Authors: Colin Wilson
Again we see, in the phrase
‘
he longed to live and live, and to go on and on
’
, the same Yea-saying vision as had happened to Alyosha, as well as to Kirilov and Shatov. We can even parallel it with Raskolnikov
’
s in the scene of
Crime and Punishment
in which Sonia reads him the Gospel:
How it happened he did not know. But all at once something seemed to seize him and fling him at her feet. He went and threw his arms round her knees. He had risen again and knew it, and felt it with all his being
’
.
7
Even Stavrogin has experienced something of the kind; he tells about it at the end of his
‘
confession
’
: his dream of a
golden age as in the Claude picture: warm sea and perfect harmony of human beings. Then the face of the dead child he raped rises in his memory and destroys the vision. Here again, Mitya evokes the Golden age:
‘
Why don
’
t they sing songs of joy?
’
just as Ivan had evoked it at the end of the
‘
Rebellion
’
Chapter. This is Dostoevsky
’
s Pro and Contra: in one balance-pan, human misery; in the other, the unconquerable force of Life from which human beings cut themselves off with their trivial, tied-to-the-present personalities. Mitya learns that man can become aware of that pure Will to live only by ceasing to care about his own little affairs.
We now come to Ivan
’
s
‘
vision
’
, one of the most important sections in the book.
For some reason, critics who have acclaimed the Grand Inquisitor section as
‘
the concentrated essence of Dostoevsky
’
have paid no attention to Ivan
’
s scene with the Devil, although it is obviously intended to supplement the earlier chapter. Actually, as I hope to show, Ivan
’
s
‘
vision
’
is the climax of the book. In it there is not only a summary of the Outsider
’
s dialectic, there are seeds of the development of a whole field of modern liter
ature.
Ivan is sick. The narrator tells us he is on the eve of a brainstorm. This is the point to which unending thinking has brought him. After a last interview with Smerdyakov (his
‘
ape
’
—a reminder of his baser part), in which he wrings a confession of the murder from his half-brother, he goes back to his empty room. And now occurs the scene towards which the Outsider
’
s destiny has always tended. The room is no longer empty. There is Another.
The Devil is a seedy would-be gentleman, wearing a reefer jacket and check trousers. Dostoevsky
’
s portrait of him is as circumstantial as a description by Balzac of some small tradesman. This is a very human devil. Ivan had told Alyosha in the Pro and Contra section:
‘
I think if the Devil doesn
’
t exist, and man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.
’
Here he is: human, all too human; something of a buffoon, like Ivan
’
s dead father; something of the ape, like Smerdyakov.
Is he real? And here is Dostoevsky
’
s point: He is as real as anything in a world of unrealities. Ivan believes he is unreal and tells him so: the Devil laughs and admits it. All is unreal. Being? What is it? Perception. What you see exists for you. If I am delusion of your mind, you are also a delusion of mine, the Devil tells him. Each man exists in a solipsist universe in which he treats his delusions as realities. Exploding logic; reason, tired of proceeding forward, tries to erupt out of the page. You, the reader holding this book—one level of reality; Ivan, another—less real; the Devil another—less real still; but all is relative. Are you reading for amusement ? No ? You have some serious interest in reading? You don
’
t mind reading of Ivan
’
s confusion between real and unreal, but when you put down this book, what then ? You must take up your own life. Real or unreal ? The intellect pretends to be sincere, pretends to question everything, but the arm-chair you are sitting in, the chest of drawers, the fire, you don
’
t question their existence, nor the work you must do tomorrow and the day after. The intellect can go off on quixotic voyages, but you, the being, the personality, have to go forward along your destiny, what Minkowski would call your
‘
geodesic
’
.
This uncoils from Ivan
’
s interview with the Devil; it is always latent in it. It will always be there until human beings have attained ultimate reality and can read
The Brothers Karamazov
from an ultimately real arm-chair which
is
just what it appears to be, facing their lives with an ultimate knowledge of who they are, what life is, what death is, where they come from and where they are going. Then they can
know
that Ivan
’
s Devil was unreal, but then,
The Brothers Karamazov
is only a book, and Dostoevsky was only a man, and for unreality there is not much to choose between them. Behind Ivan there is a universe of chaos, cinders. Ivan accuses the Devil of re-hashing the ideas from his student days; but what does that matter? It may be one more evidence of the Devil
’
s unreality, but does it prove the ideas unreal ? Are the ideas realler than Ivan ? Plato would say yes; Kierkegaard and the modern Existentialists, no. This too lies latent in the situation between Ivan and the Devil.
And these
‘
ideas
’
of Ivan
’
s: as soon as we touch them it sets the whole merry-go-round off again. As a student, Ivan had argued that good and evil have no relation to the soul. They are only two poles in life, two lumberjacks at either end of a
double-handed saw. Or compare evil to the clapper of a bell; remove it and the bell is silent, unmanifest. Good and evil, what are they? the Devil asks. When man is uncivilized, his good and evil are completely arbitrary; his gods are immoral and his devils are only graveyard bogies. As he learns to use his reason, he sorts out good from evil. But where does it end? Only at the Outsider
’
s Truth, what do they mean by it?
