Lev Shestov - Speculation and Revelation

This brings us to Notes from the Underground, one of the most remarkable, but also, through the complexity of its dialectic constructions, one of the most difficult of Dostoevsky's works, and to the story "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," which was written in the last years of his life. This story, by its theme, is, as it were, a supplement to Notes from the Underground and elucidates this work to a considerable degree, revealing its inner meaning and origin. I shall, at least, convey in brief the content of "The Dream," since it is little known to the reading public. As Dostoevsky notes in the subtitle, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" is a fantastic story. It begins with the following words: "I am a ridiculous man. People now call me a madman. This would be an elevation in rank, if I did not remain for them just as ridiculous as before." Now with this ridiculous, insane man something quite extraordinary happened.

"Although," he writes, "I learned with each year more and more about my terrible peculiarity (that I am ridiculous), for some reason I became calmer. Just for some reason, because until now I cannot determine why. Perhaps because there grew in my soul a terrible melancholy about a circumstance that was already infinitely above me: namely, the conviction which struck me that in the world everywhere everything is all the same. I had already had a premonition of this for a very long time, but the full conviction arose in the past year somehow suddenly. I suddenly had a feeling that it would be all the same to me if the world existed or if there would be nothing anywhere... At the beginning it seemed to me that previously there had been much, but later on I guessed that previously also there was nothing and that it only seemed so to me. Gradually I arrived at the conviction that there will never be anything."

And this ridiculous man, to whom everything had become indifferent, for whom there was nothing and who became convinced that in general there had never been anything and never would be anything, decided to put an end to his life. But now there reveals itself to the ridiculous man - also suddenly (in Dostoevsky everything happens suddenly) - a "new truth." And the most striking thing is that this truth turns out to be not new but the oldest truth, almost as old as the world, for it was proclaimed to man immediately after the creation of the world. It was proclaimed, it was entered into the book of books, and it was immediately forgotten by all. You guess, of course, that it is a question here of the fall into sin. The ridiculous man, who has decided to put an end to his life, since he arrived at the conviction that death alone holds sway in the world, fell asleep and dreamed of that about which the Bible tells. He dreamed that he had arrived among men who still had not tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge, who knew no shame, who possessed no knowledge, who did not understand how to judge and did not wish to judge; among men for whom, as for the first men, as for the Creator Himself, everything was not all the same but everything was "very good."

"The children of the sun," he relates, "the children of their own sun - oh, how beautiful they were. Never have I seen such beauty on our earth! It seemed to me inconceivable that they, who knew so much, should not be in possession of our science. But I quickly understood that their knowledge was filled and nourished by different revelations than is the case among us on earth and that their aspirations also were different. They did not strive for knowledge of life, as we strive to know it, because their life was filled. But their knowledge was deeper and higher than our science, for our science seeks to explain what life is, seeks itself to know it in order to teach others to live... They showed me their trees and I could not grasp that degree of love with which they looked at them... And do you know, I am perhaps not mistaken if I say that they spoke with them! Yes, they discovered their language, and I am convinced that they understood them.

But this is only the beginning of the "fantastic story." The most unexpected and shaking, the totally extraordinary and unacceptable for us, lies ahead. Dostoevsky suddenly asks whether this was only a dream or reality. And he answers that it was reality. "How should I not believe that all this was so?" he says.

It was perhaps a thousand times better than I have told. Even if all this was a dream, it is nevertheless unthinkable that it was not true. Do you know, I will tell you a secret: all this was perhaps not a dream at all! For there happened here such a thing, something so horribly true, that I could not have dreamed it. Even if my heart generated my dream, would my heart really have been able to generate the terrible truth that then happened with me? ... Is it possible that my petty heart or my capricious mind should have risen to such a revelation of the truth? Oh, judge for yourself. Until now I have kept it hidden, but now I will utter this truth. The thing is this, that I corrupted all of them.

Wherewith did the man of earth corrupt the inhabitants of paradise? He gave them our knowledge or, to use the words of the Bible, persuaded them to taste the fruits of the forbidden tree. And along with knowledge came all earthly terrors, came death. "They learned to know shame and raised shame to a virtue," Dostoevsky comments on the brief biblical story. Here, you see, science alone, knowledge alone were not sufficient - together with science autonomous "ethics" also arose. The world tore itself away from the Creator, transformed itself into a realm "bewitched" by laws, and men were changed from free beings to will-less automata. This is the content of the story.

