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Irony
Definition of Logos
Logos, along with ethos and pathos, is one of the three "modes of persuasion" in rhetoric (the art of effective speaking or writing). Logos is an argument that appeals to... read full definition
Logos, along with ethos and pathos, is one of the three "modes of persuasion" in rhetoric (the art of effective speaking or writing). Logos is... read full definition
Logos, along with ethos and pathos, is one of the three "modes of persuasion" in rhetoric (the art of effective... read full definition
Part 1, Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Simple Arithmetic :
After he first pawns some items off to the old woman, Raskolnikov overhears a student and an officer speaking in a tavern about her. To Raskolnikov’s surprise, the student claims that he would murder the pawnbroker without remorse, making an argument that employs logos to grave ends:
A hundred, a thousand good deeds and undertakings that could be arranged and set going by the money that old woman has doomed to the monastery! Hundreds, maybe thousands of lives put right; dozens of families saved from destitution [...] Kill her and take her money, so that afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind and the common cause: what do you think, wouldn’t thousands of good deeds make up for one tiny little crime? For one life, thousands of lives saved from decay and corruption. One death for hundreds of lives—it’s simple arithmetic!
The student’s argument is presented in the language of utilitarianism, a philosophy that suggests that moral actions are those that maximize human happiness. He uses logos to support a twisted argument, weighing out the public benefits of the old woman’s murder against her own, singular life. After killing and robbing her, he argues, “Hundred, maybe thousands of lives” can be “put right” by using her hoarded wealth to more socially productive ends. Ultimately, Dostoevsky was a harsh critic of this philosophy and other “rationalist” schools of thought that, for him, reduced complex moral issues to “simple arithmetic.”
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Part 2, Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—The Painters:
While Raskolnikov pretends to sleep in bed, disinterested, he listens carefully to Razumikhin and the doctor Zossimov as they discuss the arrest of two painters for the murder of the pawnbroker and Lizaveta. Though they have been arrested after being found in possession of the old woman’s earrings, which were taken from her apartment, Razumikhin uses logos to argue that they are not responsible for the murder:
If they killed them [...] then allow me to ask you just one question: does such a state of mind—that is, squeals, laughter, a childish fight under the gateway—does it fit with axes, with blood, with criminal cunning, stealth, and robbery? They had only just killed them, only five or ten minutes earlier—that’s how it comes out, since the bodies are still warm—and suddenly, abandoning the bodies and the open apartment, and knowing that people have just gone up there, and abandoning the loot, they go rolling around in the street like little children, laughing, attracting everybody’s attention, and there are ten unanimous witnesses to it!”
Like a lawyer, Razumikhin makes his case for the painters’ innocence, noting that their playful fighting does not match the expected behavior of two people who have just committed, by “criminal cunning” and “stealth,” a double-murder. If, he reasons, they had just killed the women “only five or ten minutes earlier,” then it is unlikely that they would leave the bodies behind an open door, alongside the “loot.” Further, he argues, proceeding logically, two men who have just committed such a crime would want to avoid “attracting everybody’s attention,” and yet the two men drew attention to themselves with their play-fighting. As he listens covertly to Razumikhin’s reasoning, Raskolnikov realizes that the charges against the painters will not stick.
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Part 2, Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Self-Interest:
In a scene that satirizes the individualistic, rationalist worldview that Dostoevsky critiques throughout Crime and Punishment, Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin uses logos and fallacy while arguing in favor of his market-based worldview. Confronting the suspicious Raskolnikov and the hostile Razumikhin, Luzhin makes a case for pursuing self-interest:
[Science] says: Love yourself before all, because everything in the world is based on self-interest [...] And economic truth adds that the more properly arranged personal affairs and, so to speak, whole caftans there are in society, the firmer its foundations are and the better arranged its common cause. It follows that by acquiring solely and exclusively for myself, I am thereby precisely acquiring for everyone, as it were, and working so that my neighbor will have something more than a torn caftan, not from private, isolated generosities now, but as a result of universal prosperity.
Luzhin previously echoed an old saying, arguing that if two men split a “caftan” or tunic, then both men end up naked. In contrast to this notion of splitting or sharing resources, Luzhin mobilizes “Science” to argue that “everything in the world is based on self-interest.” He reasons that if everyone loves themselves “before all,” then everything in society will be more “properly arranged” and there will be more resources overall, even if they are not distributed equally. From this principle, he uses logos to argue that, by “acquiring solely and exclusively” for himself, he is in some sense “acquiring for everyone” due to the increase in “universal prosperity.”
Though he does employ logic in his argument, Dostoevsky, who was a critic of modern individualism (though also a critic of socialism) highlights the fallacies in his argument, as it is not necessarily the case that everyone will get more resources just because there are more resources overall. Through Luzhin, Dostoevsky satirizes and critiques what he considers to be the spiritually bankrupt philosophies and practices of 19th-century Europe and Russia.
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