(Aho2019)
[…] But for Dostoevsky, a life based on the relentless pursuit of freedom, pleasure, and self-affirmation is a sucker’s game. It is not an expression of self-actualization but of bondage and self-destruction. To this end, he writes:The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! … Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own natures, for many senseless and foolish habits and ridiculous beliefs are thus fostered. . . . [How] can a man shake off his habits, what can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself. (Dostoevsky 1957,289)
For Dostoevsky, genuine freedom has nothing to do with the willful satisfaction of our own desires. Such a view is inevitably self-defeating, placing us on the hedonic treadmill, where each time we satisfy a pleasure, it is followed by a feeling of emptiness, which results in a new craving for pleasure, creating an endless cycle of pleasures followed by feelings of emptiness followed by more attempts to feel pleasure (Guignon 1993b). According to Dostoevsky, we are truly free only when we are liberated from the bondage of our own narcissism and selfishness. Thus, when he claims our self-affirmation “distorts [our] true nature,” he is suggesting that modern individualism is itself the problem.
[…] Without a framework of common values to [113] guide us, we have no idea of what to do and how to live. And this is precisely what enrages Dostoevsky’s underground man. “We don’t even know what living means now,” he cries. “What it is, and what it is called! . . . We do not know what to join, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate” (Dostoevsky 2009,96). On this reading, the explosions of violence and rage in America can be viewed as a reflection of our relentless pursuit of freedom and authenticity. […]But, as Dostoevsky reminds us, it is the atomization of society and our collective inability to see ourselves as relational beings that is contributing to our current malaise. In his view, we have never been masterful individuals, and our fate has never been in our own hands. Indeed, it is the moral orientation of egoism, individual achievement, and self-reliance that makes us sick. This is why the underground man is such a tragic figure. He wants to see himself as radically free, but his unmoored freedom leaves him angry, confused, and lonely, triggering his delusional behavior, bizarre revenge fantasies, and impulsive need to hurt others. For Dostoevsky, the reason for the underground man’s condition is simple; he has been “uprooted from the soil and has lost contact with the people” (2009, 11). And we see extreme incarnations of moral nihilism and rage in contemporary versions of the American antihero, in the unnamed narrator from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1999), for example, or Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). [115] Trapped in a cycle of empty hedonism, Ellis describes Bateman as someone who has lost his capacity for empathy and human connection to such an extent that he undergoes a kind of numbing depersonalization, where “there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory. … I simply am not there” (Ellis 1991, 367-77). And it is only through explosive acts of violence that he can be pulled out of this deadened state (cf. Aho 2016).
[…]But the idea, forwarded by Dostoevsky and Heidegger, that the cure for what ails us involves the recovery of a mythic past rooted in the indigenous values of a historical people, is deeply problematic, particularly in light of the conservative politics and anti-Semitism linked to both of them. Here, the “Jew” is accused once again of being the agent of cosmopolitanism and rootlessness. And the solution is to embrace Heideggerian rhetoric of Blut und Boden, das Volk, and Heimat. This is the implicit message of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign, of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland movement, of Austria’s Identitären, and of the antiliberal speeches of the Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin (Trawny 2018, 69; Dugin 2017). Yet, there is an aspect of historical retrieval in Heidegger’s thought that may allow us to bypass this fraught political terrain and unsettle the more toxic assumptions of modern individualism. When Heidegger refers to “authentic historicality” (eigentlichen Geschichtlichkeit) in Being and Time, he is referring to a sense of belongingness to a heritage that places moral demands on us. As such, it illuminates the fact that we are not isolated [116] subjects invariably motivated by pleasure and self-interest but beings that are mutually dependent on each other and bound together by shared values that can provide a sense of moral orientation for our lives.
[…]Flowing out of a common wellspring in the West, these stories have therapeutic power by showing how we can free ourselves from the cult of individualism and be opened up to an awareness of our “co-Dasein,” that is, our mutual dependency and rootedness in the shared values of a historical people. This awareness not only serves as a powerful corrective to the forlomness, rage, and egoism that torment characters like Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, and the underground man. It also concretizes Heidegger’s idea of “choosing a hero.” We can certainly choose, as Dostoevsky suggests we do, to model our lives after the image of Christ, where “we are all responsible to all and for all” (Dostoevsky 1957, 295). But Guignon shows that there are any number of cultural heroes, both secular and religious, whose stories can be “retrieved” and “repeated” to teach us the values of self-sacrifice, humility, and dependency on others. These stories, taken together, constitute a skein of meanings that we can draw on to create our own morally cohesive and structured life-story. Guignon’s point is that “narrativizing” or “storyizing” [117] our lives in this way continually brings with it a moral dimension because the resolution of the story usually entails “the achievement of some good taken as normative of our historical culture” (1993a, 289). In this sense, the great stories of our tradition often radiate conceptions of vulnerability, belongingness, and dependency that invariably clash with the modern values of individualism. And in the process of hermeneutic psychotherapy, they illuminate a deeper understanding of the historical context that grounds our contemporary experiences of isolation and rage, opening up new ways to interpret and make sense of who we are and what ought to matter in our lives.