PLATO & DOSTOEVSKY

Fyodor Dostoevsky was more than just a writer; he was a penetrating philosopher and metaphysician who passed through the abysses of the spirit in search of divine perfection. In his work Dostoevsky: The Metaphysics of Crime, Russian scholar Vladislav Bachinin examines Dostoevsky’s kinship with Plato, the pagan philosopher honored in Orthodox civilization and thought for his quest after the Divine Logos, Who would be revealed incarnate to the world – and more beloved by Dostoevsky than life itself – as the God-Man Christ. Translated by Mark Hackard.

Longtime European tradition has accustomed theoretical thought in the humanities to primarily use the causal-consequential method of knowledge, yet its limited possibilities have far from always troubled scholars. They have tried not to notice the circumstance that a causal connection is capable of stretching into an endless chain, and that it has therefore always been necessary to forcefully chop it off at an arbitrarily chosen spot. Otherwise, there would exist a danger of getting lost in the retrospective reaches of causal preliminary study and losing any tangible connection with the subject of one’s research.

Oswald Spengler, reflecting in The Decline of the West on the imperfection of the causal-consequential approach, asserted that in comprehension of the essence of cultural forms and phenomena, the method of analogy has been quite productive. Diverse comparisons allow for objects of contemplation placed alongside one another to mutually illuminate one another. Spengler simultaneously lamented the fact that very few master the art of refined and profound analogy, and that the technique of comparison in the humanities has been practically undeveloped.

From then not a little time has passed. However, despite the appearance of a seemingly independent genre of comparative studies, the cultural analogy continues to remain more a matter of art than science. The productivity and heuristic utility of comparisons undertaken in philological, cultural-historical, philosophical and other disciplines depend to an enormous degree on the talent and insight of researchers and in much less measure upon the use of proven methodological instruments, since the latter have not yet been formed to their proper role.

Meanwhile, elemental comparisons, and the reservoirs of knowledge which are sensed by many scholars, did not leave Dostoevsky unaffected. And this is natural, since the grander in scale the artist’s figure, the greater the number of living ties that unite him with the past, present, and future.

Dostoevsky has been compared alongside Shakespeare and Cervantes, Kant and Hegel, de Sade and Nietzsche, and many others. And there is every basis to assume that this scholarly tendency will continue, for his figure as an artist and thinker is already immense.

Dostoevsky’s Unconscious Platonism

What ties Dostoevsky to Plato? The circumstance that the writer was familiar with the ideas of the Ancient Greek philosopher[i] is still not a sufficient foundation to set them together. Besides that, the temporal interval between them of two thousand-some years, over the length of which a myriad of cultural-historical ties have been broken, forces us to approach quite guardedly the formulated question and the proclaimed attempt to carry out such an analogy along with it.

Our reticence, however, will doubtless begin to dissipate if we remember that the Platonic tradition is one of the most stable in philosophical thought and that in Silver-Age Russia, it had a striking and powerful continuation. Many major Russian philosophers of the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century were genuine Neo-Platonists. Dostoevsky was no exception, with Vyacheslav Ivanov writing of his “unconscious Platonism.”

Reality was conceived by Dostoevsky, like Plato, as consisting of two worlds. In the first approximation, this was the visible, perceptible, lower reality of the natural-social continuum and the men immersed in it. He was additionally sure of the existence of a higher, supra-natural world of eternal, absolute primary forms, and also that the waves of metaphysical reality and the causal impulses birthed by them wash over all that is and penetrate into every atom. He recognized that only man is endowed with the capability of perceiving the supra-physical influences of the higher world and vesting them in words and symbols, turning them into the objects of speculation.

If the spirit and soul allow man to be conscious of his participation in the most sacred meanings of being, then faith as a function of the soul, this immortal metaphysical essence, allows us to have an unshakable conviction that the transcendent world exists and that it is more significant than the physical world.

Creative work for Dostoevsky was the means of clarifying relations with both worlds. Our writer had no use for grounded, naively realistic poetics that preferred only to touch on the empirically perceptible and obvious while ignoring the higher, ideal reality. His polemics with critics are characteristic – it was they who demanded that artists express only “reality,” and only “as it is.” But there is “no such reality,” writes Dostoevsky, “and there never was on earth, because the essence of things is unreachable to man, and he perceives nature as it is reflected in his idea, having passed through his senses; so it is that we must set the idea in motion and not fear the ideal.” (Notebooks, 21, 75)

Dostoevsky used the conception of the idea in the Aristotelian sense, as in the given case, and utilized it in its Platonic significance, a supra-physical essence living an autonomous life independent of men.

