Logos Sent into a Headspin: Notes on the Conversation with the Devil in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/1013-2309/1601Abstract
The essay examines the intellectual structure of Ivan Karamazov’s conversation with the devil against the background of Kant’s epistemology and Karl Jaspers’ General Psychopathology. Dostoevsky takes rational thought down two paths, each of which leads to a point where it encounters something that cannot be proven but is nonetheless undeniable: the voice of conscience and the sensory presence of a hallucination. He constructs his novel in such a way that the logic first fails morally and then, at the peak of the action, fails in itself. The deeper ethical meaning of this construction is finally explored with reference to Horst-Jürgen Gerigk’s interpretation of the Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky’s novel provides not only a “theory of stages in the development of evil” (as Gerigk would have it); it houses an entire penal colony with finely graduated sanctions for each evil.
Keywords: The Brothers Karamazov, Devil, Evil, Ethics, Perception, Rationalism, Justice, Banality
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