Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Disgust, and Self-Indictment in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Conrad’s Lord Jim

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1865–66) and Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) both concern young men given to self-exaltation who commit inexcusable transgressions that neither can bear to own, as to do so would be to acknowledge a humiliating ordinariness within themselves that each seeks with obdurate ingenuity to misrecognize or localize into a discrete taint that can be cleansed. Both novels, however, cast doubt on whether one should even aspire to a “good conscience” freed from restless, lacerating self-indictment. In doing so, they question a combined hopefulness about humans’ ability to earn habitual psychic cheerfulness and history’s slow diffusion of civilizing virtues, a diffusion enshrined within novelistic form as early as Walter Scott’s immensely influential integration of personal and political plots in Waverley (1814).¹ Both Dostoyevsky and Conrad endeavor to fashion a novelistic art that, unlike the minds of Rasknolnikov and Jim, does not naturalize characteristically modern European confluences of egoistic self-importance and cognitively colonizing violence, but instead drives toward, in Dostoyevsky, radically exorbitant ethical religiosity and, in Conrad, starkly astringent secularism. The novels thus sketch alternative modernisms, but neither can comfortably affirm the viability and consequences of its vision.

Dostoyevsky’s novelistic delineation of affective revolt against conceptual, systematic thinking has long been situated within distinctly Russian anti-Enlightenment thinking.² Rousseauian themes of interiority’s discontent with conventional, shallow values become interfused with aspects of Russian piety stressing that, because spiritual insight flows from empathic participation in human suffering (above all, in Christ’s and His mother’s), human community and everyday sociality rest on a basis other than rationalized self-interest.³ Peculiarly Russian receptions of Rousseau underlie how “understanding” (ponimanie) is used by both Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy: it denotes an affective conviction of absolute ethical ties with others, ties that no reason can dissolve, a conviction that precedes any “grasping” of things.⁴

Rooted in particular socio-political contexts and topical controversies (to what extent Russia should be Europeanized, what to do about cultural estrangement of the intelligentsia from the people, whether Russian orthodox piety has relevance within modernity), Dostoyevsky’s delineation of how Raskolnikov moves toward such “understanding” nonetheless transcends those contexts and controversies (as the work’s success in translation and its transcultural influence attest). Although Dostoyevsky adhered to mind/body dualism⁵ and was antipathetic toward science generally and neurology specifically,⁶ Crime and Punishment insists on the body’s attunement to ethical religiosity in ways that intuitively outstrip its author’s own cultural-religious politics. Antonio Damasio’s recent evolutionary account of the origins of selfhood, which links reciprocity in sociality and thought to corporeal imperatives of maintaining homeostasis,⁷ as well as research in neuroscience elaborating dual (and dueling) egocentric and non-egocentric emotion processing systems,⁸ illuminates this universal reach of Dostoyevsky’s art.

Ascribing egoism and so sin to the impress of material, temporal existence upon human affectivity and “reasoning,” Dostoyevsky rejected as naïve and impious accounts of evil, inspired by Rousseau, in which corrupt social values pervert a human nature that is natively good (Scanlon 35; Orwin 172–79). Even as he explores effects of egoism ranging from “unintended by-product[s] of selfish passions” (Orwin 158) to “love of control for its own sake” (159) however, Dostoyevsky also insists that resonating within consciousness is something akin to Rousseau’s “voice of nature” or “intimations of the heart.” As Robert Belknap notes, whereas in Freud “the subconscious lacks the ability to analyse and moralise [, in] Crime and Punishment, the subconscious is deeply moral” (136). Thus from within we are estranged from the egoism constitutive of any experience of individuated human identity.

Similarly, Conrad’s highly self-aware delineation of entwinements of consciousness, affect, and trauma in Lord Jim presents estrangement from egoism as at the core of an identity rooted in humans’ experience of being recurrently, involuntarily, whipsawed between non-egocentric and egocentric registers of significance. But in Conrad notions of moral identity are bound up problematically with the racial politics of Europe at...