Pod Insights Philosophize This! Episode #222 ... Dostoevsky - Love in The Brothers Karamazov About this episode Today we talk about the philosophical themes around love in The Brothers Karamazov. We talk about Dostoevsky's existential, tragic form of Christianity. Family as a microcosm of society. Active love as an experiential framing. The Grand Inquisitor. Hope you love it! :)
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 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 going to be talking about the book The Brothers Karamazov, which means, among other things, we're going to be talking today about the faith of Dostoevsky. Faith was a big part of how he lived his life. Where if you're someone that spent many years studying him, you know, reading the journals, the letters, the notes of Dostoevsky, people often describe his view of faith as a kind of existential tragic form of Christianity. That's the kind of thing they'll say when trying to describe his faith in all its layers. Which, to a modern person who just hears that, especially if you haven't listened to these last four episodes we've done building to this point,
0:45 Speaker 00 that can sound on the surface like it's kind of an oxymoron. Like tragic Christianity? Existential questions, I mean, isn't Christianity the thing you believe in? So you don't gotta be in agony with existential dread every day? I mean, someone could say that when it comes to how most people seem to be using this Christianity thing, Jesus was basically a fidget spinner that had 12 disciples. I mean, how can that ever be anything but something that helps people cope with a painful reality they can't fully affirm? Well, if you want to understand where he's coming from with his faith, first thing we gotta make sure we're doing is not reducing Christianity, and all of religion for that matter, to just a superficial lazy kind of religion that gives people easy answers. Certainly plenty of people out there you could find that'll use religion like this,
1:28 Speaker 00 but Dostoevsky and many other people are not this kind of Christian. And it's understandable. Sometimes just as humans, we'll take the worst example of something we've seen in the world and we'll make the entire thing into the worst things we've seen from it. But out of respect to the history of people who have thought about stuff on this planet, you know, if we want to honor the ideas here, with religion being a big part of what human thought has been over the years, well, let's make a pact to try not to do that with religion, at least for this conversation today. In fact, if you remember the episode we just did before we started this series, where we talked about Keiji Nishitani and his views on the value of a deeply religious quest. The truth is that there's a similarity to the ways that Nishitani saw religion and the ways that Dostoevsky saw religion.
2:09 Speaker 00 One way to think about it is that Russian Orthodox Christianity, far from being some institution that Dostoevsky says we should blindly commit ourselves to, it's more accurate to say that Christianity gave Dostoevsky a language he could use to navigate the purpose he served in a larger network of being. And this religious path that he walked was very deep, it was tragic, it was existential. It was an existence that at times was absolutely miserable for him, but then at other times it was deeply beautiful, probably at a level that few people ever get to experience. And the level of honesty this man tried to live in, the level to which he affirmed all of it, the good, bad, the mysterious, the level to which he tried to understand the different psychological framings of reality that other people lived in, and how much ever
2:54 Speaker 00 he put in to never idealize them or to demonize them, just so he had some easy way to file them neatly up in his own head. This is a level of affirmation that can be really tough for people to relate to when they just jump in and try to read his books off the shelf, not knowing the kind of man he was. People will read his books, like The Brothers Karamazov, which as we'll see is just an enormous commentary on so many aspects of human existence, and they'll turn it, as they're reading it, into the kind of idealized movie they're used to watching in our modern world. "Oh, this book is a battle between good and evil. This is a debate that's going on between Ivan's perspective and Alyosha's perspective. Now let's find out what Dostoevsky thinks the right perspective is to have." But this was not at all what he was going for as he wrote it.
3:37 Speaker 00 We'll talk more about it here in a minute, but what needs to be said right now is that faith, like love to Dostoevsky, was not a noun, it was a verb to him. And to say something like, "Dostoevsky's faith mattered to him a lot," and to think that that's the same as saying that Dostoevsky's Christianity mattered to him a lot, well, by the end of the episode, we'll understand why this misses a big piece of what faith was to him as an active process and not a doctrine to believe in. What we'll also see is how he thought that multiple different framings of our reality might be necessary if we ever want to engage with our existence more fully than any one of these characters in this book, that any single framing of our existence will always run into its built-in limitations.
