CHAPTER 1
STEPAN TROFIMOVITCH
"Strike me dead, the track has vanished,
Well, what now? We've lost the way,
Demons have bewitched our horses,
Let us in the wilds astray."
Dostoevsky's novels and the characters that populate them are the consummate children of existential angst. His novels were in fact among the first creative actualizations springing out of this agonizingly strange and unknown spiritual temper in the pneumatological history of the self; their portrayals were among the first and the most viscerally poignant of the conscience of a whole generation of human beings - the Russian nation/the soul of the Russian people, children unabsolved, being the object of Dostoevsky's visionary scrutiny - fallen victim to it. Dostoevsky, along with Kierkegaard, was the first and the greatest prophesier to cognize the essence and portray and dramatize the lived experience of existentialism. But what, after all, is existentialism? The word existentialism itself with its percolation into everyday language has become diffuse and obscure as far as definitional rigour and conceptual regularity are concerned. However, from the instant of its adoption by Kierkegaard as a term descriptive of his philosophy down to its contemporary diluted everyday usage, this word has carried within it a kernel of meaning that has stayed consistent and true to itself. It is this meaning that will be the object of our research here, and through the exegetical method of close and critical reading, and a creatively facilitated polyphonous-dialogical engagement of the philosophers themselves, we will attempt to reveal this kernel. Our exploration has two aspects - the primary task is to delineate the existential situation in its subjective starkness. It will be presented in terms of its psychological mood inscribed with an intensely thanatophobic weltanschaung; a cosmology underpinned by a nullifidian theological scepticism privileges death as the transcendent truth of human existence and annihilates the metaphysics of the eternal spirit. The other facet of our project will be to unconceal the onto-theological (or the lack of the onto-theological) and historical foundations of existentialism. There can be no better way for the beginning of a true understanding of this subject than to seek it out at its originative moment, originative more in the philosophical or metaphysical sense than the historical one. However, in the particular case of Dostoevsky (and Kierkegaard), the theoretical germination of the existential thesis in the consciousness is also its historical inception. Dostoevsky (and Kierkegaard) wrote at a moment in history when the existential cosmology and theology (or the loss of a theology) was stirring up in the historical mind. Dostoevsky was arguably the keenest witness to this essential mutation in the world spirit and his representation of a nation undergoing this radical spiritual transfiguration comes to acquire a primary location in the history of the Weltgeist. What transpires in the lives and souls of the characters of Dostoevsky pertains to the category of reflective history as worked out by Hegel. Dostoevsky "shared the spirit of the society whose state he had before his eyes and simply transferred what was happening in the world around him to the realm of representative intellect." He thus performs the role of a reflective historian (as dissimilar from "original historians" like Thucydides and Herodotus) who represents the spirit of the age or the Zeitgeist by transferring history to the "realm of the beautiful," and his art evoked primarily and extraordinarily the feelings of fear and pity. Unlike the history of deeds and events i.e. the history of external phenomena, which Hegel classifies as "original history", Dostoevsky's achievement lies in the aesthetic (and dialogical) translation of internal conceptions. The material for such history is available to the novelist in the form of the emotions of those around him and his own sublimation of these emotions. Dostoevsky was an immediate witness of this spiritual drama and was blessed/cursed with an orphic insight into the spiritual crisis of humanity. He is an existentialist because he is "Russia's greatest metaphysician", as no one probed the beyond with the same relentlessness and moral courage as Dostoevsky. No one could utter the existential condition and speak the horror of the beyond, and no one, not even Nietzsche, proclaim the death of God with greater simplicity and passion:
"Stagnation! O, Nature! Men are alone on earth - that is the misfortune! "Is there a living man in the field?' cries the Russian hero. I cry the same, though not a hero, and no one answers my cry. They say the sun gives life to the universe. The sun rises and - look at it, indeed, is it not dead? Everything is dead, and everywhere there are the dead. Only men, and silence around them - this is the earth! 'Men love one another' - who said that? Whose command is that? (A Gentle Creature)
Dostoevsky was a virtuoso at intimating the "powers of horror." Man, in Dostoevsky, is constantly haunted by the horror of the beyond which, yet, "lies there, quite close, to him" and his people live under the unwaning shadow of abjection. "There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable" (On Abjection: The Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva). The awful cry howling through the lives of the human beings located in Dostoevsky's fictional worlds is, "There is no God," and the horror has its birth in that cry torn out from inside of them. The Dostoevskian exorbitant dwells very much within the man - his horror-breeding exorbitant inside. Dostoevsky's creatures are in a state of ceaseless violent and dark (spiritual) revolt in response to the moral freedom forced upon them by their desperate earthly plight. A freedom that they dread, but cannot escape. "We've lost the way ... in the wilds astray." There is no predetermined, always-already there path to guide man's spirit through the spiritual wildernesses of earth. The "misfortune" of man is that he is "alone on earth" and there is no God to commandeer the ship of this Theseus on the turbulent seas of faith and doubt. "'Men love one another' - who said that? Whose commandment is that?" This is a world without holy commandments and without morality and man is a prisoner of a deep solitude. Man is utterly and totally surrounded by death as the world around him is impregnated through and through with death. For what, really, can be alive when God Himself is dead? Everything that had a place and relevance in life has been robbed of its vitality in the absence of a God that lends meaning and order to it all. "Everything is dead and everywhere there are the dead." Even the sun is dead when you look at the world through the eyes of a profound death, the death of God, the profoundest and most absolute of them all, the one whose death
envelopes all in the wake of its funereal shadow. "Is there a living man in the field?" The "living" of this lexicon has to be understood in the contrastive light of theological immortality and atheistic nihilism. In the Dostoevskian wasteland, the tenability of the great beyond has been negated. Death is the only true future and the sole possibility of man. Even before the event of death, death is already there in the living as the 'ownmost' element of life. This radical solitude of man in a world where "there is no God" is the originative and constitutive principle of the Dostoevskian narrative. The separation of man from God gives birth to abjection in the face of the threat posed by the unmitigated annihilation of the spirit. The threat that emanates from the exorbitant outside/inside is that of this annihilation, as man without God is doomed to unqualified and eternal ontological obliteration without the prospect of salvation and resurrection. The exorbitant outside/inside is the transcendental nothingness that has come to occupy the space promised and sanctified earlier by God and the threat is that of man's ultimate nothingness arising out of this universal nothingness. Abjection is the moral fabric of an existence lived under the shadow of a nihilistic destiny. An etymological analysis of the word 'abjection' harks us back to its Latin stem of 'abjectio' that literally translates as casting away (ab + ject = throw or cast away). Abjection, therefore, is the psychological plight of the spiritual cast away, as the "Robinson Crusoe" state of man on earth ("men are alone on earth") is not just that of man cast away from the grace of God, but of man from whom God himself has been cast as much away as he from God: the upended and tragic case of the abandoned Creator. "The exorbitant outside or inside" has been "ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable." God has now been eradicated from within the bounds of that which forms the locus in whose interiority man can think, endure and realize the potentialities of existence, and made to abide in the domain of the impossible, the intolerable, and the unthinkable.The exorbitant inside/outside has superseded God and abjection has overcome faith. (Man's incapacity to admit to the exorbitant outside/inside permeating his inner and outer worlds is the source of this infinite abjection.) Nietzsche, after all, proclaimed the "death of God," and not that of man. "Only men, and silence around them - this is the earth!" "Men are alone on earth," enveloped by utter silence and death. "Everything is dead, and everywhere there are the dead." Even the sun is dead, and so is God. There is no God to answer man's cries and prayers, no Christ to teach the disciples, or Moses to lead the faithful. For the existential earthling, the world has lost its twofold character and man his twofold attitude as codified by Buber. "There is no I as such but the I of the basic word I-You and I-It or I-He or I-She." "'Is there a living man in the field?' cries the Russian hero. I cry the same, though not a hero, and no one answers my cry." In a world where there is no answering cry to echo the cry of the I, there is no "living man in the field" as there is no being outside of the basic dialogical words of I and You/It/He/She. This exorbitant outside or inside, this absolute nihility,"beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced." It "beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire" and deep abjection ensues from the fear of death that constantly breeds inside of man. It abandons not just the body but also the soul to the power of abyss. Nothing is eternal in a Godless world, and man, there, is powerless to believe in the immortality of soul. He is the captive of a "fear of death that knows nothing of a separation between (a mortal) body and (immortal) soul." In the throes of a desperate and violent fear, man cries out, sounding the depths of the abyss, "Is there a living man in the field?" and is answered by the silence of nothingness. " ... that it yells I,I,I and wants to hear nothing about a deflection of the fear onto a mere 'body' ... That man may crawl like a worm into the folds of the naked earth before the whizzing projectiles of blind, pitiless death, or that there he may feel as violently inevitable that which he never feels otherwise: his I would only be an It if he were to die; and he may cry out his I with every cry still in his throat against the Pitiless One by whom he is threatened with such an unimaginable annihilation." It is man's fear of culminating in mere dust and ashes that originates within him the feeling of abjection. It "shows the creature whose limbs are trembling in fear for its life in this world, a world beyond of which it wants to know nothing at all." With the erosion of man's faith, God was erased from the world and beyond; It was erased utterly and absolutely. Shod of the cocoon of religion, then, in the face of enlightenment's relentless questioning of the beyond, that which was able to "cast off the fear of the earthly, to remove from death its poisonous sting, from Hades his pestinential breath" was taken cruelly away from man. Man was robbed of resurrection and eternal life in Christ. He now "lives in this fear of death" and "awaits with fear and trembling his passage in the dark". The promise of redemption by Christ or any other god that refuted and pre-empted these earthly fears of annihilation has been rendered null and void by the new-fangled spirit of scientism and the 'rationality' of the enlightenment men. Enlightenment swept the theological order away along with the worldly one. The anthropocentric conception of the world gave way to an uncentered universe sans a transcendental anchor.
In the tortured universe of Dostoevsky "the grave opens up under our feet before each step." Thus, we see that what Franz Rosenzweig says about the redemptive and salvaging character of philosophy applies word for word to religion (faith) as the latter too "with its outstretched index finger, shows the creature, whose limbs are trembling in fear for its life in this world, a world beyond." But denuded of this assuaging and salvaging faith man is left naked at the mercy of the powers of horror. "The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine." Man is, hence, powerless in the face of that which is "not my correlative" as not being an 'objet' or 'my correlative', it deprives me of all support. Dostoevsky speaks the horror of man's state of objectlessness, when beset by the abject man does not have a cognizable object of horror. Man is ceaselessly tortured by his desire for meaning, a desire that resides in language and is the cause of its movement. The being of desire is in "an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire"; it lies in the quest for an object, a presence. Desiring an object I am settled "within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses." The abject is the banishment of God from man. Desire in Dostoevsky relentlessly pursues what lies beyond and comes up short against the banishment of here from the beyond, of this world from God, and is thrown into agonies of brutish suffering at this banishment from the everlasting life.
With the deposing of God, the thesis and antithesis of world and eternity dissolves into meaninglessness and the essence of theo-ontology is devastated. What Heidegger says about Nietzsche's word "God is dead" is also apposite to the Russian soul of Dostoevsky's people living under the shadow of the utterance "there is no God": The word of Nietzsche speaks of the destining of two millenia of Western history. It was the end of a history of metaphysics when metaphysics had to withdraw into its own inessentiality by pronouncing its impossibility. The pronouncement that "there is no God" or that "God is dead" is the culmination of millenia of questioning the 'logos' of metaphysics, a question always concealed under the very assertion of God's 'existence'. In his dissertation on 'Faith and Knowledge', Hegel posits that the "feeling on which rests the religion of the modern period - the feeling God himself is dead" is a prefiguration of what Dostoevsky and Nietzsche had to say about the closure to the question of God. Heidegger would have the word of Plutarch "Le grand Pan est mort" ("Great Pan is dead") belong to the same species of anti-metaphysical assertions. The theme of the 'death of God' has, therefore, had its own ulterior history within the overall history of Western metaphysics.
"Man fears death because he loves life. That's how I understand it," I observed,"and that's determined by nature."
"That's abject; and that's where the deception comes in." His eyes flashed. "Life is pain, life is terror, and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and terror. Now man loves life, because he loves pain and terror, and so they have done according. Life is given now for pain and terror, and that's deception. Now man is not yet what he will be.
There will be a new man, happy and proud. For whom it will be the same to live or not to live, he will be the new man. He who will conquer pain and terror will himself be a god. And this God will not be."
"Then this God does exist according to you?"
"He does not exist, but He is. In the stone there is no pain, but in the fear of the stone is the pain. God is the pain of the fear of death. He who will conquer pain and terror will become himself a god. Then there will be a new life, a new man; everything will be new ... then they will divide history into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God to ... "
Nihilism is the annihilation of God and the wilful annihilation of the self, suicide, is affirmed as man's lone hope for salvation in the wake of this ultimate annihilation; in the wake of the abject. The idea of God is unconcealed in its nudity as the fear of death and it does not possess any ontological truth in separation from this fear. He exists for us in and through the fear of death and is nothing but a metaphysical fancy of man, a dream, a chimera, albeit, a necessary one. Man needs God to alleviate the pain of death. The idea of God is the child of man's experience of suffering; it is the aftermath of the search of language for its own absolute point, rather than language being an emanation from the unconditioned Logos.
