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CIAO DATE: 8/01
Social Sciences
Vol. 32, No. 1/2001
Sociology and Metaphysics in the Work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky
By Vladislav Bachinin
*
"If it is still impossible, even for an artist of a Shakespearean scope, to discern any normal laws or guidelines in this chaos in which our public life has existed for a long time, and now in particular, then who will describe at least part of this chaos, even if he will not even dream of establishing any guidelines? Who will spot them and point them out? Who will attempt to define and explain the laws of this dislocation and reconstruction? Or is it too early yet?"—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Writer's Diaries for 1877
After the abolishing of serfdom in 1861—a sharp turn in the history of the Russian empire, that gave rise to numerous outstanding events—many questions were born in public consciousness, requiring urgent answers. Who could give those answers? Who could help to sort out the tricky tangle of problems? It turned out that neither scholars nor writers, for the most part, nor the clergy or educators were able to do so. "There remain only accidental answers, found in towns and railway stations, on the roads, streets and in market places, heard from chance people, wanderers, and last but not least, from former landowners," Dostoyevsky wrote. "There will be many different answers, naturally, more than there are questions, kindly and evil answers, stupid and clever, but there will be one thing in common: all those answers are bound to produce at least three more questions each, in a crescendo mode. The result will be more chaos, but chaos is not so bad in itself - hasty resolutions of the problems are worse than chaos." Dostoyevsky did not see anyone capable of enlightening the public regarding the accumulation of the new social phenomena and explain what was happening to them and to life around. There was a large number of problem areas and isolated corners of social life, requiring their researchers - writers, scholars, philosophers. Dostoyevsky's creative consciousness was disturbed by the most burning problems of the day. Some of his characters act as amateur sociologists concerned with the current social problems, they collect social facts trying to find hidden regularities behind the clusters of facts. In the novel The Boy, Katerina Nikolayevna says to Arkady Dolgoruky: "Remember how we were all reading about 'facts', as you called them... Remember how we would be speaking for hours only about figures, we'd count and calculate, worrying about the number of schools and where the education system was going to. We counted murders and criminal cases, compared this statistics with the good news... we wanted to figure out where we were heading and what would happen to us."
There is a similar reasoning in The Possessed, where Liza Drozdova is planning to publish a collection of facts, events, happenings, "reflecting the moral, personal life of the people, the very personality of the Russian people at this stage. It can certainly include all sorts of facts: amusing incidents, fires, charities, good and evil deeds, people's utterances and speeches, maybe even information about floods or certain government decrees. But we should select only the facts that portray the epoch. Each piece will be there with a purpose, with an indication, an aim and a thought, shedding light on the whole, the sum total." Ivan Karamazov also likes to collect "certain little facts" on the state of public morals, scattered all over historical chronicles, pamphlets, newspaper reports, court cases, and works of literature. Dostoyevsky endowed his heroes with qualities that he himself possessed in abundance, such as a live interest in real life and an ability to draw general conclusions on the basis of particular cases. Occasionally, Dostoyevsky's characters attempt at making a typological study of their personal observations of certain type of facts. For example, Arkady Dolgoruky formulates his own typological classification of scoundrels. The first type consists of naive scoundrels, that is, those who are confirmed that their vile actions are actually lofty nobleness. The second type includes scoundrels who are ashamed of their vile deeds but who would still carry them on to the end. The third type consists of pure, 100% scoundrels. Dostoyevsky's first-person narrators and chroniclers also play the role of observers and collectors of social facts (The Possessed and Brothers Karamazov). As true chroniclers, ubiquitous and thorough, they recount events in detail, leaving it for the reader to interpret facts and draw conclusions.
As you review Dostoyevsky's creative biography you become increasingly aware that his inherent traits could not be realized within the framework of his writing. The natural sociologist living inside his "I" insistently sought a way of expression: this is why some of his characters, who have nothing to do with sociology, reveal a penchant for sociological studies while Dostoyevsky himself often illustrated his essayist works with sociological examples.
