Guay, Robert, ed. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford University Press, 2019, xi + 230 pp., $24.95 paper. Book Reviews

The Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature series, edited by Richard Eldridge, is producing some of the best work in contemporary literary aesthetics. As one would expect, the series raises the question of how literary works can function as sites of philosophical activity, but it does so in a unique manner. Each volume gathers a handful—between seven and ten—of more or less like‐minded philosophers and literary scholars around a single text, with each volume effectively showcasing a particular way of conceiving the nature and prospects of philosophical approaches to literature. Thus far there are volumes on The Trial, Hamlet, Hedda Gabler, Emma, Sophocles’ two Oedipus plays, and the Tale of Genji. All of them take seriously (some more than others) the fact that many of the commonplace ways of casting the relationship between philosophy and literature are, if never quite false, then impoverished, and often in ways that are risibly flattering to philosophy and substantially less so to literature. We at times call a literary work philosophical when we wish to say that it displays great depth or explores the human condition, failing to ask why such things make it philosophical rather than something else, as though poets, novelists, and playwrights do not have an equal claim to producing insight, perhaps of a distinctive sort, into matters that also concern the philosopher. Better but still unsatisfactory is the habit of framing the relationship in terms of literature's ability to offer illustrations of philosophical ideas, as though literary works can do no more than provide the philosopher with dramatic examples. Or we have the idea that literary works function to intimate, hint at, or otherwise imply grand propositions about existence, which is fine, until we try to establish the connection to our discipline by claiming that it is the philosopher who heroically goes on to make these propositions explicit, as though all a novelist can do is gesture in the general direction of truth. The list goes on. It is a great service to the profession to have a series that makes the challenge of stating the relationship between philosophy and literature itself a central theoretical and critical problem. It is not the case that every chapter in each of these volumes discusses this problem, but, as a whole, the series has done more than anything else in a recent Anglophone philosophy of art to reveal the importance of the question and to prod us to develop resources for thinking about it productively.

Robert Guay's superb new addition to this series is especially successful at developing these resources. It is hard to imagine a novel more apt for these questions than Crime and Punishment, since it is so deceptively philosophical, offering great expanses of philosophical‐sounding discourse that often lead the unsavvy reader to the entirely wrong conclusions about the novel's philosophical import (spoiler alert: it has little to do with this discourse). As Guay puts it in the volume's introduction, Crime and Punishment is a novel that is “trying to figure out the boundaries of its own authority,” and those features of it that make it appear “a distinctly philosophical novel” might “suffice for an affinity to philosophy” or might just be a matter of “rhetoric or mood” (p. 1). This is a fine statement of the general problem: on close scrutiny those features of a literary work we wish to call philosophical very often turn out to have decidedly nonphilosophical functions when assessed in their proper literary context, and Crime and Punishment sets up many traps of precisely this sort. All of the volume's nine chapters do a convincing job of motivating a particular way of approaching Dostoevsky's great novel in a manner that is recognizably philosophical yet sensitive to the work's formal and dramatic handling of its content. The authors work in many traditions, yet there is a surprising uniformity of philosophical style and literary sensibility, and the reader has the impression of listening to a conversation unfold rather than a hearing an assemblage of disparate voices sound off on a common theme.

Since all seven of the chapters in this volume are engaged in the labor of articulating nuanced philosophical positions by way of a detailed reading of Crime and Punishment, it is a considerable challenge to do them justice in the limited space of a review. Much of what is most satisfying and surprising in these essays are the unexpected transitions of thought the novel prompts in the authors and the subtle ways in which they arrive at a philosophical point whose force cannot be captured apart from the extended interpretive work that stages it. I will highlight what I take to be the key idea of each chapter, and I will group the essays in a way that serves the interests of this review rather than reflects their arrangement in the Table of Contents.

Two of the seven chapters are by literary scholars. Both of them, though in very different ways, give the philosopher an example of what serious and informed criticism looks like, and they stand in stark contrast to the forms of earnest thematic and characterological interpretation that philosophers of literature tend to prefer. Susanne Fusso (“The Family in Crime and Punishment: Realism and Utopia”) takes an apparently marginal idea—Dostoevsky's view of the family—and shows how it organizes an array of concerns that gives Crime and Punishment the air of a philosophical novel, though with a crucial twist. The psychological and moral development of Raskolnikov functions to stage questions about the nature of freedom, autonomy, belonging, alienation, and self‐discovery. For Fusso, the novel's handling of these matters is, contrary to expectation, best seen as leading to a skeptical view of philosophy and its desire to hold absolutely everything up to scrutiny, which can often disfigure our sense of the value and nature of those features of life it seeks to make sense of, for instance, family. Caryl Emerson (“Bakhtin's Radiant Polyphonic Novel, Raskolnikov's Perverse Dialogic World”) is more hospitable to theory. Her interest is in motivating a new way of understanding Bakhtin's distinction between the “dialogical” and “polyphonic” elements of the novel and, in developing her case for this, she makes a number of medium‐ to large‐sized points about the novel's unique insights into the nature of personhood and the role polyphony plays in shaping it, in this way making good on the idea that a literary work's formal features do as much thinking and convey as much information as do its express representational and semantic features.

