Textbook for universities edited by V. V. Mironov
Philosophical ideas of F. M. Dostoevsky
A characteristic feature of Russian philosophy - its connection with literature - is clearly manifested in the works of great literary artists - A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, N. V. Gogol, F. I. Tyutchev, L. N. Tolstoy and others.
The work of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881), which belongs to the highest achievements of Russian national identity, has a particularly deep philosophical meaning. His chronological framework– 40-70s XIX century - a time of intensive development of domestic philosophical thought, the formation of the main ideological trends. Dostoevsky took part in the understanding of many philosophical and social ideas and the teachings of his time - from the emergence of the first socialist ideas on Russian soil to the philosophy of unity of V.S. Solovyov.
In the 40s young Dostoevsky joined the educational direction of Russian thought: he became a supporter of the movement that he later called theoretical socialism. This orientation led the writer to the socialist circle of M. V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky. In April 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested and charged with distributing a “criminal letter about religion and government from the writer Belinsky.” The verdict read: deprive of ranks, all rights of state and subject death penalty by shooting. The execution was replaced by four years of hard labor, which Dostoevsky served in the Omsk fortress. This was followed by service as a private in Semipalatinsk. Only in 1859 did he receive permission to settle in Tver, and then in St. Petersburg.
The ideological content of his work after hard labor underwent a significant change. The writer comes to the conclusion that it is meaningless revolutionary transformation society, since evil, he believed, was rooted in human nature itself. Dostoevsky becomes an opponent of the spread of “universal human” progress in Russia and recognizes the importance of “soil” ideas, the development of which he begins in the magazines “Time” (1861 – 1863) and “Epoch” (1864-1865). The main content of these ideas is expressed in the formula: “A return to the folk root, to the recognition of the Russian soul, to the recognition of the folk spirit.” At the same time, Dostoevsky opposed the bourgeois system, as an immoral society that replaced freedom with “a million.” He condemned contemporary Western culture for the lack of a “brotherly principle” in it and excessively expanded individualism.
Home philosophical problem for Dostoevsky there was a problem of man, the solution of which he struggled with all his life: “Man is a mystery. It must be unraveled...” 87 The complexity, duality, and antinomianism of man, the writer noted, make it very difficult to ascertain the real motives of his behavior. The reasons for human actions are usually much more complex and varied than we later explain. Often a person shows self-will because of his powerlessness to change anything, because of one disagreement with “inexorable laws,” like the hero of “Notes from Underground” (1864) by Dostoevsky.
Cognition moral essence a person, from his point of view, the task is extremely complex and diverse. Its complexity lies in the fact that a person has freedom and is free to make a choice between good and evil. Moreover, freedom, a free mind, “the outrage of a free mind” can become instruments of human misfortune, mutual destruction, and can “lead into such a jungle” from which there is no way out.
The top philosophical creativity Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” (1879-1880) was his last and largest work, which included a philosophical poem (a legend, as V.V. Rozanov called it) about the Grand Inquisitor. Two interpretations collide here human freedom, represented by the Grand Inquisitor and Christ. The first is the understanding of freedom as well-being, arrangement material side life. The second is freedom as a spiritual value. The paradox is that if a person gives up spiritual freedom in favor of what the Grand Inquisitor called “quiet, humble happiness,” then he will cease to be free. Freedom is therefore tragic, and moral consciousness man, being his offspring free will, is characterized by duality. But such is it in reality, and not in the imagination of a supporter of abstract humanism, representing man and his spiritual world in an idealized form.
The moral ideal of the thinker was the idea of “conciliar unity in Christ” (Vyach. Ivanov). He developed the concept of conciliarity, coming from the Slavophiles, interpreting it not only as the ideal of unity in the church, but also as a new ideal form of sociality based on religious and moral altruism. Dostoevsky equally rejects both bourgeois individualism and socialist collectivism. He puts forward the idea of fraternal conciliarity as “a completely conscious and unforced self-sacrifice of oneself for the benefit of all.”
A special place in Dostoevsky’s work was occupied by the theme of love for the motherland, Russia and the Russian people, associated not only with his “soil-based” ideas and with the rejection of the “alien ideas” of nihilists, but also with ideas about the social ideal. The writer makes a distinction between the popular and intellectual understanding of the ideal. If the latter presupposes, in his words, the worship of something floating in the air and “for which it is difficult to even come up with a name,” then nationality as an ideal is based on Christianity. Dostoevsky did everything possible, especially in the philosophical and journalistic “Diary of a Writer,” to awaken national feeling in society; he complained that, although Russians have a “special gift” for perceiving the ideas of foreign nationalities, they sometimes know the nature of their nationality very superficially. Dostoevsky believed in the “worldwide responsiveness” of the Russian people and considered it a symbol of Pushkin’s genius. He insisted precisely on the idea of “all-humanity” and explained that it did not contain any hostility to the West. “...Our aspiration to Europe, even with all its hobbies and extremes, was not only legal and reasonable, at its core, but also popular, completely coinciding with the aspirations of the people’s spirit” 88.
Dostoevsky as a writer and thinker had a huge impact on the spiritual atmosphere of the 20th century, on literature, aesthetics, philosophy (primarily on existentialism, personalism and Freudianism), and especially on Russian philosophy, passing on to it not just some system of ideas, but something what the philosopher and theologian G.V. Florovsky called “the expansion and deepening of metaphysical experience itself.”