When Dostoyevsky started publishing his Writer's Diary, he was planning to note down his impressions of everything that struck his mind. Characteristically, his notes were mostly concerned with criminal cases and court proceedings. It is noteworthy that his interest in crime was evident already in those days when the Dostoyevsky brothers published the magazines Time and Epoch, mostly carrying materials on famous criminal cases in Europe. They also published eight essays from the nine-volume collection of Armand Fouquier, Famous Court Cases Around the World published in France from 1857 to 1874.
Dostoyevsky's crime novels are based on social information obtained either from the press, as in the case of Crime and Punishment and The Possessed, or from personal contacts, as in the case of The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky's interest in criminal cases was not accidental. Having spent several years in prison side by side with common criminals he absorbed so many impressions of this world usually concealed from writers and scientists that they haunted him to the end of his life. When he returned to St Petersburg he started writing Notes from the Dead House, a psycho-sociological novel about morals and manners of hard labor. With the precision of an analyst, who finds himself in conditions of field observation, he describes the prison everyday's work, prisoners' relationships among themselves and with the authorities. In passing he gives precise and insightful characteristics of the criminals, makes an attempt to classify them, dividing them into three types. First, it is "professional murderers", including robbers and their chieftains; second, it is "accidental killers"; and third, it is "petty thieves and tramps". He quotes the official typology of the criminal population, where first place is given to the criminals of the "special wards", convicted for heavy crimes, usually for life, and locked up in prisons until particularly severe hard labor projects were started in Siberia. These were followed by exiled convicts, deprived of any right of property and sentenced to from eight to twelve years, whose faces were stamped. The third group consisted of military criminals, not deprived of rights of property. Dostoyevsky was fully aware that the cruel turn in his fortune provided him with unique material for writing. He made full use of this material in his novels of morals and manners, combining a literary confession with sociological reporting.
The trial and the hard labor were not the only factors, compelling Dostoyevsky to choose crime as the central theme in his work. This was also stipulated by the fact that post-reform Russia entered the stage of painful radical changes accompanied by a sharp moral decline. Facts of crime disturbed the writer's imagination, suggesting to him a series of conclusions, which led to social generalizations and forecasts. "Indeed, if you were to trace any fact from life, however insignificant at first glance, and if you have eyes and ability, then you will find there a depth that is greater than in Shakespeare." When Dostoyevsky came across facts that were not simply striking but glaringly unprecedented, he could not help undertaking a careful study of the material, resulting in a new philosophical crime novel.
Dostoyevsky was once staggered by the news about the suicide of a twelve-year-old schoolboy. The apparent cause of the suicide was bad marks at school and a punishment consisting in the fact that he was left at school after classes until five o'clock in the afternoon. However, Dostoyevsky finds a deeper and more complex cause of the crime. He reminds the reader about an episode from Tolstoy's Boyhood where a boy locked up in a shed as a punishment for his bad demeanor dreams of causing everybody's regret with his own death. But between these similar cases there was a whole period during which something shifted in the culture of the gentry and a different epoch, with different mood and mentality, set in. "The boy depicted by Count Tolstoy could dream, shedding painful tears of quiet emotion, how they would come to find him dead and they would start loving him, and feel sorry for him and accuse themselves. He could even dream of committing suicide, but never actually commit it: the strict family system of the nobility must have shaped the mind of the twelve-year-old boy in a way that would never allow him to realize his dream. But here, he thought about it and went and did it. We certainly witness life decomposing and, therefore, the family falls apart, too," says Dostoyevsky.
