Episode 164: Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” on Perfection (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 164 is something like what is Perfect Virtue? And reread Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel the Idiot, published serially in 1868 and 69. To get the reading and more information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer living under the shadow of the apocalypse in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:24 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:27 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:29 Corey: And this is Corey Moeller ruining everyone's lives with my naive love in Portland, Oregon.

0:35 Wes: Ah, nice.

0:37 Dylan: Yeah, well done.

0:38 Mark: Welcome, Corey.

0:39 Wes: Well, you've summed up the book. Yeah, that's our synopsis.

0:44 Mark: Why people probably know Corey from his existential comics.

0:47 Corey: Yes, I am better known as that one dude who makes existential comics.

0:51 Mark: Or who did.

0:53 Corey: Who did. Yes, I'm no longer doing the art.

0:55 Wes: Oh, really?

0:56 Corey: I didn't know that as of last week.

0:57 Wes: You have someone doing that for you or.

0:59 Corey: Yeah, I hired someone.

1:00 Mark: So he will be able to do extensive comic vistas, pages and pages long, that he was only able to do on a couple of occasions in the past, but now will be a regular feature so he can stretch his writing muscles.

1:12 Corey: Yeah, that's right. There should be some pretty exciting ones coming up, I think.

1:16 Dylan: Very good.

1:17 Mark: And we were very pleased to feature your art on our 2017 wall calendar. I think we have a couple more that we've grossly inflated the price to reflect the scarcity. If people want to pay $55 for one of our remaining calendars, they're up there. So we have been thinking about doing this for a long time. Not this in particular, but Dostoevsky. I talked to you about doing this for last summer. We had originally thought we might read the Brothers Karamazov. When it actually came down to it, I gazed at how long that was and how I'd already read that before and hadn't read this before and was a little more excited about this.

And actually this was a fill in episode because we had a celebrity guest that was supposed to be on the last one and we read his book and we were all ready for it and then he canceled. So maybe we'll do that later. I'm not even going to say what it is. So this was something that I had just already started a little bit. So as a drop in episode with two weeks prep suggesting to the rest of you guys, hey, let's read this

2:14 Corey: 650 page book, the short Dostoevsky novel, as it's known.

2:20 Wes: Yeah. It was quite a slog getting through that in two weeks. I mean, it's a pleasure to read.

2:24 Dylan: I loved it.

2:25 Wes: But it's. Well for me.

2:27 Corey: For me, I'd say About the first 300 pages are a pleasure.

2:30 Dylan: I ripped through the first book.

2:32 Corey: Yeah. Book one is really tight.

2:34 Dylan: It was captivating. Word for word.

2:37 Corey: Book two and three, not so much, I would say.

2:40 Wes: See, it didn't bog down for me, actually.

2:42 Dylan: It didn't, no.

2:43 Wes: And that happens often. I'm not just saying that.

2:45 Corey: And the 10 page speech about how Catholicism is worse than atheism. You just loved every second of it.

2:53 Wes: Where you're talking about in book four, Mishkin's. That's the wonderful part of the climax. Yeah, I just.

3:00 Corey: Yeah, I actually like that part too. But I could see a lot of people probably like, what is going on here?

3:05 Wes: When he finally comes out and says something mean to people, waiting for that, for the whole book.

3:11 Mark: It's four books within this book, published serially. So some of the critical things that we had a chance to look at pointed out how he kind of changed his idea about what the book was about as things were going on. This book one, that really is the best constructed part. Like the most drafts went into that, kind of the most work went into that. And then after that, he really didn't know where to go next, so he had to kind of rethink things. And so books two, three and four, the breaks are in less obvious places, like between book one and two. It's like a six week break or something.

3:43 Corey: Yeah. And it's a bit like that show Lost too, where you can tell they started it and didn't exactly know how to end it. He sort of wrote himself into a corner a little bit.

3:52 Wes: Yeah.

3:52 Dylan: He didn't know that he was going to end it the way he did.

3:55 Corey: No. When he started writing this book, in the initial drafts, Rogozin was going to be redeemed in the second draft. And in the first draft, Prince Myshkin was going to be evil at the beginning, similar to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. So he totally was changing large parts as he was progressing in his thought, as he wrote it.

4:15 Dylan: Interesting.

4:15 Corey: Yeah. And what he settled on, I guess, just to introduce the book, is he was interested in writing a character that he felt had never been written before in literature, which was a realistic character of a perfectly beautiful human being. That was the project for Prince Myshkin. And he says there has only been one perfectly beautiful human being that has ever existed in real life, and that's Jesus. And there's only been one that's kind of close in literature, and that's Don Quixote. So Prince Mishkin, for Dostoevsky, was sort of a combination between Jesus and Don Quixote, presented realistically as a character. And you can tell by the title, perhaps, that he thinks this perfectly beautiful human being is not going to have a successful time in the advanced Russian society of St. Petersburg.

5:08 Wes: Mr. Jesus goes to St. Petersburg and we'll see what happens.

5:11 Corey: That's exactly what it's like. And you know what I think it's sort of similar to is did you guys ever see that movie, like from the 90s blast from the past?

5:18 Mark: Yes.

5:19 Corey: No, I did not. So it is about in the Cold War, in the height of the Cold War, there's a paranoid father and a plane hits his house and he thinks it's the nuclear apocalypse. So he goes into the bomb shelter for 30 years and his kid is born in the bomb shelter. And so he's able to raise his kid with no outside interference at all. So he teaches the kid pure virtue. So this is like Brendan Fraser's character emerges 30 years later, a fully grown adult who's sort of a perfect human being in the movie. He's perfectly nice to everyone and he's perfectly corny in that 50s Americana way, because that's what the dad taught him.

