In the Greatest Philosophers In History series, we analyse the most fundamental ideas and views of life of the greatest philosophers in human history. In this episode, we’ll be exploring the philosophy of Fyodor Dostoevsky. As well as a philosopher, Fyodor Dostoevsky is most popularly known as a Russian novelist.
His works explore human psychology in the troubled socio-political atmosphere of 19th century Russia. His novels had a great impact on psychology, the study of how the human mind works, especially of people who lose their reason, who are nihilistic, or who become insane or commit murder. He is considered as one of the greatest psychological novelists in world literature.
Dostoevsky was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1821. His family was very religious and so was he. He began writing widely as a child, as well as being home-schooled until he was sent to a private school when he was 13 years old.
Two years later his mother died of tuberculosis. Dostoevsky’s father, an alcoholic with a short temper, retreated into seclusion, and became even more wretched in temperament. This anger was expressed as abuse on his serfs.
While still at school, Dostoevsky learned that his father had been murdered, the cause of death was left open to speculation, though some imagined it was his serfs who had killed him as an act of vengeance. The death of his father, in circumstances so mysterious and sinister cannot but have affected Dostoevsky profoundly. His first seizure coincided with the death of his father; this was to be his first indication of his lifelong battle with epilepsy.
After finishing his studies in the engineering academy at 23 years old, his passion for literature made him resign from the career he was trained for and devoted himself to writing. Although he had produced some translations of foreign novels, they had little success, and he decided to write a novel of his own to try to raise funds. He was in great financial difficulty because of his extravagant lifestyle and his developing gambling addiction.
Dostoevsky began his career writing fiction about poor people in harsh situations. In 1843 he published his first novel, Poor Folk, written in the form of letters. It is about an impoverished clerk who is hopelessly in love with a young woman he can never possess.
It showcases the life of poor people, their relationship with rich people and poverty in general. The novel was praised by a respected critic, they named it Russia’s first “social novel” and a major socialist work. Unfortunately, his second work, The Double, was received less warmly.
His later works did not gain much popularity. This lack of success troubled Dostoevsky. His life and work were characterised by aimlessness and confusion, publishing short stories that are for the most part experiments in different forms and different subject matters.
Some years later, he joined a literary discussion group of revolutionaries called the Petrashevsky Circle, focused on overthrowing the existing social order, opposing the Russian feudal system, which kept millions of serfs trapped in a life of servitude without full legal rights. Inevitably, the members were infiltrated by the secret police and eventually arrested, Dostoevsky was among them. He found himself incarcerated and in solitary confinement.
For Dostoevsky it was the true beginning of his inner life, of the illumination out of which his great works were to come. He was introduced to the theme of punishment he was suffering as well as crime. Eight months later, he was sentenced to death.
He was led to be shot by a firing squad in a public square. At the very last minute, as the rifles were loaded and aimed, a messenger arrived waving a white flag and telling the armed men to stop the execution. It had all been planned.
Every last detail had been pre-arranged in a twisted form of psychological torture. He was sent to a prison labour camp in Siberia for four years in extremely harsh conditions followed by another six years of compulsory military service in exile. The decade of the 1860s was one of the most turbulent in Russian history as well as one with great reforms, with the long-awaited end of the serfdom era.
After he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg some ten years later, he returned a different man. He wrote and published a prison memoir titled Notes from the House of Dead, in which he described his own experience as well as the lives of the variety of prisoners he’d encountered in Siberia.
And a year after that, in 1864, he published Notes from the Underground, which is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature. In this work Dostoevsky attempts to justify the existence of individual freedom as a necessary part of humankind. It presents the story of a bitter and isolated retired civil servant known as the Underground Man.
His goal is to make everyone around him as unhappy as he is. However, he’s doing something important, he insists on the peculiar fact of the human condition, we want happiness but we have a special talent for making ourselves miserable. “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering: that is a fact.
