Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer: A Vision of Plato's Erotic Immortality

Miroslav Hanak, East Texas State University

I. Recollection of the Unchanging Essence Behind Chaotic Appearance. Innate Ideas as the World Ground Supporting the World of Immanent Phenomena.

The theory of innate principles of understanding that make possible at least a measure of knowledge of phenomenal reality ties together Dostoevsky's aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology, producing an uncompromisingly idealistic world view derived, consciously or not, from Plato. Once the chaotic flux of becoming is tied down to its metaphysical roots in human understanding, the "true events" occurring in physical nature lend themselves to explanations that do not stop at the simple description of their physical behavior. Dostoevsky's Diary attempts to shed new light upon the strictly physical reality of human existence, which must be stripped of the accretions of "modern" rationalist speculation and empirical experimentation in order to make stand out the divine equality in even the most insignificant life structures.

The artist knows that the individual "does not always resemble himself", i.e., does not always fully reflect his underlying aesthetic and ethical essence. Stated in simpler terms, the subject of analysis does not always reveal his true character through "typical" appearances. Seen in this light, most "accidental" features lose their appearance of "fantastic, almost incredible",(1) as soon as their seemingly unique if haphazard occurrence is reduced to some essentially common base. "Without ideals, no good reality can ever ensue"; even as only "vaguely specified longings" for a better existence, "there would ensue nothing but still a more obnoxious abomination" of reality (D I, 239). The artist must therefore pursue the glavnaya ideya fizionomii, the principal idea of a physiognomy, by "arresting the moment in which the subject resembles himself most." This arrest of the time flux in the essence of a thing echoes Plato's definition of time as "the moving image of eternity" (Timaeus, 37d). Because of his "inability to penetrate the substance of things", man will never know truth except partially and dimly, as a subjectivized approximation of the object's essence. Truth can come to him only "reflecting itself in his idea, after having passed through his senses." Spatiotemporal reality, as an individualized interpretation of the eternal ground of being, is no more real than the idea of its ground. Hence "the ideal" is a reality "as legitimate as current reality." (D I, 83). Although vague in his treatment of the absolute reality of the idea as opposed to the relative and dependent reality of the objective world (Republic, 518D), Dostoevsky comes as close the Platonic epekeina, the transcendent platform of the eternally real, as can be expected of a nineteenth-century thinker.

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For Dostoevsky, early childhood impressions and intuitions are the fundamental molding force of the individual psyche. The apprehensions of existence by the subject of self-consciousness reveal "incredible depths of understanding", unattainable through "scientific devices and experiment"; childhood intuitions make possible the acquisition of seemingly "inaccessible ideas about God, good and evil", which surprise by their profoundness all but scientifically-oriented pedagogues who will repudiate them out of hand (D I, 232-3). This repudiation of innate ideas by empirical positivism produces the alienating "segregation" of contemporary humanity, fragmented by the scientific mania for analysis. Science isolates the individual from the common ground of humanity; searching for ever-new and original ideas and experiences that cannot be shared with others (D I, 245), modern man perpetuates himself through an "accidental family" (D II, 760-62; 752-53) which produces children "freed"! from all that used to be "binding and general." At this point, Dostoevsky offers a clear definition of Plato's eternal ground of ethical principles (see Critias, The Law, Timaeus, et al.), recollectable through memories of the innocent, "direct" sensations imparted in childhood. The vision of this ground Dostoevsky calls zhivaya zhizn, living life.

Man cannot even live without something sacred and precious carried away from the memories of childhood...man, of necessity, is inclined to mark points...in his past in order to be subsequently guided by them and to deduce from something whole. (D II, 752-3. My italics)

Here Dostoevsky suggests much more than a simple behaviorist conditioning to the more or less contingent codes of conventional morality. Nor is the intuitively apprehensible ground of being which he seeks to rehabilitate to be confused with the general laws of nature postulated by the empirical positivist. Dostoevsky admits that, rather than evolving ethical rules from "past insights" (not experience!!), "people are fond of things that are offered ready-made." To this category belong general laws that "will suddenly make everybody happy", as soon as they are allowed to come spontaneously "into existence" (D II, 605). This abominably simplistic solution suggested by modern positivist gnosticism (2) would grant freedom of behavior to facts of inanimate nature, but not free will to the individual. Without the meddlesome interference of ethical prejudice and Christian superstition, mankind is made to believe it can achieve instant perfection and happiness as soon as the laws of the physical universe are freed from undue rationalization.

