Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

He and Ibsen were joined in this concern with the intensity of the inner life by the Russians, by Tolstoy, Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov and above all Dostoevsky. Some of the most original investigations of what J. W. Burrow has called ‘the elusive self’ were Russian, possibly because Russia was so backward in comparison with other European nations, and writers there had less standing and were more rootless.⁶⁴ Turgenev went so far as to use the term, ‘superfluous man’ (Diary of a Superfluous Man, 1850), superfluous because the protagonists were so tormented by their self-consciousness that they achieved little, ‘dissipating their lives in words and self examination’.⁶⁵ Rudin, in Turgenev’s 1856 novel of that name, Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Stavrogin in The Devils (1872), Pierre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) and Levin in Anna Karenina (1877) all attempt to break out of their debilitating self-consciousness via crime, romantic love, religion or revolutionary activity.⁶⁶ But Dostoevsky arguably went furthest, in ‘Notes from Underground’ (1864), where he explores the life – if that is what it is – of a petty official who has come into a small inheritance and is now retired and lives as a recluse. The story is really a discussion of consciousness, of character, selfhood. Although at one stage, the official is described as spiteful, vengeful and malicious, at other times he confesses to the opposite qualities. This inconsistency in personality, in character, is Dostoevsky’s main point. The petty official ends up confessing: ‘The fact is that I have never succeeded in being anything at all.’ He doesn’t have a personality; he has a mask and behind the mask there are only other masks.⁶⁷

The link to William James’ and Oliver Wendell Holmes’ pragmatism is clear. There is no such thing as personality, in the sense of a consistent entity, coming from within. People behave pragmatically in a variety of situations and there is no guarantee of coherence: in fact, if the laws of chance are any guide, behaviour will vary along a standard distribution. Out of that, we draw what lessons about ourselves that we can, but the Russian writers were apt to say that we often make these choices arbitrarily, ‘just in order to have an identity of some kind’.⁶⁸ Even Proust was influenced by this thinking, exploring in his massive masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, the instability of character over time. People in Proust are not only unpredictable, they assume incompatible characteristics in a disconcerting manner, while others are the complete opposite.⁶⁹

Finally, there was Nietzsche (1844–1900). He is generally thought of as a philosopher, though he himself claimed that psychology occupied pole position among the sciences. ‘All psychology has so far got stuck in moral prejudices and fears; it has not dared to descend into the depths . . . the psychologist who thus “makes a sacrifice” [to explore such depths] . . . will at least be entitled to demand in return that psychology shall be recognised as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and preparation the other sciences exist.’⁷⁰ Walter Kaufmann called Nietzsche ‘the first great (depth) psychologist’ and what he was referring to was Nietzsche’s ability to go beyond a person’s self-description ‘to see hidden motives, to hear what is not said’.⁷¹ Freud also acknowledged a debt to Nietzsche but that debt was far from straightforward. In showing that our feelings and desires are not what we say they are, Freud arrived at the unconscious, whereas for Nietzsche it was instead the ‘will to power’. For Nietzsche, the elusive or second self wasn’t so much hidden as insufficiently recognised. The way to self-fulfilment, self-realisation, was through the will, a process of ‘self-overcoming’ or breaking the limits of the self. For Nietzsche, one didn’t find one’s inner self by looking in; rather one discovered it by giving an outward expression to the inner, by striving, by acknowledging that such motives as pride existed and were nothing to be ashamed of but entirely natural; one discovered oneself when one ‘overcame’ one’s limits.⁷²