Can a man get away with murder? Or must all murdered blood cry from the ground? Such questions consume the divided protagonist, Raskolnikov—a young man whose poverty and mad genius bring him to kill a wretched pawnbroker by plunging an axe into her head. He goes on to rob her place in the name of good, yet his ill-gotten gains will lead to rags rather than riches. He will open more problems than he will close—all of which will require answers from the depths of his mind and soul. He will want to get away with murder; he will want to silence the cries and confess. His readers, in witnessing his crime, will emerge from their own depths as better judges of character.
On his part, Dostoevsky offers a conclusion: No guilty man walks free on the sinful land he has not kissed. Hence, “crime” begets “punishment,” and Raskolnikov must spend the remainder of the novel pitting his cold-hearted rationale against his guilt-ridden conscience. Ironically enough, both can be argued to have underlying causes that serve humanity, which leaves the antihero—or perhaps the hero (unless what makes him an antihero is incorrect)—wondering why he must be punished. Dostoevsky solves this dilemma by making triumphant the love of God despite the burden of existence—a theory that Raskolnikov is forced to accept and yet will reject in favor of his own.
It is important to look at each side and weigh their merits.
Motivations for a Crime #
Imagine you are broke. Your dream of becoming a lawyer and doing justice in court is now almost a thing of the past. Your sister, to help with the finances, has agreed to marry a colossal narcissist, who only chose her so she could be indebted and shackled to him forever. As you are drinking your worries away, you make the acquaintance of a dismissed government clerk, whose daughter prostitutes herself so she can provide for her family in the place of her drunken father. Meanwhile, seven hundred and thirty paces away from the gate of your apartment lives an old pawnbroker, who beats and enslaves her half-sister. This spiteful crone deals strictly with her customers and does not allow a grace period on their payments. She is also sick, so she wants to donate her fortune to a monastery before she dies as a way of improving her claim to heaven.
The question is: Would it be so wrong to kill her, make away with her loot, and use it to benefit the suffering parties and, ultimately, mankind?
But what if it is not a matter of would but of should? What if the lens through which you determine what is right and wrong submits to what it is that you are always meant to become and, in a way, are always becoming? What if your flourishing and everything that facilitates that flourishing define the good that you ought to do? If the human program of lodging the genes as far as possible into the future implies achieving the highest human power and excellence, then maybe to serve that purpose you are given a license to kill.
Also, maybe it is not as easy to love your neighbors as you love yourself when you are starving to death on the fringe of society, with a sick wife or a daughter or a son (or all three). When all hell breaks loose, why exactly should you love your neighbors? Especially when they are stupid, treacherous, and will not open their doors for anyone?
Raskolnikov the Utilitarian #
“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one,” said Spock, the ever-logical Vulcan from the Star Trek franchise. In John 11:50, the biblical version of the quote is spoken by the Jewish high priest Caiaphas: “Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.” While the former comes from the distant future and the latter from the past, they allude to the same ethical theory of utilitarianism, whose defining principle is to maximize everybody’s happiness in the long run.
A part of what makes Raskolnikov’s crime defensible (other than being a strong appeal to emotion to those who have experienced “having nowhere to turn”) is that it does seem to maximize happiness. Lives intuitively mean more as the count goes up. This is why most people choose to save five persons at the expense of one in the famous Trolley Problem. This is also why the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where it has been estimated that the deaths incurred were less than the lives retained, can be written off as justified. Granted, lives are not reduced to mere numbers in Raskolnikov’s case, but perhaps the moral scale could be arranged so that one angel is tantamount to, say, a hundred demons or a thousand.
The thing is, lives also intuitively mean less as the moral quality goes down. This is evidenced by Raskolnikov’s crime being made understandable by the hateful character of his money-lending victim. Alyona charges too much interest; she manipulates her half-sister (whom she bit on the finger so that it almost had to be amputated) and excludes her from her will; she is a hypocrite who wants to buy her way to heaven. All of this coats Raskolnikov’s intention with the same sense of reckoning found in a certain type of action movies, where a lover or a parent takes matters into their own hands and becomes the judge, jury, and executioner of those who harmed their partner or children. Like them, Raskolnikov gives off a purifying nuance. A segment of his aim is to get rid of a social parasite, and movie tickets are sold for that.
