Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor: The Delegation of Practical Judgment and the Limits of Authority

All authority replaces some deliberation, and a critique that condemned replacement would condemn along with it the law and the epistemic division of labour. The pertinent question is therefore not whether replacement has occurred, but where the passage lies between authority that mediates reasons and authority that claims to determine exhaustively what may count as a reason. This article answers it in four moves, taking the episode of the Grand Inquisitor, in Book V of The Brothers Karamazov, as an exemplary case and not as an object of literary interpretation. First, the delegation of practical judgment is decomposed into elements that are not transferred in the same way, separating tasks from normative statuses and proposing justificatory closure as the operational marker of replacement. Second, it is shown that Joseph Raz’s service conception makes it possible to establish the excess of the authority under examination without denying its anthropological premise, which is a substantive result, and that the failure does not lie in the dependence thesis, where the most immediate objection would place it: that thesis requires the objective applicability of reasons, not the subject’s access to them. To this end, three levels are distinguished—objective applicability, knowability of legitimacy, and effective acceptance—closure being located in the second and third, with recourse to the independence condition added in 2006. Third, Rainer Forst’s noumenal power is drawn upon to describe what authority becomes when it produces a space in which its own limits have ceased to be ascertainable. Fourth, the operation by which a human interpretation presents itself as the expression of divine will is examined, the critique being confined to the suppression of the interpretive step and not extended to the appeal to revelation. The historical contextualization of the Spanish Inquisition serves as a setting and rests on its own documentation, never serving as evidence for the character’s anthropology.

DIETRICH, Pablo; DIETRICH, Maurília Gabriela da Silva. Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor: The Delegation of Practical Judgment and the Limits of Authority. Zenodo, tradução dos autores, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23821026.