And then he emerges into Los Angeles and kind of like the idiot. He tries to be nice to everyone and perfect and loving, and it's just a total disaster because everyone in Los Angeles is too edgy and cool. They see him being nice to people and they think, like, what's wrong with this guy? Why is he acting like that? And also the characters are named Adam and Eve, so it's also a little biblical. That movie is actually very similar, if you haven't read the novel and you know that movie. But the only warning I would say not to draw the parallel too close, because I don't want to give people the wrong impression.

Prince Mishkin is not a master of karate.

6:30 Wes: Just throwing that out there.

6:32 Corey: The novel would have been a lot better if he got into a few fights and turned out that the monks in Switzerland had taught him the ancient Swiss martial arts. But even Dostoevsky is fallible, I guess.

6:42 Wes: I also thought of being there, Yep, Peter Sellers, which is not entirely analogous, because he really, truly is simple, that character. And then has all sorts of just his effects on society. And then what about Forrest Gump?

6:54 Mark: That's good to discuss whether he actually is an idiot, because with Forrest Gump, and to some extent the guy from being there, the character is of subnormal intelligence. And it's the fact that the character is not sophisticated enough to be able to grasp what goes into the lack of virtue among other characters is what enables him to remain pure. Whereas Mishkin, the reason he's called an idiot is because he introduces himself. He arrives from where he's been in basically an asylum because he was severely epileptic, which I don't know enough about. Apparently, Dostoevsky himself was epileptic.

7:28 Wes: Yes.

7:29 Mark: So he knows about this. What I know about epilepsy, what little I had never heard of people being basically comatose from it, you know, Vegetable.

7:38 Wes: Yeah. There's enough evidence in the novel to think that beyond the epilepsy, he spent most of his life up to that point in a state where he couldn't really communicate. He tells one story of being out in the outdoors and being almost like an animal, just sort of present in the environment, but not able to really think or express himself.

7:58 Corey: Right. And then a donkey brays, and it awakes him from his idiocy.

8:01 Wes: Right.

8:02 Corey: And so he relates to the animal more. But I do want to say about epilepsy. Yeah. Dostoevsky had epilepsy, and his son had epilepsy, who he was convinced had his gift as a writer but not his nastiness. And his son died around the age of six of epilepsy. So epilepsy is a big theme throughout the novels. Also in the Brothers Karamazov, the main character, Alyosha, is named after his son. And epilepsy back then was much, much more terrible than epilepsy today, because they didn't have the drug that controls it. So you could go into an epileptic fit at any moment and you could die at any moment. It could disable you for a week, two weeks. You would be in almost a comatose state. And Dostoevsky experienced this several times.

8:47 Mark: So somehow, since he was in this state, and then he gets on a train and goes to St. Petersburg, I guess, for the main.

8:54 Wes: Pavlovsk is the countryside, okay?

8:56 Mark: The main part of the action. And he describes himself to this family that he hooks up with because he's distantly related, he thinks, to the mother of the family, and he says, you know, I was an idiot. And he arrives in town, even though he's officially a prince by his Lineage. He's got no money. He just has a little pack. And he just displays an obvious ignorance of social graces. Not that he's rude, but just of the difference between social classes even. He brings up the word idiot. And the other characters kind of jump

9:26 Dylan: on it when you say that he doesn't display the social graces. It's a funny kind of highly evolved version of high school, as far as I can tell, right?

9:36 Corey: One of the characters comments on him himself. He's always honest about everything, all the time. And this disarms people. Like, he tells them that he was an idiot in Switzerland. And everyone's like, what are you doing? You have to hide your weaknesses. And the quote is, he always tells the truth and nothing more, which is deplorable. Like, he's ruining their little game. It's like, you shouldn't tell us this. You shouldn't behave this way. Don't you know any better?

10:00 Dylan: Yeah. And importantly, he never merely flatters people either, right? He isn't nice just to be nice. And so there's a way in which his compassion, when it's compassionate, is always genuine, but it's not always on cue either. That's one of the turning points at the end of the book, right, when he's with Nastasya and Aglaya, right, where he's not recognizing all the ways in which he could handle the situation to take care of people's feelings.

10:27 Corey: So again, Dostoevsky described him as the perfectly beautiful human being. And beauty is, of course, a big theme in the novel. And for Mishkin, what that means is a perfectly loving human being. So like Jesus, he loves everybody. He can't be cruel. And that's what causes the problem at the end, because he. Sometimes it's a problem, for example, if you love two people because they don't want you to love each other. You know what I mean? So other people in the novel, though, are also described as beautiful. Like Nastasya is always described as beautiful, but in a much different way.

Her wickedness is often part of the beauty. So there's another meaning to the word beautiful. Like an act of kindness to a stranger can be beautiful, like Prince Mishkin, but so can a fire that's destroying the entire city, right? You can watch the fire and have a sense of beauty. And that's the sense of beauty that Natastia has and Rogozin. They're beautiful in almost kind of an evil way, right? And those two conflicting ideas about beauty sort of play as a theme throughout the novel that they don't work together very well.

11:34 Wes: And we should say something about the difference between his love of Nastasya, for instance, and Aglaya, where his love of Natasya, you know, he's often described as pitying her, feeling sorry for her. At some point, he has a sort of epiphany where he realizes, well, it's not pity, but horror. Horror at the realization that she's mad. Something like that. But near the middle, this is part two, chapter five, he's thinking about Rogojin and Natasya. So he says when he learns the truth and finds out what a pitiable being is this injured, broken, half insane creature, he will forgive her all the torment she has caused him.

He will become her slave, her brother, her friend. Compassion will teach even Rogojin. It will show him how to reason. Compassion is the chief law of human existence. So this is one, I think, type of love. And that's the kind of love you can give even to the fallen woman or the, you know, the Rogojin. And then there's Aglaya, which is a completely different kind of love, I think.

