Dostoyevsky's Philosophy: Love, Faith, and Human Connection

Dostoyevsky's core idea is that love, faith, and responsibility are crucial for finding hope in a world of cynicism and isolation.

### Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Philosophy of Love, Faith, and Responsibility
* 📚 Dostoyevsky's books are renowned for their ideas, which can be **life-changing**.
* 🤝 Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, despite agreeing on human life and psychology, have **opposing views on how people should live**.
* 💗 For Nietzsche, love is about **passion and self**, while for Dostoyevsky, it is about **compassion and selflessness**.
* Dostoyevsky's characters often struggle with the impasse between **pride, shame, and love**.
* 🕊 Dostoyevsky's concept of faith is not merely about **rational beliefs** but **trust, hope, and openness**.
* According to Dostoyevsky, even **one small good memory or action** can be a source of **salvation**.
* 🌍 Modern isolation and cynicism are major challenges to **faith and love**.
* 📖 Dostoyevsky's ideas are deeply influenced by his **personal interpretation of the Bible**.

so in this video, I'm going to be giving you a basic framework for understanding Dostoyevsky's thought. This will involve some minor spoilers to a few of his major novels, but for the most part, we'll just be discussing their ideas because that's really what his books are famous for - not storytelling or poetically written sentences, but ideas, and ones that sometimes change people's lives. Jorge Luis Borges said, Like the discovery of love, like the discovery of the sea, the discovery of Dostoyevsky marks an important date in one's life. I'm not really promising anything like that will happen, but I really do think that Dostoyevsky is a writer almost everyone can get something out of reading. But before we discover him, in order to better understand him, I want to talk about another thinker he almost always gets compared with. Let's talk about Friedrich Nietzsche. This may seem like a bit of a detour at first, but I promise this is the fastest route I know to reaching a

strong understanding of Dostoyevsky. These two guys are often framed as being direct opposites and mortal philosophical enemies. In reality, Dostoyevsky never read Nietzsche, and Nietzsche did read Dostoyevsky and was a huge fan. Dostoevsky, the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn, he ranks amongst the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life. I treasure Dostoyevsky as the most valuable psychological material I know. I am in a strange way grateful to him, no matter how much he runs counter to my most basic instincts. What makes comparing these two so interesting is how they actually almost completely agree about the facts of human life and psychology, but then somehow come to have completely opposite values and ideas about how people should live. Between their two perspectives is a very full and colorful picture of the world. There's a million interesting ways we can compare and contrast them, but I think the most useful to us right now will be to look at how both thinkers talk about love. For Nietzsche

love is anything but universal. There's judgment. I love some things because I hate other things. And what I do love about people, it isn't the things that make them just like everyone else. It's the things that make them unique, exceptional, unlike anyone else in the world. And these special qualities we love are always going to be somewhat idealized, and at least a little bit delusional. There's always some madness in love, but there's also always some reason in madness. For Nietzsche, love is about passion, and whether you love a friend, a work of art, or a beautiful landscape, it's all the same. You want to get to know the thing you love. You want to get closer to it, to see it from every conceivable angle. You want to chase it and chase it but never fully possess it because ultimately it is the desire, not the desired, that we love. We love that thing as long as it continues to change us, to give us more energy, more passion for life, more power. What do you love in others?

my hopes, right, my dreams, my idealizations. What I can become. It's all about the self. It's all about me. Dostoyevsky would disagree with that though. For Dostoyevsky, love doesn't have anything to do with wanting to possess. It's about wanting to give yourself to somebody else and to be possessed. It's not about judgment. It's about non-judgment and the things that connect us all. Not about passion but compassion. Not power but service. Not self but selflessness. Ultimately, it is to annihilate the self, to give it over completely to each and to all, undividedly and selflessly. And this is the greatest happiness. But Nietzsche has a problem with that. Not with caring and compassion, I mean some of that is nice and it has its place, but not undividedly and selflessly. Ultimately, what Nietzsche has a problem with is pity. And what Dostoyevsky has a problem with is pride. Where are your greatest dangers? In pity. Why is this such a big deal for him?

