STADIILE KARAMAZOVIENE ALE EXISTENŢEI
The Karamazovian Stages of Existence

Summary/Abstract: Within the present paper I identifytwo possible approaches on moral life. The first one is religious and it grants spirituallife – by means of inversion and compensating mechanisms – with a becoming thatopposes to the laws which govern nature or bodily life “towards” degradation anddeath. According to these “moral theories”, spiritual life follows an ascendiong path,one of accumulation, of growth and, in time, the human being gains “moral experience”,wisdom, and kindness. The other approach of spiritual life, a “scientific” one, does notsafeguard “the moral sense” from the laws operating on physical sensibility, seeing itjust as subjected to degradation and temporal alteration. The moral judgement of humanbeing cannot be safeguarded from the general weakening of judgement and also themoral sensibility cannot be absolved from the general alteration of man’s sensibility.We call a scientific perspective over moral life that perspective which keeps track of thefacts, positively – and not negatively (meaning by merely negating them by means ofconstructing another reality, which is opposed to facts) – relates to them, and as suchcan also be observed within environments that are not associated with science: magic,literature, and art.Throughout the present paper I use Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard to illustratethese two “conceptions” on moral life. Soren Kierkegaard, by his theory of stages ofexistence, pertains to that religious conception which states that human life is or oughtto be continously accumulating, growing, and against the current of physical degradation.To Dostoyevsky, moral degradation is a fact just as obvious as physical degradation, asthe man reaches the highest moral perfection (and also the intelectual an physical ones)during his teenage years. “The Karamazov Brothers” can be seen as a theory of stages –opposing to that of Kierkegaard – in which the human being is a moral one inasmuch ashe/she tries to maintain his/her “youth”, as by taking into account the spiritualtendencies of degradation, he/she resists them, within a continuous fight and tension,tragically restating his/her youth and remaining faithful to the highest moral hypostasisof his/her’s, i. e. that which was acquired during teenage years.

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