Ivan Karamazov, from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, is often paraded across the philosophical literature on the problem of evil, made to stand as an example of a particular kind of argument from evil, one that is concerned not with the quantity or severity of evil in this world but with a certain qualitative type of evil.
This argument focusses on the suffering of innocent children. Adults deserve what they get, perhaps, and it could be argued that they are acting from their free will and so are accountable for their actions. But children? How can it be that they are accountable for the sins of the world? What have they done to deserve this? How can we say that they have been helped along in their soul-making process, when they suffer and die at such a young age? They were not given the chance to endure and develop virtue. They were not given the chance to sin. And we are told that they must suffer for our freedom and soul-making? Who can abide with that?!
I think Ivan is often misunderstood. Or rather, Dostoevsky is often misunderstood, in the way that Ivan is put to use in the context of the philosophy of religion.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan is a ‘famous atheist’, it’s true, but the novel shows him to be an atheist of a peculiar kind. For one, he doesn’t deny the existence or goodness of God. Ivan confesses to having a ‘Euclidean’ mind, bound to earthly laws and incapable of making inferences beyond those laws. He accepts that he can’t understand God, and that he can’t deny the existence of what he can’t understand. And so Ivan says that he accepts God, ‘directly and simply’. What he can’t accept is the world created by God:
Let me make it plain. I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with men – but though all that may come to pass, I don’t accept it. I won’t accept it.
Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov
Ivan can’t accept this world because the suffering of innocent children, especially for the purpose of buying a future harmony, violates a moral necessity. In recognising this as a violation of moral necessity, he cannot agree to endorse it; and so he will not go along with it, and he would rather remain with his unassuaged indignation, as he says (with emphasis, in some translations), ‘even though I am not right.’ Consequently, famously, it isn’t God he doesn’t accept, it’s just God’s ticket that Ivan most respectfully returns to Him (and if he is an honest man he should return it as soon as possible).
A Philosophical Argument
There is a philosophical argument here but it would be a mistake to think it is an argument from evil to the non-existence of God. Ivan’s argument is a paradigmatic example of the problem of evil being treated as an ethical problem. Consider the concluding phrases of his ‘argument’:
Imagine that you yourself are erecting the edifice of human fortune with the goal of, at the finale, making people happy, of at last giving them peace and quiet, but that in order to do it it would be necessary and unavoidable to torture to death only one tiny little creature […] and on its unavenged tears to found that edifice, would you agree to be the architect on those conditions, tell me and tell me truly?
[…]
And are you able to allow the idea that the people for whom you are constructing the edifice would themselves agree to accept their happiness being bought by the unwarranted blood of a small, tortured child and, having accepted it, remain happy for ever?
Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov
These are questions that Ivan puts to his younger brother, as part of their process of ‘getting acquainted’, but they are also questions that Dostoevsky puts to you, to us. They are questions about our moral limits. The two Karamazov brothers, Ivan the atheist and Alyosha the novice monk, are trying to understand where one another stands, and in reading their story, we come to understand where we stand. With whom do we identify, or admire or pity, and why?
Dostoevsky writes for this purpose, offering up a mirror to our nature, showing virtue in its true form, exposing its false image. In correspondence he describes the ‘point’ of The Brothers Karamazov as being:
…blasphemy and the refutation of blasphemy. The blasphemy I have taken as I myself have realised it, in its strongest form, that is, precisely as it occurs among us now in Russia with the whole (almost) upper stratum, and primarily with the young people, that is, the scientific and philosophical rejection of God’s existence has been abandoned now, today’s practical Socialists don’t bother with it at all (as people did the whole last century and the first half of the present one). But on the other hand God’s creation, God’s world, and its meaning are negated as strongly as possible.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
This is what Ivan stands for, not the ‘scientific’ or intellectual rejection of God’s existence, but the negation of the meaning of the world: it is a matter of values, not facts. Dostoevsky’s plan is to counter this ‘blasphemy’ with a reassertion of Christian values (not facts); or, more accurately, a Christian form of life:
The refutation of this (not direct, that is, not from one person to another) will appear in the last words of the dying elder. […] In the next book the elder Zosima’s death and deathbed conversations with his friends will occur…If I succeed, I’ll have…forced people to recognise that a pure, ideal Christian is not an abstract matter but one graphically real, possible, standing before our eyes, and that Christianity is the only refuge of the Russian land from its evils. I pray God that I’ll succeed; the piece will be moving, if only my inspiration holds out…The whole novel is being written for its sake, but only let it succeed, that’s what worries me now!
