The Racial Subtext of a National Idea

Martin Heidegger kept Fedor Dostoevskii’s portrait on his desk.Footnote ¹ In a letter from August 28, 1918, Heidegger asked Frau Heidegger to obtain “an edition of Dostoyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov,” and in an enthusiastic letter from July 28, 1920, he advises her, “If you have time, do try to read Dost[oyevs]ki’s political writings, they’ll make a big impression on you—I meant to tell you before we left.”Footnote ² Heidegger saw in Dostoevskii a dedication to “truth” similar to his own in Being and Time (1927) and, more poignantly, in what is known as “later Heidegger.”Footnote ³ For both authors, “truth” is entangled with a call to national conscience, fervent dedication to the “people” (whether narod or das Volk), and the ideological currents of Slavophilism and Nazism. Dostoevskii’s unrelenting exclusionary discourse and Heidegger’s evasive refusal to fully own up to his intentions in joining the National Socialist Party represent human failings at times minimized through a focus on the complexities of the relationship between modernity and alterity (especially of the Jewish other) as an embodiment of uprooted cosmopolitanism and technological advancement.

In a recent publication for the Bloggers Karamazov, Chloё Kitzinger has raised important questions in “Problems of Teaching Dostoevsky Now” about Dostoevskii’s othering discourse.Footnote ⁴ In these pages, I endeavor to respond to Kitzinger’s pertinent call: “But the work of teaching Dostoevsky often rests in mapping the restrictions of that dialogue—the aesthetic and ideological hierarchies that organize it; the missing, fragmented, or overdetermined ‘voices’ within it; the problems it makes (intentionally or unintentionally) legible and those it (intentionally or unintentionally) obscures. Now more than ever, this work of interpretation is critical.”Footnote ⁵ Those “restrictions” Kitzinger points to are rooted in the authors’ particular conception of “truth,” realized through the dynamic between nationalism and ethnicity, two intertwined concepts that reinforce the construction of racism. Dostoevskii and Heidegger’s premise for messianic calls and intuitive experiences is fundamentally constrictive (both deliberately and inadvertently) and employed as a license for their prejudice. This, to be clear, is a moral failure.

Although Dostoevskii’s racism, especially his antisemitism and xenophobia, is not exactly an inconspicuous blemish on his oeuvre, it has not been grappled with as rigorously in Slavic Studies as has Heidegger’s Nazism in the field of continental philosophy.Footnote ⁶ One of the challenges in mapping Dostoevskii’s moral shortcomings lies in the irregularity of his ethnocentric perspective, which, as such, remains somewhat riddling in view of his ethical directions. In his encyclopedic entry on Dostoevskii, Gary Saul Morson notes that while “[Dostoevskii’s] works through the 1860s do not justify the charge of antisemitism … his thinking took a decisive turn in the mid-1870s, and from that point until his death in 1881, he became an antisemitic propagandist whose writings have inspired numerous others.”Footnote ⁷ Dostoevskii’s biases are often labeled “antisemitic” or “prejudiced” in the field, either for the purposes of specificity or restraint, but I do not employ the term “racism” here merely to foreground a disciplinary tameness in confronting an overtness in Dostoevskii’s work. Some studies on race in imperial Russia have certainly stressed the ambiguity in the relationship between race (rasa), ethnicity (narodnostʹ), and nationality (natsionalʹnostʹ), noting their conceptual separateness. Informed especially by recent scholarship that has problematized the stark division between race and ethnicity, I view Dostoevskii and Heidegger’s exclusionary discourse as racially prejudiced, considering their stratification of ethnic differences.Footnote ⁸

This study aims to conceptualize the underlying patterns of exceptionalism in works, letters, and encounters that show a fomentation of essentialist notions like “Russianness” or “Germanness.” In their projections, Dostoevskii and Heidegger assume the role of spiritual missionaries called upon to bring the people to the acknowledgment of its own greatness, a dangerous idea congesting their thought. In the process of articulating their constrained meaning-making, Dostoevskii and Heidegger charge the intelligentsia with being too detached from the “people” and their “truth.” As Heidegger puts it, they dwell in the convenient public noise of das Man, in the “real dictatorship of the ‘they.’”Footnote ⁹ It is this very “publicness” by which “everything gets obscured, and what has been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible.”Footnote ¹⁰ Dostoevskii offers a similar warning in one of the articles in The Diary of a Writer, entitled “One of Today’s Falsehoods,” fervently linking “native soul” to “natural truth” as grounds for true “independent thought,” which, according to Dostoevskii, gets suppressed by the “source of evil.”Footnote ¹¹ In his view, this “evil” is anchored in “the notion of the dignity of a European, under the indispensable condition of disrespect for oneself as a Russian!”Footnote ¹² As callers that are called upon by the spirit of the people to foment an awakening, Dostoevskii and Heidegger used their platforms to disseminate their new word to the world, a word that when traced back to the two thinkers’ ambiguous, mystical premises reveals foundational biases necessarily leading to similar conclusions. For Heidegger, the poetic word of Friedrich Hölderlin reverberates through ancient Greece and Germania in the heart of the Volk, the farmer, and the tailwaters of the Rhine; and for Dostoevskii, Aleksandr Pushkin’s prophetic call to learn from the narod’s “truth” culminates in a belief of special destiny for Germans and Russians.Footnote ¹³