This simplistic naiveté of Western empiricism Dostoevsky calls "lackeyism before another man's thought." Practiced by "unfinished men," it claims to produce a perfect society (ibid.), right out of their own ethical depravity, and strictly by the grace of enfranchised physical nature. As a result, man loses sight of the true ground of his being. "We have lost every instinct in this respect... We have smashed to pieces all former authorities and inaugurated new ones" (ibid.) meaning, we accepted secularized love for mankind instead of man's erotic thirst for the divine. Without an

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ethical-religious basis, this immanent religiosity will "soon strip the skin" from non-conforming individuals, and convince itself that "this is useful to the general cause of humanity" (ibid.) as defined by the votaries of its lowliest instincts. This existential alienation from the eternal ground deplored by Plato (Critias, 121b, Laws 886-87, et.al.) (3) is superbly formulated in Dostoevsky's "Dream of a Ridiculous Man" as a principle of "nothing matters."

I began to hear and feel with all my being that around me there was nothing... Little by little I also became convinced that never will there be anything (D II, 673).

The problem of survival of the transcendent ground in an enlightened, relativistically fragmented world is elaborated in this myth of the ridiculous dreamer. Here Dostoevsky virtually exhausts the dead-end options open to man in the post-romantic era. The inhabitants of the Second Earth beyond our galaxy live "a complete life without the urge to know its ultimate meaning" (D II, 683). Shunning the use of logic, they enjoy an intuitive communion with all nature, their dead companions, and even with the other stars. They have found the all-reconciling stance beyond the phenomenon of life and death; they accept death "without sorrow", with "meditative ecstasy." In the final apotheosis of instinctual life as such, they have discovered the key to the tranquilizing eternal presence of transcendent truth in the flux of passive immanent phenomena. The only comparable terrestrial experience that the Ridiculous Man can remember are instants of "appealing anguish", of "unbearable sorrow" which suspend momentarily the flow of cause and effect, and "bring tears" into our eyes "at the sight of a setting sun" (D II, 684) in response to an intuitive evocation of the reconciling powers of the ground of being where beginning and end fuse into an eternal presence of what simply and immediately is.

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II. The Pernicious Sophistry of Positive Science, Utilitarian Pragmatism Refuted. 

Consciously or not, Dostoevsky continues Plato's crusade against the hyperrationalization of the divine ground of being. The ontological argument of the "believing" Middle Ages which wouldn't allow the origination of the idea of God qua absolute from an imperfect, finite being, has been reversed by the "Ridiculous Man." A notion, arising out of positive science, offers once again "something infinitely greater than anything I was able to conceive"; only this time, it is "the conviction that nothing matters." A formula for absolute existential nihilism, it reflects the ultimate goal achieved by the utilitarian pragmatist, the positivist observer of "pure" phenomena, and the ultrarationalist revolutionary. Dostoevsky challenges these latterday Sophists for their radical relativization of all values, using Platonic arguments against the radical rationalization of divinely grounded ethics. He unmasks their clichés like

