Kant’s aim is to build a case for a religion of morality based on reason (where the word has been redefined to refer to the faculty of mind that allows us to think about such suprasensible ideas as “the good”).
SCHLEIERMACHER: “God is manifestly nothing other than the genius of mankind. Man is the prototype of this God.”
Kirillov: Like so many other characters in Dostoevsky’s works, he names God while showing an underlying inability truly to believe in him. Kirillov undermines any possibility of belief, because what he says on the subject (his use of the phrase “man-God,” his claim to be able to become God by shooting himself ) emphasizes God’s ultimately physical and human origin. For Kirillov, the turning point occurs between the two phases of history, the first of which (“from the gorilla to the annihilation of God”) represents a weird marriage between Darwin and Feuerbach (or Stirner, for that matter) and the second of which (“from the annihilation of God . . . to the physical transformation of man”) represents an absurdly materialized versionof the Apocalypse.
With Shatov, we find ourselves in a quandary regarding Dostoevsky’s own beliefs. I’ll speak of quandaries like this one in the next chapter. But it’s not difficult to find in Dostoevsky’s writings ideas quite similar to those Shatov expresses to Stavrogin. Prince Myshkin’s tirade in the famous vase-smashing scene has language almost identical to what we find in Shatov’s speech. If allwe had were Myshkin’s and Shatov’s remarks, we could easily dismiss Slavophile ideology (in the way it’s presented in Dostoevsky’s works) as an expression of illness (Myshkin) or faithless stupidity (Shatov). But it appears again and again in the Diary of a Writer, where Dostoevsky implicitly claims to be speaking in his own voice. “The Russian man,” he writes in the September1876 issue, “knows nothing higher than Christianity, nor can heeven conceive of anything higher. His whole land, his whole community, all Russia he calls Christianity [khristianstvo], ‘peasantry’ [krest’ianstvo—the two words sound almost identical in Russian].”68 The following year the novelist describes the fundamental belief of the type of Slavophilism to which he himselfpurportedly subscribes: “that our great Russia, at the head of the unitedSlavs, will proclaim to the whole world, to all European mankind, and to its civilization the new, robust word still unheard by the world.”69 After one of many hysterical passages in which Dostoevsky attacks the Catholic Church, he adds this about the Russian people (narod, “folk,” “peasantry”): “For now, our people are only bearers of Christ, and they place their hopes only in him. They call themselves peasants [krest’ianin], which is to say Christians [khristianin— again two words that sound almost identical].”70 The entire meaning of Russia is “all-world-ness” (vsemirnost’), “common-to-all-humankind-ness”(obshchechelovechnost’), he says in a notebook entry from 1876–77.71 Or, as heputs it in Diary of a Writer, “common-to-all-humankind-ness” is (paradoxically)the “Russian national idea.”72
The underground man seeks again and again to prove that, like it or not, we do have free will and we don’t always act in our own enlightened self-interest; witness our willingness to commit rash and self-destructive acts for the sole purpose of enjoying the exhilarating sensation of freedom.
No doubt the association of Chernyshevsky and other Nihilists (or simply radicals) with socialism was responsible for Dostoevsky’s many shrill and hysterical claims, over the years, that socialism and Christianity are opposites—that Catholicism gave rise to atheism,which in turn gave rise to socialism.
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