4:18 Speaker 00 Anyway, the plot of The Brothers Karamazov, shockingly I know, centers around the Karamazov family. Another shock will be that a significant portion of this book is dedicated to the three brothers of the family, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha. But then, more than just the brothers, the family also includes another central character of this book. It includes their father, whose name is Fyodor. Now, Fyodor was obviously Dostoevsky's own name in real life, but this character he wrote into the book wasn't meant to be symbolic of himself. In fact, he said what he meant for it to symbolize was a piece of something that's inside of all of us, to an extent. We're all a little like this Fyodor guy in a way, because Fyodor, at least when it comes to the way he treats his family, well, let's just say, he comes up short in a lot of ways
5:02 Speaker 00 that are completely disappointing. For example, he doesn't really know all that well any of these sons that we just mentioned. Certainly doesn't know them like you'd expect a father to know his son. See, Dmitri, his oldest son, is from his first marriage, and Ivan and Alyosha are sons that are from his second marriage. And all of them, when they were children, he'd just leave them to be taken care of by someone else. Then he'd go out, do all his own stuff, the stuff he really wanted to be doing. Or if he was around, then most of the time, he'd just outright neglect the kids. And now that the kids are grown up and adults, hasn't gotten any better. Life is still pretty chaotic between this family. For example, he's in a love triangle with one of his sons and another woman named Grushenka, so that's something. He gets verbally abusive with them on a regular basis in the book, gets into scuffles with
5:46 Speaker 00 them, he gets drunk all the time. He's the kind of guy that you'll be out with him, he'll be walking down the street, half in the bag, and he'll just yell at some stranger that he doesn't even know that's on the side of the road. He's the kind of guy that often does stupid stuff like this, and then usually just ends up embarrassing all the people that are around him. He manipulates the people who are close to him to get what he wants. He abuses the people who are close to him when they're inconvenient to him. In fact, you know, since Dostoevsky's talking about the role of the father in a Russian household here, I was talking to a guy one time, fan of the podcast, he was from Russia. And he told me, there's an old saying in Russia, he heard it originally from his grandma, but it's pretty common for people to still use it there, though. The saying goes, "The second worst thing that can ever happen to a Russian family is that the father leaves."
6:29 Speaker 00 And the worst thing that can ever happen to a Russian family is if the father stays.
6:35 Speaker 00 Just thought that joke seemed to apply here. I mean, the point of Dostoevsky presenting a father in this way is more than just him wanting a manipulative narcissist in the book to add a little flavor. I mean, technically, the people Dostoevsky is critiquing with this character are a group of what he saw as self-indulgent landowners that were growing in number during the 19th century in Russia when he was living. But the criticism here applies more generally for him to the growing number of people in our modern societies that are so focused on themselves all the time, their own achievements and projects. The self-centeredness of the modern individual subject has led to what he thinks is a considerable decline in the focus people choose to put on family relationships, like the ones between father and son that he lays out in this book so much. But if you wanted to find out what's wrong in a society, one place to start is to look
7:20 Speaker 00 at the relationships between the members of an average family in that society. And not only is looking at family relationships in this book going to be the perfect site for Dostoevsky to explore some of the darkest and most wonderful things we can do to the people we're close to, but this also becomes a perfect way to illustrate one of the big macro-level points he wants to make in this book about how to philosophically frame the world, and that is that we should think of the family as a microcosm of society at large. To understand what he means here, just think of a common story we hear from people in the modern world. They'll say, "I feel lonely most of the time. I don't talk to my family that much. The people I am close to just make me feel more alone when I'm around them. I spend most of my time at work, but you know what?
8:02 Speaker 00 Despite all my loneliness, I do genuinely care about my fellow people that are out there in the world." And it sucks to have to turn on the news and see so many people out there who are suffering these days. So this person will say, "Look, enough sitting around doing nothing. It's time to revolutionize this society I'm a part of. Time to fix it. So what do I do? Well, I live in a democracy. To make a difference in a democracy means I gotta put in the work to become an informed voter, which means I have to watch the news and consume content that makes me an informed voter. And for two hours of my day, every day, on the way to work, when I'm eating, whenever I get a little free time, I will do the work to keep up on the events that are going on politically, you know, the great battle that's going on between these two sides. I do this, not because it's fun, no, no, but because it's what it takes to make this world a better place.