12:37 Mark: So just to set up, there's a lot of mention of things like the Gogol play marriage. That's not something I'm familiar with, but I'm familiar with some of the English versions. So even in Downton Abbey, which I'm sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with, there's a lot of this sort of marriage drama of like, who's gonna marry who? Oh, that would be disgraceful for me to marry that person. And this sort of the differences in status. And so it's kind of playing off that. And in fact, what's so great about this whole first book is that it's just written like a really intense, awesome version of that, but then just has this twist at the end where it's like if he ended up actually out of.

Well, out of pity. But that's not beaten over the head, right in book one. But to Nastasia, who's had sort of a hard road going up to this point and been very demoralized, and it seems like he could save her by marrying her. And that would really wrap up everything. She's somebody that was involved with the nobility, but she was used poorly by them. And so he would be raising her status because it's just been revealed near the end of book one that he's inherited money. In fact, he knew this the whole time. He just. We don't really find that out until near the end of book one.

The other characters don't know this. They're all kind of treating him as this poor feckless character. And. Oh, no, actually you're a legitimate, not just a hereditary, but an actual member of the upper class. And even though that doesn't work out in the first book, in that neat and tidy package, and there's a lot more themes flying around for the rest of it, we still have that basic thing so that what's going on is even right then toward the end of book four, toward the end of the whole book, is, is he going to marry still Nastasia, who's left him and gone off with Rogozin, or is he going to marry Aglia, which is.

Who is this, like, 20 year old girl, the youngest of three daughters, like, who's in that very first family that he meets? So she's an ongoing character. One of the first things that's. So he runs. One of the other characters, Ganya, is about to propose to Nastasia, but it's a love triangle between him and the same two women. Right at the beginning, right?

14:39 Wes: Yeah. Nastasya shows up and kind of humiliates Ganya because he lives with his drunken father and family in a small apartment that's too small for the number of people in it. And they're sticking their noses up at her, and she knows she's, you know, as the kind of fallen woman. They're reticent about having her into the family. And so she comes and sort of rubs his nose in it and sees if he can take it.

15:02 Corey: There's also a very important setup to that scene where Natasya asks the group, as a kind of parlor game, to tell the most evil thing they've ever done in their life. And a series of people each tell a story, and the difference between the stories is again, going to be a very important in Dostoevsky's conception of this kind of wicked beauty. So first the character Ferdyshchenko tells a story. He's kind of a drunken idiot character, kind of a buffoon, a character that recurs in a lot of Dostoevsky's novels. He tells his story about how he stole something and then blamed it on the maid.

And the maid got fired. And everybody's horrified. They're like, why did you tell us this story? And he's upset because he's like, well, you told me to tell the most evil thing and I told you. And everyone is just. They shun him. And then one of the other characters, the older general who used to be Nastasya's kind of caretaker and she was his concubine. He's the reason that she is a fallen woman. He tells his story and it goes a lot differently. He tells a story about how back when he was a young man, he knew someone who was madly in love with this girl.

And all the girls at the time became obsessed with this Alexandre Dumas book called The Lady of the Camellias. And in this book there's a French girl who's sort of very sophisticated, and she alternates between this certain kind of flower, between pink and white flowers. And when she dies, they alternated on her grave. And it's this very beautiful image. So the idea is that this girl that his friend was in love with was kind of obsessed with these flowers. He was going to go and get these flowers and make a grand romantic gesture to her and try to win her hand.

And he confides in the general and he, for no reason at all, goes ahead of time and gets the flowers himself. So that way his friend can't do it. And he's not doing it because he had intentions on the girl. And he's not doing it because he hated the guy. He's doing it for no reason. And the fact that he's doing it for no reason is important. So he gets the flowers, he gives them to the girl, the girl goes out of this world, she loves it. And then the guy who was going to do it, having been defeated, in despair, collapses on himself and he ends up going to the Caucasus to fight in the war and dying.

And after he tells that story, everybody is touched. They say, wow, what an amazing thing. Even though in a way he was more cruel than the guy who got the maid fired. He was doing cruelty for no reason at all. But the reaction is different because it's sort of a beautiful story. Everybody loves it. It's sort of like how when we listen to a con man do a good con, no matter how cruel the con man is, no matter how many lives he ruins, everybody always loves it. They love the con man. You can't get enough con man stories so you can live a sort of beautiful life that's just wicked, where you're doing wicked things for kind of no reason at all.

But you just love it because you're not doing it for sort of base reasons. You're not doing it for self gain, you're doing it just to do it. And that kind of freedom for Dostoevsky is sort of the aesthetic life that you see in other existential philosophers, like maybe Nietzsche or Kierkegaard.

18:15 Dylan: The way you describe that action resonates a lot with Nastasya in general and the kind of what you described as wicked beauty. And in her case, it seems like all kinds of men love her. I mean, she's the kind of woman that she walks in a room and she's in this society and everybody knows who she is and everybody wants to be with her. But she also has this combination of self loathing and wickedness at the same time, right? So she does horrible things, but she really thinks very lowly of herself, which is in principle the source of why she refuses to be with Mishkin. She constantly wants to be with him and then runs away from him saying that I can't chain myself to you for your sake kind of thing.

19:02 Wes: She's very self destructive.

19:04 Corey: She's very self destructive and she thinks that her wickedness will taint the prince. But also the climax of this scene, also she listens to that story and her reaction to that story is immediate. She listens to it and says, I'm going to take my turn now. In other words, she's going to tell the worst thing she ever did and then she immediately calls off her marriage. That's the worst thing. She's doing it right now. The scene in the party was her worst thing she's ever going to do in her life. In imitation of that story, she's going to do a beautiful wicked thing for no reason.

And then the party members, as she leaves off with Rogojin at the end, after throwing the 100,000 in the fire just to torment this guy, she's throwing away all this money just to further torment him. The general who told the first story says, see, look how beautiful she is. How could I ever have resisted her? Everybody kind of is even more attracted to her. The more wild and unpredictable and crazy and wicked that she gets.