In the majority of his artistic-philosophical constructions, Dostoevsky appears as a metaphysical thinker of Platonist orientation. For him, as for Plato once, of primary significance is the higher world of immortal ideas that fertilize our gray and dim earthly reality. Coming from a mysterious world, “ideas fly through the air, but without fail according to laws; ideas live and expand according to laws too difficult for us to apprehend.” (24, 51)

Dostoevsky’s sense of the inauthenticity of men’s earthly, everyday reality at times reached the point of hallucination in his soul. And at times it began to seem to him that there would be no impediments to physical reality, endlessly distant from the higher world, suddenly dissipating in the space of a moment. This frame of mind was facilitated by scenes of city landscapes disappearing in the mists of St. Petersburg’s fog.

A scene of Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg. Painting by Ilya Glazunov.

Through the protagonist of A Raw Youth, the writer voiced one of his inmost thought-dreams:

‘A hundred times amidst this fog there came to me a strange and haunting dream: If the fog scattered and departed toward the sky, might not this entire decaying, mucous-oozing city depart with it, rising with fog and disappearing like smoke, for there only to remain the prior Finnish swamp, and perhaps amongst it, for décor, the Bronze Rider on his hotly breathing, baying steed? In a word, I cannot express my impressions since this is all fantasy, ultimately poetry and, it could be, nonsense; nonetheless, I have asked myself and still ask one completely pointless question: Here men flail and thrash about, and how are we to know if all this isn’t someone’s dream and there are no genuine, no real people, and no actual deeds? Suddenly someone will wake up, someone will dream this, and suddenly everything will vanish.’ (13, 113)

The likeness between Dostoevsky’s metaphysical outlook and Plato’s metaphysics is impossible not to notice. However, there is nothing strange in this if we remember the uniqueness of the atmosphere in which Russian artists and thinkers worked in the last third of the nineteenth century. Something else impresses us, namely the surprising likeness of the two geniuses’ biographical and creative destinies.

Two Pivotal Personalities

Both Plato and Dostoevsky are individuals of colossal scale, complex and contradictory along with being extraordinarily gifted with respect to their creativity. These are two true giants of the spirit, one of whom stood at the source of European philosophical culture, and the other who was at the source of Russian metaphysics. From Plato there essentially came all ensuing Western metaphysics. In this sense A. Whitehead’s statement that one can view European philosophy of subsequent centuries as a footnote commentary on Plato is symptomatic.

In equal measure we can say that from Dostoevsky came all ensuing Russian philosophy, and it is also permissible to interpret it as a detailed commentary on Dostoevsky.

For both thinkers, the life of the human spirit served as a main theme of reflection – life in a troubled era of transition that in the terminology of Karl Jaspers represented an “axial age,” with the only difference that for Plato this was a pivotal time for world history, while for Dostoevsky it was pivotal for local Russian civilization. These two epochs were drawn together by a common characteristic – transition, when both underwent a painful isolation from old tribal roots and patriarchal traditions, when the “bond of time” came apart and considerable special spiritual efforts were required for its restoration.

For Plato the transitional nature of his age consisted also in the fact that this was the eve of future social-historical shocks. The system of city-states, having just barely succeeded in its own establishment, without notice entered into a pre-crisis condition. The Macedonian conquest was not far off, and after it the gradual decline of Greek civilization. Speeches by the Sophists and Cynics exacerbated a pre-catastrophe mindset and heralded the “beginning of the end” of an entire cultural world.

Alexander III of Macedon, pupil of Aristotle. Illustration by Peter Connolly. 

For Dostoevsky the transition of his time absorbed on the one hand the beginning decline of Petersburg culture, and on the other, the ever-more visible assertion of a new cultural paradigm that would receive the name of proto-modernity. And all this happened in a social context of clear anomie; nihilism; cynicism; total permissiveness; general moral degradation; and an unseen number of suicides and crimes.

In both of these social-historical situations similar in spirit, there advanced to center stage a new type of personality possessing a strikingly expressed will to transgression, i.e., an untamable inclination toward overcoming extant normative restrictions.

