#Dostoevsky's Response to Russian Nihilism | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

alexmitas · 3 years

Text

Why I’m Just Like Crime & Punishment’s Raskolnikov and so Are You: A Brief Analysis of Dostoevsky’s Most Famous Novel

Just last night I finished Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. After mulling it over for a day (likely not nearly long enough to have substantiated a complete analysis, but with my memory I risk forgetting things if I move on to another book before writing about one that I’ve just finished), I’ve decided to get some of my thoughts down. Firstly, I will say that I am struck. While I’m clearly neither the first nor last person to be amazed by this novel, a work as significant as this one still deserves its praise where it’s due. People will often preface praise based on their interpretation of a creative endeavor by stating that its imperfection is obvious, even though that it’s also the best-est or their favorite, or one of the best-est or their favorite creative works that they have ever encountered, or something of the sort. I won’t be so bold to as to make that statement. That’s because, without a doubt, this was a perfect novel. After all, if something is so close to approaching a spade, by all reasonable measures, and only becomes better and better, and more and more like a spade, with age, then why not call it a spade?

Since the beginning I had a certain kind of resonance with Raskolnikov, the novel’s main character. But just as you can’t fully judge a story unless you consider it as a single, coherent piece (that is, until you have read from beginning to end), so too did I not understand the reason for my resonance with Raskolnikov until I finished reading his full tale. He’s young, he’s handsome, he’s intelligent: check, check, check; these things all apply to me, at least to some minor degree - that much was obvious from the very beginning - but while this superficial resonance was my first impression upon dining, it paled in comparison to the impression I had after the final bite of desert; to say nothing of the pleasant after dinner conversation among friends, the latter of which, of course, I use as a metaphor for the epilogue[1]. Every flaw I see in Raskolnikov, I also see in myself; for every action he takes, I can imagine a world in which I could be drawn down a path that would lead me to make the very same decisions, and to take the very same actions. I don’t know what could possibly be a better model than that for a main character.

Perhaps Raskolnikov’s biggest flaw is his overinflated ego, which is hardly out of the ordinary for someone his age, and isn’t entirely unjustified - as I said, he has three of the most promising traits one could hope for: intelligence, youth, and good-looks – but which does, in his case, lead him down an ideological rabbit hole of naivete, a hole which he creates for himself by dropping out of school, refusing work when it’s offered to him, and letting his resentment for the world grow as he lives off of a handful of meager sums sent to him by his mother and sister as a debt ridden fool in a poor Russian city during the eighteen-hundreds. This ideological thinking, which we shall not confuse with illogical thinking, for it is very much logical, brings Raskolnikov to the thought that, yes, it would in fact be a good idea to murder and rob the wealthy old pawnbroker whom is commonly considered amongst his peers as a mean-ol’ crone, holder of many a promissory note, rumored to have left her wealth to the building of a statue in her image through her will, rather than to her own children, whilst also being a generally unsightly and disagreeable woman, and, having done this, could aim to put her money to a more just cause, perhaps distributing it to others, or perhaps using it to further his own career which he would certainly payback in the form of greater value to society later on. And it isn’t such a crazy sounding idea, is it? After all, what is but one crime if the outcome provides a much greater net good? I’ve known many people, including myself, who’ve had thoughts not so unlike this one, and I suspect you are no different, dear reader. So having rationalized this to himself, Raskolnikov goes through with it, and thereby provides us a story of his Crime, which occupies only about one-fifth of the length of the novel, and his Punishment, which nearly occupies the novel’s entirety; with these proportions themselves giving us an idea of the many-fold burden of consequences for actions, as well as foreshadowing what is to come. And this rationalization runs deep. It isn’t until later, that we learn of truer reasons for Raskolnikov’s action, beginning with the discovery of an article he was able to have published while still enrolled in school, and ending with a true confession of his deepest motives to Sonya, to be discussed later.

This article that he wrote sometime before the crime, “On Crime,” reveals deeper rationale for his decision to commit the murder: and that is that he does it as a way to become something more than he is; to break down the cultural and religious structures around him, and more than that to supersede them; to rise above his fellow man as a type of “superman” or Napoleon, as he puts it, becoming someone who is able to “step over” the line which divides who is ordinary and who is great, a line that’s substance consists of rules for the hoi polloi only; ultimately inferring this idea – which, from what I understand was prevalent in Russia during the mid 1800’s – that the best way to view the world is through the lens of nihilism, which employs utilitarianism – the tenet which proposes that actions should be considered just insofar as they help the greatest number of people overall, and where acts of evil may be balanced properly, without the need for consequence, in the face of equal or greater acts of righteousness, especially if that person can prove themselves of some sort of higher value – as a central axiom. Pulling back to a macroscopic view of the novel, this sense that Dostoevsky had to instill within his characters arguments for what at the time was – and still in some sense very well are – contemporary issues, and eternal ideological and philosophical battlegrounds, rather than thrusting his own opinions through the narrator, is something I found to be brilliant and endearing, not only for the sake of keeping the author’s own bias more subdued than would otherwise be the case, but also just as a means to see what happens; to let the characters in the story have the fight, leaving both author and reader alike to extrapolate what hypotheses or conclusions they may as a consequence. In this regard, other characters – including Raskolnikov’s friend, Razumikhin, and state magistrate, Porfiry Petrovich – have the chance to debate with the nihilistic ideology of Raskolnikov after interacting with “On Crime.” This provides depth to contemporary discourse, without reeking of contrivance, and also allows us to see Raskolnikov argue for himself also, even though what he, ‘himself’, stands for is ultimately not clear; not for the reader but also seemingly not for Raskolnikov, as even after deciding to commit the crime, Raskolnikov’s opinion on whether or not it was a just event osculates frequently throughout the novel. It is this osculation, in fact, which constitutes most of Raskolnikov’s early punishment and suffering, as even though it appears as if Raskolnikov has managed to get away with the crime in the domain of the broader world[2], his conscious will not allow such an event to be swept under the rug, or even allow Raskolnikov to continue to live his life unhindered by spiritual corruption, mental destabilization, or physical trauma – all three of which plague him constantly both during his initial contemplations and later fulfillment of the crime. Ultimately, these ideological battles and inward rationalizations do not provide Raskolnikov with the accurate prognostication needed to foretell the outcome of his own state of being after committing such an act; and thereby lies Raskolnikov’s fatal flaw, derived from his arrogance and naivete, where he is left blinded by an ideology which never fulfills its promise of return. Oh, but if only he had a predilection for listening to the great prognosticator within him, his conscious, which, despite his waking thoughts, was calling out to him in the form of dreams.