8:47 Speaker 00 And quite frankly, if you're somebody that's not keeping up on all this stuff that's going on in the news every day, well, I'm sorry, but I think you're an irresponsible person to care more about your video games and your TV shows than you do about taking responsibility for the world you live in. Geez, how does it feel to look in the mirror every day and not be a part of the solution? But Dostoevsky looks at things in a very different way than this. He no doubt appreciate this person's theoretical concern for all the people around him, but he'd also think that engagement at this theoretical level, this is not the most enduring way of getting to where it is they claim to want to bring the world. For example, that two hours you spend watching a screen, getting educated on what's happening in the world. Let's ignore the criticism that you really aren't getting an education there.
9:29 Speaker 00 That this is really just someone indulging in entertainment like most people do in the modern world. Let's say someone really is getting to the bottom of what's happening at the political level. Then just do a comparison of the two hours of someone's day that they spend watching content and all the good they're doing every couple of years or so, and they can be one vote of millions. And now imagine that same two hours every day, where you instead reflected on how you're needed in the world immediately around you. You know, the roles you play right now, that you are in fact always already performing. And then imagine spending that two hours every day genuinely applying yourself to being better at what is needed from you by the people and things around you that co-constitute your existence with you. Some questions to ask: which one of those two are you more familiar with?
10:11 Speaker 00 Which one of those two are you more capable of actually changing? Which one of those two are you more qualified to know? In fact, you could say that when it comes to knowing how you're needed by the things around you, especially when it comes to the people, there may be no one that is more qualified for that task than you are. You are in a special position to be there for these people. And Dostoevsky might say, imagine dedicating two hours every single day to doing it. How would your life change? How would the lives of the people around you change? To not only be able to spend that time reflecting on how you fit into this particular life you're living, trying to understand things more on their own home ground, but then to be able to spot weak points in your abilities, where you might want to use this time every day to develop the skills that allow you to be there better for this network you're a part of.
10:55 Speaker 00 And the point here is not that Dostoevsky would ever think we should be structuring our lives around trying to save the world anyway. But let's say you are one of these people that has that as a big part of the way you see the world. Well, how many of society's problems wouldn't be problems if more people lived this way? We would have strong, qualified people dedicating the time every day, you know, moral people, you could say, and these would be people that would intervene before many of these issues became larger problems. The question for Dostoevsky is, if you consider yourself a revolutionary and you want to change the world for the better, which one of these two is more revolutionary? And it's not that there's never moments to be taken to the streets acting politically. It's that, think of how easy it is, especially in the type of societies we live in that promote self-centeredness and alienate us from each other.
11:40 Speaker 00 Think of the trap you can fall into. Think of how easy it is to mistake waving a sign around in the streets, changing a grand total of zero minds with being a small part of saving the world. Think of how easy it is to think that you're caring for all of humanity, when you're really just an ego that's turning all of humanity into a theoretical abstraction so that you can try to control it. Where your idea of love and care for these people isn't grounded in any particulars about their lived experience, but just in making broad statements about the abstract suffering of abstract humans out there, when in reality you aren't fully considering either of those things to Dostoevsky. Now, there's a lot of things you could ask back to this idea that's been presented so far. Let's pause here for a second, though, with this point he's making about the family as
12:24 Speaker 00 a microcosm of society, the failure of Feodor to his family in the book. Because I think this point becomes a much stronger one when we consider it next to an important individual section of this book. The section is called "The Grand Inquisitor." The Grand Inquisitor may be one of the most famous poems, parables, whatever you want to call it, in all of classic literature. As a section of the book, this is written on purpose by Dostoevsky, in a way where you can read it completely on its own, and it still makes total sense. In fact, there's a lot of people who hear about the Grand Inquisitor section of this book first, and then only after enjoying it will they then get turned on to The Brothers Karamazov as a book more broadly. That's how good it is. Anyway, here's how it goes, though. One of those three sons... that Feudor doesn't know much about is named Ivan.
13:08 Speaker 00 Ivan is the classic example of a highly educated, very smart, rational, skeptical kind of person, who's a bit tortured by living in a world that he's so good at critiquing and thinking about. See, Ivan's the kind of person that has a hard time believing in any religious doctrine that gets sent his way, though he does try to respect what it's saying and does take it very seriously. Ivan is also someone that looks around him at the world and sees the suffering of untold numbers of innocent people all around him with seemingly no end in sight. So feeling the frustration that often comes along with seeing this kind of stuff, he tells this story in the book called "The Grand Inquisitor", as a way to put into words what he thinks is going on with these religious institutions and all the suffering in the world. He tells it to his younger brother, Alyosha, in the book.
