“Feeling of Thought”: Nietzsche's and Dostoevskii's Experience with Nihilism

Did the events of 9/11, 2001 reveal the danger of nihilism? André Glucksmann's book Dostoïevski à Manhattan (2002) elicited a discussion concerned with the diagnosis of nihilism and with the value of literary engagement with it. Are Dostoevskii's novels “just literature”, lacking a rigorous philosophic analysis of nihilism? In my analysis of Nietzsche's Notes and Dostoevskii's Demons, I attempt to show that the framework of the “old quarrel” between philosophy and literature, in which this discussion has been situated, proves untenable in the face of nihilism. The recognition of the latter's ambiguity would be eventually not so much a matter of rigorous argumentation as of what Dostoevskii's heroes call “feeling of thought” (“chuvstvo mysli”), and what Nietzsche specifies in respect to nihilism as “feeling of valuelessness” (“das Gefühl der Wertlosigkeit”), which literature can best convey. However, this task of literature needs to be prepared by “a thought in which abstract powers have been humiliated” (Camus). Nietzsche points out the roots of nihilism in the excessive trust in “the categories of reason” (“die Vernunft-Kategorien”), and in their eventual collapse; Dostoevskii makes feel the danger of their “terrible abstractedness” (“strashnaia otvlechennost'”) in the flesh.