Book Review: The Influence of Ursula K. Le Guin & Dostoevsky and the Affirmation of Life
Bailey Potter. 2021. The Influence of Ursula K. Le Guin. PDXScholar. Portland State University & Predrag Cicovacki. 2017. Dostoevsky and the Affirmation of Life. Routledge.
Annavajhula J C Bose, PhD
Department of Economics (Retd.), SRCC, DU
Why read these books at almost the end of the beginning of 2025? Well, they and their authors’ life-stories need to be read and known in the throes of an existential crisis one can unconventionally experience in academia.
Say, you have done an experiment on yourself. Day after day, over a year, you have gone to a library because, after all, a great library is freedom and knowledge sets us free, and you have read, from morning to evening, critical literature on polity, economy and society. And at the end of everyday you have heard the Inequality Media presentations of Robert Reich and the Hitler Rants Parodies thanks to the YouTube. The outcome of this experiment is that at the end of the year you are paralysed by literature and noise and noisy data and your personal life is in a shambles with solidly entrenched patterns of problematic anger and angst, cynicism, pessimism and nihilism. You have proved right that our socio-economic system is making us mentally ill, just by intensely reading about it, leave alone by personally becoming a victim. And, lo and behold, you have at last become a case study material for psychologists and psychiatrists who want to write an article or book as also make money out of your sensitive and empathetic derangement.
I have an experiential sense and sensibility of this, and I have learned to value and move on with the solace that can be obtained from life-enhancing psychologists such as Jamil Zaki and incisive as also open-ended investigators of godforsaken human behaviour and human condition such as Dostoevsky and Le Guin.
Potter informs us that Ursula Le Guin excelled in scientific fiction and fantasy oeuvre, not as mere escapism, but as a literature of revolt or social criticism by creating a more holistic understanding of characters and worlds based on anthropology, history, mythology, psychology, sociology, political science, philosophy, Jungian thought, Taoism, anarchy, and utopia. She stood for the causes of marginalized underdogs, feminism, environmental consciousness, and anti-war, pro-equality and pro-humanity concerns, and never lost hope for a better world, one where people got along and took care of one another. Her novel, The Dispossessed, written in the backdrop of the Vietnam War, continues to resonate today. It needs to be read again and again to cling to the quest for a gender equal, racially equal, economically fair and self-governing world sans naked imperialism and colonialism. Nonviolent social-anarchist civil disobedience should not be given up despite the fact that it is not easy to live in this world: “The shift from denial of injustice to recognition of injustice can’t be unmade. What your eyes have seen they have seen. […] From now on, if you don’t resist, you collude. But there is a middle ground between defence and attack, a ground of flexible resistance, a space opened for change. It is not an easy place to find or live in.”
Dostoevsky’s oeuvre known as “fantastic realism” or realism “in a higher sense” is more daunting than Le Guin’s even as it is equally gripping. It exudes all-in-one neither clarity nor fuzziness simultaneity as he deals with all contemporary questions of science, philosophy, religion, aesthetics, economics and social justice with his hatred towards capitalism; criticism of rationalism; critiques of socialism, radical ideologies and utopianism; fight against bureaucracy; arguments in favour of reorienting economic policies from short-term to long-term guidelines; assertion that man does not act according to his own interests but according to his fantasies; penchant for the dark and morbid side of human mind; fixation on despair and absurdity; advocacy for inner spiritual improvement with emphasis on psychological importance of spirituality that people have an innate desire to feel like they are not merely animals, and to feel that human beings have a unique spiritual dignity and so on and so forth.
What is the solace or motive then that one can get from Dostoevsky to carry on with one’s life? This is where Cicovacki’s book is disturbingly enlightening: life is meaningless but its meaning can be recovered! What is this saying all about?
“The world full of evil defies both our intelligence and our sense of justice… the demand that the world be trustworthy does not imply it must be either intelligible or just. Evil usually occurs when some established boundary is transgressed. Yet not every such transgression leads to evil (or crime). Transgressions are the results of our freedom and our vital desire to explore such boundaries and open new frontiers. They are the consequence of our natural impulse to become more than what we already are – smarter, better, larger … While transgressions may lead to crimes, they are also responsible for much good, in cases when the boundaries are inappropriate and unjust.
