NAPOLEON'S PARADOX AND THE RUSSIAN IDEA OF LAW IN DOSTOEVSKY'S CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. THE IRRATIONAL / THE RATIONAL

Abstract

The paper presents an experience of a phenomenological study of the irrational/rational in the theory of law in Dostoyevsky's novel «Crime and Punishment». The object of analysis in the paper is the anthropocentricity of Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment". It straddles the boundary between the irrational and the rational, encompassing the philosophical and sociological aspects of law. The correlation between the irrational and the rational - as a correlation between the philosophical and the sociological in the hero's theory of law in the novel - has not become a subject of study in terms of Raskolnikov's resentful consciousness. The promising nature of the theme is also due to the possibility of studying the Russian paradox, revealed in the hero's Bonapartism as a Russian idea of law. An analysis of law as the central question of the writer's philosophical and artistic outlook and worldview needs to distinguish between the ontological and the sociological. In addition, Dostoevsky's philosophical views, religious and moral convictions and philosophical anthropology determined the basic principles of the metaphysics of the individual and his legal consciousness. The different sides of the irrational and the rational are focused around Napoleon's paradox, deployed in the Russian idea of law. The paper is devoted to a description of Raskolnikov's Bonapartism as the source of the Russian idea of law. The paper differentiates between the irrational and the rational in legal theory. As an irrational nature, resentment consciousness and the relationship of freedom/conscience and individual morality to it are explored. The hero's delusion, his 'powerlessness' in the ontological and religious sense, is analysed as value concepts of resentment consciousness.  The article categorises the characters according to the characteristics of resentment consciousness and on the basis of the dichotomy "mean person" / "mean" value consciousness.  The dual treatment of crime and punishment, in its ethical and criminal nature, is examined as the source of two types of conceptualization of death, from a physical and metaphysical perspective. The confrontation of the ethical in the phenomenology of crime has become a justification for the hero and levels the criminal meaning of the crime.  There is a strong sense of the priority given to repentance and the absence of repentance as major concepts in Orthodox axiology.

The significance of the problem under consideration lies in the study of the specifics of the formation of the philosophical and religious concept of Russian reality and the Russian idea in the works of Dostoevsky as a feature of his philosophical and artistic method. The novelty of the work lies in the use of a phenomenological approach to describe the ontological and sociological aspects of legal theory, in correlation with the category of consciousness.