Episode #218 ... Dostoevsky - Notes From Underground

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 is 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 gonna be doing today. And I guess you could always read a summary if you didn't wanna read the actual book. But I will say this, if you were gonna 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. And, god, I don't know. Might be fun to read some Russian literature at some point in your life if you haven't yet. 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 two. 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 it's gonna show up in a few different places in the real world over the course of his life. One of them is gonna be in the political realm in an area you might already be familiar with. There's a belief among certain thinkers around …