The madman of Nietzsche cries, "Whither is God? I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I." It is, therefore, God who has been cast, ejected, away from man by man's own wilfulness. The similarity in the tropes and metaphors employed by both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to evoke the death of God is remarkable. Nietzsche's madman cries further,"What did we do when we unchained this earth from its suns? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns?" The life giving and sustaining flame of the sun has been enveloped in the time of the darkness of the twilight of idols and of death (of God). "They say the sun gives life to the universe. The sun rises and - look at it, indeed, is it not dead?" Life now stirs in a movement away from sun and from life (everlasting). "Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning?" The expanse voided by God has been replaced by a pure and omni(present) void. "Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?" Hegel feels for the ground beneath our feet, the 'grundriss' of our 'ontos', reaches the truth about the death of gods, the only sure ground on which the edifice of modern civilization can be erected. The deep and far resounding rhetoric of Nietzsche proclaims, "Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Gods too decompose." In a world where the resurrection of Christ has been denied both man and Christ, where everything from the birth and death of Christ to his resurrection has become sheer history stripped of all onto-theological destining, if man has to resurrect himself from the ashes of the death of God, then the human condition must have its logical, philosophical, and radical culmination in suicide. " ... in his dreadful poverty, he must have felt at sometime lonely, adrift from the world, standing for a night facing the nothing ... " The question that haunts man is "Whither are we moving now?" Whither should he move? Whither must he move? "Life is given now for pain and terror, and that is deception." Man lives now in bad faith, in a state of deception, decrepit. If man has to save himself from the death of God, he must heed the call of being; he must have a new God reign in the place of the old, a god that will pre-empt nothingness. The old god has been killed and "men are alone on earth", living in a universe of silence and nothingness, but living still. Alone, but alive, still here, on earth. To save himself, man must be prepared to kill himself. To create a new god, he must himself be the new god. This is the foundation on which the new religion will be built; this is the "feeling on which rests the new religion of the modern period." In the solipsistic solitude in which man lives on earth, pervaded by a total silence all around, man has only himself as the potential for any and all possibilities. Therefore, in man's felt necessity for God he himself must be the new god. But how? "God is the pain of fear of death. He who will conquer pain and terror will become himself a god." Hence, he who conquers death (or more truly and appropriately, the fear of death) will become a god. "For whom it will be the same to live or not to live, he will be the new man." And the new god. "For man does not at all want to escape from some chain; he wants to stay, he wants - to live" (The Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig). "Now man loves life, because he loves pain and terror, and so they have done according. Life is now given for pain and terror, and that's the deception" (Kirilov, The Possessed). This deception, however, must be destroyed for man to unchain himself, for him to gain his "supreme freedom", for his soul to "float off in the wind ... free above the grave that opens up under our feet before each step"(Rosenzweig). "They will kill deception. Everyone who wants the supreme freedom must dare to kill himself. He who dares to kill himself has found out the secret of the deception. There is no freedom beyond, and that is all; there is nothing beyond. He who dares kill himself is God." Philosophy sanctions suicide, though man is destined to die but not to suicide, he is still called upon to suicide as the only true and faithful action man is capable of committing in an atheistic universe. "And it is only suicide that that philosophical recommendation would truly be able to recommend, not the death decreed for all." Death is the universal destiny; it is something that will naturally and inevitably happen to man. However, when man wilfully embraces death in committing suicide, he performs the ultimate act of freewill in choosing his own destiny, by making death the most personal and faithful of events, an act of supreme faith; as when Abraham readies himself to sacrifice Isaac on the altar of God. It is in the form of an absolute duty to God that Abraham that Abraham recuperates his faith in Him. Man, in the same manner, is called upon to perform the absolute act of faith by being willing and ready to kill himself with indifference; it is only in the fulfillment of this absolute duty to the new god, which is none other than he himself, in obedience to whom Abraham must not kill Isaac but himself. In borrowing the ethical of Kierkegaard, we understand that in his indifference to death and in suicide, man is pronouncing judgement both on himself and on faith. Suicide is the final act of faith. When man by daring to kill himself "has found out the secret of the deception. There is no freedom beyond; that is all, and there is nothing beyond. He who dares kill himself is God. Now everyone can do so that there shall be no God and shall be nothing." God is created only in and through an act of faith. "Only when the individual has emptied himself in the infinite, only then the point has been reached where faith can break through."
"There is an absolute duty to God, for in this relationship of duty the individual relates himself as the single individual absolutely to the absolute." "He who dares kill himself is God." How is that possible? How does that become - from man to God? This 'that' which becomes lies in the relationship of man to God. Man becomes God through faith; the honest, living faith, by acceptance, in what is rather than in what man wishes out of his fear of death. For the old God is nothing but the "pain of man's fear of death." "Thus in the ethical view of life, it is the task of the single individual to strip himself of the qualification of interiority and to express this in something external" (Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard). Man must actualize his faith by an external act. In the sense that "every duty is essentially a duty to God" man sanctifies the new God by an act of absolute faith whereby killing the self becomes the absolute duty to new God. The enthronement of the new God requires the act at the same time that it does not require it, as it does not matter to man, himself the new God, whether he lives or not. However, "faith is the paradox that interiority is higher than exteriority". Therefore, the mere fact of man's preparedness, an interior state, at one and the same time to carry out the act of suicide is in itself a vindication of the act and its philosophical relevance, which by dint of being higher than the act, the exterior, subsumes the latter within itself. Suicide, for Kirilov, in its interiority as the in potentia always and at all moments, and in its exteriority as the execution of the act, its culmination, so to speak, is the final point that shall make a God of man. "God comes go an invisible vanishing point."
Since time immemorial the seduction of self-sacrifice has been a potent one for man. (Intertextualize "Sacrifice, Jean Marie Guyau" here.)
Gabriel Marcel averred at the opening of his Gifford lectures that scepticism is the temptation of philosophy and suicide that of man. Suicide, hence, is the ultimate mark of the open character of man's existence. To learn something about the nature of existence and the existential character it is worthwhile to look at the various understandings of existential philosophy. In his Gifford lectures on the mystery of being, Marcel does not deign to offer "something systematic; something which would be strictly speaking, my system," an organic whole whose structural details can be anatomized. He called the lectures " a search for, or an investigation into, the essence of spiritual reality." From his point of view "such a term as search or investigation - some term implying the notion of a quest - is the most adequate description that can be applied to the essential direction of philosophy." Furthermore, "philosophy will always, to my way of thinking, be an aid to discovery, rather than a matter of strict demonstration." This is so, significantly, on account of the open and contingent nature of existence as the essence of thought is primarily and ultimately in its movement. The pre-existential philosophers, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, "lived in a constant opposition to conceptual systems of philosophy." Marcel's criticism of Hegel is thetical to the character of existential philosophy: "The philosopher who first discovers certain truths and then sets out to expound them in their dialectical and systematic interconnections always runs the risk of profoundly altering the nature of the truths he has discovered." This brings us to the Sartrean maxim of existence preceding essence as existence is determined by its open and contingent character, its susceptibility to accident, its being-toward-the-world. This openness is not susceptible to systematization or dialectical reasoning. For Jaspers too philosophical thought "can neither be true in a closed system, nor in an aggregate of aphorisms." This last is an allusion to the aphoristic style of philosophising of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard whose philosophical thought is not, nevertheless, a mere aggregate of aphorisms; their aphorisms, rather, create meaning in the Derridean mode of 'structure, signs and play', except that the play in them is to a very large degree controlled and deliberate as evinced, for example, by the use of irony in Kierkegaard. The enmity of existentialism to systems is also evinced in "Jaspers' (own) enmity to "premature terminology: a terminology at the beginning and not, as it should be, arrived at as a result of the insights won." L'existence precede l'essence. The existential man does not possess anything in the beginning, but gains the unique value and meaning of his existence by existing. "We certainly thus get rid of that dualism which in the existent opposes interior to exterior" (Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre). "There is no longer an exterior for the existent if one means by that a superficial covering which hides from sight the true nature of the object." The existent, therefore, does not possess a prior essence, hidden out of sight inside it, but rather is, in its essence and reality, the very concatenation of the appearances or phenomena in which it manifests itself. "This true nature in turn, if it is to be the secret reality of the thing, which one can have a presentiment of or which one can suppose but can never reach because it is the 'interior' of the object under consideration - this nature no longer exists." The truth of the existent is in its existence and it is nothing but the series of appearances which manifest it. "The appearances which manifest the existent are neither interior nor exterior; they are all equal."
Both Marcel and Jaspers refer to the brokenness of being. Philosophy is "unable to reach Being, which presents itself to man as broken, as a series of ruptures." "Don't you feel sometimes that we are living ... if you can call it 'living' ... in a broken world? Yes, broken like a broken watch. The mainspring has stopped working. Just to look at it, nothing has changed. Everything is in place. But put the watch to your ear, and you don't hear any ticking. You know, 'what I am talking about, the world, what we call the world, the world of human creatures ... it seems to me it must have had a heart at one time, but today you would say the heart had stopped beating"(Marcel's play). An atheistic universe is a world whose mainspring has stopped working in the sense that man's life was driven and directed by (the mainspring of) (belief in) God, and the world is broken in the absence of such faith. When Marcel wonders in his lecture about "a broken world? Are we being the dupes of a myth when we imagine that there was a time when the world had a heart?" Here we are faced again with the historical question of the opposition between science and faith - about how faith was gradually but ineluctably eroded by the encroachment of science into its realm. It carries us to the Dostoevskian agony over the vanished track, the religious path devoured and erased by the questioning and doubting spirit of European enlightenment. This broken world has engendered an indefinable inner grief and anguish in man, as it has done in Marcel's heroine and which breaks out in her speech (about the broken world whose mainspring has stopped working). "It would be rash to put one's finger on some epoch in history when the unity of the world was something directly felt by men in general." It refers us to the clandestine history of doubt in the larger and more conspicuous history of faith, of a secret existential perspective in the history of metaphysics (witness Augustine of Hippo, the neoplatonist and doctor of the church, Mulla Sadra, the Islamic philosopher associated with illuminationism and transcendent theosophy, Blaise Pascal, Rousseau, Socrates, the stoics, and Thoreau, to name only a prominent few). To adduce this point somewhat, however, Marcel invokes the ghost of nostos: "But could we feel the division of the world today ... if we had not within us, I will not say the memory of such a united world, but at least the nostalgia of it." Marcel then makes a very remarkable point, a point that, since the date of these lectures, becomes more and more relevant and gathers more and more speed with the gathering momentum of the current trend of globalization; a point that is highly pertinent to the world as it is now and will be in the foreseeable future: "What is even more important is to grasp the fact that this feeling of a world divided grows stronger and stronger at a time when the surface unification of the world (I mean of the earth, of this planet) appears to be gathering apace." It is this shift in history that has marked the movement of existentialism. This unification of the world, rather ironically, instead of a "quickening in the womb of a higher conscience, they would say a planetary conscience", has witnessed a division and disintegration of this same conscience. It has indeed culminated in a crisis of conscience. Husserl expressed this predicament succinctly and tellingly in the subtitle of his work 'The Crisis of the Sciences as Expression of the Radical Life-Crisis of European Humanity.' Husserl's meditations are a "teleological-historical reflection upon the origins of our critical scientific and philosophical situation." The nature of the reflection is teleological-historical because of the teleological nature of the crisis in world's history. The death of God was a teleological crisis of humanity as the notion of God allowed history to be equipped with a telos. Another existential philosopher and theologian, Paul Tillich, deals with the religious situation of the present day, which is in reality and origin, that is, genealogically, the religious situation of the nineteenth century. "The present is the past. Every present movement is a wave which has been raised by the waves of all the past." The existential is not a categorically new psychical state in the history of sensibility. "It is an individual event, to be sure; it is unique; but the individual event has received its content from and is borne along by an infinity of other things, by the past. Hence the eye cannot remain fixed on this one thing; the more profoundly it penetrates into the nature of the object the more it tends to glide, consciously or unconsciously, toward the past - first toward the nearest other event, from there to the more distant, and, if it were possible, to all other events." The existential state of the consciousness has come to dwell in the present by force of the past - by force of its far and near events, by force of its far and near recesses whose transcendent memories still resonate at the heart of the present.
Tillich's metaphysical description of religion in its historical situatedness is so masterly that we will have a recourse here to his complete essay on the 'religious situation' as a method for expositing our own thesis regarding the teleological-historical crisis of religion. When we are investigating any facet of the present or any other object of research in the historical context of the present moment, we are, in essence, investigating the present moment itself. The question begins to hinge on the meaning of time itself, especially in its relation to eternity. The concept of time is among the most problematic of all, which, when broached, is at once inundated with a proliferation of questions. Time, for Heidegger, is the horizon of being. "The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Dasein is grounded in temporality. Accordingly, a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?" Even abstracted from the overlapping question of being, pure temporality is still not unproblematic. "For the formulation of a topic is itself the result of long intellectual labours and sometimes its a very questionable and problematical result." Even within time, the notion of the present (moment) is the very exemplar of the philosophically problematic and ontologically untenable. "How is it possible to speak of the present when the present is a nothing, a boundary between past and future, a line without any breadth, on which nothing can stand and about which, therefore, nothing can be said?" It is impossible to speak purely and strictly about the present, because "everyone who tries to speak about the present inevitably tends to speak rather of the past, near or remote, and of the future, most distant or most near." To understand the present moment in all its contemporary temporal significance, it must first be understood what the present moment implies within the framework of one's understanding of time and its ontology and of eternity. For it also happens that "some who try to speak about the present discover that they are speaking of none of these three times but of the eternity which is above all times."
So, when we speak of the religious crisis of the present moment, what is our ontology? Indeed, what is the metaphysics of such an assertion? By speaking about the present moment at all, we become embroiled in the most fundamental question of ontology, that of being (itself) and of time. But when the problematic involves the deeper complexity of the religious crisis of the present moment, the question shifts from ontology to metaphysics. "Religion deals with a relation of man to the eternal. But a relation has two sides": temporal and eternal. The religious question, therefore, implicates both the temporal and eternal aspects of being.
"There are three answers to the question about the nature of present: the present is the past, the present is the future, and the present is eternity." "Hence the eye cannot remain fixed on this one thing (the present moment); the more profoundly it penetrates into the nature of the object, the more it tends to glide, consciously or unconsciously - toward the past - first toward the nearest other event, from there to the more distant and, if it were possible, to all other events." This last pertains to the facet of the present which 'exists' in relation to the past. The nearest event connected (or associated in the nearest manner, i.e., both historically and axiomatically) to the religious crisis of the present moment is the advent of the crisis with the closing of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth. "The present is what it is only in union with all that has gone before and without this other-than-itself, on which it rests, it is nothing." The crisis is a crisis only in relation to what has gone before it in time. It is a religious crisis in relation to the comparatively unbroken faith of the past. The crisis is, hence, the nature of the relation of the present to its own past. The nearness of this event (the origin of the crisis) is adduced by the perspectivist method whereby "our senses help themselves out of a similar difficulty in their observation of the external world by the use of a simple device - perspective. As it is in the world of space so it is also in the world of time. Only the figures which are very near are clearly visible; the farther the figures are removed the simpler their outlines become until at last they fade from view. Without perspective no object can be seen in its right spatial or temporal location. And this is even truer of the world of spiritual realities than it is of the world of things. For the spiritual achieves individuality only insofar as it contains affirmation and denial of other individuals. Knowledge of a spiritual phenomenon means apprehension of its affirmation and denial of other spiritual phenomena. To understand the present means to apprehend its affirmations and denials of the past, near and remote." It is thus that we understand the religious crisis of the present, within the framework of a history of time, if such a phrase can be allowed. The present religious crisis is the affirmation of the atheistic strand running hidden through the history of western metaphysics and a denial or negation of faith that characterized the spiritual life of humanity before the crisis. The future also 'exists' in a similar yet unique vein: similar as it is still a modality of time, but unique in its distinctness. "To live in present is to live in tension toward the future; every present is essentially a transition out of the past into the future. Spirit or mind is always direction from that which is to that which should be." The future is then what follows from the eschatological logic of an atheistic universe - the afterlife (or its lack) of man in a world without God - a possibility that breeds abjection in the present. Abjection or anguish or angst is the mood or state of mind revealing one's being-in-the-world in its immediacy. It is a consequence of man's unbroken openness and susceptibility to death - his being-towards-death.