On the other hand, the murder of a completely innocent person (like Lizaveta, who suffers the same fate as her older sister) can also be framed as necessary, if not altogether benevolent. For instance, could the person who has the formula to cure cancer be allowed to kill another human? How about a child? A family? A small community? Curing cancer would save millions and greatly reduce suffering. It would have far-reaching benefits for society that would last generations. Surely those must count for something. And what if the sacrificial bunch in question does not have to be felled brutally with an axe but injected with a painless yet lethal substance in their sleep? What if they were an imprisoned lot who had raped, pillaged, and massacred in the past? In this situation, could it be that killing—even mass killing—is the right thing to do?
Raskolnikov, however, does not have such a revolutionary cure. While he is a brilliant radical who might someday serve great justice as a lawyer and produce hitherto untapped philosophical thoughts as a writer, it may be pointed out that all of that profit lies unguaranteed in the future. And as for the more immediate generosities of his crime, note that Raskolnikov does not have to kill the pawnbroker if money is what gets him out of his predicament. He could wear a mask and knock her lights out. Moreover, as terrible as she is, Alyona would unlikely be voted off as someone so evil that she deserves the death penalty. A loan shark who is ten times worse would probably only serve several months in a real prison.
Even though these added details skew the moral scale against him, Raskolnikov still must commit his murder. To the previous objections, he would respond by saying that the uncertainty of his future achievements does not matter and that his present genius and willpower are enough. He must kill because he must prove that he can get away with it. For he is—first and foremost—extraordinary.
Raskolnikov the Extraordinary #
Let us consider a tomato plant. It has a fixed nature embedded in its biology that predetermines how its life will progress. From seed it will germinate into a seedling; from seedling it will develop its roots, stems, and leaves. Then it will blossom flowers and produce tomato fruits. In turn, those fruits will contain seeds, many of which will have spread by the time their parent plant withers. But other than its nature, a tomato plant’s success in fulfilling its life cycle depends on a range of external factors as well, such as the amount of sunlight and water it receives, the nutrients of the soil, the weather or season, and the presence of pests. And perhaps there would be a wildfire, a storm, or a draught. Perhaps a prancing deer would trample it and squash its vegetative career.
Likewise, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that a person has a preordained nature that is subject to outside threats. This nature should be seen as a set of facts that are baked into the core of the individual, working as the driving force behind each belief, thought, and action. It is the “will to power,” and those who use their exceptional genius and creativity to bring mankind toward the power are treated as “higher men.” Some of them would be Caesar, Newton, Goethe, Napoleon, and Beethoven (and Nietzsche himself). For taking the collective human excellence a step further, they embody the ideal Übermensch, or the Superman: the individual who acts purely in accord with his one and true purpose of maximizing his power, regardless of the herd and the rules of the herd.
That herd, for its lack of courage, talent, and brilliance, is made up of “lower men.” They are the human equivalent of bad tomato plants. They are the seedlings that fail to take root, the bearers of unpollinated flowers. They are diseased and trampled, and they do not grow. To maximize their power and bring the higher men down to their level, the lower men established a morality that gave them a sociocultural advantage. This morality is what labels “amassing wealth” as “greed,” “amassing sexual opportunities” as “lust,” “amassing food,” as “gluttony,” “amassing status” as “pride.” This morality promotes a way of life that values patience, humility, and surrender because the lower men who created it had no other choice but to wait in line, bow down, and “turn the other cheek.” Thus, this morality is the single biggest outside threat to higher men; it depicts them and their ambitions—wrongfully—in an evil light.
For Raskolnikov, who fancies himself among higher men—or “extraordinary men,” as he calls them in his published article—this means that some revaluation of values is needed. If he is to act out his will to power, he must establish—rightfully—his own set of rules that will give him back the advantage.
