Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Shestov. Three Russian Apostles of Freedom - страница 3

Yet as Raskolnikov walks along the street in Petersburg after his meeting with the old pawnbroker, he feels the need for human contact. He has been alone for many days in his little shabby room avoiding contact with people, living in his mind forgetful of normal life. He comes to the entrance to a cheap tavern and decides to go in and drink a beer. He is a young handsome student whose mind has taken hold of him completely and driven him to try to live in a realm beyond that of normal people. But here in the tavern the side of himself that is normal comes to the surface and he feels “suddenly set free from a terrible burden”. His burden, his problem is the power his mind exercises over his actions. A Russian critic of the 19th and 20th centuries, Lev Shestov, put the problem of living as an idea, Raskolnikov’s problem, in this way, “Man does not dare or has no power to think in the categories in which he lives, and is forced to live in those categories in which he thinks.” Raskolnikov has been living alone, estranged from society, living in the categories where he thinks. It is the problem of the Russian soul. A Russian wants to think only in the categories where he lives and he is horrified when something makes him live in the categories where he thinks. Raskolnikov’s passion is to live always where he thinks and nowhere else but drinking his beer in the tavern he does escape for a time living where he thinks because he is among poor drunken common Russians who are incapable of doing anything but think where they live. Raskolnikov feels “suddenly set free from a terrible burden” but he also has “a dim foreboding that this happier frame of mind was…not normal”. How long will he be free from his “terrible burden”? He will eventually have to leave his beer and his tavern and the world he faces outside will again make him think and thinking will again make him live in the categories where he thinks cut off from all regular human experience.

Dostoevsky’s novel is just his fancy set down in words creating imagined humans in action. But the Russian problem of the soul is real and the problem Dostoevsky treats in his novel is real because it is a problem he never succeeded in solving by using his mind, by thinking. But he thought and thought and he thought like all of us and the more he thought the more he thought that the mind itself was the problem, or rather, that the mind could not ever solve the fundamental problem of Russia and of life. What to do? We must do something but to do something we must first think what we are going to do and then what we end up doing habitually transforms us and we soon become no longer our authentic self but some superficial self that our ego makes up for ourselves using the rational power of the mind. We give up our freedom and make ourselves objects so quickly and so normally and so automatically that we reach a point where we are not even aware that we have given up ourselves and become other than ourselves. This other alien self should be Raskolnikov’s sworn enemy. But the enemy in his mind and in our minds is incapable of appearing to us as anything but our friend and we are afraid to think of him as an enemy from fear of perhaps going out of our minds. Raskolnikov is the kind of man who believes that something in the mind can reach out infinitely and discover something unknowable to the normal frame of mind. In some region of the mind, such men think, there is another dimension of the mind. The world is full of symbols of this transcendent world. All philosophers and scientists and some religious men believe this world, this other world, exists even though they never find it. But the quest for it is satisfying. It delights them that their petty human nature has a kind of divine globe, the mind, and they enjoy knowing that their minds give flashes at times of a world beyond our senses but not beyond our minds. No enemy lives within such men. They delight in thinking. Thinking leads to an absence of life that their ideas magically transform to the illusion of a presence. They think and think but it produces only more thinking not more life, not a release from the burden of life, but just more thinking until , as Lev Shestov wrote, they are not thinking in the categories where they live but living in the categories where they think.