A Law Unto One's Self

Nietzsche & Dostoevsky on Self-Overcoming

Everything is empty, everything is one, everything is past!”¹ Thus, says the character of the ‘Prophet’ in Friedrich Nietzsche’s classic work Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  The Prophet, presumably a reference to the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, vocalizes the general clamor of the European intellectual milieu in which Nietzsche lived and worked. In the bare, naturalized, secularized existence denuded of all transcendence there is no longer a divine, providential, organizing, meaning-bestowing will. There is only random chance. This existential meaninglessness is referred to as nihilism. Though Nietzsche’s prophetic sage Zarathustra shares this prognosis, he (and the author himself) rejects its pessimism. The doctrines of the ‘Superman’ along with ‘eternal recurrence’ are Nietzsche’s response to nihilism. We shall outline the former.

Modernity’s existential crisis arises out of its attachment to its old concepts of transcendence, meaning, and objective moral norms. According to Nietzsche nature provides no such ‘otherworldly’ notions and for man and society to live according to them is inherently problematic and self-destructive. What is needful is a rejection of the prevailing moral order, for man to embrace himself as a product of the earth. “I entreat you my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hope!”² Nietzsche however, is not advocating the return of man to the merely animalistic. For, such would not address the fundamental weakness that has now materialized in the moribund decline of Modernity which he so often describes as the existence of a herd animal. For Nietzsche, it would be far preferable if man, cast down to mere animal with Darwinism, to at least become the vital and self-assured beast of prey. In a famous passage in Genealogy of Morals he writes of the men who return to nature’s ethic of good/bad (as opposed to culture’s duality between good/evil):

There they savor a freedom from all social constraints, they compensate themselves in the wilderness for the tension engendered by protracted confinement and enclosure within the peace of society, they go back to the innocent conscience of the beast of prey, as triumphant monsters who perhaps emerge from a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a students’ prank, convinced they have provided the poets with a lot more material for song and praise. One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core need to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness.³

For Nietzsche, the human animal as animal must periodically emerge as a corrective to the entropy of cultural self-domestication. But ultimately his project advocates that man becomes something more than man, he must go beyond humanity—he must become the ‘Übermensch’ (the Super- or Over-man). The return to the earth is in order that mans ‘ascent’ can finally be accomplished. For “man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman—a rope over an abyss” he is “something that must be overcome…a bridge and not a goal.”⁴ The naturalization of values and subsequent destruction of the old moral order—transvaluation of values—which is a major theme in his work is but a prelude to the ‘Superman’.

Nietzsche envisions an invigorated humanity where the ethereal projections and categories of good/evil simply have no bearing. The Superman has no need of such detrimental notions. He instead will glory in his new natural virtues summarized by selfishness and will to power. Selfishness, that “sound, healthy selfishness that issues from a mighty soul…which pertains the exalted body, the beautiful, victorious, refreshing body…the dancer whose image and epitome is the self-rejoicing soul,”⁵ is what Nietzsche advocates. This is no new ‘moral system’, but humanity fully alive and subjugating all things to its own lively superabundance. It’s “will itself, the will to power, the unexhausted, procreating life-will”⁶ that recognizes its own excellence (Hellenic virtue) and naturally desires to rule. For Nietzsche, these ‘noble virtues’, so demonized by the post-Socratic Judeo-Christian tradition, are in fact the essence of man’s natural health and vitality. The old order will be overcome, but with laughter and playful disregard. The ideal spirit “plays naïvely—that is, not deliberately but from overflowing power and abundance—with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine…”⁷ The Superman tramples down and overcomes the merely human in a Dionysian dance of wild ecstasy in the face of the clarity of bare existence. “All great things bring their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming: thus the law of life will have it, the law of the necessity of “self-overcoming” in the nature of life—the lawgiver himself eventually receives the call: “patere legem, quam ipse tulisti.””⁸

For Nietzsche, it is this overcoming of god and humanity in the abounding will that is of decisive significance. Man in the atheistic and Darwinian worldview is not the product of any divine will or meaningful providence but chance, he is not created. When and if man embarks upon making himself, becoming more than what nature has made him, more than human, then he truly will be created and will be a creator. The Superman in the overcoming of his humanity creates himself, wills his own truth, and becomes his own standard of moral norm. Man must in order to overcome nihilism and meaningless must embark upon a project of autogenesis.

