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On Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s philosophical novel from 1869.
Could a morally perfect person survive in the modern world? Is all this “modernity,” which so efficiently computes our desires and provides mechanisms to fulfill them, actually suited to achieve human flourishing? Dostoyevsky (whose name, incidentally, can correctly be spelled with either one “y” or two… the translation from the Russian alphabet means that that there’s no standard spelling for any of his characters either) says no on both counts. Typical Russian existentialist!
So, in the line of D’s great string of philosophical novels, The Idiot comes after Crime and Punishment (1866) (and his great appetizer-novella Notes from Underground, 1864) but before The Brothers Karamazov (1880), and its philosophical purpose is largely to raise questions that it does not answer. In the novel’s “hero” Myshkin, D. intended to present a morally perfect human being, but Myshkin’s open-heartedness leads to disaster for both him (nothing unexpected in that, given his status as Christ figure) and those around him: People are not psychologically constituted to handle true goodness. We are a paradox, because (contra Plato) our freedom often necessitates that we turn away from “the good” that is set before us. This explains a lot of self-destructive behavior, and it means that utilitarian attempts to calculate what makes us happy and institute that as social policy will inevitably fail.
Mark, Wes, and Dylan are joined by Corey Mohler, author of Existential Comics and artist for our 2017 wall calendar (only a few copies left!). We talk through the various characters (lest you get lost just as readers of D. often do, here’s a reference list) and D’s implicit and explicit claims about psychology, ethics, religion, and how our inevitable death affects all of us. D’s concern is that society and modernity have undermined the machinery of our motivations, which is supposed to work through the naturalness of human contact, which D. thinks that traditional, peasant-based Russian Christianity facilitated (as opposed to Catholicism, which he declaims as a political enterprise). Modern culture directs us to pursue social status and money, which is so obviously empty that it then tends to push us toward nihilism, which is D’s great fear: Without a firm foundation for values, we do things out of spite, or for no reason, and can rationalize even terrible crimes as being understandable given the criminal’s economic or social situation.
Of course, as a novelist, Dostoyevsky can create these very different characters with different philosophies, and it’s never altogether clear when we’re hearing D’s actual view as opposed to one he’s just playing out the implications of. Like Nietzsche, he certainly had a dim view of ordinariness, and saw the values as exhibited through status assignments in his society as pretty screwed up. But he doesn’t start as Nietzsche does with atheism, nor does he address existentialism from a vantage that only makes sense for the religious à la Kierkegaard. We can all relate to the desire to cut through all the bullshit and react lovingly and authentically to people, and we all face the looming specter of death and how that potentially makes all of our projects meaningless.
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I really enjoyed this! I didn’t read the Idiot but I’m reading The Brothers Karamazov (still) and this conversation really helped me. It helped me understand D’s point with each of the characters. The books actually sound so thematically similar that this was a much needed confidence booster to hear that I’m picking up at least some of what D was putting down. It was also extremely validating to hear that you all struggle with the various character names. It’s the nicknames that are killing me. I was trying to draw some understanding of what each character was called by whom and under what circumstances thinking there must be some larger point to his constant jumping around with various names and no explanation. I’m glad to hear that, unless I speak Russian, I should just not worry about that. I thought Corey was really awesome at explaining D’s larger points that run through all his novels.
What I enjoy about D’s stuff is that when he describes characters’ actions he always points out this really profound and somehow really obvious way humans behave. In TBK when the the elder (sort of Buddha like character) gives advice to a hysterical woman – he points out some things about her that just made me think YES!! I do that! What is that about?!! And it happens all throughout. You can see parts of yourself in each character and see how, if you were just that one way all the time, what you might be like. But of course we are all the characters in one way or another.
Or maybe not. Maybe I just have multiple personality disorder.
Thanks for a great episode. Please do The Brothers Karamazov. And if you do War and Peace will you please give us all at least a month or 2 heads up?
I love listening to Phi Fic, there have been some excellent episodes so far. It feels like this one should be on there.
Thanks, George; we’ve read and recorded on Crime and Punishment and House of the Dead over the last several months, so keep an eye out.
As someone who has read and deeply felt the Idiot, I think perfection in the Idiot has to do with the ultramundane vision of the erratic anomoly within the mundane. The Idiot is a Christian-informed mystic vision of the heart of humanity. The feature of the book is Mishkin’s revealation of Western Culture, and really of all culture as a skin of the human heart. There is no foreseeable answer to this unfolding mystery we call History. The heart of the book is not Jesus or Don Quixote, but the Uneducated, Uncondiioned Heart.
This is elegant, but I’m not sure I totally understand. Could you develop your point a little more, please?
I really enjoyed this one. By chance I had read The Idiot a few weeks before the episode, so it was fresh in my mind. Agree with Wes that Dostoyevsky is amazing at getting inside characters heads. The podcast discussion illuminated a number of the themes, so well done. Brothers Karamazov is next on my list, so I look forward to that future episode 🙂
Ps I nominate Aldous Huxley for the next novelist to be studied.
If, like me, you’ve always had difficulty wrapping your head around those long Russian novels, what with all the patronymics and stuff; AND you’ve always had particular difficulty with Dostoyevsky, given the way there’s hundreds of pages with no action, just talk, and that seemingly unconnected characters suddenly all pop up in the same room–there are some multi-episode Russian television dramatizations that are excellently acted and very faithful to the originals, that I’ve found a tremendous aid to reading the novels. The one of The Idiot starts here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KrldfSKVfM&list=PLPbSrKJ8RAjFnmDwRh0kxD15Z22Ljhspl
and here’s Ep. 1 of Crime and Punishment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTLwOaTQzVs
The subtitles are of uneven quality–you can tell that the same person didn’t do all the episodes, but I find that in an odd way it contributes to the overall effect, like listening to a story told in a language you don’t understand very well and having to do some of the interpreting yourself.
I don’t believe that in trying to hook up the Prince and Aglaya that Nastassia was trying to close off hope of redemption so that she could give herself to the dark side – i.e. Rogozhin. I think she legitimately recognized and valued the Prince’s goodness and still had a glimmer in herself of a self reaching for it, though her self-destructiveness was stronger. I think she was trying to redeem herself from her lower side by doing something good. But then when she discovered that Aglaya was not the ideal female she imagined, and indeed cruel and demeaning, Nastassia basically gave up and let her self-destructive side take over.