by Jeff Love
18. See, for example, Jackson, Dostoevskij’s Underground Man, 49–63. Jackson calls the Notes a “pivotal work” in which “Dostoevsky develops the main themes of his great novels.”
19. I say “dialectical” not to engage in polemic with the heritage of the Bakhtinian interpretation of Dostoevsky. But a “dull-edged” polemic will emerge, nonetheless, as we bring Kojève’s thought more clearly into focus. The crucial Bakhtinian notion of “unfinalizability” must reveal itself as largely incoherent for Kojève, or as a notion that prizes “pseudo sense” over sense, in terms of Kojève’s lengthy analysis of discourse in his later works. The argument between Mikhail Bakhtin and formalism has a great deal of similarity to the argument between Bakhtin and Kojève, who is decisively closer to formalist thought than is Bakhtin. For an interesting view of the relation between Kojève and Bakhtin, see Emily Finlay, “The Dialogic Absolute: Bakhtin and Kojève on Dostoevsky’s The Devils,” The Dostoevsky Journal: An Independent Review 12–13 (2012–2013), 47–58.
20. F. M. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), 14.
21. Plato, Phaedo, trans. R. Hackforth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 190 [118a]. At the end of his life, Socrates says that he owes a cock to the healing god Asklepios, a gesture that implies gratitude for successful recovery from an illness. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche reads this gesture as an admission that equates life with sickness. Hackforth denies the connection, basing his judgment on that of the eminent classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. The denial is not terribly convincing, especially since it comes without argument. Nietzsche is of course not so dismissive. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), 39.
22. The ironic description of the poet from Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or comes immediately to mind: “What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.” See Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Alistair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1992), 43.
23. Kojève’s comment “Language is born from discontent. Man speaks of Nature that kills him and makes him suffer; he speaks of the State that oppresses him” reflects the sentiments of the underground man, whose moans are his own account of the reasons for those moans. See Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 117. More generally, the claim is that human activity, insofar as it cannot overcome death, is a kind of terror or moaning before the fact of death. Art is similar, a lamentation of our cruel situation that would not exist if that situation were otherwise, if the laws of nature did not oppress us by forcing us into death.
24. See Robert L. Jackson, Dialogues on Dostoevsky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 29–54.
25. Dostoevsky, Notes, 3.
26. Dostoevsky, Notes, 17.
27. Dostoevsky, Notes, 17.
28. Just as that primary source of comedy, Aristophanes’s Clouds, shows. The ridiculous followers of Socrates in the phrontisterion come to mind—pale, absurd creatures measuring fleas’ jumps and gnats’ farting. Coarser perhaps is the laughter of the Thracian maid who watches Thales stumble into a pit while he is looking up at the heavens. See Plato, Theaetetus, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), 121 [174a].
29. This point is made with frequency in Heidegger’s works, especially where he is eager to distinguish between philosophy and science. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 33.
30. Andrey Platonov’s poor Voshchev suffers from the disease of reflection and is “removed from production” on that basis. See Platonov, The Foundation Pit, trans. Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), 1.
31. See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation 1860–1865 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 344; Robert Louis Jackson, “Aristotelian Movement and Design in Part Two of Notes from Underground,” in Dostoevsky (New Perspectives), ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 66–81; and James R, Scanlon, Dostoevsky the Thinker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 15, 57–80.
32. In this respect, the affinity with Nietzsche is astonishing. Nietzsche suggests that the highest form of art is the capacity for mockery—indeed, for self-mockery. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Towards a Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swenson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), 69.
33. Dostoevsky, Notes, 32–34.
34. I refer here to Erasmus’s famous work In Praise of Folly (1511), the play and evasiveness of which may be read as a distant forerunner to the underground man. This comparison is particularly intriguing if one considers the relation of Erasmus to Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia (published by Erasmus in 1516). There is no folly in utopia.
