Publication Details

Abstract

The history of the interpretation of Dostoevsky’s „The Double“ embodies various (psycho) pathological, sociological, ethical and culturological conceptions and hypotheses. The author's concern is to „rehabilitate“ doubleness as a possible transition from one ontological level to another. A certain condition gives rise to a crisis of the actuality, i. e. the old doesn't work any more, while the new doesn’t work yet. That means that man and society experience the state of doubleness as ontic possible transition to a qualitative different state. The doubleness thus becomes a precondition of the individual and social reproduction, resp. selfreproduction. The latter doesn’t mean a social production in sense of socialization, but a possibility of a new natural, social and spiritual reality (seen from the point of view of an individual as well as of society), to which the crisis gave rise.