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"rights of men" and triumph over "domestic despotism" (D I, 376) for what they are: a secularization of Christian morals (D II, 996-97) into the Utopia of a purely this-worldly civic excellence. In accusing Western science of stifling "the élan of life, ties with the soil and faith in truth" (D I, 337), Dostoevsky redefines the inviolability of the transcendent ground without which human existence succumbs to genocide and suicide. Dostoevsky's opponents were not slow in striking back at the mystical bent of his thought. A. Nalimov deplores Dostoevsky 's emotional approach to social issues which cannot be solved by mysticheskie utverzhdenia, by mystical convictions, which move in a vacuum.(4) P. Nikitin chastised Dostoevsky for what the Diary took to be his most precious talent, a "realism bordering on fantasy."(5) Nikitin is offended by Dostoevsky's tendency to heighten the "natural coloring"; worst of all, he shows "a subjectively slanted attitude toward the phenomena under observation which transcends the limits of prudence and propriety."(6) Dostoevsky was indeed a radical antipositivist, something that seems to be totally lost on his positivist critics, both of his own era and of our times. T. M. Granovsky aroused Dostoevsky's ire as the prime representative of "idealist cynicism" (D I, 379), which seeks "the beautiful and the lofty" exclusively in "real, practical, current matters," while crusades of the spirit "are obsolete in our age of positive (!!) problems" (D II, 571). The theoretician of a secular religion à la Comte A. D. Gradovsky seeks salvation of mankind "in things and external phenomena", advocating "a mechanical transplantation to Russia of European forms", ignoring the fact that, according to Dostoevsky, "tomorrow, they will collapse there" (D II, 1O02). In the case of Russia, this spirit was the intuition of an eternal, life-affirming ground, beyond human imperfection, yet within the Orthodox Christian community of the God-bearing Russian nation.

Most of Dostoevsky's resentment against the secular civil theology of his time falls upon the unholy alliance that he suspects exists between the pragmatically-oriented Roman church and the Western Socialists. Both demand an immediate earthly paradise in the here and now. The Diary's firmest resolve is to demonstrate that the secular salvation of mankind by the means of empirical science opens a Pandora's box of woes in which drown the holiest of man's myths, the eternal living life, succumbing to the crass objectivization of man's immortality. The death of a transcendently grounded Christian intuition at the hands of the ultimate "enlightenment" was to reach consummate embodiment in the "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor." Russian "flunkies of Western thought" à la Granovsky and Gradovsky preach their version of a secular Second Coming, promising a "sudden and universal happiness" through the mere proclamation of a "general law" (D II, 605). At the same time that Western Protestantism has become virtually an atheist doctrine, the "universal Roman Empire" renewed by the Pope declares Christianity possible in this age of progressive civilization only under the secular aegis of the Pope (D II, 728).

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This revived Roman imperialism reflects the triumph of the bourgeois in the West, enlightened by the French Revolution which turned the proletariat into modern slaves of the victorious bourgeoisie. Yet this Fourth Estate has already launched a counteroffensive. The collapse of revolutionary liberalism erected on a thoroughly secularized platform of utilitarian "liberty, equality, fraternity" is nearing. It will be the last act in the tragic progress of Western civilization, corroded by the abstract humanism of the smug, hypocritical bourgeois. The argument of utilitarian humanism which ends in the self-negation of the bourgeoisie runs as follows: society is, per se, "abnormally organized", hence, the individual is not responsible for his criminal acts which are only a natural and necessary outcome of the social base of his civic existence. The only workable social reform is to extinguish the consciousness of crime and guilt in man; with the disappearance of a guilty conscience, the abnormality of the human condition will be also eliminated. The resulting "ant hill" of society of streamlined individuals "cannot be worse than the existing order... The main hope is in science" (D II, 787).

Now this ant heap becomes inevitably a "Tower of Babel", argues Dostoevsky. "Scientific axioms", struggling for a socialized egoist excellence, i.e., the excellence of the collective, find it impossible to exert the force of "unmistakable instinct" (D II, 911) which had perished with the myth of man's intuitive participation in a universal ground. In its stead, the abortive ultimate collective is forced to apply the ultimate cure against the universal boredom of socialist regimentation: positive science becomes the "doctrine of anarchy", the rich are robbed and the world is stained with blood in the vain hope that, "after this", by the grace of some empirical, automatic self-adjustment, by "some necessity or secular harmony", somehow everything will be settled of its own accord" (ibid.). In reality, man deprived of the greatest idea from which all the others flow, finds himself "alone on earth." A cardinal idea had "benefited him during centuries, just like the Sun", pouring forth light, force and life. The atheists themselves cannot suppress their "great craving for God", for they feel that "a great wellspring of energy" had dried up. The "lofty, inviting Sun" has receded, "mankind's last day" is dawning (D I, 266). The symbolism of life and lightgiving sun and of its function as the ultimate symbolic source of transcendent good that must be carefully harbored in each individual soul has Platonic overtones that need no commentary (Republic, 507B-508D et al.).

