HEGEL'S "FRENZY OF SELF-CONCEIT" AS KEY TO THE ANNIHILATION OF

INDIVIDUALITY IN DOSTOEVSKY'S "POSSESSED"

Miroslav J. Hanak, East Texas State University

This essay is intended to examine parallel conclusions reached by Hegel and Dostoevsky
concerning some of the more dehumanizing results of Utopian rationalism. It avoids
purposely the tracing of influences from thinker to thinker, or even the legacy of one climate
of opinion to another; it specifically shuns the research methods of comparative literature and
those of the history of ideas intended to catalog borrowings, imitations or epigonism that
constitute consecutive generations of world views and literary movements. Its purpose is
simply to demonstrate by textual analysis of Hegel's "Phenomenology" and Dostoevsky's
"Possessed" that the sweeping systematization of Western cultural phenomena in the former
closely parallels the underlying existential problems posited by the latter. Both philosopher
and novelist deal with the ambiguous function of reason and its role in the shaping of
mankind's destiny.

The evaluation of the influence of Hegel's radical rationalization of reality (panlogism) on

Dostoevsky's apocalyptic tableaux of suffering humanity has been done, quite satisfactorily,
by others. Notable in its scope and accuracy of reasoning is Malcolm Jones' article "Some
Echoes of Hegel in Dostoevsky." (1) The author identifies two schools of thought on the
subject of Dostoevsky's Hegelianism: one is represented by E.H. Carr's claim that "there are
clear traces of Hegel in Dostoevsky," (2) and by R.L. Jackson, who finds kinship between the
two in "the field of aesthetics;" (3) others, like Chizhevsky and Bakhtin, "expressly cast
Hegel's influence in doubt." (4)

On the whole, Dostoevsky scholars are skeptical about Hegel's influence on Dostoevsky. The
opaque Hegelianism of friends, associates and mentors such as Belinskij's, Strakhov's, and
Solovev's seems to have been, at best, marginal for the novelist's world view and thought
structure. A.S. Dolinin seems to be alone in stressing the central role that "the importance of
suffering in Strakhov's Hegelianism" came to play in "Dostoevsky's aesthetics and...(in) the
construction of the Dostoevskian hero," (5) but even Dolinin cautions that there is no reason
to suppose that Strakhov's Hegelianism basically determined Dostoevsky's artistic method.
(6)

Jones' own views on Dostoevskian indebtedness to Hegel tend to be even more restrictive;
echoing Joseph Frank's assessment of Dostoevsky's novels as "topical" which would place
them in the mainstream of current polemics still tinged with Hegelianism, Jones finds such
echoes not to be

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"historical" but rather something to be universally encountered "in the mind of a cultured
reader." (7) More specifically, Dostoevsky rejected "Belinsky's Hegelian emphasis on the
power of Reason," preferring to trust "aesthetic intuition;" moreover, "Dostoevsky's
aesthetics were eclectic," and his fundamental adherence to idealism showed no taste for
"systematic metaphysical trappings." (8)

As for Dostoevsky's psychology, Jones argues it "owes little or nothing directly to Hegel;" (9)
he also questions the propriety of Philip Rahv's identification of Raskolnikov as prototype of
Hegel's "world-historical individuals," pointing out that the hero of "Crime and Punishment"
"does not see himself ... as participating in the unfolding of the (Hegelian) Idea." (10) Even
though Jones admits to "Hegel's pervasive influence in Russia and among Dostoevsky's
friends," and to "some positive influence of Hegel on Dostoevsky" due to an "intellectual
atmosphere pervaded by Hegelian Idealism," (11) he assumes "there is no sign of the
Hegelian dialectic, insofar as there is philosophy of history in Dostoevsky." (12) This paper
intends to show that there is, indeed, a rudimentary, covert dialectics animating the
psychological and world-historical processes outlined in Dostoevsky's novels. Jones makes
an additional concession to direct Hegelian influence in Dostoevsky's "The Possessed;" the
"views of Stepan Verkhovensky, an Idealist of the Forties," (13) are in part, directly Hegel-
inspired; more importantly, Jones recognizes "a tenuous link" between Hegel's Skeptical
consciousness and the attitudes of Dostoevsky's nihilists.