well, first of all, for Nietzsche, pity is just disrespectful of other people. It's fine to have pity for dogs and children because their pain is simple and understandable, but an adult has a complex self-narrative. His pain has a deep story and meaning for him that you couldn't possibly understand, so it's just insulting to them if we pretend that we can feel what they feel. We're belittling them and treating them like they're a dog. And far more importantly for Nietzsche, when we pity others, it's even more disrespectful to ourselves because all such arousings of pity are secretly seductive for our own way is too hard and too demanding and too far from the love and gratitude of others. And we do not really mind escaping from it and from our own conscience to flee into the conscience of others. This was a real practical concern for Nietzsche. He said in a letter to a friend, to this day my whole philosophy totters after an hour's sympathetic conversation with a total stranger. Basically, Nietzsche would spend all day

writing alone, writing all these things about being great, living up to all your potential, becoming what you're meant to be. Then he'd go out and meet one nice person, and they'd smile at him. And for just one moment, he'd think, What does all this greatness stuff matter? Maybe I should just live for other people. And for Nietzsche, that's the ultimate blasphemy. That's proof to him that he doesn't have enough love, that he doesn't really care about his own passions enough, that he doesn't love and respect himself enough because he wants to give himself away, and to a complete stranger, not even for any particular reason, just because they're a person. How cheap does he think he is? But Dostoyevsky says immense pride is not a sign of dignity. For Dostoyevsky, if you really had self-worth and you truly felt secure with yourself, you wouldn't be afraid to be totally vulnerable and give yourself to others. That wouldn't even be possible without incredible strength and self-respect, because giving yourself away implies you

aren't being taken away. It's a choice you're making, and it's the scariest choice you could possibly ever make because it does potentially mean giving up everything you desire and even sacrificing yourself for somebody else. And according to Dostoyevsky, this is the greatest happiness. But of course, to Nietzsche, that would only sound like a trap. Of course, you want me to serve and sacrifice myself for others because you want me to serve and sacrifice myself for you. Well, I have some pride, and I'm not gonna let myself be used, and I'm not gonna be your slave. Nice try, but how about you serve your own will, and I'll serve mine. And this brings us to an impasse that Dostoyevsky has written about many times. So let's talk about Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky, one of the biggest things we all have to overcome in our lives, is the impasse between pride, shame, and love. And the relationship between these three things is represented by a love triangle in his

novel the idiot. The first person we have in this love triangle is Nastasia Philipovna. She's a person of immense and wounded pride, and she wants to take revenge on the whole world, including herself, because she has been unfairly judged and scorned by everyone just because she's an orphan who was adopted by a creepy old man who groomed her and raised her to be his mistress. And because of this, nobody likes her, nobody wants to be around her, nobody wants to marry her. They all consider her to be a fallen woman, including herself a lot of the time. But then this idiot Prince Mishkin comes along. Everyone thinks this guy's an idiot because he's non-judgmental and a very loving person. And he isn't romantically in love with Nastasia, but he offers to marry her and provide for her for the rest of his life purely out of compassion and pity for her great suffering. And this is the greatest news Nastasia has ever heard, and it's the only nice thing anyone has

ever done for her, and she immediately says yes. Then a second later changes her mind and says no. Her pride won't let her accept it. Obviously, this guy's an idiot. She doesn't want to use him and make him miserable for the rest of his life. And on a deeper level, she doesn't really feel worthy of being loved. And that's not just because she partially believes all the bad things people say about her, but far more because her pride actually makes her embrace all those things, right? She's completely powerless in terms of actually changing people's minds about who she is, but she can still express power by terrifying everybody by confirming everything they believe about her, and far worse, by becoming the devil herself. And of course, this also ends up confirming her own suspicions about herself and leads her deeper and deeper into shame. Aka Rogozin, a very rich and outrageous self-hating alcoholic who's given up on ever changing himself and has gone completely numb due to constant shame. The only thing