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III. The Apocalyptic Society of Higher Men. The Erotic Flight to Immortality.

What is Dostoevsky's own version of earthly paradise that refutes the Roman Catholic Socialism of the West, perverted by the concern for "earthly possessions and the future political domination of the whole world?" (D I, 266) Dostoevsky's rebuttal of Gradovsky's civil ethics is simply this: "humble yourselves, exalt yourselves" (D II, 1006-1010). This then

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is Russian socialism according to Dostoevsky: you must revive the recollection of the ultimate, immediate truth of the collective folk soul of Russia which has, so far, though unconsciously, withstood the corruption of Western scientific cynicism.

  No degree of depravity, no pressure, no kind of humiliation can eradicate in the hearts of our people the thirst for truth, since this thirst is dearest of all to them (D I, 63)

The recollection of the intuitive collective self-consciousness without scientific conceptualization is Dostoevsky's answer to the Angst-ridden age of modernity: "The Dream of the Ridiculous Man" is the most accomplished mythological expression of this recollection. The inhabitants of our earth's galaxic "double" erect temples for the worship of their "own idea", and celebrate "their own desire", once their intuitive attunement to the universal cosmic ground has become obscured. They do so "fully believing in the impossibility of the fulfillment of this vicarious desire" (D II, 687). Once the divine love grounded in God is degraded into human self-adoration, science, masquerading as "wisdom", can never recover the innocent faith of the mythical man, participating directly in the divine presence that stirs forth from his unconscious.

The final synthesis of Dostoevsky's dialectic of none-and-all-are-sinners suggests the abolition of all "scales and measures" of man's finite judgment. This must not be confused with the terminal abolition of bad consciousness preached by behaviorist empiricism. Human justice fails because it insists on applying absolute standards of guilt and innocence to an imperfect existential reality; it must bow to God's judgment, not to an unconditional exoneration from all punishment. God as the first and ultimate cause alone "knows the whole mystery of the world and man's ultimate destiny" (D II, 787-88). In a moment of rare agreement with Tolstoy's demand of the individual's surrender to the broader, unknown purposes of the whole, Dostoevsky asks

Why seek with intellect that which is already given by life itself, with which man is born, and by which (even against his will) every man must abide. Every man is born with conscience, with the conception of good and evil; therefore he is born with a direct aim in life to live for the good and to abhor evil... this knowledge is innate; therefore it is given gratuitously, since... from the standpoint of reason it is unreasonable (D II, 790). (My italics.)

Dostoevsky's version of Plato's Republic en logois, in ideas, repeats the injunction upon the philosopher-king to "return to the cave" and preach the ultimate truth to the prisoners blinded by empirical guesswork, even at the expense of his own life. Dostoevsky's political apocalypse envisions a "fraternity of martyrs", strongly reminiscent of Kierkegaard's world conquest by self-sacrifice(7). Kierkegaard's joyful.

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self-immolation of the savior-martyrs will force the "man of the crowd"--Dostoevsky's own underground man—to seek within himself the subjective truth of his unique yet universally authenticated existence. The erotic flight toward immortality within is possible only when the finite individual accepts the participatory in-betweenness, the Platonic metaxy of the human condition (Symposium 202B) . This too is essentially the way of the martyr for a better mankind who gains immortality by transcending his empirical self toward a collective but transcendent ground of being. In Dostoevsky's case, this ground is the living, embodied Christ of Russian-Orthodox Christianity, the transcendent Godman dispensing gratuitous grace to the humble immanent members of the sobor, who have responded to his call for sacrifice and thus fulfill Christ on earth and themselves, in the beyond.

Not in communism, not in mechanistic forms is the socialism of the Russian people expressed: they believe that they shall be finally saved through the universal communion in the name of Christ (D II, 1029).

In Plato, the equivalent metaphysical concept of the creation of a Godman through transcendent participation is the myth of eros (Symposium, 202e) which fulfills the transcendent-immanent bond between man and his divinity.