Ontological Nationalism

The mythic potency with which Dostoevskii and Heidegger choose land as a vessel for a people’s collective veneration and redemption frames Russia and Germany’s future as a return, a reclamation of the particular (uniquely “Russian” or “German”) and universal (the “people”), two categories often conflated in their works. Heidegger’s philosophical framework, which provides a rationale for his nationalism, is deeply rooted in the Romantic ideals of the German intellectual heritage and a profound attachment to the ethos of collective soul expressed through folk tradition and language. Although Heidegger draws extensively, albeit not expressly, from Johann Gottfried Herder’s conception of Volksgeist, or the “spirit of the people,” he recasts the German historical belonging in ontological terms.Footnote ¹⁴ Dostoevskii’s nationalism is likewise ontological in nature, distinguished primarily by his belief in Christ and the immortality of the soul as an intrinsic metaphysical principle, a rigid structure that excludes those who do not fit the “essence” of his imagined nation. The “gentle” national liberation of the 1840s that Aleksandr Ianov points to did not, as he says, simply “[turn] into the belligerent Pan-Slavism of the 1870s.”Footnote ¹⁵ State patriotism in nineteenth-century Russia, especially after its defeat in the Crimean War, was a dynamic process that catalyzed the formation of Dostoevskii’s “Russian idea,” subsequently reformulated by Vladimir Solovʹev in his L’idée russe (1888).Footnote ¹⁶ The universal humanity of the Russian spirit as linked to a messianic nationalism, is what Jean-Pierre Lefebvre would have called “ontological nationalism.”Footnote ¹⁷ My argument about the authors’ poetic premises for strictly essentialist messianic nationalism picks up where the late Horst-Jürgen Gerigk leaves off in his comparison of Dostoevskii and Heidegger’s eschatological directions.Footnote ¹⁸

Just as Heidegger saw in Dostoevskii a striking example of those rare few who comprehended the nation’s soul in its singularity, so too did Pushkin serve for Dostoevskii as a key figure in shaping his conception of that unique essence at once simultaneously, and contradictorily, universal. In his sketch of Pushkin, Dostoevskii proselytizes what he considers to be the kernel of the poet’s strength—his “Russianness,” or more precisely, sila dukha russkoi narodnosti (the strength of the spirit of Russianness).Footnote ¹⁹ In Dostoevskii’s rebuke of materialist aesthetics directed at Nikolai Dobroliubov, entitled “Mr. D–ov and the Question of Art” (1861), Dostoevskii defends ancient poetry, conflates art, beauty, and normality, and immediately connects these “natural” phenomena to the narod: “If a people preserves an ideal of beauty and a need for it, it means that the need for health and normality is also there, and this in itself guarantees the highest development of that people.”Footnote ²⁰ The “natural” ability of a people to redirect its way to beauty is contiguous with their indirect and mystical connection to the poet and poetic existence, a notion which Heidegger’s lesser discussed works on art and life offer in a more determinate register. Heidegger’s concept of Gewissensruf, or the “call of conscience,” can provide a basis for understanding both writers’ veneration of the poet as a possible caller linking essence, land, and destiny.

In Essence, Building a Nation

Heidegger’s “The Thinker as Poet,” “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “What Are Poets For?”“… Poetically Man Dwells …” collectively published as Poetry, Language, Thought (1971), realize the poet’s word as truth. The very first word in “The Thinker as Poet” is “way” (Weg):

“Way” is also one of the most recurrent words in Heidegger in its various forms: path, pathway, country path. Technologically driven modernity of inauthentic beings (beings as such) who have lost their way to their primordial essence and to Being (existence itself), is the gist of the problem for Heidegger. Consequently, “[T]he world’s darkening never reaches/to the light of Being.”Footnote ²² In “The Question of Being” (1950), Heidegger underscores the urgency to let the being that we ourselves are become a real concern, which according to him, is only possible through poetizing.

For Heidegger, Dostoevskii was one of those greats who understood the primordial call to destiny and its meaning in connection to a collective. In his 1940 lectures on nihilism, Heidegger quotes Dostoevskii from the latter’s elaboration on his impassioned 1880 speech at the Pushkin festival where he had been invited to speak in front of the Russian intelligentsia.Footnote ²³ In his devotional remarks, the novelist calls Pushkin “extraordinary, and, perhaps, unique manifestation of the Russian spirit,” also adding that “he is a prophetic one” as well.Footnote ²⁴ Pushkin was a poet who according to Dostoevskii had successfully portrayed the uprootedness of a negative Russian type (the “Westernizer”) and the grounded meek Russian peasant who feels the power of the native soil, hears its spiritual call, and is a builder and patron of the “authentic” characteristics in his own narod. Dostoevskii begins his speech by reading Pushkin’s poem, “The Prophet,” the ending of which is congruous with Heidegger’s view of Hölderlin:

The poetic word rises out of the darkness of the world and awakens the sleepy and idle hearts of beings.

Heidegger, like Dostoevskii, is careful to point out that the poet, too, must be called upon. Dostoevskii, in the same sections of the Diary, turns to specific examples in Pushkin’s works substantiating him as a “proper” responder and commissioner of the truthful word. Dostoevskii’s explication of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin focuses on the main characters, among whom Onegin represents the Russian intelligentsia as “detached from the People and the People’s strength,” who imagines truth to be “somewhere not within him, maybe in some other lands, in Europe.”Footnote ²⁶ Dostoevskii quotes from Onegin to underscore Onegin’s haughtiness, which he argues lies in Onegin’s discordance with “the People’s faith and truth;” the answer is in Pushkin’s plea to Onegin, the “prideful person” to humble himself and “first labor on one’s own native soil.”Footnote ²⁷ This, to Dostoevskii, is the “solution in accord with the People’s truth and the People’s wisdom.”Footnote ²⁸ In contrast to Onegin’s Westernized disposition, Dostoevskii portrays Tatʹiana in a different light. While “[Onegin] has no soil under his feet,” Tatʹiana’s memories of her childhood, “of her native home deep in the provinces … represent contact with her native land, her native People and their sacred values.”Footnote ²⁹ Tatʹiana’s “Russianness” lies in her connection with the land and its people, but also in her self-sacrifice manifested through her act of refusal of Onegin years later (even though she loves him). Tatʹiana cannot build her happiness on the unhappiness of her current husband, whom she would have to leave in order to be with an uprooted wanderer like Onegin. Thus, Dostoevskii maps Tatʹiana’s meekness and beauty in terms of two decisive markers that he identifies as exclusively “Russian”: her nationalism and her self-sacrifice, positions that for Dostoevskii are ineluctably interrelated. The Pushkin speech accentuates Dostoevskii’s attunement to Pushkin’s word as sacred truth, similar to Heidegger’s rendering of Hölderlin’s poems of fatherland in terms of the spirit of the Volk and native soil.

