The Brothers Karamasov or The Downfall of Europe by Hermann Hesse

(thanks Mr Wittingslow for putting me onto this)

Excerpts:

A people, a period, a country, a continent has fashioned out of its corpus an organ, a sensory instrument of infinite sensitiveness, a very rare and delicate organ. Other men, thanks to their happiness and health, can never be troubled with this endowment. This sensory instrument, this mantological faculty is not crudely comprehensible like some sort of telepathy or magic, although the gift can also show itself even in such confusing forms. Rather is it that the sick man of this sort interprets the movements of his own soul in terms of the universal and of mankind. Every man has visions, every man has fantasies, every man has dreams. And every vision every dream, every idea and thought of a man, on the road from the unconscious to the conscious, can have a thousand different meanings, of which every one can be right. But the appearances and visions of the seer and the prophet are not his own. The nightmare of visions which oppresses him does not warn him of a personal illness, of a personal death, but of the illness, the death of that corpus whose sensory organ he is, This corpus can be a family, a clan, a people, or it can be all mankind. In the soul of Dostoevsky a certain sickness and sensitiveness to suffering in the bosom of mankind which is otherwise called hysteria, found at once its means of expression and its barometer. Mankind is now on the point of realizing this. Already half Europe, at all events half Eastern Europe, is on the road to Chaos. In a state of drunken illusion she is reeling into the abyss and, as she reels, she sings a drunken hymn such as Dmitri Karamazov sang. The insulted citizen laughs that song to scorn, the saint and seer hear it with tears.

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But quite another question is how we are to regard this Downfall. Here we are at the parting of the ways. Those who cling definitely to the past, those who venerate time-honoured cultural forms, the Knights of a treasured morality, must seek to delay this Downfall and will mourn it inconsolably when it passes. For them the Downfall is the End; for the others, it is the Beginning. For the first, Dostoevsky is a criminal, for the others a Saint. For the one party Europe and its soul constitute an entity once and for all, foreordained, inviolate, a thing fixed and immutable. For the other it is a becoming, a mutable, ever-changing thing.

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The Asiatic, the chaotic, the savage, the dangerous, the amoral, in fact the Karamazov elements can, like everything else in the world, be regarded just as well from a positive as from a negative point of view. Those who, from a fear to which they give no name, curse this Dostoevsky, these Karamazovs, these Russians, this Asia, this Demiurge-fantasy, and all their implications, have a hard time before them. For Karamazov dominates more and more. But they fall into error by seeing only the obvious, the visible, the material. They see the Downfall of Europe coming as a horrible catastrophe with thunder and beating of drums, either as Revolution accompanied by slaughter and violence, or as the triumph of crime, lust, cruelty, corruption, and murder.

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With every culture it is the same. We cannot destroy the primeval current, the animal in us, for with its death we should die ourselves. But we can to a certain extent guide it, to a certain extent we can calm it down, to a certain extent make the "Good" serviceable, as one harnesses a vicious horse to a good cart. Only from time to time the lustre of this "Good" becomes old and weak, the instincts no longer really believe in it, refuse any longer to be yoked to it. Then the culture breaks in pieces, slowly as a rule, so that what we call ancient takes centuries to die.

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And before the old, dying culture and morality can be dissolved into a new one, in that fearful, dangerous, painful stage, mankind must look again into its own soul, must see the beast arise in itself again, must again recognize the overlordship of the primeval forces in itself, forces which are super-moral. Those who are fore-ordained, prepared, and ripe for this event are Karamazovs. They are hysterical and dangerous, they are as ready to be malefactors as ascetics, they believe in nothing except the utter dubiousness of every belief.