35. See Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. Vera Deutsch (New York: Gateway, 1968). To put this point in its proper context, I may cite the example of Gottfried Leibniz, who sought to expand the hegemony of mathematical operations over the natural world to the world of history, of human behavior. Leibniz developed a fascinating thought experiment. He advocated the construction of a machine that could resolve all disputes or arguments. Leibniz referred to this machine as a “ratiocinator,” and his aim was to ensure that the calculus managed by this machine would be so flawless that any dispute would be revealed as having at its basis a mistake that could be proved, or at least revealed, by a simple mathematical operation. As Leibniz put it, we might simply say, “Calculemus” (Let’s calculate), and the issue would be resolved. (Leibniz’s famous French text uses the French contons for calculemus.) G. W. Leibniz, “La vraie méthode,” in Philosophische Schriften (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 4:3–7; and “Synopsis libri cui titulus erit: Initia et Specimina Scientiae novae Generalis pro Instauratione et Augmentis Scientarum ad publicam felicitatem” (Summary of a Book Whose Title Will Be: Beginnings and Proofs of a New General Science for the Establishment and Increase of the Sciences for the Happiness of the Public), in Philosophische Schriften, 4:443.
36. Dostoevsky, Notes, 28.
37. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), 8:28.
38. Kojève, “Sofia, filo-sofia i fenomeno-logia,” ed. A. M. Rutkevich, in Istoriko-filosofskii ezhegodnik (Moscow: Nauka, 2007), 271–324; autograph manuscript in Fonds Kojève, Bibliothèque nationale de France (box no. 20).
39. This is a point Kojève makes in his later The Concept, Time, and Discourse. See Kojève, Le concept, le temps et le discours, ed. Bernard Hesbois (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 50.
40. Dostoevsky, Notes, 30.
41. As Jorge Luis Borges put the matter: “There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.” Borges, “Avatars of the Tortoise,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 2007), 202.
42. Dostoevsky, Notes, 17.
2. THE POSSESSED
1. The best treatment of these “heroes” as being a kind of Left Hegelian chelovekobog (man-god) is in Nel Grillaert, What the God-seekers Found in Nietzsche: The Reception of Nietzsche’s Übermensch by the Philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance (Leiden: Brill-Rodopi, 2008), 107–139.
2. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1992), 3.
3. The
Machiavellian echoes are quite evident: the prince or lawgiver may do what he prohibits others to do. See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); as to new modes and orders, see also Machiavelli, The Ten Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 5.
4. “In my opinion, if, as the result of certain combinations, Kepler’s or Newton’s discoveries could become known to people in no other way than by sacrificing the lives of one, or ten, or a hundred or more people who were hindering the discovery, or standing as an obstacle in its path, then Newton would have the right, and it would even be his duty … to remove those ten or a hundred people.” Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 259.
5. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 260.
6. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 260–261.
7. See Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
8. Here I allude to Ippolit Terentiev’s marvelous, desperate phrase in part 3 of The Idiot: “Can something that has no image come as an image?” Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 2002), 409. See also Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 130.
9. Kojève, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth, 135–176 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 153–154.
10. As noted in chapter 1, Kojève refers to Kirillov at least twice in the Hegel lectures and once in his article “Hegel, Marx and Christianity.”
11. See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991).
12. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1994), 115–116.
13. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, in Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, ed. G. Thomas Tanselle (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 832.
14. Dostoevsky, Demons, 590.
15. Dostoevsky, Demons, 622.
16. Dostoevsky, Demons, 624.
17. Here I refer to famous comments from Dostoevsky himself: “And thus, all the pathos of the novel is in the prince, he is the hero. Everything else moves around him, like a kaleidoscope” and “Everything is contained in the character of Stavrogin. Stavrogin is everything.” See Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Leningrad: Akademia nauk, 1972–1990), 11:136, 207.
18. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), 34.
19. Dostoevsky, Demons, 43.
20. Dostoevsky, Demons, 45–46.
21. Samuel Beckett comes to mind, if not Louis-Ferdinand Céline: ugliness, distortion, the grotesque as a careful strategy. Or their predecessor, Nikolai Gogol.
22. See Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 82–96; and J. Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 33–37.
23. The key treatment of the notion of bezobrazie, or formlessness, in Dostoevsky is Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 40–70. Jackson shows extraordinarily well the essentially Platonist derivation of Dostoevsky’s conception of art. Formlessness, however, remains within the traditional orbit of the form–matter distinction. The more radical notion, that the Platonic forms themselves, in their unmediated purity, can be nothing for us but an empty void, is not explored.