     You see that Dostoevsky did not himself think out this truth, could not think it out himself. That is why he speaks of a revelation of truth, of the fact that the truth was revealed to him. This is that truth which, although it is known to all since it was written down in the book that was read most by men, nevertheless remains a hidden truth. But when this truth was revealed to Dostoevsky he could no longer think and feel in the way that all of us do. All of us, vsemstvo ("omnitude") - a word that did not exist in the Russian language at all before Dostoevsky and that was invented by him - are, for him, the bearers of original sin; all its truths, all its ideals appear to him false and destructive.

     Dostoevsky, of course, had not read Hegel and did not know that Hegel had smugly proclaimed that, contrary to the Bible, the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil became the source of philosophy for all future times. But he felt, even without having read Hegel, that "all of us", "omnitude," are thoroughly permeated with the conviction that what Hegel proclaimed is true. And precisely because of this he rebels with such passion against what all of us revere. His provocative words, "Why should I recognize this devilish good and evil?" as well as all those sarcasms with which his Notes from the Underground are interspersed, are a despairing and, in their audacity, unprecedented attempt to remove from the consciousness of fallen man that in which, bewitched by sin, he sees the truth and the good. Our truths, what appears to us most immutable and indubitable, are not truth but falsehood, and what we consider good is not good but falsehood. Our reason has indeed revealed to us the truth that nature - deaf, indifferent to all, and dumb - has senselessly swallowed up and crushed that great and precious being who alone is worth all of nature and all its laws, while our conscience, which does not dare to dispute with reason and in this "humility" perceives its great virtue, demands of us the humble acceptance of what we are unable to change - and we will-lessly submit. So long as we are in the power of the truths and the ideals of "omnitude," we are doomed to all the terrors of being that lead us inevitably to eternal perdition. That is why "omnitude" is our greatest and most terrible enemy, against which it is necessary to struggle to the death.

     In Notes from the Underground this struggle is carried through. Dostoevsky responds to everything that "omnitude" asserts with the sharpest rejection; to everything that it blesses he responds with curses. Even "two times two is four" finds no pity in Dostoevsky. "Two times two is four" is no longer life but the beginning of death; "two times two is four," he explains, is an impertinence. And the humility preached by those for whom everything that is real is rational evoked from Dostoevsky that daring exclamation that I have already several times quoted: "Better let the world vanish, so long as I have my tea." For our humility is humility before deaf and unfeeling nature: can there be anything more repulsive and shameful than this? But the greatest anger, irritation, and contempt are aroused in Dostoevsky by the readiness of "omnitude," or, as he expresses himself, of "spontaneous people," to bow down before force, before the "stone wall." He is inexhaustible in sarcasms, in mockeries, but also at the same time in the most profound and subtle dialectical arguments with regard to the theories raised by "omnitude" to immutable truths - arguments which any of the famous philosophers could have envied him.

     It would perhaps be appropriate here to recall Pascal. To be sure, Dostoevsky almost never speaks of Pascal and apparently knew him little, but Pascal is very closely related to him spiritually. Pascal wrote, "Jésus sera en agonie jusqu'à la fin du monde: il ne faut pas dormir pendant ce temps-là." [Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world: one should not sleep during this time.] Is not the account of the picture that Ippolit saw at Rogozhin's really a development of this thought of Pascal's? We also read further in Pascal, "Je ne puis pardonner à Descartes; il aurait bien voulu dans toute sa philosophie se passer de Dieu; mais il n'a pas su s'empêcher de lui faire donner une chiquenaude pour mettre le monde en mouvement; après cela, il n'a plus que faire de Dieu." [I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have liked to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this he would have no more to do with God.] Hence Pascal's desperate struggle against reason, which reminds one so much of what Dostoevsky wrote in the introductory chapters of Notes from the Underground, "Écrire contre ceux qui approfondissent trop la science. Descartes.," [To write against all those who go too deeply into the sciences: Descartes] or his statement, "que j'aime à voir cette superbe raison humiliée et suppliante." [How I love to see this proud reason humiliated and begging for mercy!] Dostoevsky could have taken as the motto for his works Pascal's words, "je n'approuve que ceux qui cherchent en gémissant." [I only approve of those who seek with lamentation.] And finally it would be no exaggeration to say that Pascal anticipated Dostoevsky's "Dream of a Ridiculous Man" in his reflections on the fall into sin. The words sound different, but the meaning is the same: "le mystère le plus éloigné de notre conaissance, qui est celui de la transmission du péché, est une chose sans laquelle nous ne pouvons avoir une connaissance de nous-mêmes... Le noeud de notre condition prend ses replis dans cet abîme, de sorte que l'homme est plus inconcevable sans ce mystère que ce mystère n'est inconcevable." [the mystery which is farthest removed from our understanding, that is to say the transmission of sin, is one of the things without which we can have no understanding of ourselves... the kernel of our being is to be found in this abyss; so that man is even more incomprehensible without this mystery than this mystery is to man.]