Such are the notions on which pochvennichestvo (return to the native soil) rests upon, a movement which Dostoevskii and his older brother to an extent brought into effect, and which, as Sarah Hudspith has shown, made little distinction in the pages of Dostoevskii’s magazine, Vremia, between Dostoevskii’s own views and the Slavophilism of Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevskii, and the brothers Ivan and Konstantin Aksakov. Both pochvennichestvo and Kireevskii’s doctrine of tselʹnostʹ dukha (wholeness of spirit), аs Hudspith points out, take their major principles from the Russian obshchina, which later resulted into yet another concept, sobornostʹ, a term popularized by Khomiakov.Footnote ³⁰ The word does not have an English equivalent, but “[it] embodies the concepts of free unity, mutual love and voluntary submission to the whole.”Footnote ³¹ This is precisely what Dostoevskii writes about in The Brothers Karamazov where Zosima bids Alesha to leave the monastery and become actively involved in chelovekoliubstvo, the act of loving humankind, a love based on the idea of the brotherhood: “You see, you must go. Do not be sad. Know that I will not die without saying my last word to you on this earth.”Footnote ³² At the heart of this request is the Incarnation. Zosima’s encouragement to push Alesha, the natural protagonist (in the novel, deiatelʹ), on the path of positively affecting others and acting as a trigger and call to others’ conscience, is exactly how the young man thinks he ought to act. In the manner of divine logos, Zosima imparts to Alesha his word (a “new word” building on the old word obshchina) so that the youth can ensure its dissemination. Among a group of young children at the end of the novel, gathered at a “pagan” stone, “eating bliny,” which Alesha characterizes as “ancient,” “eternal,” and “good,” the young Karamazov exclaims, “And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand!”Footnote ³³ Zosima’s instructions on how to care properly link land and love: “Kiss the earth and love it, tirelessly, insatiably.”Footnote ³⁴ Alesha’s mission as Zosima’s student of mystical nationalism is not to model isolation and asceticism but to be an exemplar among the people, the Russian people, and to bring them to the understanding of their own greatness through active love and “building up” of one another.

To un-build and build anew, to undo and bring a new beginning are at the core of Dostoevskii and Heidegger’s nationalism. The words “build” and “building,” “dwell” and “dwelling” are sprinkled throughout both authors’ works. Consider for example, Alesha Karamazov, who is well-regarded and is never quite worried about where his next meal comes from, relying, one might argue, on the mercy of others, which the narrator introduces as a positive character trait: “and if no one else took care of him, he would immediately take care of himself, and it would cost him no effort, and no humiliation”—he builds himself up, while building others up, as in, he is self-reliant, and also reliant-on-others, but at the same time contributing, by example and leadership, to the idea of reliance in others.Footnote ³⁵ When others do not “build him up” (pristroitʹ), then he builds himself up. The idea of the building up of oneself and others predicates a belief in one’s own capability and belief in others. Another definition of pristroitʹ is to “annex” or “extend.” Alesha is the glue in the community, perhaps more immediately in the Karamazov family, which the novel portrays as a microcosm of the narod, the force that will formulate and expand the idea of the brotherhood, but with a particular ideological mold.

The mystical path Alesha, Dostoevskii’s “remarkable” hero as the novel’s “From the Author” introduction informs, takes, will be of a new beginning, framed in a new truth, a destined calling from the depths of his soul and soil that he cannot ignore.Footnote ³⁶ Dostoevskii’s Pushkin speech frames calling in these very terms, and it is not surprising that from the Dostoevskii oeuvre it is these undertakings on dwelling and building that strike a chord with Heidegger who in “Building Dwelling Thinking” provides an expansive etymological analysis of the word Bauen (building), tracing the word’s etymological roots in Old English and High German: “The real meaning of the verb bauen, namely to dwell, has been lost to us. But a covert trace of it has been preserved in the German word Nachbar, neighbor.”Footnote ³⁷ Heidegger juxtaposes the current meaning of dwelling and building, which he says is associated solely with activity, and older meanings that connect dwelling, building, and a human being with the soil and the earth, claiming that “[w]hen we say earth, we are already thinking of the other three along with it.”Footnote ³⁸ Who is capable of such “dwelling”? To Heidegger, it is unquestionably the poet.

The Philosophical Framework of the “Call”

For Heidegger, philosophizing is poetizing. He maintains this position again in the Black Notebooks. “Poetry as philosophy,” he writes.Footnote ³⁹ The line stands as a closing statement to the section, “Thinking and poetizing,” where Heidegger asks, “[W]here and how does the original oneness of that intertwined unity have its happening, its necessity, and its mission? In this essence of philosophy—as disclosive questioning of the essence (a) of being.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Just like Being, says Heidegger in “The Thinker as Poet,” “the poetic character of thinking is/still veiled over/… But poetry that thinks is in truth/the topology of Being.”Footnote ⁴¹ Frank Schalow emphasizes a connection between Heidegger’s attribution of power to the poetic word and the equivalency of “God” with “logos” in Genesis, the latter being an “address proper to the Sacred.”Footnote ⁴² To Heidegger, the poetic word is an act of unconcealment. Schalow explains, “The creativity of the word is first and foremost an act of consecration, of transmitting its ineluctable power to whomever is brought into proximity with it, i.e., the Sacred. Hölderlin grasps the unique efficacy of the word when he states: ‘But that which remains, is established by the poets.’”Footnote ⁴³ The essence of Being, as a result, unveils itself to the poet. The mystical element of Heidegger’s thought discloses itself in his call to forget all knowledge—what so far has been asked about being since Plato—for the sake of new knowledge and revelation of truth.