24. One of the novel’s key phrases, мне все равно, literally “all is the same to me,” is the crucial catchphrase of “deep boredom,” as Heidegger describes it in his 120-page account of boredom, presented as part of his 1929–1930 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. That there is a connection here that may serve as additional proof of Heidegger’s intensive engagement with Dostoevsky. See Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 59–174.
25. G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985), 136.
26. Bakhtin’s notion of unfinalizability may be a target of Kojève’s critique of nonfinality. As we will see, Kojève maintains that only a finite set of possibilities is available at any given time. There can be no assurance that those possibilities may be inexhaustible or infinite until the impossible moment when that thesis has been proved. For Kojève, then, Bakhtin’s claim of the unfinalizable is a fiction, flattering for those who want to believe in the essential openness of human experience.
27. A daring conjecture would align Dostoevsky’s notion of a “tear” or “stress point” with Heidegger’s notion of the “rift” or der Riß (tear), a key constitutive aspect of the work of art. What Dostoevsky initially considers as negative—a twist, laceration, or wound in a person—becomes an important positive aspect of the work of art for Heidegger because it prevents that work from being turned into a simple object or becoming closed off. The analogy is absorbing because Heidegger holds imperfection to be positive and important, against the more prevailing view that Dostoevsky expresses in this passage. See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 143–203, especially 188–189.
28. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 163–164.
29. See Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bargo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
30. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 166–167.
31. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 303.
32. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 335.
33. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 56.
34. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 257.
35. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 171.
36. As Mephistopheles says in part 1 of Faust, “I am part of that force / that always wills evil and does good” (Ich bin Teil von jener Kraft / die stets das Böse will und das Gute schafft).
3. GODMEN
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Towards a Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swenson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), 56–59.
2. V. S. Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, trans. rev. and ed. Boris Jakim (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne, 1995). References to the Russian text are from V. S. Solovyov, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. S. M. Soloviev and E. L. Radlov, 2nd ed., 1911–1914 (reprint, Brussels: Izdatel’stvo Zhizn’ s bogom, 1966–1970), 3:1–181. Kojève himself refers to these lectures as the “principal source” for understanding the metaphysics of Soloviev, the basis of his thought. See Kojève, “La métaphysique religieuse de Vladimir Soloviev,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 14 (1934): 537. While Kojève prefers to identify Soloviev with Friedrich Schelling, George L. Kline, for example, characterizes Soloviev as a “neo-Hegelian” and emphasizes Soloviev’s debt to Hegel. See George L. Kline, “Hegel and Solovyov,” in George L. Kline on Hegel (North Syracuse, NY: Gegensatz, 2015).
3. See Kojève, “La métaphysique religieuse de V. Soloviev,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 14 (1934): 534–554; and 15 (1935): 110–152. This text was adapted from Kojève, Die rel
igiöse Philosophie Wladimir Solowjews, manuscript NAF 28320, Fonds Kojève, Bibliothèque nationale de France (box no. 6). Kojève also published Die Geschichtsphilosophie Wladimir Solowjews (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1930). Kojève’s principal argument against Soloviev is that the latter maintains the subordinate position of divine humanity vis-à-vis the divine, the so-called theory of two absolutes being essentially problematic because they are not equal. See, for example, Kojève, “La métaphysique religieuse” 15 (1935): 124.
4. Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 2000), 114.
5. See V. Solovyov, The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge, trans. Valeria Z. Nollan (Grand Rapids, MI.; William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 19. This treatise was written at almost the same time as the lectures and begins with a sharp framing of the issue that presupposes the problem of suffering and evil, of theodicy. Indeed, Soloviev frames his investigation of the good life within the context of human purpose: What is the goal of human existence in general? The determination of purpose in turn determines the contours of what a good life can be—that is, a life that fulfills that purpose. From this perspective alone, it is perhaps somewhat misleading to argue that Soloviev asks about the good life in the Socratic way, since his questioning is infused with the Christian concern for theodicy.