Episode #218 ... Dostoevsky - Notes From Underground
35:42 Share

Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So if you've been listening to the podcast lately and you wanted an example of characters that confront nihilism at a deep level, or characters that try to be authentic on the other side of nihilism, at the level that Nishitani's talking about when he talks about a religious quest...

Well, let's just say you could do worse than reading some of Fyodor Dostoevsky's most famous books, from Crime and Punishment to The Idiot to Brothers Karamazov to the one we're talking about today, written earlier in his career than any of those. The one we're talking about today is called Notes from Underground, written in the year 1864, arguably his deepest exploration into nihilism. And there's plenty of resources out there that could give you a summary of a book like this, so that's not what I'm going to be doing today.

And I guess you could always read a summary if you didn't want to read the actual book. But I will say this, if you were going to read a book in the near future, then Notes from Underground is a pretty short one. And in keeping with what I've been talking about lately, where there are some insights about life and reality that are really only things that can be directly experienced by immersing yourself in them, then God, I don't know, it might be fun to read some Russian literature at some point in your life if you haven't yet. It might be something that speaks to you in a unique way.

Nonetheless, I feel the need to say here, there will be some inevitable spoilers in this episode if that's something that matters to you, but mostly what this will be is an innocent conversation among us friends about the nihilism that goes on for the main character of this book, as well as Keiji Nishitani chiming in every once in a while with how he sees what's going on.

Anyway, if you've never read Dostoevsky before, then one of the biggest pieces of context I could give you right here at the start is that one of the main things he wants to put at center stage throughout all of his works, but it certainly applies to Notes from Underground 2, at center stage is the complexity and the irrationality of the internal human experience. That what it is to be a person is oftentimes a chaotic mess.

In fact, Dostoevsky's work can really only be understood fully if you consider it as something that's opposing the positivism and overly rational ways of thinking that were dominating academia during the time that he was alive. So to give an example of this, this is going to show up in a few different places in the real world over the course of his life. One of them is going to be in the political realm in an area you might already be familiar with.

There's a belief among certain thinkers around this time, like Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Charles Fourier, there's a utopian socialist vision that's popular around this time, that if only we rationally understand human beings at a deep enough level, and then if only we can come up with a rational system of ordering all these people politically,

then what we'll have on the other side of that is a kind of crystal palace, as it's called by Fourier, where in this rationally ordered utopia we've created, you know, disputes between people will have been mostly resolved. Most imbalances that lead to personal problems for people will have been sorted out. The world will be a pretty wonderful place to live in, they say, and we'd have rationality and the social sciences to thank for this brave new world that we've created.

And this is a way of thinking about people and about society that Dostoevsky thinks is absolutely ridiculous. Should be said, he's coming from a similar place that we've talked about recently on this podcast. Remember the problem that Nietzsche had with Socrates? Nietzsche thought that Western thinking had made a huge mistake since about the time of Socrates, that they've massively over-indexed on the idea that rationality can lead us to the good.

that if only we reason correctly, then pretty much everybody can think their way to the ideals they should be aiming for in their moral decision-making. The idea is that people are mostly just good rational people, and that most people, when they're faced with a moral problem in their lives, well, here's the process: they collect all the information they can about it, they consider all the possible options they can think of, and then they reason very carefully and act out the best decision they possibly can. The assumption by these people is that if people are making bad choices out there,

Well, that's just because they haven't practiced reasoning about morality enough. Also, that it's our job as a society to educate people, to make them aware of all the arguments, and to teach them how to reason better. But Dostoevsky's going to say that this is nowhere near what it's like to actually exist as a human being with an internal experience of the world. Look, it would be amazing if this was how it works, where I know that something's best for me, and then I just do the thing that's best for me all the time.

But if you actually look at the psychology of someone that's facing their life head on, it is in reality an enormously complex thing. The kind of complexity you'll see all over the characters that are portrayed throughout his books. Part of what Dostoevsky wants to say with this work is that to be a human being is not to do the rational thing all the time. People often do things that they know is not the right thing for them to do.

People will sabotage themselves and other people for what's essentially zero gain in their actual life. People often want things that are obviously destructive to them. People often don't even know what it is they really want. Consider how much of life is taken up by getting the thing you want, and then after getting it, realizing not only does it turn out you don't actually want the thing you thought you did,

but that you weren't even the person you thought you were when you decided you supposedly wanted the thing in the first place. The actual, internal experience of a person is something that is enormously chaotic, filled with tensions, where we hold opposite positions at the exact same time. And this idea that you're making these sterilized, rational calculations that are going on up in your head somewhere is really just for lack of affirming the actual set of challenges you face every day when trying to navigate your own experience.