     All of Pascal's attacks against our pitiful morality and our impotent reason are repeated with renewed force in Dostoevsky's works: his constant theme, as is evident from the just quoted passages of his Notes, is purely Pascalian: "cette belle raison corrompue a tout corrompu." [this wonderful corrupt reason has corrupted everything.] Dostoevsky's "paradoxes" about our truths hide in themselves Pascal's famous "cela vous fera croire et vous abêtira," [it will make you believe and will stupefy you] and Dostoevsky was inspired to battle against "omnitude" by the same idea that was most precious to Pascal and that he wrote down on a piece of paper found sewn in the lining of his coat: "Dieu d'Abraham, Dieu d'Isaac, Dieu de Jacob - non des philosophes et des savants." [God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob - not God of the philosophers and wise men.]

     We ended with an indication of the spiritual affinity between Pascal and Dostoevsky. After looking at the terrors of the world, both of them lose confidence in that which objective knowledge brings us. "Je n'approuve que ceux qui cherchent en gémissant," says Pascal [I only approve of those who seek with lamentation.] All of Dostoevsky's searchings after truth are marked by the great sorrow of a person who comes to see clearly the whole depth of the sufferings that have fallen to the lot of those people who have exchanged the revealed truths for the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil. Our science as well as our high morality, that in which we have become accustomed to see the most reliable and surest bulwark against all doubts and temptations - arouse in them only despair. One of the most eminent representatives of contemporary philosophy declares solemnly, "Perhaps there is in all of modern life no more powerful, irrepressible, advancing idea than that of science. Nothing will check its triumphant march. It is in fact all-encompassing according to its legitimate goals. Thought of in ideal perfection, it would be reason itself, which could no longer have any authority alongside and above itself. (Edmund Husserl, "Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft," Logos, I, 1910-11, p. 296.) As if replying to our time beforehand, Pascal writes, "Quand un homme serait persuadé que les proportions des nombres sont des vérités immatérielles, éternelles et dépendantes d'une première vérité en qui elles subsistent, et qu'on appelle Dieu, je ne le trouverai pas beaucoup avancé pour son salut." [Though a man might be persuaded that the proportions of numbers are immaterial and eternal truths, dependent on a prime truth in which they have their being, and which is called God, yet I think he would not greatly have advanced his salvation.]

     You see that it is not crude, elementary materialism that Pascal rebels against; the highest scientific ideal, which comes to expression in immaterial, eternal truths that are rooted in one single first truth, antagonizes him just as much and appears to him just as treacherous as vulgar materialism. Only that God who revealed Himself in Holy Scripture, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob can relieve and soothe his tortured and rebellious soul. We find quite the same thing in Dostoevsky, and in this respect his last works: The Possessed, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, which are a development of the ideas that already underlay Notes from the Underground, attain truly staggering force. Ivan Karamazov's reflections and Ippolit's "confession" in The Idiot testify that Dostoevsky's writings, in regard to tension and pathos, are at times not inferior to the Book of Job.

     We must now stop, although only briefly, on The Possessed and on Ivan Karamazov's "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" - and then it will finally be clear to us in what Dostoevsky's regeneration of convictions consisted and what meaning it had, and that this regeneration essentially was what Pascal called his conversion. Despite the complicated and intricate plot, The Possessed is basically a continuation of that desperate struggle with the "stone wall"; with "two times two is four"; with the "impossibilities," more correctly, with that repulsive, senseless monster, indifferent to all, to which our reason, willingly or unwillingly, has handed over the fate of men and the world. Our certainty about the unlimited power of this monster seems to Dostoevsky - one can here again recall Pascal's words - "un enchantement incomprehensible et un assoupissement surnaturel !" [an incomprehesible enchatment and a supernatural slumber.] All the heroes of The Possessed - not only Kirilov and Shatov but also Stavrogin - tell us finally about how Dostoevsky, like Mitya Karamazov, tortured himself throughout his whole life about God.