It happens that his new set does not stray much from that of the herd, and he only tweaks it so that it makes his particular crime legal. (He maintains that killing whimsically left and right is wrong.) Yet this is where he begins to sit on the fence and stays seated on the fence. Due to the incompletion of his theory, or perhaps his halfhearted commitment to it, he is unable to fully side with the supposed righteousness of murdering a louse for the benefit of many. Despite having the license to kill the pawnbroker so he can shape history in his vision—as Napoleon did at the expense of his bloody wars and their bloody casualties—Raskolnikov cannot wholly separate himself from the “ordinary men” and seems to sympathize with them. It is as though his conscience acts like a voice that tells him he must return to the herd—that this return is the answer to his post-murder suffering and guilt.
Where Guilt Comes From #
Raskolnikov will think about confessing many times, mostly whenever he is in awe of human suffering. When he stands before the lifeless corpses of Alyona and Lizaveta, when he remembers the invalid, unattractive daughter of his landlady (who died of typhus and whom he had proposed to marry), and when he witnesses a woman’s attempt to drown herself in a canal, he finds the urge to come clean to the police without any substantial reason. He does not know why that urge is there and only seems to feel that it is there. And when that urge has made him anxious and miserable enough, he finally caves in and begins to seek redemption.
But why does Raskolnikov feel guilty? And as the reader, why do I feel guilty for him? Is his crime truly punishable, or have the lower men beneath him managed to twist what is good and evil for so long that the lie has altered everyone’s minds? If there is no objective moral truth—as a moral skeptic would have it—then where does guilt come from?
Rules and Laws #
Humans have evolved to be social. Together we can hunt game with eyes behind our backs, defend our territory with additional arms and legs, and raise our children with shared resources. All of this means a better chance of reproduction and survival. As a result, our brains reward our social bonding behaviors by sending out safety signals whenever we are warm and comfortable in our group. We feel good when we are lovingly stroked, hugged, and touched because we have the neural pathways that decode such actions as conducive to our growth and well-being. On the contrary, we feel anxious and depressed when we are isolated—so much so that raucous inmates who cross the line are locked in solitary cells for prolonged periods as a form of disciplinary measure. Whether we are men and women with sticks or men and women with smartphones, we are wired to build relationships and rapport, not flee into exile.
In spite of his extraordinariness, Raskolnikov cannot escape this biological fact. No matter how badly he wants to distance himself from everyone else, he must yearn to be reunited with his sister, mother, and friends, who exist in a society that rebukes murdering two women. With its rules and laws, this society has established a consensus of what best promotes the welfare of its members, before which he has transgressed and become the pariah. Thus, he experiences an upshot in guilt even before his crime, knowing his deed will leave him unable to be with the very people he is premeditating for. In the same manner that his hand will flinch away from a hot skillet, his conscience corrects him for betraying the trust of his community.
His punishment, then, may arise from a moral intuition that predates the complex cultures and religions that are present in his time. This intuition has been with him since the early humans first learned how to band up and better cooperate. Eventually, it manifested into legal codes on stone monuments and clay tablets. As groups became larger and more efficient in their functions, opportunities to inquire about the world produced abstract interpretations of human life and purpose. Today, it is in the interest of this intuition that various religious teachings and government laws are enacted and continue to be enacted.
It remains a problem that punishments can pay off. Anyone could put their hand on a hot stove and tearfully call it good if it were done, say, to save one’s family (or earn a billion bucks). Even if burning a hand is generally harmful, in a certain context it may be the right thing to do. For instance, soldiers go to war and die so their nation may live. Perhaps in the same breadth, Raskolnikov’s guilt—given enough time—would subside and make way for his crime’s glory.
