Writing
Confessions
Half on the confession of Raskolnikov, and half on mine. Why an atheist would confess at all, and why I cannot leave the question alone.
This paper is one part on the confession of Raskolnikov, and another part my own confessions.
What compels Raskolnikov to confess his crime? Is it unbearable guilt driving him to seek redemptive punishment? But he is an atheist. Why would he seek spiritual redemption if he does not believe in divine judgment? For a rationalist like Raskolnikov, the concept of "redemptive suffering" should hold no weight. He could have gotten away with the murders, so his confession cannot merely be a calculated bid for a reduced sentence, as Porfiry suggests. No, I think his deteriorating psychological state and constant doubts reveal an innate moral sense warring with his intellectual rejection of morality's metaphysical basis.
I have had my own sleepless nights grappling with whether objective morality truly exists. Evolutionary theory presents life as an amoral process of gene propagation. "Good" and "bad" are just conceptual overlays we impose, mechanisms that helped our ancestral societies survive. From this view, moral tenets are socialized fictions, not transcendent truths. The raw facts are simply cause and effect in the fierce competition to pass on our DNA.
Then there is the existentialist in me: everything is permitted. But that does not mean there are no consequences. Man is free to do anything, and bound to accept everything.
Yet I know I am just playing with words, mistaking an abstraction for a reality. Raskolnikov took an axe and hurled it down with murderous effect. Two innocents were butchered, there was blood everywhere. Raskolnikov is a cold-blooded axe-murderer. These are the facts.
In my innocence, I had thought it was all an amoral process. Now, confronted with the axe-murder, I know that what Raskolnikov did was wrong. I was asking the wrong question: what good is philosophizing about whether morality exists when I cannot accept the answer if it turns out there is none? Morality must exist. And if it does not, I shall fabricate it.
Morality, for me, like love and beauty, must transcend the optimizations of self-interest. One can debate endlessly what true utility really means, but that, exactly, is the trap: morality must be transcendental, must be "game-theory sub-optimal."
I have found no final answers in Crime and Punishment, but the urgency of the question has never been more acute. It is not just fun-and-games anymore. It is a lived truth, the first metaphysical choice through which everything else will be decided.
For now, I eagerly wait to read Demons, in hope of finding my answers. And if I do not find them there, I shall, in a frenzy, read The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov next.