Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy

Abstract

This volume collects eight essays on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky written by scholars from different humanities fields. What unites them is the idea that, after more than a century, the writings of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and the relations between them still represent a major challenge for contemporary readers. The range of subjects that the authors tackle is wide, from crime, truth, art, and nihilism to pessimism, tragedy, and the unconscious. The result is a stimulating collection of essays that explore some of the similarities, as well as the radical differences, between two of the greatest minds of the nineteenth century.The first essay is written in a literary style by Geoff Waite and Francesca Cernia Slovin, who consider both the question of Nietzsche's discovery and reading of Dostoevsky (with particular attention to the broad cultural context in which this discovery takes place) and the question of crime and the criminal, common to both thinkers. The focus is particularly on the similarity between two forms of criminality, the revolutionary and the intellectual, and Waite and Cernia Slovin suggest that Nietzsche's criminal thought was not too far from Russian revolutionary nihilism. To support this reading, they mention, among other passages, a letter to Georg Brandes (March 27, 1888; KGB III:5, p. 278) in which Nietzsche confesses that in Saint Petersburg he would have been a nihilist, and a passage from Joseph Victor Widmann's review of BGE (Der Bund, September 16–17, 1886) in which Widmann claims that, two hundred years before, such a book would have brought its author to the scaffold. Other passages used to support this reading are, however, misinterpreted: Nietzsche neither pleads allegiance to the Assassins' maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted” (21 and n. 82) nor endorses the massacre of the Decembrists (21), as Waite and Cernia Slovin claim. (For a discussion of such errors, see my Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: On the Verge of Nihilism [Bern: Peter Lang, 2015], 169–88 and 120, respectively.) Moreover, although suggestive, Waite and Cernia Slovin's approach is implausible: even if Nietzsche played with the idea of intellectual Verbrechen (recall his mention of Ovid's nitimur in vetitum), he would have rejected any association of his thought with a revolutionary political agenda such as that of, for instance, Pyotr Verkhovensky in Demons. Furthermore, if Nietzsche and Russian terrorists both aimed at shaking the foundations of society, they did so in radically different ways and had very different conceptions of how society should be rebuilt.Jeff Love's fascinating chapter explores Nietzsche's and Dostoevsky's attitudes toward the indeterminacy that derives from the failure of traditional narratives to make sense of the world. Love's thesis is that both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are “explorers in a sort of post-narrative landscape” (40), but that, in his questioning of the need for narrative itself, the latter proves more radical than the former. To support this thesis, Love analyzes the preface to the second edition of GS, focusing on the relation between sickness and healing, truth and art. According to Love, the convalescent Nietzsche accepts indeterminacy only up to a certain point. Indeed, the need for (a new kind of) art as well as the characterization of the will to truth as bad taste in GS P:4 are taken to show that Nietzsche, having disclosed the truth (or lack thereof), returned to the world of appearances and illusion. (Here it would be interesting to know Love's opinion of Nietzsche's well-known claim in TI that along with the true world we have got rid of the illusory one.) In contrast, Love argues, Dostoevsky is able to overcome Heideggerian Angst at indeterminacy, as shown by the figure of the prisoner in Ivan Karamazov's story “The Grand Inquisitor.” Whereas the figure of the Grand Inquisitor (which Love interprets as a Nietzschean character) expresses terror at indeterminacy, the prisoner, with his relinquishment of will and desire, is “free of the struggle between action and inaction, activity and passivity” (53). Dostoevsky thus shows how a new way of life could be created that dispenses with narrative altogether.The question of truth is also the focus of Jeffrey Metzger's chapter, which undertakes to answer the following two questions: Is truth perceived or produced? And which is primary in human beings, the will or the intellect? To answer these questions—which, he claims, for both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are strictly related to reactivity or ressentiment—Metzger provides close readings of the first essay of GM and the first five sections of part 1 of Notes from Underground. In nuce, his argument is that both Nietzsche and the Underground Man reject the traditional picture of the human being as animated by a rational will. However, whereas Nietzsche holds that truth is produced and that the intellect is subordinate to the will, the Underground Man “consistently suggests that an independent, perceived truth limits the human intellect and especially the will” (77). Although Metzger admits that Nietzsche's reference to un-Christian, immoral truths in GM I:1 suggests that some truths can be discovered, he claims that “this picture is almost immediately complicated or even erased in the second section of the essay” (65). It is unfortunate that Metzger does not attempt to reconcile these two apparently contradictory conceptions of truth, or that he does not consider how the production of truth through valuation relates to Nietzsche's general appraisal of honesty and truthfulness or to his analysis of the will to truth at the end of GM.Michael Allen Gillespie's chapter presents a refined analysis of Dostoevsky's impact on Nietzsche's understanding of nihilism, an impact which, Gillespie claims, is evident in the new preface to D. (Gillespie refers to Erik von der Luft and Douglas G. Stenberg's “Dostoevskii's Specific Influence on Nietzsche's Preface to Daybreak,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52.3 [1991]: 441–61. I have argued in my Nietzsche and Dostoevsky [83–88] that von der Luft and Stenberg's reading is problematic.) Gillespie rightly points out that, despite their shared analysis of the origins of nihilism, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche radically diverge when it comes to their prescriptions for overcoming it. Whereas the former believes that the path to follow is that of faith, the latter thinks that what is needed is rather the creation of “a stronger, healthier human being, the true man-god who is beyond good and evil” (100), Nietzsche's superman. (For a critique of the common