(Aho2019)
Amongst the intelligentsia in Russia, this fin de siècle nihilism was largely viewed as a sign of progress, where secular reason, empirical science, and the laws of physics freed the Russian people from superstition and the authority of religious dogma. But for Dostoevsky, these newly imported values created an atmosphere of alienation and confusion. Indeed, all of Dostoevsky’s mature (post-Siberian) works can be viewed as attacks on the younger generation of social reformers who were coming of age in the 1860s. He saw them as nihilists for rejecting the traditional values of the Eastern Church, for embracing rational egoism, and attempting to re-engineer society on the basis calculative principles like utilitarianism and scientific determinism. By embracing these secular ideals, Dostoevsky saw a historical people being cut away from their indigenous roots, resulting in explosions of madness, violence, and rage.
Dostoevsky’s major characters are often incarnations of this conflict as they confront the ideology of the modern age. Without the authority of the Eastern Church to guide them, they are uprooted and lost, free to construct whatever morality they want. In Crime and Punishment (1866), for example, Raskolnikov overhears a conversation in a bar and uses it to come up with his own theory to justify his murder of Alyona.
Kill here, take her money, dedicate it to serving mankind, to the general welfare. Well—what do you think—isn’t this petty little crime effaced by thousands of good deeds? For one life, thousands of lives saved from ruin and collapse. One death and a hundred lives—there’s arithmetic for you? (1968, 73)
But Raskolnikov’s selfishness and cold utilitarian calculus collide with the Christian values of self-sacrifice and brotherly love that he was raised with from childhood. He is torn apart by conflicting personalities, described as a man who is at once “magnanimous and kind . . . [but also] inhumanly cold and unfeeling to the point of inhumanity, as though he had two contradictory characters that keep changing places.” (1968, 215)
Similarly, when Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov (1880) learns that his half-brother committed suicide, he is driven insane by a sense of religious guilt that clashes with his own rational and atheistic worldview. “Conscience!” he tries to convince himself, “What is conscience? I make it up for myself. Why am I tormented by it? From the universal habit of mankind for seven thousand years. So let us give it up, and we shall be gods” (1957, 592). Dostoevsky describes Ivan’s feelings of guilt as affective proof of God’s presence, a presence that challenges Ivan to let go of his commitments [109] to egoism and logic, to either accept the mystery of God or be destroyed by it. Dostoevsky writes:
God, in whom Ivan disbelieved, and His truth were gaining mastery over his heart, which still refused to submit. “He’ll either rise up in the light of truth, or . . . he’ll perish in hate, revenging on himself and on everyone his having served a cause he does not believe in.” (1957, 594)
Although he is presented as being newly modernized or “Europeanized,” Ivan’s guilt as well as his concerns for ultimate questions regarding human suffering and the meaning of life illuminate a repressed longing for the supernatural and the sacred traditions of the Russian people (Paris 2008, 184).
Characters like Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, and the underground man can be read as expressions of Dostoevsky’s conviction that Europe was in decline. It was losing touch with an older sense of spiritual community and self-sacrifice for the modem values of individualism, scientific progress, and crass materialism. Through the confusion and rage embodied in these characters, he offers a powerful critique of modernity, its uprootedness from the authority of tradition, and its conception of the self as atomistic and masterful. For Dostoevsky, this modem brand of individualism creates a deep sense of loneliness and disconnection, representing a kind of cultural sickness or depravity. Father Zossima, speaking for Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, explains:
All mankind in our age is split up into units. Man keeps apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest. He ends up being repelled by others and repelling them. . . . For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole, he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and the privileges he has won from himself. Everywhere in these days men have ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort. But this terrible individualism must inevitably have an end, and all will suddenly understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another. (1957,279)
Dostoevsky’s critique of “terrible individualism” constitutes a decisive break with the modem existentialist tradition with which he is so often associated. One of the central themes of existentialism is the idea that the aim in life is to be authentic, that is, to be true to oneself as an individual in the face of nihilism. But the authentic self for Dostoevsky is not a voluntaristic subject who, freed from the stifling confines of tradition, heroically chooses his or her own values in the vacuum of God’s death. If authenticity has something to do with self-realization, Dostoevsky shows that this can happen only in [110] relation to others and the enduring values of a historical people, values that provide a deep sense of what matters in life. It is, as Charles Guignon writes, “an experience of the harmony of ‘togetherness’ or ‘belongingness’ expressed in the Russian word sobornost” (1993b, xli). On this account, the existentialist view of the self as radially free does not address the modem experience of homelessness and our propensities for rage; it only exacerbates it.
In this regard, Dostoevsky’s writings reflect Heidegger’s own critique of the “groundlessness” (Bodenlosigkeit) of modernity and the need to recover a “heritage” (Erbe) that has been covered over by the banal fads and fashions of modem life. This means, to the extent that we are absorbed in the latest tends, we are closed off from older sources of value that can give our lives a sense of shared direction and purpose. That modem life distorts and covers over our heritage in this way points to the importance of anxiety in Heidegger’s early project, because it has the power to shake us out of everydayness and bring us face to face with who we are as finite, historically situated beings. In this sense, anxiety places me before my own temporal constitution as a “thrown project” (geworfen Entwurf). On the one hand, it discloses the fact that I am not a stable, self-subsisting thing but a “not yet,” an unfinished way of being that, until death, is always pressing forward (or “projecting”) into future possibilities. On the other hand, it discloses the fact that I am already thrown into a past, into a socio-historical situation that opens up meaningful possibilities that I can take over as my life unfolds. This is why Heidegger says, “Dasein ‘is’ its past in the way of its own Being” (BT, 20). It is this latter point that reveals Heidegger’s commitment to the idea of Eieimat and belongingness and his own break with the existentialist tradition. Temporally, my existence does not just stretch forward into possibilities that are not yet. It also stretches backward toward my “birth,” toward my shared historical beginning.
The fact that I am thrown in this way means that the values and self-interpretations I choose are not ones that I alone create as a masterful subject. They are appropriated by the past that has been laid out before me, and they matter to me because they matter to the historical community to which I belong. In this sense, Heidegger, like Dostoevsky, rejects the existentialist idea that it is up to the individual alone to create his or her own values. Although we invariably lose sight of it in the surface dealings of everyday life, we are nonetheless already guided by a set of common values and a shared sense of right and wrong that belongs to our heritage. For Dostoevsky, this sense of being already guided by the past informs much of the confusion and rage of his major characters as the older values of community and self-sacrifice collide with the modem ideals of individualism, selfishness, and hedonism. When Dostoevsky speaks of the need of Russians “to return to their ‘native soil,’ to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth” (1957, 632), [111] he is referring to the indigenous values of the Eastern Church. And this helps us get clear about what Heidegger means when, in Being and Time, he introduces the possibility of an authentic “retrieval” or “repetition” (Wiederholung) of the historical meanings of the past. He is referring to the shared autochthonous values that flow through the history of the West.