And characters from Dostoevsky's work are going to reflect this true complexity in a way that's just artwork. I mean, Crime and Punishment, for example, is said by some to be the first psychological thriller that was ever written. Notes from Underground, the one we're talking about today, goes on more or less entirely in the ruminating thoughts of the main character who's trapped up in his head.

Anyway, so as we go throughout the themes of this book here today, just know that Dostoevsky is having none of this nonsense from the utopian side of things. Not only that rationality is ever going to be able to fully explain the internal experience of an individual, but also that we will ever be able to use rationality to arrive at some perfect political system that perfectly organizes people like they're the keys on a piano, as he puts it. We're not that. We're something much more dynamic and chaotic than that.

And that these utopian theories are not just political theories to him. They're not just philosophical arguments that are detached from the people. No, in the lived experience of the person in one of these societies, these theories become a matter of life and death for the soul to Dostoevsky.

Any thinking where we're going to limit the freedom of individuals to try to rationally solve their problems for them, to him, this is something that's always going to end up failing because it denies what human beings really are. Suffering is a necessary part of a human life. And if you try to rationally coordinate things to put an end to one kind of suffering for good, Dostoevsky thinks you're just opening people up to a different kind of suffering somewhere else. And this point will make more sense once we get more into his later work.

Anyway, so as an example of this internal emotional complexity we're talking about, Dostoevsky creates the main character of his book, Notes from Underground. Now, we don't know everything about this character. In fact, we don't even know his real name. People usually just call him the Underground Man when they talk about the book. What we do know about him, though, is that he is nothing short of completely miserable. Like a real shining example of a miserable person, someone that's made a prison for himself in his own life and mind.

Now the first thing to maybe know about him is that he's clearly a very smart person. And that's an important part of all this, because to Dostoevsky, it's not like what got him trapped in this prison is the fact that he's stupid. No, he's actually thought about things quite a lot throughout the course of his life.

In fact, almost everybody, if they didn't know him, might see him as somebody who's maybe thought about things too much and now has made himself miserable somehow. But from his perspective, he hasn't thought about things too much. He just sees through the illusions that most people live every day of their lives in. He sees through all the social pleasantries and customs people blindly follow. He sees through things like religion. He even sees through this rationalist utopian nonsense we just talked about, where more generally, rationality becomes something people cling to in their lives.

This is a guy that supposedly sees through the illusion of all this kind of stuff. And so the result of that is that he doesn't really believe in much of anything in terms of these theoretical systems that, from his perspective, exist in large part just to control people's behavior. I mean, in his mind, at least he's someone who's free from all that that's going on. Now, much more on this point here in a second. But first, let's just think about what kind of life this attitude creates for the underground man that he ends up living every day.

He's so critical of everything that provides meaning and connection in the world around him that he's thought himself into a corner, a corner where he's completely alone and can do nothing with his time but just contemplate things. He's never able to act on anything.

He describes in the book the kind of stuff he does with his day. He says he sits in a small, cramped apartment and he reads a whole bunch of novels. He takes in all the fictional stories from the world, but then he's constantly disappointed when he has to look at the real world in the way it actually is. More than that, because he's alone in this apartment all day, he will argue with fake people up in his head, you know, creating elaborate scenarios that never even existed just so he can feel a kind of spiteful connection to someone else for a moment.

He will spend hours remembering every problem anyone has ever caused for him, you know, plotting his revenge against these people as though these people cared a lot more about him than they really do.

He doubts constantly. He overthinks constantly. And what makes this an even worse situation for him to be in is that he's fully aware that he takes these things way too far. He's aware of the many flaws that he carries into his own existence, and yet he can't bring himself to change them. Because to change something about yourself would require at least some form of action. And when you think and doubt as much as the underground man does, you never end up being able to take action on anything.

What I mean is, you know, even with something as simple as just wanting to do the right thing in some small circumstance, say you wanted to think about how to vote on some local levy, like what's the right thing to do here? Well, if you're committed enough to doubt in your worldview, then what does that look like if you play out the tape? You will just sit around contemplating things for the rest of your life, unable to take action on anything. You will just rip apart every attempt at an idea of what justice is, for example, the second that you try to formulate it.

