I have made my career as a social philosopher, but the questions that drew me into philosophy– before I knew that I was being drawn into philosophy- were how and whether we can enjoy life if it has no ultimate, transcendent meaning. In recent years I have moved away from directly political-economic problems to address that problem explicitly from (what I regard, anyway) as a historical materialist perspective. I think that materialists above all have to provide an answer to the question of why life is worthwhile if it is a contingent emergent product of one possible evolutionary pathway that energy took and destined to die out, forever. And historical materialists, who are concerned not with the evolution of energy but the development of human institutions, should be concerned with the problem of meaning because if life is not meaningful, or no cogent answer can be supplied to the question of why it is meaningful if the universe of which it is a part is not, then it hardly makes sense to worry about what institutions organize human societies. If we are concerned with good lives then we must assume that life is worth living, but the answer to the question why it is worth living if death is permanent annihilation is not obvious.

Although they were submerged in my first four books and most of the papers I wrote and talks I gave over the first twenty years of my career, my existential concerns always coloured my thinking. Having said enough on the question of what is to be done (I do not mean that there is nothing more to say, but I have nothing more to contribute on that front) I have taken up the problem of meaning and life-value in my past few projects. The overarching concern with problems of meaning and life-value in a godless universe of light, heat, and mostly empty space led me back to Dostoevsky’s three masterpieces: The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment. My first encounters with these novels took place at intervals of roughly ten years: Crime and Punishment as teenager, The Possessed in my twenties, and The Brothers Karamazov in my thirties. After so many years almost all the details of the plots had faded, and along with them my appreciation of the literary value of the novels. What I retained was a general impression of the stories and the philosophical conflicts that Dostoevsky’s characters explore.

Since I was not re-reading them simply for the pleasure of reading but because I wanted to re-immerse myself in the philosophical struggles and contradictions the protagonists exemplify, there was a danger that I would read them too instrumentally. I rarely read philosophy for pleasure anymore, not only because most philosophers are uninteresting writers, but also because every time I open the hottest new thing I tend to think: new packaging, old ideas. I do not mean that in a dismissive way, but only that I have realized (as I think most philosophers do at a certain point) that we work on a very few fundamental problems, and there are only so many ways that one can try to solve them. There can be important variations on a theme and I certainly still learn from philosophical reading, but that exhilarating feeling I had when I was a student and young professor of an almost physical expansion of self when I read philosophy has long been absent from my research related reading. I only read philosophy these days when I am working on a project that forces me to look at what others have thought about it. I come to philosophical texts as foils or supports for my own argument. Consequently, I pay selective attention to the arguments and take from them what I need to question or help make my case. But when it comes to reading literature, one wants to be involved with the whole text and not simply whatever ideas the author is exploring.

But any danger that I that would read the novels too narrowly, too ‘philosophically,’ was dispelled as soon as opened The Possessed again. From its first page to the epilogue of Crime and Punishment that I just finished I delighted in the richly painted scenes, the often humorous counterpoint to the tragic narratives, and the often salacious undertones to the inner lives of Dostoevsky’s unforgettable characters.

Dostoevsky’s genius was to combine in the highest degree soaring philosophical insight into the most fundamental problems of mortality, purpose, and the value of human life in the absence of transcendent foundations and his ability to paint scenes and craft characters that draw the reader into their own internal logic of development. His cityscapes are evocative without wasting words, the dialogical interactions between characters seem natural and express the full range of human emotions and tensions, but the real power of the novels comes through in his unmatched power to capture the inner turmoil of his protagonist’s lives. Dostoevsky’s own convictions are not difficult to discover, but his greatness as an artist lies in his not allowing them to silence his protagonist’s attempt to live free of what they regard as illusions but Dostoevsky regarded as the highest truths. The dramatic tension of the novels centres on the ambivalence that drives the central characters Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov, and Raskolnikov (especially the later two- Stavrogin and the other main characters in The Possessed are a bit more cardboard caricature’s of the nihilists that Dostoevsky wanted to expose and skewer).

