I recently wrote an application essay for graduate school. I've excerpted part of that essay where I discuss a book that had an influence on me. Hope you enjoy!
It seems
appropriate to discuss the book that initiated me into serious reading, Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, especially
since it continues to exert influence over my thinking. I’ve revisited it numerous times since I first
read it eleven years ago and found that it grows in force and depth with each new
look. Dostoevsky rightly understood that our experience of reality is greatly
influenced by the unseen but potent forces of ideas, philosophies, and
ideologies.[1] The way Dostoevsky
illustrates the effect of these invisible forces on all aspects of human life was
revelatory on my first encounter. It continues to resonate. Most recently, I’ve
been intrigued by how Dostoevsky compares the tremendous sway that philosophies
and ideas hold over human life with literal malevolent and benevolent spirits.
I started thinking about this when I read his novel, The Possessed or Demons.
It describes a group of young radicals who are “possessed” and driven to murder
or suicide. Their “possessors” are ideologies, particularly atheism, socialism,
and nihilism. But these ideas don’t simply influence the characters; they seem
to drive and animate them, almost as if the ideas weren’t just ideas, but
spirits hell-bent on the destruction of mankind. Reading Dostoevsky, one gets
the sense that he is saying that ideas or philosophies have (or at least appear
to have) some agency of their own. They move and breathe and inhabit humans,
not unlike the influence on human behavior attributed to the Greek pantheon or
Judeo-Christian metaphysical forces.[2]
Dostoevsky’s comparison of metaphysical forces—spirits, demons, angels, and
God—with intellectual forces—ideas, philosophies, and ideologies—is clearly
seen in Brothers Karamazov
The nature
of beauty—a question of aesthetics—torments Dmitri Karamazov. Beauty haunts him
because, in his words, it “cannot be defined, because here God gave us only
riddles.[3]”
Dmitri particularly wrestles with his sensuality, which he considers a shameful
and base “storm.” Yet he cannot deny his pleasure in its shamefulness, which
makes him an “insect.” He willingly admits that his philosophy of aesthetics is
twisted. He further confesses that he cannot bear the idea of a man, presumably
himself, who “start[s] with the ideal of Madonna and end[s] with the ideal of
Sodom.” He is torn between these two ideals in the form of two women. His
fiancée, Katerina Ivanova represents a pure, or rightly-ordered, understanding
of beauty. Grushenka, who is courted by both Dmitri and his father, represents
lurid sensuality. Dmitri explains the conflict between these two competing
ideals of beauty by appealing to the spiritual world. “The terrible thing,” he
tells his brother, “is that beauty is not only fearful but also mysterious.
Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart.[4]”
Dmitri explains the struggle of understanding, or defining, beauty, which is also
a question of ethics—what is “the good” that Dmitri should pursue?—by
characterizing it as a struggle between the two greatest forces known to man. Dmitri’s
conflict is simultaneously a question of ethics and aesthetics and a spiritual struggle of gargantuan
proportions. The narrator prefaces this conversation between Dmitri and Aloshya
with an anecdote that further illuminates the intoxicating and possessing power
of beauty:
“Recently, in our town a tradesman who got a little too merry
at his own birthday party, in front of his guests, became angry when they would
not give him more vodka and suddenly began smashing his own dishes, tearing up
his and his wife’s clothes, breaking his furniture, and, finally, the windows,
and all, again, for the beauty of it.[5]”
This is the behavior of a man possessed. Dostoevsky characterizes
beauty, or rather the idea of it, as a force that irresistibly pulls and pushes
characters with a force that evokes comparison with demonic possession.
Ivan
Karamazov’s philosophy, “If God and immortality do not exist, everything is
permitted,[6]”
finds its embodiment in what the narrator calls Ivan’s “illness.” In a series
of hallucinations the devil, who holds to the philosophies that Ivan propounds,
appears and tries to convince Ivan that he exists. Ivan rebuts that he does not
exist, but is rather, “the embodiment of myself, but of just one side of me…of
my thoughts and feelings, but only the most loathsome and stupid of them.” Like
Ivan himself, Ivan’s Satan is stricken with doubt. He explains that, besides
the Cartesian proof of his existence, “All the rest around me, all those
worlds, God, even Satan himself—for me all that is unproven.” Karamazov’s
philosophy, that since God probably doesn’t exist there is probably no absolute
morality, is manifested somewhat ironically in a skeptical devil. Ivan,
initially at least, thinks his new understanding of morality will ultimately
free mankind. Ivan’s devil proclaims the same philosophy and declares that,
“Once mankind has renounced God…then the entire old world view will fall of
itself…above all, the entire former morality, and everything will be new.[7]”
The events of the novel cause Ivan to question his atheistic philosophy. It
‘possesses’ his half-brother Smerdyakov, resulting in a parricide and his
suicide.
