Could Dostoyevsky’s ‘Accursed Questions’ Be a Beneficial Obsession?

Centrism [in Great Britain]…Much of our politics now consists of performance rather than governance.  The calculations are short-term by design: win the week, dominate the clip, neutralize the headline.  The long-term consequences – erosion of empathy, normalization of cruelty, a growing sense that nobody in charge believes what they say – are outsourced to society to endure.                                                     
– Jude Wanga, The Centre Shrinks; London Review of Books 2/7/26

…psychologically the easiest thing of all is to accept as freedom the absence of movement, the habitual condition (i.e., status quo)…The social reformation of society is [seen] as violence by those to whom a certain habitual social order has presented itself as freedom, even though it may be terribly unjust and wrong.
– Nicolas Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom

 The basic assumption of every true philosophy is that there is meaning and that this meaning is attainable – the assumption that meaning can break through meaninglessness.
– Nicholas Berdyaev, Philosophy As A Creative Act

My question: Can necessary social change come – alone – from toppling the oligarchs and restoring rule by the people  or must it come from deeper change in the hearts of individuals, those most responsible  – because most benefiting – in a shallow sense of benefit, to be sure –  from “the absence of movement”?  Meaning, us – white liberals

Reading The Brothers Karamazov for the second time with our book club, I could see that what deeply attracts me to the work is Dostoyevsky’s preoccupation with those “accursed questions” which, though I work on a far less brilliant scale, pre-occupy me. Reading him has brought me a rare affirmation that in my chosen obsession with problems of “God vs reason,” and “human destiny,” and, bottom-line, how love shall include those who are other, I’m at least not alone, and in pretty excellent company to boot!   Given the current insanity loose in the world, in the modern condition of compromised morality, in which reason has proven to be no help, can it be possible this preoccupation should be restricted to clergy people, theologians, or philosophers – or to eccentrics like me?

I mean, I will likely just keep at it, especially when I get reinforcement from writers such as Dostoyevsky or Nicolas Berdyaev or the American Ralph Waldo Emerson.  As I see it, it’s not as if the questions became irrelevant after historically hegemonic divine authority was overthrown.  Emerson’s teaching was not that religious questions were irrelevant, but that the answers could no longer be taken at second hand; they must be found originally.  And how else would we prefer it to be if we consider ourselves free people?

The alternative to such soul wrestling, is to find our niche in established liberal reality, accepting the freedom of  its “habitual condition.”  After the screening of the documentary movie Earth’s Greatest Enemy at The Other Side recently, in a virtual q & a, director Abby Martin called this our being invested in capitalism, a word with mainly financial connotations.  After all, liberal reality is capitalist reality, they are not separable.  Seeing its evil, as her film about the outsize role of the U.S. military in environmental destruction makes abundantly clear,  it cannot be right to be complacent in it. It must be we have to “disinvest” somehow, which surely means our very way of life must change fundamentally. 

Another way I feel affirmed by Dostoyevsky is knowing he suffered for his art – hence he called those existential questions dogging him “accursed.”  We learn the writer suffered from epilepsy and poverty – dying at only 59 years old – but also in Dostoyevsky’s work, people suffer – all the tears shed in those pages! Is it a sign of evolutionary progress that we, by contrast, are so “stalwart?” In  liberal reality, as presented, nobody suffers; therefore mine – or yours – is absurd and people have little patience for it.   Until one is awake enough to recognize the meaning of someone who clearly is suffering for the most vulnerable, which is to say for the good of all (despite the efforts of the powerful to disgrace such sacrifice), then one’s own suffering – and anyone’s –  is threatened with meaninglessness. And perhaps “the good” is meaningless as well.  This is the message signaled by the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, which Christian civilization, in its great fear of social reformation,  has rendered well-nigh meaningless.  Similarly, Dr. King spoke of “redemptive suffering” in relation to sacrifices people made for Civil Rights; the total meaning of their suffering and his own has been demeaned, in the collective need to forget his explicit indictment of capitalism.  