But his situation actually gets even worse than this, if you're Dostoevsky, because not only will the underground man rip apart every rational argument that comes his way...

But he's also in a place where he can't fully deny the validity of there being at least some rational objective truth to things in the universe. I mean, after all, as he mentions, two times two just equals four, right? Seems pretty clear that's an objective fact of the universe. More than that, how about the laws of the natural world, the facts of our own existence?

To deny these things seems to be ridiculous at some level. And this is what Dostoevsky calls the stone wall that we encounter in the universe. It's a stone wall that we hit, that there are things that seem to be rationally, objectively true and deterministic.

And it should be said, there are many people that at this point in their thinking, you know, after questioning things like God for a while, they'll see this rational stone wall that Dostoevsky is talking about, and then they will cling on to that rationality as the new ultimate way that we get to the truth, the new ultimate way of predicting everything, but not the underground man. Because while he can't deny these things outright, while he can't deny that two times two equals four,

He also can't fully accept rationality either as something that can ever fully predict or coordinate his experience as a person or the world in all of its complexity. Rationality to him has limitations. To him, there is no objective rational form of something like justice. There's just the illusion of the endless ways people rationalize their own version of justice being objective.

In other words, he refuses to be someone that makes rationality into something more than what it is, to reify it, and he refuses to use the stone wall as a tranquilizer for any inconvenient feelings that may come out of there being limitations to rationality. But yet again, at the same time, he also cannot deny that rationality does seem to point to some kind of truth that's out there.

So the underground man is a man that's trapped in a kind of limbo up in his head. He's stuck in a place that Dostoevsky calls contemplative inertia. Because when you both can't deny rationality, but you can't accept it either. Well, for one thing, as you can imagine, this is a pretty good recipe for becoming miserable. But as the philosopher Keiji Nishitani says, when assessing the situation of the underground man, he says this is a person who has effectively negated the self of

and then withdrawn into a totally reactionary place of inactivity. In other words, he's reduced the self into a state of just contemplative nihilism and nothing else. And for Keiji Nishitani, that's the existential move that's gone on here for the underground man. Here's where he's coming from. Remember the criticism Nietzsche had of passive reactive approaches to life.

That when you're in one, you're never creating, you're never differentiating, you're never part of the unfolding of reality into the future. You're always just reacting to reality as it unfolds and then trying to understand it by filtering it through some set of protocols that someone else has already come up with.

Well, the underground man is in a situation that is even more severe than this because he's in a place where he doubts even the reactive rational theories that people try to simplify reality down with. He's calling into question everything. And for Keiji Nishitani and his religious quest that we talked about last time, the way he'd describe what's going on with the underground man is that he's someone that's overly stuck in the field of awareness he calls nihility.

Because if nihility is the thing that gets us to question the stable forms we usually use to give meaning to our reality, then the underground man and his entire life of sitting at home, critiquing and contemplating things, never taking action on anything, he is basically the human embodiment of nihility.

To Nishitani, he's someone who lives in a state of what most resembles a type of madness, where he's at the same time constantly in a state of paralysis, but constantly in a state of rebellion against the world of meaning. Now, does that description of his life resonate with anybody out there listening in a place that you may have been in before? Another question, is this a better description of your psychology than other attempts that just try to connect it to some pre-existing rational framework?

The beauty of what Dostoevsky's doing here is on full display. And I mean, despite the fact that the underground man has been framed up until this point in the episode as someone who's completely miserable, for someone like Nishitani, he actually has quite a bit of respect for someone like the underground man. Which, the subtext there is that he actually has a ton of respect for Dostoevsky.

Because for Nishitani, the character Dostoevsky writes about and presents to the reader in the form of the underground man is not some basic level of nihilism that pretty much everybody gets to at some point in their life. This isn't nihilism in the form of being an atheist and a fan of science. No, this is a deeper engagement with nihilism where we're questioning the foundations of rationality that Nishitani says you don't really see in Russian literature before the work of Dostoevsky.

And this isn't something he'd just stumble upon either. The only way he could have possibly written so vividly from this perspective is if he himself had been trapped in this contemplative inertia at some point in his life and navigated his way through it.

