Ep. 317: Character Philosophies in Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point said, I'm doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 317 is something like, what is religious existentialism? We're continuing to look at Dostoevsky's the Brothers Karamazov. For more information, please see partialexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, 3,000 rubles short.

0:27 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, holy but tedious.

0:31 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan loving the sticky little leaves of spring. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey,

0:39 Dylan: wanting to behave and be recognized as a gentleman. In Madison, Wisconsin, we're no longer live.

0:46 Mark: We're live.

0:47 Dylan: We're just not live with other people. That's right amongst ourselves.

0:51 Mark: You'll not get to see our pretty faces for this part. But it seemed like, man, that live show that just went by in a. In a rush. We have to think about for future venues doing somewhere that will give us at least two hours and not an

1:05 Wes: hour and a half.

1:05 Dylan: Yeah, I think a perfect time would have been an hour and a half of us doing our stuff and then a half an hour of Q and A and then be done. That would have been perfect. But it was a great show. It was great, though.

1:17 Mark: Yes. Thank you for everybody that showed up. Thanks for everybody that watched the streaming. If you didn't see. Yeah. Multicam video for the first time. Crazy. I felt like we laid out the Grand Inquisitor argument and the rebellion argument pretty well. Did we really say what we wanted to say in terms of actually being critical about it? I guess my question was, is it a straw man? Is this really a powerful argument for atheism or a powerful version of the argument against the existence of God due to the presence of evil?

1:49 Wes: Well, he says he's not arguing against the existence of God, though.

1:53 Mark: Okay, well, yeah, so it's one of the other forks. You know, the traditional argument again, God exists. God is totally good. Anything that's totally good would prevent suffering, sort of by the definition of being totally good. Yet there is suffering. Therefore there's a contradiction. That's really all that the argument says.

2:11 Wes: He accepts harmony. He accepts the idea, the Augustinian idea that you can justify from a higher point of view. Right. From the point of view of the afterlife or from God's point of view, it all looks good. Everything looks great. But that doesn't change the fact that from our point of view, it can't be just so Maybe. I guess for the argument to have weight, it just. There has to be a truth of the matter. And in absolute terms, harmony doesn't work and it can't be justified. The stuff about it, him accepting it maybe is a bit rhetorical, I guess.

2:41 Dylan: I'd ask if it's completely rhetorical because of the way in which the question of goodness and evil is wholly human. The natural harmony of, like, say, the natural world where there are animals that die and other animals feed other animals, there are disasters and stuff like that. I think that Ivan would characterize that all as a harmony that's acceptable harmony. Maybe evil is the right word. It's the gratuitousness of the suffering. It's not just suffering. It's the kind of evil perpetrated by human beings and other human beings. And that juxtaposition is brought up a lot in what Zosima would point to as we should be trying to emulate a kind of natural world. So there's something about human beings that's breaking a kind of natural harmony that to me implies for Ivan, that that harmony doesn't exist.

3:30 Wes: So in a way, this harmony, the theodicy argument, it's a bit unfair. It kind of rigs things, right? It breaks one of our own rules. It's basically saying, well, if you could look at it from God's point of view, it all makes sense. It's kind of an illegitimate the harmony approach from St. Augustine. One could criticize it because he's just basically saying, oh, you're immortal minds. Your Euclidean mind, right, as Ivan puts it, is not up to the task. But seeing how everything would balance out, it's like looking at a picture. We only get to look at the picture up close, and we just see all these fine brushstrokes and we see this messiness.

You zoom out. It's a big, harmonious, beautiful picture. That's what God sees it from, and we can't see it from that. And therefore. And that's the end of the argument. And what Ivan is saying is actually, no, we do have. Even from our position, we do have some critical, irrefutable evidence that transcends this distinction between zooming out, looking at the picture, and being stuck in the picture at this level, that limits our vision, and that's the suffering of children. And then the idea is that harmony. This is the next step in his argument, which I think is a little bit fishy.

But he will say that if there is going to be harmony, we have to talk about how we are Going to balance out the suffering of children and how that is atoned. And Augustine or someone on the other side of the argument could say, hey, hey, that's actually not what we're talking about. We're not saying that there's going to be atonement for suffering. Maybe they are, but I don't think they're committed to that. That's one area where Ivan is susceptible to critique, I think.

5:01 Dylan: Well, following this story of Zosima and the insistence of forgiving murderers and stuff like that, wouldn't all those examples that Ivan gives be cases that could be forgiven?

5:12 Wes: Yeah, according to Zosima, right. One of the very first early things in the novel with the women is one of the women is a murderer. One of the women that comes to him has murdered her husband.

5:22 Dylan: Yeah.

5:23 Wes: And he's like, wait, don't say it out loud. Just go ahead, whisper it in my ear. Don't anyone else see? Okay, yeah, everything can be forgiven. Even that. Just go say some prayers.

5:33 Dylan: And yeah, that second part is interesting. There becomes a question of what the terms of being forgiven are. And it's not just saying the words.

5:41 Seth: There's.

5:41 Dylan: There's something. Yeah, a version of you have to own it and atone for it in your heart. There's a kind of a mysterious thing that has to have happened to you in the way in which you accept that responsibility. You accept that you did that, and you, I think probably you suffer for it. And a version of you feel sorry or something like that, you regret. I don't know.