"To understand the present means to see it in its inner tension toward the future." This present is nothing but man's being-toward-death which is the structure of man's orientation toward future, his 'inner tension toward the future." "Being-toward-the-end was determined in a preliminary existential sketch as being towards one's ownmost non-relational potentiality-of-being not to be bypassed." However, when caught up in an atheistic belief system, man begins to stare into a future of nothingness, which follows necessarily from the premises of atheism. "In this field also (that is, in the field of time, or temporality) there is such a thing as spiritual perspective, the possibility of finding amid all the infinite aspirations and tensions which every present contains not only those which conserve the past but also those which are creatively new and pregnant with the future." The future is thus a prolongation and fulfillment of the tensions and conceptions of the past. "There is such a thing as apprehension of the growing form, just as there is an apprehension of the grand outlines of the past development. To understand the present means ultimately to understand the future with which the womb of the present is great." Eschatology can exist only as a part of theology. Eschatology is the study of last things and the end of time. It is any system of doctrines concerning last or final matters, as death, the future state etc. The religious situation of the present is immediately related to an eschatological future state because in the religious situation time and eternity are related.
"Where now shall we find that existent reality, the time, the present, about which all this is to be said? Doubtless it is not to be found in nature with its cyclical process, its distant and strange past and its distant and strange future. Society is the carrier of an existing present as an historical reality; it is the existent thing which we are inquiring after in this context." It is, therefore, in history, rather than in nature that the spiritual crisis of humanity is played out and comes to acquire its meaning. Also, to understand the theological connotation of natural time one must first resort to historical time. The religious or theological situation is also understood in and through historical time. "A religious situation is always at the same time the situation of a (historical) society. But the term situation seems to mean something which is established, at rest and constant, a basic fact which lies at a deeper level than do all the visible tendencies, something which is invisible to those who live within it, but which is, for that reason, all the more effective." It is the unthought of lived theological experience. "It refers to an unconscious, self-evident faith which lies at a deeper level than the apparent antithesis of the belief and unbelief which both arise out of it and are both equally rooted in it." Religious crisis sets in only when this deep faith is challenged, and not the peripheral dialectical antithesis of belief and unbelief. "This unconscious faith which is not assailed because it is the presupposition of life and is lived rather than thought of, this all-determining, final source of meaning constitutes the actual religious situation of the period." It is this religious situation which was threatened and destroyed in the nineteenth century. "The time experienced shocks which it could not resist, the effects of which it could neither reject nor secularize."
Man is physically situated in the present moment which in turn is situated in the midst of history. "This present of ours becomes null and void if it loses itself within the narrow horizon of the day and degenerates into a mere present." Therefore, man's unconcealing of his own project and orientation in the lebswelt calls for a teleology of history. The present constitutes an ontological grundriss only because of the historical foundations at work underneath it. "The present reaches fulfilment through the historical ground which we bring to effective activity within ourselves." The human individual is the locus of history's action on the present moment. Future is the mode of man's being-towards-world in which man projects himself through the present moment into an unmanifest future which nevertheless inhabits this moment in the form of a conscious vision that incorporates choices and desires for one particular shape of future from among its multiple potentiatlities. An existentialist future is a humanist future of men's projective enterprise.
Time is also man's mediator with eternity. "A present that has attained fulfilment allows us to cast anchor in the eternal origin. Guided by history to pass beyond all history into the Comprehensive - that is the ultimate goal which, though thought can never reach it, it can nevertheless approach." Thus history has a teloeology that points beyond history towards eternity. There is an expectation of infinitude embedded in the individual's present and all other moments. This eternity and infinity is the ideal and desired teleological culmination of all of history's projective endeavours and the conscious and unconscious destiny of philosophy in all its forms - religious or secular.
Karl Jaspers' approach towards time and history corresponds to that of Paul Tillich. Both seek to bring the impulses and stresses of the past to bear on an understanding of the present moment. "(Our age) requires the whole history of mankind to furnish us with standards by which to measure the meaning of what is happening at the present time." The conception that we have a history is related to our consciousness of our humanity. Both history and humanity are unquestioned and ossified conceits of our thought but they arise within a framework of interrelated problems about that in which our humanity consists and the construction of history that flows and originates from the hence constituted humanity. "Humanity or mankind is the human species, human nature (e.g. compassion, altruism) and the human condition (the totality of experience of existing as a human." Sans this humanity, man will not possess a history."Humans, to an apparently superlative degree amongst all living things, are aware of the passage of time, can remember the past and imagine the future, and are intimately aware of their mortality." History is the handiwork of this time consciousness of man; a consciousness whose unconditioned/unthought is the human being's being-toward-death. The term humanity is also used to describe "the joy, terror, and other feelings and emotions associated with being and existence." History is the narrative of the way in which humans react to or cope with events that individuals and societies inevitably and necessarily encounter on account of the human condition. "A glance at the history of mankind leads us, however, into the mystery of our humanity," inasmuch as that humans are also questioning beings who investigate history for its purport and "ask themselves questions relating to the purpose of life beyond the base need for survival, or the nature of existence beyond that which is empirically apparent: What is the meaning of existence? Why was I born? Why am I here? Where will I go when I die? The human struggle to find answers to these questions - and the very fact that we can conceive them and ask them - is what defines human condition in this sense of the term." But this very fact is also the one that confounds the spectator of human history and leads his descent into the mystery of humanity. For as much as history answers certain kinds of questions, it raises even profounder ones in the process of answering those it was formulated answer. It leads to a sort of wonderment at the very existence of history. "The fact that we possess a history at all, that history has made us what we are and that the duration of history up to now has been comparatively short prompts us to ask: Where does it come from? Where does it lead? What does it mean?" The questions of history are questions about man's existence and its meaning. In the measure that he makes history, man in his turn is also made by it. He is a creature of history, and the two have their qualitatively distinct kinds of being in a union of complementarity. It follows from the fact that all historical entities are contingent, that not just our existence but its meaning too is shot through with contingency. The historically determined contingency of our existence acquires density from the fact of this history being deeply diminutive when contemplated against the vast temporal dimensions of the geological cycles of the earth and the infinitely vaster cosmological cycles of inter-galactic light years. The acutely brief history of man on earth means that he has too little experiential knowledge of time and too infinitesimal a perspective over cosmos to answer the enigmatic questions of existence.
At the opening of Strindberg's Dream play Indra calls out to his daughter
The unique significance of Dostoevsky, hence, lies in his profound ability to perceive a transitive and transformative moment in the philosophical history of the world and the aesthetic operation to which the genius of his dialogical imagination subjects his acute perceptions, translating them into a deeply faithful portrait of the world spirit. The world is encountered in Dostoevsky as free from God and in a state of nullity as a consequence. On account of this doubling of origins (historical and philosophical) the works of Dostoevsky acquire a very special significance in the context of the history of existentialism. After all, what more suitable text is there for an exegesis of existentialism than one of the great novels of Dostoevsky? In fact, any one of them is arguably as good as another for the purposes of an existential hermeneutics and together his corpus constitutes a veritable mine of existential meaning. However, since we must start the task of interpretation somewhere, we start with the "Possessed" keeping in mind that it is a random choice and indicates no hierarchy or preference of order in the Dostoevskian ouevre vis-a-vis our hermeneutical project.
What we mean by philosophical origin is that the existential discourse/narrative of the Dostoevskian novel grows out of its seeds and has its roots in a philosophical ground that had came to occupy human consciousness and that became its very soil around the turn of the eighteenth century. At that moment in history, God was vanishing if he was not already dead and the space left void by him had come to be inundated by an all darkening and all destroying nothingness.
"The track had vanished."
In a religious world, as all major religions testify (the noble path, the godly way, and so on), the path of man's journey through the world was dictated and his steps guided by the word of God. But by the nineteenth century that path had led humanity to a dead end and put a halt, so to speak, to man's spiritual journey. The godly path had vanished with the death of God. "The track had vanished" implies the previous existence of the track and the current void that has substituted it in the spiritual space. Existentialism has its origin in this godless universe of darkness and nothingness. It originates in the puzzlement and the befuddled attitude of man before this universal nothingness ("Strike me dead", "Well, what now?"). Deprived of the faith and meaning supplied by religion and in the absence of a path illuminated by its guiding light, man is plunged headlong into the dark abyss of meaninglessness. It is at this moment of despair that he is confronted by the primeval (existential) question, "What is the meaning of my existence? What does it even mean to exist?"
"We've lost the way". The telos of history had been lost and man was devoid of any meaningful destination except, perhaps, death. That which was supposed to sustain him and illuminate his way to the destination had instead betrayed and abandoned man to the dark forces of his own consciousness. "Demons have bewitched our horses, Led us in the wilds astray." Man's soul had been left stranded at an extremely critical spiritual juncture, at the mercy of the demons of his own mind - doubt and despair in the face of the absurd as following God he was led over the precipice into the abyssal depths of unmeaningness. "We've lost the way" also states a historical truth by intimating that a way was being followed until the moment that it was lost. Traditionally the religious way of life has been compared to a path that man walked on his spiritual journey and his life and world to utterly tenebrous wilds the only way out of which was by following the word of God and leading a righteous life. (Existentialism was also the imperillment of the righteous life or morality as anything and everything is permissible in a world without God.) Existentialism as a weltanschaung had a very definite origin in history at the moment man was "led into the wilds astray". Its substitution of the religious faith as the predominant weltanschaung was as concrete an event in the history of ideas as any. So, a certain change did come to transpire in the history of human consciousness. In fact, the very character of the consciousness was altered. "We (humanity) have lost our way", our belief in God, and are at our own devices in the "wilds", the wilderness of a godless world. The men riding the horses are metaphorical of both the individual man's and the historical mankind's spiritual journey through the world. In the Dostoevskian world the individual man's and mankind's historical narratives coincide as man who had travelled relatively secure through the world assuaged by the spiritual-emotional comforts of religion was almost suddenly (as the existential angst that had been slow in building up suddenly glared at man with the overwhelming awfulness of its sublime nothingness) and rudely faced, at the dawn of the ninetenth century or thereabout, with an existential world stripped of all transcendental meaning. The point we have been belabouring is a historical/chronological one enunciating that the dawn of existentialism was a historical event that transpired at a certain moment in history, a moment of transition inhabited by the Dostoevskian creations and their ilk (which basically signified all of the modern west or at least a very significant portion of it). It was something undergone by humanity and Dostoevsky masterfully delineates this undergoing - the philosophical origin, so to speak, of existentialism in individual consciousnesses as the character of the world-soul or the total historical consciousness of mankind metamorphosed too (the two originations are concomitant as the individual is but a micro-universal manifestation of the world-soul).
The afore-quoted epigraph chosen by Dostoevsky is thus shown to be crammed full of significance as it epigramatically communicates the emotional state of the existential that pervades the novel as its dark emotional and spiritual undercurrents, that in fact constitutes the very substance of the novel, its ground of origin, and undergirds the worldview of the characters peopling it. It is in the dialogue of the narrator and the characters of the novel with the silence of this void that the narrative structure of the novel emerges. It emerges out of a gaze directed into the abyss. Dostoevsky's novels are full of cries of profound distress of human beings who have gazed into this abyss and glimpsed its frightening nothingness. The narratives of Dostoevsky's novels are the articulations of the existential angst felt deeply by the characters inhabiting them and, at a higher/deeper scale of theorization, through them by Dostoevsky himself (or by them through Dostoevsky - with respect to a creative act it stands to mean one and the same thing).
In the present essay we seek to reveal this underlying existential substratum of Dostoevsky's novels or the abyss out of which they emerge and the how of this emergence. We show how the narrative and its meaning and structure emerge out of this spiritual and emotional well-spring of the existential condition of the nineteenth century man. For Bakhtin all novels/narratives are products of a dialogical imagination. What is said is the thesis of the dialogue, but it is what is unsaid, its own peculiar silence, that is its synthesis, the meaning of the dialogue. It is in the dialogue of the narrative with its silence that its meaning emerges. The crux of our project, therefore, lies in interpreting this silence, in articulating the unsaid in Dostoevsky. This is not to negate the value of what is said. The unsaid rather enhances the value of what is said by pointing to the unspeakable through the medium of speech or by ironizing speech to manifest the unspeakable in terms of tone and mood. Language, after all, is an unceasing exercise in striving to speak the beyond, and language in Dostoevsky speaks the horror of the beyond. In Dostoevsky, the unspeakable or the beyond is man's existential condition. The horror of the existential permeates speech in Dostoevsky. Therefore, to understand the existential one needs must understand Dostoevsky's unsaid.The human beings in Dostoevsky's novels are in the throes of the existential condition and their speech emerges out of this condition - a condition that is the (philosophical) ground of his novels and the characters in them. It is the space through, across, underneath and beneath which Dostoevsky's letters dance. We do not here have an a-priori theory of what is existentialism but follow and unravel its various strands through the Dostoevskian text. We, of course, take it on faith, so as to enable us to begin the task of exegesis, that the Dostoevskian narrative is the exemplar narrative (delineation) of existentialism, And also that there is a philosophico-literary fabric called the Dostoevskian text.
"I will say at once that Stepan Trofimovitch had always filled a particular role among us, that of the progressive patriot, so to say, and he was passionately fond of playing the part - so much so that I really believe he could not have existed without it."