In Dostoyevsky's eyes, the disappearance of the inner moral obstacles to suicide in children and adults alike was a most disturbing symptom. In Writer's Diary for 1876, Dostoyevsky publishes his novella The Meek One, which was inspired by an article in Novoye vremya newspaper for 3 October 1876. It was about a suicide of a young woman: "On 30 September at 12 o'clock in the daytime, a seamstress Maria Borisova jumped out of the window in the attic of Ovsyannikov's six-story house No. 20 in Galernaya Street. Maria Borisova came to Moscow not having any relatives and having only time-work for a job. Recently, she was complaining that her work was very poorly remunerated while her savings from Moscow were petering out, causing her great concern about her future. On 30 September, she complained of a headache, then had some tea with rolls. At this time her landlady went to the market, but as she descended the stairs, glass fragments fell from the top floor window and then Borisova's body. The residents from the house across the street saw Borisova break two window-panes, crawl out onto the roof feet first, cross herself and holding an icon in her hands jump down. The icon was that of God's mother, with which her parents had blessed her. Borisova was picked up and carried to the hospital where she died a few minutes later."
Dostoyevsky was struck not so much by the woman's suicide as by the fact that she committed it holding an icon in her hands. He had always thought that only materialists and nihilists committed suicide. "Suicide with an icon in one's hands is an unusual and unheard-of detail. This looks like a meek, humble suicide, without reproach or complaint. It was simply impossible to live any more. She felt that God did not want her alive and she died with a prayer on her lips. Certain things, for all their simplicity, do not leave you alone for a long time. You have a feeling that somehow it is your fault, too. That meek soul, who had destroyed herself, gives me no peace of mind."
Dostoyevsky was not a sociologist in the direct sense, but his observations, suppositions and ideas on the nature of suicide and crime possessed enormous heuristic potential and compelled sociologists, criminologists, and philosophers in later years to study carefully the great writer's heritage. Moreover, his ideas were often included in the norm-setting semantic contexts, thus losing their inner antinomy. Placed in the rationally constructed context, they were simplified to the point of being schematic and thus were no longer able to spotlight the real essence of those extra-ordinary phenomena of human existence. Dostoyevsky held a firm conviction that each crime has an element of mystery, impenetrable for the rational mind and scientific analysis. A sociological analysis of a criminal fact ought to be supplemented by a metaphysical approach when "the incomprehensible is comprehended through the comprehension of its incomprehensibility." 1 Such a view contradicted the principles of the developing Western sociology. Comte, Spencer, Durkheim aimed at liberating sociology from the metaphysical elements. Sociological methodology developed and tested a set of theoretical instruments allowing it to single out the social facts from the physical and metaphysical reality. Theoretical discourse was usually confined to a unilateral social determination whereby, in accordance with its logic, certain social causes led to predicted social facts and circumstances which, in their turn, generated certain social consequences. This methodological scheme reduced the subject of investigation by explaining the known through the known and thus multiplying rationalistic truisms.
In the latter half of the 19th century, sociology earned the reputation of a rationalistic discipline, dry, pragmatic, and dominated by "fact-worship." The rational and pragmatic Western consciousness regarded favorably the image of the young discipline. However, in Russian culture the attitude towards the positivist-oriented sociology ranged from ardent apology to utter disappointment.
In his literary-philosophical works, Dostoyevsky illustrates these attitudes vividly. He clearly sees the advantages and weak points of the sociological method. Giving its due to the initial rationalistic treatment of the social facts he admits its instrumental usefulness. But a positivist approach is unacceptable for him because the social thought is thus deprived of its metaphysical wings, turning into a soulless discipline incapable of "metaphysical soaring." Dostoyevsky was aware of the impotence of sociology and its calculations, the uselessness of its Euclidean efforts where there was a need to penetrate the very depths of social being, determined by the contradictory human nature, spiritual clashes within man's inner life, tragedies of crime and suicide. He was annoyed with the self-assured narrow-mindedness of the theory describing the personality of a criminal as the product of his social environment, and thus disregarding the question of personal freedom and moral responsibility. Dostoyevsky saw the sociological and metaphysical approaches to the problem of crime as two different methods complementing one another. Whereas the sociological method did not go further than discovering the nearest social determining factors to explain the crime, the metaphysical method compelled one to reach beyond the limits of reality in search of "the cause of the causes," the original cause of existence.
