Per Caritatem

In addition to a positive view of mystery (see part III), both authors offer strong critiques against reductionistic rationalism and scient-ism.   In a section entitled, “The Leech,” Zarathustra introduces us to a man, who identifies himself as “the conscientious in spirit,” and who appears to be a philosopher-scientist of the materialist variety.  He tells Zarathustra that it is “better to be a fool on one’s own than a sage according to the opinion of others.”[1] This philosopher-scientist seeks an Archimedean point upon which to stand.  That is, he wants a solid “ground and foundation” that doesn’t rely on mere authority and misguided tradition, and this requires him to “pursue the leech to its ultimate grounds.”[2] Here it is worth mentioning that Hegel, even more rigorously than Descartes, attempted to construct a philosophical position-more specifically, a presupposition-less logic (cf. Philosophy of Logic-in which one must put all previous philosophical and religious suppositions to the test, questioning even the very principles of logic (e.g., principle of non-contradiction).  The conscientious man, in a way similar to Descartes and Hegel, pursues the “leech,” which is a metaphor for various philosophical, religious and scientific systems whose claims, like the leech, demand or have the potential to demand our life blood.

Interestingly, the conscientious man goes on to say, “in the conscience of science there is nothing great and nothing small.”[3] One wonders why this committed philosopher-scientist would utter such words.  Perhaps the reason is, as Nietzsche says in Human All Too Human (#251, “Signs of a Higher and Lower Culture”), because science is unable to motivate us or move us in the way that religion can.  In the same section from Human All Too Human, Nietzsche speaks of the “two-chambers of the brain,” bringing to our attention the “downside” of living in predominantly scientific, materialistic (philosophically speaking) age.  Scientists, for example, have cast so many doubts on the claims of religion and metaphysics, yet what Nietzsche himself seems to suggest is that which makes us human is tied to religious and even traditional metaphysical claims (e.g., claims about the soul and God).  Consequently, we must develop a “two-chambered brain,” one chamber that allows us to embrace and experience religion, and another that can come to terms with the truths of science and philosophy of the materialist strain.   In other words, as Nietzsche sees things, religion gives us passion and drives us forward.  Science, in contrast, is unable to provide this kind of drive, as its role it to regulate the passions and discern truth from error.   So “truth” in this context, or to use the conscientious man’s term, “honesty,” viz., that which is “hard, strict, narrow, cruel, and inexorable,”[4] lies in science, not in religion and (traditional) metaphysics. Nonetheless, even though he himself has given up on ancient religion (e.g. Judaism, Christianity) and metaphysics, Nietzsche is willing to admit that if all we have is this scientific “truth” and strict, cruel honesty, then something essential to human beings has been lost.  As he says throughout Human All Too Human, the kind of truth science gives is a “humble truth.” Consequently, it cannot satisfy our deepest longings.  As a result, we require a dual-chambered brain in which at least one side, the religion and metaphysics side, gives us what we need to carry on.  With these things in mind, we may interpret the conscientious man’s statement, “where my honesty ceases, I am blind, and I also want to be blind.  But where I want to know, I also want to be honest-that is, hard, strict, narrow, cruel, and inexorable,” as another variation on Nietzsche’s theme of our divided psyche.[5]