Of all the characters Raskilonikov is, to my mind, the most finely drawn and tragic. He is naive, arrogant, unoriginal, vastly more brilliant in his own mind than in reality. But he is also receptive to the suffering of others. In a fit a empathy he gives his last 20 roubles to the widow of a man who was at best a drinking buddy, and eventually falls in love with (and is redeemed by) the man’s prostitute daughter, Sonya, who accompanies him to Siberia. He convinces himself that he is one of the great men morally permitted to kill in the service of loftier ends, but he is undone almost immediately by conscience, which debilitates him and makes him easy prey for the investigator of the murder that he committed. He pretends to be intellectually aloof but his main motivations are sentimental. He wants to be Napoleon but undoes any future career prospects by driving away his sister’s suitor because he knows he is exploiting her and threatening to kill another man who once tried to rape her when that man reappears in Petersburgh. Raskolnikov is not just a refutation of nihilism, he is a case study in self-deception, guilt and conscience, the undoing of youthful arrogance by the contradictions of life, and of devotion and love as well.

While Raskolnikov is the most finely drawn of Dostoevsky’s characters, Ivan Karamazov is the most philosophically compelling. In an unforgettable scene with his devout brother, Alyosha, Ivan articulates a breathtakingly powerful and beautiful vindication of life in a a meaningless universe. He not only demolishes the idea that life has to have some cosmic purpose to be enjoyed, he exposes the complicity of cosmic purposes with vicious indifference to existing human life. Best known for his notorious assertion that if there is no God then nothing is true and everything is permitted, his deeper commitments lead in the opposite direction: not towards indifference to life, but the embrace of its contingency, vulnerability, and simple pleasures: He tells Alyosha that he “loves life more than the meaning of it”(Dostoevsky, 1971, 252).  While reason suggests that there is no greater value in a long rather than a short life if both end in timeless oblivious, he rebels, as Camus insisted we should against the absurd, declaring that “I go on living in spite of logic.  Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky leaves as they grow in the spring” (Dostoevsky, 1971, 252).  But his argument reaches a crescendo when he convicts the believers in divine plans with an inhuman indifference to actual living beings: “If all should suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children got to do with it?  It is beyond comprehension why they should suffer.  Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? … I renounce the higher harmony altogether.  It is not worth the tears of that one tortured child” (Dostoevsky, 1978, 268).  I have read no more perfect synthesis of poetry and philosophy.

The characters of The Possessed are less nuanced and riven by inner turmoil. As I noted above, Stavrogin, the protagonist of The Possessed is more caricatured than either Ivan Karamazov or Raskolnikov; more of an obvious reductio ad aburdem of the youthful nihilists of the 1860’s that Dostoevsky wanted to attack. The chapter which contains his ‘confession” included in some versions of the novel seems rather too convenient and unmotivated, unlike Raskolnikov’s eventual conversion, which has its roots in the empathetic and devoted side of his character. In general The Possessed is the most didactic of the three novels. but even though it takes no effort to grasp the argument that Dostoevsky wants to make against the nihilist and early socialist movements, there are also wonderfully humorous scenes. The meeting of the nihilist cell will reduce anyone who has been to any sort of student radical meeting to convulsions of laughter. And Kirilov, the other main nihilist figure who kills himself to prove that human beings are ultimately free (we are the power of life and death), is both mocked for the absurdity of his ideas and treated with tenderness. Kirilov mourns the murder of his traveling companion by Stavrogin and his plan, as idiotically self-undermining as it is, was conceived as self-sacrifice for the sake of all future humans who would be able to recognize the value of and enjoy life once freed from the metaphysical burden of worrying about eternal punishment.

Walter Kaufmann wrote that philosophy should be considered a minor subset of literature (Philosophy and Tragedy). I believe that he is correct, at least as regards existential and ethical philosophy. Philosophy is to literature as anatomy is to medicine: we treat trace the skeleton that supports life; the novelist and the poet (the best ones) follow the much messier paths of the full flesh and blood human beings who live the conflict between present and eternity, between desire and duty, between self and other. Philosophy raises the mind above the earth to consider the cogency of the principles by which life may be lived and evaluated; the novelist and poet stays on earth and brings to life the whole integrated and explosive inner life of people, with all their ambivalences, turmoil, self-undermining drives, and the seeing the better and doing the worse (Spinoza) of concrete living individuals and the contexts of their lives. Philosophy is world-analysis, but literature is world-creation.