The ideas
and philosophies that grab hold of Dostoevsky’s characters are not always
malevolent. The youngest Karamazov, Alyosha, has a transcendent experience
after the funeral of his mentor Father Zosima. He is listening to a Gospel
reading at the Elder’s wake and begins to meditate on the last homilies of the
great holy man. Suddenly, he is “filled with rapture,” and the elder’s
admonition to love creation and through this love to see God, “rang in his soul.”
He is filled with the desire to follow the elder’s admonition and “forgive
everyone and for everything.” Then
suddenly he feels “clearly and almost tangibly something as firm and immovable
as this heavenly vault descend in his soul. Some sort of idea, as it were, was coming to reign in his mind.” As he would
later explain it, “someone visited my soul in that hour.[8]”
The heavenly “idea” that came into his soul was Father Zosima’s philosophy,
which is the mystical Orthodoxy that Dostoevsky seems to have written the novel
to promote. In considering the way Dostoevsky seems to conflate ideologies with
spirits, it is interesting to note that, for both Ivan and Alyosha, the ideas
that inspire them both contact them in the form of a supernatural visitor.
Ivan’s Devil and Alyosha’s heavenly “someone” descended on them suddenly and
unexpectedly. Alyosha’s experience can be understood as a spiritual, or
baptismal, experience as well as a monumental revelation of the philosophy
advocated by Father Zosima.
Dostoevsky
renders ideas so powerfully and vividly that one can almost picture the ideas
he engaged—Socialism, Nationalism, Atheism, and Orthodoxy (to name a
few)—swirling in a suffocating cloud above the human characters who are driven
to exasperation or exaltation by these invisible forces. I believe he made the
artistic decision to attribute spiritual powers to ideologies and ideas because
it communicated the tremendous sway they have over our existence. Our vision
and experience of reality, our decisions and desires, are prefigured by the
philosophies and ideologies that dominate our milieu. Unfortunately, they are
often invisible to us in much the same way water is invisible to a fish. On his
deathbed, Father Zosima explains to Alyosha, “much on earth is concealed from
us…and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds.[9]”
Though this statement has a clearly religious sentiment, I also think it can be
used to explain Dostoevsky’s attitude towards the power of ideas and
philosophies. So much of our experience and feelings are rooted in the world of
ideas; a world apart from this world which touches ours in powerful ways.
Ideologies and philosophies affect our minds and moods and move our hands mysteriously,
often without our knowledge.
Dostoevsky’s
tremendous respect for ideas and their power to mold reality in many ways laid
the foundation for my intellectual life. He instilled the conviction in me that
the ideas, beliefs, and presuppositions that we embrace will determine the
course our lives. They are therefore worthy of the most careful and thoughtful
consideration and engagement.
[1] Though space doesn’t allow for a
discussion of some of the secondary literature around Dostoevsky, it is worth
mentioning that I am indebted to Bakhtin’s description of Dostoevsky’s novels
as “polyphonic” as well as Virginia Woolf’s essay, “The Russian Point of View”,
specifically her description of the “Russian Soul,” in helping me think about
the role of ideas in Dostoevsky’s work.
[2] Dostoevsky was an Orthodox Christian, and so it’s certainly
possible that my interpretation, that he personified ideas as spirits to
explain how they influence humans may only be a part of it. He may also have
been talking about literal spiritual warfare, though that’s not generally how’s
he interpreted today. If asked whether is speaking of literal spirits or using
that concept as a vehicle for ideas, I suspect Dostoevsky would respond that
they are the same thing.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 101.
[6] This phrase, though often
attributed to Dostoevsky, doesn’t actually occur in the novel. It is however, a
concise and accurate summary of Ivan’s philosophy. Ivan struggles throughout
the novel with the existence of God and the consequences that follow from his
conclusion.
[7] Ibid., 634,
637, 642, 648-649.
[8] Ibid., 362-363. Emphasis added.
[9] Ibid., 320.
