Motivations to Murder

For this semester I’ll offer my reflections on an introductory, freshmen-level course on western core texts that I am teaching.

Overhearing a young officer and a student in a bar, Raskolnikov is introduced to the ethical theory that rivals Kant’s categorical imperative, utilitarianism. Speaking of Alyona Ivanova, the old, rich, and spiteful pawnbroker who, according to the student, causes “harm to everyone; she herself doesn’t know what she’s living for, and she’ll die of her own accord tomorrow.” The student then spells out utilitarianism:

. . . there are young, fresh forces, going to waste for lack of support, by the thousands, all over the place. A hundred, even a thousand good deeds and undertaking could be planned and performed with the old woman’s money that’s being left in her will to a monastery! Hundreds, maybe thousands of beings could set on the right path; dozens of families could be rescued from poverty, kept from dissolution, from ruin, debauchery, and venereal hospitals – all with her wealth. Murder her and take her money and then use it to dedicate yourself to the service of all humanity and to the common good: what do you think, wouldn’t thousands of good deeds make up for one little, tiny crime? Thousands of lives saved from wrack and ruin – for one life? One death and a hundred lives in exchange – it’s a matter of arithmetic!”

After his raving, the student dismisses the idea of murdering Alyona Ivanova and goes back to playing billiards with the young officer. But for Raskolnikov, the student articulated “exactly the same ideas” that were in his mind, right before he was to visit the pawnbroker and kill her.

After the murder, Raskolnikov meets Porifry Petrovich, a homicide detective who suspects Raskolnikov as the murderer and speaks indirectly and ironically.  He expresses extreme curiosity and interest about an article Raskolnikov wrote some months ago called “On Crime” in which he suggests that certain rare individuals – the benefactors and geniuses of humankind – have “a right to permit his conscience to overstep . . . various obstacles, and only in the case that the execution of his idea.” According to Raskolnikov, people are divided into the ordinary and the extraordinary with the former “men of the present” and the latter “men of the future.” Although some benefactors and geniuses are executed by the ordinary, a few will triumph during their lifetime and begin executing other people “if necessary.”

As Razumikhin observes, Raskolnikov introduces a new idea – “bloodshed as a matter of conscience” – an idea that is later taken up in the twentieth century by fascist and communist ideologues and in the twentieth-first by religious fundamentalists. Murder is not morally permissible, like in Hobbes’ states of nature but is morally imperative for the extraordinary person to do so. Such an account of human nature of ordinary and extraordinary people also makes the social contract impossible, which is premised on the equality of citizenship. In Raskolnikov’s politics, we have a hierarchical society of the Nietzschean übermensch, the extraordinary individuals who forge a new world for people.

In spite of his theory, Raskolnikov also acknowledges that the extraordinary person can make a mistake and, if doing so, suffers in his conscience:

“Let him suffer, if he pities the victim . . . Pain and suffering are always obligatory for someone with broad intellect and deep feeling. Truly great individuals, it seems to me, must experience great sorrow in the world.”

But why should the extraordinary experience great sorrow in the world? Is it because of the knowledge they claim to possess that ordinary people lack? Or that they have to murder people to execute their idea? Or that they find the world fundamentally disordered and only they have the insight and will to establish a New Jerusalem on earth?

Later in the novel, when confessing to Sonya, Raskolnikov admits that he finally realizes that he is not an extraordinary person. He committed murder only for himself, wanting to find whether he “could overstep or not” and discovered that he cannot. He’s not a “Napoleon” but an ordinary “louse” because his conscience continues to haunt him about murdering Alyona Ivanova. Raskolnikov suffers immensely, as Sonya observes, and cannot rid himself of his guilt.

But perhaps such suffering is not a sign of ordinary weakness but of extraordinary spirituality. Maybe Raskolnikov is an extraordinary person but not in the way he had originally thought. Instead of being a Napoleon Raskolnikov could be a Lazarus (it is not by coincidence that the story of Lazarus is referenced throughout the novel). Perhaps Dostoevsky is suggesting that a person who can suffer the greatest of sorrows can be the only one later resurrected as a different kind of extraordinary person.