AN ANALYSIS OF THE GRAND INQUISITOR SCENE

By Bob Corbett
September 1998

From: THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. by Fydor Dostoevsky and translated by Constance Garnett.

1879

1. The descriptive argument of the Grand Inquisitor.
   1. Human beings can be divided into two groups, according to whether or not they can and do handle freedom.
      1. The criteria of this division are:
         1. Whether or not a person can and will handle freedom.
         2. Whether or not this freedom is manifest in action.
      2. When one does the division it turns out that the groups are:
         1. Tens of thousands can and do handle freedom.
         2. Thousands of millions do not.
      3. This argument is advanced by the inquisitor not on the basis of bias or assumption, but on his observation of human behavior in his time and in history.
         
         He argues that the masses, the thousands of thousands, have demonstrated:
         1. An excessive general failure on consistently achieving even subsistence in food.
         2. An impossibility in bearing the burden of responsibility for important moral decisions.
         3. A desperate need for unity and a marked inability to live with difference.

2. The Grand Inquisitor analyzes this data to mean:
   1. Most humans are by nature incapable of handling freedom, of taking care of their basic needs, of accepting the moral responsibility of conscience or of living with differences. He arrives at this conclusion since his observations suggest that this has been the pattern of human behavior from the beginning of human history.
   2. He does believe there is a relatively small group (tens of thousands) of people who are different -- BY NATURE -- and who can do for themselves, handle responsibility and conscience and not only live with difference, but even create it. Again, he appeals to experience, being able to cite these people in human history.
   3. A few notes to elucidate his claims:
      1. There is a powerful case to be made, especially up to Dostoevsky's time, that the masses of humans did not do a very good job of providing for the basic necessities. Life from the beginning of human history until very recently was, for the thousands of thousands, very harsh indeed, a genuine struggle for existence, where only a small minority made it into their 40s and life for most was extremely difficult.
      2. The masses of humans have not been impressive in their honest (authentic) ability to take moral responsibility upon themselves. Human history is filled with various appeals to transcendence, necessity, magic and the occult, evil forces like Satan or demons, or human powers like kings, armies, invaders etc., all of whom were claimed to have been the reasons why people did what they did. Also natural forces -- storms, droughts, sickness, various natural disasters -- have frequently figured in explanations of why things were they way they were. The open personal acceptance of responsibility for the way things were has been typically reserved to those people who would obviously fit into the inquisitor's class of the tens of thousands.
      3. The masses of humans have had an exceptionally bad record of dealing with difference. The history of humanity is filled with constant wars and struggles where the difference of another group was said to be the motivating factor in the violent struggle. Claims that people worshipped the wrong gods, or lived the wrong sort of family life, or practiced wrong social practices, said or believed the wrong beliefs etc. Marxists would have us believe that economic struggles are really lurking just beneath the surface and that these other reasons are simply false justifications. Freudians would have it otherwise. Whatever the deepest reasons, the inquisitor seems correct that the constant pointing up of unacceptable DIFFERENCES does seem to be the primary justification given time and time again in human history.

3. The inquisitor's claimed "humanistic" response to this situation:
   1. The inquisitor believes that he and many like him are among the tens of thousands -- those capable of and demonstrating the ability to achieve material ends, take moral responsibility upon their shoulders and live with difference.
   2. The inquisitor believes he loves people and that this "natural" condition of humans causes the thousands of thousands great suffering and anxiety and constant war.
   3. By coming forward in a loving act of sacrifice, the inquisitor and any like him, take the responsibility upon themselves for getting things done, making moral decisions and keeping peace. This is enormous work and an awesome responsibility.
   4. However, it is rather easy to get the thousands of thousands to allow them to do this. All they have to do is DELIVER. That is:
      1. Provide basic material subsistence and comfort.
      2. Make the moral decisions for everyone.
      3. Work toward a unified world of sameness, where no one has to confront difference. (For the thousands of thousands to have to confront difference would mean they might have to question whether they or them were living "rightly," and they'd have to face moral responsibility, something they are naturally incapable of doing.)
   5. In following this humanistic task, the inquisitor and other such "humanists" must watch out for any members of the tens of thousands group. They threaten to disturb the tranquility of the thousands of thousands, thus plunging them back into misery. Thus, in the name of the greater good for the greater number, and the greater good for the NATURALLY helpless, the inquisitor and other such "humanists" must be prepared to be brutal, even to the extent of burning a 100 heretics a day if it takes that to insure domestic tranquility and provide for the common good.

4. An existentialist reply to the inquisitor.
   1. The situation is much as the inquisitor describes it. There do seem to be two groups, each which behaves much like the inquisitor describes.
   2. However, the existentialist rejects the view that either group is as it is by NATURE. Then why? Heidegger argues that there is a tendency in humans to take things easy and make thing easy, a tendency toward inauthenticity. However, if once people can come to confront this inauthenticity, then they have the potential to escape into authenticity, or at least more authenticity than before.
   3. How does one break out of inauthenticity (the way of life of the thousands of thousands) and into authenticity (the way of the tens of thousands)? The existentialists would believe that several things might help:
      1. Existentialist theory and literature. These are ways to bring the existentialist critique and alternative to people's attention and try to lure more people away from inauthenticity. They would also accept that other philosophical positions might do this too.
      2. Existentialists are realists. They don't really expect that the thousands of thousands will race to authenticity. But, they believe their experience does not show that people cannot change over. People actually do. Thus people are not in their camp by NATURE. Change is possible and experienced.
      3. The hope seems much more to be that the tens of thousands may well become hundreds of thousands though the efforts of existentialists and other authentic people. However, they do recognize that it is unlikely that most of the thousands of thousands will ever change.