The transgressive personality, driving toward free self-definition and fearing no obstacles, having a mature sphere of motivations and tending toward independent thought, preferred to decide autonomously whether or not to reckon with existing norms, traditions, and laws. Its characteristic passionate desire for the new was revealed in a readiness for justified “overstepping” of boundaries of the tolerable and permissible, the extraordinary boldness of the creative spirit, and also in an “unusual aptitude for crime.”

The transgressive personality manifests particular keenness for cynical sophisms, various types of “corrupting ideas” in the air, ideas threatening to destroy any humanity in man.

The primary moral-legal reality established by Plato’s time, along with the sovereignty of the city states, did not take long in revealing its imperfections. Amidst a background of many dramatic social metamorphoses and collisions, the need for a more effective regulative system that could restrain the transgressive personality from dangerous steps and counter “corrupt ideas” of the sophists and cynics announced itself with special acuity. This demanded of Plato mastery of an enormous mass of moral and legal problems. And he, the direct descendant of the legislator Solon, actively led a “brainstorm” over a corpus of ethical and philosophical-legal issues in his magnificent dialoguesThe Republic and The Laws.

Not by accident and mostly due to similar reasons, Dostoevsky placed moral-legal and criminal dilemmas at the center of his work. He was moved by the aspiration to uncover the metaphysical and anthropological bases of man’s tendency toward destructive transgression and simultaneously delineate the means by which one could neutralize this devastating potential.

Two axial ages relating to two civilizations divided by space and time not only left their mark on the personalities of both heroes, but also allowed their gifts to develop in full measure. Plato succeeded in his realization as a thinker and metaphysician who as well possessed the singular, powerful talents of the poet, dramatist, and mythmaker. Not overshadowed by Plato in the scale of his own creative identity, Dostoevsky showed himself an artist and thinker with the original repertoire of a powerful philosophical mind and genial metaphysical intuition.

[i] Ivanov, Vyacheslav. Dionis i Pradionisiistvo. St. Petersburg, 1994. Pg. 11.

Execution as an Introduction to Metaphysics

Impressive is the likeness between existential sketches of Plato and Dostoevsky’s destinies. Personal tragedy awaited each of them at their life’s upward ascent, tragedy accompanied by trial, prison, and the most severe psychological shocks. For Plato this was the trial, imprisonment, and execution of his teacher Socrates, who became his spiritual father and to whom was assigned the role of the Platonic alter ego in his dialogues. For Dostoevsky the tragedy was his own passage through the cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress, an unjust trial, mock execution, and hard labor in Siberia.

Semenovsky Square, scene of Dostoevsky’s 1849 execution, commuted by the Tsar to hard labor.

After Socrates’ execution, Plato left Athens for a protracted period. Years later he returned to his native city, already a different man with new views and internally prepared for the discovery of a second philosophical “compass” that would enable him to direct all the strength of his spirit toward proof of existence of the supra-sensory world of immortal ideas, and most of all, the idea of supreme justice.

After he fulfilled his sentence, Dostoevsky spent many years far from Petersburg and also returned to full-fledged creative life as an internally changed man with a totally different worldview. His first “compass,” when he sympathized with the socialists and was partial to the ideas of Fourier and the views of Belinsky, remained in the past. He transformed into a thinker and metaphysician with an accentuated receptivity to the realities of the transcendent world and basic metaphysical problems – God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom. In his reflections on the turning point in Dostoevsky’s worldview, an event that occurred as a result of his “invitation to execution” by the authorities, Lev Shestov recalled a legend about the angel of death, who was covered entirely with eyes. If the angel arrived for a soul and became convinced that he had come too early, he would depart for an unspecified time, leaving the one he spared a second pair of eyes. Consequently the man who had stood on the edge of death began to acutely perceive a reality otherworldly, metaphysical, and inaccessible to normal sight, and with seriousness would ask himself the most difficult metaphysical questions.

The metamorphosis that took place with Dostoevsky was interpreted in a similar way by Vyacheslav Ivanov. He assumed that death drawing near in earnest played the role of midwife to free the writer’s metaphysical ego. After initiation into the mystery of death came the desire to touch the higher secrets of being. Just the author of the Divine Comedy once discovered the mysteries of hell and death through his love for Beatrice, so for Dostoevsky at the scaffold there was revealed the secret of Love as the highest first principle of the world, unconquerable to the forces of evil.