In what is one of several dream sequences observed by characters in the novel, Raskolnikov dreams himself a young spectator, holding the hand of his father, as the two of them watch a group of misfit boys pile into a carriage. The carriage master, no more than a youthful fool, whips a single mare solely responsible for pulling the carriage. Overburdened and unable to do more than struggle forward at a pathetic pace, the mare whimpers and suffers visibly as the cruel and drunken carriage master orders it to trudge on, whipping it forcefully, all the while calling for any and everyone around the town to pile into the carriage. Laughing and screaming hysterically, the carriage master turns brutal task master when he begins to beat the mare repeatedly after with much effort the beast finally collapses to the ground in exhaustion. Horrifically, a handful of other people from the crowd and the carriage find their own whips and join in on the beating of the poor mare until it finally dies. Young Raskolnikov, having witnessed this event in its entirety, rushes to the mare after its brutal death, kisses it, then turns to the carriage master brandishing his fists before he is stopped by his father. This is the reader’s first warning of the brutality to come, and had Raskolnikov payed heed to what his conscious was trying to communicate to him in his dream, he may have noticed, as we as readers do, that the reaction the young Raskolnikov had to the barbaric murder of the mare very much predicted what Raskolnikov’s ultimate reaction to his then theoretical crime would be – regret; and, therefore, repentance. A second dream of Raskolnikov’s, which very much enforces this idea, pits Raskolnikov in the act of once again murdering Alyona, except this time, when he strikes her atop the head with the same axe, she simply brandishes a smile and laughs uncontrollably instead of falling over dead. This all but confirms Raskolnikov’s suspicions to himself, as his subconscious relays his foolish inadequacy, as a man who thought that he could elevate himself above others by “stepping over” the moral boundaries all of his societal peers abide by (and for good reason). Again, through this tendency that he has to stubbornly ignore his conscious, I find Raskolnikov eminently relatable, to some degree, and it is no wonder: it is a rare individual who finds obeying their conscious to be anything but onerous (then again, perhaps this is only most common in individuals who are still relatively young and naïve, a trait which I share with Raskolnikov, but one in which you may not, dear reader; but I digress). Of course, just because a task is onerous, does not mean that it is impossible. The characters which have been placed around Raskolnikov, and specifically the ones which serve as foils to his character, provide examples of contrast with individuals who at the very least are able to combat the compelling desire that we all have to ignore our consciouses. The three most blatant examples of foils for Raskolnikov are his sister, Dunya, his best friend, Razumikhin, and his eventual wife, Sonya Marmeladov.

The first example of this contrast apparent to the reader is in the character Razumikhin. Razumikhin is also a student living within the same city as Raskolnikov. Unlike Raskolnikov, however, he has not bailed out of university for financial necessity nor wanton of a grand ideological narrative. There is also no reason to believe he has more financial support than Raskolnikov, as he also appears to be poor with no hint of endowment, instead supporting himself through the meager-paying work of translating for a small publisher. And while Razumikhin is even more naïve than Raskolnikov – having never once suspected Raskolnikov of so much as a dash of malevolence – he lacks the same venomous arrogance, whilst showing no signs of lower intelligence. Dunya, Raskolnikov’s sister, provides another example of similar contrast. This is because, as his sister, and, again, with no reason to believe that she is any more or less intelligent or attractive than her brother, Dunya comes from the same upbringing, whilst holds no apparent resentment towards the world around her. Even when she is given the choice to harm someone else – when she finds herself on the side of a gun pointing at a man who has locked her inside of a room against her will (arguably giving her a modicum of a reason to kill another, depending on one’s own stance on morality) – she is unable to do it, instead casting her tool with which to do so aside and letting fate take care of the rest[3]. Lastly, and this may be the most apparent example, presenting what may be Raskolnikov’s true foil, we have dearest Sonya, stepdaughter of the Marmeladovs. Sonya, who in the face of two useless parents, takes it upon herself to prostitute herself so that her family, including three young siblings, may eat, makes Raskolnikov look privileged and morally woeful in comparison. Recognizing this himself, Raskolnikov does his best to look out for Sonya, in what is perhaps his most genuine form of empathy. Despite this – or perhaps, in fact, in spite of this; for early on Raskolnikov identifies Sonya as the sole individual whom may be able to help him redeem himself – Raskolnikov obsessively pushes Sonya to read a verse from the bible involving the story of Lazarus, as a redemption for himself, but also for Sonya, projecting as he does his misdeeds unto her and equating his murderous acts with her soiling of her sexuality for the sake of providing for her family. The story of Lazarus is a story which promises resurrection of the individual as Jesus Christ resurrected Lazarus from the dead. In this way, Raskolnikov probes, a part of him reaching out ever fervently for the means of the rebirth of his soul, despite his hitherto forthright determination to escape his guilt and conviction, looking for proof of Sonya’s moral purity, which he already suspects, despite his accusations, to which she responds by admitting herself a sinner, asking God for forgiveness, and later by bestowing upon Raskolnikov one of her two precious necklace and crosses. And it is in a kindred vein to these three examples of contrast in which the final contrast is made in small part by every character in the novel; for in some sense this novel represents the journey of one man as he isolates himself from a community he loathes to subordinate himself to; of a man who wishes to supersede his place in the world and become a “superman”; of a man who places his individual ideology above the morality of his peers; and it is in this way that the ordinary character, subservient to religion, provides contrast for the atheist who mocks them, not with critique, but with arrogance.