6:04 Wes: This is how Zosima puts it. God will forgive all. There is no sin which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant. Can there be a sin which would exceed the love of God? Be not bitter against men. Forgive the dead man. I'm cutting out bits and pieces, by the way here. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it and expiate not only our own sins, but the sins of others. So this speaks directly to Ivan's problem and tries to solve it. Right. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love.

Ivan is thinking about, well, the mother doesn't have the right to forgive the torturer of her children for what he did. Alyosha's response looks a bit like Zazima's response because he says, well, there's Jesus, right? He has the right to atone for everything through his suffering because he takes all our sin and guilt on him. And that's not exactly what Zosima is saying here. What Zosima seems to be saying is more in the existential vein. It's not that we're relying on Christ to forgive all of this. It's love in general. It's our love. It's a personal thing.

We kind of have to redeem it for ourselves through our love and our loving acts.

7:20 Mark: The last question that we got was asking for a more sophisticated explanation for how the shift of guilt with Christ's sacrifice of himself is supposed to work. And of course, I've heard many different versions of this preaching, but none of them have made sense to me such that I can actually apply them and hook them up directly with the Zosima quote and this ongoing existentialist thing of I can somehow take such responsibility for other people's sins. Because, Dylan, as you described, like, it's a rigmarole to be personally forgiven for something.

And if we're going to say that the reconciliation of the world at end times or from God's point of view or something is not going to involve every single individual that has sinned. Going through these hoops like that is a thing that you can do to make your life now livable. You know, that's one of the theses of the book, is that the murderer who came to Zosima before couldn't live with himself. And, you know, once he confessed, then he was able to get past it. But there's going to have to be some mass way of everybody is forgiven. And that's how reconciliation works, through Christ's sacrifice.

Or maybe Zosima and Dostoevsky are giving some alternative or that we can all be Christs, basically.

8:45 Dylan: I don't know if it's all Christ, but I think that part of the book is arguing that that mass balance is asking the wrong question. And I don't know if it would be that it's too mysterious. But to me, Zosima is juxtaposing Ivan to a Euclidean kind of point of view. And he's making the same kind of mistake that the church fathers make and that others make or the scientists make in trying to harmonize the world in a global way. And that, I think, is just going to be just. It's not even the question worth asking. I think he would deny that that's part of the teaching, that the only thing is the existential piece where you can get that balance on an individual basis, on an individual activity. That's why the source is always through individuals and Their acts of love with respect to other people. There isn't a global, like soup pot of love balance. That's not true.

9:46 Wes: You know, the other thing he says that's related to that is to the woman whose son has died, right? This happens right after the woman he tells, everything will be forgiven. He says, be not comforted. Consolation is not what you need. Weep and be not consoled, but weep. And then he tells her everything. In the end, all suffering turns into quiet joy and bitter tears will be only the tears of tender sorrow that purifies the heart and delivers it from sin. So part of the argument here is that suffering isn't actually something that needs to be atoned for, that we have little furnaces inside us that transform suffering via love into joy, and that we need the suffering, that the suffering is a critical element of our experience and that we couldn't have love without it.

So it's like boiling down the theodicy to the individual level, to psychology, basically. It's like saying, you know, nothing could exist without freedom, Nothing could exist without the devil and without negation and all that. You boil that down to an individual psychological level argument, which is that there is no love without suffering and there is no joy without suffering. Suffering is the raw material of joy. It has to be transformed into.

11:02 Seth: I almost feel like we might be conflating a couple of things here. I just want to make a fine distinction between atonement and forgiveness, which are two very different things. And part of one way that you could interpret the grand inquisitor position from Ivan is this radical particularity, the radical individualism, meaning from the perspective of forgiveness, the person who is wronged is the one who has to be able to forgive the perpetrator of the violence or the crime. Ivan saying the evidence of the suffering of children is sufficient to show that atonement by God, some abstract God's eye view, universal atonement, sorry, forgiveness is not satisfactory.

Like there's no redemption, there's nothing in it for the suffering child. If God forgives the perpetrator. Now that's different than atonement, where you might say that if the perpetrator forgives and has this mystical experience you were describing in their heart and they transformed, they wouldn't be transforming suffering, I guess. Well, maybe they are. They're transforming something into. So though both are mechanisms that are driven by the power of love, right? It is through love that you forgive, it is through love that you can atone. But they're two different things.

So I wonder if Ivan's position isn't so much like an anti theological position or an anti love position, but more something about the radical position, irreducibility of individuals versus a kind of universal or transcendent notion that there has to be practical love between individuals here on earth versus some kind of universal love. Does that make sense?

12:45 Wes: I mean, I think if I don't understand, misunderstand, you said. I think you're pointing to the fact that in a way, Ivan's arguments, it's not like they're exactly inconsistent with the response in Zosima and Alyosha. Right. They kind of set up the response. Ivan is pointing to some deficiencies in normal theodicy. He hasn't thought of the next step in the argument yet. That's for Alyosha and Zosima. But I think this is part of why we feel so much that Dostoevsky is all in on those arguments and the force of them. I think Dostoevsky thinks there's a response, but it's not in traditional Catholic theology. It's in something else.

13:24 Dylan: Well, and I like that, Wes, because it puts Dostoevsky having a fight about a religious interpretation. He's coming out. Maybe what you're saying even implies that the strength of Ivan's argument is not even so much for atheism, which maybe Mark is right in terms of an atheist argument. Maybe it's a straw man, but it's an argument stronger against the theodicy.

