The Failed Ubermensch

Raskolnikov and Zarathustra

 All I knew

And all I believed

Are crumbling images

That no longer comfort me

Raskolnikov

                 At the end of Crime and Punishment, the main character Raskolnikov has a terrible vision that seems to foretell the very downfall of Modernity. While in prison, Raskolnikov has a fever-dream in which a global pandemic breaks out, caused by a microorganism “endowed with reason and will,” leading every man to believe “the truth was contained in himself alone.” This unwavering conviction, which induces madness and rage, causes nations to take up arms against one another over newly invented, passionately held beliefs. Before they engage on the battlefield, the troops fall upon one another, cannibalizing and tearing each other apart, each gripped by the utter certitude that he himself possesses ultimate truth. They break off into factions, rallying around causes they come up with on the spot, only to abandon them the next day and fight among themselves over this mornings new ideology. Each man presents his own corrections and his own version of belief, and the world consumes itself in this way.  If Lyotard was correct when he characterized the post-Modern condition as the breakdown of meta-narratives, then Dostoyevsky foresaw the state of the world 100 years before it came to be.

                This devastating nightmare played itself out in dramatic fashion over the course of both world wars and several major civil wars – most relevantly, the Russian revolution – in which three competing ideologies clashed for the future of civilization. Fascism, Socialism, and Democracy fought over pieces of crumbling Empires for roughly four decades, and these conflicts made Dostoyevsky’s work one of chilling prophesy. Though these major conflicts can be seen as the initiation of the prophesy, it has yet to fully play itself out, particularly in America. In the wake of this period of conflict, rather than settling into the ideology of the victors, the West has continued the process of fracturing into ever more specialized perspectives, and as accounts of reality proliferate, people of the same nation devolve into cannibalizing each other on the cultural and political scene.

                At the moment, it could be argued that there is no enemy nation outside ourselves. Perhaps a vague threat looms from China and lingers to an extent from Islam, but ostensibly the West has no direct enemy on any of its borders who want to invade and take it over, as a policy. In this sense, it seems today we are still deep in the bloodbath of Raskolnikov’s vision, in which Westerners and, specifically, Americans, fight each other with more vigor than they’ve shown against an external threat in decades. And what are we fighting over? To a small extent, policy, but to a much larger degree, the in-fighting is over somehow allowing a multiplicity of perspectives to occupy the same space in the public consciousness. What we’re really seeing with this cacophony of perspectives is either the attempt of one ideology to emerge triumphant or the long, slow process of total civilizational disintegration.

                In Raskolnikov’s nightmare, the competing perspectives breakdown into smaller and smaller factions until man-on-man conflict consumes society and everything is brought crashing down: trade ceases and agriculture cannot be continued. This stagnation, the effects of this gridlock, are today decried everywhere in the inability of our politicians to act in the face of national problems such as gun violence or the opioid epidemic, repair our “crumbling infrastructure,” or rein in spiraling national debt. We see the proliferation of perspectives with the call for acknowledging the “lived experience” of myriad “marginalized” groups or individuals, whose position must be held on equal footing with all other convictions.

Consider, for example, when George Floyd was killed and people began asserting, seemingly everywhere at once, that “Black Lives Matter.” How long did it take for that message to become “Black Trans Lives Matter?” The US military has only been allowing women in all active-duty roles for only 27 years, yet it has had to continually loosen its physical fitness standards to accommodate their desire to participate. Meanwhile, in the wake of a real pandemic, with obesity and opioid use still at epidemic proportions,, the US government put a trans person – an identity that only emerged from the shadows a decade ago – at the top of the department of Health and Human Services. Suddenly these new perspectives, like those in Raskalnikov’s vision, are immediately on the level of all other ideologies and the institutions they enter must suffer before the ideology is rejected as false or inefficient.

                In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov brings all of his misery upon himself, and of course upon the pawn broker and her truly innocent sister. Dostoyevsky is known to have written this novel, at least in part, as a critique of utilitarianism, in which policy or law is implemented to serve the greatest good to the greatest number. Dostoyevsky starkly renders the true implications of this perspective with the graphic and prolonged murder scene of the old women, which Raskolnikov excuses with his intention to use her money to go on and accomplish great things. In other words, the good eventually done through this deed will retroactively justify the deed. Raskolnikov, then, rationalizes violence, and we can see this sort of scenario playing out writ large in our society. Mass immigration, despite brining in criminals and suppressing wages, is rationalized because a greater number of the people brought in will be non-violent and hard working. Violent criminals are let out on bail reform because while some go on to commit more violent crimes, the majority do not. And one need only look again to the George Floyd killing, and its subsequent rioting, to find a large-scale justification for violence.