Leaders for racial justice who came after Dr. King argued persuasively that when the boot is on the neck, militancy makes more sense than redemptive suffering.  But for those of us for whom capitalism has made suffering obsolete, ought we not wonder if wholesale avoidance of suffering has to do with the  increase in innocent suffering?

And thirdly, another Dostoyevskian feature that provides a little encouragement for me with my lonely preoccupation,  pointed to in our book club discussion last week,  is that in his examination of the accursed questions his focus is almost exclusively on the social world.  I doubt this was because he found no solace in nature.  Today,  seeking roots in nature out-of-doors, whether in gardens or in the wilderness, is perhaps liberal society’s primary source of inspiration and consolation, spurred of course by justified fear of environmental destruction.  Abby Martin, as well, pointed to nature as the means for sustaining hope.  However, I have long wondered if finding spiritual solace exclusively in nature out-of-doors, or in so designating nature out-of-doors as the only purity sufficient to be“God’s stronghold,”   might in some way work against social revolution?

For me, though I grew up very familiar with and consoled by nature,  it was not in that nature that I found God as a moral authority.  As a mystical experience, yes, but not something connecting with my personality and how I’m to live in this earthly life that is interdependent with other people.

In the 1960’s and 70’s  many people I knew were having that enhanced experience of God out in nature by means of psychedelics, but then what happened?  What concerns me is how experience with nature  becomes a call to obedience, to disinvestment in capitalist reality, so that no longer is society’s moral chaos  – “all is permitted” – the accepted and acceptable norm.  I believe we must look more intimately into nature – into one’s personal human nature – for that connection that would make us see we are meant to obey; i.e., that I have an absolute obligation to disinvest from capitalist reality.

That is (and this is arguable of course)  although perceiving the out-of-doors as the precinct of the spiritual may not blind people to the fact of the precarious existence of society’s most vulnerable,  it will not bring one, referring again to The Brothers Karamazov, to a realization like Elder Zosima’s: “personally, each one of us, [is guilty] for all people and for each person on this earth.”  This knowledge he called “the crown… of every man’s path on earth.”  Without deep personal realization people can profess belief in for instance, the “interdependent web of life” and yet defend the habitual condition of Capitalism, along with the suffering it “outsources” to society. That is,  apart from the oppression of the most vulnerable,  far more pervasive is the psychological violence of “crystallized hardened public opinion,” the violence done by media, the “normalization of cruelty, the [sense that] nobody in charge believing what they say,”  etc.   

That is, and I argue this most gently,  reliance upon connection with nature out-of-doors for spiritual infusion, though it will provide solace, perhaps “hope,” is not sufficient for disinvestment in capitalism, and in worse cases becomes simply another area of consumption – the gear, the travel costs, etc.! For in liberal reality we face a nearly unchallengeable hegemony.  Implicitly, the “habitual condition”  is sanity and deviation from it insanity. At the same time there is hardly a thinking liberal who doesn’t realize insatiable capitalism is the insanity.  These are the “abysses” we live between,  that frankly encourage unconsciousness.

The greatest risk I see in embracing the idea that to get out in nature is the same as communing with God, is that it can divert from the inward call to the reality of nature-in-oneself,  to the holy grace of creativity.     It has not been generally understood that death-of-God was death knell, too, for imagination’s reality.  And now, most people entirely dependent upon reason to tell us what is real,  we cannot find our way back to a God with God-like authority, who is “Lord,” so to speak.     However,  a way exists to connect with the authority of God, with the absolute connection of all with all,  in which each soul is implicated, and which is not enforced by the flames of hell or papal infallibility.  It lies in the recovery of alive imagination – the Unconscious –  in individuals, the path to which is already laid out in myth and in the mythic imaginative depths of human beings. 