These trials indeed made an indelible mark on the writer’s personality, his worldview, and his creative activity. They changed in essence the content of his existential experience, replaced many points of reference in his values, and changed the ideational contours of his most important existentials. In their light everything became darker and more significant. The acquired gift of metaphysical conception opened before Dostoevsky a world of higher existentials and allowed him to understand much of what was hidden from the majority of men.

Much later Dostoevsky spoke directly on the ability of the existential of death, drawing immediately near to man, to change the essence of his worldview. This happened after he read Lev Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina:

There came the scene of the heroine’s death (later she again recovered) – and I understood the entire essential part of the author’s goals. At the very center of this mediocre and insolent life there appeared a great and eternal vital truth, and it at once illuminated everything. These small-minded, worthless, and mendacious people suddenly became true and upright people worthy of the human name, solely by the force of a law of nature, the law of human death. All their outer shell vanished, and their one truth appeared…The reader felt this as a vital truth, the most real and unavoidable in which we need to believe, and that all our life and all our worries, both the most petty and shameful and equally those we frequently consider as supreme, all are more often than not only the most small and fantastical vanity that falls away and disappears without even defending itself before a moment of truth in life. The primary idea was in pointing out that there is in fact this moment, though it rarely appears in all its illuminating fullness, and even in some lives never at all. (Notebooks 25, 52-53)

After this “Copernican revolution” had occurred within Dostoevsky, not only he but also his characters became different. Henceforth all those close to him in spirit will reveal an inclination toward a metaphysical worldview. Raskolnikov, consciously stamping it out within himself, will have it. It would come to be possessed by the “vile Petersburgers” from the novellas Notes from the Underground, Bobok, and Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and neither can it be denied to Svidrigailov nor Stavrogin with their dark fantasies. And of course, in the highest degree it is found characteristic of Ivan Karamazov, who established a grandiose metaphysical panorama inside his own ego.

Aside from these “dark” metaphysicians, there are also those of “light” – Prince Myshkin, Zosima, Alesha Karamazov. Behind both groups is the metaphysical ego of Dostoevsky himself. Like Goethe, who once split into Faust and Mephistopheles, Dostoevsky the metaphysician also splits into his “dark” and “light” doubles.

Painting by Ilya Glazunov.

Dostoevsky’s metaphysical ego evinced a talent for metaphysical contemplation, speculation, and imagination. This capability for metaphysical contemplation allowed the writer to perceive metaphysical reality in entirety and in its separate components. In him we uncover qualities of a special type – an ear for metaphysics in order to hear the ineffable, and metaphysical vision in order to see the unseen, i.e. to perceive that which was hidden behind the curtain of exterior material reality. First discovered as the ability to contemplate phantoms in the story The Double, in the future it would show itself in each of the author’s works. Behind the younger Golyadkin there appears the phantom image of the “underground man” from Crime and Punishment, one that nearly drives Raskolnikov insane:

Who is he? Who is this man who came out from under the earth? Where was he, and what did he see? He saw everything, of this there was no doubt. Where then did he stand, and whence did he watch? Why does he only now come out from under the ground? And how could he see – is this really possible? A fly was flying, and it saw! Is that possible? (6, 210)

One can build various psychological and metaphysical hypotheses in the drive to explain the nature of these phantoms. But beyond them we see without doubt an unconditional truth: there is always someone in the world who knows the whole truth of what happens to us.

In the twentieth century Georges Florovsky noted that a sharp metaphysical ear at all times listens through the shroud of everyday life, hearing how the eternal metaphysical storm rages. With Dostoevsky this sense of hearing was intensified to an extreme. Perhaps like none of his contemporaries, he proved sensitive to the mysterious hum of the metaphysical world.

This was facilitated by a mature talent for metaphysical speculation, i.e. the ability to structure demonstrative conclusions with the help of intellectual-metaphysical intuition, in the light of which images that were a result of metaphysical contemplation took shape in integral ideational, normative, and evaluative models of the extant and the ideal. As a result there arose new spiritual forms – metaphysical thought-images that gave a fuller and deeper representation of the place and role of metaphysical reality in human existence.

And finally, the third spiritual-creative talent with which Dostoevsky proved endowed in the highest degree was a metaphysical imagination. This permitted him to complete developing models of thought-forms of the extant and the ideal toward a necessary integrality of poly-semantic symbols and full-scale symbolic pictures.