The man here is the part. He could not have existed without the part. Existence precedes essence. Man creates meaning. He exists through the part. What is significant here is that he does not possess a 'true character', so to speak. There is no true character but rather a character created. There is no pre-existing character or essence of man but he, rather, creates the essence in the wake of his existence. He chooses a part to play and then endeavours to remain true to it so as to eke out an identity for himself in a world bereft of all higher authority capable of and entitled to bestow meaning. But this act of bestowing meaning upon himself remains just that, a bestowal, and does not progress to an authenticity of existence through a reception of the bestowed, as in a world sans the sanctioning authority of God the giver and the receiver of the gift of meaning are one and the same, man. Man continuously seeks to gift himself meaning but fails to receive it. In the act of giving man saturates himself with the identity of the giver and cannot possibly assume the identity of the receiver too. He is forever gifting himself and forever failing to receive the gift. Just as man needs both his ears and both his eyes to coincide to complete the sensory acts of audition and vision, respectively, he needs both his giver and receiver selves to coincide, an act impossible of realization in the intellectual world of man for his consciousness is constituted such that he cannot simultaneously be a receiver and a giver. Therefore, the gift of the self forever eludes him as he is too busy gifting it to himself to be able to receive it too. Stepan Trofimovitch inhabits this in-between space marked by the slippage of the gift, a mark that divides man from himself, an identity torn asunder, the schizophrenic man who is constantly enacting himself, alienated and estranged from himself, whose real self falls away from him as he enacts it. He is reduced to enacting a self, mere role-playing, as he lacks an original self (something that can only be guaranteed by God). It is God that makes us the gift of a meaningful self and protects the meaningfulness of the universe, he is the guarantor of essences and brings us to birth into a universe of pre-existing essences. But a godless world falls victim to the duplicity of role-playing instead of a truthful embrace of a given self as man is suspect in his ability to create essences. He can only play at creating them as nothing, no higher authority, is there to sanctify the truthfulness of his creation and man can only ever be doubtful of his own authority and all that bears the name of his authority, including his own identity "Stepan Trofimovitch had always filled an important role among us." His social identity was, notwithstanding its importance, only a role. It was something extraneous to himself and not of his original nature. Human nature is thus a created essence and not a God-given one and like the scales of the skin can be shed. Or can it? " ... he was passionately fond of playing the part - so much so that I really believe he could not have existed without it." Stepan Trofimovitcvh could not exist without the part. He must believe in the reality of his own existence. It is of a piece with him, an inseparable and the central aspect of his existence. But there is an essential schizophrenic disjunction in the facticity of Stephan Trofimovitch's being a passionate patriot in that it does not belong to him truly and originally but is something acquired, a "habit", and is extraneous to his essential being. The Stepan Trofimovitch syndrome is emblematic of the grater human reality about which Sartre says that Dasein (the special kind of being that man possesses) is "being which is what it is not and which is not what it is." Stepan Trofimovitch is a passionate patriot but that is not his reality i.e. it is not true to say about him that he is in reality a passionate patriot. But if he is not a passionate patriot then what is he? What is his reality?What is the reality of Dasein? What is the truth about man? And what does it mean then to say that Stepan trofimovitch is a passionate patriot? He crafts his own self in the real sense of an artifact. He plays a part but is nevertheless not an actor. "Not that I would have put him on a level with an actor in a theatre ... This may all have been the effect of habit .... " The self that Stepan Trofimovitch projects is an artifact. What, then, is the essential being of his self ? What is the truth about Stepan Trofimovitch? It begs the question about who I am or who any individual is. It begs the question of the "whoness" of the person, the question of his particularity and essence. It also begs the question of authenticity. In the post "death of God" world, one living in the "twilight of its idols", personal identity has been disengaged from the source of its secure underpinnings. Stepan Trofimovitch has the reputation of an 'atheist' and a 'freethinker', but it is only the reputation and not the truth about the man, his identity exists in a limbo, so to speak, in a state of disengagement from his true self. He wonders aloud "why people think me a dangerous freethinker and atheist", but he nevertheless hankers intensively after this identity imputed to him by society. Identity in such a state of personal estrangement, alienation, and disenchantment becomes more a social function than a personal possession, more a 'being-for-others' than a 'being-in-itself' or a 'being-in-oneself', more role-playing than authenticity. "This (the progressive patriot) may all have been the effect of habit, or rather, more exactly of a generous propensity he had from his earliest years of indulging in an agreeable day dream in which he figured as a picturesque public character. He fondly loved, for instance, his position as 'a persecuted man' , and so to speak, an exile. There is a sort of traditional glamour about those two little words that fascinated him once for all and, exalting him gradually in his opinion, raised him in the course of years to a lofty pedestal very gratifying to vanity." The "generous propensity" is the original nature, the in potentia, the being-in-itself of Stepan Trofimovitch. It is his authenticity or search for authenticity(1), his subjective truth (2), his mode of self-transcendence (as the metaphysics or value of desire lies in its urge for self transcendence). This "generous propensity" of man is his ceaseless striving for authenticity, his search for his original nature, his ownmost self. But he belies his subjective truth, which for Kierkegaard is the true heart of existence and which in the existential tradition is the hallmark of authenticity, by falling into the trap of an objective essentialism. Kierkegaard is the originary and a particularly fruitful thinker with reference to the concept of authenticity as for him it was the prime article of faith of a life lived 'well' and faithfully. In the Kierkegaardian ethical canon, that which is static is dead matter and the authentic existence lies in an unwaning and amaranthine movement of self-transcendence. The authentic selfhood is always at loggerheads with the predefined unidimensional objectivity that has become the defacto mode of modern existence. By inhabiting these unidimensional objectivities man winds up impersonating inert abstractions and putting on lifeless masks (identities) devoid of the true vitality of existence. It is akin to the biological foreign matter that can only spell pathology for the healthy human body. Stepan Trofimovitch suffers from a spiritual pathology of sorts by residing in a false persona - an ethical plight that defines existence in our post-modern world - an existence replete with acts of bad faith, of lives lived in bad faith. Dostoevskian characters are marked by the quandary of a double moral existence, living as caricatures or fascimiles of their potential authentic selves. In being a "passionate patriot" Stepan Trofimovitch is being what he is not and caricaturing what he is or not being or becoming what he truly is or should become. He is living in the realm of the imaginary as opposed to that of the real. The verb becoming is critical in the ethical context of existentialism as authenticity is nothing but an unceasing becoming, overcoming of the statisms of the self. It is also awry in such a context to aver that a man can become 'something', that there is an objective essence waiting to be dwelt in by him for the rest of his life, an identity to be attained at the end of a journey of spiritual and psychological becoming. The word identity itself is a misnomer and a giveaway as one dictionary definition of the word states that "it is the state or fact of remaining the same one or ones as under varying aspects or conditions." "The condition of being oneself or itself, and not another." "Condition or character as to who a person or what a thing is." "The effect or fact of being the same one as described." "The sense of self, providing sameness and continuity in personality over time and sometimes disturbed in mental illness, as schizophrenia." The origin and history of the word is articulated as "1570" from M. Fr. identite (14 c.), from L.L. (5 c.) identitatem (nom. identitas) "sameness" from 'ident-', comb. form of L (idem) "the same" identical; abstracted from 'identidem' "over and over", from phrase 'idem et idem'. Also: 1560-70; late Latin identitas, equivalent to Latin 'ident' (idem) repeatedly, again and again, earlier 'idem et idem' ('idem' neuter of 'idem' the same + et and) + itas _ ity. The latin origin of the word indicates sameness and repetition or the repetition of the same as undergirding the idea of identity. "The state or fact of remaining the same one or ones as under varying aspects or conditions" is undercut and put under erasure in the Kierkegaardian contemplation of repetition. Kierkegaard's weapon of choice, irony, is evinced in his christening of the narrator of 'Repetition' as Constantin Constanius. As is always and tellingly the case in Kierkegaard, the cognominations of his narrators have a deeper and ironical significance in the greater context of the works. The name Constantin Constanius explicitly rings of connotations of constancy of the individual in his personality and in love. (Nothing is more redolent of the continuity and fidelity of the self than its constancy in love. Love as the manifestation of constancy in desire is what binds us in our identities and our relationships. Love thus is the guarantor and anchor of our stability and unchangingness as individuals. It is the guardian angel (as enunciated in a figurative style) of our essence and the protector of our permanence in the here and the beyond. The aesthetic and ethical virtues of love establish the psychological adherence and cohesion of the individual and its ethical and religious phases confirm his/her eschatological substantiality. All these phases of love (agape) in their totality constitute the eternal fidelity of the person and flow into the formation of his Christological persona. In an act of sovereign irony, Kierkegaard undermines the whole creed of the constancy of personality by naming his "aesthetic schemer" of a narrator 'Constantin Constanius' - Constantin who in his guise as the 'confidante' and 'observer' of the 'melancholy young man' of 'Repetition' counsels him to "Be inconstant, nonsensical; do one thing one day and another the next, but without passion, in an utterly careless way that does not, however, degenerate into inattention, because, on the contrary, the external attentiveness must be just as great as ever but altered to a formal function lacking all inwardness." In short, to become a deceiver. The arbitrary and the accidental are possessed of a critical function in Kierkegaardian thought. The repetition of the accidental and the fortuiotous is the most significant of experiences and the one most directly redolent of the divine for Kierkegaard. Fortuitous is "a happening produced by chance" and chance is "the absence of any cause of events that can be predicted, understood, or controlled". It is "the unpredictable element that causes an event to result in a certain way than another." In either case chance is spoken of as a real force and treated or personified as a positive agency. (thesaurus.com). For Kierkegaard chance is the most meaningful way in which God's absolute agency is manifested and enacted in the life-histories and destinies of human beings, as when in the 'Seducer's Diary' the lover experiments with the idea of God when he overhears the conversation of two women indulging in wishful thinking, or rather, fantasising about what it would be like were they to be gifted with a small fortune and thinks of experimenting with the idea of God or chance and the destinies of the two poor women by anonymously granting them their wish at that very instant. This overlapping or coincidence of instants, the instant of prayer and the instant of grace, is deeply theological for Kierkegaard. It is God's revelation to his creature. It is the inner dialectic of time where eternity and history encounter and flow into each other. The instant in Kierkegaard plays into the meaning of prior situation, which is existence pure and naked, to which no response has been made as yet and no response assigned. The Kierkegaardian instant is critical to an understanding of the real meaning of existentialism. The instant harbours within itself the absolute beginning, the radical origin, an infinite beginning that still does not have a consequent and from which everything that comes into existence is an absolute departure. It is for this reason that the given situation, which for man and for all ontological purposes is the prior situation, the situation into which he is borne, is severed from the divine contiguity by dint of its absolute falling away from the infinite beginning. It is for this reason that it is a world without beginning and end, a world sans an origin and sans a telos. This is why "We've lost the way" and why history has been robbed of a telos in an existential universe." "The track, therefore, has vanished" and "We've been let in the wilds astray." Therefore, for Kierkegaard it is the task of the man of true faith (the knight of faith) or the man in search of authenticity to recover that lost origin by giving in to chance, by willfully negating repetition and sameness and by contradicting constancy at all its critical junctures. By becoming a deciever. But to have a meaning, to be blessed with an aesthetic significance, the spirit of inconstancy has to be elevated into an 'art of inconstancy.' One has to be inconstant "without passion, in an utterly careless way that does not, however, degenerate into inattention, because, on the contrary, the external attentiveness must be just as great as ever but altered to a formal function lacking all inwardness." Inwardness is of the essence. It is what lies at the heart of temporality, the womb of time - the infinite beginning - that is of significance. Whatever exists always begins after this i.e. after the infinite beginning. It does not have its origin in the radical origin and exists in an absolute departure from the infinite beginning and has no foundation/ground/grundriss or goal/telos. In such a scenario (the prior existential situation), the only authentic response to be made is on behalf of the subjective faith. Subjectivity for Kierkegaard is truth. It is "what makes the individual who he is in distinction from others." This harks back to our definition of identity as "the condition of being oneself or itself and not another" or the condition of being authentic. The dialectic of the subjective and the objective, the inward and the outward, the constantly self-transcending and the constantly constant are at the heart of the Kierkegaardian concept of 'either/or' or "aut/aut" (in its Latin form). "Either/Or is an excellent title. It is piquant and at the same time also has a speculative meaning." "Either/Or" is "the aesthetic and the ethical, immediacy and reflection, the individual and the universally human, time and eternity, history as a given and the gaining of a personal history, the momentary and the moment, existential dialectic, the use of freedom, erotic love and ethical love, living poetically and living responsibly, despair and hope, possibility and actuality, choosing, immanence and transcendence, the inner and the outer, cocealment and openness, imagination and actuality, thought and actuality, knowledge and action." It is "an existential dialectic," a state of fine tension. "Either/Or" is all these, but, and therefore, not the state of being identical. That which is trapped in the state of identity cannot possibly be authentic as the authentic by nature is self-transcending. The author in "Search for Authenticity" quotes OED as defining the authentic as "something first-hand, original as opposed to copied," something real, actual, genuine as opposed to imaginary, pretended. Further "Examples usually refer to genuine documents and works of art as opposed to counterfeit (items)" or those of disputed origin. The "passionately fond of playing the part" Stepan Trofimovitch thus creates an inauthentic and unoriginal self. An imaginary, pretended, and counterfeit self. A predominant theme of existentialism is to differentiate between a counterfeiter and an authentic individual and to probe the makings of authenticity. One of the Kierkegaardian motifs is life as a work of art and the crafting of the human self. Although Stepan Trofimovitch does create himself as a work of art and crafts himself as an artifact it is only in the form, in the outer husk or shell. It was "an agreeable daydream in which he figured as a picturesque public character." He daydreamt himself into creation as a "progressive patriot." It was, however, in reality a mere part that he played just as the young man in 'Repetition' must go on, despite his inward inconstancy, with "the external attentiveness that must be as great as ever but altered to a formal function lacking all inwardness." In a way of speaking, Stepan Trofimovitch's "progressive patriot" is a body without soul, an inauthentic self (as inauthenticity for Kierkegaard is equivalent to dying to one's true self and not being alive to one's real possibility). Stepan Trofimovitch's is a life lived in bad faith (inauthentically, falsely). An incurable romantic ("a generous propensity he had from the earliest years for indulging in an agreeable daydream"), Stepan Trofimovitch is the victim of a "crazy notion" as he seeks to inhabit a moribund ideal. The living ideal of authenticity constitutes in overcoming the ethos that the majority swear by and the Knight of Faith is one who can act freely and independently of the world and the public opinion.(Stepan Trofimovitch, whereas, craves public sanction.) "When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the personality receives the accolade of Knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity." "The soul comes to be alone in the whole world." Stepan Trofimovitch, whereas, we know, cannot live without company, he needs must continually repeat (and not create) and enact himself in the role of the "progressive patriot" before the eyes of his audience and most consummately and absolutely (Something inside him breaks forever when Varvara Petrovna decides to marry him off to Darya Pavlovna as he realizes that she does not desire and regard him anymore in the womanly way as a handsome man, and certainly not as an intellectual man, "the progressive patriot.") in the eyes of his benefactress Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin. His "progressive patriot" self is not immediately present to him, but is mediated through the the reflection of himself that he contemplates in the mirror of Varvarta Petrovna's desire for him, in the reflection of his performing, acting, dramatizing self that he glimpses in the eyes of his audience. Stepan Trofimovitch can be said to dwell in the realm of the Lacanian 'Imaginary,' the Imaginary wherein "Lacan regarded the 'imago' as the proper study of psychology and identification as the fundamental psychical process. The imaginary was, then, the ... dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined." The fundamental psychical process, then, in Stepan Trofimovitch is his identification of his 'real', everyday, continuous persona with the imagined self. "The basis of the imaginary order is the formation of the ego in the 'mirror stage'
STEPAN TROFIMOVITCH
"Strike me dead, the track has vanished,
Well, what now? We've lost the way,
Demons have bewitched our horses,
Let us in the wilds astray."
