Recently I noticed someone posted a comment on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Demons”, saying the book was a call to a return to reason instead of materialism. This confused me because Demons strikes me as a call to return to Orthodox Christianity. The book criticizes rationality along with atheism, socialism, communism, and nihilism for undermining religious faith. I haven’t read Demons is years, but I recall it was a criticism of nihilism and a call to return to a transcendent faith, namely Orthodox Christianity. Christianity, though often presented as “rational”, is different from rationality in its call to accept and have faith in revelations which originate from beyond the minds of people, from an incomprehensible source, glorified in its enigma, and its transcendence beyond mere human reason.
When I first read Demons, I mistook it for a story accepting and actively dealing with the problem of nihilism as the most critical way forward for western culture. Rather than hearkening back to religious faith that the developments of the enlightenment have undermined completely in the west, accepting and dealing with nihilism seems to me an unavoidable problem for the western culture. I mistakenly believed that D.’s incredibly insightful characterization of intelligent and brilliant people grabbing nihilism by the proverbial horns and wrestling it all the way down into an endless abyss, seemed to me a disturbing but inevitably direction our greatest philosophic minds may end up lost in.
But later on, I realized how wrong I was. Dostoevsky understood the problem of nihilism deeply of course, but he chose to write stories which focused on the most destructive and negative possible outcomes that even the most brilliant and resourceful characters would pursue as a warning, and a call to return to religious faith once again.
‘Demons’ is not mainly about the unreasonableness of materialism, leading to a fixation on animalism. Instead, it has more to do with how people fill the void left behind by Orthodox Christianity. Demons describe people adopting a much wider variety of alternatives to that faith, such as Catholicism, scientism, idealism, socialism, and atheism. Presumably, you would think of Christianity as the opposite of a materialistic philosophy. Yet, Dostoevsky sees only specific types of Christianity as nothing more than artifices to fill the void of the one true orthodox faith. This alone betrays his cultural biases, of course. After all, even after two thousand years of Christianity, we haven’t seen any abandonment of animalistic behavior in the name of Christianity other than our list of philosophies. Christianity has been used to justify animalistic behavior as well over the millennia. They spread it, for example, through violence. Dostoevsky thought various modern philosophies or even versions of Christianity were just artificial replacements for the truth of orthodox Christianity. Furthermore, various modern philosophies or even versions of Christianity are seen by Dostoevsky as artificial replacements for the truth of orthodox Christianity, since they fail to embrace the supposed transcendent Truths that come from revelation more than reason. When Stavrogin plots his suicide, it is “rationalism” par excellence. So I think that the story is promoting a return to a very specific form of Christianity, not just an abandonment of “materialism in favor of reasonableness. Materialism is more reasonable than the spiritual revelation of Christianity. Animalism because of materialism, materialism as oddly “irrational” by your estimation, seems contradictory.
The politics of Dostoyevsky’s times, particularly the many secular philosophies, including nihilism, were more like differing forms of pseudo rational ideologies. If they led to animalism, it was just a fully self-conscious type of it instead of the repressed and unconscious form it takes under divine revelation.
If you look at communism, for example, much of it was just religion dressed up as a rational and secular philosophy. But without any transcendant, mystic basis, all these humanistic doctrines could lead to rational conclusions which led to the dehumanization of men. “Atheistic” doctrines like communism or Marxism, were more like religious movements than philosophical movements. The methods of the Orthodox Church were used to replace Christianity. But to D. this invariably leaves man rudderless and subject to nothing but his own egoistic desires and a quasi spiritual project of becoming a dubious higher being upon the earth rather a humble servant of the christian faith.
With all this said, I now want to return to the notion that materialism causes men to behave like animals. This idea is not really what Demons is about, but its an interpretation I am addressing.
Materialism relates to science and its assumptions which lead to a sort of quasi scientific worldview some call ‘scientism’, or, the notion that all questions of any value are now or in future will be answered by science. Evolutionary biology is one of the main threats to Christian ideas of the special creation of man who is central in the universe and whose choices in this life determine the outcome of their eternal life. Instead, we are just another species of animal on the earth. Undermining this idea, undermines much of what is most sacred in christianity directly and through implication. For instance, if God did not create Adam and Eve literally 6000 years ago without sin and perfect, then how can we take the idea of original sin seriously? And without the idea that every human is now born tainted by their original disobedience against god, the sacredness of Christian values come into question. There is no reason to adopt the values of Christianity based on faith in an Transcendent Absolute for the reasons explained in Christian theology and mythology, namely that the values of the bible are from God, objective, and to be obeyed in all circumstances in order to secure eternal life. Granted there is the whole conversion process too which loses is luster since being born again is considered a purification of the original sin all people have through the sacrifice of Jesus, naturally.