Hegel's discussion of Unhappy Consciousness in "The Phenomenology of the Spirit" shows

the dialectic mediation of Skepticism and Stoicism, evolving eventually into the Unhappy
Consciousness, a "bitterness of soul-dirernption," due to the "movement of an infinite
yearning" after the "unattainable beyond," which "in being seized, escapes." (15) Hegel
recognizes in this stage of the Spirit's journey to self-realization a soul-splitting alienation of
the individual from the traditionally divinely conceived World Ground. Yet of an even
greater relevance for Dostoevsky's concern with the monstrous perversion of the self by
Utopian salvationism is a more advanced stage of Spirit's concretization at the level of
"rational self-consciousness through itself," (16) which brings about the triumph of the
subjectively idealizing Law of the Heart over cold, objective Necessity, i.e., this deterministic
realm of natural laws. In this conflict Hegel anticipates the problematic rationalization of
mankind that Dostoevsky abstracted in Shigalov's notorious sentence: "Starting from
unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism." (17)

Hegel's Spirit, at this point self-existent, i.e., alienated from objective reality, and painfully
conscious of this self-existence, "recognizes itself as the Law of the Heart." Over against this
self-cognition stands

on the one hand a law by which the particular individuality is... oppressed, a violent
Ordinance of the World,... and, on the other hand, a humanity suffering under that
ordinance... (and) subjected to an alien necessity. (18)
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The overthrow of this "violent Ordinance" is carried out by subjectively-oriented Reason,

which "does away with the suffering" (19) occasioned by "the heart-throb for the welfare of
mankind." (20)

In the ensuing dialectic passage the subjective Law of the Heart realizes, i.e., objectifies itself
as a now universal pleasure "which all hearts feel." At this point, Hegel postulates his ever-
recurring reservation concerning the dialectic process: Individuality and Necessity have not
yet become concretely unified by the former's "discipline." This as yet only immediate
realization of "undisciplined nature passes for a display of excellence and for bringing about
the well-being of mankind." (21)

The second negation, i.e., negation of the Law of the Heart which had just triumphed over the
alien Ordinance of the World, now sets in. As soon as "the individual fulfills the law of his
heart," it becomes another "universal ordinance." Its "pleasure becomes reality" all right, but,
as it conforms to the new law,
the law has...escaped the individual...(ceasing) through its very realization to be a law of the
heart. For it thereby takes on the form of actually "being," and is now universal power, which
holds this particular "heart" to be a matter of indifference. (22)
Having lost his subjective self, the individual "now lives, grows on his own account, and
purifies himself of individuality." (23) The resulting world-saving ego is "in itself
contradictory, torn to distraction in its inmost being." (24)

The nihilism of such a deindividuated universal self is described by Hegel unequivocally as

"something real and essential for consciousness in general, but not for me;" it is "an ego
conscious of nothingness," and the coveted union of the Self and the Other has turned out to
be "madness in general," a consciousness "...aware of its self as this individual reality and, at
the same time... estranged from it...it is, qua absolute reality, aware of its unreality." (25) The
final conclusion drawn by Hegel from this operation of consciousness is frighteningly
familiar to us from experiences supplied by recent history, especially by the Guyana
holocaust engineered by Rev. Jim Jones.

The heart-throb for the welfare of mankind passes therefore into the rage of self-conceit, into
the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and to do so by casting out of its
life the perversion it really is, and by straining to regard and to express the perversion as
something else. The universal ordinance...it...now speaks of is an utter distortion of the law of
its heart..., a perversion invented by fanatical priests, by riotous,
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revelling despots who seek to indemnify themselves for their own degradation by
degrading...in their turn - a distortion practiced to the nameless misery of deluded mankind.

Anticipating the suicidal drive of nineteenth and twentieth century ideological demonism,
Hegel completes his schematic apocalypse.