Indeed, we are social creatures, but we also have the proclivity to demean, humiliate, and destroy the outsiders who do not belong in our groups. History shows that our states and religions are capable of waging ruthless wars against one another—to which we, along with the increasing power of our technology, have done nothing but ramp up the risk to the level of extinction. We have the capacity for apocalypse because we are conscious agents with conscious minds. We can treat ourselves as our own individual groups and be hell-bent on destroying everyone else for the sake of whatever reason we deem justified—despite harmful consequences.
Raskolnikov’s critics who want to fault him for his crime must have ground to stand on. Perhaps this ground and all other grounds bottom out in moral, conscious beliefs influenced by nature, in which case Raskolnikov could get away with his murder within himself just as Nazi camp guards could get away with their genocide within the Nazi regime.
That is, if he can stomach it, and he cannot. Just like the rest of humanity, when it comes to sending millions of people to die in gas chambers, cannot. He has a nature and a conscious nature. If he must eat, he must eat. If he must sleep, he must sleep. If he must repent, he must repent. He must stand on a ground upon which killing a louse and stealing her money is either legal or not, upon which he has the right to murder or not.
Specialized Men #
To give Raskolnikov the best possible defense, it should be assumed that he will live to pay for his crime (and that other accidental crime) by becoming the greatest Russian lawyer and philosopher of all time. He will fill countless prisons with guilty criminals (quite ironically) and contribute philosophical writings that will edify the world with groundbreaking ethics. Yet this line of thought already includes the devil in its details. Built into it is the premise that excelling at a craft and maximizing one’s power leads to superior moral values, even though craft and power do not reflect the full range of personhood.
In Raskolnikov and Nietzsche’s perspectives, Isaac Newton was a higher man for his sheer genius and efforts that pushed mankind’s understanding of mathematics and physics. The same thing can be said for Beethoven and music, Napoleon and politics, and even Nietzsche and philosophy. But a crucial thing to note is that all these people are only superior in their respective professions and not in the profession of being a good person. They are mistakenly elevated as specialized men, even though a person can be higher than another person depending on the hierarchy. He may be terrible at physics and politics, but the world’s most specialized plumber will dominate Newton and Napoleon in the field of plumbing.
Yet plumbing and doing math are only a few of the multiple facets of personhood. Even being part of scientific breakthroughs is only a facet of personhood. There are options to choose from: take care of the family, join the military, start a business, write a book, build a house, embalm corpses, or cook delicious pasta every day. The infinitude of these options shows that life is a giant team effort. To prevent the world’s plumbing system from deteriorating (and along with it, the hygiene of millions), the plumbers rely on the mathematicians to make sure their pressure gauges and flow meters are measuring the right things. Meanwhile, the mathematicians rely on basketball players for their entertainment (although math is probably entertaining enough for them to make a career out of it). And so, the engineers rely on the farmers to get their food, the farmers on the truck drivers to get their supplies delivered to the market, and the drivers on cigar rollers to roll their cigars.
Going back to Raskolnikov, it is possible that by creating the categories of higher and lower men and imposing his morality onto the herd, he forgets that he is part of the herd and must exist in the herd. By building an altar before his will to power and offering a dead body for it, he becomes the very thing he swore to destroy and loses his humanity. He says: “And the thing which really shows that I am a louse is that I am perhaps viler and more loathsome than the louse I killed, and I felt beforehand that I would tell myself so after I killed her.”
His witnesses agree that he should.
Suffering as the Answer #
A punch will hurt in the face, and a stab will hurt in the stomach. But the loss of a loved one will hurt to the core. Without having to know each other, two people on a street can agree which one of these sufferings is worse than the rest. They can do this because they have faces and stomachs and hearts, and perhaps they have been punched and stabbed and robbed of familiar faces, who also had stomachs and hearts when they were alive. These two strangers can then sit down on the curb and reminisce about those warm faces. They may shed some tears over those memories before they part.
These tears are the language of the soul. They are not made of atoms like hydrogen and oxygen, for none of us have scooped them fresh and brought them to the lab and studied what they mean. None of us have cupped our hands to catch the tears of a crying mother who holds the dead body of her child so we can tell her they are saltwater. We simply look at her, and we cry. We cry with her in silence—because in silence the soul can speak. In our understanding of her vow to take all the punches and stabs and kicks and slaps to see her baby live again, we participate in her pain and we suffer.
