Dostoevskii taught me that most of our actions emerge from the interplay between our social and our psychological identities, and that there are two ways of exploring human's psyche outside the realm of caused actions and reactions.
Firstly, our actions are not merely external in origin because in reality we often act contrary to our external interests or ignore them completely.
This is called the gratuitous act that helps to explore the human identity. The human beings sometimes responds to the words or actions of our colleagues in the workplace, or of our doctor, but we learn most about someone when he simply surveys his nose, walks into a store and buys nothing, or ruinously crashes a party.
These gratuitious acts reveals the subconscious more clearly than the caused ones.
Although for Freud the subconscious lacks the ability to analyse and moralise, Dostoevskii's unconscious is deeply moral. Dostoevkii's unconscious is a struggle between dreams and impulsive actions against the rational mind's rejection of moral values.
This is the so-called paradoxical or the perverse moment, in which the milieu can not explain and even justify crime. Nevertheless, humans are paradoxically free agents in a world of deep determinism. In this sense, Raskolnikov's murder, demonstrate one's exceptionality.
Crime is the prerogative of a small elite whose value to mankind puts them above punishment or guilt. But for the common people, criminal behaviour is the result of a disease which has two symptoms, the need to commit a crime and the need to get caught.
Although, crime consequences are different for the elite than for the common people, guilt is a universal experience that unifies mankind. This universal guilt becomes the central moral experience of mankind because God's responsability for crime is shifted to every one of us who has ever hurt anybody or failed to do good.
Secondly, for Dostoevskii what one does in a moment of helplessness where nothing you do will make any difference expresses one's pure identity. The actions explored by Dostoevskii are dependency and childlike credulity, suicidal despair after having been raped... This is Dostoevskii's fascination with cruelty in which sadism plays a central role.
The victims of cruelty become psychologically transparent in their helplessness, and we understand their unmotivated actions as pure expressions of their subconscious. In The Grand Inquisitor, Jesus kisses The Grand Inquisitor after he has been visited in his cell and The Grand Inquisitor explained him why he is no longer needed. Not all humans are ready to be free and humankind will live and die happy in ignorance under the Church rule.
The entire world is engulfed in lucidly self-righteous violence that it is explained by the paradox of desire and aggression. Normally, for Dostoevskii if violence is reciprocal, it is not physical and, if it is physical, it is not reciprocal. In the same way, love can save Raskolnikov and Sonia, but this happy love go unconsumated. Like aggression, desire, if it becomes physical, it is not reciprocal, and if it is reciprocal, it is not physical.
In sex one partner was always stronger, more sophisticated, and in a position to exploit the more innocent and weaker. In sex we find the phenomenon of dominance by the strong, and submissiveness by those who must submit. With violence, however, this pattern does not work at all, in fact, the weaker often assault the stronger, who do not reciprocate. The unifying element that explains the incompatibility of the reciprocal and physical is the paradox of desire and aggression.
It is the paradoxical power that explains the parallel mechanisms of violence and desire in Dostoievski. The beaten and the sexually exploited inherit the earth. The power of the weak in which the victims turn into victors.
In sex one partner was always stronger, more sophisticated, and in a position to exploit the more innocent and weaker. In sex we find the phenomenon of dominance by the strong, and submissiveness by those who must submit. With violence, however, this pattern does not work at all, in fact, the weaker often assault the stronger, who do not reciprocate. The unifying element that explains the incompatibility of the reciprocal and physical is the paradox of desire and aggression.
It is the paradoxical power that explains the parallel mechanisms of violence and desire in Dostoievski. The beaten and the sexually exploited inherit the earth. The power of the weak in which the victims turn into victors.
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