ABSTRACT
The confusion becomes clear when the followers of nihilism and Oblomovism try to enlist Dostoevsky, who spent his life trying to become fully human. Raskolnikov makes what Sartre would recognise as a 'valid choice', from his own 'arbitration', claiming his own 'freedom', 'making himself' when 'society' has given him no sense of meaningful existence. For the fashionable avant-garde, however, a rape would bring Dostoevsky into the acceptable stature of the 'intellectual gangster': he could be placed in an honoured niche alongside Genet, and the anti-heroes of a hundred bad films. In philosophical anthropology there are many sources of recognition of reality. All values, and the individual sense of tightness, are the products of 'encounter'. There is the capacity for concern, drawn out in the baby by the mother, through that imaginative-cultural exchange. From a position of 'schizoid superiority' and pathological disdain, the avant-garde proclaim their godlike situation as being above morality, and thus above all normal responsibilities.