A metaphysical approach to social reality deals with noumenal, absolute content of social facts. Based on philosophical, religious and ethical principles related to the existence of God, soul, and its immortality, which cannot be verified in principle, existing outside rational proof or disproof, metaphysical methods enable one to discern in the social manifestations of good and evil the clear symbols of super-personal energies inherent in the social world. The investigator is free either to view a social fact within the limited space of social factors or disregard these limitations and view the same fact as part of the boundless transcendental context of the world ontology.
Dostoyevsky studied both sociology and metaphysics with great attention and left a number of profound ideas regarding their cognitive possibilities, as well as theirs good and bad points. Man's inquisitive mind may get confused by the sociological method, leading into a blind alley due to its narrow-mindedness and by the apparent incomprehensibility of the truth by metaphysical methods. As a result, man may find himself in a cognitive-existential impasse, which may drive some people to suicide. One can appreciate the position of those "who would give a million rubles to obtain the truth." Where the price of the truth is equated to the price of life any treasure appears as a trifle that can be easily sacrificed for the sake of the truth.
Philosopher Sergei Bulgakov noted the fact that the questions Dostoyevsky's characters discuss invariably had a sociological and a metaphysical aspects. From the sociological point of view they appear as problems of socialism, anarchism, social transformation of man while from the metaphysical point of view they are related to God and immortality of the soul. Interpenetrating and intertwining these two modes usually make a whole.
In the chapters from The Brothers Karamazov such as "The brothers get acquainted with each other", "Revolt" and "The Great Inquisitor", Ivan who had been theretofore an enigma for the reader, lets his brother Alyosha into his inner world. He appears in three different roles at the same time: as a sociologist collecting facts on the state of morals; as a writer creating the novella "The Great Inquisitor"; and as a metaphysical thinker. There are three sections in Ivan's metaphysical collection, consisting of facts related to Asia, of the evidence gathered from chronicles, pamphlets and newspapers published in Europe, and of specifically Russian material that he calls "Russianisms". They all testify to one thing: to human beings' excessive, criminal brutality and bloodthirstiness.
'Ivan quotes one fact each from the European and Asian practices, such as the Turks' abominable cruelty in Bulgaria where they tortured infants, and also the story of a benighted semi-savage murderer called Richard who was kept in a Swiss prison where they taught him to read and write, showered him with charity and finally publicly executed him by guillotine in the cultured city of Geneva. This is followed by a series of Russian stories. The first was from a poem by Nekrasov who describes a drunken peasant brutally whipping his horse right on "its tearful meek eyes" because the wretched beast got stuck pulling a heavy cart. Then he recalls two facts from court cases on educated parents torturing their children. And finally he tells a story from some archival collection about a landowner, who hunts down an eight-year-old boy, setting a pack of dogs on him. What conclusion does this collector of "interesting" facts make? He makes three conclusions and each one, like a huge bird in a small cage, beats within the limits of sociological factors and strives to break free of them.