What is more, because the earth has no meaning (was not created), once man by his own will creates himself he likewise gives the earth its definitive meaning. “The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!”⁹ The Superman thus becomes the meaning and goal of life. “He who creates a goal for mankind…gives the earth meaning is the future.”¹⁰ Thus, he is likewise the eschatological imperative against which all present is subordinated and oriented to. “This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-struck of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man…”¹¹ The ‘Übermensch’ is the new hope, Nietzsche’s response to nihilism, the “victory over God and nothingness—he must come one day.”¹²

It is my contention that Friedrich Nietzsche, despite the shortcomings of his positive vision, is nonetheless a master diagnostician of modernity and its maladies. So important in fact do I see his work that I believe it is worthwhile to sketch a critique if only to salvage his contribution in the service of a Christian response to the collapse of Western Christendom which he prophesizes. Before exploring this project of self-transcendence bereft of transcendence—a failed enterprise ab initio. I must be asked, can a man be a law unto himself? Fortunately, one the greatest Orthodox minds of history, Fyodor Dostoevsky, has made that a central theme of his classic novel Crime and Punishment.

His protagonist Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov—self-justified by his own utilitarian and social theories—commits a ghastly murder and in the ensuing psychological crisis we see two laws at war with each other: one the law of Raskolnikov’s own making and another deeper law seeking to assert itself. In Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky has put on display the schizophrenic incongruence between the theories of European intelligentsia and the dictates of human nature. 

            Raskolnikov is a law student in Petersburg who, due to financial constraint and intellectual boredom, has left the university and is mired in and obsessed with a thought experiment. The idea deals with the nature of crime and the right of certain people to transgress current law. According to Raskolnikov’s theory, humanity can be divided into two: the ordinary and the extraordinary. The ordinary live according to the laws of society and should not break them. But the extraordinary are persons of unique genius who actually make culture. Thus, they have an antagonistic relationship with current moral norms. For they have an innate right “to overstep…certain obstacles”¹³ in the realization of their progressive ideas which are to the benefit of all humanity. Ordinary human beings who constitute an obstacle to this progress must simply be swept away. The extraordinary man destroys “what exists in the name of better things” thus “if it is necessary for one of them, for the fulfillment of his ideas, to march over corpses, or wade through blood…he may in all conscience authorize himself to wade through blood.”¹⁴ Raskolnikov however, adds “in proportion…to his idea and the degree of its importance.”¹⁵ Their actions may be criminal, but they are morally permissible. The ordinary—in person and capital—are means to an end to be utilized by the extraordinary in the utterance of a new word. Extraordinary men will have no moral qualms about this for things are permissible for them.

            These ideas are remarkably resonant with Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘Superman’. However, it is extremely unlikely (due to chronology) that Dostoevsky is responding directly to Nietzsche. The novel does explore several strands of contemporary European thought, but none of them seem to be explicitly informing Raskolnikov. Dostoevsky is however fleshing out central themes of ninetieth-century utilitarian, social and progressive theories that Nietzsche would give definitive expression to at the end of the century. Raskolnikov’s direct influence, mentioned throughout the novel, is not a philosopher but a historical personage—Napoléon Bonaparte. Napoléon managed to commandeer the French Revolution, brought the sword to the better part of Europe, and sacrificed a whole army in his ill-fated campaign in Russia. Yet he is commemorated not as a criminal but as a great man. He was a lawbreaker and criminal who likewise reformed French law according to the enlightenment ideals of the Revolution and became one of the architects of modern Europe. Napoléon is a prototypical realization of Raskolnikov’s extraordinary individual. But given the profound similarities between Nietzsche and the character Raskolnikov, we can get a glimpse of what a Nietzschean project might look like if played out in a particular life story.

