Dostoyevsky’s manuscript drawings. Russian State Library. Photo: Maria Kolosov

In Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason, Kant posited the existence of a radical evil within the soul and thereby, according to Goethe, “criminally sullied his philosopher’s cloak with a shameful taint”. He also transformed our whole approach to the problem of evil, whether as an ugly ditch, standing between man and his creator, or the practical problem of surmounting the evil each individual faces in his or her consciousness, in his or her relations with others and his or her world. Evil has always oppressed man, but since Kant it has become impossible for the religious person — especially a Christian — to honestly give a universal consistent account of evil and its raison d’être in the world, as it raises the question: Can God — the all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good — permit its existence? Any attempt to excuse or even slur over its existence is to be rejected. Kant claimed, we should face and calmly acknowledge evil, and believe in God despite — almost because — of the evil we see around us, while remaining fully conscious of it, refusing the false solaces of religion, which often encourages us to construct a picture of our world as in fact it is not, but as we would have liked it to be. We should not acquiesce to evil, nor should we create false solutions which misrepresent the world.

What Kant insisted had been insisted before — in the Book of Job and by Luther — namely, that there is a belief in God as creator of all that exists in this world, both good and evil, not as an escape, but almost as a result of refusing to be put off with an idol — a god of this world — who can only be believed in by a diminution of consciousness. Job and Luther, however, stand at the end of the journey Kant embarked on. Job is not given any reason why the old die in pain and indignity, but beyond his consciousness of evil he discovers God and, as such, he is able to believe both in a God that is good and that this God created literally every thing in this oppressive universe. By accepting that this world is full of evil is also the world God created, God becomes God and Job accepts Him as such. This is different from the pious platitudes of those who find God in a quiet moment, away from the suffering of their ordinary life; as some type of  religious sedative, which itself is a type of evil, just as the literature of escape is a type of evil — as it often produces a corruption of consciousness in the minds of those who read it  — at least while reading it.

Any a priori solution to this problem of recognizing that God created a world, in which evil exists, inevitably leads many “true” believers to justify the existence of evil within the world, and thereby contributes to help them quiet their consciences and so reduce their concern for its elimination. To find a place for evil within the divine plan is to confer on it a validity it cannot have for many believers in the here and now. If they hurry to say something short and comprehensive, instead of quietly considering what evil is, namely, that in their experience humans find it to be intolerable, yet inexplicable and so what they do and say about that evil only appears tangential to their experiences of this world. It is not just as though individuals present themselves as having a knowledge of evil that is somehow detachable from those concrete evil situations, which is intolerable: it is also and more importantly blasphemy against those who do suffer. So anyone, who plays the role of a religious intellectual in the comfort they enjoy and without which they could not write the articles they do that are primarily concerned with the sufferings of others, are acting hypocritically. But each individual can, by making himself or herself aware of the evil in the world, can each become aware of their own limitations of understanding, as well as what they can and what they cannot do to eliminate it. It is one of the most destructive manifestations of evil that a good man or a good woman, who assumes responsibilities, which he or she cannot bear, often destroys himself or herself and others in his or her attempts to help.

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Dostoyevsky in his novels showed us how much he was aware of the particularity and ambiguity of the evils in the most innocent-seeming events. Such an awareness is at once a good in itself as it may prevent us from regarding human suffering either as something inevitable and, therefore, no longer our responsibility, or as something that we can alleviate, let alone cure, as though we ourselves were free from any taint of corruption. The mere act of moral contemplation can in itself produce an ability to be present in a situation in a way which is better, even without taking further action. My suggestion — and it is not just mine — is that Dostoyevsky’s novels should be construed as attempts to confer validity on human suffering by stripping man down to essentials and discovering what remains not just in a murder trial in Petersburg, but also in contemporary bedrooms and kitchens in Tel-Aviv or Paris, London or New-York and on public highways everywhere, and even in Yeshivot as well as in the cloisters of Christian churches.

If the exploration of the problem of evil is transformed by the readers of Dostoyevsky’s novels, they may be led to see beyond that evil, if not to a solution, at least that there is a solution, that is, that evil does not have to have the last word. That our faith in others and the world should certainly be transformed and purified in its vicarious contact with the evil in the world, purified of idolatry and of a too easy alliance between this world and its creator. To prepare his readers for such a transformation was central to Dostoyevsky’s Christian outlook. For him, each individual, if he or she is honest with himself or herself, must put everything in the balance, not least their own private explanations of the existence of evil. Whether their belief survives this process — their faith should be sufficient to trust that God will prevent what is worthy in this world from being destroyed. Each individual’s faith in God should provide motive for putting itself in doubt — each shall be cured of false belief in the way in which anfechtung in Luther and “the dark night of the soul” in St. John of the Cross was the mode of their journeying to God of those who, like Augustine, sought a city which was above. Perhaps, the difference between those who travel this path, no matter what their religious beliefs are, is less that the difference between the piety of the man who rests content with an unexamined faith, to one who consciously submits to the test of doubt.