” Dostoevsky argues against the popular view that man is a creature of reason and that society can be organized in a way that guarantees the happiness of humans. He insists that humans desire freedom more than happiness, but he also sees freedom as a destructive force, since there is no guarantee that humans will use it in a constructive way. The evidence of history suggests that humans seek the destruction of others and of themselves.
Suffering is part of the human condition. And ideologies that seek to improve the world always contain a flaw, they won’t eradicate suffering, but rather change the things that will cause pain. Thus, life can only be a process of changing the focus of pain and there will always be something to agonise us.
Notes from the Underground launches an attack on all ideologies of social progress which aspire to the elimination of suffering, solving one problem and directing our nature to become unhappy in other ways. Dostoevsky was a unique writer in that he often made the people who stand for the antithesis of what he believed, the strongest, smartest, and most admirable people in his books. Which takes great moral courage.
However, some people may be mistaken in thinking that he condones the actions of heinous characters. This amazing piece of literature was the start of his four masterworks: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. Crime and Punishment remains the single most widely known Russian novel as well as one of the greatest works in world literature.
It is first and foremost a fascinating detective novel, but one in which we know from the very beginning who committed the heinous crime. It focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Raskolnikov, an impoverished law student in St. Petersburg unable to pay for his studies.
He can be viewed as a materialistic rationalist, an oddity at that time and taken by the idea that God was dead. He was convinced that the only reason that anyone acted in a moral way was because of cowardice and tradition. Dostoevsky wanted to set up a character who had every reason to commit murder: philosophically, practically, and ethically.
Raskolnikov formulates a plan to kill an evil old woman who is a pawnbroker and who possesses a great deal of money from people struggling financially, after eavesdropping on a conversation in which a student claimed that the world would be better off if she were dead and the money were given to someone who needed it more. He also believes that he can liberate himself from poverty and go on to perform greet deeds for society, the end justifying the means. Raskolnikov rationalised his philosophy of murder stating: However, things did not go as planned.
After the carefully planned murder, he finds himself confused, paranoid and with disgust for what he has done. He enters periods of delirium in which he struggles with guilt and horror and has a series of disturbing dreams. In a way, along with the murder, he had also killed a part of himself.
Raskolnikov’s pride separates him from society, he sees himself as a sort of “higher man”, a person who is extraordinary and thus above all moral rules that govern the rest of humanity, and so he cannot relate to anyone of the ordinary people, who must live in obedience and do not have the right to overstep the law. He says: Thus, he considers himself one of them, and in view of unfortunate worldly circumstances and the advancement of mankind in some way, he steps over the obstacles of murder and robbery. After the murder, his isolation increases.
The novel deeply explores the psychology of the inner world of Raskolnikov. Dostoevsky seems to suggest that actual imprisonment and punishment is much better than the stress and anxiety of trying to avoid punishment. One must eventually confess or go mad.
Dostoevsky portrays Raskolnikov as a nihilist, gloomy and with a feeling of deep emptiness, for the most part of the novel. He is a utilitarian who believes that moral decisions should be based on the rule of the greatest happiness for the largest number of people, thus justifying, in his mind, the murder. In the views of the socialist reforms in 19th century Russia, crime is a protest against the abnormal structure of society and nothing more.
In other words, the environment is what has ruined them. Thus, if society were to be organised normally, then all crime would disappear instantly, since there’d be no reason to protest and everyone would immediately become righteous. However, Dostoevsky heavily criticises this notion stating that: In other words, we cannot be held under a rigid social system.
He states: This, in essence, is one of the most important aspects of Crime and Punishment. Humanity is much more complicated than the social engineers like to think. Another aspect of the book is to accept suffering and be redeemed by it.
This was Dostoevsky’s message to a world hurrying frenziedly in the opposite direction. Seeking to abolish suffering and find happiness. However, since Dostoevsky’s time the world has known much trouble and found little happiness.
The novel reflects the social upheaval and the major changes in Russian society after centuries of serfdom. Poverty became a constant hardship and there was an increase of violence as a result of difficult economic conditions. Drnkenness, prostitution, disease, and abandoned children all came to typify the nature of Russian reality in the 1860s.
