Abstract
I do not want to say much about the age-old problem of whether or not our actions (and thoughts) are determined by laws governing the structure of matter and working out an inalienable course despite our illusions that we are, to some degree, free and responsible agents. Upon reflection, it is soon evident that hard determinists are unlikely to be easily refuted, if only because, as Jonathan Glover says, they can keep insisting — however speculatively — on further refinements of their initial position.1 Thus, any example we might give of a free action will be explained by further hypothetical subtleties in the predetermining biological, biochemical or material causes that are held to produce that action. As William H. Davis2 points out, the key issue in this kind of debate is whether or not the future contains more real possibilities than one, but no test or experiment can resolve this, because experimental conclusions always pertain to past actions, and cannot demonstrate that something else could have happened instead. After considering a range of such arguments, Peter van Inwager3 draws the resolute conclusion that thoroughgoing determinism is incompatible with free will because the determinist position entails that I would have to falsify nature’s laws to act freely.
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Notes
See Jonathan Glover, I. The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1988), pp. 181 ff.
William H. Davis, The Freewill Question (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 4.
Peter van Inwagen, ‘The Incompatibility of Freewill and Determinism’, Philosophical Studies 27 (1975), 185–99.
See Daniel C. Dennett, Elbow Room. The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p. 2.
Charles Taylor, ‘Responsibility for Self’, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 281–99. Page numbers are cited in the text.
Peter Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962), 1–25.
Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 435–50.
D. M. MacKay, ‘On the Logical Indeterminacy of a Free Choice’, Mind 69 (1960), 31–40; ‘The Use of Behavioural Language to Refer to Mechanical Processes,’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 13 (1962), 89–103; Jonathan Glover, I. The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity, p. 65.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 434 ff.
The fullest account of Berdyaev’s life is Donald A. Lowrie, Rebellious Prophet. A Life of Nicolai Berdyaev (London: Victor Gollancz, 1960). I draw mainly on Lowrie for the following account.
Also helpful are Matthew Spinka, Nicolai Berdyaev: Captive of Freedom (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1950);
Konstantin Sigov, ‘Exile and Freedom: The Life of Nicolai Berdyaev’, Soviet Literature 9 (1990), 149–58.
For an account of Boehme, and how his philosophy relates to the historical development of the idea of the person, see Patrick Grant, Spiritual Discourse and the Meaning of Persons (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 119 ff.;
also, Carnegie Samuel Calian, The Significance of Eschatology in the Thoughts of Nicolas Berdyaev (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1965), pp. 15–17. On the Ungrund outside God, see Berdyaev, Dream and Reality, p. 99.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Page numbers are cited in the text. Bakhtin and Berdyaev were writing in the 1920s, but Berdyaev’s books were suppressed in Russia.
See David Patterson, ‘Dostoevsky’s Poetics of Spirit: Bakhtin and Berdyaev’, Dostoevsky Studies 8 (1987), 219–31. Patterson considers the similarity between Bakhtin’s and Berdyaev’s approaches to Dostoevsky, concluding that ‘What Bakhtin does implicitly Berdyaev states explicitly’ (219). The key to their approach to Dostoevsky is polyphony, through which freedom is pursued, and which leads to transformation.
James C. S. Wernham, Two Russian Thinkers. An Essay in Berdyaev and Shestov (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), pp. 12 ff. Wernham notices that Berdyaev describes Ivan as an atheist, but claims that Berdyaev also saw Ivan’s protest atheism as implicitly theological. Thus, Ivan’s is ‘the atheism which brings liberation from an unworthy conception of God’ (14).
See Robert L. Belknap, The Structure of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ (Paris: Mouton, 1967), chapter 2, ‘The Structure of Inherent Relationships’, pp. 22–53, and pp. 64 ff., on how the Legend echoes throughout the novel.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Preface to The Grand Inquisitor’, ed. Anthony Beal, D. H. Lawrence. Selected Literary Criticism (London: Heinemann, 1956), pp. 233–4.
Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion. Commentary on the Genesis, Language, and Style of Dostoevsky’s Novel (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), p. 92, points to the ‘masquerade and melodrama’ of the Legend, and calls attention to various ‘false notes’. Terras also suggests that some details suggest Ivan takes a perverse pleasure in telling his shocking anecdotes about the children.
On Dostoevsky’s linking of Roman Catholicism and socialism, see Jacques Catteau, ‘The Paradox of the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov’, trans. Françoise Rosset, ed. Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky. New Perspectives (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1984), pp. 246 ff. There is no end of debate on these matters.
See, for instance, Malcolm V. Jones, Dostoevsky after Bakhtin. Readings in Dostoevsky’s Fantastic Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 166 ff., and Terras, A Karamazov Companion, pp. 90 ff.
See the letter to Nicolay Lyubimov, 10 May, 1879: ‘All the stories about the children occurred, took place, were printed in the newspapers, and I can show where. Nothing has been invented by me. The general who hunted down the child with dogs, and the whole fact is a real occurrence, was published this winter…’. See Fyodor Dostoevsky. Complete Letters, vol. 5, ed. and trans. David A. Lowe (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1991), p. 83.
For an interesting account of Ivan’s woundedness, see Robert Louis Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky. Deliriums and Nocturnes (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 319 ff.
Michael Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 165–91. See especially p. 182, on Ivan’s concern for his own condition as an oppressed child; also, ‘the confrontation between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor is as much a disquisition on parenthood as it is an exercise in theology’.
See Robert L. Belknap, ‘The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel’, William Mills Todd III, Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), pp. 193 ff.
See Robert L. Belknap, ‘The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel’, ed. Todd, p. 185; William L. Leatherbarrow, Fedor Dostoevsky (Boston: Twayne, 1989), p. 157; Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky, p. 345; Jacques Catteau, ‘The Paradox of the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov’, trans. Françoise Rosset, ed. Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky. New Perspectives (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1984), p. 252; D. H. Lawrence, ‘Preface to The Grand Inquisitor’, p. 234;
Ellis Sandoz, Political Apocalypse. A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), pp. 214–5.
Denys Turner, Marxism and Christianity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). Page numbers are cited in the text.
Georg Lukács, ‘Dostoevsky’, trans. and ed. René Wellek, Dostoevsky. A Collection of Critical Essays (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1962), p. 158.
Bakhtin contrasts the polyphonic novel and the monologic, where the author’s point of view controls the characters’ discourse. Again, there is a great deal of debate about Dostoevsky’s actual opinions. As Terras points out in A Karamazov Companion, during his last years Dostoevsky was a well-known political conservative (3), and The Brothers Karamazov was serialised in the conservative Russian Herald (33). His journalism expresses ‘obvious misconceptions, biases, and errors’ (27), including anti-socialism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism (71 ff.). None of this should be underestimated, even though, as the modern editors of A Writer’s Diary. Volume I. 1873–76, point out, it is hard to pin Dostoevsky down. As John Bayley says in a review of this edition, ‘Dostoevsky’s “own” personal and philosophical views — that is the ones that are prefaced with an “I” — are repeatedly held up to ridicule by other voices in the chorus, and distorted or insanely emphasised by some wholly unappealing persona’. It seems that polyphony extends beyond Dostoevsky’s novels, and ‘although the Diary contains all these hateful things, its art does not, and cannot, endorse them’. See ‘Hearing Voices’, The Sunday Times, ‘Books’, 26 June 1994, p. 7. See also A. Boyce Gibson, The Religion of Dostoevsky (London: SCM, 1973), p. 209: ‘there are no set views which can be ascribed to “Dostoevsky”…. almost to the end, he was divided against himself’.
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© 1996 Patrick Grant
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Grant, P. (1996). Freedom: Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and Berdyaev’s The Destiny of Man. In: Personalism and the Politics of Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379480_5
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