19:59 Wes: I'm not sure how detailed we could get in the plot just because her self destructiveness is a product of Totsky became her ward or she became his ward at when she was like 7 years old. And then he decided to make her his concubine when she was I guess 16 or something like that. Now she's 25 and he's done with her and he's trying to marry her off to Gania for 75,000 rubles. Meanwhile, his friend General Yepanchin thinks he's going to be able to fool around with her as well and has some pearls for her. It's a very nasty, very, very toxic situation, which is her level of Self destructiveness, given what it means to be branded as someone who's been, you know, as the fallen woman in that society is understandable.

20:45 Dylan: So it's a kind of wickedness. Right. She feels, there's a way in which she, in that background, she clearly feels like she's wicked. But that wickedness somehow, as you point out, has been, for lack of a better term, thrust upon her. Right. And it's a little bit different than the kind of wickedness that Corey just described in the general story, where it's, at least in the story, is a kind of purely wanton wickedness.

21:11 Wes: I'm not sure I think of her as wicked exactly. She's impulsive, but she does a lot of mean things. Like she calls out, she's mean. Yes. Evgeny Radomsky tries to get some in trouble for being in debt and basically is teasing all these men and, you know, playing this big game where she, you know, she throws the money into the fire and sees if he's gonna get it out and all that stuff. So she's torturing people in a way, but she's sort of in a constant state of retaliation for what they think of her.

21:38 Dylan: Yeah. So you understand her, I think. I mean, at least I found myself sympathizing with her and finding her spiritedness attractive because it was in great reaction to horrible things that had been done to her and a horrible constant situation she has in which she's, no matter what she does, significant fractions of society, namely Lizaveta and her type simply don't have anything to do with her for reasons that she has no control over. Right. She was basically kidnapped and abused and she's retaliating against it. And that spiritedness is, you know, I found myself admiring it and understanding it, but I think it's a different kind of spiritedness and lashing out, even if it has a meanness to it and than described by the act of. In that other story, which is a kind of wanton cruelty.

22:34 Wes: Yeah. She's in a state of active defiance against these sort of rules of status, you know, the rules of society which put you on one level or another. So the Prince, Prince Myshkin is just sort of. He doesn't care about that stuff. He's not status conscious. He ignores all the rules with respect to that. And that makes him enormously, you know, everyone wants to call him an idiot on the one hand because he's not obeying those rules, but then he's magnetic. Everyone is completely attracted to this guy and he's Sort of like the sun that everyone revolves around. So she's an act of defiance to all those rules, and he just sort of floats above them.

23:11 Corey: For Dostoevsky, she's sort of representing this character that recurs over and over in his novels of that kind of active defiance that was probably first in Notes from the Underground, where the character is lashing out and purposely sabotaging his own life just out of spite, just to exert his own freedom. Because Natastya has had everything taken away, she has very little control of her own life. So she has to rebel in a kind of way to exert that she has a life. She's almost kind of an existential hero in that way, where she goes about everything in the most extreme way possible, and she does everything her own way, no matter what.

She's going to take the hundred thousand and throw it in the fire. She never even wanted it, but she's still going to pay the price, you know. So she represents for Dostoevsky sort of the human freedom and the human passion that is one part of the problem of life is that you have to exert your freedom despite what might be best for you, despite the rules of society and despite Prince Mishkin's naive love. Prince Mishkin doesn't have as much freedom as Natasha has because he's operating in this very narrow band of what he can do. He's sort of, in a way, chosen that he has to be this perfect human.

And in a perfect human, there's no room for human freedom. And that's the theme that Dostoevsky brings up over and over. For the loving character, you have to be perfect. And for the perfectly rational character, he's always criticizing the rationalists who are trying to form a perfect society, because within a perfect society there's also no room for freedom. So he sees these kind of utopian thinkers of his time that were very popular among the intellectuals, as trying to have a kind of intellectual authority where you are supposed to always obey whatever is the most rational, and that will lead to the perfect, happy life.

It's maybe similar to what Plato said, and it's in his age, the utilitarians said, look, just you have to do these things. You have to figure it out and then be perfectly rational and you'll lead a perfect life. And Dostoevsky says, look, that's just not going to work. You want to yell at Nastya, like, what are you doing? Why don't you just do what's best? But she can't do that because that's just not a human existence. It's just more sort of like a machine existence. Dostoevsky really wants to criticize that idea that we can figure out what the best possible life is.

And that even if we did figure out what the best possible life is, that we should or would pursue such a life because the characters do not behave that way and human beings don't behave that way.

25:42 Mark: Well, I still see the main characters in the, let's say the two love triangles. So it's not Ganya that's just at the beginning, but between Myshkin and Rogojin and then Nastasia and Aglia that all of them, to the extent that they are in love.

25:56 Wes: I think it's Aglaya though, right?

25:57 Mark: Isn't it Aglaya? Yeah. Okay.

25:59 Wes: Because I listened to this as well. Yeah, okay.

26:02 Mark: Yeah, it sort of reminded me of like that book Of Human Bondage which is just all about being slaves to love. That in particular Rogojin and Nastasia, like they have this just self destructive dynamic. Rogojin from the very beginning. So he's one of the first characters we meet. And we meet him at the first time as Mishkin on the train and he's describing how awesome Nastasia is and how he's going to win Nastasia. And then at the scene that we've been describing where she throws the money from Totsky that Ganya was going to get in the fire, she ends up going with Rogojin.

But Mishkin, just from having this conversation, a very friendly conversation on the train with Rogojin, you know, predicts that, yeah, if he actually succeeds, like he's just so slain by his passion that he'll probably kill her, that that's just the kind of guy he is. And he's sort of saying this without malice toward Rogojin. And of course, spoilers, that's, you know, how the whole thing ends is this self destructive thing that maybe Mishkin could have in some way put a stop to. But you know, he did all he could. And then likewise when Aglia and Mishkin are themselves involved and it looks like that might work out toward the end of book four, but then Nastasya reappears after she and Rogojin are sort of absent for most of the second half of the book.

