Unpublished Notebooks (1860-1865)

I’m no philosopher, but I couldn’t help but notice that the world seems to have problems.  So how do we solve them?

Some problems can be solved through logic.  Diagnosing where a pipe is leaking, for example, can be solved in this way.  Because such rational thinking can be so successful in solving some problems, I can easily assume that I can use it to solve any problem.  Say a school is having problems with the students fighting one another.  Couldn’t I use the same faculty of logic that I used with the pipe to formulate a systemic solution?

Dostoevsky doesn’t think so.  “The West will perish from formulas,” he writes.  Mere ideas have a tendency to remain only theory, and the deeper one delves into them, the more distanced one becomes from the problems of real life.  “Great is the distance,” he says, “between humanity in theory to practice.”

Dostoevsky believes that with these larger, more crucial questions, progress can only be made through Christ, “the idea of man incarnate,” entering into humanity.  Because of this, he looks for solutions in the personal and relational rather than the merely rational.  With the issue of school discipline, he believes “humane influence more important than ‘humane rules’ despotically enforced.”

This belief can be seen in the way he writes.  Imitating Christ as “the idea of man incarnate,” Dostoevsky seeks to shape concepts into bodies.  “Man from the very earliest times,” he writes, “has explained himself in images.”  To do otherwise he believes to be akin to cutting off one’s nose.

This is seen in his approach to brainstorming.  If he is batting around a concept in his notebooks, he often prefers to use an imagistic shorthand.  For example, he often refers to socialism simply as “twigs.”  Scholars guess that this image is a reference to the proverb that says that many twigs together are strong, but when seperate and disunited they break easily.  As editor Carl Proffer puts it, Dostoevsky sees “socialism as essentially composed of separate individuals—unlike a Christian community bound together by the indestructable idea of God.”  By compressing his language in this way, his thought process seems to take on a more tangible quality.  

Even when debating over ideas, Dostoevsky seems to prefer to focus on concrete gestures.  He writes to N.A. Dobrolyubov that “you . . . grabbed for your pen in order to justify yourself . . . to chastise your enemies.  One way or the other, you still in all grabbed for your pen.”  Dostoevsky captures his point with a visual and then repeats it until it becomes symbolic.  

What’s interesting here is that by imagining what Dobrolyubov looks like while he’s writing, Dostoevsky’s focus is more on Dobrolyubov himself than on his ideas.  Indeed, Dostoevsky is less concerned with Dobrolyubov’s ideas than with the spirit in which he expresses them.  Dostoevsky is disturbed by the enthusiasm with which Dobrolyubov points out another’s mistakes, and Dostoevsky encapulates this attitude through the visual of Dobrolyubov grabbing his pen.

But all this isn’t to say that Dostoevsky isn’t interested in concepts.  If that were the case, he wouldn’t bother grappling with ideas at all.  He’s equally articulate in decrying an over-fixation on the material world.  Personalities, as such, offer nothing more than what he refers to as a “belly,” that is, a mere bundle of instincts.  In such a view, Dostoevsky says, humanity loses its dymanism; it becomes something fixed, trapped.  And love becomes impossible.  

So, Dostoevsky’s eye, like the poet’s in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, glances “from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.”  His concepts descend into flesh, and his descriptions ascend into symbol.  This ever-shifting focus from the physical details of as-is reality to the dream of what is hoped for may be part of what gives Dostoevsky’s writing its power.