13:50 Mark: So somebody, one of the questions characterized this as irrationalism, that Leibniz being sort of our prototypical rationalist, that he buys this theodicy argument from Augustine and gives it his own slant, folks can listen to our Leibniz theodicy episode and actually says, yeah, we as, as individual humans because we have reasoning power. We can see how, not exactly how the painting will look from far away, but we can know with certainty that, that it does work out, that it is the most beautiful possible thing and it's only, yes, our finite humanity that makes us unable to actually sense that.

But we can know it. And so that's for Ivan to say, I reject that. That kind of reason is. Is hollow for me. I need to experience it as a finite creature. And then Dostoevsky through Zosima and Alyosha is saying, actually you can experience that. You can experience it on an individual level of acting. But it does seem like. I'm not sure if I would characterize it as irrationalism. But you're turning away. You're saying, just don't worry about the big picture. The way that we have to deal with these. This is fundamentally not a logical problem. It's an emotional problem.

It's how are you gonna get through the day and not despair at the world? And so I was just characterizing it in my response as basically, he's an instrumentalist, he's a pragmatist that like, yes, of course it's very rational to have the point of view Dostoevsky recommends. If you think the alternative is being really depressed, adopt whatever attitude will not make you really depressed. But is that just irrational in a way, you know, according to the, The Leibniz point of view?

15:36 Wes: Well, now you're reminding me of Wittgenstein and. Or maybe just English language philosophy, where the problems, you're supposed to just dissolve the problems and say, oh, that's not really a problem. If I look at it closely enough, it's a linguistic problem or it's something that Mark, you're taught, you're saying it's an emotional problem or whatever it is. That's an interesting.

15:55 Dylan: Well, it's one way of getting rid of a problem, right, is saying that you're asking, you're asking the wrong kind of question. And so therefore you get rid of the problem by reframing the question. That's sort of what you were doing earlier with regards to making it psychological, or Dostoevsky was. I mean, that's all you were saying. I didn't mean to pin it on you exclusively.

16:13 Wes: I'll take the credit.

16:16 Mark: My originally saying this was a straw. I mean, so far we've been considering the rebellion argument. Really, I don't think that's a straw. I think this is actually a sophisticated sort of next step take. If you actually took Leibniz's theodicy seriously and wanted to come up with the 20th century, a more modern existentialist response to it, it's the Grand Inquisitor argument that I wonder, is that the straw man? In other words, what Actually the Grand Inquisitor argument seems like it is. If you say this is such a powerful argument, are you saying that actually the Grand Inquisitor, given the assumptions about Christianity and what Jesus challenged to embrace individual responsibility, you can't have visible miracles right in front of you, right?

You can't have God show you the big picture to just bring back in the rebellion thing, like you have a mystical experience and you actually can yourself sense that you have to use faith, that this is the challenge. And so given those premises, the inquisitor says this argument in favor of sort of Dostoevsky as Atheist icon, unwilling atheist icon, that the Grand Inquisitor is exactly right in responding to that. That if you think that what Christianity is, is this really hard nosed, you have to walk over the hot coals of temptation, of despair to get to the correct view and only a few people will by necessity be able to do that.

It's a very difficult road. Only the saints really. Then it seems like that maybe the Grand Inquisitor was right. Do you think that when people say this is a great atheist argument, are they saying, wow, the Grand Inquisitor really has a point there? Because that seems like the possible straw man. Because I don't think any actual atheist would say or you know, irreligious person would say what the Grand Inquisitor does, the atheist or irreligious person is saying. This whole thing ends up being argument to absurdity. There's fundamentally something wrong here with the Christian premises.

If this is where it drives you.

18:14 Wes: Well, the argument, right, is that Jesus had the opportunity to set up a utopia and didn't. Why didn't he do that? What theodicy says is that there are these deep reasons why human freedom necessitates evil and suffering or some even more metaphysical considerations necessitates negation and all that stuff. But so the Grand Inquisitor argument says, well, okay, but what's wrong with the utopia? Yeah, we sacrifice freedom, but we understand as a political and social arrangement it's not impossible. You can't just say that's not an option because of deep metaphysical reasons or something else.

It is an option. So now you have to tell me why not have Utopia? Yeah, it's a dictatorship, but it's an enlightened dictatorship because it's Jesus or it could have been Jesus. Now it's got to be the, the Grand Inquisitor, the Catholics, which is not going to be anywhere near as good with all the burning of people. But anyway, it could have been Jesus.

19:13 Dylan: So this move to Jesus. I think that the Grand Inquisitor argument is a stepping stone, but I don't think it's sort of the period at the end of the rebellion sentence. It's a different sort of thing. I confess that I was thinking about it and trying to figure it out, but I didn't have a good way to talk about it. And I ended up reading one of these secondary sources at the end, the Morson, which is called the God of Onions, which in part points to there being sort of a one, two punch there with the rebellion more or less being about God and a harmony There and the absurdity of that. And then the Inquisitor argument, being an indictment, is going with Jesus, and then the solution ends up being Spirit or Holy Spirit in the end, which is where you get the love. Peace. That's the real response, is the form of God in the form of the Holy Spirit, not the form of God in as God or as Jesus.

20:18 Seth: I was just gonna say I don't know enough about Catholic. I'm assuming that's Catholic theology. To understand the nuance between God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, those are the three pieces, right?

