O declínio do espólio: razão, sofrimento e moralidade em Arthur Schopenhauer e Fiódor Dostoiévski

Abstract

The present work is determined as a dialogue between philosophy and literature through the articulation of the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and the mature work of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), with a view to exploring the visible relations from which it’s possible to support the thesis that the philosophy of one and the literature of the other illuminate each other mutually and even present an aspect of complementarity. In this attempt to interpret the extent to which the Dostoyevskian literary world is expressed in Schopenhauerian terms, the notions of reason, suffering and morality are placed in a central position. In concept and image, the ideal of a teleological history is doubly refused, bringing rationality back to the encounter with finitude. It’s the return to the problem of suffering, which doesn’t concern a stage to be overcome dialectically by the political and moral progress of humanity, but the constitutive dimension of the human being. It means to appreciate him according to his abysses: in the irrationality of his will, in the evil positively established by his colossal selfishness inscribed in the heart of a muted nature; but, also in the miracle of goodness which constitutes itself as moral action, founded on the feeling of compassion to express the intuition of the gratuitousness of universal pain. I propose the interpretation that these authors make up a dialogic field that represents a response to the ethical-existential problems arising from the optimism of rationalism and scientific positivism at that time. It isn’t, therefore, purported to affirm a relationship of influence, whose presupposition is the existence of a philosopher Dostoyevsky who makes his literature the instrument of realization of a hidden philosophy indebted to Schopenhauer’s work. Or that it is intended to be, before, signal that the images produced by the mature prose of the Muscovite writer lead to conceptually elaborated contents by the author of The World as Will and Representation, illuminating them not by a simple and remarkable coincidence, but by the fact that both take of a same malaise.