And that maybe that's why it seems to drag a little more, that you're like, where are these interesting characters? Why are they just talking more with the boring people? But yeah, I see all of them in different ways, as not exactly puppets of their emotions. They certainly react to it in different ways. But that Nastasya's actions, at least in regard to her final deciding. Okay, I've been set on being with Rogojin this whole time, even though she's treating him like crap and like sleeping with all these other people. But she, you know, it's looking at this as a sort of nihilism.

She's given the opportunity to say, I'm going to be with Myshkin after all. So they schedule a wedding, but then she ditches him and goes back to Rogojin. And there's even more this going back and forth, you know, between books one and two that we don't get to see that they just refer to that. That is not so much her exerting her freedom as her own fear and her, you know, low self esteem that has driven in her to. I'm irresistibly drawn to Mishkin, but yet I'm not worthy of him, so I must. I must push him away. I must run away from him. I must.

And also, maybe she, it seems, even loves Rogojin, but yet has her issues with him as well. So I don't see her actions necessarily as free.

28:33 Dylan: Well, that's interesting that you said it that way at the end, Mark. I mean, I was thinking about the fact that she importantly doesn't always do what's good for herself. You know, I was thinking about the way Corey was characterizing it that, you know, in the sort of utilitarian or platonic notion that you would always choose the thing that was you understood as to be a good, even if it ended up being a bad thing. You always understood it as being good. But she and other characters don't always choose things that they know are good. They choose things sometimes that they know are bad. Either bad for themselves or bad for other people.

29:08 Wes: Yes. And they do that for reasons of status.

29:11 Corey: Well, not just status. I don't think Natastya is looking for status.

29:14 Wes: Well, no, but the status is still involved. It's still her relation to status in the sense that she's a fallen woman.

29:20 Corey: But definitely this theme of doing things that you know are going to harm you as a sort of property of your freedom is a big recurring theme throughout all the Dostoevsky novels. Obviously, Notes from the Underground, if you guys have read that is the main one where the character explicitly says, I know I'm not going to go to the doctor, even though my liver hurts and I know I'm only harming myself But I'm still not going to go to the doctor simply out of spite. And that kind of character happens in Brothers Karamazov too. The oldest brother will simply do things that he knows.

This is going to totally ruin my life, but I have to do it anyway because I'm sort of following my will. I'm not following my intellect and I'm not doing what's best for myself. But I'm following something else. For Dostoevsky. There is something else in life aside from reason and goodness that is in the prince there's some kind of passion.

30:15 Dylan: But why is that manifest always in doing harm or evil things? Why isn't Myshkin that kind of person as well? I mean Rogojin and even Nastasya, you would say, okay, they are embodying this kind of freedom because they are doing things that are bad and that will plainly harm them in the future. Rogojin goes to Siberia for 15 years or whatever it is after killing Nastasya and she goes back into his arms, likely knowing that he could kill her. And there's other characters like this.

30:51 Wes: Well, what Aglaya does is essentially self destructive as well. Bringing the prince to Nastasya and creating a situation in which she could lose him.

30:59 Dylan: Yeah. So what I'm questioning is why. Now maybe this is just the way Dostoevsky thinks about the case is that only self destructive activities embody freedom. And maybe that's just part of the takeaway for Dostoevsky. But I wonder why that would be the case. And if in the case of a perfectly beautiful human being, why that would not be an embodiment of freedom as well. Unless the claim is that somehow that he's merely an animal in that respect, that there's something kind of natural about the universe, that he would just flow along as being perfectly beautiful, but somehow not a human being because he's not asserting his freedom. And therefore the only way you could assert your freedom is by destroying the beautiful in the world. I mean, is that the idea?

31:43 Corey: Well, I certainly wouldn't say the only way exerting your freedom for Dostoevsky is sort of a following of your own will, wherever it may go. And if it goes to happiness, it goes to happiness, if not, not. And he thinks a lot of times we don't strive for happiness. Like he has this great quote that says, look, if human beings were trying to be happy, then all of human history has been a mistake. Because if you look at the historical record of how people have behaved, nobody's really even trying to be happy. People conquer Like Napoleon, did he conquer countries to try to be happy?

You really. That would be a very strange way of putting it. We're scientists investigating science to try to be happy. That's also a very strange thing to say. They're doing it to do it. So freedom is doing things because you want to do them, not immediately like, whatever I want to do, I'm going to do it right now you have to drive towards your desire. So Natasha or Rogojin is driving towards Natasha. And what is the reason for driving towards Natasha? There is no further reason. That's the aim of his will.

32:44 Dylan: So why are not Myshkin, Don Quixote and Jesus perfect examples of freedom?

32:48 Corey: Well, for Dostoevsky, I think there are different kind of modes of life, and this is particularly clear in the Brothers Karamazov, where each brother represents a different mode of existence. You have Alyosha, who is basically Prince Mishkin, who's representing the religious mode of life. Right. The loving religion. You have Ivan, who is the rationalist. He's going to do everything in science and be kind of a utilitarian, do everything according to reason. And then you have Dimitri, the middle brother or the oldest brother, who just does everything the way he's going to do it. He's going to drive at his will,

33:25 Wes: no matter what the sensualist is. What that's.

33:27 Corey: He's the centralist. Yeah.

33:29 Wes: So someone pursuing pleasure.

33:31 Corey: Right. And those three types of existences, it's important to remember that Dostoevsky writes them as different characters, but he doesn't mean that. Look, there's these three kinds of people, and here's the problems that each has for Dostoevsky, all three of them are in all of us, and they're struggling and pulling us in different ways. We want to be a moral person, right. We want to be a rational person. And we want what we want. And each of those sort of three components of our psyche are pulling us in different directions. And I think the ultimate problem in life for Dostoevsky is how to reconcile these different components of ourselves.