As Crime and Punishment goes, it is the chief redemptive figure, Sonia, who successfully converts Raskolnikov back to the herd by participating in his suffering. As a young woman who has nowhere to turn, she is forced to earn a meager living by selling her body. She cannot turn to her alcoholic father for help because his head gets crushed under a carriage wheel. She cannot rely on her consumptive mother because she coughs blood and is slowly descending to insanity, and death. She cannot ask anything of her half-siblings because they are too young and sickly. And yet, through her own suffering, she succeeds where no one else can because, to Raskolnikov’s eyes, she represents the suffering of all humanity.
When the two of them weep together, it is the same language of the soul that they speak. Suffering is universal and true, whether it is felt and perceived by a radical young student or a sordid young prostitute. In this sense, suffering is the element that levels humanity down to the same vulnerable footing, where everyone is certain to be wounded and maimed either by man’s inventions or time. Here, it is what cuts off manly power at the knees by reminding its manly host that all men must someday return to dust and die. It is the answer that leads to Raskolnikov’s confession, given that when everyone is equal, no one can be higher, and when no one can be higher, no one can impose higher values.
This answer ties to the Christian ethos of self-sacrifice. The Lord that Dostoevsky believed in was mocked and whipped and condemned to die an agonizing death on the cross. It is a death that, at first, seems to affirm evil. If God himself can fall victim to the conspiracy of man’s sin, then man’s sin cannot be judged, and the likes of Raskolnikov may rejoice. But Christ rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, suggesting that the meaningful surrender of oneself defeats death and the sin that is the cause of death. By giving up power and other earthly materials, one can clear his vision and begin to see the fullness of humanity, therefore avoiding the worship of an aspect of it.
Raskolnikov takes the first steps toward abandoning his notions of higher men and higher values when he asks Sonia to read the story of Lazarus to him. At this point in the novel, he is mentally and physically drained by being outside of humanity due to his crime. He is as good as dead, or so his punishment renders him. As a resurrected man, Lazarus becomes a subject of interest and salvation. Raskolnikov wants to return to the world of the living as well, and the only way to do that is to realign and fix his values with those of the living.
In Part Three, Chapter Two, perhaps the best description of Raskolnikov is told to his mother, Pulcheria, by his friend, Razumikhin:
“He is morose, gloomy, proud and haughty, and of late—and perhaps for a long time before—he has been suspicious and fanciful. He has a noble nature and a kind heart. He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely. Sometimes, though, he is not at all morbid, but simply cold and inhumanly callous; it’s as though he were alternating between two characters.”
It has been said that every person has an angel and a demon sitting on their shoulders. This is true for anyone with a conscience and for Raskolnikov, whose entire story revolves around listening to their whispers and being caught in the middle of their moral tug of war. He must either preserve himself and fight for the validity of his crime or confess to the police and submit himself to a higher authority, which may be the law, or the nature of humanity, or God, or maybe all these three. In the end, his angel wins, yet he remains as an inanimate piece of the rope who is only pulled over to one side because he is forced to.
But the fact that he has a moral qualm is reasonable enough. He underestimates his doubts about his crime and forgets that he has those doubts within the moral structure of his society, which in turn is nested within the moral structure of his world. And those moral structures, while imperfect, have not yet burned down the world. They have some good in them that must be recognized: they provide him with the opportunity to even formulate a moral ground to stand on.
Raskolnikov lets his witnesses heave sighs of relief when he finally goes to the police and confesses. It has that calming effect because we, like him, have had something to confess and know that crimes do get punished. We are familiar with his whispering angel and demon because we are pulled by the same forces in our own lives. His crime, then, is everyone’s crime; his punishment is everyone’s punishment. And we all must participate in his confession, lest we worship ourselves, our false gods, and, for being sinful at the time of death, be eternally punished.