…

…And that ought to be enough for now.

TLDR: 10/10 would recommend.

Thanks for reading,

- Alex

[1] The epilogue, from what I’ve observed from others’ critiques, seems to be controversial in that some believe the novel stands alone better without it. It is not until the epilogue – well into the sentence of punishment by the state for his crimes – that Raskolnikov finally gives up his idea that, essentially, ‘the only thing he did wrong was improperly rob the old lady and to then fall emotionally and mentally apart afterwards’; where, too, he finally gives up his last bit of arrogance and outward loathing for the world and his circumstances, and accepts responsibility for his actions, likely brought on by the outwardly visible sacrifices made by his then wife, Sonya, who he looks to for repentance. However, critics argue that without the epilogue, we would simply be left to assume on our own that Raskolnikov finally gave in to repentance when the novel ended with his confession, and that that would be preferable to what is otherwise a heavy-handed ending, condensed as it is compared to the rest of the novel. This would make sense and likely be fitting enough of an ending. However, in defense of the epilogue, without it, a reader’s main takeaway from the story might be only, ‘do not underestimate how much opposing your conscious will degenerate your soul,’ while with the epilogue, the takeaway is more likely to also include something along the lines of, ‘beware denigrating religion and the multitude of cultures which it has produced, for without the ability to hold yourself accountable for your own deeds and also to be redeemed, there is nothing standing between you and self-destruction and misery, to say nothing of the destruction and misery of those around you,’ which of course is realized by the death of Raskolnikov’s mother as well as the sickening of himself and his wife, as a consequence of his refusal to actually accept his punishment and repent even after his confession (which without acceptance of responsibility is still only a selfish act), outlined in the two chapters proceeding the end of the novel. So if I’d had the genius necessary to write this story, I’d also have looked to include an epilogue to ensure that the totality of my characters’ lessons would also be realized by the reader, for whatever that’s worth.

[2] While Raskolnikov does seem to commit the crime of murder and robbery without getting caught, this does not mean that things go according to plan; in fact, far from it: while Raskolnikov manages to murder Alyona, he very poorly robs her – leaving behind a large bundle of cash she had under her bed, which he missed due to his state of unanticipated frenzy. He also ends up killing Alyona’s younger sister, Lizaveta, when she arrives immediately following the murder, in an act of pure self-perseverance, which just goes to show: when you take the fate of the world into your own hands, when you ‘step over’ the boundaries that your culture (or God; whichever) has deemed should not be crossed – when you arrogantly and naively take the fabric and truth of the universe into your own hands – you do not know what it is you are doing; you do not know what the consequences of your actions will be. It isn’t made clear the degree to which the killing of Lizaveta changed the outcome for Raskolnikov’s soul. Perhaps committing one crime constitutes the same moral weight as committing two crimes simultaneously, but also perhaps it was everything; the one factor unaccounted for which destroyed his evaluation of just outcomes and, having done so, his resolve.

[3] Here is a specific instance in which Dostoevsky’s propensity to pit ideas against each other in the form of characters playing out their practicalities in a real-world context comes to bear. This specific battle, represented by the juxtaposition of the aforementioned scene with Raskolnikov’s murdering of the two women, pits morality against ideology, while leaving a clear winner: for it is one which leads to the eradication of two lives and the degradation of more than one soul, and it is another which leads to the absolution of a dangerous conflict. These two specifically – morality and ideology – clash frequently during the novel’s entirety, with morality often taking its microcosmic form of religion.

#fyodor dostoevsky #crime&punishment #essays #novel analysis #classics

12 notes · View notes

beautypoweranddeath · 7 years

Text

Dostoevsky, Desire, and Soullessness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This semester I wanted to do some work on nihilism, and one of the books my professor recommended I write on was Dostoevsky’s Demons. Since that sounded like a lot more fun than just writing on Heidegger or Nietzsche (both of whom I ended up writing on for another class anyway), I decided I’d pick up the novel. Now, this was my first time reading a Dostoevsky novel. I didn’t know what I was in for, or honestly what the novel was even about. However, I did know enough to print out a cheat sheet of character names so I wouldn’t get completely lost among the huge cast list in which everyone has their long Russian name, a title or two, and a patronymic. And on my list, next to Stavrogin’s name, it said “the main character”, and then simply: “has many of the characteristics traditionally ascribed to vampires”. My first thought was “wtf”, and then my second, Buffy-loving trash self’s thought was “awww yiss”. Little did I know I would be solving the dilemma of what the heck “having a soul” entails in the Buffyverse. Buckle up, folks.

I will be spoiling pretty much all of BTVS, sections of Angel, and most of Demons. I’ll touch briefly on some of the typical triggers for the Whedonverse, but plan to leave out the really triggery parts of Demons, i.e. Stavrogin’s written confession in the alternative censored chapter.

When Stavrogin is first introduced he seems to be a kind of mild-mannered society boy, except that he occasionally does very strange, kind of violent things, with absolutely no warning and for no apparent reason. He bites a diplomat’s ear at a fancy party. (This gradually turns into something of a meme within the community depicted in the novel. People are literally described as “ear-biters” when they behave strangely or unexpectedly. It’s hilarious.) He makes out with his host’s wife at a social gathering. And in both cases, when everybody’s shocked and horrified with him, he appears genuinely confused as to what all the fuss is about. His family decides he has brain fever, he gets medical care, and almost everyone figures he was just temporarily insane.