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky wants his critical readers to understand of Ivan that ‘…it is not I who am speaking in distressing colours, exaggerations, and hyperboles (although there is no exaggeration concerning the reality), but a character of my novel, Ivan Karamazov. This is his language, his style, his pathos, and not mine.’
Ivan is meant to stand for something; he is an embodied (fictional) example of something that Dostoevsky is not: a blasphemy. Ivan is intended to be an illustration of a mistake. What mistake?
A Mistake
Dostoevsky is speaking in defence of Christianity. He not so subtle in presenting Ivan, the atheist, as a grandiose and contradictory figure, ultimately flawed. In truth Ivan is a hypocrite. He claims to argue his case out of ‘love for humanity’, but this is shown to be mere words:
I have never been able to understand how it is possible to love one’s neighbour. In my opinion the people it is impossible to love are precisely those near to one, while one can really love only those who are far away. […] In order to love a person it is necessary for him to be concealed from view; the moment he shows his face – love disappears.
Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov
And later: ‘It’s possible to love one’s neighbour in the abstract, and even sometimes from a distance, but almost never when he’s close at hand.’
Ivan does not seem to like people. For the most part, he looks down on them. He thinks he is cleverer than them. In what we are shown of Ivan prior to the brothers ‘getting acquainted’, Ivan talks like an intellectual: detached, self-important and satirical. Though the meeting between the brothers takes place in an inn, we’re told Ivan is ‘no lover of inns in general’ and that Ivan has been a confessedly uncaring brother. He says he has no friends. He speaks of disenchantment and revulsion at life. He plans to ‘drink from the cup’ until he is 30, then fling it to the ground even though he hasn’t drained it all.
Ivan is angry, depressed, misanthropic. He has little real love for humanity, but what he does have, from his lofty arrogant heights, is pity. This pity becomes focussed on innocent children because it is difficult to maintain pity for adult human beings who behave badly (and anyway are ugly). Pity for an adult human being too easily turns into condescension and it is hard to love what you look down on. You are more inclined to kick them away like dirt on your shoe.
So for all his talk of his moral stance being taken ‘out of love for humanity’, Ivan doesn’t show manifest signs of compassion. This is a common feature in Dostoevsky’s ‘villains’, in contrast to his ‘heroes/heroines’. I suppose you could call it false moral pretensions: claiming moral motivations to be grand when they are really petty. These are always held up in contrast with the humble moral pretensions of Christianity, the only truly moral pretensions Dostoevsky thinks one ought to have. These pretensions manifest as self-effacing compassion and an acknowledgement of one’s own moral inadequacy, not grandiose moralising.
But it is not a moral sense that Ivan lacks; that is not his mistake. We are shown this when we are shown that Ivan is misunderstood by Smerdyakov. Ivan is mistakenly thought to believe that ‘everything is permitted’, and many naive readers take him at his word. But Ivan says of this hypothesis only that he ‘wasn’t entirely joking’. The holy Elder Zosima sees through his satirical facade, saying to Ivan: ‘you don’t believe your own arguments, and with an aching heart mock at them inwardly.’ (Zosima recognises Ivan’s tormented absurdity and acknowledges the ‘great future suffering’ that awaits him, inevitably.)
In truth Ivan feels all too strongly what it means for not everything to be permissible. He chooses to stick to the facts of the horrors of the world, the unconscionable sufferings of innocent children, and will not accept any story that requires him to relinquish these moral facts. His moral sense is strong and absolute. It is precisely this moral sense that is his fatal flaw. He is too absolute, and lacking a faith that is a necessary co-requisite for that strong moral resolve.
What Ivan learns when he sees his words reflected in Smerdyakov, and what drives him mad with remorse, is the terrible consequences of living and speaking in the tormented absurdity that comes from a moral conscience denied the hope of a religious faith. Ivan is living out this tormented absurdity. Ivan is an embodied (fictional) example of Kant’s moral argument for belief in God. Dostoevsky is showing us why faith is a necessary postulate of practical reason. Ivan lacks this necessary postulate; he even recognises it as necessary, and yet still he cannot accept it. He will not let himself accept it. That is Ivan’s mistake. That is what drives him mad. (Well, that and his drinking, which is no doubt a product of his despair; a point that isn’t laboured but is hinted at throughout.)