13:53 Speaker 00 And real quick before we get into it, what makes this poem so interesting is that it's not just saying, "Look at all the suffering in the world, therefore it makes no sense that a God exists." No, what Ivan's saying is something that's in a way far more radical than that. This is what's sometimes called by people that analyze the book, "An anti-theodicy from Ivan." What does that mean? Well, we've talked about many theodices on this podcast over the years. The word "theodicy," if you just break down the different parts of the word, it literally means justification of God. And throughout history, there have been a lot of attempts by thinkers to justify God. One of the most common things that people try to justify, especially when it comes to the Abrahamic religions, is how a loving God could ever exist and still allow for what seems like a horrific amount
14:35 Speaker 00 of completely unnecessary suffering that's going on on a massive scale. Well, again, Ivan's not saying that you shouldn't believe in God because this suffering can't be rationally justified. He's saying, even if this God does exist, this isn't a God that's worth honoring or praising anyway. It doesn't matter if you can rationally justify it, because any God that allows for this kind of suffering should be rejected if you're Ivan. But again, "The Grand Inquisitor" gets recited in story form when it's in the book. In the story, Jesus comes back to earth. You know, the famous second coming of Christ we've all been waiting for is finally upon us, hooray. And where does he choose to come back when he decides to do it? Well, 16th century Spain of all places, right in the middle of the Spanish Inquisition.
15:17 Speaker 00 And as the story goes, almost immediately, Jesus comes back and starts performing miracles on the side of the street again, kinda like David Blaine. But this time, when he's doing the miracles, he doesn't get followers. He just gets arrested when he does it. Then, not long after he gets arrested, he gets interrogated by a really forceful, high-level clergyman that people in the story call the Grand Inquisitor. The Grand Inquisitor looks at Jesus as he's interrogating him, and he says, "You know what? Since you're the representative that's available here on behalf of the Creator of the universe, I gotta tell you something. You absolutely failed when you created this world when it comes to human freedom." Because he tells him, "It's the possibility of human freedom, you see, that's responsible for all the evil in the world. Here's how it goes: People are born, they're able to make choices, they inevitably are
16:01 Speaker 00 tempted by evil, then they have the freedom to choose that evil sometimes, and then innocent people by the billions, including children who have no frame of reference for any of this stuff, suffer unnecessarily. And look, you chose for the universe to be this way, Jesus. He says, "You've been gone a long time, so let me fill you in on what's happened since you left. The church has come along, and they've had to step in and correct for your big mistake there." As a high-ranking clergyman, he says, "The church realized long ago that people can either have freedom, or they can have happiness. You can't ever have both. And when it comes down to it, human beings don't actually want freedom as much as they say they do. People just want full bellies," he says, "They want happiness and peace. And the way you ensure that is not by giving them freedom, but by giving them authority,
16:45 Speaker 00 miracles, and mystery," he famously says. "You give them the doctrine to live by, with strict consequences if they don't. And when they toe the religious line there, this removes the whole freedom thing from the equation and starts producing a human being that is actually happy." The bottom line is this for the Grand Inquisitor: Institutionalized religion, the church, is an enormous lie. But it's a noble lie. It's a necessary lie. People are better off living with this lie. Just ask any blindly religious person how great it is to be them every day. They really think they have it all figured out. And how can Jesus, of all people, just sit there with a straight face and not be wailing in agony over how unjustifiable all this suffering really is? He can't justify it. In fact, "Go ahead, Jesus, just try to.
17:28 Speaker 00 Give me your argument back to all this stuff I just said." At which point, Jesus, staying quiet during this entire speech, listens patiently. And when the Grand Inquisitor finishes, he stands up, walks over to him, kisses him on the mouth, and then walks away. A move that Dostoevsky thinks is a complete and powerful counter perspective to everything that the Grand Inquisitor has just said.
