Questions on Crime and Punishment Book Two

A question, adapted from Hannah Arendt (The Life of the Mind: Volume One: Thinking): What does Raskolnikov seek throughout Crime and Punishment? Does he seek meaning, or does he seek truth? Is there any difference between meaning and truth?

Think about this: man expresses the activity of his mind through language, through words, through signs. What do “clichés, stock phrases, adherence to standardized codes of expression and conduct” signify? What does a man’s “own new word” signify?

When Arendt experiences Adolph Eichmann’s war crimes trial, she is “struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives.… The only notable characteristic one could detect in his … behavior … was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.” Arendt remarks on the external signs of this thoughtlessness in terms of language: “Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence” (4).

Where else do we encounter those “clichés” etc. that I have talked about as being “sentimental”? I have kept pushing the question: Why does Raskolnikov murder those women? Well, what I’m really asking is the question I would like you to consider as you continue reading Crime and Punishment: “Could the activity of thinking as such … be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?” (5).

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