The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  Calculated ugliness is as unusual a combination as beauty and ugliness, although the connection may not be immediately evident. There is, however, nothing unusual about the association of beauty with order, an association that, as we know, stretches back to Plato and is a key aspect of the power that the hyperouranian realm may exert on those who have glimpsed it. The supreme order is beautiful because it is order, perfection, finality. Likewise, calculation depends on order—one may not calculate where there are no fixed rules of combination. If we accept that ugliness is the contrary of beauty, then it seems that ugliness denotes a lack of order. But, if that is so, calculated ugliness is itself difficult to understand. The orderly display of disorder? Is this not a sort of nonsense that implodes the boundaries on which both terms depend?21

  The argument is this: Stavrogin plans his seemingly random acts. He is an agent of disorder. Yet to refer to Stavrogin as an agent of disorder is to reduce him to the very terms he seems to seek to deny. The deliberate perpetuation of nonsense is caught in the very logic it seeks to mock or overcome. This argument has been leveled at the underground man as well, and it is a variant of another argument: one cannot speak of nothing consistently because to speak of nothing is to transform it into what it is not by definition supposed to be. To speak about nothing is to speak nonsense.22 Nothing cannot readily have sense unless it is not what it is. But if it is not what it is, then what is it?

  These complicated ontological concerns need not detain us for the moment. The immediate point is that the narrator indicates that people seek to impute to Stavrogin a comprehensible identity, applicable to his seemingly random actions, as a way of dismissing the far more radical possibility his behavior raises—that there is no reason at all for it, that his behavior is simply an expression of chance, an expression of something that can have no coherent expression, that is the reverse of coherent expression. We return once again to the basic question: How may one give form to what has no form? And, in this respect, perhaps crime is the attachment to formlessness, the liberation from form.23

  Kirillov and Stavrogin have in common an attachment to crime, insofar as both seem to be creatures of negation—Kirillov as the theoretical suicide and Stavrogin as a character who has no character, recalling the underground man’s insistence that the intelligent man of the nineteenth century can only really be characterless. Stavrogin is a hero of nonidentity, a hero, in other words, whose identity is not to have an identity. In the guise of the hero, the beautiful individual, he is the very embodiment of ugliness or, perhaps more significantly, the embodiment of an irresolvable contradiction—or a contradiction resolvable only through suicide. In the end we learn that Stavrogin commits suicide, although we never really learn why he does so. One presumes that he could have remained in his own underground for as long as he wanted.

  Stavrogin’s suicide is much more enigmatic than that of Kirillov. Kirillov’s suicide is not really what it appears to be: an act of theoretical freedom. It is not an acceptance of death being more beautiful than life, a point clarified by Kirillov’s hesitation at the very end as well as by his incessant talk about his intention to die. In Kirillov’s case, theory is a substitute for practice, not an overcoming of it. After all, this overcoming could only be forthcoming through suicide.

  Stavrogin’s enigmatic quality is indeed quite different. Boredom seems to overtake Stavrogin. Kirillov’s “holy terror” before pain is worlds away from Stavrogin’s descent into indifference. Kirillov is a good deal more like the active figures whom the underground man ridicules, whereas Stavrogin is a brilliant avatar of the underground man himself, “shining darkness” or “beautifully ugly.” But he is bored—and boredom, is it not ugly too?24

  The sage can only be bored. The sage realizes the emptiness of all attachment (as Kirillov, for example, does not). The sage, beyond being and nonbeing, “is”—but in what sense? The sage is the characterless being or a being that is, insofar as it recognizes the emptiness of all merely specific shapes of being. The sage is in a sort of suspended animation, a figure that is detached, that offers no soothing tales, that provides no one with an impetus to act or not to act; the sage does not theorize. The sage is boredom itself, since for the sage there is nowhere to go and where he has come from can be little more than a history of error, comic error, for one who sees how all errors are merely comic attempts to give purpose, to alleviate boredom—and the terror of death is one of the great incitements to purpose. The sage is a variant of the last man, but a very complicated one, though they might appear to be exactly alike.

  FINAL HARMONY

  Theory and practice may not be reconciled. Or we may put the issue in different terms: reason and will may not be reconciled. There is a series of other couplets we may cite whose relation turns on a similar problem: that finality is both coveted and rejected. Though we may covet the harmony exhibited by God as at the very least a metaphor for perfection and an end to struggle, the effect of imitating that final harmony is boredom or unrelenting repetition, from which we seem to seek relief at all costs, as the underground man suggests.

  How, then, do we approach this basic problem? Do we suggest that this structure is somehow fixed in human nature or in the metaphysical determinacy that we cannot overcome? Or is this structure itself merely a narrative behind which lies nothing at all other than a contingent history? These questions, largely of an epistemological nature, ask whether freedom is indeed possible, and possible other than as nonsense, as negation. If freedom is only possible as nonsense or negation, then we must return to question our definitions, because nonsense would seem to refer to the limits of our definitions rather than constituting a definition itself. A positive definition of a negative capacity is transformative, and hence impossible, because it gives that negative capacity a positive identity.

