Dostoevsky and the Philosophy of Crime

crime

/krīm/

Noun

1. An action or omission that constitutes an offense that may be prosecuted by the state and is punishable by law.


2. Illegal activities: "the victims of crime".

According to the dictionary, Crime is an act of breaking the law, a static and constant guideline  for maintaining equilibrium in the society. So a Criminal is someone who does not follow these constant guidelines and makes a detour from these ways. Someone who once in a while got bored of routine and decided to pick up the gun and blow off someone's head. Okay, maybe that was a bit too Tarantoic illustration of the idea, but let us extrapolate from here towards a wider philosophic extraction .

In his novel, Crime  and Punishment, Dostoevsky reveals a rather surprising comparison between ingenuity and crime as stated in Raskolnikov's article. In the article, he divides the human race into two classes; the ordinary and the extraordinary. The purpose of the ordinary is just mere reproduction, by which occasionally an extraordinary man arises. This extraordinary man, at times may believe to have the right or even the duty to destroy anything that comes in the path of their ideas. In other words, he is not afraid to change the way things are.  Therefore one can basically define him as being similar to a criminal. Let us pause our thoughts for a moment and travel back in time; back to the moment when Galileo revealed his discovery that the Earth moved round the sun and not conversely. Galileo was fully aware about the consequences of his revelations and how it will be reciprocated negatively. But still he did not back down from what he believed in and destroyed every idea that was there before and trampled on it willingly, making a mockery of those contemporary beliefs. And then he was condemned as a 'criminal'. I agree with it, I mean the term criminal. He was a criminal. He broke routine and brought chaos to the minds of the ordinary.

We are all great believers of Routine where our philosophy is bound by a fixed strategy and our whole life revolves around it. We hate it when anything goes a bit off the track. In other words we hate changes made to our life. We even ridicule people who does things in a different way. But once in a while there comes someone in our life who just changes our whole viewpoint by force and if it's beneficial to us we call him a genius but if it somehow doesn't turn out to be we brand him as a criminal for making it happen. We detest that person but wasn't the core idea of both the person same. So what made one criminal and the other not.

So that's where Raskolnikoff's article prettily points out how we can say a little bit of crime is needed for a desired effect. It depends upon you, how you take the crime