Which as we know, Nishitani is all about steering into deeper and deeper forms of nihilism as a means of undergoing a personal religious transformation. So if the underground man actually represents someone that's currently going through a pretty deep engagement with nihilism, then let's talk about a few more of the events in his life that are given as examples in the book that Dostoevsky uses to show what might be missing from only viewing the world in this way.

You know, Dostoevsky once wrote that if you want an example of what hell is, well, hell is a place where a person is unable to love. And the underground man building his world in the way that he does, treating people in the way that he does, essentially guarantees that he's always going to be living in this kind of hell.

And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today, patreon.com/philosophizethis for an ad-free experience. First up today is NordVPN. So if you're not familiar, a VPN is a virtual private network.

It's an application you run on your devices that creates an encrypted tunnel for your data, protecting your internet connection and your privacy. It hides your IP address, so whether you're working in a coffee shop, traveling, it makes it a little less stressful for you to be using public Wi-Fi. I use NordVPN to access documentaries that are only available in other countries. I know, I know. Arrest me. I'm a monster. I just, I can't, I can't help it. I just love that Louis Theroux. He's just so gosh darn genuine.

Anyway, none of that would be possible without a VPN. NordVPN's the fastest VPN in the world and it's about the price of a cup of coffee per month. One account works on up to 10 different devices, so tell Temi he's included here too. To get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/philothis. Our link will also give you 4 extra months on the 2-year plan. There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the episode description box. Up next is Aura Frames.

Isn't it funny how the people we love the most are often the hardest people to shop for? Luckily, there's one gift that everyone on your list is sure to enjoy: an Aura Digital Picture Frame. Named #1 by Wirecutter, Aura Frames makes it incredibly easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame.

And when you give an Aura Frame as a gift, you can personalize it and preload it with a thoughtful message or photos using the Aura app, making it an ideal present for those long-distance loved ones like Grandma Beatrice. I gave it as a gift. Loaded all kinds of pictures on it of the family this year. It's been wonderful. I mean, me and my family absolutely love the Aura Frame that we have. I highly recommend it for you. It's a great gift.

Save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carver matte frames by using promo code PT at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code PT. This deal is exclusive to listeners, so get yours now in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. December is here, and it's that cozy time of year when you're curling up with a warm blanket, maybe have a hot drink, maybe you're watching your favorite holiday movies with the fam.

But let's be real, while the holidays can bring joy, they can also be a little stressful. And therapy can be a great way to bring some comfort that lasts far beyond the holiday season. Whether you're looking to build positive coping skills, to set better boundaries, or just work on becoming the best version of yourself, therapy can be for everyone. It's not just for those who have been through major challenges or traumas.

Now, if you're thinking about starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a quick questionnaire. You'll be matched with a licensed therapist. Plus, you can switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Find comfort this December with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash fill this today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash fill this. And now, back to the podcast.

The title, Notes from Underground, is a metaphor for the kind of isolated madness that he lives in every day. He actually compares himself to a mouse at one point in the book, a rodent whose life is to listen to people through the floorboards and then to judge their conversations, finding out all the things that are wrong with the way that they're looking at things.

You can see another tension here start to emerge in the way that he's living. The tension is that on the one hand, he's super aware of many of the flaws that he has. He's very aware that basically nobody has any reason they would ever want to hang out with him.

I mean, the way he sees it, he's not ever going to participate in their delusions. So what use could they possibly have for him? He really is, in his own mind, a subhuman creature, like a mouse that lives in a crawlspace. But on the other hand, he definitely thinks of himself at some other level as superior to these other people because he's smarter than them, because he's thought about things more than them.

because he sees the flaws in their thinking that they aren't able to see. So he finds comfort in this feeling of superiority. I mean, better to be a mouse, thinking of yourself as subhuman, but smartly critiquing everything alone in a crawlspace, than to be dumb and oblivious and acting out a set of delusions like these people do. This is his thinking.

So the underground man, and by the way, you may also know him by his work as Mr. Congeniality in the various pageants that he attends. There's a story in the book he tells of a time he took this attitude of his to a party that was going on. He wasn't invited to the party. No, no. He just shows up. He's told about it when he runs into someone that's going the day before.

Anyway, he shows up at this party and everyone's looking at him. Oh, oh, you. Nice to see you. These are his former classmates at the party. And he hates all these people, by the way, but he just still had to go for some reason. And he shows up bringing all this famous energy he's known for into the room. And when people start trying to talk to him at the party, what does he inevitably do? Well, he's awkward. He doesn't really know how to have a conversation with someone without being defensive.