It is necessary to understand the nuances of Heidegger’s mystical construction of the call of conscience to propose the possibility that Heidegger leaves room for interpretation of the nature of the call and the caller. Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time shows that the call is not merely primordial and silent. In his elevation of the poet, the poet’s “sacred” status does qualify the poet and poetizing as ways to authenticity. For Heidegger, the poet’s word tells the story of our being signifying not nothing, but something for the few. Heidegger begins Being and Time with the description of simple, everyday phenomena, i.e. I have done the deed. I am yet to do the deed. I have certain judgments about the morality of the deed known in the Christian tradition as conscience. Heidegger then challenges the moralistic view that abounds our interpretations of this term; instead, what is at stake is Dasein (Da “there,” and Sein “being,” literally “being-there”) coming face-to-face with its uncanniness, with the ineluctable strangeness of being a human. Heidegger defines “[c]onscience as the call of care from the uncanniness of Being-in-the-world—the call which summons Dasein to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-guilty.”Footnote ⁴⁴ While Heidegger claims that the call does not come from someone from the world, he complicates the nature of the caller by also stating that the call is “from me and yet from beyond me and over me” that “points forward to Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Heidegger clearly states that the call is not something “present-at-hand” (anything), nor is it to be explained “biologically,” and yet, he leaves room for ambiguity by rendering the call as “something like an alien voice.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Although not present-at-hand, conscience is there, revealing itself as a call, seemingly to the daring few.

In a scenario when something calls, a possible answerer could be expected: “Our understanding of the appeal unveils itself as our wanting to have a conscience [Gewissenhaben-wollen].”Footnote ⁴⁷ Despite Heidegger’s claim that the call should not be interpreted as a heroic leap toward authenticity, the referents to the “call” as the “breaker,” the “interrupter,” “the momentum of a push,” “abrupt arousal,” “the summoner,” “the power of conscience” are far from indiscriminate.Footnote ⁴⁸ Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation note on “summoning” renders it as a possible “heroism.”Footnote ⁴⁹ “Must not courage … attune the disposition here?” writes Heidegger in the Notebooks.Footnote ⁵⁰ Wanting to have a conscience,” Heidegger reiterates, “is … an understanding of oneself in one’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being.”Footnote ⁵¹ Heidegger hints at the “ability” of different Dasein in taking action in itself for itself, but it seems like the odds are against hearing the call, as “[it] is … something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor have we ever done so. ‘It’ calls, against our expectations and even against our will … to a more or less awake [Dasein].”Footnote ⁵² Heidegger takes these (call, caller) “phenomenological findings” as something “not to be explained away.”Footnote ⁵³ Yet, this uncertainty suggests a multiplicity of conscience-phenomena that showcase the limitations of truth in his philosophy and, ironically, responsibility. This may also explain Dostoevskii’s similar approaches to his meek characters (like to Pushkin’s Tatʹiana) who act as special triggers to the more Westernized, and therefore, morally ambivalent types.Footnote ⁵⁴

Thresholds and Messianic Truth

Dostoevskii and Heidegger’s nationalism results from a questionable amalgamation of native land, soil, the earth itself, and the peasant, all intertwined into a special significance for both authors that forms their idea of destiny. When Dostoevskii fervently spoke of Pushkin’s astute understanding of the narod, he did not simply mean a group of peasants who comprise a nation. He referred to the traditional Russian peasant commune, the obshchina, which existed in Russian life even before Christianity. In the literary scene of the 1840s, notable Slavophiles had their influence on major Russian literary figures of the time, including Dostoevskii, who avidly read Ivan Aksakov’s Slavophile newspaper Denʹ. This is not to say that Dostoevskii unrelentingly agreed with all the Slavophile positions, but he certainly appreciated their fervent opposition to western thought and the Slavophile proclamation of the new word (novoe slovo). Emboldened by the Slavophile movement, Dostoevskii tells Nikolai Strakhov of his own new idea on a developing character for a novel, a Russian wanderer, “a gambler, but not a common gambler, just as the miserly knight of Pushkin” who, he says, “is a type of a poet.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Being engulfed in western cosmopolitanism makes this character lead a non-Russian existence, attracted to money and gambling. Being detached from the native soil, whether physically or emotionally, is unRussian and thus unhealthy for the soul.

Both Heidegger and Dostoevskii use the notion of liminal suffering as a ground for illumination. It is not surprising that Heidegger concludes his rectorial address (Rektoratsrede) with a quote from Plato’s Republic that speaks to his propensity for thresholds and abysses: “All that is great stands in the storm.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The intrepid tone makes sense considering the challenge that lies in reaching authenticity and unveiling Being. In a similar note, Dostoevskii’s inclination toward schisms and oscillations, constructing characters that often dwell on the threshold, must have spoken to Heidegger.Footnote ⁵⁷ A human being, according to Dostoevskii, is most alive when seeking beauty, an ideal: “A human being,” he says, “thirsts for beauty … when he is in disaccord with reality, in discordance, in struggle, that is when he lives most fully, for the moment at which man lives most fully is when he is seeking something, … it is then that he displays the most natural desire for everything that is harmonious and serene.”Footnote ⁵⁸ It is in this threshold between the quotidian world with its untruths and the truth, and the very struggle in being caught between these worlds, that brings about the storm, the fit, but also the unveiling.

Truth as unconcealing (alētheia) is an important aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy of being and Being, idle states and primordial strife (Kampf).Footnote ⁵⁹ While it is comfortable to remain tranquilized by the impersonal das Man, for Heidegger, to dwell authentically, it is imperative to remain on the “threshold” (Heidegger also uses the word “fissure” [Zerklüftung]) of a certain suddenness and trembling in order to be able to hear the messianic “call.” Mikhail Bakhtin keenly points out that “Dostoevsky always represents a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable—and unpredeterminable—turning point for his soul.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Dostoevskii’s work offers no scarcity of such liminal characters with arduous spiritual journeys to illumination and “truth,” which Heidegger labels as Lichtung (the “clearing”) for the select Dasein. But prior to attaining this, these agents of in-betweenness must heed the call.

