Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: Toward a New Metaphysics of Man

Abstract

The theme "Dostoevsky and Nietzsche" is one of the most important for understanding the meaning of the abrupt changes that took place in European philosophy and culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. This epoch is still a puzzle: it was a flourishing period for the creative powers of European humanity and at the same time the beginning of the tragic "breakdown" of history that gave birth to two world wars and unprecedented calamities, the consequences of which Europe has been unable to overcome, as shown by the uninterrupted decline of traditional culture, which began at the end of World War II and still continues today. In this epoch, as in the eighteenth century, which culminated in the Great French Revolution, philosophy came out of the study onto the street and became a practical force that steadily undermines the existing order of things; in a certain sense it was precisely philosophy that called forth the catastrophic events of the first half of the twentieth century, which had as never before a metaphysical subtext. At the center of the upheaval that engulfed absolutely all forms of European civilization and culminated, at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the rise of nonclassical science, "nonclassical" art, and "nonclassical" philosophy, was the problem of man, his essence, the meaning of his existence, and the problem of man's relations with society, the world, and the Absolute. It is no coincidence that M. Scheler used the term "anthropological turn" to describe the changes that occurred in philosophy in this epoch; what had long been implicit in philosophy and art and in paradoxical fashion had become apparent even in the new scientific theories, was now made clear: man is not a tiny "atom" in boundless and alien being, but the starting point for all suppositions, the primary field of meanings from which any philosophical or scientific "questioning" must depart.