Dostoevsky's novels and the characters that populate them are the consummate children of existential angst. His novels were in fact among the first creative actualizations springing out of this agonizingly strange and unknown spiritual temper in the pneumatological history of the self; their portrayals were among the first and the most viscerally poignant of the conscience of a whole generation of human beings - the Russian nation/the soul of the Russian people, children unabsolved, being the object of Dostoevsky's visionary scrutiny - fallen victim to it. Dostoevsky, along with Kierkegaard, was the first and the greatest prophesier to cognize the essence and portray and dramatize the lived experience of existentialism. But what, after all, is existentialism? The word existentialism itself with its percolation into everyday language has become diffuse and obscure as far as definitional rigour and conceptual regularity are concerned. However, from the instant of its adoption by Kierkegaard as a term descriptive of his philosophy down to its contemporary diluted everyday usage, this word has carried within it a kernel of meaning that has stayed consistent and true to itself. It is this meaning that will be the object of our research here, and through the exegetical method of close and critical reading, and a creatively facilitated polyphonous-dialogical engagement of the philosophers themselves, we will attempt to reveal this kernel. Our exploration has two aspects - the primary task is to delineate the existential situation in its subjective starkness. It will be presented in terms of its psychological mood inscribed with an intensely thanatophobic weltanschaung; a cosmology underpinned by a nullifidian theological scepticism privileges death as the transcendent truth of human existence and annihilates the metaphysics of the eternal spirit. The other facet of our project will be to unconceal the onto-theological (or the lack of the onto-theological) and historical foundations of existentialism. There can be no better way for the beginning of a true understanding of this subject than to seek it out at its originative moment, originative more in the philosophical or metaphysical sense than the historical one. However, in the particular case of Dostoevsky (and Kierkegaard), the theoretical germination of the existential thesis in the consciousness is also its historical inception. Dostoevsky (and Kierkegaard) wrote at a moment in history when the existential cosmology and theology (or the loss of a theology) was stirring up in the historical mind. Dostoevsky was arguably the keenest witness to this essential mutation in the world spirit and his representation of a nation undergoing this radical spiritual transfiguration comes to acquire a primary location in the history of the Weltgeist. What transpires in the lives and souls of the characters of Dostoevsky pertains to the category of reflective history as worked out by Hegel. Dostoevsky "shared the spirit of the society whose state he had before his eyes and simply transferred what was happening in the world around him to the realm of representative intellect." He thus performs the role of a reflective historian (as dissimilar from "original historians" like Thucydides and Herodotus) who represents the spirit of the age or the Zeitgeist by transferring history to the "realm of the beautiful," and his art evoked primarily and extraordinarily the feelings of fear and pity. Unlike the history of deeds and events i.e. the history of external phenomena, which Hegel classifies as "original history", Dostoevsky's achievement lies in the aesthetic (and dialogical) translation of internal conceptions. The material for such history is available to the novelist in the form of the emotions of those around him and his own sublimation of these emotions. Dostoevsky was an immediate witness of this spiritual drama and was blessed/cursed with an orphic insight into the spiritual crisis of humanity. He is an existentialist because he is "Russia's greatest metaphysician", as no one probed the beyond with the same relentlessness and moral courage as Dostoevsky. No one could utter the existential condition and speak the horror of the beyond, and no one, not even Nietzsche, proclaim the death of God with greater simplicity and passion:
"Stagnation! O, Nature! Men are alone on earth - that is the misfortune! "Is there a living man in the field?' cries the Russian hero. I cry the same, though not a hero, and no one answers my cry. They say the sun gives life to the universe. The sun rises and - look at it, indeed, is it not dead? Everything is dead, and everywhere there are the dead. Only men, and silence around them - this is the earth! 'Men love one another' - who said that? Whose command is that? (A Gentle Creature)
Dostoevsky was a virtuoso at intimating the "powers of horror." Man, in Dostoevsky, is constantly haunted by the horror of the beyond which, yet, "lies there, quite close, to him" and his people live under the unwaning shadow of abjection. "There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable" (On Abjection: The Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva). The awful cry howling through the lives of the human beings located in Dostoevsky's fictional worlds is, "There is no God," and the horror has its birth in that cry torn out from inside of them. The Dostoevskian exorbitant dwells very much within the man - his horror-breeding exorbitant inside. Dostoevsky's creatures are in a state of ceaseless violent and dark (spiritual) revolt in response to the moral freedom forced upon them by their desperate earthly plight. A freedom that they dread, but cannot escape. "We've lost the way ... in the wilds astray." There is no predetermined, always-already there path to guide man's spirit through the spiritual wildernesses of earth. The "misfortune" of man is that he is "alone on earth" and there is no God to commandeer the ship of this Theseus on the turbulent seas of faith and doubt. "'Men love one another' - who said that? Whose commandment is that?" This is a world without holy commandments and without morality and man is a prisoner of a deep solitude. Man is utterly and totally surrounded by death as the world around him is impregnated through and through with death. For what, really, can be alive when God Himself is dead? Everything that had a place and relevance in life has been robbed of its vitality in the absence of a God that lends meaning and order to it all. "Everything is dead and everywhere there are the dead." Even the sun is dead when you look at the world through the eyes of a profound death, the death of God, the profoundest and most absolute of them all, the one whose death
envelopes all in the wake of its funereal shadow. "Is there a living man in the field?" The "living" of this lexicon has to be understood in the contrastive light of theological immortality and atheistic nihilism. In the Dostoevskian wasteland, the tenability of the great beyond has been negated. Death is the only true future and the sole possibility of man. Even before the event of death, death is already there in the living as the 'ownmost' element of life. This radical solitude of man in a world where "there is no God" is the originative and constitutive principle of the Dostoevskian narrative. The separation of man from God gives birth to abjection in the face of the threat posed by the unmitigated annihilation of the spirit. The threat that emanates from the exorbitant outside/inside is that of this annihilation, as man without God is doomed to unqualified and eternal ontological obliteration without the prospect of salvation and resurrection. The exorbitant outside/inside is the transcendental nothingness that has come to occupy the space promised and sanctified earlier by God and the threat is that of man's ultimate nothingness arising out of this universal nothingness. Abjection is the moral fabric of an existence lived under the shadow of a nihilistic destiny. An etymological analysis of the word 'abjection' harks us back to its Latin stem of 'abjectio' that literally translates as casting away (ab + ject = throw or cast away). Abjection, therefore, is the psychological plight of the spiritual cast away, as the "Robinson Crusoe" state of man on earth ("men are alone on earth") is not just that of man cast away from the grace of God, but of man from whom God himself has been cast as much away as he from God: the upended and tragic case of the abandoned Creator. "The exorbitant outside or inside" has been "ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable." God has now been eradicated from within the bounds of that which forms the locus in whose interiority man can think, endure and realize the potentialities of existence, and made to abide in the domain of the impossible, the intolerable, and the unthinkable.The exorbitant inside/outside has superseded God and abjection has overcome faith. (Man's incapacity to admit to the exorbitant outside/inside permeating his inner and outer worlds is the source of this infinite abjection.) Nietzsche, after all, proclaimed the "death of God," and not that of man. "Only men, and silence around them - this is the earth!" "Men are alone on earth," enveloped by utter silence and death. "Everything is dead, and everywhere there are the dead." Even the sun is dead, and so is God. There is no God to answer man's cries and prayers, no Christ to teach the disciples, or Moses to lead the faithful. For the existential earthling, the world has lost its twofold character and man his twofold attitude as codified by Buber. "There is no I as such but the I of the basic word I-You and I-It or I-He or I-She." "'Is there a living man in the field?' cries the Russian hero. I cry the same, though not a hero, and no one answers my cry." In a world where there is no answering cry to echo the cry of the I, there is no "living man in the field" as there is no being outside of the basic dialogical words of I and You/It/He/She. This exorbitant outside or inside, this absolute nihility,"beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced." It "beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire" and deep abjection ensues from the fear of death that constantly breeds inside of man. It abandons not just the body but also the soul to the power of abyss. Nothing is eternal in a Godless world, and man, there, is powerless to believe in the immortality of soul. He is the captive of a "fear of death that knows nothing of a separation between (a mortal) body and (immortal) soul." In the throes of a desperate and violent fear, man cries out, sounding the depths of the abyss, "Is there a living man in the field?" and is answered by the silence of nothingness. " ... that it yells I,I,I and wants to hear nothing about a deflection of the fear onto a mere 'body' ... That man may crawl like a worm into the folds of the naked earth before the whizzing projectiles of blind, pitiless death, or that there he may feel as violently inevitable that which he never feels otherwise: his I would only be an It if he were to die; and he may cry out his I with every cry still in his throat against the Pitiless One by whom he is threatened with such an unimaginable annihilation." It is man's fear of culminating in mere dust and ashes that originates within him the feeling of abjection. It "shows the creature whose limbs are trembling in fear for its life in this world, a world beyond of which it wants to know nothing at all." With the erosion of man's faith, God was erased from the world and beyond; It was erased utterly and absolutely. Shod of the cocoon of religion, then, in the face of enlightenment's relentless questioning of the beyond, that which was able to "cast off the fear of the earthly, to remove from death its poisonous sting, from Hades his pestinential breath" was taken cruelly away from man. Man was robbed of resurrection and eternal life in Christ. He now "lives in this fear of death" and "awaits with fear and trembling his passage in the dark". The promise of redemption by Christ or any other god that refuted and pre-empted these earthly fears of annihilation has been rendered null and void by the new-fangled spirit of scientism and the 'rationality' of the enlightenment men. Enlightenment swept the theological order away along with the worldly one. The anthropocentric conception of the world gave way to an uncentered universe sans a transcendental anchor.
In the tortured universe of Dostoevsky "the grave opens up under our feet before each step." Thus, we see that what Franz Rosenzweig says about the redemptive and salvaging character of philosophy applies word for word to religion (faith) as the latter too "with its outstretched index finger, shows the creature, whose limbs are trembling in fear for its life in this world, a world beyond." But denuded of this assuaging and salvaging faith man is left naked at the mercy of the powers of horror. "The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine." Man is, hence, powerless in the face of that which is "not my correlative" as not being an 'objet' or 'my correlative', it deprives me of all support. Dostoevsky speaks the horror of man's state of objectlessness, when beset by the abject man does not have a cognizable object of horror. Man is ceaselessly tortured by his desire for meaning, a desire that resides in language and is the cause of its movement. The being of desire is in "an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire"; it lies in the quest for an object, a presence. Desiring an object I am settled "within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses." The abject is the banishment of God from man. Desire in Dostoevsky relentlessly pursues what lies beyond and comes up short against the banishment of here from the beyond, of this world from God, and is thrown into agonies of brutish suffering at this banishment from the everlasting life.
With the deposing of God, the thesis and antithesis of world and eternity dissolves into meaninglessness and the essence of theo-ontology is devastated. What Heidegger says about Nietzsche's word "God is dead" is also apposite to the Russian soul of Dostoevsky's people living under the shadow of the utterance "there is no God": The word of Nietzsche speaks of the destining of two millenia of Western history. It was the end of a history of metaphysics when metaphysics had to withdraw into its own inessentiality by pronouncing its impossibility. The pronouncement that "there is no God" or that "God is dead" is the culmination of millenia of questioning the 'logos' of metaphysics, a question always concealed under the very assertion of God's 'existence'. In his dissertation on 'Faith and Knowledge', Hegel posits that the "feeling on which rests the religion of the modern period - the feeling God himself is dead" is a prefiguration of what Dostoevsky and Nietzsche had to say about the closure to the question of God. Heidegger would have the word of Plutarch "Le grand Pan est mort" ("Great Pan is dead") belong to the same species of anti-metaphysical assertions. The theme of the 'death of God' has, therefore, had its own ulterior history within the overall history of Western metaphysics.
"Man fears death because he loves life. That's how I understand it," I observed,"and that's determined by nature."
"That's abject; and that's where the deception comes in." His eyes flashed. "Life is pain, life is terror, and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and terror. Now man loves life, because he loves pain and terror, and so they have done according. Life is given now for pain and terror, and that's deception. Now man is not yet what he will be.
There will be a new man, happy and proud. For whom it will be the same to live or not to live, he will be the new man. He who will conquer pain and terror will himself be a god. And this God will not be."
"Then this God does exist according to you?"
"He does not exist, but He is. In the stone there is no pain, but in the fear of the stone is the pain. God is the pain of the fear of death. He who will conquer pain and terror will become himself a god. Then there will be a new life, a new man; everything will be new ... then they will divide history into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God to ... "
Nihilism is the annihilation of God and the wilful annihilation of the self, suicide, is affirmed as man's lone hope for salvation in the wake of this ultimate annihilation; in the wake of the abject. The idea of God is unconcealed in its nudity as the fear of death and it does not possess any ontological truth in separation from this fear. He exists for us in and through the fear of death and is nothing but a metaphysical fancy of man, a dream, a chimera, albeit, a necessary one. Man needs God to alleviate the pain of death. The idea of God is the child of man's experience of suffering; it is the aftermath of the search of language for its own absolute point, rather than language being an emanation from the unconditioned Logos.