In Dostoevsky's mythology it is then the sobornost' of the Russian collective psyche embodied in the masses with their concept of a folk Christ which consummates the idea of divine perfection in the earthly paradise in "the living image of the universal communion of men" (D II, 582). Only the Russian people can bring about the "direct elimination of all (existential) contrasts (D II, 579), something that has been unsuccessfully attempted for centuries by the fragmented cultures of the West.

Dostoevsky's blueprint for the execution of his "Republic" of absolute, ultimate bliss remains, like Plato's, an eternal truth unshaken in its reality by the difficulty and improbability of its execution. Dostoevsky's "Ridiculous Man" echoes Plato's rebuttal concerning the feasibility of absolute justice: is it any less true because it had never been tried" (Republic, 590C and passim) as follows:

But how to establish paradise—I don't know because I can't express it in words... let this never come true and let paradise never come to pass... nevertheless, I will be preaching (D II, 690).

The subjective penetration of the forgotten divine world ground is psychologically feasible; hence spiritual immortality ought to be within man's reach as his ultimate, preterrational enlightenment.

Believe me: once (the martyrs for a better mankind) finally find the path of truth, they will inspire the rest to follow them... freely. What is there Utopian or impossible in this proposition? (D I, 624)... Our people

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have long been enlightened by the fact of their acceptance of the quintessence of Christ... together with him, they have embraced genuine enlightenment (D II, 983. My italics).

This "genuine enlightenment" uses the fact of the physical mortality of the individual as a contrastive proof of the immortality of a transcendent, eternal whole. The acceptance of man's phenomenal finiteness, rather than rebellion against it, makes man psychologically immortal as the spatiotemporal sensorium of the divine ground which makes this ground de facto exist in space and time. This mutually fulfilling participation between Christ and the God-bearing Russian folk gives a spiritual purpose to existence which would otherwise remain a purely material involvement in the phenomenon of mortality. Following in the footsteps of Plato, Dostoevsky declares the joyful acceptance of a measure of immortality appropriate to man's hybrid state between matter and spirit (Republic, 611e, et al.). Dostoevsky's concept of immortality is mediated and incorporated on earth by the "ecumenical church", a suitable vehicle for man's limited powers, "insofar as the earth is capable of embracing it" (D II, 1029). It may be only a myth, Plato's "horrendous lie" (Republic, 414C) and, at the same time, it is a pious fraud, man's noblest expression of his need to symbolize himself in the universe which remains eikos mythos, a mere "likely story" (Timaeus, 29c-d).

The final words of the "Ridiculous"—or "impossible"—man authenticate this likely story as the fundamental truth of everything that strives beyond mere materiality, yet can be grasped only in the dimension of space and time.

I saw truth and I know that men can be beautiful and happy without losing their faculty of living on earth. I refuse and I am unable to believe that evil is a normal condition in man (D II, 689).

(even should I never) participate in the harmony of the whole... and never even comprehend what it means, nevertheless I must submit to this message... accept suffering because of the harmony of the whole, and consent to live (D I, 471).

Notes

1. F. M. Dostoevsky, The Diary of a Writer, trans. Boris Brasol (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949), I, 90. The following quotations from Brasol's translation will be referred to in the text as D, while key words introduced in the original Russian are taken from Polnoye sobranie sochineniy F. M. Dostoevskogo, ed. A. F. Marks
   
   

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   (St. Petersburg, 1895), IX, X, XI.
2. Cf. Eric Voegelin, Plato (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 193, 278; also by the same author; Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968).
3. Voegelin, Plato, 193.
4. Sila ili bessilie, Sovremennost'. Gazeta politicheskaya, obshchestvennaya i literaturnaya, No. 148 (20 August, 1880) Cf. D. B. Grishin, Dostoevsky; chelovek, pisatel i mify (Melbourne: Department of Russian Language and Literature, 1971), 35.
5. "Dnevnik pisatelya, "Polnoye sobranie sochineniy, ed. Marks, XI, 106.
6. Delo, 1876., No. 6, 311-12. Cf. Grishin, 70.
7. Das eine was not tut; Kritik der Gegenwart, Tagebuecher, Angriff auf die Christenheit. Cf. Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, trans. David E. Green (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 247-48.