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19:19 Speaker 00 Now, why would that make sense to Dostoevsky? Well, there's a lot here to examine. See, it's a very specific move that Dostoevsky's going for here when he has Jesus not say anything, but just get up and kiss the Grand Inquisitor. When Jesus doesn't say anything, it's not like he's just trying to be nice to him. It's not like he doesn't want to dunk on him in front of his friends or something. No, the point is, he's not even going to argue with the Grand Inquisitor, because argument is something that's always limited to the theoretical abstract framing of events in the world, which is incapable of even receiving the response that Jesus is giving here. What I mean is, Jesus is looking at the world through a different kind of experiential framing than the Grand Inquisitor is. And by kissing him, it underscores the built-in limitations to the way the Grand Inquisitor
20:03 Speaker 00 is trying to frame supposedly all of human existence. Now if that sounds confusing, well, let me try to clear it up. The good news is, we've been talking about the possibility of this pre-theoretical framing of our reality since about episode 211 of this podcast. I'm talking about the more phenomenological embodied framing to our reality. We've talked about Heidegger's das Sein and the immediacy of experience in that regard. We've talked about his later work with his concept of letting be and its connection to the practice of attention in the work of Simone Weil. We've talked about the great mystics who throughout history, by a process of self-empting, have tried to get to communion with something greater than themselves that they're connected to. We've talked about Nishitani and how he thinks that most of Western philosophy throughout history has gone on in the experiential framing of consciousness and that he thinks it's
20:47 Speaker 00 deeply lacking in these other framings of our experience that he calls nihility and shunyata. Well, look, this is part of why Nishitani saw Dostoevsky as such an exceptional thinker from the Western tradition. He seems to be going deeper into the value of these other framings of reality that are outside of just theoretical abstractions. Most thinkers in the West never do this. See, there's nothing wrong to Dostoevsky with arguing or with framing the world in terms of theoretical abstractions and then trying to get a better understanding of it. We need to do this kind of stuff. But what he would say is, we are always limiting ourselves. Whenever we make the mistake of believing that by coming up with abstract definitions of things in the world, you know, having grandiose conversations about human life
21:28 Speaker 00 as a defined thing and human suffering as a defined thing, we're always limiting ourselves if we really think we're accessing everything there is to understand about these things. It's a similar move to the one we saw from Nishitani a few decades later. The movie makes with nihilism and his book, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, that we talked about. Remember, what he says is that what many Western thinkers have typically done is they look at a concept like nihilism and they'll approach it just from the abstract theoretical framing. They'll come up with definitions as to what nihilism is. They'll look at tons of different examples of nihilism out there in the world throughout history. They'll find similarities and differences between them and then they'll argue with each other and try to refine their definitions to capture the essence of what nihilism is.
22:11 Speaker 00 But remember, as Nishitani points out, that while this is one piece of nihilism, for sure, nihilism is just as much an experienced embodied reality for a subject that is going through a nihilistic experience. His point was that if we want to take nihilism as seriously as we can, we have to honor this phenomenological framing of what nihilism is, not just stop short with having arguments about nihilism as a broad abstract concept. Well, notice the similarity there to the Grand Inquisitor and his broad abstract arguments about what human life is, or whether suffering makes sense or not. And here's one of the big points for him in this book. There's a way to talk about suffering, where it's part of an abstract rational framing of the world.
22:53 Speaker 00 There's a tsunami that takes out 10,000 people and they're all suffering. There's a deer out in the woods somewhere whose leg gets crushed by a giant rock and it's suffering. There's a way to have a conversation about suffering, where the goal is to work out a way to rationalize it in some giant utilitarian calculus you're doing on the level of the universe. But there's another way to talk about suffering, from this more pre-theoretical framing, where we're simply trying to affirm the universe more as it is. Where we're not trying to demonize suffering, we're not trying to idealize suffering. And when we just experience suffering as an aspect of our existence, suffering, in another real sense, just is a part of the life of the types of creatures that we are. And again, far from telling these other people that they shouldn't be trying to understand
23:37 Speaker 00 suffering on these massive scales, the better question for him is not, "How do we rationalize suffering?", the question is, "How do we find a way to authentically experience a world where suffering is always something that's present in it? How do we do that?" Well, it's not by idealizing the world, it's not by rationalizing it away, and it's not by lying to ourselves about what the world is. The answer for Dostoevsky is going to be faith, or to strive through the difficulty of learning to actively love the world, or to affirm our existence unconditionally. Now, more on that framing of faith and love here in a second. But first, a couple loose ends to tie up here that are interesting. Notice how this isn't an argument that's trying to refute the idea that suffering is unjustifiable.