The madman of Nietzsche cries, "Whither is God? I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I." It is, therefore, God who has been cast, ejected, away from man by man's own wilfulness. The similarity in the tropes and metaphors employed by both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to evoke the death of God is remarkable. Nietzsche's madman cries further,"What did we do when we unchained this earth from its suns? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns?" The life giving and sustaining flame of the sun has been enveloped in the time of the darkness of the twilight of idols and of death (of God). "They say the sun gives life to the universe. The sun rises and - look at it, indeed, is it not dead?" Life now stirs in a movement away from sun and from life (everlasting). "Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning?" The expanse voided by God has been replaced by a pure and omni(present) void. "Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?" Hegel feels for the ground beneath our feet, the 'grundriss' of our 'ontos', reaches the truth about the death of gods, the only sure ground on which the edifice of modern civilization can be erected. The deep and far resounding rhetoric of Nietzsche proclaims, "Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Gods too decompose." In a world where the resurrection of Christ has been denied both man and Christ, where everything from the birth and death of Christ to his resurrection has become sheer history stripped of all onto-theological destining, if man has to resurrect himself from the ashes of the death of God, then the human condition must have its logical, philosophical, and radical culmination in suicide. " ... in his dreadful poverty, he must have felt at sometime lonely, adrift from the world, standing for a night facing the nothing ... " The question that haunts man is "Whither are we moving now?" Whither should he move? Whither must he move? "Life is given now for pain and terror, and that is deception." Man lives now in bad faith, in a state of deception, decrepit. If man has to save himself from the death of God, he must heed the call of being; he must have a new God reign in the place of the old, a god that will pre-empt nothingness. The old god has been killed and "men are alone on earth", living in a universe of silence and nothingness, but living still. Alone, but alive, still here, on earth. To save himself, man must be prepared to kill himself. To create a new god, he must himself be the new god. This is the foundation on which the new religion will be built; this is the "feeling on which rests the new religion of the modern period." In the solipsistic solitude in which man lives on earth, pervaded by a total silence all around, man has only himself as the potential for any and all possibilities. Therefore, in man's felt necessity for God he himself must be the new god. But how? "God is the pain of fear of death. He who will conquer pain and terror will become himself a god." Hence, he who conquers death (or more truly and appropriately, the fear of death) will become a god. "For whom it will be the same to live or not to live, he will be the new man." And the new god. "For man does not at all want to escape from some chain; he wants to stay, he wants - to live" (The Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig). "Now man loves life, because he loves pain and terror, and so they have done according. Life is now given for pain and terror, and that's the deception" (Kirilov, The Possessed). This deception, however, must be destroyed for man to unchain himself, for him to gain his "supreme freedom", for his soul to "float off in the wind ... free above the grave that opens up under our feet before each step"(Rosenzweig). "They will kill deception. Everyone who wants the supreme freedom must dare to kill himself. He who dares to kill himself has found out the secret of the deception. There is no freedom beyond, and that is all; there is nothing beyond. He who dares kill himself is God." Philosophy sanctions suicide, though man is destined to die but not to suicide, he is still called upon to suicide as the only true and faithful action man is capable of committing in an atheistic universe. "And it is only suicide that that philosophical recommendation would truly be able to recommend, not the death decreed for all." Death is the universal destiny; it is something that will naturally and inevitably happen to man. However, when man wilfully embraces death in committing suicide, he performs the ultimate act of freewill in choosing his own destiny, by making death the most personal and faithful of events, an act of supreme faith; as when Abraham readies himself to sacrifice Isaac on the altar of God. It is in the form of an absolute duty to God that Abraham that Abraham recuperates his faith in Him. Man, in the same manner, is called upon to perform the absolute act of faith by being willing and ready to kill himself with indifference; it is only in the fulfillment of this absolute duty to the new god, which is none other than he himself, in obedience to whom Abraham must not kill Isaac but himself. In borrowing the ethical of Kierkegaard, we understand that in his indifference to death and in suicide, man is pronouncing judgement both on himself and on faith. Suicide is the final act of faith. When man by daring to kill himself "has found out the secret of the deception. There is no freedom beyond; that is all, and there is nothing beyond. He who dares kill himself is God. Now everyone can do so that there shall be no God and shall be nothing." God is created only in and through an act of faith. "Only when the individual has emptied himself in the infinite, only then the point has been reached where faith can break through."
"There is an absolute duty to God, for in this relationship of duty the individual relates himself as the single individual absolutely to the absolute." "He who dares kill himself is God." How is that possible? How does that become - from man to God? This 'that' which becomes lies in the relationship of man to God. Man becomes God through faith; the honest, living faith, by acceptance, in what is rather than in what man wishes out of his fear of death. For the old God is nothing but the "pain of man's fear of death." "Thus in the ethical view of life, it is the task of the single individual to strip himself of the qualification of interiority and to express this in something external" (Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard). Man must actualize his faith by an external act. In the sense that "every duty is essentially a duty to God" man sanctifies the new God by an act of absolute faith whereby killing the self becomes the absolute duty to new God. The enthronement of the new God requires the act at the same time that it does not require it, as it does not matter to man, himself the new God, whether he lives or not. However, "faith is the paradox that interiority is higher than exteriority". Therefore, the mere fact of man's preparedness, an interior state, at one and the same time to carry out the act of suicide is in itself a vindication of the act and its philosophical relevance, which by dint of being higher than the act, the exterior, subsumes the latter within itself. Suicide, for Kirilov, in its interiority as the in potentia always and at all moments, and in its exteriority as the execution of the act, its culmination, so to speak, is the final point that shall make a God of man. "God comes go an invisible vanishing point."
Since time immemorial the seduction of self-sacrifice has been a potent one for man. (Intertextualize "Sacrifice, Jean Marie Guyau" here.)
Gabriel Marcel averred at the opening of his Gifford lectures that scepticism is the temptation of philosophy and suicide that of man. Suicide, hence, is the ultimate mark of the open character of man's existence. To learn something about the nature of existence and the existential character it is worthwhile to look at the various understandings of existential philosophy. In his Gifford lectures on the mystery of being, Marcel does not deign to offer "something systematic; something which would be strictly speaking, my system," an organic whole whose structural details can be anatomized. He called the lectures " a search for, or an investigation into, the essence of spiritual reality." From his point of view "such a term as search or investigation - some term implying the notion of a quest - is the most adequate description that can be applied to the essential direction of philosophy." Furthermore, "philosophy will always, to my way of thinking, be an aid to discovery, rather than a matter of strict demonstration." This is so, significantly, on account of the open and contingent nature of existence as the essence of thought is primarily and ultimately in its movement. The pre-existential philosophers, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, "lived in a constant opposition to conceptual systems of philosophy." Marcel's criticism of Hegel is thetical to the character of existential philosophy: "The philosopher who first discovers certain truths and then sets out to expound them in their dialectical and systematic interconnections always runs the risk of profoundly altering the nature of the truths he has discovered." This brings us to the Sartrean maxim of existence preceding essence as existence is determined by its open and contingent character, its susceptibility to accident, its being-toward-the-world. This openness is not susceptible to systematization or dialectical reasoning. For Jaspers too philosophical thought "can neither be true in a closed system, nor in an aggregate of aphorisms." This last is an allusion to the aphoristic style of philosophising of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard whose philosophical thought is not, nevertheless, a mere aggregate of aphorisms; their aphorisms, rather, create meaning in the Derridean mode of 'structure, signs and play', except that the play in them is to a very large degree controlled and deliberate as evinced, for example, by the use of irony in Kierkegaard. The enmity of existentialism to systems is also evinced in "Jaspers' (own) enmity to "premature terminology: a terminology at the beginning and not, as it should be, arrived at as a result of the insights won." L'existence precede l'essence. The existential man does not possess anything in the beginning, but gains the unique value and meaning of his existence by existing. "We certainly thus get rid of that dualism which in the existent opposes interior to exterior" (Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre). "There is no longer an exterior for the existent if one means by that a superficial covering which hides from sight the true nature of the object." The existent, therefore, does not possess a prior essence, hidden out of sight inside it, but rather is, in its essence and reality, the very concatenation of the appearances or phenomena in which it manifests itself. "This true nature in turn, if it is to be the secret reality of the thing, which one can have a presentiment of or which one can suppose but can never reach because it is the 'interior' of the object under consideration - this nature no longer exists." The truth of the existent is in its existence and it is nothing but the series of appearances which manifest it. "The appearances which manifest the existent are neither interior nor exterior; they are all equal."
Both Marcel and Jaspers refer to the brokenness of being. Philosophy is "unable to reach Being, which presents itself to man as broken, as a series of ruptures." "Don't you feel sometimes that we are living ... if you can call it 'living' ... in a broken world? Yes, broken like a broken watch. The mainspring has stopped working. Just to look at it, nothing has changed. Everything is in place. But put the watch to your ear, and you don't hear any ticking. You know, 'what I am talking about, the world, what we call the world, the world of human creatures ... it seems to me it must have had a heart at one time, but today you would say the heart had stopped beating"(Marcel's play). An atheistic universe is a world whose mainspring has stopped working in the sense that man's life was driven and directed by (the mainspring of) (belief in) God, and the world is broken in the absence of such faith. When Marcel wonders in his lecture about "a broken world? Are we being the dupes of a myth when we imagine that there was a time when the world had a heart?" Here we are faced again with the historical question of the opposition between science and faith - about how faith was gradually but ineluctably eroded by the encroachment of science into its realm. It carries us to the Dostoevskian agony over the vanished track, the religious path devoured and erased by the questioning and doubting spirit of European enlightenment. This broken world has engendered an indefinable inner grief and anguish in man, as it has done in Marcel's heroine and which breaks out in her speech (about the broken world whose mainspring has stopped working). "It would be rash to put one's finger on some epoch in history when the unity of the world was something directly felt by men in general." It refers us to the clandestine history of doubt in the larger and more conspicuous history of faith, of a secret existential perspective in the history of metaphysics (witness Augustine of Hippo, the neoplatonist and doctor of the church, Mulla Sadra, the Islamic philosopher associated with illuminationism and transcendent theosophy, Blaise Pascal, Rousseau, Socrates, the stoics, and Thoreau, to name only a prominent few). To adduce this point somewhat, however, Marcel invokes the ghost of nostos: "But could we feel the division of the world today ... if we had not within us, I will not say the memory of such a united world, but at least the nostalgia of it." Marcel then makes a very remarkable point, a point that, since the date of these lectures, becomes more and more relevant and gathers more and more speed with the gathering momentum of the current trend of globalization; a point that is highly pertinent to the world as it is now and will be in the foreseeable future: "What is even more important is to grasp the fact that this feeling of a world divided grows stronger and stronger at a time when the surface unification of the world (I mean of the earth, of this planet) appears to be gathering apace." It is this shift in history that has marked the movement of existentialism. This unification of the world, rather ironically, instead of a "quickening in the womb of a higher conscience, they would say a planetary conscience", has witnessed a division and disintegration of this same conscience. It has indeed culminated in a crisis of conscience. Husserl expressed this predicament succinctly and tellingly in the subtitle of his work 'The Crisis of the Sciences as Expression of the Radical Life-Crisis of European Humanity.' Husserl's meditations are a "teleological-historical reflection upon the origins of our critical scientific and philosophical situation." The nature of the reflection is teleological-historical because of the teleological nature of the crisis in world's history. The death of God was a teleological crisis of humanity as the notion of God allowed history to be equipped with a telos. Another existential philosopher and theologian, Paul Tillich, deals with the religious situation of the present day, which is in reality and origin, that is, genealogically, the religious situation of the nineteenth century. "The present is the past. Every present movement is a wave which has been raised by the waves of all the past." The existential is not a categorically new psychical state in the history of sensibility. "It is an individual event, to be sure; it is unique; but the individual event has received its content from and is borne along by an infinity of other things, by the past. Hence the eye cannot remain fixed on this one thing; the more profoundly it penetrates into the nature of the object the more it tends to glide, consciously or unconsciously, toward the past - first toward the nearest other event, from there to the more distant, and, if it were possible, to all other events." The existential state of the consciousness has come to dwell in the present by force of the past - by force of its far and near events, by force of its far and near recesses whose transcendent memories still resonate at the heart of the present.
Tillich's metaphysical description of religion in its historical situatedness is so masterly that we will have a recourse here to his complete essay on the 'religious situation' as a method for expositing our own thesis regarding the teleological-historical crisis of religion. When we are investigating any facet of the present or any other object of research in the historical context of the present moment, we are, in essence, investigating the present moment itself. The question begins to hinge on the meaning of time itself, especially in its relation to eternity. The concept of time is among the most problematic of all, which, when broached, is at once inundated with a proliferation of questions. Time, for Heidegger, is the horizon of being. "The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Dasein is grounded in temporality. Accordingly, a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?" Even abstracted from the overlapping question of being, pure temporality is still not unproblematic. "For the formulation of a topic is itself the result of long intellectual labours and sometimes its a very questionable and problematical result." Even within time, the notion of the present (moment) is the very exemplar of the philosophically problematic and ontologically untenable. "How is it possible to speak of the present when the present is a nothing, a boundary between past and future, a line without any breadth, on which nothing can stand and about which, therefore, nothing can be said?" It is impossible to speak purely and strictly about the present, because "everyone who tries to speak about the present inevitably tends to speak rather of the past, near or remote, and of the future, most distant or most near." To understand the present moment in all its contemporary temporal significance, it must first be understood what the present moment implies within the framework of one's understanding of time and its ontology and of eternity. For it also happens that "some who try to speak about the present discover that they are speaking of none of these three times but of the eternity which is above all times."
So, when we speak of the religious crisis of the present moment, what is our ontology? Indeed, what is the metaphysics of such an assertion? By speaking about the present moment at all, we become embroiled in the most fundamental question of ontology, that of being (itself) and of time. But when the problematic involves the deeper complexity of the religious crisis of the present moment, the question shifts from ontology to metaphysics. "Religion deals with a relation of man to the eternal. But a relation has two sides": temporal and eternal. The religious question, therefore, implicates both the temporal and eternal aspects of being.
"There are three answers to the question about the nature of present: the present is the past, the present is the future, and the present is eternity." "Hence the eye cannot remain fixed on this one thing (the present moment); the more profoundly it penetrates into the nature of the object, the more it tends to glide, consciously or unconsciously - toward the past - first toward the nearest other event, from there to the more distant and, if it were possible, to all other events." This last pertains to the facet of the present which 'exists' in relation to the past. The nearest event connected (or associated in the nearest manner, i.e., both historically and axiomatically) to the religious crisis of the present moment is the advent of the crisis with the closing of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth. "The present is what it is only in union with all that has gone before and without this other-than-itself, on which it rests, it is nothing." The crisis is a crisis only in relation to what has gone before it in time. It is a religious crisis in relation to the comparatively unbroken faith of the past. The crisis is, hence, the nature of the relation of the present to its own past. The nearness of this event (the origin of the crisis) is adduced by the perspectivist method whereby "our senses help themselves out of a similar difficulty in their observation of the external world by the use of a simple device - perspective. As it is in the world of space so it is also in the world of time. Only the figures which are very near are clearly visible; the farther the figures are removed the simpler their outlines become until at last they fade from view. Without perspective no object can be seen in its right spatial or temporal location. And this is even truer of the world of spiritual realities than it is of the world of things. For the spiritual achieves individuality only insofar as it contains affirmation and denial of other individuals. Knowledge of a spiritual phenomenon means apprehension of its affirmation and denial of other spiritual phenomena. To understand the present means to apprehend its affirmations and denials of the past, near and remote." It is thus that we understand the religious crisis of the present, within the framework of a history of time, if such a phrase can be allowed. The present religious crisis is the affirmation of the atheistic strand running hidden through the history of western metaphysics and a denial or negation of faith that characterized the spiritual life of humanity before the crisis. The future also 'exists' in a similar yet unique vein: similar as it is still a modality of time, but unique in its distinctness. "To live in present is to live in tension toward the future; every present is essentially a transition out of the past into the future. Spirit or mind is always direction from that which is to that which should be." The future is then what follows from the eschatological logic of an atheistic universe - the afterlife (or its lack) of man in a world without God - a possibility that breeds abjection in the present. Abjection or anguish or angst is the mood or state of mind revealing one's being-in-the-world in its immediacy. It is a consequence of man's unbroken openness and susceptibility to death - his being-towards-death.
