Kant, Schopenhauer, Saul Bellow: Duty in The Victim

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Abstract Saul Bellow formulated his idea of duty under the influence of Kant and Schopenhauer. He introduced it first in his second novel, The Victim (1947), and later fully developed it in his seventh novel, Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). This article examines Leventhal's principle of duty in the light of Kant's in The Critique of Pure Reason and Schopenhauer's in The World as Will and Idea. The Victim deals with the issue of Jewish assimilation in mainstream American life in the post-Holocaust period. Bellow considers the matter in a reverse order with a view to castigate both Jews and Gentiles for their chronic misapprehensions about each other. In the novel, a Jew, Asa Leventhal, behaves like a Gentile (victimizer) and a Gentile, Kirby Allbee, like a Jew (victim). Leventhal is blood conscious and therefore he dutifully helps his blood relatives. Allbee insists that Leventhal help him as a matter of his moral duty to a human being in distress. After their repeated encounters, Leventhal sheds his blood biased view of duty and becomes conscious of the Kantian/ Schopenhaurean “dispassionate” principle of duty under the “objective moral law.”