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Real as imagination is, the difficulty in our age  in making one’s way to one’s creative nature is also painfully real – there’s no socially supported “vision quest” to help us as there is for some indigenous people.  Generations of repression necessary to socialize human beings into the societies in which they are born obscures the soul path  from the viewpoint of consciousness. Clues to the existence of the creative depths remain in our bodies, however, often making themselves known psychologically,  in projections, for example.  Other clues, more disagreeable ones, are  addictions, and compulsions,  and neurotic symptoms such as  “don’t go there” private taboos.  Poet Mary Oliver writes, “the most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”   These are the ones obeying the private don’t-go-there against re-aligning oneself with creative nature.  

Thus for those us living in the “habitual condition,” revolution must begin  intimately.    In my own case,  against just such a firmly in-place inner taboo,  I underwent what looked like – and was – mental breakdown and psychotherapeutic rescue;  it was also, against my conscious will, a “vision quest.”  I learned at mid-life I needed the metaphor-making capacity of my own soul, not merely a passive admiration of nature’s awesome beauty.   I understood I was to speak out from that place of spiritual communion in defense of soul’s reality against her enemy: materialist, reason-based liberal reality.   The devil ( a perfectly valid poetic naming for the reality of evil) has, quite creatively, switched his mode of access, making himself over ingeniously into a  liberal reality that appears to be inherently virtuous so people are relieved of making that effort themselves.  He deceives those of us most benefiting in liberal reality to believe we can “have it both ways” – we can be virtuous and be unconscious beneficiaries of its completely materialist, God-and-imagination-denying, technologically wondrous benefits.

Clearly, this is “the Father of Lies!” For the camel cannot pass through the eye of that needle without changing one’s relationship to liberal capitalist reality. (As Alyosha says to the intelligent young girl Liza after hearing her crazy compulsive thoughts, “It’s your rich life.”  She asks, “Why, is it better to be poor?” “Yes,” he replies.  )  However, even when the evils of capitalist domination – its natural culmination in Empire and military domination –  are so plain that anyone can see them – anyone can make a meme about them – the alternative isn’t simple to find . 

As it turns out, because the devil’s power resides in unconsciousness,  supporting ego against soul’s imagination, choosing creativity actually flushes the devil out of hiding.  The evil of the capitalist system has roots in each personal self, so that escaping into liberal reality’s habitually lulled unconsciousness – disappearing into its delights – assists the devil’s work   Each picking up of one’s creative work is an act of discernment. a choice to participate in the poetic the “garden of delight” in place of the delights of capitalism. Every day, every moment presents  the choice to be on one side or the other, both in oneself and in the world. Not a matter for compulsivity, i.e.,  do good or else I’m bad, lose weight or else I’m bad, stop drinking or else I’m bad – it is an entirely other act of consciousness, a conscious entering of the creative realm, choosing over and over to realize one’s true inclusion in the Good through the creative act.

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 In case my mention of suffering,  the “accursedness” of the questions, causes anyone to think I’m preaching self-denial, emphatically I am not. Taking up ones’ creativity as prayer is to enter the garden of delight –  where there’s connection,meaning, instead of meaninglessness.  Father Zosima recommends the monk-like life, a form of asceticism, yes.  But not to be taken up to deny oneself beauty in one’s home or surroundings or personal appearance.  Not to deny the joys of conviviality, of games, of family life, of wine and good food, but to find  the joy that is the pearl of great price, the message communicated in the soul that is not from a “natural” source, but a “supernatural”one.  

And, in conclusion, to ward off misconceptions regarding likely associations people have with monks, saints, and the like  – I must add creative expression does not make one a “nice person.” One can think of many creative exemplars who were not like Alyosha, or like Jesus.  Many were tormented individuals like Lorenz Hart, brilliantly portrayed by Ethan Hawke in the movie Blue Moon, or like myself.  But practiced consciously, religiously,  one joins a process of saving oneself from unconscious complicity in evil, the kind that defines liberal politics (see epigraph), a salvation not won once-for-all. Practicing it, one might  be at very least enlarging the space – in oneself and also in the world,  in which it is possible to be/do good.

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