In both Dostoevskii and Heidegger, there is the underlying assumption that not every person is able to understand existence and calling as such. Dasein in its everydayness might not acknowledge its guilt on the basis of its Being, but only authentic Dasein does and acts in full awareness of that guilt. Heidegger’s debt here to Dostoevskii’s thresholds where spiritual crises become gateways to feeling “guilty” for the other and to Augustine’s self-reflexivity is remarkable.Footnote ⁶¹ To Augustine, “The final and perfect image of God is to be found not merely in the mind’s remembering, understanding, and loving itself, but in its remembering, … it is shown that this trinity is no more adventitious to the mind than that of its self-awareness.”Footnote ⁶² Once again, we stumble upon the question of one’s “own accord”: “owning up” to guilt is a step to make one’s actions one’s own despite the fact that Dasein’s thrownness and its being “there” are not of its own accord. It is not by chance that Heidegger uses the word “guilt” to signify the basis of nullity. As Macquarrie and Robinson explain, “‘[s]chuldig,’ and ‘Schuld’ and their derivatives have many different meanings, corresponding not only to ‘indebtedness’ … but also to … ‘responsibility.’”Footnote ⁶³ What kind of Dasein answers the call of conscience? A possible answer could be: a Dasein that is responsible in the sense that it wants to want to have a conscience. The question is not whether one chooses to have conscience—Dasein already has conscience via Dasein—but wanting to want to have conscience, wanting to respond to the call.

In such a selective line of inquiry, the so-called “own accord” is reduced to a derivative of the primordial guilt—call-answering and wanting to want to have a conscience are not fully of one’s own accord if “[t]he nullity we have in mind belongs to Dasein’s Being-free-for its existentiell [identifiable aspects of existence] possibilities. Freedom, however, is only in the choice of one possibility, that is, in tolerating one’s not having chosen the others and one’s not being able to choose them.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Heidegger restates this idea: “Wanting-to-have-a-conscience resolves upon this Being-guilty” which he calls “resoluteness,” also defined as, “the letting oneself be called forth to one’s ownmost Being-guilty.’”Footnote ⁶⁵ Interestingly, Heidegger again couches the derivative “own accord” in heroic terminology: “Anticipatory resoluteness is not a way of escape, fabricated for the ‘overcoming’ of death; it is rather that understanding which follows the call of conscience and which frees for death the possibility of acquiring power over Dasein’s existence.”Footnote ⁶⁶ It is crucial to understand that the call of conscience itself does not bring Dasein to itself, but that such is the “job” of the resolute choice; it is a personal challenge, a strife to remain in the threshold, on the brink of indecision and disaccord, which opens up the way to authenticity.

Heidegger argues that resoluteness assists in hearing the call, but what he does not discuss is how the “interruption” of the “listening-away” amidst the hubbub of everydayness initially occurs. Let us accept that the call does manifest itself as “abrupt arousal,” but its story seems to merely begin in medias res. How is it that some Dasein, even under the conditions of the “they,” hear this interruption and consider it significant and therefore worthy of their wanting? Would Heidegger agree that reading Being and Time, for instance, alerts us, or makes us more aware? It is likely, considering the role of the seer Heidegger not only attributes to Hölderlin, but also to the philosopher. “The philosopher,” he says,“… leaps ahead and stands there to the side and instigates the clarity of questioning and tends to the hardness of the concept and thereby administers the space-time of free poetizing in the empowerment of the essence toward the grounding of humans in soil.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Heidegger simultaneously expands and narrows down the category of the “seer”: “Only someone who is German can in an originary new way poetize being.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Resolutely poetizing and living authentically, according to Heidegger, are the only ways to truth.

Responsibility to the Calling Narod

In order to explain Dasein’s revelation to itself by itself and its unity in this self-understanding, Heidegger considers the existential significance of guilt. What one hears in the call of conscience is that one is “Guilty!,” and that “[a]ll experiences and interpretations of the conscience at one in that they make the ‘voice’ of conscience speak somehow of ‘guilt.’”Footnote ⁶⁹ Not only does everyday guilt signify debt, but “[it] also has a signification of ‘being responsible for.’”Footnote ⁷⁰ Such conventional (and moral) interpretations of “Guilty!” thrust Dasein into the domain of concern and obscure Dasein’s primordial Being-guilty. However, Heidegger does not demonize moral understandings of guilt but claims that there is a pre-moral source for common morality.Footnote ⁷¹ The authentic Dasein comes to understand the always-already phenomenon of guilt. The ontological guilt refers to a non-specific, unconditional, existential guilt that is primordial, and an essential way of Being as care. It is the call of conscience that informs beings they are guilty on the basis of their Being. To deny one’s primordial guilt is to deny the call of conscience, an act that is the basis of inauthenticity.

Heidegger’s notion of guilt on a primordial basis is analogous to Dostoevskii’s prime belief expressed in Zosima’s exultations in the philosopher’s favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov: “vsiakii pred vsemi za vsekh vinovat,” a phrase, which is often translated as “all are responsible for all,” and is meant to strip any positive connotation of Ivan Karamazov’s recurring anarchic sentiment, “everything is permitted.”Footnote ⁷² Dostoevskii’s post-Siberian novels, to various degrees, present being guilty as a categorical imperative despite the concept’s prevalence in the author’s last novel. Zosima’s and his disciple Alesha Karamazov’s dutiful exemplarity of guilt toward the other is the chief refutation of instances of unbound “permission.” Unlike Heidegger, Dostoevskii ties guilt to the immortality of the soul, but like in Heidegger, guilt does predicate a sense of responsibility in Dostoevskii’s moral-ethical framework that relies on an outwardly driven action, hence, a response to the other. According to Dostoevskii, the absence of either (love/guilt/responsibility or the belief in the immortality of the soul) annihilates the other. The universal aspect of this love could be an element of Dostoevskii’s dvoeverie or “dual faith,” a fusion of Orthodox Christianity and paganism, ecstasy and cardiognosis. Dostoevskii often makes this love the responsibility and task of the concrete individual who lives Christ’s word as an example to the nation that, in turn, serves as the guiding light of Christendom.