Conclusion Number One. Human nature is such that even civilization cannot change it for the better. Man remains aggressive and cruel the way he was in the primitive times. The difference between a Russian and a civilized European is only in the fact that the latter embellishes his cruelty with a larger number of social conventionalities. Conclusion Number Two. The Devil does not exist, he had been created by human imagination in the image of man. Conclusion Number Three is hard to be called a conclusion at all, it is rather an affirmation with a question mark full of tragic bewilderment. "I cannot understand why is the world structured like this." Why there is so much crime and suffering? Why do people multiply evil and torture one another? Why does evil and not good determine the course of social life? People's excessive cruelty towards one another - known as an indisputable fact - is still incomprehensible for the mind, it defies rational explanation and inspires moral indignation. One's mind boggles attempting to make any sense out of this. Hence Ivan the sociologist makes a paradoxical conclusion. "I don't understand anything... but now I don't want to understand anything. I want to stay with the facts. I've long made a decision to stop trying to understand anything. If I try to understand I'll betray the fact, so I decided to stay true to the fact." This passage, seemingly uttered in delirium, could be an accurate characteristic of the positive paradigm of Comte and Durkheim with their "fact-worship". Ivan Karamazov, like a Delphian oracle, foresees the fates of science that "stays true to facts" as a way of protecting itself in the present although it will die in the future. Holding on to facts, science will be able to remain true to itself for a long time. But relying on facts only, it will sooner or later stop understanding anything and no longer will be able to give satisfactory explanations of any facts. "Euclidean mind" of positive sociology, overloaded with the knowledge of social facts and giving the answers to the questions "What?" "Where?" "When?" and "How?" will be confused by the questions "Why?" and "What for?"
Ivan discards the trivial explanation that in the end everything obeys the logic of a progressive movement upward to civilization. He does not accept the rational "Euclidean trash" that justifies the devilish chaos inside which man has to exist. He is not satisfied with the explanations referring exclusively to the social environment. If he dealt only with "Russianisms" he could try explaining them by the unsatisfactory social conditions in Russia. That was precisely how the prosecutor Ippolit Kirillovich and the former theological student Rakitin explain the main "Russianism" - patricide - in The Brothers Karamazov. The first saw this crime as the product of the destruction of Russia's social foundations while the second regarded it as the consequence of the lingering serfdom and the current social disorders. However, Ivan looks not only at Russian reality but at Europe and Asia as well, he cites examples from the past and the present, intentionally trying to universalize the problem. He is concerned not so much with the facts as with human nature. In the light of such universalizing, additional facts will add nothing and will not bring any closer to an answer. Inevitably, the time will come when one will have to turn away from facts and from the approach based on "fact-worship" and take a completely different approach. So Ivan undertakes what can be called a vertical flight: he abandons a sociological approach and takes up a metaphysical one. His language changes markedly, now focussing on different notions, such as God, eternity, Christ, heavenly forces, redeem, etc. And that is despite the fact that Alyosha is speaking not with a reactionary theologian but a Moscow University graduate majoring in natural sciences. For Dostoyevsky, Ivan Karamazov is a metaphysical hero who plays out his personal existential-metaphysical drama as he retreats far away from the vanity of the world into the realm of "last questions". In that realm, everything is quite beyond human grasp; one can only accept reality without reasoning, relying on the highest wisdom of the Providence. It is better for those confronted with these questions to stay within the limits of the subconscious trust in the current world order and in the supreme justice, existing for the purpose of putting everything into place in the end and reward everybody according to their deserts.
The tragedy of Ivan's position is contained in his inability to be satisfied with either a primitive collecting of facts or with unthinking obedient faith. He cannot stop half-way and neither is he able to return to his previous unreflecting state, because he is a born thinker for whom the truth is more important than a million rubles. It is important for him to understand how is it possible that the heavenly wisdom of the Creator goes side by side with such an abundance of senseless evil doings overfilling life.
For Ivan Karamazov, the same as for Dostoyevsky himself, it was harder to accept and keep to the principles of theodicy than for the European philosophers of the 17th-18th century because the latter had already been affected by the Enlightenment, rationalism, and positivism. An immeasurably greater spiritual resistance was required from them to oppose the influence of the rationalistic stereotypes. Striving for the heavenly world, the Russian theodicy developed in the struggle with the forces unknown during the times of the European Baroque - with the nihilist spirit of the natural sciences discoveries, with the materialist ideas and moods typical of the realism and naturalism in art, with the influence of the European neo-romantic anthropodicy, or rather "egodicy" of Stirner. All of these infused Russian theodicy with extraordinary expressiveness and tension.