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Dostoyevsky’s novels, even less than Proust’s, are not primarily psychological; that is to say, they are not explorations of the human psyche for its own sake with no further motive than to say: “That’s how things are”. Behind Dostoyevsky’s profound psychological explorations there is the question: “What is man?”, conceived not as a psychological question, but rather as a form of the questions: “In what does the value of a human life consists in?”, “What end does man live for?” Here I, following many others, discern a close affinity between Dostoyevsky’s concerns with those of Kant. Kant, too, explored the question of the ultimate significance of human life and fount it not in matters of fact about human beings, but in human freedom and, especially, the freedom man needs to function as a moral agent. In order to characterize what it is that is special about the value of human life, Kant distinguished between two realms: the realm of theoretical reason and the realm of practical reason. Within the realm of theoretical reason — the field of knowledge of matters of fact — man is causally determined and no amount of knowledge can reveal anything of the human significance about the human condition. Hence, the question of human freedom does not arise in this realm. The ultimate significance of human life lies in the action that each individual engages in as a moral agent. As an active moral agent, man is no longer an observer of the universe, but is someone who is autonomously attempting to impose his will upon it. Kant’s account of the two standpoints has been claimed by some to be incoherent to the extent that it violates his own canon of what can be meaningfully said. I do not think that this is so and, to clarify Kant’s account of freedom, I am now going to turn away from his Critique of Practical Reason to Dostoyevsky’s attempt to show what the significance is of a belief in human freedom in the various concrete situations in which men ply their lives. Kant’s analyses only begin to make sense in the concrete context of the lives of individual human beings and it is only within explorations of those lives that anyone can begin to see their significance.

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The belief in human freedom displayed by some characters of Dostoyevsky shows that they are each protesting against reducing their human suffering to triviality — which, for Dostoyevsky is to say that these characters see their lives as being devoid of humanity. The two classic Dostoyevsky’s characters who most famously display this are Raskolnikov at the end of Crime and Punishment and Dmitry Karamazov at the end of The Brothers Karamazov. Both characters have committed a crime for which they have been found guilty. Karamazov is, in fact, innocent or, at least, “technically” innocent. The novels explore with profundity the psychological roots of the protagonist’s actions in a way, which leaves little room for the protest that they could have done otherwise. Dmitry willed to kill his father and in this he was merely fulfilling his psychological pattern, which was predetermined. But, as it is said in his trial, psychology is a two-edged weapon — while it may have vindicated the innocence of Dmitry, in the sense that it showed that he could not be held responsible for his action. But, by viewing his life as fully determined, it is, he realizes, reduced to triviality. Only by accepting himself as a moral agent, by accepting himself as responsible for his action, which entails also his punishment as just, can Dmitry assert the human validity of his life. Only if a human being transcends the phenomenal world with its universal causal ordering — the world of theoretical reasoning — can it be said to have any human validity at all. If man is not immortal, then everything is permitted, says Ivan Karamazov. But if everything is permitted, then there is no room — no logical room — for either freedom and/or for viewing human life as possessing ultimate value. Therefore, an individual can only transcend his or her physical limitations by performing acts of will, such as accepting the responsibility for his or her actions, as only they express his or her humanity. That is, by doing things like those, things, that in Kant’s vocabulary assert the postulate of human freedom, are all individuals able to show themselves and others that the lives they live are humanly significant.

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Parallel with this contrast between psychological determinism and the validity of human action, implicit in the scheme of Crime and Punishment, there is another contrast, symbolized by Dostoyevsky in the figures of Christ and the Grand Inquisitor. The setting for the legend of the Grand Inquisitor is a discussion between Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov of the problem of evil, in which Ivan presents what surely must be one of the most powerful statements of the problem. In Ivan’s statement of this problem, he demolishes the usual criticisms of it by accepting them — for the sake of his argument — as being true. That Ivan is willing to accept as true that God needs evil to turn into good and that this world, which God created, is the best of all possible worlds. Nevertheless, he goes on to ask Alyosha: “Imagine, that you are creating a fabric of human destiny to make men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny [innocent] creature and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears — would you content to be the architect on those conditions?” To Ivan’s question Alyosha can only reply that he would not consent. In this statement of the problem of evil, Ivan presents us with an apologia pro vita sua for the figure of Grand Inquisitor. The legend, as related by Ivan, is not only an exposition of what is involved in rejecting Christ. In Ivan’s exegesis of this temptation narrative, Christ is presented as demanding from men a free response of love, thereby refusing in any possible way to influence man’s acceptance by any means, other than an absolutely free response. God shows His respect for man’s freedom by His invitation to man to live without any reward or inducement. But, says the Grand Inquisitor, man is not strong enough for the kind of freedom envisaged here. Man stands in a desperate need for authority, for a religion, which tells him what is right and wrong, which, even if it reduces him to a subhuman level, it at least keeps him happy and sets him from despair and misery. It is this tension, which Dostoyevsky is trying to give expression to not just in The Brothers Karamazov, but also in his other novels as well. The example of Versilov in Raw Youth comes to mind. The world pictured as a universal harmony, but which lacks freedom, is a picture, which trivializes man. Significantly, in many of Dostoyevsky’s novels it is an atheist who appear as presenting the strongest argument both for Christ and for immortality. It is in his characterizations of his atheists — Versilov, Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor — that we find the most powerful exposition of the tension that Dostoyevsky devoted a large part of his literary career to clarifying — a passionate concern for human freedom, combined with a passionate hatred of evil, while simultaneously recognizing the ultimate incompatibility of human freedom and the hatred of evil. Hence, Ivan is shown to be prepared to live without freedom, while Alyosha is shown to be prepared to live with the tension that Kant drew attention to — namely, that within the realm in which causation rules, and individual humans are virtually unfree. But this realm is the only one where any individual can attempt to impose his or her will on — a realm that is indistinct from the one we live in —the one in which individual men and individual women can at least meaningfully hope to be free.

Haim Marantz taught for many years in the Department of Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel. He has worked and written extensively (and continues to do so) in the area of Political Thought.

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