                The question here seems obvious. What is one to do in the face of all this? Raskolnikov occupies both ends of the spectrum, and Dostoyevsky seems to give us an answer in the wake of the vision. Initially Raskolnikov embodies reasoned morality, which brings him immense psychological torment. He finally relents and confesses his crime to relieve his conscience, and while in prison has this fever dream and perceives the fault in this line of thinking. He ostensibly “finds religion,” for his realization comes also in the wake of reading the bible and interacting with true believers, not least of them the patient Sonya. What Raskolnikov discovers, however, is not so much that religion is “true” or “real,” but that society needs to be ordered around a preset, over-arching set of principles, lest things devolve and collapse. Therefore, we might say that the lesson here is to eschew intellectualized, reasoned, secular “morality” for traditional religion and faith. In fact, elsewhere in Dostoyevsky we see him portray reason as psychologically destructive and faith as spiritually rewarding in the conflict between Ivan and Alyosha of The Karamazov Brothers.

                Things are not so simple, sadly, in todays world, and upon first reading it may appear that Dostoyevsky does not see this. When the world is literally coming apart, one cannot simply fall back on tradition, for these traditions are themselves fracturing and crumbling to dust. The disorder wrought by this fracturing is on full display in Crime and Punishment with the alcoholism and rampant despair of the poor and wayward drunkards, the attempted suicides by and predations upon the lost souls wandering St. Petersberg, the literal and figurative prostitution of young women to support their families. Remember this book takes place in the wake of the freeing of the Serfs in Russia and the widescale, rapid introduction of liberal policies imported from Western Europe. In fact, the ideas Raskolnikov bases his wicked plan on are themselves watered down European Enlightenment values as presented through the Russian intelligentsia. So in the end, when Raskolnikov falls back on religion, one must ask if this religion still exists and, if so, for how long? History proves that in what will become the Soviet Union, it lasts only about another half a century.

                Dostoyevsky does admit this however, he simply doesn’t offer a solution. At the very end of the vision, he says that everyone save very few, silent and hidden, fall victim to the rationality pestilence, and the only hope for these men is to wait for the madness to eventually starve so they can begin a new, unpolluted generation. Raskolnikov falls into the arms of Sonya and finds comfort there, a metaphor for falling into the arms of the church, who holds him as the world burns. But if we are being honest, Sonya is herself a defiled prostitute, and the Church too is crumbling today as well as then. Raskolnikov finding religion is almost, in a way, giving up. It may not look like it, because of all the vehemence, posturing, and vitriol spewed by the reactionary right, but in a way the reactionary spirit is one of surrender, surrendering to the failure of your ideology, and denying the supremacy of what you see as tearing your civilization apart. The reactionary position is the rear-guard action of a receding people, and for how best to manage this retreat, Crime and Punishment can offer us no further insight. To avoid the trap of reaction and move into the future, we must look to Nietzsche.

                                                                                Zarathustra

                The diametrical theme of Crime and Punishment is faith versus reason, Sonya representing faith while Raskolnikov embodies reason. In the book of Matthew, remember, Christ tells the priests that the prostitutes will “go into the Kingdom of God” first because they have faith [i]. This serves a dual function in the novel, for faith in God relieves one of the spiritual torment wrought by the suffering of the world, whilst simultaneously laying out ordering principles for society, clearly defining what is good and what is evil. Raskolnikov both finds a reprieve from his debilitating guilt and apprehends the deleterious effects the breakdown of faith and, subsequently, morality will have for civilization. If reason inaugurates chaos in the world and in ones soul, and faith offers no more then a redoubt from the catastrophe, there must be a third way.

                Nietzsche presents this third way with Zarathustra, though he makes no illusions about its ease or even possibility in societies present condition. Raskolnikov’s scheme can be seen as his attempt to craft a new system of morality, one to replace the receding institutions of the church and the state with his own values. He lacks the constitution to carry his system to its fruition, however, and he becomes a broken man who veritably collapses into religion. Thusly Dostoyevsky demonstrates to us the folly of taking upon oneself the burden of inverting the values handed down by tradition. Perhaps Raskolnikov’s downfall was not caused by attempting to construct a new system of morality as such, but the way he went about it. His theory of the “extraordinary man” reasoned that the pawnbrokers’ death was necessary to achieve greatness and bring splendor to the masses. In other words, he reasoned himself into attempting to become something he was not. He did not act out of some inner compulsion to greatness, but out of a rationalization that rendered his actions totally senseless and nihilistic.

