In the field of philosophy, there’s often a lot of ‘maybes’. Sometimes you want an answer to a question, and multiple different respected philosophers give you different answers. This is the importance and the curse of the field of philosophy. A lot of people don’t want to spend their time trying to find an answer to a question that has no answers.
But the purpose of doing this has less to do with an accomplishment or with material gain; the fundamental idea of philosophy is the way that every human develops in life. You start out with facts that you know to be true. Then, as you are educated more about the world, you begin to question the ideas presented to you and come up with opinions. Those opinions begin to shape who you are as a person.
This is why philosophy is about thinking. What does a philosopher do? He thinks and he reasons with himself and others. This process does not have an end goal, but as you go through it, you start to develop more as a person.
I’ve been reading Crime and Punishment, and while I haven’t finished it yet, one of the most interesting philosophical ideas in the book is the idea of the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Raskolnikov, the main character, presents the idea that there are both ordinary and extraordinary people; the people who stay within the bounds of current society and attempt to fit in, and the people who try to shape society to their vision. Of course, this is my interpretation of the topic, but this is the general consensus of what his theory is saying. I believe he further explains by saying that you can only really tell who was extraordinary and who was ordinary based on history. Those who shape history to their will are extraordinary. Not only that, but the extraordinary have, in some form, a right to shape the world as they see fit.
This idea forms the basis of Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov commits a murder and tries to delineate himself as extraordinary with many excuses. Eventually (I haven’t read this part), the consequences will likely catch up to him. But do I agree with his philosophy?
I think what Raskolnikov is saying has some merit, but not a lot. In my opinion, every human life has the same value; no one is more important or less important than someone else. I mean this in the sense that every human life has the same potential to change the world, no matter where they are born. Of course, the idea sounds absurd, as there are inequalities everywhere, but I’m only talking about potential. There are many people who rise above their expected status in society and exceed expectations, even if they are not talked about in history. For this reason, I think the extraordinary people and the ordinary people do have the same value. The main part of this theory is that a human’s impact on the world is not explicitly decided from their time on earth. Many people can have impacts even when they are no longer here. The best example for this is the children of that person. The father of someone like Napoleon or Gandhi would never be considered extraordinary but think about it. It was their decision and their existence that lead to an extraordinary person, who then changed the world. Of course, no one knows who will create an extraordinary or ordinary person. But my idea is based off of the butterfly effect– just because a person has made a large change now and some others have not does not mean that their existence in the world will not have large and unforeseeable effects in the future.
So, my interpretation is that extraordinary people are simply the people who change society within their lifetime and are revered by history. Ordinary people generally stick to societal rules, because that is who they are and like to be.
There is another element of who’s extraordinary in the book, and that is their moral compass. Essentially, people like Raskolnikov are not extraordinary because they cannot commit an act against society and carry on normally. The guilt of those deaths will always weigh on them, and as a result the consequence will be that they are unable to shape society to their will. I agree with this. No criminal is extraordinary simply because they broke societal rules. However, I think that the extraordinary are the people that bend the consequences.
Think about someone relatively immoral like Joseph Stalin. He broke many moral rules, but he did shape society to how he saw fit. How did he do this? Clearly his immoral acts would’ve caused terrible consequences for him. Let’s assume they did. That never stopped Stalin from achieving his goals within his lifetime. He became the most powerful man in Russia and one of the most powerful people on earth. By that metric, he shaped history. That is the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary; the ordinary cannot escape the consequences of their actions in order to achieve a goal. Their consequences will catch up to them before they can shape society how they see fit.
Let’s approach this view from Napoleon. Napoleon conquered most of Europe, got exiled, returned, and then got exiled. If you think about it, he did not succeed. He was unable to maintain his position as the emperor of France. So then, clearly the consequences caught up to him. But I didn’t mean that consequences cannot catch up to the extraordinary; consequences can and likely will catch up to them in some form. Joseph Stalin likely had a lot of mental anguish due to the stress of his position. But these people at least tried to escape the consequences. Ordinary people, after reshaping society, will succumb to the pressure of these consequences and give in, relinquishing their ‘right’ to reshape the world. But even after suffering consequences, like Napoleon, they will still attempt to escape further consequences and reshape the world. Napoleon didn’t simply stop after he was exiled the first time–he came back to try again, though unsuccessfully. If Napoleon had seen another chance to retake France, he would’ve easily taken it. He wouldn’t have easily backed down because he knew the consequences might be bad. Those are the type of extraordinary people that Raskolnikov talks about.
Of course, extraordinary people can still be good people. They don’t have to be the types of people that Dostoevsky refers to, like Napoleon (who he seems to talk about a lot in Crime and Punishment). There are many people like Gandhi or FDR who were extraordinary in that they were doing moral deeds. But that is why I didn’t talk about extraordinary people necessarily with a moral compass. It is not that they are escaping the consequences of their negative actions, but that they are attempting to escape the consequences of their actions that reshape society. FDR made many decisions that people may not have liked (in spite of his successful presidential career), and the consequences would have hit him in some way, like public backlash. But he would try to escape those consequences in the hopes of still reshaping society.
In essence, I agree with Raskolnikov’s theory, but I don’t think it has anything to do with morality like implied in the book.
This connects back to what I talked about at the beginning. My “answer” to Raskolnikov’s theory is not an answer; it’s an opinion. It’s an opinion that says something about me and has shaped me in some way (I don’t know how, but it definitely has). There is value in thinking about questions like these that have no answer, because your opinion of them is indicative of who you are. This is what makes humans special and unlike other animals. To anyone reading this, take pride in your ability that you can think like this. All of us should be proud.