Dostoevsky and Crime

Edward Wasiolek argues that from the time Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground , he had worked out a metaphysical outlook that centered on the dialectics of human freedom, free will and society, and nihilism. What he lacked was a plot to go with his metaphysic, but he found the plot by focusing on crime:

“What is a criminal for Dostoevsky? He is someone who has broken a law and thus put himself outside of society. Every society draws a narrow circle of what is permitted, and every human being carries within him the impulses and dreams of acts that pass the pale of the permitted. Crime is this ‘might be’ which the forces of law, convention, and tradition hold at bay. It lies in the undefined regions beyond the clear line that society has drawn about us. In those regions man’s nature is unrealized, undefined, and undared . . . .

“Society, like individual man, is for Dostoevsky an arbitrary power, constructed by arbitrary wills for purposes of self-protection. What is ‘lawful’ is arbitrary; and what is unlawful, crime, is arbitrary. The criminal merely opposes his arbitrary will against the arbitrary will of society. He transgresses no sacred canon; he merely dares what the timid and unfree dare not do. It is only when one is free of the domination of society’s will that one is free to exercise one’s will. A free act is necessarily a ‘criminal’ act, in the special sense of being beyond what is permitted by law and custom. It is in this sense that all of Dostoevsky’s great heroes are criminals; all of them step outside the circle of the permitted into the undefined region of the unpermitted.”

Crime thus comes to stand in for the protest of the free man against whatever is fixed and determined, a protest especially against the injustice of the criminal’s placement in society. Crime thus becomes a form of social protest, an act of liberation. And, because the laws that he violates are arbitrary themselves, the criminal’s arbitrary act of will is, paradoxically, not finally a violation of fundamental social realities. On the contrary, the criminal who acts arbitrarily is doing at the individual level just what society does when it arbitrarily fixes norms in the first place. What the criminal does with his arbitrary violence is expose the bigger arbitrary violence that is human society. The criminal proves himself an Ubermensch who knows what is best for society.