When Stavrogin returns later in the book, he’s seems to be cured - he knows how to behave in society, he’s not obviously breaking any rules, and there’s even a kind of chilling beauty to him. But then, there’s a chapter midway through the book, where Stavrogin converses separately with two wildly different characters. The first is a man who is dispassionately planning to kill himself, not because of any sadness, despair, or mental illness, but out of a French-existentialist-type belief that the man who rejects life as given to him makes himself a god. (“For three years I have been searching for the attribute of my divinity, and I have found it: the attribute of my divinity is – self-will! That is all, by which I can show in the main point my insubordination and my new fearsome freedom. For it is very fearsome. I kill myself to show my insubordination and my new fearsome freedom.”) The second man is one of the few good characters, an idealist who loves his country and recognizes that without God, Russia will always be lost. And it is revealed that both of these men received their worldview from talking to Stavrogin some years ago. But it wasn’t the case that he had changed his mind, believed that life is meaningless and suicide is power at one point, and that loyalty and love of God are great values at another point. He was talking to both men concurrently; he was married to neither belief, just saying things for the sake of saying them - he created both the sick apathy of the one and the hopeful idealism of the other, and even now doesn’t care either way. The good character finds this disgusting - can’t stomach that his hero who showed him beauty is also the same man who convinced the other to contemplate suicide - but Stavrogin can’t understand why the coincidence of the two opposites is seen as a betrayal.

This scene illustrates what Stavrogin’s character is meant to embody: absolutely indifferent freedom. He is capable of both great beauty and great evil, and stands undecided, apathetic between the two. The priest Tikhon reminds him of what the Bible says about this kind of neutrality: “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” And the further we go into the story, the more the otherworldly, chilling beauty of Stavrogin just becomes unsettling. Nothing moves him, nothing motivates him to care. He stands between the characters who have very clearly given themselves to evil and the characters who are striving for the good, and somehow, he is scarier than all of them - more evil, somehow, than those who have deliberately chosen evil, because of his standing still.

But wait! you say. He stands in between goodness and evil, capable of both, able to choose either -- aren’t we all in that position? Isn’t that just what freedom means? Au contraire, my friends!! This understanding of neutral, indifferent freedom is fairly new in the history of thought, and hopefully I’m going to be able to demonstrate (briefly) why it doesn’t even adequately live up to our experience.

Imagine you are in the position of having to make a very simple choice between basically equal or at least comparable alternatives, what philosophy usually calls “commensurate goods”; an easy example is choosing between ice cream flavors. Now if you’re anything like as indecisive as me, there will be at least two options that you think you might want, and you’ll spend several minutes stuck between the two of them, trying to figure out which to get. You’re free - no one is coercing you, and the two options really are basically equal in and of themselves. But even though you are completely free, this state of indecision still isn’t comfortable - while you’re caught between choices, you probably feel restless, frustrated, rushed. This is because while black raspberry and mocha chip are basically equal among themselves, you don’t stand before them in neutrality. The phrase “getting pulled in two directions at once” maybe sounds a little melodramatic for an example this mundane, but it applies nonetheless: rather than standing absolutely still before the two options, you are getting pulled by both of them - the choice is hard because you want both of them, not because you’re apathetic. What moves and motivates the choice is desire, and desire doesn’t let you stand still unless you resist it; it tugs at you.

This bit might be a little tough, because in modernity we typically think of desires as things that well up from within us spontaneously - desire is seen as something starting in the person, projected onto the thing desired. But in classical philosophy, the shorthand for “desirability” is just “goodness” - when you say something’s good, what you mean is that it’s desireable - so desire starts in the goodness of the thing, not the perception of the one desiring. Setting aside sexual desire and all of the attendant baggage, just think about stuff in the world. Flowers, pets, ice cream - all this stuff is good, and your desire to have it around you is because the stuff is good, not because you randomly decided to assign value to it. Desire isn’t you sitting atop your indifference throne, looking over an assortment of blah things and pronouncing boredly while you wave a bejeweled hand, “I suppose I want that one”. Desire is the good thing yelling out to you, “HEY, LOOK HOW GREAT I AM”, and your soul coming alive in response, saying “GOSH DARNIT YOU’RE RIGHT, YOU ARE GREAT”. Goodness lives in the object, and desire is your ability to feel the goodness of the object reaching out to you, pulling you toward it.

So how does freedom work if you’re always getting pulled towards goodness, you ask? Well, get ready for the GREAT news: everything in the world...is good.

You don’t have to remake things so that they’re worth something. You don’t have to bestow value on things by the power of your choice. You don’t have to go searching for goodness, or come up with it yourself. It’s everywhere. It’s ALWAYS calling to you, out of everything that’s real. The reason that you’re free, and the reason that you’re not completely frozen in indecision, is that you are drawn into action by ALL the goodness in the world - your making a choice is just the final step in a movement already begun, your consenting to the desire which was enkindled by the object.

If, then, this is what real freedom is, what would it mean to be indifferently free, like Stavrogin?

Indifferent freedom, if the whole world is good and calling out to you, is like closing your eyes and covering your ears. It’s not neutrality - or rather, it is neutrality, but neutrality as detachment. It’s like if someone who loves you spent seven hours in the kitchen, painstakingly preparing your favorite meal, making everything from scratch and using the best china dishes and pairing the perfect wine with the meal - and then when they showed it to you, with all the steam rising from the food enticingly and the whole house smelling like heaven and home, you just shrugged and said “eh...I could take it or leave it”. That’s indifferent freedom - standing in front of beauty and love, and saying that it doesn’t matter one way or another. At its essence, it’s being unmoved - but by something that should move you. It detaches the person from the world, shuts them in on themselves where no thing and no goodness can reach them - and from the perspective of the person, it evacuates the world of goodness, of all its vitality and power to draw. Everything is equal, not because everything is equally good, but because everything is equally meaningless. This explains Stavrogin’s strange behavior - any of us at a party have the freedom to bite someone’s ear or not bite someone’s ear, both options are before everyone - but Stavrogin genuinely cannot tell why one of those options should have more weight for him, why the goodness of not biting someone should outweigh the debatable goodness of the amusement he would get out of biting someone.

It should be pretty clear where I’m going from here. It is my proposal that what it means to be soulless in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer mythos is explained by freedom of indifference. The vampires and the demons are essentially people who have become insensitive to the pull of goodness; all options, no matter how heinous, are equal to them, because the voice of desire has been stifled.