Consider the conversation between Shatov and Stavrogin, in which is disclosed what inspired Dostoevsky when he wrote The Possessed. Stavrogin begins to interrogate Shatov with the most cynical expressions, which Dostoevsky knew how to choose so masterfully, whether he believes:

"Don't you dare ask me with such words, ask me with different ones, different ones!" Shatov said as he suddenly began to tremble. - "All right, with different ones," Stavrogin said as he looked sternly at him. "I only wanted to know whether you yourself believe in God or not." - "I believe in Russia, I believe in its orthodoxy, I believe that the new advent of the Messiah will come to pass in Russia...! believe... ," Shatov began to babble frenziedly. - "But in God, in God?" - "I... I will believe in God."

A conversation such as this, which reflects the most difficult and profound moments of Dostoevsky's own spiritual struggle, becomes understandable if we recall what Stavrogin himself said to Shatov shortly before this conversation: "Reason was never able to define good and evil or to separate evil from good even approximately; on the contrary, it always pitifully and shamefully mixed them up; science, however, gave solutions that are clear as a fist."

Science gave solutions that are clear as a fist. This means that finally a soulless force, more correctly, a force indifferent to all, obtained power, through science, over the fate of the universe and of men. This thought was utterly unbearable for Dostoevsky. But meanwhile he felt that people submitted to this thought and, as it sometimes appeared to him, submitted to it finally and forever, and even joyously. Moreover, not the worst, not the weakest, not the lowly in spirit, but the best, the strongest, the rich in spirit submitted. This thought saturated our whole culture: art, philosophy, ethics, even religion. Both Shatov and Stavrogin do not speak for themselves; they only reveal to us by what tormenting doubts the soul of Dostoevsky himself was shaken. The most fearful thing for him was the awareness that his intellectual conscientiousness demanded of him those confessions that Shatov made to Stavrogin, or, more precisely, that Stavrogin almost forcibly tore from Shatov: "I believe in orthodoxy... but in God I cannot believe." This is perhaps the greatest temptation that a tortured human soul can prepare for itself and endure: religion is still possible, but God is not, God is impossible, or, more correctly, that God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob of whom Scripture speaks and to whom Pascal appealed is impossible, and only the God of the philosophers, that is, a monster clothed in splendid and solemn garments who crushes and swallows up everything there is in the world and does not recoil even before crushing and swallowing up that being who alone was more precious than the whole universe, is possible. At the thought that this monster would ascend the throne of God and become as God for all - this is really the basic thought of the Apocalypse, the revelation of St. John - Dostoevsky experiences those attacks of irreparable, irrepressible despair that serve, apparently, as the condition of the birth of great and final comprehensions and of that extraordinary upswing of power which alone makes such comprehensions possible.

Already The Possessed - how much the title alone is worth! - shows us with almost unbearable clarity into what the human life torn loose from its Creator through knowledge is transformed. We ourselves and all the characters of The Possessed choke in the oppressive and evil-smelling atmosphere of senseless, stirred-up human passions. In The Brothers Karamazov no less shattering pictures of the life of men who have lost connection with the living God appear. But the terrors reach their culminating point in the "confession" of the Grand Inquisitor. The Grand Inquisitor, as well as the hero of Notes from the Underground, the youth Ippolit in The Idiot, Stavrogin, Kirilov and Shatov in The Possessed - all these repeat and develop, in various ways, that last and fearful thought which arose in Dostoevsky when he took over from his teacher Belinsky, along with the idea of humanity, the humanly impossible task of obtaining an account of the fate of all the victims of history, of accident, etc. Is there anyone in the world to whom one can turn with such a question? Shatov told Stavrogin that he would believe in God, and he said it in such a tone that it is clear to everyone that neither he nor Stavrogin will ever believe in God. Everything that we hear from the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor in the legend composed by Ivan Karamazov hides in itself the same admission. It is in words like these that the Grand Inquisitor himself, turning to Christ who had been arrested by him, formulates this:

