Philosophical Fiction and Ideology

The notion of ideology — roughly the study of how ideas guide people’s social, political, and moral actions — has recently become important in analytic philosophy. I argue that we can get a grip on the notion by the production and and consumption of philosophical fiction, using as a case study a close reading of Dostoeysky’s Crime and Punishment.

Analytic philosophy is getting socially aware. For a long time the preserve of middle class white men, the discipline is slowly opening up to new voices, and new concerns are coming to the fore.

So, for example, philosophers such as Rae Langton have written about the subordinating effects on women of a lot of pornography; Jason Stanley has written about the ‘flawed ideology’ which political propaganda promotes; Sarah Jane Leslie has written about how certain forms of language (so-called generics like ‘Muslims’) lead to our making prejudicial judgements about minority groups, and Kate Manne has just released a monograph on misogyny.

I think that one way to understand the common factor in a lot of this work is the notion of ideology. What exactly ideology is is unclear, but we could roughly gloss it as views that, when held, are held deeply and which have important practical — social, political, moral — consequences. For example, one can understand feminist philosophers’ concern with misogynist pornography as the concern that such pornography puts forward a certain ideology of sex (that women are subordinate, sex is typically violent and so on) which leads the consumers of pornography to act as if that ideology were true. More generally, at the heart of the theory of ideology is that ideas have behavioural in addition to logical consequences, and that we should pay more attention to the former than we do. My aim here is to suggest that the consumption and production of philosophical fiction is a means to that end. At least some philosophical fiction helps us understand how ideology works by presenting in detail the effects of ideas on people.

Considering one famous work — Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment — I will show that it aids our understanding of how ideology works, giving us conceptual resources that should help us in more academic work. My plan is first to briefly introduce our two key notions, and then consider Crime and Punishment.

So let me start by saying just a little more on ideology. It’s notoriously difficult to define ideology. In my use, roughly inspired by recent analytic work, it means certain deeply held beliefs (although perhaps ‘belief’ is overly intellectualised: see the Haslanger passage about to be quoted) which shape how one views and acts in the world (compare Stanley 2015 ‘the beliefs that unreflectively guide our path through the social world.’(184) and Haslanger 2012 ‘representations of social life that serve in some way to undergird social practices.’ (411)).

But the exact definition, if there is one (which there probably isn’t), of ideology is somewhat beside the point. We have a decent grasp of the notion, and we can define it ostensively.

In addition to the example given above from the study of pornography, we could also point to the set of views clustered around the idea that the free markets are fair and efficient, or again around the idea that the very rich should be taxed a lot to support the poor (any given person may balk at saying both of these are ideologies; as Terry Eagleton (1991:2) says, ideology is like halitosis — something the other person has).

Theorists of ideology are keenly aware that ideas have power. For Haslanger, the very term ‘woman’ promotes an ideology which subordinates woman; for Stanley, flawed ideologies support material inequality, which itself imperils democracy. Both these thinkers have much more to say about ideology, but for my purposes the important thing is the relation between ideology and social behaviour (behaviour such as treating women as inferior or causing inequality to grow).

The suggestion I want to make is that just as academic philosophy is an apt medium to explore the logical consequences of ideas, so philosophical fiction is an apt medium to explore their behavioural consequences.

To make that point, I turn to philosophical fiction. As with ideology, it’s hard to give a definition of philosophical fiction. And as with ideology, it doesn’t matter for my purposes. We can define it ostensively: first, there are works of literary fiction (Voltaire, Murdoch, the Russians, Sartre, De Beauvoir and Camus come most readily to mind), and second there is science or speculative fiction. The former typically explicitly features characters moved by philosophical ideas (think Dr Pangloss, or Ivan Karamazov, or Roquentin) while the latter may convey philosophical content more indirectly, through the setting of the novel. The most recommended work on a list of philosopher-recommended speculative fiction[i], Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left hand of Darkness, for example, considers a universe whose inhabitants only adopt sexual attributes once a month. In such a world, naturally, the author can dramatise a range of interesting philosophical questions in a more direct way than one can do writing what is typically considered ‘literary fiction’ which for the most part sticks to describing the actual world (the distinction between genre and literary fiction is becoming increasingly blurred, but historically it has been important).

My aim now is to consider how the two topics of philosophical fiction and ideology can be yoked together. In order to do that, I will give an account of a central and well-known work of philosophical fiction, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Looking at the historical context in which it was written, I’ll suggest it provides a very clear case study of the subtle ways in which ideology influences action, which furnishes the theorist of ideology with concepts they can use in theoretical work.

The plot of Crime and Punishment is probably familiar, and can be summed up in a couple of sentences. Raskolnikoff, a poor student from a poor family, under the influence of the thought that sometimes one can do wrong for the greater good, murders an old woman pawn broker and — and not as planned — her daughter, and is rendered delirious by guilt. In this state, he is pursued by a police officer, before eventually, at the bidding of an adolescent prostitute, giving himself up.

In order to see what we can learn about ideology from this, however, it’s necessary to go beyond the bare details, and consider the intellectual background to the novel, and some more details about the plot. I’ll do the former first.

Crime and Punishment was published in 1865. In the 1860s Russian intellectual life saw the blossoming of a new sort of intellectual. These would be called, famously, ‘nihilists’ by Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons (1863), which brought this type of person to the fore (perhaps a helpful analogy, for those old enough, is the way Coupland’s Generation X brought, well, generation x as a distinct type of person to the fore in the early 1990s).