Ivan lacks sufficient spiritual power to keep to the principles of theodicy. This is abundantly clear when he explains the contents of "The Great Inquisitor". His outstanding literary talent enables him to find a new angle of depicting the nature of evil, violence and crime. The hero of "The Great Inquisitor" is a Spanish cardinal who is convinced that man is base by nature, prone to temptations, inclined to vice and crime, and that freedom is bad for him because he can only use it for evil purposes. As a matter of fact, Ivan Karamazov's views coincide with those of the Great Inquisitor. Both think that people are for the most part "unfinished, trial creatures". Freedom is quite beyond their power. But some of them are different - intelligent, strong-willed, power-loving, rising above the rest and conscious of possessing the precious gift of freedom. However, the tragic dialectic of life is such (and this is, most likely, Dostoyevsky's, rather than Ivan's, idea) that these people are not inclined to listen to God's voice but to the cunning call of the devil, the spirit of destruction and death. In their hands freedom turns to permissiveness and crime.
In the course of the novel Ivan voices some very dangerous thoughts, boiling down to the general idea that since the world is steeped in evil and people, too, are submerged in evil as in a swamp, there is no need to embellish oneself with white robes of saintliness, why not openly take the side of the clever and powerful Evil Spirit - the Devil, as the Great Inquisitor did. The pages of the novel where Ivan expounds his creed are very disturbing reading. However, there is no need in any consolation because metaphysical worldview is alien to moralizing by definition. Charging forward, it does not stop short before reason of protectionist prudence and is prepared to take risks even faced with accusations in immorality. The ethos of metaphysics is quite different. Since the times of Descartes metaphysics regards thinking as an act of heroism, because profound thinking is always associated with certain risks. "You have to take a risk and hold on in the risk zone which is very difficult." 2
Ivan Karamazov, and Dostoyevsky with him, does not simply stand still in the risk zone, he is prepared to move forward and upward. The author makes his hero go to the very end until there is nothing ahead except the gaping chasm of "mental crime". Ivan's mind of a daring adventurer is not afraid of the chasm, seeing in its dark depths the semblance of the truth shielding the darkness and thus making him not to be afraid of it.
What does Ivan gain by transferring his sociological range of problems, based on facts from real life, into a metaphysical level? The problem he is concerned with acquires scope and depth in its treatment and interpretation that it would never had if it remained at the sociological level. Moreover, it undergoes an existential transcription and acquires a profoundly personal character, allowing Dostoyevsky's character to formulate his creed in life. Thus, the social facts that had existed independently of a person become included in their personal view of the world while a person's knowledge of people in general is identified with knowledge about himself and his "I". At the points of contact between sociology and metaphysics one finds universal existential models, absolute values, and higher moral truths. When human consciousness approaches the range of their meanings its knowledge of social facts is superimposed on the scale of moral absolutes. In this way facts acquire a meta-sociological meaning that had not been obvious before. This scale of moral absolutes is highly essential for social sciences, literature, art and all the other forms of culture. The need for it is felt particularly acutely in transitional periods when the old values collapse, creating chaos in morals and notions when people no longer distinguish between vice and virtue, crime and courage. Dostoyevsky wrote with much bitterness about journalists dealing with social facts but being unable to distinguish between good and evil. In their opinion, the main thing was to write in the spirit of liberalism and progress. "How is he to write as a liberal? He no longer knows how, he has forgotten... To write about them with disgust and horror is too risky - What if it won't be liberal enough. Just in case he mocks everything."