I posted the above analysis somewhere on the internet and it led to this exchange, which adds a bit to the analysis:

Subject: Dostoevsky's THE GRAND INQUISITOR: follow-up

Bob Corbett wrote:
:
: I thought I'd share this piece with you and perhaps some of you will want
: to discuss my reading of it.

Daniel Hoffman replied:

Thank you for your well-written outline of one of my favorite passages in all literature.

Lately I've been coming more and more to see the Grand Inquisitor's point of view. My disenchantment with people who vote for politicians who operate counter to their interests, yet blame others for the results, gets stronger all the time. Explanation of this in terms of reason, I believe, are futile. The people who exercise reason are often those who abuse it and those who are swayed by their emotional appeals, perhaps, are victims of cynical abuse because they lack the mental capacity to remember the pertinent details long enough to see the incoherence in what is being said.

Nietzsche, in "The Use and Abuse of History," asks us to:

"Consider the herds that are feeding yonder: they know not the meaning of today or yesterday: they graze and ruminate, move or rest, from morning to night, from day to day, taken up with their little loves and hates and the mercy of the moment...., The beast lives "unhistorically;" for it "goes into" the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder." (Adrian Collins, trans)

This is quite a bit like the they-self (the "das Man") in Heidegger's "Being and Time," whose being and whose accountability, dissolves into the others. Unlike the inauthenticity involved in Being-towards-Death, where the person disowns death, and thus one's ontological responsibility, this activity of participation in the das-Man "disburdens" Dasein of answerability and makes vital human values into commodities to be manipulated.

Reading Murray and Herrnstein has me thinking that, perhaps, we are witnessing a difference in native ability and that the Grand Inquisitor represents a cognitive elite that has to make do.

I'm out of time...
Daniel Hoffman

Bob Corbett replies to Daniel Hoffman

13 Dec 1994, Daniel Hoffman wrote:

Murray and Herrnstein's "Bell Curve" throws > an interesting problem into the equation by pointing out differences > in ability.

Corbett replies:

The whole position of the Grand Inquisitor states a great problematic I've faced in my 30 years as a philosophy teacher.

The DESCRIPTION he gives seems to me undeniable. Using Heideggerian language, which I prefer, a very few, the Inquisitors tens of thousands, tend seriously toward authenticity. Then thousands of thousands tend toward the safety of trading authenticity and personal freedom for the comfort of material well-being, moral certainty and social harmony, just as Dostoevsky argues. But why? At least three main answers are possible:

1. Nature -- as you seem to argue.
2. Nurture -- as my life as a professor who TRIES to move students from inauthenticity toward authenticity seems to imply.
3. Some combination of the two.
   I guess I lean in this direction. But, if nurture plays any sort of serious role, then what an "interventionist" (which is what I guess I've been) does is not to deny nature, but ignore it, concentrating on what can be changed by nurture.

I don't know what I think about CAUSES. I'm much more interested in facts than causes. I guess, to continue the Inquisitor's language, it does seem to me that vigorous intervention of those who care and believe in people's ability to learn and change, can raise the tens of thousands into the twenties of thousands. But, the thousands of thousands will continue on as they were. Further, and what is frustrating as an "activist" teacher, is that I see students make major shifts in those college days, but relatively soon, slip back into the world of the thousands of thousands. On the other hand, now that I'm getting older and have so many more students "out there," I'm getting more and more letters out of the blue from students whom I don't remember at all, telling me, and often demonstrating to me, that my teaching has made a huge impact on their lives (in the way were discussing) that I never dreamed of or knew about. After all, most of my students, even in my very small classes, are not people who I get to know personally or for long.

It appeals to my sense of hope.

Hoffman continues:

Corbett had said:Notice how few people talk about responsibility, but only freedom. The Inquisitor sees the necessary inter-relation of the two.

Hoffman replies:

People who talk of "my rights" often talk of the responsibilities of others. I no longer accept Rawls first Principle: "Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others." (p.60 TJ) It is the height of decadence to give the sociopath the same basic liberties as people who can prove they can handle freedom. Then again, many of the most successful people are sociopaths and they are often the ones deciding on standards of who deserves what.
Daniel Hoffman

Corbett replies:

I tend to agree with the conclusion but for different reasons. I just don't see the slightest reason for taking on all that responsibility for others. Rawls does not convince me. There are some 6 + billion people in the world. Hell, our little minds couldn't even process the complexity of moral and social responsibility on Rawls' analysis. Without it, his "morality" is tokenism. When I add that to my Existentialist bias that the universe is basically meaningless, and that we ACT unequally (whether by nature , nurture, or whatever mix), I'm not ready to buy into the "view from nowhere" contract as Nagel calls it.

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