I like this theory for several reasons: one, I just like to imagine that Joss has read Dostoevsky. It’s funny to me. Two, I feel it explains more than any of the alternative theories I’ve seen or been able to come up with. So let’s go through the main players!

Alternative Theory #1: Vampires and other soulless creatures have a fundamental desire for what is evil.

This is the simplest explanation, and it’s definitely what the show in its early seasons professes to be the truth. However, there is a giant gaping hole in this theory: as evidenced by season after season of character development for Angel and Spike, and the creepy similarities between Vamp Willow and Dark Willow, there is a real continuity between a character when they have a soul and when they don’t. If the souled version and the soulless version had simply opposite desires, then they would be pulled in opposite directions and basically be two totally different people.

Alternative Theory #2: Everyone (or at least some particular individuals, including both vampires and humans) has a fundamental desire for what is evil, but having a soul keeps this desire at bay, like a stop-gap for humanity’s natural darkness.

Don’t get me wrong, this theory is more or less completely consistent with the show (“Orpheus” on Angel in particular seems to put forth something like this theory in regards Angel and Faith), but it’s a really hopeless view of the human person - and would also suggest that characters are most free and most “themselves” when they’re soulless. Unless you want to say that Angel with a soul is basically identical to Spike with a chip (like a serial killer in prison), there needs to be a change that goes deeper - if instead, as I propose, the most fundamental desire of human beings is for the good and losing your soul just dampens and confuses this desire without reversing it, this explains the continuity between souled and soulless while firmly locating the “real” identity of the person with the one who has a soul.

Alternative Theory # 3: Vampires and other soulless creatures have a desire for the good as always, but they are incapable of distinguishing good from evil.

This is another tempting explanation, except that it pretty much describes the human condition - it explains why Angel sometimes does the wrong thing, but not why Angelus is so markedly different from Angel - you have to explain the continuity and the difference. Angel occasionally does wrong things because he thinks he knows what the right thing to do is, is being drawn by the goodness he perceives, but happens to be mistaken. Angelus, on the other hand, seems to do the wrong thing knowing that it’s the wrong thing - but this knowledge is only in his head, it doesn’t extend to his heart, and so he’s not drawn by what he knows to be good and is able to cheerfully pursue what he knows to be evil as an equally viable alternative. Furthermore, if being soulless means you literally can’t tell the difference between right and wrong even in theory, Spike’s conversion in seasons five and six is completely and utterly inexplicable - it seems like he should have been showing up at Buffy’s doorstep with offerings of stuff he’s killed, like a cat, growling that his gift is going unappreciated. In reality, although he does suck at doing the right thing because the good still isn’t attractive to him, and although he expects way more credit than he actually deserves for every act of non-evil, he has a pretty straightforward turnaround - he knows basically which direction to face on the spectrum of good and evil, even while soulless.

So now that we’ve run through the alternatives, let’s look at some helpful examples from canon which I think illustrate my theory!

Possibly the best example of my theory is on Angel the Series, which is surprising, because for all its lightness that show typically has a much more pessimistic view of anthropology and soteriology than Buffy does. However, Darla’s pregnancy is one of the most interesting uses of the soul/no-soul device in the entire ‘verse. Darla starts to experience souled-ness as a result of the proximity to her son - and while this demonstrates next to no knowledge as to how matter and form, body and soul work, it leads to the fantastic moment of self-awareness: “I won’t be able to love him. I won’t even be able to remember that I loved him.” She has no illusions. Love is not a choice that she can continue to make once she’s no longer experiencing souled-ness - she can’t pull herself up by her bootstraps, love by sheer force of will. The pull of love that she feels comes from him and not from her, it is his goodness touching her. Once she gives birth, goodness will lose its grip on her and she’ll detach absolutely from her child; he will mean nothing to her, and there is no guarantee that she won’t hurt him. It’s not her choice to make - without the drawing power of his goodness, she is helpless to make the right choice.

Another really interesting example is the parallels drawn between depression and soullessness. Spike tells Buffy she “came back wrong”, and she’s immediately ready to believe him, because it is the same lie that depression is telling her. Depression silences our desires, shuts us in on ourselves, convinces us that there is nothing truly good in the world for us. Depression makes us indifferent, when that is not our natural, healthy state of being. Buffy’s journey in season 6 is a slow regaining of desire, from “this isn’t real but I just wanna feel”, then to “I don’t wanna die, that’s something right?”, and finally to “Things have really sucked lately, but it's all gonna change. And I wanna be there when it does. I want to see my friends happy again. And I want to see you grow up….There’s so much I wanna show you.”

The most obvious hole in my indifferent freedom theory is the lack of absolute apathy in the vampires, i.e. Spike famously being described by James Marsters as having “delight in all the wrong things”. The vampires seem to enjoy things, particularly, to enjoy being evil and inflicting pain. However, on the other hand, Angel tells Darla (I’m paraphrasing), “you took me places and showed me things and blew the top off my head, but you never made me happy”. Vampires are seeking something - notoriety, a rush, power - but it’s not satisfying. In the end, Spike’s delighted obsession with slayers and Angelus’ cruel pursuit of the girl he remembers loving are just a slightly more hyper version of Stavrogin quietly doing whatever happens to cross his mind just because he can. And if a disproportionate number of vampires seem to lean towards inflicting pain, this statistic can probably be explained by the fact that they need blood to live - and all options being equal, you may as well pick the one that keeps you comfortably undead. Or, perhaps all their desire for the good has been replaced by desire for blood, and it’s only everything else in the world that is neutral? This would explain why “vampire with a soul” is such a difficult idea for everyone to grasp - they still need blood to live, and yet their desires are in order again. (If we delve deeper into the Dostoevsky, there’s also a whole thing with beauty being replaced by the shocking, the absurd, or the grotesque. But seriously, this essay is monstrously long already.)