There are limits to a purely sociological research of the facts related to morals and crime. Even several decades after Dostoyevsky's death, sociology still did not make any progress in handling moral and legal facts. In 1920, P. Sorokin noted sadly that "humankind is still powerless in their struggle with social evils and never learnt to utilize social and psychological energy, the highest from all the existing kinds of energy. We cannot make an intelligent person out of a stupid one, or an honest person out of a criminal, or a strong person out of a weak-willed one. Often we cannot tell good from evil, and even if we can we are unable to resist temptations." 3
The inability of superficial factography to distinguish between good and evil is not necessarily the feature of a transitional period. The same processes may occur in relatively stable times if they are ruled by the successors of the Great Inquisitor who would do everything in their power to deprive people of higher moral goals and, consequently, suppress in them the awareness of their predestination. In his Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky writes: "We've got facts! Yet facts are not everything. At least half of the matter is the way you handle these facts!" Sociology learns to handle facts from meta-sociology whose methodological principles derive from metaphysics. Only at first, superficial, glance metaphysics may seem useless for the solution of concrete problems of knowledge. Only for the untrained mind it may seem to be out of this world and unrelated to existential, earthly problems. In reality it turns out to be very practical in the end because, as Maritain noted, it reveals to people the real human values in their true hierarchy and thus helps them to feel more secure in this life. "Metaphysics maintains a just order in the world of knowledge, it secures natural borderlines, harmony and mutual interdependence among different sciences. And this is much more important for man than the most beautiful flowers of the mathematics of phenomena." 4
It is hardly likely that man's seeking mind is not really interested in preserving true guidelines while not losing sight of moral landmarks. Metaphysics strives to persuade the mind in the existence of the eternal and the absolute, insisting that social facts possess something beyond their limits, even beyond the limits of human understanding in general.
Dostoyevsky was aware of the limited cognitive possibilities contained in sociology, a young science that attracted him very much at the time. In those moments when he felt that particularly acutely his feelings could be called "intellectual sorrow", to quote Descartes. It is hard to imagine what this sorrow might have led to had it not been for the extraordinary intellectual-metaphysical intuition of this thinker and writer of genius. It gave him an assurance that the outward reality concealed another reality, quite unlike the visible one, and that the hidden reality was more real than the one, on the surface of which evident social facts were scatted.
Unlike the sociology-oriented mind, which consciously rejects mythology, mysticism, and religion, the intellectual-metaphysical intuition remains connected with them and often functions as their follower. Whereas the language of the sociology-oriented mind is mostly concerned with denoting things, attempting to reveal the social meanings accessible to it, the language of the metaphysical intuition is concerned with connotations, presupposing the presence of unverbalizable hidden meanings in the same facts. In distinction to the cautious rational mind, not even trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, the metaphysical intuition strives to embrace the unthinkable and speak about that which cannot be expressed in words. Metaphysics maintains that apart from the apparent aspects, the moral and legal reality has an invisible life which you cannot observe, that this other reality is multi-dimensional and many-layered and has its roots in the supra-causal world of the original causes of all things, whence come the highest imperatives, determining the models of people's social behavior.
The same force that compelled Raskolnikov to commit his crime was pushing Russia towards its catastrophe at the same time. In conditions of fast developing anomie any accidental event might have proved fatal, and no sociological surveys could provide trustworthy factual material and forecasts for Russia's future. At that level there was an obvious need for a complementary interaction between sociology and metaphysics. Dostoyevsky's work is permeated with this powerful methodological intention as no other writer's work. His role and importance in the exploration of the origins of social crime place him in a niche all his own.
Endnotes
Note 1: Sergei Frank. Collected Works. Moscow, 1990 (in Russian). Back.
Note 2: Merab Mamardashvili. Lectures on Proust. Moscow, 1995 (in Russian). Back.
Note 3: P.A. Sorokin. The System of Sociology, Vol. 1, Petrograd, 1920 (in Russian). Back.
Note 4: Jacques Maritain. La metaphysique et la mistique. Paris, 1926, p. 69. Back.
*: V. Bachinin, D.Sc. (Sociology), professor at the National Ukrainian Academy of Law. This essay was published in the journal Sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya (SOTsIS), No.3, 2000. Back.