24:21 Speaker 00 If Dostoevsky did that, then that would more or less concede the point that suffering can be rationalized away, and it would turn the book into something more along the lines of a theodicy. But remember, he's not making a theodicy with this book. No, for Dostoevsky, there isn't a rational justification for the suffering in the world. In fact, he acknowledges the complexity here and the validity of this other framing. When it comes to the arguments that are being made by the Grand Inquisitor, the Grand Inquisitor makes some pretty good arguments. But again, the real point for him that he wants us to understand here is that these are just arguments. In fact, he makes the same point in the book at multiple different places. There's a character named Father Zosima, who's a religious man, who represents one of the voices of the saint in The Brothers Karamazov. Remember, like we've been talking about, every Dostoevsky novel
25:06 Speaker 00 has characters that embody the perspective of the madman and the saint. Well, Father Zosima is one of the saints in this one, and he has a really great conversation with a woman named Madame Kokolakov along these same lines. She tells him about her own existential struggle, how she's really bothered by the question of what happens after you die. And similar to Ivan, she's also really bothered by all the suffering she sees in the world. She wishes she could do more about it. And Father Zosima says back to her while they're talking, "Look, I hear you." He validates what she's saying, and he says he's also felt this. He says these can be some of the hardest things to try to reconcile when you're living mostly in this way of framing things. But he says to her, "I can't offer you any words or an explanation that'll rationalize this stuff away for you. The only thing I can offer you," he says, as a man that's living a deeply religious life,
25:50 Speaker 00 "is to say that when you approach the world more from the experiential framing of love instead, then it's not that you get a rational explanation for why all this suffering exists or for what happens after you die, it's that from that framing of love, the presence of suffering or the mystery of death requires less of an explanation, because suffering becomes a reality to be experienced, not just an intellectual problem to be solved. Not everybody has the luxury of being Ivan like this. Now, this is also where we benefit from having read the other four of his novels that we've covered so far. Because we know by this point, that if a saint figure in one of his books is talking about love, they're not talking about a superficial kind of love. To say, "I'm gonna live life in a more loving way towards the people and things around
26:35 Speaker 00 me," that doesn't mean you're gonna go out and start doing more nice things for people, compliment people more, hold the door open for 'em, radiate more loving patience in everyone's direction. No, loving the world around you is not becoming a cartoonishly nice person. Active love, like the kind that Father Zosima is talking about in the book, and the kind of love symbolized by Jesus when he kisses the Grand Inquisitor. This is a way of framing our experience in a way that tries to affirm everything about it as unconditionally as we can. So, the Grand Inquisitor in the story is not stupid for the arguments he's making. He's not even wrong. He's just framing reality in an incomplete way, one that has blind spots. So, Jesus responds to this person with love, by modeling the exact counterpoint that the
27:20 Speaker 00 Grand Inquisitor needs from him in this moment. In other words, this moment isn't about Jesus to Jesus. He's considering how he's needed most here, and how to best fulfill that role. Kind of like what Dostoevsky was saying about how he can be towards our family earlier. And think about how this kind of love applies to an actual situation you might find yourself in. You look out at the world, and whether it's your best friend, or your child, heck, even the local swamp that's got a lot of litter inside of it, and it's gross. The point is to see these things, not in some idealized way, where we think about how they should be all the time. The swamp should be clean right now. My child should be better at math. My best friend should be better at knowing what to say here. The universe should have a plan that all this suffering's a part of.
28:03 Speaker 00 We do this kind of thing so often when we frame things in terms of theoretical abstractions and try to control them. But to love is to affirm things as they are. And therefore, to love is to see things as they are, to experience things on their own home ground. Love is the orientation of care we have towards this world we live in, when we truly seek to understand it on its own terms. And look, if you're Dostoevsky, just saying that is one thing. But if you actually wanted to live more in this way, it is clear that to him, this is not gonna be an easy thing for someone to just start doing. You don't just flip a switch on, and all of a sudden you're loving everything. No, it's a very painful thing at times, to love the world around you as it is. Things are often frustrating, disappointing, and more than that, affirming these things
28:48 Speaker 00 as legitimate pieces of a network that you're embedded in, that often isn't something that comes with a lot of credit that you get for doing it. I mean, when you're patient towards someone close to you, for example, in a moment that they're struggling in, to Dostoevsky, love is something that often goes on behind the scenes. It's something most people don't even notice. They're ungrateful for the love they do have. It's something most people only notice years later. Like, you'll think back to something your mom did for you years ago, and you realize, "Oh, oh, that's what she was doing there." And again, in the type of societies we live in, that incentivize getting recognition for things, where to be visible and seen, that's what validates your existence. Dostoevsky would no doubt see this as a unique challenge that we all have to overcome to an extent during our own time.
29:30 Speaker 00 Now, notice the similarities here to the shift in experiential framing that we heard about from K. G. Nishitani, where an important piece of what an authentic religious quest is always aiming for to him, is this shift in perspective from thinking, "How do the things in the world serve me?", to "For what purpose do I exist in this larger network?" That's the religious quest for K. G. Nishitani. Well, I hope it's obvious here, the similarities to this act of love that's being described in the book. Because when you do the work to actually see the world more in this way, and Dostoevsky says that things like compassion, and patience, and forgiveness, these become things that aren't just some moral performance you're putting on every day, just because you know they're the right things to do, so you better do them. No, they start to become the genuine way that you orient yourself towards everything
30:15 Speaker 00 around you, because you increasingly see that everything around you is a part of you. It's co-constituting you. The illusion of separation that's so common in our modern societies gets lifted, and then at that point, to purposefully harm something else around you would be the equivalent of stabbing your left hand with a fork so that your right hand can get a piece of chicken. You know, harming something around you is ultimately just you harming yourself in this framing. See, the Grand Inquisitor is right in a way. It may be that human freedom is something that leads to more suffering in the world than there may otherwise be. But Dostoevsky would say that freedom is both the cause of suffering, as well as the only way to love, or to have faith, or to gain any possible enduring connection to the world around us.
30:59 Speaker 00 Where he's coming from is, I can't be forced to affirm something about the world. It has to come from an authentic place of freedom, or else without that, if I'm just forced to do it by a church or something, it just becomes me following orders. I mean, imagine being commanded by someone else to love something. You can't do it. And that's part of why Dostoevsky puts family relationships on display so much in this book. You know, weathering the frustration that you're no doubt gonna face when trying to love like this. This is easier and more available to someone probably when you practice with your immediate family, friends, the things you know best. To say this all in another way, I am a kind of being that suffers. I just am. And through a specific kind of suffering, reflected on in a very specific kind of way,
31:44 Speaker 00 new skills, perspectives, new ways of connecting with the world around me, these are things that are revealed to me through that suffering. I mean, if you're filtering the world through more of an idealist lens here, you can meet a really strong, interesting person who's had a rough life, and you can look at that person and have an attitude of pity towards them. "Oh, oh, I'm so sorry that you had to go through all that. No one should have to face the kind of stuff you went through there." And it's a nice sentiment, of course, and there's a certain kind of idealistic truth to it. But a person that spends their whole life running from suffering, getting bailed out whenever they would otherwise be forced to push themselves, that will likely end up being a very shallow person. Now, that said, it's not like Dostoevsky's glorifying suffering here either.
32:26 Speaker 00 I mean, keep in mind, this is someone that's suffered from epilepsy all his life. He's having seizures and medical events as he gets stressed out writing all these books we've been talking about. On top of that, this is a guy who lost multiple of his children at very early ages, and you know, the stories that his wife writes about him in her diaries, the reactions that he had to these deaths. He was absolutely crushed by it. You know, combine that with a lifetime of him struggling with gambling issues and drinking too much. Anyway, he's not glamorizing suffering here. What he is saying, though, is that someone that's never had to face difficult realities, or someone who's had the privilege to live in an idealistic framing of the world for most of their life, this is likely to be someone who's uneducated on the limits of what a human experience can be like.
33:10 Speaker 00 You know, it's in this way then, that love is described by Father Zosima in the book, as a kind of teacher. Love is a kind of knowledge that we acquire. In other words, love is a gateway into this more immediate connection to being. And it's a particularly beautiful one of these gateways, because love really is something that's available to almost anyone, regardless of what their lifestyle is. There just always is a collection of things around you that you can affirm, rather than idealize. But think of the strength of being able to affirm anything as your starting point. Now, on that note, one thing that needs to be underscored when I say all this, is that love is not just a teacher, to Dostoevsky. The active part of active love is also very important here as well.