Violating unfair boundaries and establishing the more appropriate ones make possible the important advances regardless of what kind of transgressions human beings commit (victimizers) or suffer (victims), they can distance themselves from evil deeds and respect their common humanity. Dostoevsky maintains that these points are crucial for our trust in the world and other human beings. The world can he trusted because of the cycles of deaths and rebirths, of trans-processes and re-processes.. Besides transgressions, Dostoevsky emphasizes the presence of another vital impulse in every human being- a desire for order, stability, and security. What is broken should be mended; what is sick, healed; what is transgressed needs to be restored. In addition to the trans-processes, which lead to transgressions of established boundaries, Dostoevsky calls our attention to the re-processes, which aim at regenerating order, stability, and security. He expresses this distinction in terms of the symbolic cycles of death and rebirth a death of the old and a birth of the new. The cycles of trans-processes and re-processes are based neither on intelligence nor on justice. They are indifferent to our rational and moral categories. Nature does not reveal any plan or purpose. Yet the cycles of trans-processes and re-processes have a meaning without purpose. They provide the pattern which, like glue, connects together an enormous swirl of individuals and events, all of which partake in the gigantic drama we call reality. This pattern helps us make sense of the world’s past, present, and future. The striving to become more human than we already are, coupled with the appreciation of what already exists, is not simply a natural impulse. Dostoevsky treats it as the highest expression of human spirituality.
A striving of this kind may begin as a natural impulse, with the appreciation of beauty. No intelligence and no morality are needed for the appreciation of what is beautiful. We are drawn to beauty naturally, without prerequisites, ulterior motives or future expectations. Dostoevsky insists that the fact that we are sensitive to beauty is a clear indicator that there is structure and order in the world independent of human beings and their reasoning, intentions, and actions. Symbolically speaking, the fact that we are appreciative of beauty shows that, even when not having a permanent dwelling in the world, we are not strangers in it either. We cannot be masters of the world, but we can be its guests, grateful for the gift of life inexplicably granted to us. Our gratitude for the gift of life is intensified when we extend our appreciation from beauty to love, and then move on toward faith and hope. While the appreciation of beauty is our preparation for the positive reception of other “useless” values, love is the crucial turning point for the development of human spirituality.
The appreciation of love teaches us that we should turn with care and sympathy even toward those human beings from whom our natural impulse would lead us away. We can learn to accept and appreciate even those who strike us as irrational and unjust. Love always involves a leap of faith, because it places trust into something that is not tangible, or not yet. Dostoevsky understands faith in its biblical sense: “Faith gives substance to our hopes and makes us certain of realities we do not see”. Faith is not primarily a possession of dogmatic beliefs but an inner attitude of trust in the visible and the invisible aspects of reality. For Dostoevsky, this means the interconnectedness of the profane and the sacred. Nature is not a blind and pre-determined Newtonian mechanism, but a living organism permeated with various kinds of energies and forces.
The sacred is not transcendent but immanent in the world and present in multiple aspects of human life. Dostoevsky does not understand the sacred – or the holy – in the intellectualistic and moralistic terms. For him, God is not the omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent being, but is as ambivalent as human beings are. Dostoevsky’s God does not resemble the Divinity praised by the pious friends of Job. His God is far closer to the unnamed voice which addresses Job from the whirlwind. This God is the principle of creativity as well as of destructivity, of death no less than of life. This God is the God of paradoxes, and only faith can come to terms with this ambiguous God and His perplexing many human emotions: acts, and attitudes which, like gifts, can bestow meaning on the fragments of reality. Dostoevsky thinks that such bestowing comes from a variety of spiritual attitudes. No one capable of appreciating the beauty of the setting sun wonders at that moment whether the world is absurd. No one capable of feeling gratitude or love doubts for a second whether life is meaningful. No trusting person thinks of suicide. At least in the moments when we are capable of appreciating beauty and love, in the moments in which we have faith in ourselves, other human beings, nature or God, our existence is experienced as a miracle which cannot but be affirmed, regardless of whether any plan or purpose hides behind creation. Dostoevsky concedes that not everything in reality, perhaps not even most of it, is meaningful. Nor does he have any qualms about accepting that our intellectual capacity is not a fully adequate means for comprehending what goes on in human life.
The meaning of life is for Dostoevsky a spiritual category expressed through the joy of being alive and the affirmation of the aspects of life that deserve to be appreciated. Dostoevsky’s optimism is ultimately grounded in spirituality. _His attitude toward life is optimistic in the sense that there is always a chance for people to become more human than they are. This optimism, minimal as it may be, is also realistic and compatible with the presence of evil in the world. Dostoevsky maintains that it is usually the experience of evil which stimulates our spiritual growth and leads us to overcome the ego-centeredness by becoming more sensitive, caring, and forgiving. No person of faith, no one appreciative of the gifts bestowed upon us, would demand a proof of the meaning of life. This spirit of appreciation is the glue which makes life worth living. Dostoevsky’s philosophy of life and his optimism are based on this awareness of our gifts, which crystallizes in the central messages of his affirmation of life: that we give gifts to others, and, even more importantly, that we ourselves become gifts to others.”
So, let us overcome cynicism, pessimism and nihilism. Let us not commit suicide.
References
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/our-economic-system-is-making-us-mentally-ill
https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/oct/02/optimist-cynicism-faith