Consciousness in this its frenzy of self-conceit proclaims individuality to be deranging, mad

and perverted... It is the heart...or the particular consciousness, immediately seeking to be
universal that is thus raving and perverted. (26)
In his introduction to the Slovak translation of Dostoevsky's "Devils", the Czech Hispanist
and comparatist professor Vбclav Černэ identifies three avatars of self-devouring super-
individualism. In Stavrogin, Dostoevsky portrayed "absolute pride;" in Kirilov, "absolute
existence," and in Petr Verkhovenskij, "absolute power," (27) all three parallel variants of the
dialectic tension between Hegel's Law of the Heart alienated from subjectivity by the Frenzy
of Self-conceit.

In effect, Černэ calls Stavrogin's "pure pride" absolute self-consciousness, a term virtually
lifted from the Hegelian dialectic. Černэ calls Stavrogin's stance beyond good and evil the
ultimate abomination, because it betrays "lukewarmness" and "utter indifference" to being or
not being. Seen in the light of Hegelian metaphysics, a consciousness beyond the reach of
mutually cancelling opposites and self-destructive paradoxes lacks the mainspring of spiritual
concretization and is, indeed, spiritual death. Having excluded himself from the admittedly
frantic vagaries of Hegel's "heartthrob for the welfare of mankind," Stavrogin remains safe
from the perverting and perverted Law of the Heart, but also from the single redeeming virtue
of the godless "possessed," that is, an absolute faith in some substitute for the discredited
transcendent order. In Černэ words, absolute faith "comes closest to absolute belief - only one
leap across the precipice separates atheism from God's bosom." (28) Thus Stavrogin has
achieved the final reconciliation of the Self with its Otherness, the world, an equivalent to the
Hegelian equation of Ego=Ego (29) arrived at statically, so to speak, out of boredom with the
insane excesses of the "possessed" struggling and dying for absolute perfection and justice in
the here-and-now. Invariably, such possession destroys but it can, in exceptional cases, like in
Shatov and Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovenskij, bring redemption in death. Malcolm Jones'
qualification of the older Verkhovenskij as "directly Hegel-inspired" hints at one such
exception.

Černэ uses another Hegelian concept in explaining Stavrogin's only emotion, an absolutely
detached voluptuousness of depravity. Stavrogin

transfigured himself in order to test his endurance under the assumption that for him nothing
is impossible. This (brings him) to a
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monstrous position of insolent self-conceit, from which... contemptuous height he rejects all
universal human standards... He meets his end in an act of despair that is a Satanic parody of
Christ's salvation...a devil of pride who finally sneaked into Golgotha itself, intending...to
slyly set himself on the cross in the place of the humble Christ. (30)

Kirilov comes off somewhat nobler than the Luciferian Stavrogin, but his madness proves no
less fatal to individuality competing for the vacated post of Absolute Being. He commits
what Černэ calls "a theological suicide," (31) calculated to usurp the legacy of the defunct
transcendent order. Although not emotionally arid like Stavrogin, Kirilov lives in "pure
thought," (32) practicing abstract reason at the expense of personal existence. In this, his sin
might be compared to Hegel's own metaphysical arrogance, intent on abstracting the sum of
phenomenal reality into his, Hegel's personal Absolute Spirit. That this is so Professor Eric
Voegelin demonstrates by citing the end of Chapter VI of the "Phenomenology" where Hegel

introduces the Ich that is "assured of the certainty of the Geist within itself...as the God who
fully reveals himself" in the middle of those who know themselves as pure knowledge. (33)
For Černэ, Kirilov is "another caricature of Christ," a pioneer of mangodhood assuming "the
burden of mankind," (34) defined as "the fear of the pain of death." (35) By killing himself as
the exemplar of self-overcoming individuality, Kirilov believes he can assure the rise of a
higher species of man, "for whom it will be the same to live or to die." By conquering this
"pain and terror," the superman of the future "will be himself God." (36) In the final analysis,
Kirilov's suicidal rationalism dwarfs even Hegel's deicide suggested in the above-mentioned
passage as well as the paradox of self-mirroring ego driven insane by the awareness of its
concrete unreality. Kirilov insists that