33:52 Speaker 00 And the kind of commitment that this active love requires is on the level of something that to Dostoevsky really only makes sense to describe as faith. Now, of course, there's a history of talking about faith and reason as two things that are mutually exclusive. And there's more than that, a long history in the West of breaking things down in very dualistic ways, where we say that, you know, here's a doctrine called reason, here's another doctrine called faith, and one of these doctrines has to be superior to the other one. So, give me an argument for which one is better. But as I said at the beginning, faith is more of a verb than it is a noun, to Dostoevsky. Faith, in other words, to him, was more along the lines of how Kierkegaard viewed faith from around this same time. See, Kierkegaard saw faith as certainly a concept that is important in many religious
34:36 Speaker 00 conversations, but faith was even more to him, just part of the anatomy of human decision-making and living our lives every day. We have to make decisions every day that are based on faith. What decision ever gets made on perfect information? It's a very human trap to fall into when we're over-indexed on this rational, abstract framing of the world. You can argue with yourself infinitely about what the perfectly correct thing to do is, but you can also just spend your entire life arguing with yourself up in your head and never taking action on anything, is what Kierkegaard used to call being lost in the infinite. But to Dostoevsky, doing anything meaningful in the world requires an act of faith. It requires us recognizing that we don't know everything all the time.
35:18 Speaker 00 And more than that, that it's okay, we shouldn't know everything all the time to be able to make a decision. The real challenge we should be focusing on lies in sticking to the path you've chosen, where again, you're inevitably going to run into things that are frustrating, difficult, horrifying, you know, all the things that are always going to be a part of this world we're living in. Faith is the commitment that is required to live in a framing like this long enough to uncover what it has to show us. But because of how difficult doing this is in practice, while faith is required on the commitment side of this to Dostoevsky, it is faithful commitment to act of love that he thinks is crucial. And this is the framing he thinks is most embodied by the characters of Fathers Zosima and Alyosha in the book. Though it's clear, he had a lot more he wanted to expand on in this area.
36:02 Speaker 00 He had plans to write an entire second part of Brothers Karamazov, following around mostly Alyosha. But sadly, he died before he could ever write it. Now, it's clear by the end of this book, that there are no winners here for Dostoevsky. I mean, it's clear, he thinks the message of Fathers Zosima and his student Alyosha is what you've most likely missed in your life in the modern world if you're coming to this book. But the idea that Ivan, on the other hand, has been destroyed here in some way, or is totally wrong, that's just too simple of a take. Remember, this guy has an entire career behind him of writing in characters like Raskolnikov or The Underground Man. He could have made Ivan into anybody. He could have made him into somebody that was a complete moral failure, but he didn't. No, in fact, he purposefully makes Ivan in this book, a very respectful, thoughtful
36:45 Speaker 00 version of somebody that's just a bit over-indexed on irrational framing of the world. It's clear he saw a lot of value in what Ivan was bringing to the conversation. And someone could say back to all this, okay, but which one did he really believe in, though? I mean, you could say that he sees the value in both of these ways of framing things, and that's very peacekeeping of you. Maybe we should give you a Nobel Prize or something. But you can't live in doubt and in faith simultaneously. It's a paradox. He had to choose one or the other, right? By definition. But is that true? Is doubt never a part of living in faith? Or is faith the iterative battle that goes on every day against the possibility of doubt in order to serve a higher purpose?
37:27 Speaker 00 You know, Dostoevsky once wrote that he only arrived at faith very late in his life. And he says he only got there through a furnace of doubt. That's the word he used when he described it. Couldn't it be said that some days he felt like Ivan and other days he felt like Alyosha? Can't faith and commitment be stronger some days more than others? And can't doubt and argument be more needed on some days more than others? You know, especially considering the existential tragic complexity of his own personality? And look, this book, The Brothers Karamazov, is an absolute monster in terms of characters and plot. I mean, even the philosophical themes are impossible for me to cover in a single episode like this. I got about 30 minutes in and was just like, "I'm calling this one Love in The Brothers Karamazov."
38:11 Speaker 00 And there's always room, of course, to talk about this book more or other smaller books by Dostoevsky. I'm always open to what people are interested in hearing about. And beside that, we can talk about the novels of Albert Camus, which are highly relevant to this conversation we're having. We can talk about Kafka for all I care, just let me know. But I think next episode, at the very least, I want to get back to the Kyoto School for a second, with this new perspective that we have on Dostoevsky fresh in our minds. Specifically, I want to talk about the concept of nothingness at a much deeper level than we ever have on this podcast. I want to show you why some people think that if Dostoevsky steered into this direction that most Western thinkers never even touch, what happens if you keep steering in that direction? Do you go off a cliff?
38:54 Speaker 00 Or do you discover something that you only see glimmers of in some of the greatest moments of Dostoevsky? If you value this show as an educational resource, consider contributing on Patreon, patreon.com/philosophizethis. As always, thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.
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