Fathers and Sons — itself worthy of study — presents the clash between this new generation of nihilists, and an older generation of intellectuals associated with the 1840s. This latter generation was influenced by the German romantics and esteemed art. The new generation, by contrast, was influenced by a hard-headed scientism at the centre of which was atheism, determinism, and utilitarianism.

Dostoyevsky looked upon this new generation with horror. They failed, he thought, to recognise that science can’t tell the whole story, that it couldn’t make sense of the irrational or superrational features of existence (most notably, for the Christian Dostoyevky, God, but their dismissiveness towards art was part of it). Because of that fundamental mistake, they were massively misled, and he feared their error would propagate through society.

He thus read Turgenev with pleasure, and perhaps read a review of the work by one Pisarov who argued that the philosophy of the nihilists, lacking any objective values, could lead one to do anything — even murder.

(This detail, and indeed all my information about the intellectual background, comes from Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevksy: A Writer In His Time (see 349 for Pisarov). This book, as much a history of ideas in 19th century Russia as a biography, is worth reading for anyone interested in how ideas develop, get expressed in a society and have social consequences.)

Crucially, what sets Rasknokiff off on his eventually murderous path is his writing, six months before the murders, an article in which he expounds essentially Pisarov’s view of where nihilism will lead. He wonders if it can be acceptable for some people to transgress moral laws — for certain supermen, such as Napoleon, to make their own morals for the betterment of society, even if that means doing what conventional morality regards as wrong.

The key thing here, which is the first point I want to make, is that we can clearly see in Raskolnikoff the behavioural consequences of an ideology: of a set of ideas (nihilism), and in particular a set of ideas circulating in a community at a time, structuring how one views and acts on the world.

*

Let me stop my exposition briefly to consider one of the reasons why I think this is important. Mid-19th century Russia was a society very interested in ideas. We are ourselves, I think, a similar sort of culture, except rather than hanging around salons reading journals, we hang around the internet reading tweets and thinkpieces.

And just as the ideas circulating in Petersburg in 1860 lead, or seemed to lead, to important social consequences, so it seems hard to deny the same holds for us. Steve Bannon is apparently influenced by blogger Mencius Moldberg[ii]; one reads articles on mainstream websites asking whether identity politics lost the presidential campaign for Hillary.

The most important issues facing us, it seems, are shaped by people shaped by ideas, ideas widely available and widely discussed. But this fact can often be obscured by its closeness. One of the benefits of studying philosophical fiction is that it brings it into relief, enabling us better to understand ourselves and the role ideology plays in our lives by seeing the role it plays in the life of a different culture.

Let’s return to Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikoff writes his article, and lingers a while living his poor, degrading existence. Then he hatches the plan to kill the old lady, and does so, accidentally killing her daughter at the same time.

This brings us to my second and third points. One of the things Dostoyevsky is at pains to point out is that Raskolnikoff isn’t at heart bad. Although he vehemently disagreed with the nihilists, he thought they were misled rather than bad. Indeed, to the extent that they were concerned with bettering society — something which they held in common with the intellectuals of the 1840s — he was on their side.

We should accordingly, at least to some extent, think of Raskolnikoff in this way, as someone misled: as an example of the way in which an ideology can distort and lead us away from our true selves. Raskolnikoff’s beliefs work against and hinder his hidden goodness, alienating him, in a sense, from himself.

But that’s not quite the whole story. Part of the subtlety of the novel is that Raskolnikoff’s motives are yet more complicated. On a superficial reading it can seem as if the abstract thoughts about morality and justice lead to the murders. But, as again Frank very helpfully shows, there is more to it than that. He points out that Raskolnikoff’s actions were as much motivated by a sort of egoism as by views about morality. In particular, with the Nihilists he thought that certain superior people were permitted to act in ways conventional morality would condemn, but he also crucially wondered whether, and desired that, he himself was one of those superior people: he wanted to be a Napoleon sort who could make his own values, and learns, painfully, that he is not.

This furnishes our third point: that the relation between our ideology and our behaviour is often a complicated one: even the most ideologically motivated person’s actions will owe in large part to unrelated beliefs and desires, such as the desire to prove oneself superior.

So I suggest Crime and Punishment can help us attend to three things about ideology: its genesis in the ideas of its time; the extent to which it can alienate us from our true selves, and relatedly the way it can lead to a confusion between our expressly stated motives and our real reasons for action.

These maybe sound, when baldly stated like that, somewhat obvious. But even if they are, it’s good to keep the obvious things in our mind when doing more abstract work, or when attending to the daily news. Reading (and producing) philosophical fiction can keep them in our mind by making them explicit and vivid, enabling us better as theorists to understand ideology, and as citizens to understand the ideological times we live in.

Works Cited

Eagleton, Terry. 1991. Ideology. Verso.

Frank, Joseph. 2012. Dostoevsky: A Writer In His Time.

Haslanger, Sally.2012. Resisting Reality. Oxford: OUP.

Stanley, Jason. 2015. How Propaganda Works. Princeton University Press.

[i] Curated by Eric Schwitzgebel and findable here: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/PhilosophicalSF.htm

[ii] For an introduction to this stuff, if desired, one could consult this http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/