  Yet if freedom is indeed possible other than as nonsense, then the question emerges as to why freedom matters. What matters about freedom such that we might desire to be free? Indeed, the question arises in either case because the fact is that we are talking about freedom, and in talking about freedom we reveal an interest in it that is more than a little pressing. Dostoevsky himself makes freedom into the highest aim of human activity. Dostoevsky installs the desire for freedom, even when that desire dissolves into nothingness, as the sine qua non of human activity. No other activity matters so much; will is more important than reason.

  If we take the underground man and the other dark heroes of Dostoevsky’s fiction at face value, we are compelled to conclude that they seek freedom from the humiliating force of nature described so eloquently by the underground man. Nature humiliates, and on top of that, human beings as natural beings humiliate each other in their attempt to overcome nature, to escape from its suffocating embrace. Here the link Gottfried Leibniz makes between metaphysical limitation and moral and physical evil is palpable.25 Our metaphysical limitation—our imperfection or inability to overcome nature—is the fount of the kind of rebellion that moves Dostoevsky’s heroes. But there is no necessity in the desperate striving of these Dostoevskian heroes; they may come to a different view, one which requires them to subordinate themselves to the whole, to leave behind will, defined as the marking point of disobedience in Dostoevsky just as it is in Augustine.

  THE OTHER DOSTOEVSKY: ZOSIMA

  There is also another Dostoevsky, who offers a response to the problem of freedom that is radically different from the one we have examined thus far. I have focused my account of Dostoevsky on a central difficulty, expressed clearly in Notes from Underground and in the triumph of violence—or will—in both Raskolnikov and the heroes of Demons. In all cases, this central difficulty, the conflict between reason and freedom or reason and will, proves to be incapable of resolution—one must opt for suicide or for the muddle of the underground man, who is incapable of resolving anything.

  This other Dostoevsky transforms the muddle in a remarkable way. He does so by transforming the notion of freedom from one exclu
sively oriented to a freedom from limitations in any of the more or less utopian dreams of his heroes of will or nonsense to that of a notion of freedom to commit to a certain way of living that emerges as a practical project. Dostoevsky places the emphasis not on a terminal and absolute freedom—a kind of freedom that by definition can find no place in the world—but on a freedom that is worked out primarily as a freedom in relation to and among others. This kind of freedom, which takes as its condition of possibility the impossibility or incoherence of the absolute freedom sought by the Dostoevskian heroes of will—emerges in what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as the “dialogicity” of Dostoevsky, a complicated notion, to be sure.26 For the moment, however, I want to illuminate the basic distinction Dostoevsky draws between the hero of will, as one who strives for absolute freedom, and the much less dramatic hero of social freedom by reference to an intriguing example in Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov: the enmity between Father Ferapont and the elder Zosima, which creates an astonishing counterpoint in part 2 of the novel, a “pro et contra” that deserves careful attention.

  Father Ferapont is introduced in book 4 of part 2, the famous book entitled “Strains” or “Lacerations” (надрывы),27 although he is mentioned earlier in the novel as an opponent of the institution of elders in general and an adversary of the elder Zosima in particular. Prior to presenting a detailed account of Father Ferapont, the first chapter of this book affords a glimpse of the elder Zosima’s primary idea, which appears most clearly the closer he comes to death:

  “Love one another, fathers,” the elder taught (as far as Alyosha could recall afterwards). “Love God’s people. For we are not holier than those in the world because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls, but, on the contrary, anyone who comes here, by the very fact that he has come, already knows himself to be worse than all those who are in the world, worse than all on earth.… And the longer a monk lives within his walls, the more keenly he must be aware of it. For otherwise he had no reason to come here. But when he knows that he is not only worse than all those in the world, but is also guilty before all people, on behalf of all and for all, for all human sins, the world’s and each person’s, only then will the goal of our unity be achieved. For you must know, my dear ones, that each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth, not only because of the common guilt of the world, but personally, each one of us. For all people and for each person on this earth.”28

  Zosima’s basic assertion here is that we all have a responsibility to each other, a proposition that has attracted substantial attention—one could argue that it is a cornerstone of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy.29 The basic notion is that we come first to recognize others in terms of our having a responsibility to them. Others are not there “for us”; on the contrary, others are “for us” only to the degree that we identify ourselves as being responsible or answering to them. Levinas is quick to identify the essentially social orientation of Zosima’s simple exhortation. We are not monastic creatures but rather creatures whose primary devotion to God is expressed as devotion to others and not solely to God. The relation to others defines one’s piety and godliness.

  Father Ferapont represents a rigorist rejection of that notion; it is God who must take precedence over other human beings. The relation to God trumps the relation to other human beings. Individual salvation is central, not salvation as a group project, as a project that constitutes a community as such. Father Ferapont is a “great faster and keeper of silence” whose rigorous asceticism and eccentricity qualify him to be a “fool in Christ,” one touched directly by the divinity. He lives apart from others and does not seek to deal with them.