A Hopeless Romantic
It seems to me that to show this clearly Dostoevsky gives the two brothers, Ivan and Alyosha, a shared ground. They both share a Romantic ‘Karamazovian’ inheritance. They agree that one should ‘live with one’s insides’ and ‘love life over logic’; ‘especially before logic’, Alyosha says ‘for only then will I understand its meaning.’ This is a late echo of Dostoevsky’s own youthful discussions with his brother, Mikhail. In correspondence, Mikhail implores his overly-sentimental younger brother, Fyodor, to be more rational: ‘To know more, one must feel less.’ Fyodor Dostoevsky replies: ‘What do you mean by the word to know? To know nature, the soul, God, love […] These are known by the heart, not the mind.’
This Romanticism is fertile ground for what Dostoevsky sees as true faith and it’s clear that he wants the Karamazov brothers to be read as Romantics. The text of their discussion is littered with allusions to Romantic literature and much is made to depend on them: Pushkin’s ‘sticky leaf-buds’, Fet’s ‘dear corpses’, Goethe, Tyutchev, Polezhayev, and, vitally, Schiller’s ‘I hasten to return my entry ticket’.
But where the Romantic Alyosha finds hope in Christianity, the Romantic Ivan finds only despair in the unconscionable evils of the world. His strong moral sentiment is combined with a lack of faith and hope, denying him any chance of reconciliation, forcing him to remain in his unassuaged indignation, and so he is doomed to a tormented absurdity. Dostoevsky surely means him to be a cautionary tale. Dostoevsky has shown us this without saying his argument. Ivan’s character and story is his ‘argument’.
Ivan has everything that his brother has apart from Christian faith and the true love for humanity that comes with that. In drawing this contrast, Dostoevsky isolates the variable. Ivan has the moral sense that is lacking in other mutinous pseudo-intellectuals like Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment) or Stavrogin (The Devils); he has the ‘acceptance’ of God, on an intellectual level, that is present in Alyosha; and he even shares the Romanticism necessary for truth to extend beyond scientific knowledge. But he lacks faith and hope, the non-cognitive dimensions of religious belief.
Ivan Karamazov is a Romantic, like his brother, but he is a hopeless Romantic. He is driven by a Romantic recognition of moral necessity, a recognition that denies him any intellectual satisfaction because rationality cannot make sense of such senseless suffering. What is required is a leap of faith. But this is something Ivan cannot do even if he is not right. His Karamazovian moral sensibility will not permit him.
The correct ‘refutation’ of this, as Dostoevsky says, is found in the depiction of the religious life of the Elder Zosima. Dostoevsky worries whether this will be ‘a sufficient reply’, it being only ‘indirect’ and ‘an artistic picture’. Needless to say, this is not a philosophical rebuttal. This offers no morally-sufficient reason for the suffering of innocent children. This does not make rational sense of senseless suffering, or even try to. It is like the Book of Job in that regard.
In The Rebel, Camus says that Ivan Karamazov appeals to a ‘justice which he ranks above divinity. He does not absolutely deny the existence of God. He refutes Him in the name of a moral value’. But I am uncomfortable with Camus’ reading, which seems to portray Ivan as a sort of failed hero. Camus says in a footnote that ‘Ivan is, in a certain way, Dostoevsky, who is more at ease in this role than in the role of Alyosha’. But this is clearly false, and would be misleading if it were taken as a hidden truth.
Ivan is a villain. Dostoevsky knows this. Zosima knows this. It is only Ivan who can’t understand how it is that he can stand in the name of justice, ‘out of love for humanity’, and still end up the villain. But his moral sense is enough to tell him that he is, undoubtedly, even if he can’t understand how or why. We are meant to feel sorry for him, but we are not meant to endorse his view. He is no hero. Zosima is the hero, and Alyosha for seeking to emulate Zosima. Ivan’s story ends with a confession.
The Brothers Karamazov is a paradigmatic instance of the problem of evil being treated as an ethical problem. It shows without saying; it shows a form of life; in it, the ethical is made manifest. It would be hideously reductive to extract an intellectual argument from that context.
Read more: The Problem of Evil as an Ethical Problem
Note: Dostoyevsky’s correspondence is all sourced from Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). And the translation of The Brothers Karamazov is David McDuff’s (London: Penguin, 2003).
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