Antiquitopia

In Dostoevsky's masterpiece, Crime and Punishment , Razumikhin, the representative of "reason"--but who has disdain for cold, calculated reason--often speaks of why he loves liars, because in lying they unwittingly, inevitably speak truth: I like it when people lie! Lying is man's only privilege over all other organisms. If you lie--you get to the truth! Lying is what makes me a man. Not one truth has ever been reached without first lying fourteen times or so, maybe a hundred and fourteen, and that's honorable in its way; well, but we can't even lie with our own minds! Lie to me, but in your own way, and I'll kiss you for it. Lying in one's own way is almost better than telling the truth in someone else's way; in the first case you're a man, and in the second--no better than a bird! The truth won't go away, but life can be nailed shut; there are examples. Well, so where are we all now? With regard to science, development, thought, ...

The idea lives not in one person's isolated individual consciousness--if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others . Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else's voice, that is, in someone else's consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of contact between voice-consciousnesses the idea is born and lives. (M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics ; trans. Caryl Emerson; italics original)

I'm in the middle of teaching Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky at the moment, and Raskolnikov, the protagonist, is a divided character; his consciousness is divided against himself. His very name means "schismatic." In the act of murder, he loses the conscious ability to control his own actions; he acts as if in a dreamlike state, a trance. Moreover, almost every character trait he has, he also exemplifies its opposite. He is schism-made-flesh. His best friend, Razumikhin, whose name means "reason," describes his friend: What can I tell you? I've known Rodion [Raskolnikov] for a year and a half: sullen, gloomy, arrogant, proud; recently (and maybe much earlier) insecure and hypochondriac. Magnaminous and kind. Doesn't like voicing his feelings, and would rather do something cruel than speak his heart out in words. At times, however, he's not hypochondriac at all, but just inhumanly cold and callous, as if there really were two opposite ch...

SOCRATES: On the other hand, Polus, my opinion is that the wicked man and the doer of wicked acts is miserable in any case, but more miserable if he does not pay the penalty and suffer punishment for his crimes, and less miserable if he does pay the penalty and suffer punishment in this world and the next. (Plato, Gorgias 472; trans. Walter Hamilton) How did Plato know the premise to Dostoesvky's Crime and Punishment ?