  Father Ferapont never went to the elder Zosima. Though he lived in the hermitage, he was not much bothered by hermitage rules, again because he behaved like a real holy fool. He was about seventy-five years old, if not more, and lived beyond the hermitage apiary, in a corner of the wall, in an old, half-ruined wooden cell built there in ancient times, back in the last century, for a certain Father Iona, also a great faster and keeper of silence, who had lived to be a hundred and five and of whose deeds many curious stories were still current in the monastery and its environs. Father Ferapont had so succeeded that he, too, was finally placed, about seven years earlier, in this same solitary little cell, really just a simple hut, but which rather resembled a chapel because it housed such a quantity of donative icons with donative icon lamps eternally burning before them, which Father Ferapont was appointed, as it were, to look after and keep lit. He ate, it was said (and in fact it was true), only two pounds of bread in three days, not more; it was brought to him every three days by the beekeeper who lived there in the apiary, but even with this beekeeper who served him, Father Ferapont rarely spoke a word.… He rarely appeared at a liturgy. Visiting admirers sometimes saw him spend the whole day in prayer without rising from his knees or turning around. And even if he occasionally got into conversation with them, he was brief, curt, strange, and almost always rude.30

  Father Ferapont is a kind of madman or fool in Christ precisely because he takes no notice of other human beings. He mortifies himself and refuses to speak except in puzzling ways that others may try to interpret—the mantic speech of the “divine” madman is most frequently gibberish (and obscene) when one chooses to ignore the divine message supposedly locked therein. In this regard, Father Ferapont is also a purveyor of nonsense, and this nonsense together with his isolation are forms of freedom from the bonds of society that bear some resemblance to the kind of freedom enjoyed (and bemoaned) by the garrulous underground man. The dialogue with the northern monk that follows the description is one of Dostoevsky’s great comic moments. But it is also revelatory of the peculiarity of Father Ferapont, who seems to have invented his own version of the Holy Spirit, the Holispirit, a comic play on words in the Russian (святой дух as apposed to святодух). Invention is, however, not a virtue of the truly pious, and there are more than a few hints that Father Ferapont’s ostentatious piety is theatrical in a mocking sense that one would not associate with God but with human vanity, the very same vanity that propels Dostoevsky’s other heroes to challenge God. In this respect, the elder Zosima, despite his position of authority, proves to be much more humble, much more aware of the distance between the disharmony and disorder of human reality and the divine harmony.

  Zosima’s project of humbling oneself before others is indeed a project of overcoming the tendency, natural as it may be, to place oneself before others: the tendency toward vanity. One way of acquitting oneself of vanity is to speak clearly so that all may understand, not in parables or riddles like Father Ferapont. For that matter, Father Ferapont’s silence may just as easily be interpreted as rejection of speech, as rejection, thus, of the simplest element of relation to others. In the end, Father Ferapont’s rejection of community tends to resemble contempt for the other, not true understanding. Only God is fit for Father Ferapont, who sees devils everywhere, especially in the cell of the elder Zosima, who has inadequately inoculated himself against others by actively advocating community.

  The denouement of the tension between the elder Zosima and Father Ferapont constitutes a classic Dostoevskian “scandal” or “crisis” scene and serves to highlight the significance of the opposition between the two men as radically different ways of viewing Christianity, with Zosima oriented to largely “horizontal” relations, whereby the construction of faith is evidenced by the construction of a community, while Father Ferapont is oriented toward community with God, exclusive of any other kind of community. The section that immediately precedes the scandal scene provides an elaborate and remarkable narrative of crime and redemption, involving both the youthful indiscretion of the elder Zosima and a haunting murder tale of a mysterious stranger. It is certainly of special significance that Zosima’s primary idea, the responsibility of each one of us to and for the other, for all others, seems to have particular resonance for this str
anger.

  “Paradise,” he said, “is hidden in each one of us, it is concealed within me, too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life.” I looked at him: he was speaking with tenderness and looking at me mysteriously, as if questioning me. “And,” he went on, “as for each man being guilty before all and for all, besides his own sins, your reasoning about that is quite correct, and it is surprising that you could suddenly embrace this thought so fully. And indeed it is true that when people understand this thought, the Kingdom of Heaven will come to them, no longer in a dream but in reality.”31

  The delicacy and simplicity of this thought seems belied by the reaction to Zosima’s death, which follows this narrative. Zosima’s corpse begins to smell. Questions arise about his sanctity, because there is no miraculous lack of smell and hence no miracle to provide a divine sign that Zosima is not merely human but somehow above the human. The focus on the supernatural, a focus away from Zosima’s simple message, is clearly related to a rejection of that message as relying on mere human effort to bring forth a final kingdom without positive proof that doing so will in fact be a divine project. Those who seek to realize this project must rely on an essentially groundless conviction alone. Father Ferapont intrudes to raise the question of Zosima’s sanctity and, by doing so, he instills doubt in many of those present. In response to a question put to him by one of Zosima’s close associates—“And who can say of himself, ‘I am holy?’ ”—Father Ferapont makes these telling comments: