Episode #219 ... Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment

Today we talk about the philosophical themes that Dostoevsky had in mind when writing Crime and Punishment. We talk about Russian Nihilism and its consequences. Rational Utilitarianism and Egoism. A common misunderstanding of Raskolnikov as an embodiment of Nietzsche's work. Confession. Guilt. Affirming life through consent. And much more. Hope you love it! :) Sponsors: Nord VPN: https://nordvpn.com/philothis Thank you so much for listening! Could never do this without your help. Website: https://www.philosophizethis.org/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/philosophizethis Social: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/philosophizethispodcast X: https://twitter.com/iamstephenwest Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/philosophizethisshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com/PhilosophizeThis, philosophical writing on Substack at PhilosophizeThis on there. I hope you love the show today. So today, we're talking about Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. And while there's no substitute for reading the actual book, you know, sitting down, giving yourself the gift of feeling the characters, putting yourself in the experience directly, being that this is a philosophy podcast, we can talk about some of the philosophical themes Dostoevsky definitely had in mind as he was writing this book. See, to know about the deepening of Russian nihilism at the time, the rise of what you could call eventually the narcissism of modernity, to know about the crisis of faith that many people are encountering across the world, well, this is some philosophical context that

• 0:44Speaker 00

  can be easily missed if you were taking a purely literary approach to the book. And you know, take it from me, the last thing you want to be in this world is simply a librarian. You want to be a philosopher librarian. That's the life goal you should be aiming for. Anyway, that said, the main character we're going to be talking about today is one of the most memorable, relatable characters in maybe all of classic literature. It's a young man by the name of Rodion Raskolnikov, or just Raskolnikov for short. Now, on the surface, the book kind of masquerades as being about this guy Raskolnikov, where he takes an axe, murders two innocent people, and then deals with the personal and legal fallout of doing something like that. That's what the book masquerades as. But part of what makes this book such a work of brilliance from Dostoevsky is that

• 1:26Speaker 00

  the murder is actually a secondary thing to the main point of the book for him. There's a sense in which the book could have been about a lot of different things, but a double murder for Dostoevsky is going to be an absolutely perfect site to explore the contradictions of Russian nihilism when taken to their natural ends as consequences in the real world. You know, it's been said that the true drama of Crime and Punishment is actually the complexity of the internal experience of Raskolnikov and him coming to terms slowly and painfully with the true reasons why he committed these murders in the first place, that he's been lying to himself for a very long time, and that the consequences of a brutal murder like this shakes him awake. It shows him his true relationship to his own existence,

• 2:08Speaker 00

  or to God if you're Dostoevsky, or if you wanted to describe it in terms of what we've been talking about lately on this podcast, it makes him aware of this more immediate relational network that we are always already a part of. We'll get into all of it, but I want to make sure right here at the start that we avoid one pretty popular mistake to make about this book and about Raskolnikov as a character. You know, a lot of people will say what it is I'm about to say, and then a lot of people will repeat it, as it turns out. They'll say that Raskolnikov as a character is an embodiment of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, that he builds his worldview around the idea that God is dead, that he sees himself as an Ubermensch, and that Friedrich Nietzsche is someone whose work can be thought of as essentially just a character that's one component

• 2:50Speaker 00

  of a Dostoevsky novel. But to say this is to misunderstand both Nietzsche and what Dostoevsky was going for in the character of Raskolnikov. First of all, just to tackle the literal end of this first. Crime and Punishment is written in the year 1866. First time Nietzsche mentions God is dead is in his book The Gay Science, which is written in 1882. In other words, Dostoevsky's writing this book 16 years before Nietzsche ever explicitly even wrote those words. Secondly, there's no evidence that Dostoevsky ever even knew who Nietzsche was. Nietzsche knew who Dostoevsky was towards a later period of his life, and should be said he was a fan of what he was doing. But the literal interpretation of this as being a reference to Nietzsche is not something that really adds up. So maybe you say, "Well,

• 3:33Speaker 00

  it's not that Dostoevsky was referencing Nietzsche directly, but the character of Raskolnikov was referencing ideas that were going on at the time that Nietzsche later crystallized in his philosophy." Well, this is an even worse misunderstanding, because Raskolnikov was the exact kind of person that Nietzsche spent most of his career critiquing. Dostoevsky, when he writes Raskolnikov, intends for him to be a character that was a reactionary, passive vessel of the ideas that were gaining popularity during his time. Then by being this inauthentic person, lacking self-awareness, just carrying these ideas out, that's what gets him into the trouble that he's gonna have to come to terms with for the rest of the book. Well, that isn't the authentic, life-affirming creativity that Nietzsche was such a big fan of.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Anyway, we'll talk more about this here in a second, but just know both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky would have a lot to say to someone like Raskolnikov. But before we get more into it, let's start with some details about him as a character. We need something solid to be critiquing here, if you've never read the book before. And if you listened to last episode of the podcast on Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, the book that immediately precedes Crime and Punishment, think of the Underground Man as the sort of prototype version of the character of Raskolnikov. Because they have several key similarities that are going to be important for Dostoevsky when he's writing it. Raskolnikov, like the Underground Man, is very smart. He is in poverty. He often thinks about things alone in isolation. He also thinks he sees through many of the systems of ideas that other people seriously believe in.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  And similar to the Underground Man, all these things lead him to feel a similar sense of superiority that he has over his fellow people around him. He has all these same qualities, but unlike the Underground Man, Raskolnikov is someone who's not completely trapped in his house underground. He's still someone who's capable of taking action on things, which then means he's still someone who's capable of making big mistakes. So here's his big idea that he gets at the beginning of the book. His situation in life sucks. He's poor, he's temporarily dropped out of law school. More than that, he gets a letter in the mail from his mom telling him that back at home his sisters just decided to marry a rich guy who's a horrible person, just so she can support him in going to law school. I mean, what kind of world do we live in? Where good people like this are in such dire situations?

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Oh, but then there's this pawnbroker that he knows. You know, being someone who's behind on his rent pretty often, he was desperate to find a way to trade what little stuff he has for some money upfront to be able to pay rent. So there's this woman who's a pawnbroker in the book, Aliona Ivanova is her name. And everybody knows this woman to be a real mean, greedy, exploitation-driven kind of person. Not only did she give people basically no money for their stuff when they come to her, but then she charges massive interest, simply because they're desperate and she can get away with it. More than that, she just hoards all the money she does get, she doesn't recirculate it. And she's the kind of person that will even exploit people who are mentally handicapped. She does this with her half-sister in the book, who lives with her, clearly isn't happy living with her, but she has to endure it anyway. She's trapped in an abusive situation.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  So Raskolnikov has a plan. Why not just kill this pawnbroker? I mean, after all, everybody wins here if he does it. Her half-sister gets set free. Raskolnikov's sister won't have to marry the rich dude. At the end of the day, the world's just gonna have one less greedy miserable person that, really just rationally speaking, is a net negative on the system if we're being honest. I mean, think about it. People say, you know, if you could go back in history and kill baby Hitler, wouldn't you want to do it? Well, it's clear that everybody who's around this person is just worse off by being around her. And if her money wasn't being hoarded, then Raskolnikov could give it to somebody that needs it more, not the least of which would be himself. I mean, he knows he's gonna use it to go to law school to become a lawyer. And think of all the good that would be possible if he were able to become a lawyer.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  He knows what's possible here. So he does it. He overhears the half-sister the day before, saying she's gonna be out of the house between this time and that time. He grabs an axe, classic weapon of choice, and he goes over and kills the pawnbroker. Now, in the process of doing it, that half-sister, who was supposed to be gone, ends up walking into the room. So now she's gotta go too. And after killing both of them, he takes her money, he runs away, leaves a certain amount of incriminating evidence behind, and then locks himself in his house and begins the long nightmare of trying to process the consequences of what it is he's just done. Now, for some context here, as we talked about last time, Dostoevsky always has in his sights the rational utopianism of his time, where part of it is believing that through

• 7:54Speaker 00

  utilitarian rational calculations, we can arrive at the truth, we can arrive at moral truth, and we can arrive at a utopian socialist system of organizing people that can be perfected if we just get better at this moral calculus. That by just weighing the rational pros and cons of an action, that we can justify our actions, as long as we can prove that the pros outweighed the cons. Well, this is the kind of calculation that Raskolnikov has made with the pawnbroker's life. He decided he was qualified to calculate whether or not the world was a better place without her. Now, there's two big problems with this philosophically for Dostoevsky, both of which go hand in hand, and both of which blossom out of the Russian nihilism that was gaining popularity when he was writing this book. One of them is that utilitarianism we just talked about. I mean, just as one example.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Consider how quickly his perfectly calculated plan transformed into something with an innocent person getting an axe to the head. Funny how difficult it can be to do an accurate weighing of the pros and cons of something when you realize you're trying to make that calculation about a world you can't fully predict. And the second big problem for him stems right out of that one. It's the rational egoism that often accompanies this Russian nihilism that magically places Raskolnikov at the center of this decision-making process. So, the assumption is supposed to be that not only can I look out at the world and calculate what the objectively right thing to do is, but that I, as an individual, should be the arbiter of that choice. See, the utilitarianism would be bad enough, but it's the egocentric part of this that makes it particularly bad to Dostoevsky.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  See, because an important detail of all this is that Raskolnikov believes that he is special in the book. Actually, to be more accurate, he thinks he might be special. He knows that special people exist sometimes, people like Napoleon, people like Muhammad. He knows there's people every so often throughout history that'll come along and go against the traditional moral order of things and create what he calls "a new word." And what he means by that is he creates a new set of moral criteria for themselves to live by. This is why Raskolnikov wants to commit the murders. He wants to find out if he's capable of being one of these special people. Because he sees through these outdated systems where a god tells him what to do, he thinks his job now is to create his own morality and essentially become a god himself.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  He says repeatedly in the book, he wants to run a test to see if this is the kind of person he is. And this is no doubt where people mistake this as being something that's connected to Nietzsche and his theoretical concept of the Ubermensch. See, there's a common misunderstanding of Nietzsche that's possible here, where people think that what Nietzsche's saying is that god is dead, and so now what we gotta do is to recreate morality in our own image. But Nietzsche's critique is actually something far more radical than this. See, to Nietzsche, if the Ubermensch is someone that really exists out there, then they're probably someone who's transcended the very idea of morality altogether. They're not someone that tries to recreate it or to participate in it as an activity. You know, as we talked about on Episodes 211 and 213, pretty recently on this podcast, and you can always go back and get more of the details of this there.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  But to affirm reality at the level that Nietzsche is talking about in his work, is to accept the fact that, well, first of all, obviously to him, there are not moral categories that are written into the universe, like good and evil. So, the real question becomes, when people sit around and moralize about which things are good or bad in the world, and sit around and use their time to judge other people's behavior, how can we explain the kind of activity that they're involved in there? What is morality really? Well, for Nietzsche, one way to look at it, is that morality is an often complex expression of the wills of a bunch of passive reactive people. Meaning, what morality is at bottom, is a reactive way of describing the world and what happens in it. So, the people that engage in that type of moralizing about things, are always fundamentally doing something passive.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  They are looking out at the world, waiting for things to happen, deciding whether this or that behavior corresponds to some pre-existing set of moral protocols that someone else came up with, and then they categorize that behavior in some way, usually based on a duality of good versus evil. But regardless of whatever moral scorekeeping most people do, these things aren't actually good or evil to Nietzsche. Moral categories like that are just the kind of things we say, when a lot of people out there collectively agree, a formation of their wills collectively. But someone affirming reality at the level that Nietzsche is talking about, with the Ubermensch, just wouldn't look at the world in terms of these moral protocols. The only criteria that would matter to them, about whether something was worth doing or not, is just whether it really is something that corresponds to their own will. A difficult enough task in its own right.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  So, morality, generally, isn't a behavior that the Ubermensch would have much time for. It's too passive for someone that's affirming life in this way. It's too much sitting around judging the things that are happening to you, rather than being the person that's making the things happen. So, Nietzsche's Ubermensch, then, is not someone that recreates morality in their own image, like Raskolnikov. The Ubermensch, if this is someone who can exist, would have, in a sense, transcended the very concept of morality itself, in terms of how they act in the world. So when Raskolnikov, in the book, you know, rejects the moral rules of a god he thinks is fake, and when he then thinks it is a good idea to come up with a bunch of rational arguments and moral rules that to him are supposed to more accurately describe what's good or bad, well, that's not Nietzsche's philosophy.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Nietzsche would say that he's just recreating there the very sorts of reactive processes that he's a product of. And by being a rational utilitarian, he's not surprisingly, pulling from the very ideas that were fed into him by the counterculture of the world he lives in. Raskolnikov then is not an example of Nietzsche's Ubermensch. He's an example of a very particular kind of nihilism that's gaining popularity in Russia during this time. And by the way, this shouldn't be a disappointment to anyone, because this is exactly what Dostoevsky was going for anyway. Now, a very interesting part about all this is that this critique from Nietzsche actually shares a kind of resemblance to the critique that Dostoevsky is going to have of Raskolnikov. Because Dostoevsky would be very skeptical of anybody out there, Raskolnikov included,

• 13:47Speaker 00

  that thinks they're a special individual, thinks they're above everybody else that's around them. Because after Raskolnikov commits the murders, there's a detective in the book, his name's Porfry, and he asks Raskolnikov, as he's investigating him, "When it comes to these special people that you believe in, how is anyone ever supposed to know the difference between one of these actual special people and someone who just thinks they're special? Like, are you the person that gets to decide whether you are someone who's special or not? What if you're wrong? What if you're not very special, and that's exactly what makes you think you're more special than you really are? It's a real question. Who's the governing body that gets to decide that? Is it just you? Again, the rational egoism at the heart of this worldview starts to run into some contradictions. And it goes much further than this if you're Dostoevsky.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Because maybe you say back to the detective there, "Well, look, look, I'm special because I'm different. Like, I'm truly, if you look at my worldview, an original kind of person. In other words, I can spot differences, okay? And I'm not like any of these stupid people around me that just blindly follow social norms and customs and pray to a god every day that tells them how to live. I tell myself how to live. And I do that by rationally analyzing the world around me, measuring consequences, and coming up with my own moral norms and customs that are different. But Dostoevsky might say back to this, okay, that's cool. But those norms and customs you just came up with. What exactly makes them something that's different? Like, why would you even use that word there? Different? Different from what? Oh, do you mean different from the culture? That you're supposedly not a part of?

• 15:17Speaker 00

  But yet it still defines what your position is here anyway? Here's the philosophical critique that he's making. What Dostoevsky would say is that Raskolnikov is not actually recreating a brand new morality from the ground up as the sort of man god that he thinks he is. He's in reality, still very much shaped by the relational network of ideas, people and things that he's a part of. And that that's true of his thinking, no matter how many rational, theoretical, abstract theories he can come up with, for why a different morality is really the one that applies to him. Now, to Dostoevsky, the type of creatures we are are ones that are co-constituted by the world we're in. To use language we've been exploring since episode 211 on this podcast, where else did you get these ideas from? That you use to create your morality? What else could you be

• 16:02Speaker 00

  other than this relational network that you're a part of? See, it's easy to sit in isolation, to think a bunch by yourself, and to create a bunch of these theoretical utilitarian abstractions about what your values are. But the fact that it can feel to you like you are the one that solely individually came up with those ideas and that they're your special ideas that you've reasoned to. This can be an illusion that smacks you in the face the second these theories are tested in the real world. And the first evidence you can see of Raskolnikov coming to terms with this fact for himself is when he commits these two murders and then his life turns into an absolute living hell for him afterwards. Yet, turns out, it didn't matter how many utilitarian arguments he had about why killing these people was the right thing to do. On the other side of actually doing it,

• 16:47Speaker 00

  he clearly does not feel like this was morally justifiable. He's not the person he thought he was. He's sick every day with guilt. He can't sleep. When he does sleep, he has nightmares. He's fainting in public. He's living his entire life on the run from all the people who suspect him of doing this thing. And then further on the run from the family and friends that clearly know something's very off with him. And look, if it's not obvious, this is not the picture of a person who's a man-god, who's created their own set of moral values that they believe in. No, this is a picture of someone who's come up with a rationalization for their behavior. But truly, at their core, is a member of a network, a culture, a set of ethical truths, that they now realize they just made a decision, or they have completely violated what it is they actually believe.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Now, how many people out there listening can relate to this feeling that he's having? I mean, maybe you've never murdered somebody. I mean, hopefully, you've never murdered somebody. The bigger point, though, for Dostoevsky is that this is a very pronounced version of a kind of experience we all have in a less pronounced way when we rationalize our behavior. That it is uniquely possible, in this modern world we live in, to exist in a way where your whole life never becomes about facing the discomfort of looking at yourself honestly, but about endlessly rationalizing your behavior, and then coming up with a story that sounds pretty good about it. See, because Raskolnikov told himself that he committed this crime to make the world a better place, and he had all the rational arguments to prove it to you if you asked. But what he comes to find out, over the course of the book, is that he didn't actually kill

• 18:15Speaker 00

  those people for utilitarian reasons. He did it as a type of ego-driven fantasy, where he wanted to run a test to see if he was special, to see if he was truly different. Well, he found out, with some of the highest stakes imaginable, that he's not, in fact, as different as he once thought he was, that he's still very much a part of the moral order he was supposedly rebelling against, and that his attempt to recreate what God-centered approaches have done for people throughout the course of history was nothing more than a rationalization for his own ego. And if, for the sake of conversation, we can accept Dostoevsky's point here, then something very interesting comes out of this, about what it means to be an authentic person who's living in a culture. There's a great question that someone like Raskolnikov may have asked at some point in his life.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Is following the norms, or the customs, or the religion of a culture, does that have to be something that is life-denying by default? Like, if being an individual means you gotta be different from everyone else, then a common criticism of religion by some people is that it flattens the world into a place where they can't become individuals, that it's a renunciative tradition, that people are... Are forced to see a feeling they have inside of them and call it something that's evil, you know, to hate things about themselves, is following a religion, something that makes it impossible to be truly different. But Dostoevsky might ask, why would that be the case? I mean, extend this same question to being a member of a culture or a member of a community. Like, couldn't it also be the case, he would ask, that to truly be an individual is not

• 19:41Speaker 00

  to be different, it's always, whether we realize it or not, to be an instantiation of a culture and then to find a way to make that culture your own. What he's saying is that there's a way to affirm life by first being truly aware of your actual position in this relational network of being, and then after that, to fully consent to your participation in that set of roles. See, that's the true mistake that Raskolnikov makes in the book. It's not a moral mistake, it's not a legal mistake. To Dostoevsky, it was a religious type of mistake. It's an alienation from his role in this network of being. It seems like to Dostoevsky, it's at bottom, really a deep lack of self-awareness that Raskolnikov has, probably from not engaging with nihilism at a serious enough level.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  There's a clear example of what he's talking about here in the book. There's another character that Raskolnikov actually falls in love with and realizes he wants to be more like. It's a woman named Sonia. And Sonia represents, I guess, an alternative way that someone could react to a bad situation they're in. See, because both of them are in bad spots in their own way. Remember Raskolnikov? He's broke, dropped out of school, sister marrying the rich dude who's a horrible person, and his response is to rationally justify killing someone and then to take all their money. But Sonia, she's also in a bad spot too. Her dad is an alcoholic in the book. He spends what little money the family has on vodka every day. She has multiple siblings that are all struggling as well. And she's a Christian woman who starts prostituting herself just to be able to care for the rest of her family.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  And by the way, not only does her dad spend all his money on vodka, but then he steals the money that his daughter just got from prostituting herself and then goes and spends that money on more vodka. I mean, that's, look, here in America, that's a telltale sign you probably have a little bit of a problem. No judgment, though. It turns out it's too late for him anyway. Sonia's situation gets even worse than this, because along the way, they find her father dead one day after he gets run over in the middle of the street by a wagon. So what then is Sonia supposed to do now? And Raskolnikov, seeing her situation, at one point in the book asked her, "You know, why don't you just end all this now? Like, why not just jump into a frozen river or something and end this pathetic life you have going on?" He actually says it in this kind of way. This is one side of a very complex Raskolnikov. And her response back to him, it's beautiful.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  It's, "But what would happen to my siblings if I chose to do that?" At which point, Raskolnikov stops. He thinks about what she just said to him, and he realizes just how special of a person she really is. This is when he realizes he has so much that he wants to learn from this person. And he realizes this is what true strength probably actually looks like. Now, you may be saying right now, "What the heck? Really? Really? This is the second book in a row this guy makes a main character into a prostitute." Well, he does it for very good reason. Again, Dostoevsky is the kind of author who's not interested in idealistic storylines. Alright, he doesn't want to use one-dimensional characters that are gonna fit in nicely into a Disney movie one day. He's interested in a kind of realism, in the actual messiness, and sometimes chaos, that makes up the reality of our world.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  And the poverty that Sonia's in, combined with her choice to become a prostitute. This obviously shows us a couple things. It shows us how the choices we have to make in this world are not always optimal. And they're often dictated by circumstances that are completely outside our control. But what it also shows us is that when Sonia consents to become a prostitute, you know, being a devout Christian who's acting out of a place of love and care for her family, while this is a horrible situation, and the extremity of the situation is designed this way, this is still a choice that in some small way to Dostoevsky, becomes hers. What he seems to be saying is that no matter what it is in this sometimes horrible world, there is always at least some personal salvation that is possible

• 23:21Speaker 00

  in consent and affirmation of our place in a network. To act out of a genuine love that we have for others. It's a type of self-sacrifice that's not renunciative or life-denying, but one that consents to how we're needed by the things that are already meaningful to us. Now, think of how this way of living contrasts with Raskolnikov and the situation he found himself in. He was faced with a bad situation, became in denial of his true place in the network, and then told himself all sorts of stories that sounded good that he didn't really believe in deep down. I think Dostoevsky would ask here, "Who's truly the one you think is in a place of life denial? Is it the religious person that affirms? Or is it the utilitarian that denies?" No doubt, what Dostoevsky is getting at here is that to be a religious person

• 24:05Speaker 00

  does not guarantee that you're going to be renouncing things about yourself. A lot of people may in fact use it that way in practice. But in terms of the standards we can set for ourselves, that it's possible to affirm life as an individual within a religion by making it something that is your own. In fact, I think he'd say that that's always what you're doing anyway when you're in a culture, despite whatever rational illusions you may construct that may think you're outside of that culture or totally independent, like Raskolnikov or The Underground Man. So when Raskolnikov finds himself in a place where he's completely consumed by guilt now, you know, when the detective in the story, Porphyry, continues to have these conversations with him, increasingly suspicious about his involvement in the murders. And when he's living every day in this terrible prison he's created for himself up in his mind,

• 24:50Speaker 00

  he starts to think that maybe the only way out of this prison in his head is to go to a prison in the real world. In fact, both Porphyry and Sonia suggest to him in the book, "Look, even if with the evidence they have, they're never going to be able to convict you, maybe what the right thing to do is for yourself is to confess to the crime you've committed." Now, why does this make sense in relation to everything that we've talked about so far? Because a genuine confession from Raskolnikov here would accomplish two big things for him. One, admitting that he's done something wrong allows him to find a limitation of his own ego. I mean, taking accountability for something you're wrong about is one of the only ways it's possible to grow as a person. It's one of the most powerful things you can do in your life. And given just how many limitations we all have,

• 25:33Speaker 00

  how often you can face these limitations if you're paying attention, if you're someone who's truly willing to take responsibility for yourself, it's often uncomfortable, but it's a huge advantage to have in life in the long run, again, to not just be endlessly rationalizing your own behavior. The second thing a confession accomplishes for Raskolnikov is that if he's living in this place where he's consumed by this guilt and fear for how he's violated this order he's a part of, then the only way out of that is to believe in the legitimacy of some sort of authority that can punish you in some way and then rid you of this guilt. So think about what this point means. Let's say you make a mistake, which we all Sometimes do. If you don't believe in an authority's ability to absolve you of something you've done wrong,

• 26:18Speaker 00

  then there's no possibility of you feeling better. You're always trapped in a place where you can't ever repent for it and make amends for anything. I mean, imagine, you know, trying to ask your accountant for forgiveness for punching your grandpa at Christmas last year. It's like, it wouldn't work. It doesn't make any sense. And if you're feeling guilty, and then at some point do something that makes you end up not feeling as guilty, well, whatever it is that's absolving you of that guilt, even partially, has to come from somewhere else in this larger network that you're a part of. And again, for Dostoevsky, it is uniquely possible these days to live under the illusion that you are the ultimate arbiter of everything. "Oh, I've done something wrong? Hmm, well, I'll just do things that make amends for what I've done, and then I will decide at what point I've made things right again."

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Well, "make amends to what exactly?" he would ask. "And what piece of this network are all these things you're doing in service of?" Dostoevsky thinks these are impossible questions to answer, coming solely from a place of rational utilitarianism, that there must be something else, something bigger than yourself, that you're always referencing. And the subtext here is, it's not enough in the book for some detective to build a case against Raskolnikov, to arrest him, send him to jail for 20 years, and then Raskolnikov gets out and he walks around the rest of his life guilt-free. No, as Porphyry says in the book to him, "The law alone cannot provide Raskolnikov with what he needs here to feel better about what he's done." I mean, to his point, there are people that'll sit in jail for their entire lives and still

• 27:46Speaker 00

  manage to avoid the law in this sense, because the law is something more than just being punished, Dostoevsky. Unless, if Raskolnikov is willing, to submit to the legitimacy of the law as something that can truly punish him for what he's done, then any time he stops, even for a second, and looks at himself in the mirror, or he pays attention to his own thoughts for a while, he will be hit with the same guilt and fear that he has not yet atoned for. And, oh yes, he may spend decades of his life distracting himself from what he's done, running away from it in his thoughts, rationalizing it with a few pre-canned stories he likes to tell himself about why it was okay. Because that's what we do, right? With all sorts of things, no matter how small they are. We start at a really high-level, abstract theory about why what we're doing is totally normal.

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  It's okay. Everybody does what I'm doing in their own way. But as Raskolnikov tried to do this in the book, you know, justifying the murders with his great man theory, or with his utilitarian arguments, well, at a certain point, the detective porphyry doesn't even have to arrest him. He just talks to him and shows him exactly who he is by asking him questions that get him to point out the particulars of what he has done. Eventually, Raskolnikov realizes that he has two choices. He can either spend the rest of his life running from this guilt and fear, living like a distracted prisoner up in his own mind, or he can face it directly, confess to what he's done, and much like Sonia, achieve at least some form of personal salvation by consenting to the authority of the network that he's a part of.

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  And to Dostoevsky, this is clearly going to be consenting to the authority of God. Ultimately, Raskolnikov in the book decides to confess to the crime. He's sentenced to eight years in a Siberian prison, which probably is more like 800 years in a normal prison. But before he goes, he professes his love to Sonia, who vows to stick by him as he's gonna be going to prison, and she'll be there once he gets out. Of course, she'd do something like that. That's so, that's so Sonia of her. Anyway, it's alluded to in the epilogue of the book, that even though Raskolnikov confessed to his crime, and even though he's laid the groundwork for at least some kind of atonement for what he's done, he definitely has a whole lot more work to do if he ever wants to live a life that's deeply in connection with being. And it's clear that while Dostoevsky feels satisfied that he's expanded on some of the

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  themes from Notes from Underground in this book, what we now see, the contradictions of Russian nihilism, not just going on at the head of the underground man, you know, locked away in a solitary apartment, but now we see how they look in practice, in the real actions of Raskolnikov in the social world. Well, by the end of the book, Dostoevsky makes it clear he has a lot more to say in future books about how these mistakes manifest at other levels of the world, and ultimately, how to live with this more religious connection to God and to being. In other words, to Dostoevsky, this is not just a critique. This is not just about him pointing out the mistakes and the rationalist utopianism of his time. He wants to construct something here as well. It's about a self-emptying that he wants to give people access to, and it's one that I'd love to go more into if you're all still feeling the idea of these episodes on the great novels from Dostoevsky.

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  By the way, seriously, thank you to everybody that reached out this week and told me that this is what you wanted. It really helped me make a decision to do this episode next. It also, just for whatever it's worth, when you tell me what you want, it ends up helping the podcast in some indirect way because it, you know, it tells the algorithm that we're worthy of being seen by people. Anyway, I know that's not what it's about, but it is an unintended consequence, so thank you for that. Patreon.com/PhilosophizeThis. And as always, thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.