The Limitations of Reason Exposed in Crime and Punishment :: Crime Punishment Essays

The Limitations of Reason Exposed in execration and Punishment Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment illustrates an important idea. The idea is that reason, that grand and uniquely human power, is restrain in reach and scope. Social critic Friedrich August von Hayek commented once that, . it may be that the most difficult task for human reason is to squeeze its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and come after principles we cannot hopefully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of culture may depend. Such limitations imply that on lifes most important questions - specially those of a incorrupt or ethical nature -- reason solely can produce chilling consequences. Without adequate or any deterrent example illumination, reason alone, when pushed to its limits, can produce consequences which stand dramatically opposed to those moral demands. Dostoevskys narrative is directed as a specific critique of Russian manifestations of purely rational political theories current in the 1860s in his homeland. plainly the challenge he poses has meaning for us at the end of the twentieth vitamin C. Dostoevskys parable focuses on a particular brand of 19th century Russian ideology, as it begins to crystallize in the mind of a novel idealist. But the modeling procedure Dostoevsky uses in teasing out the contradictions of Raskolnikovs unguided application of a morally bankrupt theory, could every bit well be applied to contemporary have in minding around several important and equally bankrupt modern ideas - ideas harshly criticized by thinkers such as Hayek.Without heed - the source of which is ultimately beyond rational understanding - in the earthly concern of the meta-rational -- reason-as-reason will, sooner or later, run aground. Directed reason on the another(prenominal) hand provides an orientation - an orientation that gives purpose and direction to inquiry -- by allowing us to select from an infinite range of possibilities the even up path - the right reason. Problems emerged for Raskolnikov then, and for us now when we deny the need to recognize, acknowledge and bow to immaterial guidance. The rational and the meta-rational must operate symbiotically one pointing the way, the other show the Truth. Raskolnikov rationalized murder. We are appalled. Why? Each of us will attempt to declaration in a different way. Fundamentally though I think that most of our answers boil down to the same idea.