to recognize that there is no God and not to recognize...that one is God oneself is an
absurdity, else one would certainly kill oneself... But one, the first, must kill himself, for else
who will begin to prove it. (37)
The "thirst for absolute power," embodied in the younger Verkhovenskij, completes the triad
of forces constituting the gravitational field in which the "possessed" struggle for the attribute
of secular absoluteness. In Černэ’s words, Petr represents "the divorce of contemporary
socialist movements from the belief in individual human freedom." Much like their Judeo-
Christian predecessor, the new secular religions demand "absolute and unconditional faith,"
(38) a "new asceticism, a new saintliness and, eventually, a new martyrdom." (39) They thus
assume a stance above the "bourgeois fraud" (40) of individuality, excusing its destruction by
an "objective historical necessity." (41) Once again, Černэ's terminology parallels Hegel's
Law of the Heart transmuted into

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the negation of subjective compassion and, eventually, by a further Aufhebung, sublation,

into "an inner perversion of the self," a "conscious self-destruction" which reconciles the
struggling forces in a "nameless misery of deluded mankind." (42)

The demons and devils of lesser magnitude that cluster around this nucleus of Satanism-
through-absolute-rationalization practice, within their limited lights and powers, what
Dostoevsky calls a "vaudeville of devils." (43) Shatov of course looms great as victim of the
will to the secular absolute, in himself and around him, representing the second exception to
unredeemed "possession". In a way, he embodies the only worthy imitatio Christi. Like
Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovenskij, his faith in the existence of a transcendent Goodness and
Truth comes belatedly and remains conditional; he counters Stavrogin's query whether he
believes in God with a qualifying assent: "I...I will believe in God." (44)

At the opposite side of the spectrum looms Shigalov's speculation about attaining absolute
equality for mankind forcing "nine-tenths of humanity" to "give up all individuality and
become a herd" (45) for the sake of the remaining one-tenth. A decade later Nietzsche was to
use the term Herdentier for the mass or herd-man, a residue of the old, decadent humanity, to
be regenerated by a violent act of will of the forthcoming superman. But Dostoevsky
anticipates more than Nietzsche; his Shigalov uses the term "final solution" pretty much in
the sense it was to acquire in Nazi ideology.

Liputin, Ljamshin, Lebjadkin, even apparent innocents like the latter's crippled sister and
Lizaveta Ivanovna—whose young lady's heart had "been trained on the opera," (46) the
bungling governor Lembke as well as the two "local Minervas," (47) Lembke's socialite wife
Julia Mikhailovna and the ambiguous sponsor of the two Verkhovenskij's, Varvara Petrovna,
all of them succumb to the feverish dialectics between the drive for absolute self-assertion
and self-annihilation.

This essay attempted to show that, contrary to Jones' view, (48) Dostoevsky does employ an
equivalent of Hegelian dialectics. It appears, at first, in the vagaries of souls starving for the
absolute; gradually, it corrodes and explodes the social fabric of a godless humanity. This
process resembles the restless movement of Hegel's Spirit shaping the historical destiny of
mankind, as it gradually overcomes all imperfections of finite existence.

In direct opposition to Hegel's descriptive method, Dostoevsky works prescriptively. Unlike

Hegel, he refuses to write off the shapeless mass of tormenting and tormented humans who
can never be normalized by the mere operations of logic. Thus by indirection, but most
vigorously, Dostoevsky rejects Hegel's detached vision of cyclically self-cancelling "spiritual
shapes" of history which alternately form and fade in an automatic, mutual "sacrifice," "the
self-abandonment in which Spirit sets

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forth, in the form of free fortuitous happening, its process of becoming Spirit." (49) Instead,
Dostoevsky offers Stepan Trofimovich's attainment of the absolute in the reconciliation of the
finite, miserable individual with an idea "so infinitely more just and more happy" that "every
man must bow down" (50) before its infinite greatness.