Three of the chapters focus on the novel's relevance to matters of agency, affect, and self‐constitution. Garry Hagberg (“Portrayals of Mind: Raskolnikov, Porfiry, and Psychological Investigation in Crime and Punishment”) offers a wide‐ranging and rich discussion of how Crime and Punishment brings to our attention the social and linguistic nature of the self. For Hagberg, the exchanges between Raskolnikov and Porfiry reveal the linguistic material out of which we fashion a self‐concept and through which make our minds known to both ourselves and others. Hagberg's chapter makes Dostoevsky into a kind of proto‐Wittgenstein, and it is among the most compelling accounts of what we should imagine Wittgenstein to have learnt from the novelist, whom we know he admired greatly. Robert Guay (“Crime and Expression: Dostoevsky on the Nature of Agency”) finds in the novel a sustained meditation on what makes an action ours. Like Hagberg, Guay finds in Dostoevsky a fundamentally social answer to this philosophical puzzle: actions become intelligible and hence attributable to a person only through their public execution. In this sense, we declare our agency through the ways in which we make ourselves manifest to others, and failures of agency, as we find in at various points in Raskolnikov's moral development, turn out to be strikingly similar to what Hagberg calls failures of self‐definition (p. 25). Rick Anthony Furtak (“Love, Suffering, and Gratitude for Existence: Moral and Existential Emotions in Crime and Punishment”) explores Raskolnikov's moral and affective maturation—the two obviously go hand in hand—and it offers a novel account of what it means to acknowledge one's guilt and how this stands to reorder basic features of the emotional and cognitive economy of the agent. The result of this is that the agent is reorientated not just to an act but, ultimately, to existence. All three of these chapters suggest a certain view of the relationship between philosophicy and literature. To put it crudely, it is not at all the case that literature comes to matter to philosophy because it offers exempla of this or that philosophical concept or puzzle. Rather, the philosophical gift of a great novel is that it can reveal a gap between our theories and the features of human life they ought to be able to explain, and thus that criticism often obliges us to revise and refine our philosophical commitments, just so that we can articulate the meaning and import of a powerful literary representation. In this sense, philosophy serves criticism, but their entanglement clearly improves the explanatory power of each.

The remaining two chapters situate their readings of Crime and Punishment in the context of the work of a single philosopher. Randall Havas (“Raskolnikov Beyond Good and Evil”) complicates a familiar philosophical reading of Crime and Punishment that sees Raskolnikov as an essentially Nietzschean figure who is striving to liberate himself from the shackles of traditional morality. In this sense, Raskolnikov, somewhat like Nietzsche's “free spirit,” is marked by a desire to be self‐legislating and to have his actions divulge his exemplary moral self‐sufficiency. Havas finds this familiar reading to be misguided, as it both obscures Nietzsche's philosophy and occludes significant deficiencies in Raskolnikov's understanding of his own motivations and dependence on others. Though the topic is not new, Havas's lively and original discussion offers an excellent account of what is gained, and what is lost, when enlisting Nietzsche to make sense of this novel that can often feel so perfectly made for Nietzschean interpretations. Sebastian Gardner's splendid chapter (“Metaphysical Motivation: Crime and Punishment in the light of Schelling”) offers the most provocative account of the philosophical stakes of the novel. According to Gardiner, “by committing murder Raskolnikov attempts to achieve knowledge” (p. 99). This knowledge is not just of his own possibilities of agency or of the nature of evil. For Gardiner, it is knowledge of a fundamentally metaphysical and so philosophical sort, into the “reality of freedom” (p. 100). This obliges Gardiner to explain how a novel could possibly be apt for such an investigation, and he offers a bold account of how fiction—and, more generally, the aesthetic dimension of literature—can go where philosophy cannot in the attempt to make a truth fully available to understanding.

I began this review by mentioning a touch of ingenuousness in how philosophers of literature at times conceive of the relationship between their discipline and their preferred art form. At its worst, it often seems presupposed—“seems” because no one could get away with explicitly stating the idea—that there is a set of concerns, issues, or questions that are essentially philosophical and that we can think of a novelist as “philosophical” because she too is interested in them. If we try to say what these concerns are, silliness ensues: we invoke questions of selfhood, what we owe one another, the nature of desire, the problem of alienation, the structure of a flourishing life, and so on, and clearly none of these questions belongs to philosophy. But then what more are we saying when we ask what makes a novel philosophical, and why do we feel that we are paying compliment to literature when we describe it as philosophical? The essays collected here do not answer these questions as much as they pollute our sense that it is helpful to pay them much mind. They leave the reader with the sense that, in successful cases of philosophically minded criticism, the boundaries between the two parties to the ancient quarrel are necessarily and productively blurred, and that our sense of the possibilities of both philosophy and literature are enriched on account of this. In Guay's words, “taking a philosophical perspective on novels can at the same time be a way of gaining perspective on philosophy; the novel has a much to say to philosophy as philosophy does to the novel,” and so philosophy and literature might best be seen “mutually informing” (p. 2). This is an attractive view, and this excellent volume goes a long way in giving the philosopher of literature a sense of what it amounts to, both as a critical principle and a philosophical position.