They'll ask him something about himself. He'll say something back that's a little off, and people will pull back a bit. So they try again. They're like, maybe I'll make a joke with him this time. But he freaks out. He says something mean or antagonistic back to them that doesn't make sense. The group pulls back even more. The guy is utterly incapable of connecting with anyone at this party because he has no ability to meet people in the conversation on their own home ground.

So the whole situation's turning out to be pretty uncomfortable at this party, and to make all the awkwardness just a little easier for him to deal with, he starts drinking. And oh does that help his situation a ton. Eventually he drinks to the point that he gets up in front of everybody and makes a horrible speech that just makes everyone mad at him. Then after that he decides, "You know what? Screw these guys. I'm just gonna sit here and drink alone, and if they want to talk to me, they're gonna have to come and talk to me first. That's what I'm gonna do."

But no one talks to him. He just sits there getting more and more drunk as the night goes on. He actually overhears a guy say at one point, "I will never forgive myself for letting him join us tonight." Then at one point in the night, the whole group of guys that he was talking to moves from the table they were sitting at over to the sofa. They're trying to have a more comfortable conversation. But

But nobody invites him over to the sofa to have the conversation with them. So what does he do? Well, the underground man, for three hours straight, walks over near them, adjacent to them, and drunkenly paces around thinking to himself silently, laughing occasionally to himself, looking over at them, listening in on their conversation. He's like this lost puppy, wishing they'd just call him over to talk to them so he can show them how smart he really is. But at the same time, he's also hating all these people with a passion.

All the while telling himself, by the way, that the only reason he's pacing around like this is because it's exactly what he wants to be doing right now. It has nothing to do with him. For three hours, he does this at this party. Eventually, the night ends. Everyone's going home. And now you may think this is where you'd call it a night if you're the underground man. Go home. Hang the shoes up. But no, no. Drunk. Just got done humiliating yourself at a party. What does a man do when he's on a roll making good life choices like this?

Well, he decides to go to a brothel after the party. He actually was going to go confront some people that were at the party that he thought had went to that brothel. But upon arriving, realizes they're not in fact there. And so he starts talking to what may be the most spiritually enlightened person of the entire book, a prostitute by the name of Lisa. Now, Lisa is going to teach us something very important about the underground man and the whole collection of games he's playing with his life.

I guess it's worth repeating how they met. I mean, he's drunk, he's upset, and in his insecurity, he just starts lambasting this woman at a brothel for all the poor life choices she's making as a prostitute. How she's ruining her ability for any chance at a better life with her line of work. You know, classic underground man kind of stuff. But it's funny, you know, Lisa, hearing all the criticisms from this man, it's clear in the book she's a smart person and has a pretty complicated reaction to all this. On the one hand, she's obviously hurt by the criticism and all the stuff he's saying, and

But on the other hand, she feels like he's someone that's shown some kind of care towards her. He's trying to help, albeit in a twisted sort of way. He clearly doesn't like himself very much, but at least he's there. And maybe she feels for him a bit as a fellow human being. Maybe this is just some kind of misguided affection.

So when he leaves the brothel and gives her his address and says to stop by sometime, well, she shows up at his house a few days later. And the day she shows up at his house, he's in a particularly underground state, even for underground man standards. Like this is a day where the dude's spiraling. And when she sees him like this and she opens herself up to him, he just rejects her and lays into her even more like pure cruelty at this point, just trying to hurt her with his words, even though it's not what he actually feels.

I mean, keep in mind this is someone who had just spent the last three days in the book hoping she would show up. And now he's telling her stuff like he's laughing at her behind her back, hoping that she'd never show up. But still, even after all this, Lisa just gives him a hug. She holds him. She lets him cry on the couch. She still offers herself to him unconditionally, even when he's in this almost completely broken state.

Now this reaction from her makes him furious and also completely confused. After all, from his perspective, she can't be serious, right? What could he as a person possibly have to offer her? For somebody to want to love somebody who's like him...

She must be either out of her mind or stupid or completely misreading the situation. So he does the ultimate disrespect. He tells her to go. He puts a five ruble note in her hand. It's kind of like giving her 20 bucks and then sends her on her way, basically just pointing out that she's a prostitute and that it's time for her to go. At which point she refuses the money. She drops it, leaves the apartment, slamming the door behind her. He chases after her at the end of the book, calling to her, but she doesn't stop.