Another possible objection: wouldn’t this schema make having a soul the easier option, to the extent that it’s basically a cheat? Wouldn’t it be more worthy, more impressive, more good, to choose out of a vacuum, without desire pulling you? To which I would respond: of course it’s easier, but that doesn’t mean it’s less worthy. We have a weird obsession with doing difficult things; we glamorize the long arduous struggle before the right choice is finally made - and in storytelling, that makes a certain amount of sense, since if everyone did what was right instantaneously, there wouldn’t be much of a story. But our preference for the difficult good thing over the easy good thing is also coherent with our typical conception of freedom: if indifferent freedom is about raw choosing power that wells up from within, the “stronger” person is the one who chooses what is difficult, i.e. the tortured hero presented with the impossible dilemma in a world of moral grays, gritting his teeth and saying, I’m choosing so hard right now. But within a goodness and desires-based theory of freedom, it isn’t the struggle that makes good action heroic. On the contrary, real goodness is easy - ease is actually one of the traditional qualities ascribed to virtue. The truly good person does the right thing consistently and easily while taking joy in it, without having to deliberate about which choice is best. They’re so good at doing the right thing that it’s practically effortless, automatic. Somebody who has to struggle to do the right thing is on the path towards virtue - they know what the right thing is, and they’re trying to do it - but if it’s difficult for them, that means that they haven’t become internally convinced of the goodness/desirability of the right thing, they’re only doing it because they think they ought to. The good character who chooses the light over the dark without any hand-wringing, the “cinnamon roll” if you will, is more morally heroic than Gritty Georg who makes 10,000 difficult morally gray choices per day. That guy is just really bad at doing the right thing, really bad at being in love with goodness. So while we can be kind of impressed by Spike choosing to save the world in season 2 and choosing to get his soul back in season 6, those choices are still not at the moral level of something as simple as, say, Buffy loving her sister.

Another objection: what about Spike falling in love with Buffy? Wasn’t he being drawn by her goodness, and therefore not totally indifferent even while he was soulless? And don’t get me wrong, this objection has weight - Spike’s arc in the last three seasons is fascinating, and I want to do justice to it. But a lot of theories about souls in the Buffyverse tend to do justice to his arc by a kind of “Spike exceptionalism”, and while that’s somewhat warranted, it makes the mythos of the show very messy and that drives me crazy. Plus, the more emphasis you place on Spike being a “special” vampire who loves goodness and tries to do the right thing, the more “Seeing Red” becomes a wholly unintelligible character moment, and I think it’s actually a very important conclusion to the season 6 Spuffy arc. So here’s my interpretation.

In order to truly love, your primary stance toward the other has to be a kind of “letting be” - you have to recognize that they are other than you and wonderful precisely in their otherness before you desire them for yourself, or else desire becomes merely appropriative, a matter of power and possession. Indifferent freedom (or soullessness) is not capable of this, because letting the other be is a receptive stance which prioritizes the being of the other, and indifferent freedom always prioritizes activity and the being of the self - all action has to start from within, nothing can move the person except the person himself, or else it isn’t considered “free”. There is no love, there is only power. So, Spike is genuinely indifferent all through his soullessness. If he has moments where he appears to love (his mother, Dru, Buffy, etc.), it’s because he remembers that this used to be a value that was important to him and therefore chooses it out of his position of neutrality. He isn’t brought out of himself, he doesn’t receive anything from the person he “loves” - and this is why his supposed loves are so warped. Beating up Druscilla until she loves him again is a coherent plan to him - because it’s not about wanting what’s best for her, and not about the way that his love for her pulls on him, but rather simply his possession of her. He can achieve love by power, because for him the two are identical - both have the same basic form of something initiated from within and exerted onto the chosen object. And this, of course, is why season 6 Spuffy ends the way it does. All of Spike’s actions toward Buffy have been calculated so that she would do what he wants, and when this fails his manipulation becomes overtly violent power - because power has been the inner form of his relation to her all along. Emotional manipulation fails to let the other be just as much as physical violence does; it is the bedrock of a relationship where one person only cares about being in control, getting what he “wants”. “Seeing Red” is important because it reveals the dark truth beneath the “edgy” season 6 Spuffy relationship, that power is not and can never be love, emotional abuse is not and can never be romantic.

So is this what Joss Whedon intended the soul plot device to be an analogy for? I’d have to rewatch the whole show to make a final decision, but I kind of doubt it. Do I have questions about how it would work, in-universe? You bet. Are people to be held accountable for decisions made when soulless? Why is it that Angel and Spike are overwhelmed with guilt when they’re re-ensouled and Darla and Anya are basically apathetic? What does the indifference of soullessness have to do with immortality? What is the nature of the slayer’s power? Much remains to be answered.

IN SUMMARY (i.e. I’ve burnt myself out and this is all you’re getting)

Any reading of the Whedonverse must account for soullessness in a way which allows for a real continuity and discontinuity between souled and soulless iterations of the same character, and doesn’t treat the soul as an extrinsic addition which does nothing more than restrain desires which are actually fundamental. This is the only way to locate the true self of characters with the good/souled version of them, while avoiding overly simplistic readings which treat a character’s soulless actions or personality as entirely irrelevant. In a world in which goodness really exists and really draws you, it is not possible to have a desire for evil except under the aspect of good, because desireability implies goodness. Thus, if we want to avoid a completely nihilistic interpretation of the show wherein nothing is really good and nothing matters, the form that evil has to take is indifference or neutrality rather than somehow a desire for evil as the “opposite” of good. And therefore, what it means to be soulless in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is to be in a state of diabolical neutrality, where goodness and love no longer call out to you and all action is just a result of sheer arbitrary power which can be directed one way or another. While soulless, characters are detached from goodness and therefore incapable of virtue and love. Effort or choice is not enough for conversion – they have to be taken hold of by something outside them, which is why re-ensoulment is necessary. You can’t create your own goodness by an exercise of power, it has to be given to you.

FIN

Note: this essay contains a necessarily simplified account of Stavrogin’s psychology and the picture of evil presented in Demons. Since Stavrogin is still only human, the indifference is less absolutized in him than it is in the Buffyverse vampires.