The metaphysical imagination is always an act of spiritual transgression, a rupture beyond the limits of the visible into metaphysical reality, the transcendent spheres of higher absolutes, and the world of the reality of the subject. Simultaneously this is a departure beyond the frontiers of space and time, the results of which are shown as symbolic pictures of a providential character. Such, for example, was Raskolnikov’s dream in the labor camp, which consequentially showed all the signs of a terrible prophecy on Russia’s fate in the twentieth century.

In Dostoevsky’s symbolic universe, things represent something more than what they are by their nature. Within it an axe can not only lie under a counter in a workshop or hang in a loop under Raskolnikov’s coat, but it can also rotate around the earth suspended over the heads of all the planet’s inhabitants (Brothers Karamazov). And this is not the supra-sensory idea of an axe, but a fully material axe capable of splitting the heads of millions of old women. At the same time it is a symbol of the awful danger that threatens the multitude of men. The menacing connotations concentrated therein leave the naive symbolism of Nechaev’s People’s Retribution, which had made an axe its emblem, far behind. In such a manner Dostoevsky’s “realistic symbolism” reveals itself; it allowed him to peer beyond the real into what was most real, to see ontology beyond politics, and beyond criminality to metaphysics.

For Dostoevsky the metaphysical imagination was one of the most important instruments of creative work. He clearly recognized that the real is not divided into reason and intellect to the exclusion of all else, and that within social realities, much does not conform to any logical schemes. The powerlessness of rational explanatory means was uncovered in full measure when it was necessary to investigate the anthropological irrealities of human existence.

Distinct from re-productive sociological reasoning, the metaphysical imagination is genuinely productive. It allows the spirit to not only look beyond the manifest, thereby demonstrating a transgressive character unknown to sociological reasoning, but also to tell in the language of symbols about what was seen. Meaning that the creative spirit acts in the role of a “messenger” (D. Andreev) and demonstrates a special providential, prophetic intuition.

For Dostoevsky the existential direction of metaphysical imaginings held special meaning – it allowed him to see his own life’s path and the biographies of his characters as destiny organically inscribed into the objective context of metaphysical reality and into a theocentric picture of the world, thereby organically uniting the relative with the absolute, the personal with the supra-personal, and the particular with the universal.

Dostoevsky greatly valued his aptitude for metaphysical imagination, since it allowed him to search out and often sense the taste of metaphysical freedom. In a most essential way it expanded the space of his personal metaphysical experience, both light and dark. With its participation he placed the social and anthropological realities that interested him into the context of metaphysical reality, where an event was transformed into fate, wrongdoing into sin, punishment into retribution, etc.

Painting by Viktor Vasnetsov.

By its unique nature, literary work itself predisposed Dostoevsky to a metaphysical conception of the world. His relation to each of his characters resembled God’s relation to his own creatures. The novel appeared as a world where everything is run by the sole will of the author, where every character’s fate is already predetermined and not one hair can fall from his head except by the will of the novelist. The author acts in the role of creator and providence: he judges and decides who among the characters is to live, and who to die. Relating to the world of the novel, the author dwells in another, transcendent dimension. For his characters he is unseen, unheard, and located beyond their reach. Yet if (let us imagine this) the characters come upon the idea that they exist unto themselves and independent of their creator, they will have fallen into the deepest delusion.

Plato, able to receive a second pair of eyes that allowed him to view the metaphysical world of ideas, acquired them to a large degree as a result of the tragic death of his teacher. Socrates, who saw in his own death a departure to another world, helped his pupil thereafter to become firmly convinced of the notion that only the other world, in which man lives not with his body but his spirit, is primary. That reality in which innocent sages are sentenced to execution cannot be the true and chief one. Therefore there absolutely must exist another higher and ideal world where justice is not trampled, but rules supreme. This collision of Platonic destiny is deeply felt and explained by Vladimir Soloviev in his lecture “Plato’s Life Drama.”

The principle of two worlds becomes the driving one in Plato’s metaphysics. His ideas appear as higher values of being in which all the best that has the chance of realization in the existence of nature, man, and civilization is concentrated. The ideals of order, measure, harmony, perfection, the greater good, and universal justice are focused into Platonic ideals to the highest degree. With concern to all that is earthly and purely human, those things are only the weak imitations of idea-exemplars and far from true perfection.

For men, form-giving first principles that derive from ideas serve as a source of hope that our earthly world has the possibility of being less imperfect. Moreover, with Plato ideas act as a unique metaphysical guarantor that evil never succeed in totally subordinating the world to turn it exclusively into a nest of vice, crime, suffering, and darkness.