During this time, nihilism became prevalent, espousing for the end of belief in religion and God and for it to be replaced by something new. At this time German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote that God is Dead, not a celebratory but a tragic statement. However, he believed that men could do without religion and create new values, rising up to the figure of the ubermensch or overman.
Thus, man becomes God. Dostoevsky saw this new atheist movement as incredibly dangerous; it laid the seeds for the character of Raskolnikov, with his own superman beliefs. Nietzsche read and admired Dostoevsky, he called him “the only psychologist from whom he had something to learn”, and that he Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had strikingly similar themes.
Both are haunted by central questions surrounding the human existence, especially ones concerning God. While Dostoevsky is a literary author exploring these themes through nuanced characters and plot lines, Nietzsche’s writing style is more aphoristic and poetic. Dostoevsky’s next major book is The Idiot, whose central character is Prince Myshkin, a young man who returns to Russia after spending time in a Swiss sanatorium receiving treatment for epilepsy and “idiocy” (until the 20th century an actual medical term for neurological disorders).
Starting with the train ride to St. Petersburg he is thrown headfirst into the corruptness of society. His open-heartedness, innocence and lack of social experience leads many of the people he encounters to assume he lacks intelligence and calls him an “idiot”, even though he is highly intelligent, often thinking deeply about human nature and embodying what are supposed to be the best aspects of a human being and a true Christian.
Where Crime and Punishment leads to Raskolnikov’s internal struggle, The Idiot deals with Prince Myshkin’s effect on the cold, money-hungry and manipulative society he finds himself in. Dostoevsky set himself the task of depicting a good soul in the cruel world. It is one of the most personal of all his works showing the feeling and thoughts of a person before execution, mirroring Dostoevsky’s own experience.
He wrote: There was a church not far off, its gilt roof shining in the bright sunshine, he remembered staring with awful intensity at that roof and the sunbeams flashing from it, he couldn’t tear his eyes of those rays of lights, those rays seemed to him to be his new nature and he felt that he’d somehow merged with them, the uncertainty and the feeling of disgust with that new thing which was bound to come in a minute was dreadful, but he said that the thing that was most horrible to him was the constant thought: He said that this reflection finally filled him with such bitterness that he prayed to be shot as quickly as possible. Another similarity between the main character and Dostoevsky are the epileptic episodes. For much of his adulthood he suffered from an unusual and debilitating form of epilepsy.
He wrote to his doctor: Overall, the novel reflects the meaning of life and death and suffering as well as the beauty of humanity. For: The book did, however, receive some criticism because of its awkward structure and chaotic organization. Dostoevsky wrote in a letter: His third masterwork is Demons or The Devils.
It is an allegory of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the ideologies present in 19th century Russia, especially European liberalism, and nihilism in contrast to what was most important to Dostoevsky, Russian Orthodoxy. The novel is sometimes very funny but slowly turns progressively tragic and sinister, plumbing into the depths of human despair, with no one escaping the darkness. It turns into a large-scale tragedy which studies the question of social organisation of the future society which is to replace the present one.
The main purpose of the novel is to show what a spiritual emptiness can do to human nature and how an unresolved individual existential crisis might lead to disaster. The Devils can be seen as characters regarded as spokesmen for different ideologies attracting the Russian mind. Each of the ideology carries a perspective on God, they can be summarised in four different views: The first ideology is religious nationalism that claims that the aim of all movements of nations is solely seeking for God.
The second is the destructive nihilistic socialism which serves as a disguise for opportunism. The third one is a faith in self-will to overcome pain and fear and for one to become God himself, and the fourth is the Satan-like, seductive, yet repellent and empty personality associated with the hallucination of Romanticism. In the end, all of them perish.
“The whole law of human existence consists in nothing other than a man’s always being able to bow before the immeasurably great. " In other words, Dostoevsky portrays human existence as a sign of “immeasurable and infinite” divinity. People find themselves emotionally attached not by realism, but by the ideal side of ideologies and the religious note in it.