So it's not so much that one is freedom, one is religion, and one is rationality. And you are one or the other, like the brothers, you're all of them. And how you can reconcile it, and in particular, how you can reconcile your reason and religion is a huge problem for Dostoevsky because, I mean, in most of these books, the characters are not able to do it, and that's what leads to disaster. And for Dostoevsky, always, if you only have One component that always leads to disaster. So Prince Myshkin ends up a disaster, not because he's perfectly loving, but because he's only perfectly loving.

He's not capable, for whatever reason, of breaking out of that mode of existence and pursuing a passion or pursuing a cold rationality. And if he were capable, he would be much more effective. And Rogojin and Natastya are the same. They can't break out of their sensuality. And if they were able to step back, you'd see, like, maybe things would have gone better for them if they said, look, let me use my rationality here for a little bit. Oh, wait, I probably shouldn't be doing this. But if you get too far in one extreme and you can't reconcile these different modes of being, it's just not going to work.

35:19 Mark: So let's maybe take each of these in turn. So Rogozin, the antagonist, is presented from the very beginning as he seeks after wealth. He's about to get into some money. He is status conscious. He's sort of sneering, he's amused by Mishkin, but sort of sneering at him at the same time. It's just that Mishkin doesn't really notice. And for most of the book he is. He's presented as just basically a slave to his passion for Nastasia. And you could put it that he's determined himself, like he put his will into that. So, you know, it is a matter of his free will that he's pursuing this. But he's become the serious man in de Beauvoir's language, subordinating himself to Nastasia.

36:01 Corey: And because I would say that he's become the adventurer. If you remember, in Beauvoir there was also the serious man takes society seriously. So the generals are the serious man. They don't want anything to disrupt the seriousness of what they perceive society. But there's also the adventurer character in Simone de Beauvoir, who just pursues amusement, sort of for amusement's sake, and has no real authenticity, authentic connection to what they're trying to achieve. So Natastia, for example, throwing the money in the fire is sort of doing it. Sure, just to do it. And she doesn't have a real authentic aim in her life. What is the purpose of her life? She would not be able to answer that question.

36:36 Mark: So you think Rogozin is just not even serious? I mean, the pathology of is, for whatever reason, if she had just gone with him right away and actually treated him well, would this have been different or would he have still have been an abusive dick bag. You know, it seems like he's hyper suspicious and it's just described as, you know, he's even like goes on a hunger strike and he's doing all these things. But it's to make up for the fact that he beat her because she wasn't being sufficiently faithful to him in his eyes at least he was being paranoid about it.

And so she describes it as that he's being all penitent but he's storing up rage and that this will inevitably lead to him taking things out more on her that this is not going to be. They're both aware of this dynamic. So in that sense he seems a slave to his passion. I can't see him as his adventure of the day as he will throw his entire will into subordinating himself in ways that humiliate him and make him fill with rage against her to her will. Like that doesn't seem like a thing that he would want to choose, not just rationally.

37:46 Corey: But that's sort of the paradox of this kind of freedom is that on the one sense you're doing what you want to do all the time, but in another sense you're also sort of a slave to your passions and you're not able to be free in a more long term way. Like Immanuel Kant says, freedom is to always be rational or whatever, whereas these characters are just always sort of pursuing their most base immediate desire all the time and not having that kind of higher order freedom. And that's where they really get in trouble.

38:15 Wes: I think that's why we're confused about this because it's. Yeah, in the philosophical tradition generally we would think of being a slave to one's passions. We would not call freedom. Being rational would be the, the only possibility for freedom.

38:29 Corey: Right. But Dostoevsky definitely rejects that. He says you have to have both. Because he says time and again, following a perfect rationality for Dostoevsky is being kind of a slave too. You're being a slave to an idea, maybe even someone else's idea.

38:41 Wes: Is that just a sort of looking at the novels as, as a whole

38:45 Corey: or I would say the speech that is given by the character from Notes from the Underground directly says that. And that speech he sort of gives this philosophical look, saying, look, if you figure out the perfect rational world, the utopia, which is what a lot of the intellectuals of this time were kind of utopian socialists, they were trying to reform Russia into a sort of perfect utilitarian world. And he says, look, if you achieve it perfectly. Let's imagine you achieve it. People won't do it. People will rebel and do the opposite, just out of spite. They're not going to go along with this because humans, in order to be human, sort of have to have something of their own. They have to be doing something that's generated from themselves. They can't just live in this kind of pure, clean, perfect world where they're perfectly happy.

39:30 Wes: Lebedev is the character in this novel who sort of expresses some of this.

39:34 Corey: Right? And I want to talk about Lebedev's

39:35 Wes: speech, cursing the materialism, the railways and all that stuff.

39:39 Corey: Do you guys remember in the Matrix when they said that the first thing that the computers did was design the Matrix to be a paradise and then it didn't work because the humans rejected it? That's Dostoevsky's idea. He says you can't have paradise. Human beings will reject it because they want to do something of themselves. They want to fulfill their own projects.

39:57 Dylan: But this doesn't sound like a rejection of paradise as much as rejection of perfection. And it wouldn't matter whether it was a perfect paradise or a perfect hell, or a perfect religiosity, or a perfect intellectualism or a perfect wickedness. In all of those cases, that kind of perfection submits to that kind of rule bound analysis that we were just describing. And that the act of freedom would be to act out against those rules, regardless of what those rules were, whether they were the rules of morality, whether they. The rules of thievery, whether they. The rules of being a religious man, any of those things.

40:41 Corey: Right? I think that's right. For Dostoevsky, you can't have a solved problem of life. You have to do something on your own. It has to be generated. You have to have your own expressions.