Now, what does all this reveal about the underground man, if you're Dostoevsky? Like, why include these scenes from his life in the book? Well, one thing Dostoevsky wants to show is how much his life has turned into a constant painful tension between love and freedom. A tension many people in the modern world find themselves living in with our technological and framing we tend to give to everything, including other people.

Let me explain. You know, coming from the modern Western world, it's always really tempting to see freedom in terms of how much independence you have. Like, how much can I do my own thing without somebody else stepping in and telling me I can't? That's what freedom is. Or framed in a slightly different way, can I do things in my life without other people projecting their expectations onto me? If there's lots of expectations from other people, that must mean I'm not very free.

So when the underground man doesn't follow social expectations and critiques everyone who does, or when he critiques systems to the point that he doesn't believe in anything, or when he pushes people away to the point that he can't form a connection with anybody, when he does these things, he thinks this is him exercising his freedom. But to Dostoevsky, being independent is not a synonym for being free. Being independent is a synonym for being alone.

I mean, it should be said, Dostoevsky would be highly skeptical of anyone out there that's under the impression they're totally independent anyway. We are at bottom interdependent creatures. We are born into the care of others. And as we've been talking about lately, we are always already embedded in relationships with people, with ideas, animals, the universe. And to see yourself as independent is really just a modern luxury that says a whole lot more about how little you're paying attention to your own existence than it does anything about the state of the world.

So not only does he think freedom like this is an illusion, but even if you could have total independence, it wouldn't be the highest form of freedom that human beings are capable of anyway. And the underground man, when he's at that party, at some level craves the social connection to his former classmates. He wants them all to like him, but at the same time, he wants to hate them. And he can't figure out how to get past this. Think of the three hours he spent pacing around the party alone. And think of the metaphor Dostoevsky's using there.

If you're alone just in your everyday life, and in theory you would like people to be able to connect with, well, in one sense, the people are already there. There's people all around you if you look for them. But if you're unwilling to even try to meet them on their own home ground, even a little, if you then sabotage your ability to connect with anyone by getting drunk, if you just pace around alone in your apartment coming up with everything that's stupid about what they're saying...

What do you expect is going to happen? You think they're going to throw you a parade? And then to come up with the rationalization after the fact that don't worry, this is exactly what I wanted to be doing with my night anyway. That is an absolute masterclass by the underground man here.

You can't have love and connection and have total independence simultaneously. The two are incompatible. And what you'll notice are the similarities here to the religious quest we talked about last time through the work of Keiji Nishitani. I mean, why is it that so many religious traditions talk about love as the natural insight of being committed to a religious quest? Is it just a coincidence? Is it that they know stupid people won't question it when they hear it? Oh, yeah, love, love. Yeah, I agree with that. Here's 10% of my income. Take it.

No, the reason why is because love is the opposite of the utilitarian framing that we usually give to everything in the modern world. Again, we often view everything in terms of what use it serves to ourselves or to society, not in terms of what it is on its own home ground. For example, how many people out there in the modern world structure the relationships in their lives, the people they supposedly love, simply in terms of some role or function those people serve to them?

They'll be asked, why do you love this other person? And they'll say back, well, I love them because we share similar values, or because they make me feel emotionally comfy, or because they have a good job, or we're both passionate about fitness together, whatever it is. And these are all well and good as ways to categorize people. But in many religious settings, this is not a kind of love that is enduring. This is a kind of love that is ultimately conditional.

Because the person loses the good job or all of a sudden they don't make you feel as emotionally comfy and the love often goes away with it.

But this is why some people say that love is not a noun, it's not a set of conditions that's met. Love is a verb. Love is a commitment and a process that you're engaged in with another person. It's an acknowledgement of their whole being, the flaws, the strengths, the good and bad, the truly bad about someone. It's like adopting a tragic perspective for a single person where you never idealize them, but accept them in all their complexity. None of that means you stay with someone if they're abusive to you. Sometimes to love someone is to know when to not be around them.