"Why should I conceal it from you? Do I not know to whom I am talking?... Perhaps you wish to hear it precisely from my mouth. Hear, then: We are not with you, but with him - this is our secret." With him, i.e., with him who came into the temple and set himself on God's throne. Who speaks thus? Not a man "who desires only material, dirty goods," as Ivan Karamazov expresses himself about him, "but he (the Grand Inquisitor) who himself ate roots in the wilderness and, having conquered his flesh, raged against himself in order to become free and perfect but who, nevertheless, loved mankind throughout his whole life and suddenly began to see clearly and perceived that it is no great moral blessedness to achieve perfection of the will if one at the same time becomes convinced that millions of other creatures of God remained made only as a mockery."

In these words of Dostoevsky there comes to us again what his teacher Belinsky once expressed in his famous letter: I wish neither perfection nor happiness nor all bliss, about which wise men speak over and over again, if I cannot be calm about all my brothers in blood. I throw myself down - altogether like the Grand Inquisitor - head first from the uppermost rung to the enemy of mankind.

And it might seem that after the Grand Inquisitor pronounced his blasphemous "We are not with you but with him" as before the face of God Himself, the earth must open up before the wretch and swallow up this man doomed to eternal torments. But in Karamazov's legend the ending is different. "The prisoner listened to him the whole time intently, looking gently right into his eyes and obviously not wishing to say anything in reply. The old man wished that he would say something to him, even if it were bitter and terrible. But he suddenly approached the old man in silence and kissed him softly on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips." So the God of Holy Scripture responded to the greatest abuse against Himself. And now when this great truth, incomprehensible to our Euclidean intellect, revealed itself to Dostoevsky, that enigmatic transformation which he called the regeneration of his convictions took place in him. Not love is God, but God is love. Not that weak, powerless love that can only shed tears over the boy hunted to death by dogs, over the girl beating herself with her fist on her breast and tortured by her own parents, over the miserable Ippolit condemned to death, but the love of Him who created the world and whose will all obey. In such moments Dostoevsky overcomes the "two times two is four," as well as the "stone walls" and the "laws of nature" and that terrible monster who swallowed up everything that was most precious in the world. In such moments he writes the short story "A Boy at a Christmas Celebration with Christ," his response to the fearful question of Belinsky that does not, as it were, tolerate any answer. The love behind which the omnipotent God stands will never be turned into hatred. For God will defend and calm those who found no defense and tranquillity either among men or in human wisdom. To find this truth, Dostoevsky had himself to go, and to lead all of us, through those terrors that are portrayed in his works. He showed us the hell on earth as Dante once showed us the hell beyond. Out of the depths of terror and the deepest plunges he learned to appeal to God. I have just mentioned his "A Boy at a Christmas Celebration with Christ." In this way Dostoevsky finally replied to the insoluble question put to him by his teacher. The darker the night, the brighter shine the stars; the deeper the sorrow, the closer is God.

Dostoevsky's voice grows ever louder and stronger and finally reaches an unheard-of force. At times it seems that one hears not the words of Dostoevsky but one of the incomparable psalms of King David. And so I will close his discussion with a passage of this kind:

"Alyosha Karamazov, who suddenly turned around, left the cell of the deceased old monk. He did not remain standing on the porch but quickly descended. His soul, filled with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, breadth. Above him stretched wide and boundless the vault of heaven, full of soft, shining stars. From the zenith to the horizon the still indistinct Milky Way divided itself in two. A bright, still almost motionless night enfolded the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral sparkled against the sapphire sky. The splendid autumn flowers in their beds were slumbering until morning. The earthly silence appeared to merge with the heavenly, the earthly mystery seemed to come into contact with the mystery of the stars... Alyosha stood there, looked, and suddenly threw himself down on the earth. He did not know why he embraced it, he did not realize why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it. But he kissed it, weeping, falling down and wetting it with his tears, and he vowed ecstatically to love it, to love it for ever and ever. Over what was he weeping? O, he was weeping in his rapture even over these stars and he was not ashamed of his ecstasy. It was as if threads from all these worlds of God met all at once in his soul, and it trembled all over, coming into contact with other worlds."