            Raskolnikov believes himself to be extraordinary. Thus, he begins to entertain the idea of murdering the old cantankerous pawnbroker, Alena Ivanova, to both financially launch his career and definitively prove to himself that he is such a culture maker. The idea remained (however obsessively) just that until Raskolnikov by chance overheard a conversation between a student and an officer discussing utilitarian theories. Amazingly the student outlines and justifies the very crime Raskolnikov has been ruminating about. The student sets up the calculation. “On the one hand you have new, young forces running to waste for want of backing” and on the other hand the “life of [a] stupid, spiteful, consumptive old woman”¹⁶ with a wealth of locked up capital destined for a monastery. He concludes, “Kill her, take her money” and “dedicate yourself with its help to the service of humanity and the common good.”¹⁷ The good that can be done would outweigh the taking of one life. Indeed, removing Alena who is nothing more than a harmful “louse or a cockroach”¹⁸ is itself a service to humanity. The calculation is simple “One death, and a hundred lives in exchange.”¹⁹ For Raskolnikov, this vocalization of his own idea is a license to carry it out.

            Raskolnikov (fairly early in the novel) commits his robbery and homicide. However, the whole affair is horribly botched. The pawnbroker’s sister, Lisaveta, inadvertently walks in upon the murder and is murdered herself. Raskolnikov does not even manage to steal the money he believed himself to have a right. Even his escape is the sole product of chance. He immediately and profoundly becomes psychologically disturbed by what he has done. Part of his despair is that his conscience is upset at all. As an extraordinary man, he should not be disturbed by such a thing. But the theory itself begins to unravel on a more profound level. Raskolnikov is increasingly disturbed by the humanity of his victims. He is unexpectedly confronted with the turmoil and demands of his own conscience manifest as a redemptive need to confess. In short, he experiences guilt. This inner turmoil and instinct to disclosure and restitution do not come from without (as a cultural construct enshrined in law), but from within his own humanity (quickened however by the influence of humanizing figures in his life). Raskolnikov is a man torn. The rest of the novel explores this painful reconciliation between Raskolnikov’s theory and the realities of himself and his crime.

Raskolnikov comes to grips with himself. He is not a great man. He is exceptionally intelligent, that is true. But he is not great. He could have gotten away with his crime and he plays an intellectual game of cat and mouse with the perceptive police inspector Porfiry Petrovich. But this is only a game only from Raskolnikov’s perspective. Porfiry Petrovich has him pegged from the start and what ensues is just a university student being outsmarted by a midlevel administrative bureaucrat. Likewise, Raskolnikov is oblivious to the real possibility of human connection all around him, resentful at the ordinary lives and ordinary dramas of his family members, and incapable of romantic relationships save falling in love with a prostitute—Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova—who becomes something of humanizing influence upon him. In short, he is an ‘incel’ to use our contemporary verbiage. A mentally unwell incel at that! He walks the streets talking to himself, doesn’t bathe, and constantly finds himself embroiled in the seedy ordeals of life at the bottom of society. His breakdown was certainly accelerated by his mental breakdown upon committing murder, but it was well underway prior to this episode. One even gets the sense that the killing of Alena Ivanova is an act of desperation wherein he can prove to himself that he is not in the end a loser. That committing a deed in proportion to the grandiosity of his self-perception would confirm, nay realize, that perception. But his deed was not great, bludgeoning to death a mean and lonely old lady and her sister to get at what turned out to be a merger fortune he just wound up burying. It was a pathetic deed in proportion to his pathetic existence. He couldn’t even clean his room or make it off his coach most days, how was he and how was this going to change the world? It wasn’t and didn’t. Coming to grips with his own meagerness becomes for Raskolnikov the path of liberation…of realization and self-overcoming.     

Before making any claims about the transcendent nature of this law or the limits of the Nietzschean project. Indeed, perhaps Raskolnikov, like Nietzsche himself, just didn’t have what it took to be a law unto himself—the social programming of latent Christendom was too insurmountable. And as of yet, all who have set out on a Nietzschean project have likewise failed. This is not to say that pragmatic results are the criterion of ethical certitude. But, Raskolnikov’s archetypical failure ought to portent a faulty paradigm of cultural creation and transcendence. Surely this is not the way.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 155.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 42.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘Genealogy of Morals,’ in Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), I, 11.

4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 43, 215.

5. Ibid., 208.

6. Ibid., 137.

7. Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘Ecce Homo,’ in Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 754.

8. Genealogy of Morals, III, 27.

9. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 42.

10. Ibid.

11. Genealogy of Morals, II, 24.

12. Ibid.

13. Dostoevsky, Feodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated and edited by George Gibian (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 220.

14. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 221.

15. Dostoevsky, ibid.

16. Crime and Punishment, 56.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.