Dostoevsky, as well, offers his own critique of rationalism and related forms of reductionism.  Though accused by many scholars of advocating a (so-called) Kierkegaardian irrationalism and extreme voluntarism, as Rowan Williams has convincingly argued, such a conclusion (among other things) fails to take into account (1) what Mikhail Bakhtin coined as the “polyphonic” mode of Dostoevsky’s text-a mode creating both dissonant and consonant extended harmonies-and (2) the way in which Dostoevsky allows Alyosha’s faith to grow and mature, thus exhibiting a picture that reflects more authentically the complexity and struggle involved in living a life of faith in this world.[6] Many critics point to an early statement (Feb. 1854) found in a letter written by Dostoevsky to Natalya Fonvizina, a woman who had gifted him with a copy of the New Testament that he had read avidly while in prison.  The content of the letter is frequently cited as evidence that Dostoevsky’s religious faith is based on irrationalism and exhibits something closely resembling Nietzsche’s will to power (extreme voluntarism).[7] Dostoevsky’s admittedly difficult statement reads as follows:  “if someone were to prove to me that Christ was outside [вне] the truth, and it was really the case that the truth lay outside Christ, then I should choose to stay with Christ rather than the truth.”[8] Williams, having examined and analyzed several of Dosteovsky’s texts and characters-from the Underground Man (Notes from the Underground), to Shatov and Stavrogin (Devils), to Alyosha and Ivan (Brothers Karamazov), offers a plausible (and to this author convincing) way to approach and interpret Dostoevsky’s statement that resonates with Dostoevsky’s own complex understanding of faith as that which “moves and adapts, matures and reshapes itself.” On Williams’s read, even if Dostoevsky’s 1854 confession expresses his own doubts and struggles about how exactly to harmonize faith and reason, belief in the supernatural and the often anti-supernaturalistic bias of science, his confession comes to mean something like the following:

“Truth,” as the ensemble of sustainable propositions about the world, does not compel adherence to any one policy of living rather than another; if faith’s claims about Christ do not stand within that ensemble of propositions, that is not a problem.  It means that they cannot be confused with any worldly power that might assume the right to dictate a policy for living or impose a reconciliation upon unwilling humanity.[9]

Williams goes on to stress that Dostoevsky’s position need not be interpreted as advocating that the claims of faith are contradictory or “arbitrarily willed” and hence, irrational.  Rather,

they represent something that can make possible new motions of moral awareness precisely because they are not generated by the will.  But these new motions generated by the recognition of the claims of faith are a response that moves “with the grain” of things, at least to the extent that it does not lead to literal and spiritual self-destruction.  At this level, response to Christ connects with a “truth” that is more comprehensive than any given ensemble of facts.  The truth of faith is thus something that cannot be reduced to an observable matter of fact:  it is discernable when a certain response is made which creates the possibility of “reconciliation,” and is fleshed out by way of the specific engagements of loving attention.[10]

Even if one became convinced of this interpretation, as Williams points out, it still leaves us with the nagging question of how exactly the claims of faith connect with the “ensemble of facts” of this world?  In other words, do Christ’s claim (the claims of faith) merely have the power to transform a person’s individual, moral “inner space” while leaving the world at large-whether the claims of science, the “facts” of history or the moral chaos and injustice so prevalent in the world-untouched?  Questions like these take us immediately to the famous “Grand Inquisitor,” section of Brothers Karamazov, to which we now turn.

Notes

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[1] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 362.

[2] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 362.

[3] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 362.

[4] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 363.

[5] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 363.

[6] As Williams explains, “What he [Dostoevsky] does in Karamazov is not to demonstrate that it is possible to imagine a life so integrated and transparent that the credibility of faith becomes unassailable; it is simply to show that faith moves and adapts, matures and reshapes itself, not by adjusting its doctrinal content (the error of theological liberalism, with which Dostoevsky had no patience) but by the relentless stripping away from faith of egotistical or triumphalistic expectations.  The credibility of faith is in its freedom to let itself be judged and to grow.  In the nature of the case, there will be no unanswerable demonstrations and no final unimprovable biographical form apart from Christ, who can only be and is only represented in fiction through the oblique reflection of his face in those who are moving toward him” (Dostoevsky:  Language, Faith, and Fiction, p. 10).

[7] Williams, Dostoevsky, p. 15.

[8] From Dostoevsky’s 1854 letter to Natalya Fonvizina (full text in Pol’noe sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. [Leningrad:  Nauka, 1972-1990] 28.2:  176), as found in Williams, Dostoevsky:  Language, Faith and Fiction, p. 15.

[9] Williams, Dostoevsky, pp. 25-6.

[10] Williams, Dostoevsky, p. 26.