’
He does not reason himself towards God, or towards becoming a god himself, but only into the position of Burridan
’
s ass, starving between two equal loads of hay. The notions of good and evil evaporate. He finds himself—in his room, staring at the wall; and if Another exists, then he is like this one, a shabby vulgarian in check trousers. This is the end of the great God Reason, when it goes far enough; eternity, a dusty room with cobwebs; the Devil, a human being, and Heaven, perhaps, as in Rupert Brooke
’
s sonnet, where:
An idle wind blew round an empty throne
And stirred the heavy curtains on the walls...
And belief? It is not that Ivan does not want to believe. Spiritual starvation has made him sick and afraid of his own existence.
Will the veiled sister pray
For the children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray?
If he can recover from this
‘
terrifying insight
’
and find belief, he may become more passionately religious than Alyosha; he will believe with the unwavering certainty of one who has been lost for a long time and is determined never to be lost again.
But we are not to know what happened, because Dostoevsky never finished the story. There
are
hints in the Devil chapter. There is the story of the free-thinker, who believed there was no life after death, and when he died, was indignant to find he was wrong. As a punishment for his unbelief he was sentenced to walk a quadrillion miles. He lay down and refused to move, and a thousand years went by before he grew tired of lying down, and set out to walk the quadrillion miles. And when he
had finished—(and here Ivan interrupts to ask where he got the billion years to do it in? The Devil explains that our earth has lived and died a thousand times—Zarathustra
’
s Eternal Recurrence)—when he had finished, and was admitted into heaven at last, he cried immediately that two seconds in heaven were worth walking for a million times as long.
...
8
Here Ivan interrupts with a shout,
‘
You are repeating a story I made up when I was a student.
’
The Devil has proved again that he is a figment of Ivan
’
s imagination. So!
But consider the story itself. Its content is the same as Nietzsche
’
s vision on the hilltop: reconciliation, a Vision of pure Being that makes up for all the apparent terrors and miseries of living. The unbeliever walks for a quadrillion miles, yet one moment of reality makes up for it. It is like S
teppenwolf
’
s idea that he might one day look back on himself from his ultimate goal
‘
to which the difficult path seems to be taking him
’
, and smile with
‘
a mixture of joy and pity
’
, or even to realize, like Meursault that
‘
he had been happy and was happy still
’
. It is an idea, this, that turns up repeatedly in world religions; that
li
fe is such a tissue of delusions that man can never have the remotest idea of who he is or what he is doing, but that the dream can break suddenly, and the resulting glimpse is sudden complete understanding. The Bhagavad Gita expresses it:
‘
Even if you are the most sinful of sinners, this insight will carry you like a raft above all your sin
’
(IV, 36).
Chuang Tzu says:
‘
While they dream, they do not know that they are dreaming. Some will even interpret the dream they are dreaming (i.e. Hegel and the systematizing philosophers) and only when they wake do they know it was a dream. By and by comes the great awakening, and then we find out that this hfe is really a great dream.
...
’
And here is the very essence of
Existenzphilosop
h
ie.
The poet-philosopher has an intuition that man is so completely sunk in delusion that he can never hope to know himself consistently and act upon his knowledge. A moment comes, and it seems a moment of deeper insight than man normally has, of recognition that man does not know the world or himself. He is so sunk in delusion and a high opinion of himself that there is no hope at all of his ever knowing himself. This is a way of seeing
that comes easily to Outsiders, because the Outsider
sees
with such penetration through the usual self-deluding, the way in which all men and women blind themselves with their emotions. The consequence is usually a Swiftian contempt for men and women, the kind of feeling that finds full expression in the last pages of Gulliver
’
s
Voyage to the Houyhnhnms:
My reconcilement to the Yahoo kind in general might not be so difficult if they were content with those vices and follies only which Nature has entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician, a physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this is all according to the due course of things; but when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience.
...
This is not pathological loathing; there is not the slightest touch of insanity about it (in spite of the prevailing modern opinion to the contrary). It is the ordinary Outsider attitude to men, and it is also the religious attitude. The same savage indictment of human folly can
be found in the Book of Eccle
siastes, as well as in the New Testament and the
Pensees
of Pascal. The common mob, the philistines and moneychangers, are
‘
flies in the market-place
’
. Then, as the Outsider
’
s insight becomes deeper, so that he no longer sees men as a million million individuals, but instead sees the world-will that drives them all like ants in a formicary, he knows that they will never escape their stupidity and delusions, that no amount of logic and knowledge can make man any more than an insect; the most irritating of the human lice is the humanist with his puffed-up pride in Reason and his ignorance of his own silliness.