Love of the neighbor (svoikh blizhnikh, as Ivan Karamazov specifies) gains significance only in practice, in seeking an understanding of the secrets of the heart, which Alesha Karamazov and the unconventional monk who represent such “active love” (dеiatelʹnaia liubovʹ) within the community, espouse. Footnote ⁷³ We learn from Zosima his deepest convictions on love: “‘What constitutes hell?’ I reason thusly: ‘The suffering of being no longer able to love.’”Footnote ⁷⁴ The characters in Dostoevskii’s major novels, including The Brothers Karamazov, suffer from their own relentless egoism and rampant rationalism. Zosima’s point in “Of Hell and Hell Fire: A Mystical Discourse” is that as long as one lives, one ought to shun abstract love. Dostoevskii, in his Diary of a Writer, declares, “[L]ove for humanity is even entirely unthinkable, incomprehensible, and utterly impossible without faith in the immortality of the human soul.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Around the time when he was working on his last novel, Dostoevskii wrote to Nokolai L. Ozmidov in February of 1878: “Human reason comprehends [natural] … laws. Now suppose that there is no God, and no personal immortality … Tell me then: Why am I to live decently and do good, if I die irrevocably here below?”Footnote ⁷⁶ The responsibility, however, is not merely a responsibility to another human being, but to a spiritual brotherhood responsible to the narod.

Dostoevskii’s expressed connection with the “poor folk” was germinated in the katorga of the Siberian camp during his exile in 1849–54. His prejudices are conspicuous in his autobiographical fiction, Notes from the Dead House, which harbors the Russian prisoners’ aversion to Poles, Jews, and other non-Russians. In the Diary, Dostoevskii remembers a day that consisted of the Poles beating a Tatar, who lay senseless on his bunk. He then speaks of his desire to fall asleep but that the agonizing day had stolen his dreams. Consequently, Dostoevskii says, “Little by little I lost myself and imperceptibly plunged into the memories of the past.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The story that he later tells is of muzhik Marei with whom he had an encounter in his childhood. While wandering in the woods as a child, he hears a wolf howling, which terrifies the young Fedor, who in terror runs screaming at the top of his lungs and stumbles into the field where the peasants are plowing. “It was our muzhik Marei,” he writes.Footnote ⁷⁸ The tall peasant comforts the child, an act that takes Dostoevskii several pages to describe. Susan McReynolds observes that “Dostoevsky equates Christianity with the Russian people.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Dostoevskii magnifies this moment of comfort, which transforms Marei, the object of his veneration, into a full-blown suffering narod that performs Christian acts with simplicity and without really being literate about the scriptures.Footnote ⁸⁰

The Brotherhood, without the Jews

Indeed, in the zealous exaltation of anything considered precious and pure come fears and biases replete with instances of victim-blaming. In the section, “But Long Live the Brotherhood!” (1877) of the Diary, Dostoevskii is responding to the charge of antisemitism. The contradictory passages in the Diary depict a man trying to exonerate himself and at the same time unable to hide his racism: “[D]espite all the considerations I have already set forth, in the end I still stand for the full extension of rights to the Jews,” writes Dostoevskii.Footnote ⁸¹ And yet, the sentence that follows attests to the prejudiced viewpoint he entertained especially in his later years: “What if the Jews should descend like a horde upon that liberated peasant who has so little experience, who, until now, has been watched over by the entire commune? Why, that would be the end of him at once: all his possessions, all his strength would tomorrow pass into the hands of the Jew.”Footnote ⁸² While here Dostoevskii uses the word “Jew,” he also often incorporates the pejorative “Yid” (zhid) in “The Jewish Question” (1877) and even tries to defend its usage: “when and how did I declare my hatred for the Jews as a people? … Might they not be accusing me of ‘hatred’ because I sometimes call the Jew a ‘Yid’? … as far as I can recall, I always used the word ‘Yid’ to denote a well-known idea: ‘Yid, Yid-ism, the Kingdom of the Yids,’ etc.”Footnote ⁸³ McReynolds sees a pattern and growth in Dostoevskii’s antisemitism over the years, which were linked with Dostoevskii’s intolerance of the west and its eventual equation with the “Jewish idea.” Footnote ⁸⁴ These points find their support largely in Dostoevskii’s letters to his wife, Anna, and to the poet Apollon Maikov in whom Dostoevskii confided often, as well as in the pages of the Diary. Europe, to him, where he fled due to his accumulated debts in Russia, had become a prison, a confinement that could not compare to his rejuvenation in the Siberian prison of his native land. The “Judaized” west becomes associated with emphysema, child murders, and increased frequency in his epileptic shocks. It is no coincidence that the examples of crimes Ivan Karamazov lists as a justification for his abstract, impersonal love of humanity are mainly drawn from Europe.

Dostoevskii opposes European criminality with a Slavic brotherhood of nations partly understood in light of his anxieties and fears over victims and villains. His Pushkin speech speaks of the goal, “vital reunification,” which the Russian people “sensed … unconsciously” and which pushed them toward “the unification of peoples!”Footnote ⁸⁵ Dostoevskii elaborates,

A “real” Russian would become a brother to all, but in a very exclusionary sense, a brother to the “great Aryan tribe.”

A “pan-human” for Dostoevskii is “pan-European.” “Westernism” and “Slavophilism,” he says, are “great misunderstanding between us.”Footnote ⁸⁷ It is the “Russian heart” that will resolve this “misunderstanding” by becoming a brother to all, albeit with reservations. The attitude toward the non-Russian is racial but couched in terms of “distinctiveness” on a primordial basis: knowing intuitively. We see a similar basis in Heidegger where “truth” is exclusionary for those “who are indigenous, who stand on native soil.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The non-descriptive Dasein of Being and Time becomes German Dasein that alone can feel the urgency of the new age. Heidegger writes,

To Heidegger, not all individuals continue to matter, but only the few, those who have been attuned, who are in search of “truth” vis-à-vis soil and land.

