Berdyaev, on D's treatment of debauchery

"The debauchery which so often results from sensuality is according to Dostoevsky a phenomenon of the metaphysical and not of the physical order. Self-will begets inner division, which in turn begets debauchery wherein the unity of human personality is lost. In the divided, dismembered, depraved man, shut up in himself, ability to join with another creature is dead; his own self begins to break up; he no longer seeks in love another being different from himself, but just seeks love. Real love is what one bears towards another; debauchery is love and affirmation of self, conducing to the ruin of self. Human personality is strengthened by communion with its kind; debauchery is the most frozen isolation to which a man can condemn himself, a decline to a sentient nothingness. Delight of the senses is as it were a stream of fire, but when it deteriorates into lechery, the fire goes out and passion becomes as cold as ice. The Karamazovs' lechery has not yet reached the region of ice that is one of the circles of Dante's hell. But Stavroguin's has. His tragedy is that of a distinguished and unusually gifted man who wastes himself in arbitrary, unruly, and uncontrolled follies; he gives way to his caprices until he has no power of discrimination left. The words addressed to Dasha in a letter that she finds after his death have an agonizing ring: 'I've tried my strength everywhere . . . Whenever I have tested it, whether for my own satisfaction or because I wanted to show off, I have found it limitless, as I still do . . . But what I never have seen and don't see now is what to apply my strength to . . . I am still capable, as I always was, of wanting to do something good and finding satisfaction in it . . . I've tried debauchery on a large scale and wasted my strength on it, but I don't like vice and I didn't want it . . . I can never abdicate my judgment or believe in an idea to such a degree as he [Kirilov] did. I can't even be interested in ideas to that extent.'

"Good and evil, our Lady and Sodom, were equally attractive to Stavrogin, and this inability to make a choice is the exact indication of the alienation of freedom and loss of personality that are involved in self-will and inner division. We learn from the example of Stavrogin that to want everything without distinction and careless of the limits of our human nature, is equivalent to wanting nothing at all, and that an unmeasurable strength directed towards no end is no better than complete weakness. Stavrogin's malignant and aimless eroticism ended in a veritable sexual impotence: he became absolutely incapable of loving a woman. Inner division wears away personality, and this division can be overcome only by making a choice, by selecting a definite object for one's love, whether it be God as against Satan, the image of our Lady as against Sodom, or one particular woman as against the unnumbered all other women. Debauchery means the absolute inability to choose from among many attractions; it results from the alienation of freedom and the will's balance, from the fall into nothingness that is the penalty of not having the courage necessary to maintain the reality of one's being. Debauchery is man's line of least resistance, and it is right to envision it primarily from the ontological rather than from the moral point of view. That is what Dostoevsky did."