded it as the ultimate source of human morality. I was immensely perplexed on why Dostoevsky would venture to deconstruct his own arguments but after a considerable amount of deliberation, I discovered why he chose to do this. The reason I think Dostoevsky possess the hallmark of a profound thinker is because he does not commit the intellectual impertinence of desperately trying to undermine the opposition’s argument but rather assiduously strives to understand it. He acknowledges why the opposition is inclined towards that conclusion and goes on to present his own views on the matter to achieve an unbiased perspective on the object of discussion. It seems to me that The Brothers Karamazov, in addition to being fraught with controversial surmises, also contains extremely powerful lessons about the conduct of dialectic which are all the more necessary in the contemporary epoch of mass communication.

The Other⌗

In order to understand why I believe Dostoevsky’s writings have far reaching implications on modern discourse, I suppose it would also require an understanding of the nature of interpersonal relationships and for this I resort back to my readings of an eminent French philosopher named Jean Paul Sartre.

Sartre is posthumously proclaimed as the philosopher of freedom among the citizens of France and the reason behind such a title is obviously his attempt to offer a phenomenological explication on the concept of freedom. Sartre’s endeavor to construct a phenomenological ontology, as he liked to call it, that provides an adequate account of reality has had incredible influence over philosophical circles and made him one of the most famous exponents of existential phenomenology.

When reading Sartre, his inveterate obsession with freedom became quite evident and I very quickly acquired the impression that this is what drove him to derive a radical definition of human consciousness that was conducive to free will and which later served as the basis for his ontology. Sartre simply conceives consciousness as nothing more than a revealing intuition that exists solely in virtue of its relation to the objects of the world.

At the very outset, he completely rejects Descartes’ cogito ergo sum and proposes that consciousness cannot be self conscious by positing itself as an object of reflection but rather is only aware of itself implicitly by being conscious of other objects. By this sleight of hand, Sartre escapes the fallacy of an infinite regress and furthermore attributes a peculiar quality to consciousness that allows it to transcend the deterministic laws of causality and ensures its freedom of action. Since consciousness has no existence in and of itself, it can maintain a paradoxical state of ‘being what it is not and not being what it is’ to quote Sartre’s words.

This definition of consciousness, in addition to being one of the most strikingly original postulates in metaphysics, also entails extraordinary implications in the realm of intersubjective relationships. In providing us with a rather peculiar account of human consciousness Sartre has, to some extent, assured its autonomous nature by positing that it exists in a constant state of becoming but what does that imply about how others perceive us?

Clearly our perception of others is never quite the same as we see ourselves. In spite of the fact that we acknowledge the qualities in ourselves that we usually regard as perennial, we never seem to exclusively identify ourselves with it since the essence of our subjectivity is much more than a unity of our thoughts and past actions. But this essence, however, is inaccessible to any external being that perceives us and is consequently resolved into a finite conception in the means to apprehend us.

This is what Sartre’s most quoted maxim that ‘Hell is other people’ tries to illustrate. When one is conscious of being perceived by the other, he feels that his ever complex subjectivity is, in some sense, delimited to an unsophisticated finitude. He becomes conscious of the attempt that his constant state of becoming is perpetually reduced to a state of mere being. And the realization of this simple idea, I believe, would have substantial consequences in the quality of intellectual discourse because trying to encapsulate the subjective nature of one’s being seems to me to characterize one of the most salient aspects of human dialectic.

Modern Dialectic⌗

At first sight, it might seem incredibly far fetched to make a connection between two ingenious philosophers who lived decades apart from each other but both Dostoevsky and Sartre understood something quite profound about human existence that the modern world has began to forget.

In spite of the fact that Dostoevsky disdained the nihilistic standpoint, The Brothers Karamazov contains extraordinarily convincing arguments for renouncing a meaningful life in favor of nihilism. The reason for employing such a paradoxical style of writing is clearly because the author’s intention is simply not to proselytize the reader to accept his theological beliefs but rather is to present his proposition in light of various other perspectives that are equally plausible.

However, this does not reflect the fact that he thinks his opinions are untenable in any sense but merely instantiates his proclivity to challenge his own ideas to the absolute extreme to refine his conception of the ultimate truth. This tireless curiosity for truth that we observe in Dostoevsky is precisely what the modern dialect has lost due to its arrogance. Intellectuals and laymen alike are so accustomed to looking at the world from their standpoint that they scarcely ever notice how the other sees the world. As a result, one constantly reduces people to some half baked preconceived notion that appeals to his prejudice, ignoring quite blatantly that every single individual conceals an entire universe inside of them. Every opinion that is voiced has merely become a covert struggle to display one’s verbal competence instead of it being used as a tool to expound the truth underlying reality. If it is one thing that modernity could learn from revolutionary thinkers like Dostoevsky, it is their unbreakable fidelity for the truth of the matter. The only ideology they pledge allegiance to has always been the truth.

Sometimes this allegiance comes at the expense of renouncing one’s most cherished beliefs but no price is too high pay for being disillusioned by the verities of actuality. But the truth however does not exist only in realm of mere objectivity and this seems to me is where Dostoevsky and Sartre meet. Although I could understand why Dostoevsky did not want to dismantle the opposition with petty tactics, I couldn’t fully explain why he didn’t choose to embody his suppositions in abstract language. For a long time, I merely attributed this choice of expression as arbitrary but it was Sartre’s account of the Other that resuscitated a long buried train of thought. One can never get to the bottom of things unless one considers the subjective aspect of dialectic and this perhaps is the most striking realization I have had reading Dostoevsky. By perpetually assaulting his own presuppositions, the age old Russian author not only presents an unbiased view to the reader but also tries to comprehend his opponents in all their essentiality.

Moving past the realm of mere objective refutations, he constantly endeavors to obtain the reason for why a particular thought is appealing to man of said background. Simply put, Dostoevsky tries desperately not to reduce the other to his own presumption of them and consequently strives to refute that “Hell is other people”. One could obviously raise the objection that this is a fool’s errand. That one can never really capture the unadulterated essence of a person’s true nature and clearly one cannot. But nonetheless, it seems to me that this still doesn’t justify forsaking the endeavor because it does not mean one can never get close.

Most dialectic that is often encountered in the modern world fails to consider the idiosyncratic aspect of a particular opinion and usually seeks to convince the opposition about the falsity of his convictions by deploying logical fallacies and other de-constructive techniques. This disregard for the other steers the argument away from the truth of the subject and merely transforms it to an intellectual fist fight were both the parties make use of subversive tactics to undermine each other, not realizing that neither one of them has imparted a modicum of wisdom on the other. Directing one’s attention to the subjective side of an argument might seem to take us backwards because reason has always grounded itself in the objective realm.

But it is also worthwhile to remember that there are innumerable areas that exist within the domain of knowledge where reason cannot penetrate. And the only way that one could at least try to comprehend these provinces of ineffability is by putting himself in the other’s shoe. As Harper Lee writes quite eloquently ‘You can never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it’ and it’s about time that we started getting under each other’s skins the right way.