Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and the Outsider

George Pattison’s closing essay in Dostoevsky and the Christian Traditionexplores the similarities between Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky.

It’s been common to read both as “prophets revealing to `modern man’ the abyssal freedom, the wild
frontiers and the midnight cries that threaten both the rational
system-building of philosophers and social engineers as well as the
moral complacency of a bourgeois world that is only too happy to
believe that `all is well’” (240).

Pattison finds this a “deeply flawed” reading. Though acknowledging that both “are critical of totalising rational systems and bourgeois complacency,” he adds that they are “equally critical of  . . . arbitrary, capricious and individualistic protest.” Both view such protest as “reactive” and ineffective (240-1). 

The outsider is a natural result of the totalizing systems of modernity, and in that sense a part of the system: “both see the outsider syndrome as representing
a vitally and fundamentally important event in the spiritual,
moral, social and intellectual life of modernity. The outsider is the
inevitable shadow of modern rationalism, such that both rationalist
and outsider are mutually interdependent, symbiotic life-forms that,
in their mutually destructive rivalry, threaten to obliterate altogether
the integrity of the human being and destroy the bases of authentic
sociality. Nihilism, in short, is not to be identified simply and solely
with the voice of the outsider, the voice of protest, the negation of
rationality: nihilism is the denial of authentic humanity that both
rationality and the protest against rationality conspire to bring
about” (241).

Following Girard, Pattison argues that, for instance, “Dostoevsky does not endorse the protest of the Underground
Man: he represents it ± and in doing so explains it precisely
as a mark the underground man’s lack of freedom, his domination
by a structure of mimetic desire that is mechanistic in essence and
that effects the frustration of self-attainment. True freedom is to be
found through the transformation of social experience ± and not in
the mere denial of that experience. The fundamental problematic of
freedom has not merely to do with the transcendental constitution of
the self but with the self in relation to others” (244).

I’m not persuaded by Pattison’s Girardian conclusion, but he got Dostoevsky right: For all his sympathetic understanding for life underground, that’s not where he wants us to live.