20:30 Dylan: The Trinity, they all show up. And depending on your Christian sect, they have different emphases.

20:36 Seth: Okay, I don't know enough to. To meaningfully comment on this, so if anybody wants to enlighten me, that would be nice. But I like the thesis anyway. It sounds nice.

20:44 Dylan: I think that you can see it in here by the focus on nature and the idea of love being an animating force in individuals, so sort of the fire of motion in them, as opposed to a God, something outside you that is ordering the universe, or B, Jesus, another entity outside you that is saving the world. Is that the idea of spirit is something that is individually inside and animating and accessible to everybody, and the source of that is the world itself.

21:21 Wes: I was going to back up just a bit because I think we haven't said exactly how the Grand Inquisitor argument is even a response, because, well, is it a response? Or Ivan gives his rebellion, suffering of children argument. Alyosha talks about Jesus and Ivan's like, ah, I've thought of that. I have a whole big story. And then it's like, well, how does it respond to the idea that Jesus can actually atone for suffering? And so I thought a lot about this and I thought, okay, I see what he's doing here. Because on Ivan's theory, the central part of Augustinian theodicy is that freedom is what makes everything worth it.

That's the big harmonizing thing. Yeah, we suffer, but we needed. This is the big Catholic thing. Freedom necessitates suffering. And what is. What are human beings without freedom? They're not even human. The point of the Grand Inquisitor argument is to say freedom is not supportable to use and freedom is unsupportable. I think that's a direct quote, especially if people are hungry, right? In general, people can't even use their freedom. You're saying, well, God gave you this superpower. Be grateful, you know, it's worth all the suffering. But for most people, it's not a superpower.

It's not even a power. It just doesn't even exist. And one of the reasons why it can't be used is because we're hungry. We have all these necessities to deal with, and it's too distracting to even worry about freedom. And this is the thing that ironically, Jesus could have helped solve from the very beginning. If you turn stones into bread, if you make sure everyone has everything they need, okay, then maybe, you know, you can talk about some sort of freedom within that paradigm. But if you're talking about system of complete scarcity, there's no room for, for freedom there.

And then there's the whole story about, well, look what happens. Look at what happens if you do this, if you put people in this scarcity position. What are they going to use their minds for? What are they going to use all this wonderful reasoning for? They're going to use it for science and technology. They're going to use it to build the Tower of Babel, and that's inevitably going to fail. People are not going to ultimately be happy with that technology facilitated alleviation of suffering that's going to be spiritually bankrupt. It's going to lead to new types of suffering.

And then people are going to demand that the freedom, whatever freedom they have be politically be taken away, that there be some kind of theocratic authoritarian regime that can relieve them of that and bring them back to the position which would have been there in a better way if Jesus had just created the utopia on earth. So in other words, all of history is set up to undermine freedom. It's almost like a deterministic system anyway. And Jesus gets the ball rolling by rejecting, turning stones into bread as if he were saving freedom, when in fact he's setting everything up to undermine freedom.

24:11 Mark: So this is a direct sequel to our last New York live show on Brave New World.

24:18 Wes: Yeah. Yeah, it really is.

24:21 Dylan: It is. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that. But you're correct.

24:24 Mark: I mean, they both have the. The socialist response would be, you can give people bread without making a totalitarian state. Duh. Like, does it really undermine.

24:35 Seth: Do you.

24:36 Mark: There's so much. The central conflicts in this book are conflicts of honor, of thumos, are conflicts of competing for a love interest. It's you owe me money. No, I don't owe you any money. You just because you're my father, you owe me money. These people are already pretty well to do. Dmitri is able to just throw around money. And his money problems are not that he's going to starve. It's that he's going to be in disgrace or he'll have to borrow from somebody that he doesn't want to borrow from or not pay back money that he thinks he's honor bound to pay back.

These are not expressions of. You could almost refer to them as like kindergarten problems. In other words, kindergarteners, very, very emotional creatures. They will react. They could have what seemed to them very deep conflicts over who gets what toy or what activity we're gonna do next. But their basic needs are already being looked after. There's a nanny state present.

25:29 Wes: These are White Russian problems.

25:31 Mark: Exactly. So it seems like you still might wanna criticize the nanny state and how far the nanny state should go. But it seems like we'd still have lots of problems and challenges that then we could get to overcome and be virtuous in that sense, you know, because that's what it comes down to is that Dmitri, because he actually does not, even though he has all this motivation, he does not kill his father. That is taken to be a miracle, right? That is taken to be one of the things that shows that we actually do have freedom. So in other words, we can exert our freedom and still have our bread covered.

26:04 Wes: I mean. Yeah, so now we get a political question of how much bread, how much of that is possible without inadvertently ruining the economy by taking, you know, state ownership of the means of production, all that stuff. I mean, those get into very thorny economic and political questions. So we. It's possible that we can't ever. We can have a nice healthy welfare state, but it doesn't completely solve the problem. And there are lots of other problems around. Again, part of the problem is that the Grand Inquisitor is saying that science and technology create a spiritual crisis for people.

They create. You know, he's agreeing, agreeing with. I mean, this is what Father Paisi and Zosima say earlier on is science and technology are in certain ways in conflict with belief. And so there's spiritual suffering. People need. It's not just that they need to totalitarian state for the bread. They need it for the spiritual comfort. They need their freedom to be taken away. Freedom is a cause of suffering. It's not the big prize you get for agreeing to suffer. It is just another form of suffering.