40:52 Dylan: Yeah. So to me. But that makes it very important. Even despite the railing against rationalism, which sounds right, it makes an important difference. That rationalism is just one example of in the political popular culture that embodies this problem. Because the same problem would be true of religion and other sorts of things.

41:13 Corey: Right? And we see that in the novel, because we have this novel where you have all sorts of different characters representing different strands of humanity and what happens. It's a disaster for everybody. It doesn't work out for anybody in this novel. Everybody gets their lives ruined at the end because they were all too, perhaps too extreme or weren't able to see things clearly. It's different for different characters. But this novel is everybody fails. This is a novel showing the problems in these different kind of lives that you can lead. And he doesn't give the solution in this novel. The solution was supposed to be given in the Brothers Karamazov, but that was part one of three and then he died. So actually you don't really get the solution in that either. But this novel is really about the problems that he's seen more than anything.

41:59 Mark: So let's look at Nastasia then, in terms of freedom. We were given some examples, one of the ones we haven't brought up, that I think is a good evidence for her not being free or for. I just think it's much easier to give a Freudian analysis of her than a sort of existentialist analysis of her, that she is a victim of low self esteem, of thinking she's a victim. One of the things, you know, she's in love with Mishkin. She doesn't want to be with him because she thinks she will be polluting him. And this torments her. So even though, you know, at the end of book one, she goes off with Rogojin, but then in the.

In the interim, that takes place in Moscow, I guess that's between the two books that month or six weeks or whatever it was, it says that, yeah, she pretty quickly left him, actually lived with Mishkin for a while, not sexually connected, presumably, and she couldn't stand that. It was like it was kind of torture for both of them, that she's a victim of this psychological malady that she's put herself into. And then by the end of the book, so she's kind of disappeared for most of the books two and three, that she just. She shows up to torment Evgeny a little bit and drives by on her stagecoach and.

And that's about it, but then shows up at the end that she's writing letters to Aglaya, trying to get her and Mishkin hooked up, which Aglaya is pretty resentful about, just as a very young person that doesn't want to be told what to do and is higher in status than Nastasya. And the whole thing is very creepy. The letters Nastasia are described as really quite mad. She describes both of them, both Aglaya and Mishkin, as your perfection. And I love you both like I love you 20 year old other female Aglaya. And she thinks that by hooking them up somehow this.

Well, what is. What does she think that will happen? That it'll somehow free her at least to go to her certain fate with her certain death with Rogojin. That she can sort of settle into that. What does she think is going to happen here?

44:03 Corey: Well, I think if she removes the possibility of marrying the prince herself, sort of psychologically, she is no longer tempted to redeem herself. Her big problem throughout the novel she's always flirting with oh, I can kind of go back to the other side. I'm a fallen woman. But if I, maybe if I marry the prince, I'll be redeemed and I'll stop being evil, I'll stop being nasty and I'll just be a redeemed society woman again. And so she's torn between that and sort of going the other way, going totally mad and going off with Rogojin and, and becoming even worse. And she thinks maybe if she can remove the temptation like once the prince is married, that side will be closed and she can just fully commit to the other side. And it may be sort of the same.

44:50 Wes: I see it as motivated entirely by self loathing. That scene where she gets out of the carriage and she's about to be married to the prince and runs to Rogojin and says save me. Where really she's running to her destruction.

45:06 Corey: Well, a lot of people who have like intense self loathing sort of want to continue it. Right. You know what I mean? They want to be self destructive. So if she removes the prince, she can totally destruct on her own.

45:16 Wes: Happiness is no longer a legitimate avenue or what people normally think of as happiness because it's too inconsistent with her picture of itself, it's too discordant. So you know, she has that time with the prince before they almost get married where she seems to be happy at times and then she gets more morose. She's basically uncomfortable with the goodness of it and the goodness of the prince because she sees herself the way society sees her as tainted. She's guilty, she feels like rogation is all that's that she's worth.

45:53 Corey: Yeah, I think that's pretty spot on.

45:55 Wes: So I don't think of that as freedom exactly. But I understand when you say it sort of reflects the part of the psyche that's passionate or that isn't simply utilitarian or pleasure seeking. So that sort of. We could say like Freud, this is beyond the pleasure principle, this sort of self destructiveness. It's death drive or it's. And it has other sources. I don't know how to connect that to freedom. To freedom, exactly. Precisely. And I think the freedom part of, you know, it's not an explicit part of the novel. Right. So there's Lots of philosophical discussions in this novel.

This idea of freedom isn't explicitly discussed, except there's one part where Lebedev, so he gives a lot of anti materialism speeches that sort of sound conservative and oh, you liberals today, you materialists. So in one of them, this is part two, chapter two, he says, it seems to me that everything is ruled by measure in our century. All men are clamoring for their rights. A measure of wheat for a penny and three measures of barley for a penny. But added to this, men desire freedom of mind and body, a pure heart, a healthy life, and all God's good gifts.

Now, by pleading their rights alone, they will never attain all this. So the white horse with his rider, Death comes next. And this is his interpretation of the Apocalypse and is followed by hell. We talked about this matter when we met and it impressed her very much. So there's one explicit mention of sort of these values that go beyond utilitarianism and beyond pleasure. And we can think of again of Nietzsche here, and God's good gifts are one of them. So there's sort of a conservative element to this. And we see this again later on where Lebedev is sort of arguing the conservative case in the case of the railways and whether they are polluting the springs of life or.

47:50 Corey: I think Lebedev's speech is actually the place where Dostoevsky hides his real opinion in the novel. And he often does this in the novels. He'll put sort of his own opinion on sort of current affairs in Russia and what you should do. He'll always hide it in the most ridiculous character. Lebedev is kind of a drunkard and a rogue and he gives this speech and everybody's laughing at him. He's making this ridiculous argument that you shouldn't have trains, where the trains are sort of representing modernity. But it's very. He bungles the argument kind of.

