Perhaps it is through the following questions that Dostoyevsky’s writings might be approached: What does it mean to be a self? Or what is that which is named a self? Or perhaps what is that which escapes the what-ness that belongs to philosophy and its questioning and reasoning?
This questioning arises originally in, and from out of, the space opened up by the impossibility of deciding morally or religiously. The disappearing of the moral and the religious is the absence of what defines the right and the wrong and truth and falsity. This absence inserts contradictions into existing and existence, for, from now on, existence takes place only in its referring to itself, even if this referring is nothing but escaping, detouring, or suicide.
What does it mean to be a self?
In The Brothers Karamazov, an answer to this question might be glimpsed. To be a self is to be held together by contradictions, and to be obliged to decide from out of these contradictions which form one’s existence; to dwell in paradoxes and the paradoxical that lack the clarity of a saying which makes apparent the right and then distances it from the wrong.
“Here all contradictions exist side by side…Yes, man is broad, too broad, indeed. I’d have him narrower…God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
That which is called a self, or that which lets itself be called a self, occurs thus as a conflict, a conflict thrown into the world and its suffering, from which escaping is impossible. This notion of the suffering of the world is important in The Brothers Karamazov because it shows that the self, which is a paradoxical conflict thrown into the world, is both involved in and responsible for a suffering that it neither brought forth nor can escape from, yet it remains responsible for and involved in it. This involvement-responsibility problematizes, disrupts, and radicalizes the conflict, which takes place as a self.
fleeing from the contradictory/self in its thrown-ness into the world and its suffering confirms the contradictions in a way that radicalizes the self’s distances from itself. Fleeing is the rendering double of that which has never been one. Repressing the contradictory in the conflict, according to Dostoyevsky, must fail because the repressed does not disappear, but rather arises from out of its repression as the repressed and thus disrupts its repressing and the thinking that made possible this repressing in the first place. Accepting the conflict/contradictory/self is becoming a plurality refusing and undoing any attempt at reducing the multiple to the simplicity of that which is one and oneness.
Philosophy and its arguing, according to Dostoyevsky, cannot think these impossibilities and cannot even traverse the self because philosophizing and arguing take place only in a certain detachment from the world and from the self itself. That is, arguing inserts a distance between the self and the world, and hence makes possible a relation in which a subject and an object can arise in their distance from each other. But, for Dostoyevsky, to be a self is to refuse this distancing and apartness; to confirm the thrown-ness into the multiple which refuses simplicity, to live in the conflict.
For more articles on Existentialism, please read Heidegger: The Death of God, Metaphysics, and Poetry, Lev Shestov’s Religious Existentialism, What is Existential Isolation?, Philosophy and the paradox of the death of God, (Existential) Rejectedness, or If God were a She.