Without the need to redeem the self from original sin through a salvation ritual and with he authority of christian values coming into question as well, the straw man we see is that human beings are reduced to nothing but mere animals without any real reason to be moral, to be good. Instead, they say, man simply becomes a selfish, egoistic, megalomaniacal, souless beast. Dostoevsky though is considered a genius because of how he can portray the psychology of a man of great talent, mental capacities, resources, advantages, and intelligence falling under the spell of nihilism, nihilism which comes as a result of the throwing off of Orthodox Christianity and its related worldview.
D.’s empathetic and charitable portrayal of Stavrogin made it difficult for me to see originally that he was actually meant to ward us off from nihilism and all the other humanistic ideologies that replaced Christian values. His portrayal was so fair and unbiased that you might, like me, come to believe that Stavrogin was an anti-hero, but really, he is more like a man possessed and in need of redemption from God.
Interestingly, Stavrogin as brilliant and disturbing as his character is, represents a rather dumbed down notion in American Christianity which says that without christianity, man will simply become like an animal, or worse. This idea though misses an important point, which Nietszche writes about and which shows a deeper understanding of the problem than Dostoyevsky—Christianity in its posture as Absolute Truth for all time and people had within it the seed of nihilism all along. Nihilism was not pulled out of thin air by philosophers. It was what was left when the Christian edifice collapsed. Christianity created this crisis by presuming Absolute Authority and it worked for almost 2000 years generally. But then the materialism of science began to show the all-too-human errors in the bible, inadvertently, which moves the onus of responsibility upon the shoulder of men, rather than a sacrificial God-man, or a Hebrew Sky God.
So, all the humanistic philosophies and political systems that set themselves up as Absolute in the same style as the church, were inevitable and a direct result of the errors of Christianity. Dostoeyevsky seems to miss this point too. He sees them all as artificial substitutions that lead inevitably to chaos which rationally speaking is pointless. What good is a philosophy which only serves to destroy humanity with glee? Well, the answer is that destructiveness is only one way of dealing with the nihilism brought to us from Christianity. Or just allowing ourselves to fall into some passive stupor of distraction and hedonism is yet another possible path forward for many. I imagine Dosteyevsky would have me stop there in my description of where non-christian ideologies lead inevitably, but there is at least one more option: to actively create new values despite the apparent contradiction of striving while also seeing it as unavoidably futile. I think maybe this tension was the basis for Nietszche’s idea of the eternal return and the love of fate. The Eternal Return is, on one hand, an inspiring vision where the life each lives now, takes on the gravity and significance once reserved for other worlds people only see in dreams or hallucinations. But it also moves us away from the idea that we can deal with life fully by focusing on the other world to come and all its compensations for the problems we face now, that we have cynically given up on ever fully dealing with. In a sense, the idea can feel like a moment of enlightenment where you become fully self-possessed, and experience a joy and freedom and meaning. Its almost like Buddhist enlightenment perhaps, but maybe more like the Tantric sort, minus reincarnation of course. Its this profound feeling which naturally leads us to feel that even if the life we live now were to repeat endlessly, that we would still love our fate.
But then you have the opposite side of the eternal return which is a terrible sense of overwhelming futility and meaninglessness. As you live your life and really look at what you are doing and look inward to take hold of who and what you are, eternity in the moment can’t only be, just being, it also has to be a course of action that is your responsibility and result of your vision and creativity as to what one really ought to do if “this is it”, so to speak. The truth is, there is no innate thing anyone must do. There is just what we choose to do as an expression of who and what we are. Ironically, this problem is surely enough to lead anyone down the same path Dostoyevsky fears for himself and for the west.
This lack of any form of transcendence which was once found in Christianity becomes a the rock Sisyphus Pushes up the hill forever,only Sisyphus is not happy about it as Camus thinks. He is experiencing the kind of eternal torture Christians have been dreaming about for milennia, and that torture can exist here and now. The actions you take now are the actions you take for all time. Is this what you want to be doing over and over forever? Any sane person would say no. One should do what gives the eternal moment the most empowering, expansive, and loving qualities we can muster, yet, regardless of how much we struggle to make the moment count, for it to mean something, for it to be imbued with a purpose, a meaning, and a sort of quasi-transcedental destiny, its just another futile blip in eternity, so small, so insignificant, so empty, so lonely, so temporary, so mortal, so much pain and horror, so much inner conflict, so much destruction.