Further note: at a certain point, you just have to come to terms with the fact that Whedon’s soul/no soul system is sloppily constructed, and develops inconsistently throughout the show. There will be holes in any theory. I would be unsurprised to hear of any more holes in mine that I have not already anticipated.

#Buffy The Vampire Slayer #Angel the series #dostoevsky #how to tag this nonsense #meta #eight single spaced pages of meta

8 notes · View notes

cabiba · 5 years

Link

In an era when indulgent university administrators and professors treat students like spoiled children, one longs for intellectuals who address their audience as adults. The British novelist, biographer, literary critic, travel writer and political commentator Rebecca West (1892-1983) is the tonic we need. Like other great authors of the 20th century—including George Orwell and Doris Lessing—West never received a university education. That may help explain her intellectual non-conformism and free-wheeling spirit.

West brushed against orthodoxy like barbed wire against chiffon. She was a suffragist who rejected pacifism in the First World War (and the Second); a leftist who fought communism; an internationalist who spoke up for small nations; an individualist who valued authority and tradition. West never crouched in one position. She was unflinchingly realistic. Human conflict, she said, is inescapable. It is as much a feature of art as it is of states. Eros, too, creates antagonism, for sex is dangerous. Yet human co-operation is ubiquitous. Women and men need each other, and can and do love each other. A feminism that treats women as if they were vulnerable children, and that blames a man for a woman’s own irresponsibility, was seen by West as absurd. Needless to say, her attitude to life is as far from the nursery-school feminism of today’s university—smothering, alarmist, bureaucratic—as it is possible to be.

Freedom carries obligations, West believed—the first of which is to grow up. “I believe in liberty,” she declared in a 1952 credo, particularly the liberty of a person to “be able to say and do what he wishes and what is within his power.” Because every individual is unique, each person “must know some things which are known to nobody else.” The transmission of such knowledge, which “could not be learned from any other source,” requires a space in which people are able to speak their minds.

The contrast between a state of innocence and a mature comprehension of life’s intractable demands (the “hard task of being adult,” as she put it in her 1931 book Ending in Earnest) is central to Rebecca West’s philosophy. We do not expect children to be active in politics; we protect children from politics. Nor do we consider adults who behave like children to be competent human agents. Maturity is the sine qua non of liberty because a pluralist society, unlike an authoritarian one, requires actors of independent mind who can draw a distinction between their civic responsibilities and private sentiments, who are sufficiently restrained to care for the world even as they pursue their own pleasures, and who are willing to take on onerous public burdens. Like great art, the liberal pursuit of freedom demands intelligence and discernment—a readiness “to test the veracity” of fantasies that all of us harbor to some degree and to evaluate “their importance in the light of the intellect.”

Maturity is evidenced, in short, where individuals embrace the “bitter rapture which attends the discovery of any truth,” and where they would rather be disconsolate in “communion with reality” than comforted by orthodoxy. West’s thesis is reminiscent of German social scientist Max Weber’s belief that a politics of responsibility requires “realistic passion.” What marks a mature person (ein reifer Mensch), Weber wrote in Politics as a Vocation (1919), is an attitude of principled realism enabling one to bear the perversity of the world without succumbing to cynicism.

The threat of regression to a childlike state was a recurring topic in West’s work. We see its first appearance in her 1918 novel, The Return of the Soldier , which centered on a shell-shocked infantryman’s retreat into bygone comforts, at the expense of those around him. Infantilism is a more apt term than “immaturity” here, because it implies not just a lack of emotional development, but a stubborn longing to remain childlike or return to a childlike state. While immaturity is merely pathetic, infantilism is twisted. During West’s lifetime, it encompassed several distinct forms.

The first was a male mode of dependency brought about by economic ruin. Mass unemployment during the Depression years pushed many families to the edge of destitution, but some were fortunate to contain women—wives and mothers—whose talents equipped them to work in industries less affected by the general collapse (a situation that some may recognize in today’s economy). Reason alone would suggest that men fortunate to live with provident women would have cause to be happy. But many such men were not happy at all: “Some fell into infantilism and wanted to remain in a permanent state of dependence.” Others “formed a deep feeling of resentment against their wives, which was sometimes so intense that it led to divorce.” Where a man loses his sense of virility, he will either renounce it forever and regress to the state of a child; or he will affirm virility in a twisted form, and insist that men are harmed when their superiority over women is impaired.

If the first form of infantilism postulated by West is reactive, being occasioned by economic breakdown, the second form is purposive—a deliberate, antinomian and transgressive assault on moral decency. The phenomenon was epitomized by novelist André Gide, author of such works as Isabelle, The Immoralist and The Counterfeiters. Gide’s contempt for women, deemed the cause of much of men’s wretchedness (and his interest in violent children) reflects the displacement of an infantile neurosis by which pleasure and joy are conceived as objects of guilt: If women bring pleasure, they must be hateful. West construes this unspoken connection as the root of Gide’s homosexuality

Gide’s infantilism reveals itself in a morbid attraction to cruelty—l’acte gratuit—as in Les Caves du Vatican, in which the hero brutalizes an old man on a train for no real reason. Dostoevsky also dwelled on such depravity. But whereas the Russian moralist saw it as a troubling form of modern behavior, Gide luxuriated in its nihilism. Such glee, West says, reflects “the child’s sense that in making this discovery it is breaking a command laid on it by an adult world.” This was but a component of Gide’s larger cachet in literary circles, which was based on his expression of a deep-seated desire “to stay infantile instead of becoming an adult.”

By West’s analysis, this is not only perverse; it is also sinister. For l’acte gatuit over which Gide “licks his lips” is “the very converse of goodness, which must be stable, since it is a response to the fundamental needs of mankind, which themselves are stable.”

As an act of rebellion against the adult world, l’acte gratuit has one evident limit: The gratification of such impulses must be haphazard, because each individual will find cruelty enjoyable in his own way. For rebellion to become a collective act, it must be animated by something more than idiosyncratic forms of lashing out. It needs an ideology, and a cohesive justification for rebellion. Among Western intellectuals, communism provided that cohesive justification. West’s theory about communism’s allure to the Western literati is too large a topic to be examined here in detail. But she traced one element of communism to the dissatisfaction felt by children toward their parents.