"To understand the present means to see it in its inner tension toward the future." This present is nothing but man's being-toward-death which is the structure of man's orientation toward future, his 'inner tension toward the future." "Being-toward-the-end was determined in a preliminary existential sketch as being towards one's ownmost non-relational potentiality-of-being not to be bypassed." However, when caught up in an atheistic belief system, man begins to stare into a future of nothingness, which follows necessarily from the premises of atheism. "In this field also (that is, in the field of time, or temporality) there is such a thing as spiritual perspective, the possibility of finding amid all the infinite aspirations and tensions which every present contains not only those which conserve the past but also those which are creatively new and pregnant with the future." The future is thus a prolongation and fulfillment of the tensions and conceptions of the past. "There is such a thing as apprehension of the growing form, just as there is an apprehension of the grand outlines of the past development. To understand the present means ultimately to understand the future with which the womb of the present is great." Eschatology can exist only as a part of theology. Eschatology is the study of last things and the end of time. It is any system of doctrines concerning last or final matters, as death, the future state etc. The religious situation of the present is immediately related to an eschatological future state because in the religious situation time and eternity are related.
"Where now shall we find that existent reality, the time, the present, about which all this is to be said? Doubtless it is not to be found in nature with its cyclical process, its distant and strange past and its distant and strange future. Society is the carrier of an existing present as an historical reality; it is the existent thing which we are inquiring after in this context." It is, therefore, in history, rather than in nature that the spiritual crisis of humanity is played out and comes to acquire its meaning. Also, to understand the theological connotation of natural time one must first resort to historical time. The religious or theological situation is also understood in and through historical time. "A religious situation is always at the same time the situation of a (historical) society. But the term situation seems to mean something which is established, at rest and constant, a basic fact which lies at a deeper level than do all the visible tendencies, something which is invisible to those who live within it, but which is, for that reason, all the more effective." It is the unthought of lived theological experience. "It refers to an unconscious, self-evident faith which lies at a deeper level than the apparent antithesis of the belief and unbelief which both arise out of it and are both equally rooted in it." Religious crisis sets in only when this deep faith is challenged, and not the peripheral dialectical antithesis of belief and unbelief. "This unconscious faith which is not assailed because it is the presupposition of life and is lived rather than thought of, this all-determining, final source of meaning constitutes the actual religious situation of the period." It is this religious situation which was threatened and destroyed in the nineteenth century. "The time experienced shocks which it could not resist, the effects of which it could neither reject nor secularize."
Man is physically situated in the present moment which in turn is situated in the midst of history. "This present of ours becomes null and void if it loses itself within the narrow horizon of the day and degenerates into a mere present." Therefore, man's unconcealing of his own project and orientation in the lebswelt calls for a teleology of history. The present constitutes an ontological grundriss only because of the historical foundations at work underneath it. "The present reaches fulfilment through the historical ground which we bring to effective activity within ourselves." The human individual is the locus of history's action on the present moment. Future is the mode of man's being-towards-world in which man projects himself through the present moment into an unmanifest future which nevertheless inhabits this moment in the form of a conscious vision that incorporates choices and desires for one particular shape of future from among its multiple potentiatlities. An existentialist future is a humanist future of men's projective enterprise.
Time is also man's mediator with eternity. "A present that has attained fulfilment allows us to cast anchor in the eternal origin. Guided by history to pass beyond all history into the Comprehensive - that is the ultimate goal which, though thought can never reach it, it can nevertheless approach." Thus history has a teloeology that points beyond history towards eternity. There is an expectation of infinitude embedded in the individual's present and all other moments. This eternity and infinity is the ideal and desired teleological culmination of all of history's projective endeavours and the conscious and unconscious destiny of philosophy in all its forms - religious or secular.
Karl Jaspers' approach towards time and history corresponds to that of Paul Tillich. Both seek to bring the impulses and stresses of the past to bear on an understanding of the present moment. "(Our age) requires the whole history of mankind to furnish us with standards by which to measure the meaning of what is happening at the present time." The conception that we have a history is related to our consciousness of our humanity. Both history and humanity are unquestioned and ossified conceits of our thought but they arise within a framework of interrelated problems about that in which our humanity consists and the construction of history that flows and originates from the hence constituted humanity. "Humanity or mankind is the human species, human nature (e.g. compassion, altruism) and the human condition (the totality of experience of existing as a human." Sans this humanity, man will not possess a history."Humans, to an apparently superlative degree amongst all living things, are aware of the passage of time, can remember the past and imagine the future, and are intimately aware of their mortality." History is the handiwork of this time consciousness of man; a consciousness whose unconditioned/unthought is the human being's being-toward-death. The term humanity is also used to describe "the joy, terror, and other feelings and emotions associated with being and existence." History is the narrative of the way in which humans react to or cope with events that individuals and societies inevitably and necessarily encounter on account of the human condition. "A glance at the history of mankind leads us, however, into the mystery of our humanity," inasmuch as that humans are also questioning beings who investigate history for its purport and "ask themselves questions relating to the purpose of life beyond the base need for survival, or the nature of existence beyond that which is empirically apparent: What is the meaning of existence? Why was I born? Why am I here? Where will I go when I die? The human struggle to find answers to these questions - and the very fact that we can conceive them and ask them - is what defines human condition in this sense of the term." But this very fact is also the one that confounds the spectator of human history and leads his descent into the mystery of humanity. For as much as history answers certain kinds of questions, it raises even profounder ones in the process of answering those it was formulated answer. It leads to a sort of wonderment at the very existence of history. "The fact that we possess a history at all, that history has made us what we are and that the duration of history up to now has been comparatively short prompts us to ask: Where does it come from? Where does it lead? What does it mean?" The questions of history are questions about man's existence and its meaning. In the measure that he makes history, man in his turn is also made by it. He is a creature of history, and the two have their qualitatively distinct kinds of being in a union of complementarity. It follows from the fact that all historical entities are contingent, that not just our existence but its meaning too is shot through with contingency. The historically determined contingency of our existence acquires density from the fact of this history being deeply diminutive when contemplated against the vast temporal dimensions of the geological cycles of the earth and the infinitely vaster cosmological cycles of inter-galactic light years. The acutely brief history of man on earth means that he has too little experiential knowledge of time and too infinitesimal a perspective over cosmos to answer the enigmatic questions of existence.
At the opening of Strindberg's Dream play Indra calls out to his daughter
The unique significance of Dostoevsky, hence, lies in his profound ability to perceive a transitive and transformative moment in the philosophical history of the world and the aesthetic operation to which the genius of his dialogical imagination subjects his acute perceptions, translating them into a deeply faithful portrait of the world spirit. The world is encountered in Dostoevsky as free from God and in a state of nullity as a consequence. On account of this doubling of origins (historical and philosophical) the works of Dostoevsky acquire a very special significance in the context of the history of existentialism. After all, what more suitable text is there for an exegesis of existentialism than one of the great novels of Dostoevsky? In fact, any one of them is arguably as good as another for the purposes of an existential hermeneutics and together his corpus constitutes a veritable mine of existential meaning. However, since we must start the task of interpretation somewhere, we start with the "Possessed" keeping in mind that it is a random choice and indicates no hierarchy or preference of order in the Dostoevskian ouevre vis-a-vis our hermeneutical project.
What we mean by philosophical origin is that the existential discourse/narrative of the Dostoevskian novel grows out of its seeds and has its roots in a philosophical ground that had came to occupy human consciousness and that became its very soil around the turn of the eighteenth century. At that moment in history, God was vanishing if he was not already dead and the space left void by him had come to be inundated by an all darkening and all destroying nothingness.
"The track had vanished."
In a religious world, as all major religions testify (the noble path, the godly way, and so on), the path of man's journey through the world was dictated and his steps guided by the word of God. But by the nineteenth century that path had led humanity to a dead end and put a halt, so to speak, to man's spiritual journey. The godly path had vanished with the death of God. "The track had vanished" implies the previous existence of the track and the current void that has substituted it in the spiritual space. Existentialism has its origin in this godless universe of darkness and nothingness. It originates in the puzzlement and the befuddled attitude of man before this universal nothingness ("Strike me dead", "Well, what now?"). Deprived of the faith and meaning supplied by religion and in the absence of a path illuminated by its guiding light, man is plunged headlong into the dark abyss of meaninglessness. It is at this moment of despair that he is confronted by the primeval (existential) question, "What is the meaning of my existence? What does it even mean to exist?"
"We've lost the way". The telos of history had been lost and man was devoid of any meaningful destination except, perhaps, death. That which was supposed to sustain him and illuminate his way to the destination had instead betrayed and abandoned man to the dark forces of his own consciousness. "Demons have bewitched our horses, Led us in the wilds astray." Man's soul had been left stranded at an extremely critical spiritual juncture, at the mercy of the demons of his own mind - doubt and despair in the face of the absurd as following God he was led over the precipice into the abyssal depths of unmeaningness. "We've lost the way" also states a historical truth by intimating that a way was being followed until the moment that it was lost. Traditionally the religious way of life has been compared to a path that man walked on his spiritual journey and his life and world to utterly tenebrous wilds the only way out of which was by following the word of God and leading a righteous life. (Existentialism was also the imperillment of the righteous life or morality as anything and everything is permissible in a world without God.) Existentialism as a weltanschaung had a very definite origin in history at the moment man was "led into the wilds astray". Its substitution of the religious faith as the predominant weltanschaung was as concrete an event in the history of ideas as any. So, a certain change did come to transpire in the history of human consciousness. In fact, the very character of the consciousness was altered. "We (humanity) have lost our way", our belief in God, and are at our own devices in the "wilds", the wilderness of a godless world. The men riding the horses are metaphorical of both the individual man's and the historical mankind's spiritual journey through the world. In the Dostoevskian world the individual man's and mankind's historical narratives coincide as man who had travelled relatively secure through the world assuaged by the spiritual-emotional comforts of religion was almost suddenly (as the existential angst that had been slow in building up suddenly glared at man with the overwhelming awfulness of its sublime nothingness) and rudely faced, at the dawn of the ninetenth century or thereabout, with an existential world stripped of all transcendental meaning. The point we have been belabouring is a historical/chronological one enunciating that the dawn of existentialism was a historical event that transpired at a certain moment in history, a moment of transition inhabited by the Dostoevskian creations and their ilk (which basically signified all of the modern west or at least a very significant portion of it). It was something undergone by humanity and Dostoevsky masterfully delineates this undergoing - the philosophical origin, so to speak, of existentialism in individual consciousnesses as the character of the world-soul or the total historical consciousness of mankind metamorphosed too (the two originations are concomitant as the individual is but a micro-universal manifestation of the world-soul).
The afore-quoted epigraph chosen by Dostoevsky is thus shown to be crammed full of significance as it epigramatically communicates the emotional state of the existential that pervades the novel as its dark emotional and spiritual undercurrents, that in fact constitutes the very substance of the novel, its ground of origin, and undergirds the worldview of the characters peopling it. It is in the dialogue of the narrator and the characters of the novel with the silence of this void that the narrative structure of the novel emerges. It emerges out of a gaze directed into the abyss. Dostoevsky's novels are full of cries of profound distress of human beings who have gazed into this abyss and glimpsed its frightening nothingness. The narratives of Dostoevsky's novels are the articulations of the existential angst felt deeply by the characters inhabiting them and, at a higher/deeper scale of theorization, through them by Dostoevsky himself (or by them through Dostoevsky - with respect to a creative act it stands to mean one and the same thing).
In the present essay we seek to reveal this underlying existential substratum of Dostoevsky's novels or the abyss out of which they emerge and the how of this emergence. We show how the narrative and its meaning and structure emerge out of this spiritual and emotional well-spring of the existential condition of the nineteenth century man. For Bakhtin all novels/narratives are products of a dialogical imagination. What is said is the thesis of the dialogue, but it is what is unsaid, its own peculiar silence, that is its synthesis, the meaning of the dialogue. It is in the dialogue of the narrative with its silence that its meaning emerges. The crux of our project, therefore, lies in interpreting this silence, in articulating the unsaid in Dostoevsky. This is not to negate the value of what is said. The unsaid rather enhances the value of what is said by pointing to the unspeakable through the medium of speech or by ironizing speech to manifest the unspeakable in terms of tone and mood. Language, after all, is an unceasing exercise in striving to speak the beyond, and language in Dostoevsky speaks the horror of the beyond. In Dostoevsky, the unspeakable or the beyond is man's existential condition. The horror of the existential permeates speech in Dostoevsky. Therefore, to understand the existential one needs must understand Dostoevsky's unsaid.The human beings in Dostoevsky's novels are in the throes of the existential condition and their speech emerges out of this condition - a condition that is the (philosophical) ground of his novels and the characters in them. It is the space through, across, underneath and beneath which Dostoevsky's letters dance. We do not here have an a-priori theory of what is existentialism but follow and unravel its various strands through the Dostoevskian text. We, of course, take it on faith, so as to enable us to begin the task of exegesis, that the Dostoevskian narrative is the exemplar narrative (delineation) of existentialism, And also that there is a philosophico-literary fabric called the Dostoevskian text.
"I will say at once that Stepan Trofimovitch had always filled a particular role among us, that of the progressive patriot, so to say, and he was passionately fond of playing the part - so much so that I really believe he could not have existed without it."