27:09 Dylan: Dostoevsky does seem to be, through the voice of someone like Paisi on the side, that modernity, and in this case, it's the modernity of the mid 19th century, which is pretty modern compared to the 15th century. But it's kind of a false idol that there is some alleviating of suffering that is physical. And maybe in some ways by presenting the Karamazovs in this world in which there isn't the problem of bread, for these people at least, there's an implication that somehow modernity is overall satisfying the bread case in some important ways for many, many people revealing the freedom problem, that is that the truer suffering and Dostoevsky would certainly come down on the side that the suffering associated with the spiritual suffering is probably worse than the bread suffering, even if somebody else might not agree.

And that the suffering of bread and other aspects of life can actually be a handle for getting on the right way of being so as to alleviate spiritual suffering. Having deprivation of a certain amount will lead you to, you know, can be an encourager. This is the theory, right? You have choices that you can't make and then as you have more and more of your needs met and now you're put in a position of everything is a choice. There's a burden that comes with that. And in this case the burden is deeply spiritual because we're not strong enough to handle the choice when it's always just choice.

28:49 Mark: Is this a good transition to talk about Dostoevsky in relation to other existentialists that we sort of promised, at least I brought up in the live show we could try Sartre, obviously the burden of choice. But clearly Sartre like Camus is, you gotta face that tough thing. You know, you might want to deny the absurdity, you might want to deny choice, but you need to be hard nosed about it on this view. Maybe the Jesus that the inquisitor is accusing actually does reflect at least one horn of the existential challenge that life gives us is that it is hard to embrace choice and Dostoevsky.

The second part of it, the Zosima solution of like, well, given that we have choice, use compassion, use ethics, that's sort of maybe falls into line with that. There's no ethics right within Sartre's picture of choice as a burden. It's just that we have anxiety, we have all these things that, you know, these existential terms that Heidegger had set up that Sartre uses. But then as we read in Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity, there might be given that we are this kind of doomed to choose animal, some stuff that we really should do. And you know, so Dostoevsky is maybe giving his two cents, which does not seem unlike say Buber, you know, that are the existential situation is an interpersonal me looking into your eyes and sort of there's an obvious ethical implication from that, which I think lines up to recognizing the other person as being someone deserving of your time.

30:24 Dylan: One thing I immediately thought of was Ivan, again, in the context of Camus, myth of Sisyphus. That starts out like the biggest question is why I don't kill myself.

30:36 Mark: It was in that book.

30:37 Dylan: You basically have Ivan saying, I don't know why I don't kill myself. I can't help it. I just want to live. But I'm going to kill myself when I'm 30. That's the end of the line. But right now, I just want to live. I want to. Wes used the sticky leaves. I love the sticky leaves. And the way he frames his wanting to live is loving things. It's not even like he frames it as, I want to get high and get drunk and carouse. And I just find it so stimulating that he loves these things in a way that he doesn't understand why, but he does, and that's what keeps him wanting to live. But he expects he's going to just eventually it's going to wear out and he's going to kill himself.

31:14 Wes: I'm just thinking about this part of the argument in the Grand Inquisitor, where the Grand Inquisitor says, what people need is something that will satisfy their conscience. A quote unquote stable conception of the object of life. And that freedom is not a good enough candidate for that. That's been the traditional candidate, Freedom and God and so on. And the conception that is meant to replace that for the Grand Inquisitor is this idea of alleviation of material suffering through bread and through the political regime. But also there's these other elements of creation of a community and thinking of a rant here as well.

Sort of the elimination of individuality, community to this ridiculous degree where individuality is entirely eliminated. And the need for thinking, the need for choice. People surrender over freedom entirely. I'm not sure if I have something good to say about it, except that that's supposed to, on the Grand Inquisitor's account, satisfy this need for meaning. And then how does the existentialist or Zosima or whoever respond to that meaning problem? Right. The existentialist generally leans into the freedom thing. Dostoevsky wants to go the love route.

The existentialist leans into this. This whole idea of freedom. But how do either of them address the problem of meaning?

32:42 Seth: Well, one other key piece of the Grand Inquisitor's position is that There's a social hierarchy. I mean, essentially Jesus represents radical democracy. And existentialism as a philosophy is radical individuality, radical responsibility, radical individual responsibility. And the Grand Inquisitor is saying, look, people are not cut out for that. They just are not capable of handling that level of responsibility. But it's not all people. He's like, there's a select group who can see and they don't just take responsibility for themselves, but they take responsibility for everybody.

That's the point. So there's a sense in which the Grand Inquisitor is saying, the vast majority of people need to be ruled, need to be told what to do, need to be controlled. In a certain weird sense, that is exactly what happens with the orthodox Church, at least with the Catholic institutions. And if you think about the universal church run state, because this is also in some sense, right, a discussion about, I don't know if it's a criticism. I don't know enough to know whether that same function would accomplish the same thing, which is you could essentially implement some kind of Catholic theology where everybody, where the priests hold the secret knowledge and the laity learn from them, are told what to do by them.

All the Grand Inquisitors saying is, yeah, that's fine, let's just take away the notion that they are actually sinners or can be sinners and let's just bring them in line.