West found a useful case study in Britain, where communism took root within the socialist gradualism associated with Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the Fabian Society they championed, the London School of Economics (Fabianism’s intellectual nerve center), and the debunking satire of (among others) H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. This group aimed at social improvement and the betterment of the working class. Its message appealed to civil servants, teachers, doctors and lawyers who sought to reform local government along democratic socialist lines, upgrade working standards, improve housing, education and the prison system, and, in tandem with the trade-union movement, provide British workers with a decent standard of living.

West’s appraisal of the Fabian movement is double edged. Fabian policies often struck her as sensible, humane, overdue and, especially in regard to local government and penal policy, effective. (The National Health Service, established in 1948, is due in no small part to earlier Fabian efforts.) But as Fabianism evolved, its authoritarian and bureaucratic overtones became more evident. The Webbs, in particular, were early enthusiasts of Bolshevism. The circle they assembled around them, being well off and well known, produced a sort of aristocratic socialism that was corrosive of all authority besides its own.

Fabian children received an education in contempt. As West observed in a 1945 article for Time and Tide: “The foundation of their [Fabian parents’] creed was the assumption that there was nothing in the existing structure of society which did not deserve to be razed to the ground, and that all would be well if it were replaced by something as different as possible. They were to do it quietly, of course; but the replacement was to be absolute. To them the past was of value only in so far as it gave indications of how to annul the present and create a future which had no relation to it.”

In volumes lying around the houses of the privileged socialist set, “the values of our [British] traditional culture made their last stand and bled and died, all except altruism and truthfulness and austerity” (on which Bernard Shaw and his close associates claimed a monopoly). The idea of loyalty to the Crown or of fighting for one’s country was laughable to these aristocratic intellectuals because Britain was, after all, a ridiculous country when it was not simply malignant. West would be appalled, but not particularly surprised, at the current predilection among intellectuals to expand this antipathy to Western civilization in general.

Afforded ample material comfort and an expensive education, West noted, the offspring of these celebrity socialists rebelled in a curiously conformist way. They had been taught to be dissenters, and so they would remain. They had been taught to enjoy being in opposition as distinct from being in power; and “nothing is easier than being in opposition,” West wrote in The New Meaning of Treason (1964). But as the welfare-state vision of their parents became a reality, the fantasy of opposition became more difficult to sustain. The election of the Labour Party to government in the British general election of 1945 meant that reformist socialists now had the means to put forward a socialist program of mass industrial nationalization. If rebellion was to continue, it must find a new vehicle where “the glorious drunkenness of permanent opposition” could continue.

The children found this intoxication in communism—which West described as “a haven to the infantilist,” because it exists both in and outside of government simultaneously: the Soviet Union was a state that opposed the state in which the younger generation lived. Communism enabled a loyal disloyalty, a rejection of one’s own country while affirming obedience to another that is far more radical. The make-believe to which communists subscribed was that the Soviet Union portended a world of peace, plenty and justice, even as its leaders liquidated millions and revealed themselves willing to form a pact of convenience with Nazi Germany.

Moreover, the communism club was not without its privileges; and this was an important factor for a group fearful of becoming déclassé and unable to repeat the material success of its parents. Soviet communism bestowed esteem on visiting scientists; it feted foreign tourists and commentators; and it showered honors on those who spied for the proletariat. In short, communist intellectuals were men and women resolved to trump their parents’ radicalism where it had become all too conventional, while also creating a new self-serving moral hierarchy soldered to a collective cause.

* * *

The ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers quipped that Rebecca West was “a socialist by habit of mind, and a conservative by cell structure.” He forgot to mention her feminism and her liberalism. In any event, political admixtures are common in many fine minds. Was Alexis de Tocqueville a conservative or a liberal? He was both and more besides, depending on the matter at hand. Alexander Pope, confirming his own political latitude, joked: “Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory.” And Pope’s friend and confidant Jonathan Swift was equally hard to peg, prompting George Orwell, in Politics vs. Literature (1946), to dub him a “Tory anarchist, despising authority while disbelieving in liberty, and preserving the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the existing aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible.”

A writer who draws on multiple traditions can never sink into the dogmas of any one of them. Or indulge their extremes. But while West’s politics were multiform, her liberalism stands out, today, as her most admirable quality. This is not just because those committed to free expression must keep speaking to and against those who would hear only one voice, and because today’s most popular forms of feminist expression promote censorship and victimhood. West’s liberalism also feels morally urgent because liberals are engaged in an ongoing fight with themselves. In that fight, the priority should not be compassion or conciliation but truthfulness. As West observed, “it is never possible to serve the interests of liberalism by believing that which is false to be true…The fact-finding powers of liberals have, therefore, always to be at work.”

Infantilism goes along with illiberalism, because while a liberal society requires a baseline of human freedom and responsibility, the infantilized citizen is dependent on a person, group, or identity. One need look no further than our colleges and grievance-saturated social media to see how this works. The basic cause of such malaise may lie more in ideology than psychology, but the psychological consequences are plain enough.

Rebecca West remarked that Freud “gave sadists a new weapon by enabling them to disguise themselves as children.” Social media adds masochism to the mix, as when some reckless accusation tempts the unfortunate target to engage in self-abasement. Yet the accused have responsibilities, too, and unthinking contrition is its own kind of infantilism. Those unwilling to defend their opinions, and who self-flagellate in public on the basis of non-existent crimes, invite their tormentors to apply an extra dose of humiliation. The invitation is rarely declined.

If we have no right to be comforted as adults, we can still take comfort in exemplars of independence and individuality. Rebecca West is not as well-known as many other great writers of the 20th Century. But perhaps that will change in an era when infantilism and ideology are renewing their assault on that “bitter rapture” called truth.

Peter Baehr teaches social and political theory at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He can be reached at [email protected]. This article draws on research supported by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council.

#feminism

0 notes