The “Contamination” of Essence

Heidegger took pride in the fact that he did not advocate the “official theory of race” because he was not racist. During the dinner that followed the rectorial address, the minister of culture pointed out to Heidegger that the latter did not mention the “issue of race,” to which Heidegger allegedly (and caustically) responded, “You noticed that?”Footnote ⁹⁰ But the Black Notebooks betray Heidegger’s racism, specifically of the Jew as the problem, under the cloak of this haloed evasion that he considers his racism-free stance. Antonia Grunenberg, for instance, speaks about Heidegger’s criticism of psychoanalysis because Heidegger identified the discipline with Jewishness. Psychoanalysis however was not the only thing under Heidegger’s radar for critique; he equally rejected tabloid journalism, and dismissed it as public opinion (thus, “noise”), and with that, all the critics of the 1920s (mainly Jewish), whether it was Alfred Kerr, Siegfried Kracauer, Kurt Tucholksy, Karl Kraus, or others.Footnote ⁹¹ The cultural “contamination” that Heidegger identifies with Jewishness is again revealed in the Notebooks, in statements like, “psychoanalysis practiced by a Jew, ‘Freud,’” or “the Jew Litvinov has reappeared.”Footnote ⁹² Heidegger so vehemently tries to separate his thinking from that of the National Socialists that it seems to him that his criticism of general categories like psychoanalysis, Bolshevism, or technological modernity erases the prejudice he has for the individuals included in his attack. The difficulty in Heidegger is that he presents the problem of modernity as a “Jewish problem.”

Not coincidentally, Heidegger’s 1934–35 lectures, Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine,” focus on the river as a path-making force (in lieu of absent gods) that brings a people to the understanding of its place of birth. “The human being cannot find the way,” says Heidegger, “nor do the gods point the way directly.”Footnote ⁹³ The Rhine, the “waters of the homeland,” like a guide poetically projected in Hölderlin’s words, unconceals the path. Heidegger states, “Yet in the rushing, self-assured course of the river, a destiny fulfills itself, land and Earth are given limits and shape, and the homeland comes into being for humans and thereby truth for the people.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Jeff Malpas draws parallels between Heidegger’s anti-modernity and anti-technological stance with the Jewish other: “Heidegger views the Jews as an embodiment of technological modernity also—seeming thereby to accept uncritically the common stereotype of the Jew as the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ obsessed with money.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Heidegger directs his critique towards Machenschaft (machination) and Rechnung (calculation) in order to emphasize the many shortcomings of technological modernity, but Malpas notes that in doing so Heidegger fails to point out any specific technological devices or device, and instead uses generalities as a mode to criticize a system “that turns the Rhine both into a source of hydroelectric power and a destination for the tourist industry.”Footnote ⁹⁶ To Heidegger, under the gaze of technological modernity and increase in the power of “Judaism,” the mine-ness and the spirit of the river veils itself.Footnote ⁹⁷ Mirroring Dostoevskii’s rhetoric in the Diary, Heidegger responds to the charge of racism in the Black Notebooks 1939–1941 in a manner that portrays Jews, not him, as racist: “With their emphatically calculative giftedness, the Jews have for the longest time been ‘living’ in accord with the principle of race, which is why they are also offering the most vehement resistance to its unrestricted application.”Footnote ⁹⁸

Playing the Part

The fact that Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and assumed the position of rector might have something to do with his mission of unveiling German Dasein’s truth and what he had thought was the university’s authentic purpose. Speaking as if a messenger from the lost German spirit, Heidegger opens his 1933 rectorial address at Freiburg University by calling on the younger generation of students to understand their inherent greatness:

The fulfillment of the historic mission of the German university is only possible through hearing the word of the “true” leader(s) whose sole purpose should be to awaken others to their destiny and to the essence of the German university.

John Caputo, in his remarks on the notorious address, intentionally provides select words in the German in his translation: “Both the leader (Führer) and the led (Geführten) must be guided by the essence of the university.” Words like “rootedness,” “essence,” “spiritual mission,” and “destiny” are, in Caputo’s view, “the beginning of a growing essentialism in Heidegger’s thought that will finally displace the notion of facticity.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ While Caputo’s emphasis on Heideggerian essentialism finds many a confirmation in the philosopher’s works, I do not think Heidegger undermines facticity in his address. He may underplay it, but it is likely that the human “host” (Heidegger avoids talking about the human body), say Heidegger himself, in his privileged position as a rector, is a necessary element or even a transmitter of this essence, and by extension, the German people and Germanness. In this sense, Heidegger might not necessarily be referring to Hitler when he uses the word Führer. Here he may very well be speaking about himself, but only as the one who has received the “call,” unable in such a political landscape expressly to claim the right to lead the way.

Even if in his initial involvement Heidegger aligned himself with the National Socialist cause, he distances himself, indeed too late, from the party by describing it in the Black Notebooks as “machinational.” In his castigating remarks on Bolshevism and National Socialism, Heidegger differentiates between Russianism and Bolshevism the same way he does with Germanism and National Socialism. Referring to Bolshevism and National Socialism, Heidegger states, “Both are machinational victories of machination—gigantic forms of the consummation of modernity—a calculated depletion of nationalities.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Heidegger disapproves of the National Socialist purification agenda, as he has another purification in mind. This might explain why he remained within the party for as long as he did. His mission unrealized, he later hid himself in the Black Forest, perhaps ashamed. In the Black Notebooks 1931–1938, Heidegger states, “My rectorate was based on a great mistake,” a mistake that he perhaps had in mind when he wrote the self-absorbed lines in “Thinker as Poet”: “He who thinks greatly must/err greatly.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Dostoevskii and Heidegger’s constant qualms with their contemporaries to some extent rest on the two authors’ disagreements about what entails a “true” connection to a said motherland or fatherland. The authors’ reverence for what they perceived to be “simple,” and therefore positive, whether a mountain range or the contours of a peasant’s face, shapes their works in ways that are often on a similar register. Upon first seeing the philosopher who “attracted the youth of this period like a magnet,” Heinrich Petzet’s impression of Heidegger was not how he had imagined him: “[Heidegger] had nothing about him of the scholar, but rather gave the impression of a peasant or a woodsman.”Footnote ¹⁰³ It is no surprise that Heidegger had much admiration for Paula Becker-Modersohn as an artist, whose paintings often depict peasant women and men, and women with children.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ One of Heidegger’s favorite paintings was Vincent Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes (1886), worn-out workman boots. In his “Origin of the Work of Art” (1950), Heidegger maintains that this very “painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It is the work of art that opens up Being to beings. Significantly, it is not just any work of art, or just any poet or poem that moves Heidegger and acts as a guide in his philosophical ventures.

