Dostoevsky's Conception of Man: Its Impact on Philosophical Anthropology

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 300 pages
• Published by: Dissertation.com
• Edition: 1st Edition December 1997
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1581120060
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1581120066
• Book Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Weighs: 13.6 ounces

Reader Reviews
As the author of this work I would like to say that in its ideation it is a top notch work of interpretation. Five stars. Written in fulfillment of my doctoral dissertation at Penn State University, the prose is a bit cumbersome. Three stars. Net evaluation: 4 stars! Someday I will simplify this work---that is not to say I will dumb it down---God forbid. There are several original philosophical theses in this work which are pregnant with profound insight concerning human life---to wit, man is "omniadaptable". I coined this term to express Dostoevsky's insight into 'prison anthropology' as described in Notes from the Dead House. Another profound aspect of human life which we glean from Dostoevsky is that labor is an essential aspect of human existence, by 'essential' I mean that one cannot describe the human person without taking labor into consideration. To quote the narrator in the Dead House: "Man must hew a road no matter where it may lead." It follows that history has no direction. Man's technology and marketplace has no ethical direction. Nor does human history. Man, in some sense, is a 'frontier being" (to use Verbeke's term)---neither spirit nor beast. As such man possesses a higher potential and a 'lower' potential. Allow me to expand upon this idea which I believe is quite novel in Dostoevsky's anthropology---an idea, I might add, that is pregnant with profound implications for psychology. To be honest, this is not a 'new' idea...it is at the core of the Gospel writers' vision of man and as I take it is central to Jesus' authentic teaching. At any given moment man has a potential 'higher' path and a lower moral path that he or she can take. This is the essential gate to freedom. Good and evil stand before us as compresent possibilities. Yet, man never gets the complete picture of reality and hence the choices he or she makes are circumscribed within an essential finite ignorance. As such, the human being must complete its choosing in order to be truly ethical with a 'holy spirit'. Man is neither 'good' nor 'evil' per se but can be viewed as Kant does in terms of a purely rational anthropology---man is a "biped with logos" to quote Aristotle. Choosing is not unique to the human animal---this is a common fallacy. Man's freedom understood as a power to choose is at best epiphenomenal...snails and slugs 'choose' as do rabbits and mockingbirds. On the other hand, man taken as the most developed ape does not convey the anguished consciousness before the necessity of choosing in the face of incomplete knowledge. And it is this way every time! No matter how progressed man becomes via technology, he is still ignorant with reference to the totality of the mystery of Being. No, what makes man human is not consciousness but conscience---it is the knowledge and dissatisfaction that accompanies every finite choice. Human being opens to good or evil through choice as a monkey choses to finger a banana or a serpent---this act that is unavoidable since the human consciousness meets the 'resistance'(Max Scheler) of its material incarnation as a dilemma or fork in the road. This is man's essential ethical bipolarity...Certainly Raskolnikov's redemption in Crime and Punishment crystallizes this fact of freedom. It is the negation of karmic retribution and the theory that man is 'determined' through previous sets of actions and choices. Yes, habitual choices lend themselves to the formation of character as in Aristotle's ethical theory, however, in Dostoevsky's view, which I argue is Christ's and mine as well, even though I may have habitually fallen prey to an evil choice 100 times before, this 'karma' does not bind me entirely to its consequences. I remain free for redemption. Though I may have been born into captivity, indeed a slave to sin and unregenerated animal determinism, at the end of the day I have a choice that leads me to a higher state of being. The seed must fall and die in order to live as the epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov reads. Certainly, this is not a freedom to go on sinning, because in an addictive, habitual setting sin is not a free choice but a compulsion. To go on sinning is in fact the only kind of freedom which man or woman in an unregenerated state posesses. But regeneration bids us to answer the knock which Christ offers. Freedom from sin consists in a freely chosen redemption. As such, in my opinion, the only teaching that fully manifests this particular salvation, is authentic Christianity. As St. Paul so eloquently describes, the stumblingblock that is Christ is placed before the two fundamental human positions: Greek and Jewish! The Greek demands knowledge---rationality, in a word---'episteme'. The Jew demands a sign or a miracle---Christ offers only the paradox of himself crucified. Amazing! Grace is absolutely unavoidable. There are two paths that human beings can tread...Sitting on the fence is a pretty dangerous call to quote Mark Knopfler. Man must complete himself to echo Pico della Mirandola's essay. Philosophers are yet Greeks and tend to overrationalize. For example, philosophers tend to syncretize Buddhistic "salvation" with Christian salvation. This is like mixing oil and water. Salvation by means of negation is not of the same ilk as salvation by means of a positive choice. East is east and West is west and never twain shall meet. Attempting to achieve redemption from desire and suffering through a realization of impermanence and nothingness is a completely different path than acknowledging one's radical ignorance and choosing to open one's heart to the Living God. The former requires ascesis and withdrawal from the human world while the latter demands that one loves one's neighbor as oneself---not as a an ethical slogan but as an actual fact! In the unregenerated state the human animal can only manage to muster love in collusion with his or her existential needs. This is the love of the family and tribe and it falls short of 'agape' or St. Paul's description of love in his second letter to the Corinthians. This is the only 'love' that Freud and Western capitalism acknowledge. Agape is madness, self immolation...foolishness. And yet the denial of self and ego resembles the core of Buddha's ethical teaching. The resemblance is superficial and ends here. The denial of self achieved in Christian salvation is predicated by the receipt of an overwhelming gift of God's sacrifice whereas the negation of ego and the realization of impermanence which Buddha exhorts is simply the most highly refined rational strategy of an animal that suffers its being in the world. This book is highly recommended for scholars of Dostoevsky and philosophers who want to know where Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre and even Heidegger discovered the root of their conception of man as a free being.