Consider the character of two twin figures: Socrates and Jesus Christ, the paradigms of Reason and Faith, both leading the way for the rest of us to transcend this world and its bullshit. Both characters present human nature as mixtures of higher and lower, rational and animal, spiritual and material - both show us how to commune with the higher parts of us and in doing so relinquish our miserable attachment to the lower. Both of them end their lives with willing submission to capital punishment, symbolically overcoming the unjust power of this world and entering into eternal union with the True and the Divine.
These archetypal characters have animated Western imagination ever since, and it wasn’t until most of two millennia had passed after the time of Christ that these images started to be turned on their head. These inversions found their greatest expression in two writers who created these inversions independently and from wildly different angles, never talking to each other but somehow having the same sort of thoughts as with Newton and Leibniz simultaneously cranking out Calculus. The first inversion, that of Socrates, happened in the mind of Nietzsche, maybe the first major Western philosopher to directly attack Socrates. Socrates affirmed an unchanging realm of Truth beyond sensory experience, whereas Nietzsche called for an ecstatic affirmation of the mortal life with all of its impermanence and suffering. The second inversion, that of Christ, happened in the mind of Dostoevsky, though Dostoevsky emphatically didn’t affirm what he created. Dostoevsky’s novels are soaked with a sort of Christian desperation, depictions of a mad world full of mad people who have have rejected God out of self-righteousness, leading to self-absorption and self-destruction. His novel “Demons” features the supremely-interesting demon Kirilov, a man who declares that suicide is in fact the way for humanity to transcend our finitude and become God ourselves. He advocates suicide not as an act of despair, as a reaction to extreme misery or hopelessness, but as a freely chosen philosophically-motivated act. “God” is a concept invented by finite creatures who reject their own finitude to console themselves over their inevitable deaths - if we become finite creatures who *embrace* our own finitude then we become even more powerful than this fictional God, since not even God could directly will His own self-destruction. To summarize this inversion: Christ is God becoming man and submitting to death, and Kirilov inverts this by asserting that man can become God by embracing death on his own terms. Christ is the infinite becoming finite and dying to overthrow worldly power, Kirilov is the finite dying to become infinite and claiming all worldly power as its own.
Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s inversions of Socrates and Christ both center on a radical confrontation with human finitude, but they are wildly different in their results and ultimate outlooks. Nietzsche’s inversion of Socrates is an affirmative one, even ecstatically so - Socrates to Nietzsche is a kind of villain, setting Western thought up for many millennia of failure, leaving us in dire need of some sort of revival and renewal. For Nietzsche, the attempt to ground our lives on something beyond ourselves has been a failure on every level, choking its own contradictions and starving life of all vitality. Nietzsche isn’t some sneering teenager flipping the bird to authority because he feels like it - he sincerely perceives Western civilization to be in a terrible crisis, and sees the only way forward to be a joyful “yes!” to literally everything. Socrates didn’t transcend anything when he let himself be killed - he just bent the knee to stupidity and tyranny, not so much embracing the divinity of the eternal as denying the divinity of the here and now. What we need instead is an overflowing of life, in loving yourself in all that you are, in an endless overflowing of creativity and play.
Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, on the other hand, remains deeply haunted by the Christianity he claims to reject. The highest act of self-affirmation, for him, is conscious self-destruction. It is a dark, desperate act, a total defiance of the God that it claims to reject. It ultimately - inevitably for Dostoevsky - fails. Kirilov is a part of a radical progressive group who plots the beginning of world revolution in a provincial Russian town, and he agrees to commit his philosophical suicide in a way that helps the revolution achieve its aims. The plot unfolds, the town is aflame, blood is in the streets, and he has a change of heart. An instigator points a gun at him and demands that he kill himself, to which he calmly replies “…or what?” Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, his attempts at radical self-assertion lead to paralysis and madness. Unlike Raskolnikov, Kirilov oes not survive the novel’s events to peacefully convert to Christianity. Kirilov is a warning, a portrait of the abyss awaiting those who reject God as more and more are doing as modernity unfolds - Kirilov is a trained engineer, and a materialist who casts his gaze across the cold world of atoms and sees nothing but the possibility for human will to be realized - for Dostoevsky, Kirilov’s descent into brilliant, suicidal madness is philosophically inevitable.
So, Nietzsche’s inversion of Socrates heralds a bold new post-rationalist dawn, while Dostoevsky’s inversion of Christ in Kirilov heralds a cold new post-Christian darkness. Both compel us to confront the limits of human self-assertion in the world we live in, where the old certainties of reason and faith no longer hold. The waters we swim in value ‘authenticity’, now - pursuing philosophy or faith are still options for us, but they are just that, *options*. We no longer see the world as compelling us to think, nor God as compelling us to believe. Like it or not, it’s up to us, to greet our self-creating in the void with heroic affirmation or terrified despair or both.
Luckily, we get to create ourselves together. We do have to figure it out ourselves, but we don’t have to figure it all out alone. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, to me, are lights in the darkness, and I read them for the same reason I read anyone - not because they tell me what the truth is, but because in reading them I feel somehow illuminated and much, much, much less alone.