Heidegger expands the role of the guide to chosen artists and writers, including Dostoevskii, whose work and persona are tuned to a similar pitch. For instance, Marie-Eugène-Melchior, Vicomte de Vogüé, a young French diplomat stationed in the French embassy in St. Petersburg, is said to have observed in one of his meetings with Dostoevskii that “[his] face ‘was that of a Russian peasant, a true muzhik of Moscow: the flattened nose, small eyes blinking under the arched eyebrows, burning with a fire sometimes gloomy, sometimes gentle; … Never have I seen on a human face such an expression of accumulated suffering.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The significance of de Vogüé’s observation lies in his last remark, a comment from Dostoevskii that underscores the author’s pride in what he perceived to be “truly” Russian: “We possess the genius of all the peoples and also have our own; thus we can understand you and you cannot understand us.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Russian exceptionalism reveals itself even in the simplest of encounters, and comes more starkly into relief in the poetic discussions of “us” and “them.”

From Hearer to Herald

“Do we dwell poetically?” asks Heidegger rhetorically. He responds, “Presumably we dwell altogether unpoetically.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Poetizing is a spiritual unveiling of Being, that which is concealed; it is the primordial way of being. “The poet calls, in the sights of the sky,” writes Heidegger, “that which in its very self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself. In the familiar appearances, the poet calls the alien as that to which the invisible imparts itself in order to remain what it is—unknown.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The poetic has to come to light “appropriately,” for one to “dwell humanly on this earth.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The issue is that “[n]ot only the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The spiritlessness of the world is a dark cloud looming over Europe. Unlike Dostoevskii, who insists on the “prophetic” qualities of Pushkin, Heidegger elevates Hölderlin to the category of the “holy.”

Similarly, it is the poets, writes Hölderlin in “Bread and Wine,” “who are like holy priests of the wine god,/Moving from land to land in the holy night.”Footnote ¹¹² One of Hölderlin’s poems, “To Our Great Poets,” likewise demonstrates poetic sanctity:

For the destitute not to prevail, says Heidegger, “we others must learn to listen to what these poets say.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ To Heidegger, the world’s night in itself is not the largest concern, but the fact that human beings lead an unaware existence that has brought about the perpetual twilight. But unaware of what? Of the poets? Or of beings’ dwelling in the world, of not hearing the primordial call? In Dostoevskii, too, the call seems to be on multiple frequencies, reaching those with at least some potential, as is the case of Rodion Raskolʹnikov, who in his frenzied walk turns toward the River Neva and the cathedral and feels an “insoluble [nerazreshimomu] sensation it awoke in him.” The wind then carries to this misguided youth a “deaf and voiceless spirit,” which completes the picture of beauty and harmony even if, in this novel, only intermittently.Footnote ¹¹⁵ For Dostoevskii and Heidegger, the attuned listener hears the call, and only then the listener transforms this primordial call and calling into words for the few who will listen to the call (the poet/Pushkin→Dostoevskii as one of the few→the few/Russians; the poet/Hölderlin→Heidegger as one of the few→the few/Germans). The tragedy in both Dostoevskii and Heidegger lies not in the failure of recognizing the “truth-caller” per se, but in the special national status they attach to the originary structure of the call, its caller, and hearer.

Dostoevskii and Heidegger spoke their own indeterminate truths, seldom aligning their opinions with others, and when the few poets, generated from the bosom of the people came knocking on their door and uttered their word, they opened, listened, and perceived it through their own prejudiced lenses. They stood in the storms of their respective times, feeling largely alone in their search for Being and truth. As Heidegger writes in the Notebooks, “for the Great thinkers cannot be loved—the icy solitude which must surround them, and which can be penetrated only by an interrogative battle.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ In this solitude, largely implicated by their own view of themselves as arbiters of truth, they carried the heavy but to them, the necessary burden of the call, something they considered to be their pietas as conduits to the understanding of being and, ironically, to the mysteries of active care for the other. In his final remarks on Pushkin, Dostoevskii says, “Pushkin died in the full flower of his creative development, and unquestionably he took some great secret with him to his grave. And so now we must puzzle out this secret without him.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Perhaps for Heidegger, Dostoevskii held a part of that puzzle, the puzzle that Heidegger believed was his duty to work out. It is a puzzle that gestures toward the perceived spiritual ideals of a people, that the “cultivated” few owe it to their race and land to help regenerate these ideals. These patterns in thought also germinated the seeds of rampant nationalism, xenophobia, and antisemitism, which sought and found their victims.

In their own ways, Dostoevskii and Heidegger advocated for the beyond: beyond everydayness, beyond what we already are in our quotidian decisions, worries, and concerns. It is this “beyond” that gives their thinking an indeterminate character. Both authors, however, were determined critics of pure rationalism and calculative thinking, traits they unfortunately too often associated especially with Jewishness. The exclusionary streak is a philosophical deficiency in Heidegger because it implies an inherent limit to the scope of his ideas. In Dostoevskii, it is an aesthetic deficiency because it sets an artificial limit on the ethics he is willing to extend to humanity. Farin and Malpas have raised an important question in their reading of the Black Notebooks: whether it is the failings of the philosopher, inadequacy of the philosophy, or the flawed nature of the represented tradition.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The same concerns could be extrapolated onto Dostoevskii and his ideas, as well as to us, as readers, and our own honesty in grappling with these authors’ moral errors, while simultaneously appreciating the ethical questions they raise.