He's like, ah, we should get rid of the trains. And everyone's making fun. But then he sneaks in there this idea that for Dostoevsky something has been fundamentally lost in the culture, which is sort of the concept of this sacred idea. And it's very similar to Nietzsche's Death of God, where people no longer can exist in the way they did or in the way Dostoevsky thinks they did in like the 14th century, where everybody assumed in this sacred concept of God that grounded society. And Lebedev is lamenting about it in again, the most ridiculous way, because he tells the story of a person who was eating Monks and eating babies.

And he's like a psychotic killer. This has happened in the 14th century, supposedly. And he says, you can see how bad our society is because back then, this serial killer, at the end of his life, after eating 60 monks and six babies, turned himself in to go to the rack. And he goes, he would never turn himself in today. So that's. We've lost something crucial. And this is very kind of a silly idea. Like what? Who cares if he would turn himself in? He still ate the monks, you know. But for Dostoevsky, we've lost this concept of the sacred, where you can no longer, basically, society as a whole has lost the core concept of God.

49:56 Wes: Yeah, here's the way he puts it at the end of that monk story. Show me a single idea which unites men nowadays with half the strength that it had in those centuries and dare to maintain that the springs of life have not been polluted and. And weaken beneath this star. The star, meaning the railway system beneath this network in which men are entangled. Do not talk to me about your prosperity, your riches, the rarity of famine, the rapidity of the means of transport. There is more of riches, but less of force. The idea uniting heart and soul to heart and soul exists no more. All is loose, soft, limp. We are all of us limp.

50:35 Corey: So he's doing two things here. He's lamenting the loss of sort of the Russian soul and this religious soul and this sort of loving connection that people have to each other. He's being replaced by kind of cold rationality. And he's also making a political commentary on his contemporaries because in Russian society at the time, all the intellectuals were these sort of utopian socialists who wanted to remake society. And a lot of people think, a lot of critics say that Dostoevsky very accurately predicted what was going to happen when they took power.

Maybe people say what he predicted, the Soviet Union or whatever, maybe that's a bit of a stretch. But he has this great line in here that is kind of chilling if you know what happens in the 20th century where he says, I, the vile Lebedev, do not believe in the carts that deliver bread to mankind, for carts that deliver bread to all mankind without any moral foundations for their actions, may quite cold bloodedly exclude a considerable part of mankind from enjoying what they deliver, as has already happened. So he's saying, look, you can improve things and have this utopia, but if you're not having a moral foundation, you can quite easily commit genocide without a second thought, because what's it matter, right?

What's it matter if you kill 10 million Ukrainians or whatever?

51:51 Wes: Yeah, here's another very apropos. This is in the same area, this is in the railway section still. Part three, chapter four. Okay, so Malthus was the friend of humanity, but with ill founded moral principles. The friend of humanity is the devourer of humanity without mentioning his pride. 4 Touch the vanity of one of these numberless philanthropists and to avenge his self esteem he will be ready at once to set fire to the whole globe. And to tell the truth, we are all more or less like that. I perhaps might be the first to set light to the fuel and then run away.

And we saw some of this with Orwell and "Notes on Nationalism", this sort of. And Nietzsche as well, the sort of skepticism about people who seem to be out for the good of the many seem to be utilitarian, but deep down, maybe driven by pride, maybe driven by darker motives and those darker motives can emerge to, you know, sort of betrayal of the Russian Revolution. You end up with Stalinism and the purges and all this terrible, terrible stuff because the motives underlying that seeming love of humanity take over. I think that's prescient, pointing to that kind of danger or sort of the pointing to some unconscious motives that lay beneath the conscious belief that we're out for the good of humanity.

53:12 Corey: Right, that's exactly right. And if you look at some of those quotes that Stalin has, he says, look, I despise humanity and I have absolutely no love for anybody, but I'm working for the benefit of all mankind. It's almost exactly some of the things that Stalin wrote in his journals were pretty similar to what Dostoevsky is putting in the mouth of, in this case Malthus, who was a philosopher that Dostoevsky read as a young man. He was sort of part of a socialist group and they read philosophers like this and they wanted himself to create this kind of society.

And that's what got him caught by the Tsar and sent to prison and go through sort of the horrible things. Like early in the novel he describes the mock execution that happened to him. This is biographical. So from reading these texts and wanting a democracy and a utopia in Russia, he got captured. He spent about a year in prison. He was tortured. And then they brought him out into the square and they set up the nooses and everything and they read the last rites and they then at the last possible second, before he was about to be hung, they said, okay, the czar has commuted your sentence to five years in Siberia.

And then Dostoevsky went to Siberian prison, which he writes about extensively in Notes from the House of the Dead, it's called. He sort of writes about his experiences there. And that time in prison is the time where he, his thinking changed from a rationalist utopian thinker to a much more conservative, Christian love based thinker, where he thought, look, this is not enough. The horrible things that he witnessed. He said, look, you need human love that connects us to each other, otherwise it doesn't matter what kind of society you design. You need some kind of binding value that brings people together and gives them a reason to love each other and care about each other.

55:11 Wes: I'm resisting reading other chunks of this Lebedev speech, which I just think is great. But in this exchange it's Ganya who sort of is opposition at first. Ganya expresses this point of view, which is sort of what Lebedev is opposing. So it's worth putting it, as Ganya puts it. But the universal necessity of living, drinking, of eating, in short, the whole scientific conviction that this necessity can only be satisfied by universal cooperation and the solidarity of interests is, it seems to me, a strong enough idea to serve as a basis, so to speak, and a quote, unquote, spring of life for humanity in future centuries. So yeah, so this is the idea he's opposing, that this is enough, that the physical well being, that the material well being of people, the sort of thing which will really form the basis for communism or the self preservative instinct, that that is not enough.