34:18 Mark: Well, I remember he says, one of the things that we would grant to the oppressed populace, the properly oppressed populace, is the feeling that they get to sin but they get to be forgiven. Like that. That's actually part of. It's like having a pet, that this is maybe not a good analogy, but like you give them the illusion of freedom or that you give them just a taste of. I think this was in Brave New World too, that like, yeah, we'll have competitions, but there'll be again, sort of kindergarten competitions. There's actually no stakes to them. It's not the life and death struggle that perhaps, you know, on some conceptions, on the Hegelian or the Nietzschean conception that we need for a truly meaningful life.

34:58 Wes: I think it's a critique of Catholic confession. Right. Although I don't know how much, because the elders and, you know, Zosima and other elders are critiqued for because it looks like they're doing confession when, you know, when he goes out to the women and he's hearing about all their problems and then giving them some response. It's like a public version of Catholic confession. And that's what Zosima takes a lot of flack for. So that's one way of dealing with conscience. Right? That's one way of partially addressing the meaning problem in the totalitarian state.

It looks like there's still some version of confession, although as the account progresses it starts to look like surveillance and total Orwellian control and surveillance of people. There's nothing private. You're not just going to confess some things, you're going to confess everything and it's going to be 247 confession. But you can contrast that to Zazima's more psychological approach. And then, you know, I'm naturally inclined to assimilate this to proto psychoanalysis when he's saying things like don't lie to yourself and it's okay to hate as long as you're aware of that and understand that.

And then Zazima's role as confessor, so to speak, is to facilitate that kind of self awareness so that conscience is more than okay. I just, I did something bad and now I'm going to go tell someone about it and then I have to do my penance. That model is not sophisticated enough. The idea is that maybe you talk to someone, but you heal your own conscience in a sense, or you do something with your own conscience that involves being more self aware, more aware of one's own negative instincts instead of denying them and repressing them, saying, oh, I'm pure and good like Ivan or whoever, and then acting on them unconsciously, you try to solve some of those psychological problems and get a better understanding of yourself.

36:55 Dylan: Would you point to Zozima's love solution, especially the Russian monk section and maybe even afterwards, like the things that you should be doing, living active love all the time and cultivating active love. Love the birds. That kind of work is basically a therapy solution. It's therapeutic.

37:16 Wes: I mean, again, it reflects my bias here, but it does fit with the idea that Dostoevsky Wright is the sort of leads into Freud, I mean, leads into Nietzsche and then so leads into Freud. That's Nietzsche said he does. His is the only one I learned anything about psychology from. So I do think of it as, yeah, this is another therapeutic solution. But of course it goes all the way back to Greece.

37:36 Dylan: Yes, I was just going to mention

37:37 Wes: virtue ethics and yes, yeah, and knowing yourself, you know, Nietzsche being what you are. Right. So there's something about individuality that becomes very important. Zazma's like, it's not about love of one's own virtue, it's about love of individuals. Right. So love of One's own virtue can be in this big abstract sense.

37:56 Mark: Anyway, to rephrase Dylan's question, I mean, does his solution about love provide what you were the quote that you gave of the stable conception of the object of life. Right. So the Inquisitor is saying, without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living. It seems like maybe Dostoevsky agrees with that, even though this is the Inquisitor saying that and thinks that the example of love that actually does provide a stable conception of the object of life. Right. What your purpose is, is to love and be helpful and connect with people.

And that's all we need. We don't need. So I guess the. The question is then, to put it in Beauvoir's terms, is that constitute being the serious man. So, right. The hardcore Sartrean Camus is embrace the freedom, embrace the absurdity. There is no. If you make a leap into something that you say, this is greater than me. I'm going to now attach myself to a stable conception of the object of life. I'm going to assign myself an essence as a human being. Then you are somehow cheating that, like real existentialism means you don't do that, that you live forever on a balance that you have to solve through your personal life.

But there is no philosophical solution to the problem of existence. You only solve existence by just living one day at a time.

39:16 Wes: But she could accuse any philosophy or ideology of this, right? One could say, oh, you're being a serious man about existentialism, right? That's your ideal. I think Zosima is on that same track of rejecting the serious man, right. When he says things like, you know, some people, they really love their own virtue, right? They think they're being ethical and out for justice and the good, but really they're in love with their own virtue. And ultimately the critique is that it's really. People are often doing status, power, prestige, status stuff when they think they're being good.

39:50 Mark: Are they virtue signaling, Wes?

39:51 Wes: Yes, yes, I would try to avoid that phrase. So, yes, Zosima is one of the first people to critique virtue signaling. So the idea is that there's a more imminent approach to love of individuals, and that comes first. Right? So there's some parts of the book that specifically critique this idea, and I think it's Zosima again of embracing all these higher ideals because it will become the basis by which you justify killing lots and lots of people or creating this totalitarian utopia, in part for the Grand Inquisitor. So you Want to avoid that. And the individuals always come first. The love of the individual always comes first. So I think that runs against the serious men conception.

40:37 Mark: Yeah. Even in Beauvoir herself we have the idea of the serious man is not just a standard for values, it's a wrong way of having values. So the Grand Inquisitor himself is the serious man. But there, there has to be a more nuanced way of relating to your own values so that you do not just externalize them and say that is the truth and the Lord and I serve it. You have to internalize it in a way. So that's it was the serious man then is the adventurer, where you take on projects, but then you just abandon them. And there has to be the one beyond that, which I don't think has a name like. But the actual existentialist point that you do take values seriously, you do commit yourself to things, but you realize that this, you take responsibility for the fact that you're doing that. Maybe that is the solution, is that,

41:26 Dylan: well, that's the act of love.