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In this connexion the figure of Ivan is astonishing. We learn to know him as a modern, accommodating, cultivated individual, somewhat cool, somewhat disappointed, somewhat sceptical, somewhat tired. But he gets younger, more ardent, more significant, more Karamazov-like. It is he who wrote the poem of the Great Inquisitor. It is he who, after coolly ignoring the murderer whom he believes his brother to be, is driven in the end to the deep sense of his own culpability and even to his self-denouncement. And it is he too who the most clearly and the most significantly experiences the spiritual explanation of the unconscious. (On that indeed everything turns. That is the whole meaning of the Downfall, the whole new birth arises from it.) In the last part of the book is a very singular chapter in which Ivan, coming home from his interview with Smerdyakov, sees the devil seated there and converses with him for an hour. This devil is no other than Ivan's unconscious, no other than the shaken-up content, long submerged and apparently forgotten, of his own soul. And he knows it too. Ivan knows it with astonishing certainty and distinctly says so. Nevertheless he speaks with the devil, nevertheless he believes in him--for what is inward, is outward. Nevertheless he is angered against him, surges against him, even throws a glass at him whom he knows to come from within himself. Surely no poem has ever set forth with more lucid clearness the communion of a human being with his own unconscious self. And this communion, this (despite anger) intimate understanding with the devil, this is just the road that the Karamazovs have been elected to show us. Indeed Dostoevsky shows the unconscious to be the devil. And rightly. For that which is within us is distorted by our tamed, cultivated, moral vision into something hateful and Satanic. But some sort of combination of Ivan and Alyosha would indeed provide that higher, more fruitful foundation upon which a new world must be built. Then the unconscious will no longer be the devil, but the God-Devil, Demiurgus, He who was always, who comes from the All. To find a new Good and a new Evil is not art eternal matter, is not the concern of Demiurgus. That is the business of mankind and its humbler and smaller Gods.

Read it, hither>>>

Hark, how the night grows fluted and hollowed... da Vinci, Duino Elegies, the Kantian sublime

Da Vinci's The Annunciation shows the angel Gabriel speaking the divine will to the Virgin Mary. As the exemplar of Rilke's mother figure, she touches the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, both communing with something sacred beyond and protecting from the terror that lies there. The terror of the eternal, the terror of the night, the seduction of its horror, the sublimity therein. Taking a Kantian notion of the sublime, we are getting close to Rilke's night-time world, growing fluted and hollow. For Kant the sublime had to be overwhelming, but only intimate terror, rather than actually embody it. To be in a situation of real fear or danger would render impossible a true feeling of sublimity, wherein our imagination is subordinated to our supersensible faculty of reason. 


The third stanza gives a distinctly Rilkean sublime, though its universality and eternality are made quite clear. Loved his interior world...that primal forest within... where his tiny birth was already outlived... descended, lovingly, into the older blood... And every terror knew him.... Yes, Horror smiled at him... immemorial sap mounts in our arms... That our interior world has already outlived our personal history, our tiny birth, gives us a sense of the Kantian forest within. Within our faculties, we border a world that transcends our sensuous existence. We can never know it objectively, but we can feel it, sense it. It is terror and delight, the holiest kind of pleasure that moves us into the beyond. We are protected from it in various ways; the safety of childhood, of the mother, who forms a sort of blanket of comfort, whose movements are our most familiar. Too, without courage, we can fear, but it is never a sublime fear, it never reaches, branches out, touches the eternal. That lesser fear is destructive only; it neither liberates us nor extends itself - rather, is an inhibitive loop that weakens our souls, our capacity for movement. It is selfish in its circularity, its single-mindedness. It revolves around us, and us alone. We posit ourselves at the centre of a solar system and are crushed by the burden of our own metaphysical weight. We are Dostoevsky's Underground Man; actionless, neutered. Such a great burden to be the prime focus of the world! And yet, in the sublime we recognise something greater, some transcendent universality, and, at the same time, our place within it, for the experience is ours. Ah, we are liberated from ourselves! We realise that we are not so very important, but that we are sublime; we are freed. 


In the Kantian mathematical sublime, we are overwhelmed by our imagination's inability to comprehend the infinite, though our reason, as a totalising faculty, steps in and allows us to grasp the infinite as a totality, though a kind of unfulfilled one. The fact that we can hold as a totality what is objectively impossible to grasp is an indication of our higher calling as rational beings. We are in touch with both a humanity that is universal and our ability to transcend sensuous experience. The dynamical sublime is the confrontation of nature as might, which gives us a sense of our physical destructibility. As long as we are not in real physical danger, we can feel an overwhelming fear at the power of nature that is not tied to our immediate physical situation but to our concept of our sensible selves as insignificant compared to it. Immediately (or in a kind of whirring oscillation) we seem to sense something higher in ourselves, indeed a kind of humanity, a transcending of the physical world by our supersensible faculty. That we are in touch with some kind of eternal essence, whether (as it was for Kant) God or (for the atheists) a sense of rising above the individual self to feel a part of a universal humanity, indicates a higher vocation, that of our rational moral selves.

Leonardo da Vinci; The Annunciation, c. 1472-5