understanding of Nietzsche's superman as a Dostoevskian man-god, see my Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, pt. 2.) This higher human being is able to affirm the idea of the eternal recurrence and to accept even the most tragic and horrible aspects of existence—unlike Ivan Karamazov, who rejects any possible theodicy that would justify the suffering of innocent children. By overcoming the spirit of revenge, the superman becomes “truly active and creative and thus able to give human beings new values and purposes for their lives” (103).Joshua Foa Dienstag aims to explain Nietzsche's apparently ambivalent attitude to Dostoevsky, an attitude best synthesized in the following remark about Dostoevsky from a letter to Brandes (November 20, 1888; KGB III:5, p. 483): “I am grateful to him in a remarkable way, however much he goes against my deepest instincts.” To explain this ambivalence, Dienstag focuses on pessimism, comparing Nietzsche's “Dionysian pessimism” or “pessimism of strength” with the pessimism developed by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground. Dienstag maintains that what Nietzsche found so “liberating” (KGW VII:3, 14[47], p. 33) in Dostoevsky was how the pessimism expressed in Notes from Underground shared a peculiar characteristic with his own, namely, “the characteristic of displaying the world in all its limitations and ugliness” (117). In other words, both pessimisms were tragic. Nonetheless, by reading Dostoevsky's other writings Nietzsche discovered that, however tragic, Dostoevsky's pessimism was also profoundly Christian. Dienstag's analysis of Nietzsche's consideration of Dostoevsky's pessimism is convincing, but his focus on the Notes in order to explain the sentence “How liberating is Dostoevsky!” overlooks the fact that the note dates from spring 1888. For when Nietzsche wrote that sentence he had already read Dostoevsky's other writings.Edith W. Clowes provides a very interesting comparison between Dostoevsky's and Nietzsche's “mappings” of the unconscious through the spatial metaphor of the underground. Clowes's thesis is that “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were among the first, if not the very first, thinkers to situate moral psychology in a non divine space, to ‘map’ it, as it were” (126). Contrary to the previous tradition, Clowes argues, both thinkers locate the roots of moral consciousness in the lower regions of human nature, that is, in the obscure “underground,” which now becomes a metaphor for the psyche and specifically the unconscious. After a brief description of “spaces” of moral consciousness in European writing before Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Clowes provides a detailed analysis of the similarities and differences between Dostoevsky's and Nietzsche's “undergrounds,” as well as an examination of the vocabulary used by each. What emerges is that, in their respective mappings, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche both “link moral consciousness and moral behaviour to their unconscious ground in instinct and drive.” This underground is a universal reality in each of us, constituting “our only ground for moral behavior in the modern world, in which the divine no longer is viewed as creative agent but is, in contrast, created by people out of a psychological need for higher moral order” (138).Ilya Kliger's chapter has the merit of treating Nietzsche and Dostoevsky from a very innovative viewpoint, that of what he calls “tragic nationalism.” According to Kliger, Dostoevsky and the early Nietzsche were confronted with a similar problem, namely, the dire condition of a feeble and fragmented modernity. Their solutions to this problem are analogous: they both promote “an odd vision of immediate unity-in-separation: between antiquity and modernity, community and the individual” (149). In other words, for both thinkers it is necessary to mediate between the isolated individual (the genius or the intellectual) and the communal whole (the Volk or narod), radical modernity, and the deep archaic past. Kliger argues that “this logic is articulated in Nietzsche as a relation between the hero and the chorus and enacted by Dostoevsky in … the substitution of the novelistically fruitful member of the intelligentsia for the narod” (165).Tragedy is also the focus of the last chapter of the volume. Dmitri Nikulin's interesting thesis is that the distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian put forward by Nietzsche in BT can be found in Dostoevsky in a more complex and refined form. Nikulin devotes the first part of his chapter to showing that Nietzsche's rigid distinction deprives the two opposite elements of “their complex mythological and often contradictory traits” (179) and, more importantly, suppresses the dual nature of both Apollo and Dionysus. Nikulin claims that, in contrast, Dostoevsky captures the rich complexity of both figures. To support this claim, Nikulin focuses on The Brothers Karamazov, arguing that the figures of Apollo and Dionysus are represented by the characters of Alyosha and Dmitry, respectively. Furthermore, Nikulin claims that in Dostoevsky's novel not only “gods,” but also “demons” (Ivan and Smerdyakov) and female characters, disguised as maenads, play a crucial role, and that such figures are “altogether missing in Nietzsche” (189). Here readers of Nietzsche might object that Nietzsche defines Socrates himself as “an altogether newborn demon [Dämon]” (BT 12).It must be said that that, unfortunately, some of the chapters in this volume contain mistakes or inaccuracies regarding Nietzsche's readings of Dostoevsky. For instance, White Nights is wrongly identified with the volume Erzählungen von F. M. Dostojewskij that Nietzsche read (18), it is not certain that he read either Crime and Punishment (87) or The Idiot (109), and L'esprit souterrain, which he read, was not merely “a recent translation of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground” (109), but rather a very strange combination of that book with The Landlady. (For a discussion of such errors, see my Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, 93, 99–106, 107–17, and 25–26, respectively.) Given the existing secondary literature on Nietzsche's readings of Dostoevsky (including C. A. Miller's “Nietzsche's ‘Discovery’ of Dostoevsky,” Nietzsche Studien 2.1 [1973]: 202–57), such errors could and should have been avoided. Nonetheless, the chapters have the undeniable merit of offering new perspectives on the relation between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and rethinking it in innovative and thought-provoking ways. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky's writings continue to shed light on our understanding of modernity, and this volume makes an important contribution to understanding the relation between them.