41:28 Mark: Right.

41:28 Dylan: Cultivating love. Right. In the Dostoevsky way.

41:31 Wes: It's not a cognitive relationship to some theory or even some passionate relationship to a theory. It's more procedural. It's more habit. It's a habitual relation to other human beings and the way one acts lovingly.

41:45 Dylan: I like that you linked up the Grand Inquisitor to the serious man, Mark, because what's the phrase you just used about basically over determining the solution, insisting on there being a complete solution, which to me is exactly how the Grand Inquisitor is working and exactly how it's a companion problem to the scientist. It is committing the same mistake.

42:09 Mark: And I don't think my formulation that I just gave of the correct ways to identify with it, because the serious man identified like the Grand Inquisitor takes responsibility for the fact that he has recognized that this is his duty and he fully identifies with it and doesn't see himself as just following the orders of, you know what the morality as he conceives it. So it can't be that. It can't be just identification. So I don't know what the better word is for how you're supposed to relate to your values for an existentialist. We do have an example in here of the subman, which is Smerdyakov. I really liked this mention of. He was a contemplative, which I just never heard this used this way before.

42:52 Wes: This is something I wanted to talk about because it's kind of confusing.

42:55 Mark: There are a good many contemplatives among the peasantry. Smerdyakov was probably one of them. And he probably was greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly knowing why. This follows how somebody says, you know, they'll just catch him just staring off into space. And Dostoevsky wants to distinguish between actually deliberating about something. Right. Being a philosopher. And what is this alternative of contemplation? I guess it's getting somehow fixed on an idea that you don't fully understand and that you'll end up acting out subconsciously. It just seemed a very idiosyncratic take on the subman.

43:29 Wes: I mean, it sounds a lot like Socrates.

43:32 Dylan: Right.

43:32 Wes: I forget where that account is. Maybe the symposium where Socrates will go out and stare into space and he

43:39 Dylan: shows up at the symposium. He shows up and stays standing on the porch for a very long time.

43:45 Seth: Yeah.

43:45 Dylan: Before he goes inside and can do

43:47 Wes: it for hours and hours. So.

43:49 Mark: But he's not hoarding impressions. Like that's a different thing. That's like the good way of doing it. I think that Dostoevsky, you know, all of his characters are thoughtful, but somehow this guy's not being contemplative. And Dostoevsky's German is not being thoughtful in a way that would lead to self reflection.

44:06 Dylan: Yeah.

44:06 Wes: I think in book three, chapter six, the narrator explicitly characterizes this as not thought or reflection, but only contemplation. And if he's disturbed and asked about it, he doesn't remember. So. And here's a quote yet probably he has hidden within himself the impression which had dominated him during the period of contemplation. Those impressions are dear to him and no doubt he hoards them imperceptibly and even unconsciously. And then at a certain point, Ivan makes a similar explicit accusation about Smerdyakov hoarding up his appearances or something like that. So what does that mean exactly? Like it's got to be doing something.

44:45 Mark: I guess I was interpreting that as we also, when we hear Smirdyakov talk, which is not that much, he has ressentiment. He clearly feels like he is not getting his due in the world. The classic picture of the subman that we get from Beauvoir is the Nazi, the Nazi follower. Just somebody that they have this pent up energy and they're waiting for something to come along and channel them, you know, into being a goon for some cause or other. They're not like the serious man who actually identifies with the cause. They just obey. And that's what Smirdyakov ends up saying that he did that. Ivan, you told me that it was okie dokie for your father to die. And so I followed your cues on that, and I take no responsibility for it. It's really you as the murderer.

45:32 Seth: Yeah, that's interesting. Mark. I think this would make a great essay. You could put out there mapping Arendt onto the Brothers Karamazov out there. But there's a sense in which Smerdyakov is also calculating. I would say this. He's a little richer and a little more complicated than just the subman archetype that Arendt proposed, I think.

45:53 Wes: Yeah, I think. I think you're right. Seth.

45:55 Dylan: He's.

45:55 Wes: I mean, he has some pretty clever arguments, right, in that scene before Dimitri bursts in talking about, you know, really riling Grigory up with that whole thing about faith and how you could renounce your faith.

46:09 Dylan: I mean, they're all the children of Fyodor, who is kind of a horrible human being. But I'm wondering if the cause of. And like the versions of all of their individual behaviors isn't in some way a consequence of different aspects of the sort of corruption that is Fyodor. Pavlovich and Smirdyakov is one of them, right?

46:36 Wes: Yeah. It's funny. It's interesting that Smerdyakov, in a way, is the only one not abandoned by Fyodor. They're all to some extent, raised a little bit by Grigory. But then they, very early on, all the other brothers go off to live with other people, are shuffled off, and they've only. And this is not something emphasized in the novel, but it's true. They've only really just become reunited with each other and their father. They're all kind of strangers. And Smirdyakov is the one who's grown up with Fyodor. And at a certain point, Fyodor takes an interest in Smerdyakov because of.

Maybe it's after the incident where he loses all those rubles and Smerdyakov gives them. Gives them back the epilepsy. Right. It's as soon as Smerdyakov becomes epileptic that a little light bulb goes off and Fyodor and is like, okay, this is an interesting guy. And then he's given access to the library, reads a few books, doesn't like them like you expect at that point, okay, he's going to be kind of an Ivan mini Me, and he's going to be into books and stuff. No, he's not into books. He's into, like, arguing about stuff, but he's not actually into books.