                Nietzsche’s solution, and that of Zarathustra, is to allow our instincts to flourish. The instinct to greatness, to conquer, to disregard the inherent value of others in the face of the will, is a theme that runs through much of Nietzsche’s work, and is the central pillar of Zarathustra’s worldview. The instinct is what must be repressed in order for society to function, and those who fail to get it under control become the “subterraneans” of todays world, the criminal type who society relegates to prisons and the margins of society [ii]. This perspective explains the criminals’ scorn for Raskolnikov in Siberia, for they are born criminals whose very way of living lands them in jail, and they rebuke Raskolnikov for murdering the old woman because he is a “gentleman.” [iii] Raskolnikov puts reason ahead of instinct and blunders into a deed whose “image he cannot endure once done.”[iv] In this way Raskolnikov attempts to force an invaluation of values by way of reason, but as Nietzsche makes clear, the Ubermensch must emerge, he cannot be constructed using the tools of modernity, the linchpin of which is reason itself.  Zarathustra returns to the wilderness when the people are not ready to hear his message, and does not re-emerge until he sees the eagle carrying the serpent, a sign that the time is right for the people to receive his teaching.

                The path to the Ubermensch – Nietzsche’s version of the “extraordinary man” – is as fraught with danger and failure as Raskolnikov’s. We may see Raskolnikov as analogous to the tight-rope walker from Zarathustra’s prologue, someone who attempts and fails to cross the abyss of nihilism on his own. The dancing devil who distracts the man making the crossing, causing him to fall, may be likened in Crime and Punishment to the “incomplete” ideas “floating in the air”[v] in Russia that fools like Raskolnikov take up, to their own demise. In this way we must not allow ourselves to get distracted by the cacophony of ideas that have become a torrent in the modern world, bombarding the individual with ever mutating ways of being. Zarathustra remains centered on the will, and not molded by ideas.

                Expanding the analogy to the novel as a whole, we must consider the Last Men and the conflict between faith and instinct. On the surface, it may seem that the drunkards and aimless lost souls wandering St. Petersburg in Crime and Punishment are the “Last Men,” blinking in their stupor. I contend, however, that Raskolnikov himself also becomes a “Last Man” at the end of the novel when he finds religion. Today’s “Last Men” are often referred to as “NPC’s” or “Normies,” people who are outside the struggle for the future of civilization, people who shuffle about in the safety of the herd, content to graze upon the grasses of mainstream culture and never try to accomplish anything great or move society beyond the current morass. These folks mill about on the edge of the abyss, failing to ever peek into its depths, let alone attempt to cross like Raskolnikov.  When the church capitulates to woke ideology more and more every year, in many cases actually proselytizing its doctrines, one cannot possible see it as a bulwark against the tsunami of wokeness.

                In the gay science, Nietzsche discusses his “God is dead” concept in slightly more poetic detail in the aphorism entitled “the peasant rebellion of the spirit.” He likens the church to a picturesque scene of Roman ruins, with a few walls and columns still standing, others tumbled down and overgrown with grass and weeds. perhaps we may imagine a setting sun casting vermillion upon the scene for one last flash of brilliance before the dark of night submerges it in shadow.  In the wake of the enlightenment and modernity, the church cannot offer a way forward, the upsurge and mingling of myriad perspectives has negated its institutional power and swept it away with the new ideas.  Nietzsche decries, here and elsewhere, the great leveling of society and how it perpetuates the herd mentality and the Last Men. The church, according to Nietzsche, is an institution for ruling, and it is destroyed by “modern ideas” like those of Raskolnikov, who clearly is not an “extraordinary man.” The peasant rebellion of the spirit is the masses deciding for themselves what is right without recourse to any authority figure, such as a priest who once served the confessional role that Sonya does in Crime and Punishment. If we wish to survive this plague, perhaps the best way forward is to plunder the iron girders from the ruins of tradition and use them to build the New Man.

*****

[i] The Gospel of Matthew, 21:31-2   [ii] Nietzsche; Twilight of the Idols, aphorism 45, chapter “Roving Expeditions of an Inopportune Philosopher” [iii] Dostoyevsky; Crime and Punishment: epilogue, Chapter II [iv] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Of the Pale Criminal [v] Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment: Translators Forward, Pevear and Volokhonsky, Knopf, 1992