What it does mean, though, is that you know where you're coming from if you're treating people in your life by framing them solely in a utilitarian way, where your relationship with them is reduced to a transaction. And love, true connection to another person, requires the kind of self-emptying that we talked about last episode in the work of Nishitani or in the work of Simone Weil, while in the Russian Orthodox Church of Fyodor Dostoevsky as well. It's a process of removing the ways you project yourself onto someone to make room for receiving this person as they are.

And this is why Lisa in the book is such a confusing person to the underground man. When she opens herself up to him, she's not doing that because he provides some emotional service to her or because she has some project that he makes sense in the scope of. No, as much as it's possible for a human being to give the gift of unconditional love to another person,

She is trying to, and he's rejecting her because to accept someone who's trying to give this unconditional love to him would be a direct attack on his entire existence. See, sometimes self-loathing like this, when someone's really doing it seriously, sometimes self-loathing is actually a carefully constructed worldview by a person, something that keeps you safe from being hurt by other people and safe from having to rethink the way you're seeing things.

See, from the perspective of the underground man, if the only reason anybody would ever choose to love anyone is because they're serving some utilitarian function in their life, then it makes sense why nobody would ever want to be with me. But if there's this person, Lisa, that wants to give her love to me unconditionally, then what does that mean about my entire rationalization for how the world works? Oh, it means there might be another way of relating to people that's possible. It means this whole story I've come up with might not be the entire story of what's going on.

Lisa's very existence and approach towards love becomes a direct attack to his worldview and everything that keeps him feeling safe. And think of the brilliance of this from Dostoevsky and how this extends to worldviews that don't even involve love. I mean, in the world we live in, it is so common for people to have a very limited perspective of how the world works and then to come up with elaborate rationalizations for why what they're seeing is actually the full truth of things.

But all this is an example of, to Dostoevsky, is again retreating into rationality, that stone wall. This is mistaking a rationalization for the truth. And then getting stuck for possibly years of your life, missing out on who knows what. But for the underground man, what he's missing out on is a possible connection with another person here. The very kind of love and connection that might transform him out of this place of contemplative inertia. He rejects his one and only lifeboat here.

because he can't admit that the ship is sinking. He just rationalizes it away. So what would it take to let this kind of love in for someone like the Underground Man? Well, real quick, it should be said, many people describe the character of the Underground Man as sort of a prototype for what Dostoevsky would develop in more realistic terms in later novels. The Underground Man, people say, is a sort of skeleton of the main character of one of his most famous books, Crime and Punishment, the main character being Raskolnikov.

The only reason I bring this up is that the things the underground man may be missing in the way that he's framing the world are things that Dostoevsky most explores in his later books. Things like the transformative potential of confession or the transformative potential of suffering.

See, love, suffering, confession, if you take a step back and just look at the three of these, they're all activities that are rooted in a type of self-emptying. And we'll explore this more on next episode if you all want to hear more from Dostoevsky. I, as always, await your guidance over email or messages this week. Let me know if you're interested in hearing about more of his work. But the short version of this is that to Dostoevsky, so often what prevents people from the experiences that would teach them something about their own existential quest are

are the very things that we avoid so that we can avoid a type of temporary suffering. Think of how this applies to the underground man. He would rather rationalize this entire transactional way of seeing other people for the rest of his life than face the very uncomfortable fact that there's a type of love that's possible that's unconditional, that's a choice. You know, if he were to accept this, it might change his entire life, but it would also be very uncomfortable for him. So he sets up all sorts of rational barriers to prevent him from ever truly considering it.

But we do this in smaller ways too all the time, Dostoevsky thinks. We live in these rationalized illusions we set up that prevent us from facing the discomfort that might transform us. And for Dostoevsky, when it comes to confession, love, and suffering, confession is something that forces you to meet the limitations of your own ego, to accept that there's something you're accountable for and thus can learn and try to grow into.

Love becomes something that forces you to fully affirm the existence of someone else and thus to see and know your own limitations. And suffering, a particular kind of suffering, reflected on and acted upon in the right way. Suffering often shows us the limitations we live in, where the ego and the theoretical abstractions we make sense of reality with limit its true complexity.

Could confession, love, and suffering be gateways into this deeper connection with being that we've been talking about? Well, Dostoevsky seems to think so. But again, if you want to know what hell is, hell is a place where a person is unable to love. I would love to talk about crime and punishment and the idiot Brothers Karamazov. Please let me know. Either way, thank you so much for helping a podcast like this keep going. Patreon.com slash philosophize this. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.