The man here is the part. He could not have existed without the part. Existence precedes essence. Man creates meaning. He exists through the part. What is significant here is that he does not possess a 'true character', so to speak. There is no true character but rather a character created. There is no pre-existing character or essence of man but he, rather, creates the essence in the wake of his existence. He chooses a part to play and then endeavours to remain true to it so as to eke out an identity for himself in a world bereft of all higher authority capable of and entitled to bestow meaning. But this act of bestowing meaning upon himself remains just that, a bestowal, and does not progress to an authenticity of existence through a reception of the bestowed, as in a world sans the sanctioning authority of God the giver and the receiver of the gift of meaning are one and the same, man. Man continuously seeks to gift himself meaning but fails to receive it. In the act of giving man saturates himself with the identity of the giver and cannot possibly assume the identity of the receiver too. He is forever gifting himself and forever failing to receive the gift. Just as man needs both his ears and both his eyes to coincide to complete the sensory acts of audition and vision, respectively, he needs both his giver and receiver selves to coincide, an act impossible of realization in the intellectual world of man for his consciousness is constituted such that he cannot simultaneously be a receiver and a giver. Therefore, the gift of the self forever eludes him as he is too busy gifting it to himself to be able to receive it too. Stepan Trofimovitch inhabits this in-between space marked by the slippage of the gift, a mark that divides man from himself, an identity torn asunder, the schizophrenic man who is constantly enacting himself, alienated and estranged from himself, whose real self falls away from him as he enacts it. He is reduced to enacting a self, mere role-playing, as he lacks an original self (something that can only be guaranteed by God). It is God that makes us the gift of a meaningful self and protects the meaningfulness of the universe, he is the guarantor of essences and brings us to birth into a universe of pre-existing essences. But a godless world falls victim to the duplicity of role-playing instead of a truthful embrace of a given self as man is suspect in his ability to create essences. He can only play at creating them as nothing, no higher authority, is there to sanctify the truthfulness of his creation and man can only ever be doubtful of his own authority and all that bears the name of his authority, including his own identity "Stepan Trofimovitch had always filled an important role among us." His social identity was, notwithstanding its importance, only a role. It was something extraneous to himself and not of his original nature. Human nature is thus a created essence and not a God-given one and like the scales of the skin can be shed. Or can it? " ... he was passionately fond of playing the part - so much so that I really believe he could not have existed without it." Stepan Trofimovitcvh could not exist without the part. He must believe in the reality of his own existence. It is of a piece with him, an inseparable and the central aspect of his existence. But there is an essential schizophrenic disjunction in the facticity of Stephan Trofimovitch's being a passionate patriot in that it does not belong to him truly and originally but is something acquired, a "habit", and is extraneous to his essential being. The Stepan Trofimovitch syndrome is emblematic of the grater human reality about which Sartre says that Dasein (the special kind of being that man possesses) is "being which is what it is not and which is not what it is." Stepan Trofimovitch is a passionate patriot but that is not his reality i.e. it is not true to say about him that he is in reality a passionate patriot. But if he is not a passionate patriot then what is he? What is his reality?What is the reality of Dasein? What is the truth about man? And what does it mean then to say that Stepan trofimovitch is a passionate patriot? He crafts his own self in the real sense of an artifact. He plays a part but is nevertheless not an actor. "Not that I would have put him on a level with an actor in a theatre ... This may all have been the effect of habit .... " The self that Stepan Trofimovitch projects is an artifact. What, then, is the essential being of his self ? What is the truth about Stepan Trofimovitch? It begs the question about who I am or who any individual is. It begs the question of the "whoness" of the person, the question of his particularity and essence. It also begs the question of authenticity. In the post "death of God" world, one living in the "twilight of its idols", personal identity has been disengaged from the source of its secure underpinnings. Stepan Trofimovitch has the reputation of an 'atheist' and a 'freethinker', but it is only the reputation and not the truth about the man, his identity exists in a limbo, so to speak, in a state of disengagement from his true self. He wonders aloud "why people think me a dangerous freethinker and atheist", but he nevertheless hankers intensively after this identity imputed to him by society. Identity in such a state of personal estrangement, alienation, and disenchantment becomes more a social function than a personal possession, more a 'being-for-others' than a 'being-in-itself' or a 'being-in-oneself', more role-playing than authenticity. "This (the progressive patriot) may all have been the effect of habit, or rather, more exactly of a generous propensity he had from his earliest years of indulging in an agreeable day dream in which he figured as a picturesque public character. He fondly loved, for instance, his position as 'a persecuted man' , and so to speak, an exile. There is a sort of traditional glamour about those two little words that fascinated him once for all and, exalting him gradually in his opinion, raised him in the course of years to a lofty pedestal very gratifying to vanity." The "generous propensity" is the original nature, the in potentia, the being-in-itself of Stepan Trofimovitch. It is his authenticity or search for authenticity(1), his subjective truth (2), his mode of self-transcendence (as the metaphysics or value of desire lies in its urge for self transcendence). This "generous propensity" of man is his ceaseless striving for authenticity, his search for his original nature, his ownmost self. But he belies his subjective truth, which for Kierkegaard is the true heart of existence and which in the existential tradition is the hallmark of authenticity, by falling into the trap of an objective essentialism. Kierkegaard is the originary and a particularly fruitful thinker with reference to the concept of authenticity as for him it was the prime article of faith of a life lived 'well' and faithfully. In the Kierkegaardian ethical canon, that which is static is dead matter and the authentic existence lies in an unwaning and amaranthine movement of self-transcendence. The authentic selfhood is always at loggerheads with the predefined unidimensional objectivity that has become the defacto mode of modern existence. By inhabiting these unidimensional objectivities man winds up impersonating inert abstractions and putting on lifeless masks (identities) devoid of the true vitality of existence. It is akin to the biological foreign matter that can only spell pathology for the healthy human body. Stepan Trofimovitch suffers from a spiritual pathology of sorts by residing in a false persona - an ethical plight that defines existence in our post-modern world - an existence replete with acts of bad faith, of lives lived in bad faith. Dostoevskian characters are marked by the quandary of a double moral existence, living as caricatures or fascimiles of their potential authentic selves. In being a "passionate patriot" Stepan Trofimovitch is being what he is not and caricaturing what he is or not being or becoming what he truly is or should become. He is living in the realm of the imaginary as opposed to that of the real. The verb becoming is critical in the ethical context of existentialism as authenticity is nothing but an unceasing becoming, overcoming of the statisms of the self. It is also awry in such a context to aver that a man can become 'something', that there is an objective essence waiting to be dwelt in by him for the rest of his life, an identity to be attained at the end of a journey of spiritual and psychological becoming. The word identity itself is a misnomer and a giveaway as one dictionary definition of the word states that "it is the state or fact of remaining the same one or ones as under varying aspects or conditions." "The condition of being oneself or itself, and not another." "Condition or character as to who a person or what a thing is." "The effect or fact of being the same one as described." "The sense of self, providing sameness and continuity in personality over time and sometimes disturbed in mental illness, as schizophrenia." The origin and history of the word is articulated as "1570" from M. Fr. identite (14 c.), from L.L. (5 c.) identitatem (nom. identitas) "sameness" from 'ident-', comb. form of L (idem) "the same" identical; abstracted from 'identidem' "over and over", from phrase 'idem et idem'. Also: 1560-70; late Latin identitas, equivalent to Latin 'ident' (idem) repeatedly, again and again, earlier 'idem et idem' ('idem' neuter of 'idem' the same + et and) + itas _ ity. The latin origin of the word indicates sameness and repetition or the repetition of the same as undergirding the idea of identity. "The state or fact of remaining the same one or ones as under varying aspects or conditions" is undercut and put under erasure in the Kierkegaardian contemplation of repetition. Kierkegaard's weapon of choice, irony, is evinced in his christening of the narrator of 'Repetition' as Constantin Constanius. As is always and tellingly the case in Kierkegaard, the cognominations of his narrators have a deeper and ironical significance in the greater context of the works. The name Constantin Constanius explicitly rings of connotations of constancy of the individual in his personality and in love. (Nothing is more redolent of the continuity and fidelity of the self than its constancy in love. Love as the manifestation of constancy in desire is what binds us in our identities and our relationships. Love thus is the guarantor and anchor of our stability and unchangingness as individuals. It is the guardian angel (as enunciated in a figurative style) of our essence and the protector of our permanence in the here and the beyond. The aesthetic and ethical virtues of love establish the psychological adherence and cohesion of the individual and its ethical and religious phases confirm his/her eschatological substantiality. All these phases of love (agape) in their totality constitute the eternal fidelity of the person and flow into the formation of his Christological persona. In an act of sovereign irony, Kierkegaard undermines the whole creed of the constancy of personality by naming his "aesthetic schemer" of a narrator 'Constantin Constanius' - Constantin who in his guise as the 'confidante' and 'observer' of the 'melancholy young man' of 'Repetition' counsels him to "Be inconstant, nonsensical; do one thing one day and another the next, but without passion, in an utterly careless way that does not, however, degenerate into inattention, because, on the contrary, the external attentiveness must be just as great as ever but altered to a formal function lacking all inwardness." In short, to become a deceiver. The arbitrary and the accidental are possessed of a critical function in Kierkegaardian thought. The repetition of the accidental and the fortuiotous is the most significant of experiences and the one most directly redolent of the divine for Kierkegaard. Fortuitous is "a happening produced by chance" and chance is "the absence of any cause of events that can be predicted, understood, or controlled". It is "the unpredictable element that causes an event to result in a certain way than another." In either case chance is spoken of as a real force and treated or personified as a positive agency. (thesaurus.com). For Kierkegaard chance is the most meaningful way in which God's absolute agency is manifested and enacted in the life-histories and destinies of human beings, as when in the 'Seducer's Diary' the lover experiments with the idea of God when he overhears the conversation of two women indulging in wishful thinking, or rather, fantasising about what it would be like were they to be gifted with a small fortune and thinks of experimenting with the idea of God or chance and the destinies of the two poor women by anonymously granting them their wish at that very instant. This overlapping or coincidence of instants, the instant of prayer and the instant of grace, is deeply theological for Kierkegaard. It is God's revelation to his creature. It is the inner dialectic of time where eternity and history encounter and flow into each other. The instant in Kierkegaard plays into the meaning of prior situation, which is existence pure and naked, to which no response has been made as yet and no response assigned. The Kierkegaardian instant is critical to an understanding of the real meaning of existentialism. The instant harbours within itself the absolute beginning, the radical origin, an infinite beginning that still does not have a consequent and from which everything that comes into existence is an absolute departure. It is for this reason that the given situation, which for man and for all ontological purposes is the prior situation, the situation into which he is borne, is severed from the divine contiguity by dint of its absolute falling away from the infinite beginning. It is for this reason that it is a world without beginning and end, a world sans an origin and sans a telos. This is why "We've lost the way" and why history has been robbed of a telos in an existential universe." "The track, therefore, has vanished" and "We've been let in the wilds astray." Therefore, for Kierkegaard it is the task of the man of true faith (the knight of faith) or the man in search of authenticity to recover that lost origin by giving in to chance, by willfully negating repetition and sameness and by contradicting constancy at all its critical junctures. By becoming a deciever. But to have a meaning, to be blessed with an aesthetic significance, the spirit of inconstancy has to be elevated into an 'art of inconstancy.' One has to be inconstant "without passion, in an utterly careless way that does not, however, degenerate into inattention, because, on the contrary, the external attentiveness must be just as great as ever but altered to a formal function lacking all inwardness." Inwardness is of the essence. It is what lies at the heart of temporality, the womb of time - the infinite beginning - that is of significance. Whatever exists always begins after this i.e. after the infinite beginning. It does not have its origin in the radical origin and exists in an absolute departure from the infinite beginning and has no foundation/ground/grundriss or goal/telos. In such a scenario (the prior existential situation), the only authentic response to be made is on behalf of the subjective faith. Subjectivity for Kierkegaard is truth. It is "what makes the individual who he is in distinction from others." This harks back to our definition of identity as "the condition of being oneself or itself and not another" or the condition of being authentic. The dialectic of the subjective and the objective, the inward and the outward, the constantly self-transcending and the constantly constant are at the heart of the Kierkegaardian concept of 'either/or' or "aut/aut" (in its Latin form). "Either/Or is an excellent title. It is piquant and at the same time also has a speculative meaning." "Either/Or" is "the aesthetic and the ethical, immediacy and reflection, the individual and the universally human, time and eternity, history as a given and the gaining of a personal history, the momentary and the moment, existential dialectic, the use of freedom, erotic love and ethical love, living poetically and living responsibly, despair and hope, possibility and actuality, choosing, immanence and transcendence, the inner and the outer, cocealment and openness, imagination and actuality, thought and actuality, knowledge and action." It is "an existential dialectic," a state of fine tension. "Either/Or" is all these, but, and therefore, not the state of being identical. That which is trapped in the state of identity cannot possibly be authentic as the authentic by nature is self-transcending. The author in "Search for Authenticity" quotes OED as defining the authentic as "something first-hand, original as opposed to copied," something real, actual, genuine as opposed to imaginary, pretended. Further "Examples usually refer to genuine documents and works of art as opposed to counterfeit (items)" or those of disputed origin. The "passionately fond of playing the part" Stepan Trofimovitch thus creates an inauthentic and unoriginal self. An imaginary, pretended, and counterfeit self. A predominant theme of existentialism is to differentiate between a counterfeiter and an authentic individual and to probe the makings of authenticity. One of the Kierkegaardian motifs is life as a work of art and the crafting of the human self. Although Stepan Trofimovitch does create himself as a work of art and crafts himself as an artifact it is only in the form, in the outer husk or shell. It was "an agreeable daydream in which he figured as a picturesque public character." He daydreamt himself into creation as a "progressive patriot." It was, however, in reality a mere part that he played just as the young man in 'Repetition' must go on, despite his inward inconstancy, with "the external attentiveness that must be as great as ever but altered to a formal function lacking all inwardness." In a way of speaking, Stepan Trofimovitch's "progressive patriot" is a body without soul, an inauthentic self (as inauthenticity for Kierkegaard is equivalent to dying to one's true self and not being alive to one's real possibility). Stepan Trofimovitch's is a life lived in bad faith (inauthentically, falsely). An incurable romantic ("a generous propensity he had from the earliest years for indulging in an agreeable daydream"), Stepan Trofimovitch is the victim of a "crazy notion" as he seeks to inhabit a moribund ideal. The living ideal of authenticity constitutes in overcoming the ethos that the majority swear by and the Knight of Faith is one who can act freely and independently of the world and the public opinion.(Stepan Trofimovitch, whereas, craves public sanction.) "When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the personality receives the accolade of Knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity." "The soul comes to be alone in the whole world." Stepan Trofimovitch, whereas, we know, cannot live without company, he needs must continually repeat (and not create) and enact himself in the role of the "progressive patriot" before the eyes of his audience and most consummately and absolutely (Something inside him breaks forever when Varvara Petrovna decides to marry him off to Darya Pavlovna as he realizes that she does not desire and regard him anymore in the womanly way as a handsome man, and certainly not as an intellectual man, "the progressive patriot.") in the eyes of his benefactress Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin. His "progressive patriot" self is not immediately present to him, but is mediated through the the reflection of himself that he contemplates in the mirror of Varvarta Petrovna's desire for him, in the reflection of his performing, acting, dramatizing self that he glimpses in the eyes of his audience. Stepan Trofimovitch can be said to dwell in the realm of the Lacanian 'Imaginary,' the Imaginary wherein "Lacan regarded the 'imago' as the proper study of psychology and identification as the fundamental psychical process. The imaginary was, then, the ... dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined." The fundamental psychical process, then, in Stepan Trofimovitch is his identification of his 'real', everyday, continuous persona with the imagined self. "The basis of the imaginary order is the formation of the ego in the 'mirror stage'
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