The work was so powerful that one particular chapter “At Tikhon’s” was banned and considered immoral because it was “unbearably realistic”, with Dostoevsky being forced to publish the book without it. A shocking and revelatory chapter summarising the essence of the novel which would later be included as an appendix. The Brothers Karamazov is the final novel by Dostoevsky, he shortly died after its publication.
It is a philosophical novel that enters deeply into questions of God, free will and morality, disguised as a simple murder mystery. It tackles the fundamental question of human existence – how best to live one’s life. It presents three brothers: the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational atheist Ivan; and youngest of all, the novice Alyosha, who all have opposing views to this fundamental question.
Their father, Fyodor, is a reckless and rich man who chases after women. Dostoevsky did not really know how the book would evolve when he started writing, a testament to his genius. As a consequence, the book is not so much about the plot, but rather how these brothers evolve and deal with their struggles based on their differing world views.
Humans are walking contradictions and Dostoevsky’s character development in this book is truly a masterpiece. The characters are more real and human than any other and you’ll identify with them, sympathise with them, curse them, and celebrate them. It can be a deeply personal experience since you might be attached to one of these characters’ worldviews, eventually realising that you don’t like what you see – shifting your entire worldview and direction in life as a result of this experience.
A particularly important passage in the book is that of an imaginary encounter with the most powerful religious leader the Grand Inquisitor and Jesus, who has made his return on Earth. Here, the rationalist and nihilistic ideology that permeated Russia is defended by Ivan while meeting his brother Alyosha. He proclaims that he rejects the world that God has created because it is built on a foundation of suffering.
Christ has reappeared among the people and been recognised. He walks among them in silence with a gentle smile of infinite compassion. The Grand Inquisitor passes by and commands the guards to seize Jesus.
The guards take him as a prisoner and lock him in. The day passes and night falls. Amid the profound darkness the iron door of the prison is suddenly opened and the old Grand Inquisitor himself slowly enters the prison with a light in his hand, he stops and gazes for a long time into the face of Christ.
He accuses him of having inflicted on humankind the “burden” of free will, and that he is a threat to the stability of society. If he were to remain alive, he’d upset everything and must die again. All the time the Grand Inquisitor has been speaking, Christ has remained quite silent.
He suddenly approached the old man and kissed him gently, that was all his answer. The old man, stunned and moved, tells him he must never come there again and lets him out. The prisoner went away leaving the old man with that kiss glowing in his heart and his idea staying in his mind and so it remained still.
Dostoevsky portrays the Grand Inquisitor not as a monster, but rather as a quite admirable figure. He is a guide to the crucial idea that human beings cannot live in purity, cannot live up to Christ’s message. The statue to Russia’s national poet Pushkin was unveiled in 1880 providing Dostoevsky with the opportunity he’d long sought, actually to speak to his fellow countrymen, warning them of the dangers that lie ahead and the ruinous consequences that would surely ensue if they followed the Westerners with their fraudulent promises of progress and freedom.
He delivered his address in a hall of columns used by the nobility. A truly prophetic figure, speaking with great force and eloquence and leading up to his tremendous climax when he proclaimed the coming of a universal brotherhood brought about not by socialism and revolution but by the full and perfect realisation of the Christian Enlightenment. He died a year later in 1881, from his complicated health problems.
Everything that Dostoevsky had warned against had become a reality in Russia, the church had collapsed, nihilism and atheism became prevalent and the ideologies of Marx and Lenin that made people believe that it was possible to create a perfect society without God, caused millions of deaths. Dostoevsky’s works, far from seeming to belong to a vanished past, grow ever more relevant to the dilemmas and distractions which are part of the experience of living in this age. All his life he was questing for God and only seems to have found him, if ever, at the end of his days, after passing through what he called the hellfire of doubt.
What makes his books well worth reading now is the unsparing vision of what destructive forces come into the world when there is a vacuum of spiritual understanding. Freedom to choose between good and evil he saw as the very essence of human existence. All our imperfections are part of the human condition and we shouldn’t torment ourselves with the dream that we could become perfect and ideal beings.