47:37 Mark: He sings with a falsetto, plays a

47:41 Wes: guitar, and then he becomes a cook. He becomes a really good cook. And he's well dressed, contemptuous of women. Kind of a dandy, really.

47:49 Dylan: Yeah.

47:50 Wes: You know, I'm sure there's lots of literature on this where the implication is taken that, you know, it's taken as an implication that he's gay or something. I don't know.

47:58 Mark: Well, he's.

47:58 Wes: He's a big literature.

48:00 Mark: He's singing to this woman that's supposedly engaged to. And then I believe he's staying with this woman and her mother when he's sick. But it doesn't keep him from killing himself. Like, we don't get his inner life at all. Like, what is his relationship with this woman? Does he have love in his life? Can that somehow redeem him? Like, it seems to have no play in his decision making, as so far as the story tells us, yeah, it's true.

48:24 Wes: So Ivan can't stand him and calls him a lackey and all that and raw material for revolution. So in some way he's supposed to be the type of person who will be susceptible to getting involved in a socialist revolution, although his kind will come first and then better ones after. He's storing up ideas. It sounds a little bit like Nietzsche's last man, in a way, as if Ivan thinks Smerdyakov is the last man paving the way for something else. And this is a point where Ivan seems a little bit pro revolution to come. His kind will come first, better ones after.

But I think this is where the storing up ideas, this is part of what might explain it, is that people are speaking of a stable conception of. Of life as. As something giving it meaning. People are given ideas that they don't fully understand and they're willing to act on them. So it's not a kind of thinking, maybe it's just a kind of taking ideas in and they're disconnected. They're not fully.

49:25 Mark: Well, I was surprised, Wesley, that you were saying that he was giving clever arguments. And I purposefully didn't write down this argument that he has with Fyodor about. They had heard about a person who was being tortured by Muslims to give up their Christian faith. And you know, if you do that, is that excusable or not? And he says something to the effect of it is excusable because once I in my heart say that I'm not a Christian anymore, then actually I can't be held to Christian standards. And so then saying that I'm giving up my faith is no longer a sin because I'm not a Christian in the first place. It's not a sin for someone who's not a Christian to say that. And it seems like an obvious bit of casuistry. Is that the word that we keep using? Bad reasoning?

50:08 Wes: Sophistry and.

50:09 Mark: Yeah, sophistry and that. That seems to be maybe when we, if we sort of are trying to put this whole thing in Plato terms, the appetitive part, the thumos, the spirited part, and then the reasoning part is that reason doesn't get a lot of positive coverage in this book like it is. People who are trying to use reasoning are like Ivan, or more like this instance of Smerdyakov, where they're really just playing some little game and they don't really mean it. Yeah, Ivan writes this article that's published about theocracy and he's partially joking like that Reason is sort of playing with ideas in a non serious way. It is not the thing that would then push you toward God in Plato's picture. It is not the solution.

50:55 Wes: Yeah, when I said clever, I think, yeah, he's still sophist in a way. Although I think there is an interesting point to his argument, which is that there's something inherently contradictory about the idea of faith or it's. It's used in this hypocritical way. Right. So the idea of talking about people who are gonna get flayed alive because they won't renounce their faith is to say that one can, in the name of faith can engage in all this sort of self sacrifice and all this masochism. And this is one of the themes of the novel is this objection of morality is a kind of masochism and asceticism.

If faith is imperfect, which it is in all of us, that's his conclusion, then any of us should be able to renounce it without going to hell. You know, if there is such a thing as perfect faith, then it would move mountains. It would have all this practical leverage in the world, in which case we wouldn't need any self sacrifice because we could just kill off the people, crush the people who are about to flay us. I think that is actually a rather clever argument about the nature of faith in the way it's used. But you could say really what happens with someone like Smerdyakov is his reasoning.

He's a nihilist and. Or he's a cynic or whatever you want to call him. And his reasoning is focused on the hypocrisy of others and their inconsistencies. It's kind of an adolescent position. It's something you see a lot today, right. In political discourse Today, people focus not on the substance of what's being talked about, but the hypocritical nature of their opponents. Oh, you want to defend Ukraine? Well, America did all this wrong and wrong and wrong. Right. You're hypocrites. And that becomes the focus, the moral inconsistency, the lack of moral status of the actor, which is actually not relevant when figuring out what the best course of action ethically is before you.

So if you think everyone's a hypocrite, this is sort of, in a way, the inverse of his faith argument. You know, if you. If you think everyone is a hypocrite and your picture of morality demands purity on the part of the actor, then everything is permissible. That's something we should talk about too, the whole permissible thing.

52:59 Seth: So Smerdyakov also notably, Right. We mentioned this earlier, says to Ivan, well, you told me that everything was permitted. If there is no God, everything's permitted. So how did I do anything wrong? That argument about renouncing faith can also go in the same way against Zosima, where it's, if God can forgive anything and anyone, then he can forgive me for renouncing my faith to save my skin and avoid torture.

53:25 Mark: This sounds like a good place to break off part one. We're having a really good time here, and we want to release a part two of this episode. So come back next week, or if you're a partially examined Life supporter, you can hear it right now.