NOTES
1. The Slavonic and East European Review (London: Cambridge University Press, Vol.
XLIX, 1971), pp. 500-520.
2. "Dostoevsky" (London: 1931), cf. Jones 500. Jones quotes additional opinions
favorable to the Hegel-Dostoevsky link put forward by A.Z. Steinberg in the latter's
"Dostoevsky" (London: Hillary Publ, 1966), by I.I. Lapshin, "Estetika Dostoevskogo"
(Berlin, 1933), and V.V. Zenkovsky, "A History of Russian Philosophy," trans. G.L.
Kline (New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1953).
3. "Dostoevsky's Quest for Form" (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1966).
4. D. Čyћevskyj, "Hegel bei den Slaven" (Reichenberg: Gebrueder Stiepel, 1924) and
M. M. Bakhtin, "Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo" (Leningrad, 1929). Cf. Jones,
501.
5. A.S. Dolinin, "P.M. Dostoevski] i N.N. Strakhov," "Shestidesjatye gody" (Moscow-
Leningrad, 1940), pp. 238-54. Cf. Jones, 5O7.
6. Dolinin, op.cit., p. 327.
7. Joseph Frank, "The World of Raskolnikov", Encounter, June 1966, pp. 30-35. Cf.
Jones, op.cit., 511.
8. Jones, ibid., pp. 508-509.
9. Ibid., 514.
10. "Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment," Partisan Review, XXVII, 1960, pp. 393-425.
Cf. Jones, 514-15.
11. Jones, 519. My emphasis.
12. Ibid., 508.
13. Ibid., 520.
14. Ibid., 513.
15. G.W.F. Hegel, "The Phenomenology of Mind," B. Self-consciousness, IV. The True
Nature of Self-certainty B. Freedom of Self-consciousness 3. The Unhappy
Consciousness. Trans. J.B. Baillie, 2nd. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 25-58.
16. "Phenomenology," C, A A, Reason. V. Certainty and Truth of Reason. B. Realization
of Rational Self-consciousness through itself, b. The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy
of Self-conceit. Op. cit., 390-400.
17. Fedor Dostoevsky, "The Possessed," trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Random
House, 1963), p. 409.
18. "Phenomenology," loc.cit., p. 391.
19. Ibid., p. 392.
20. Ibid., p. 397.
21. Op. cit., 392. My emphasis.
22. Ibid., 393. My emphasis.
23. Ibid., 394.
24. Ibid., 396.
25. Ibid., 396-97. My emphasis.
26. Ibid., 397. My emphasis.
27. Vбclav Černэ, "Dostoevsky and His Devils," trans. F.W. Galan (Ann Arbor: Ardis,
1975), pp. 5O-51.
28. Černэ, op. cit., 36.
29. Hegel, "Phenomenology" VI. Spirit, c. Spirit Certain of Itself: Morali ty C.
Conscience and the Beautiful Soul. 3. Evil and Forgiveness. Op. cit., 679, VIII,
Absolute Knowledge 3. The Return of Spirit... to Immediate Existence, p. 804, and
passim.
30. Černэ, p. 52; 56. My emphasis.
31. Ibid., p. 59.
32. Ibid., p. 57.
33. "On Hegel—A Study in Sorcery," Studium Generale 24 (1971), p. 347.
34. Černэ, p. 59.
35. "The Possessed." p. 114.
36. Ibid.
37. Op.cit., 629.
38. Cerny, 61.
39. Ibid., 66.
40. Ibid., 32.
41. Ibid., 61. My emphasis.
42. Hegel, "Phenomenology", Op. cit., 397.
43. "The Possessed," 620.
44. Op. cit., 256.
45. "The Possessed," p. 410.
46. Op. cit., 533.
47. Op. cit., 471.
48. see note 12; Jones, 508.
49. "Phenomenology" VII, Absolute Knowledge 3. The Return of Spirit... to Immediate
Existence, p. 806.
50. "The Possessed," loc. cit., p. 674.

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