he has any passion left for is nastasia, and he beats her, humiliates her, and publicly pays her to be his mistress. When this kind of life becomes too much for her, she runs back to mishkin's love and acceptance, and when that eventually becomes too much for her, she runs back to ragosa. So basically, she keeps ping-ponging back and forth between the two, unable to finally love herself, and equally unable to fully hate and finally kill herself. And for dostoyevsky, most of us get trapped in a similar way, somewhere between these three things, which for him is actually hell. The suffering of being unable to love, because whether you're strong or weak, your judgment, your pride, and your shame will eventually destroy you. Either you'll end up like regular because you just always mess up and you decide it's better to just be numb and try not to care about anything, or you're strong and you learn from all your mistakes and you always correct them and improve yourself. And it's wonderful to be you, and you're

so virtuous and so powerful, until you're not, because eventually you'll come up against a problem with yourself that it isn't within your power to change, and you'll go from having everything to having nothing, and you'll meet with true hopelessness and despair, and that'll probably be the worst thing you've ever experienced. But for Dostoyevsky, it's still better than going numb, because it brings you a whole lot closer to getting out of hell than being numb does. You do not want to be merely lukewarm. For Dostoyevsky, loving yourself and seeing yourself without judgment isn't the easy way out, and it doesn't have anything to do with being complacent or blind. Above all, do not lie to yourself. Right, look at yourself as honestly as you can and take as much responsibility as you can. And above all, do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that is the cause of everything, right? Always be honest with yourself and try to change, but regardless, forgive yourself. Shame only leads to more shame and makes you

act worse either because you go numb, or you embrace it, which will eventually just lead you to numbness, or some other kind of suicide, unless you can come to unconditionally love and forgive yourself. And that's pretty easy, right? I just have to say it, boom, I love myself. Now I forgive myself. And then I also have no problem being honest with myself. And so now I'm just always the best person I could possibly be. Well, except that truly loving yourself is the only thing in the world that's harder than being completely honest with yourself. For we must not love only occasionally, for a moment, but forever. Everyone can love occasionally, right? Most of us can't help but love somebody sometimes, but that isn't going to get us out of hell. We have to love ourselves unconditionally forever, even in our darkest moments when we hate ourselves the most. And what makes that even more impossible is that we can't consciously choose to love. And when we try to love and conceive of love with our conscious mind, we often do and create the exact

opposite our judgment has a really easy time getting in the way of love and totally drowning it out. The character Yvonne Karamazov says, I can never understand how one can love one's neighbors; it's just one's neighbors to my mind that people can't love. The one might be able to love people at a distance. Yvonne is an injured idealist and a humanist. He hates how much needless suffering is in the world, except at the same time when he actually meets people, he doesn't like any of them. He's not a very good brother or a very good friend either, but supposedly he loves the whole world. Really, he doesn't love people; he loves the idea of people, which isn't actually love at all because love isn't an idea, it's an experience, and it happens first and foremost with the person right next to you. Real love isn't and can never be an ideal because all of our ideals, no matter how beautiful they sound, are exactly the opposite of love. They're

all judgment and love is non-judgment. So, when Yvonne idealizes love, he turns it precisely into what it isn't. And of course, it no longer makes any sense to him. For Dostoyevsky, idealism isn't the opposite of cynicism. Idealism is a much sneakier, more dangerous kind of cynicism. Because when you do create your own ideal version of love, the actual feeling and experience of love not only becomes unnecessary to you, it becomes your mortal enemy. Because the real-life feeling and experience will always contradict your ideal. So, you have no choice but to kill actual love. And that brings us to the story Yvonne tells of the Grand Inquisitor, which is really an argument between judgment and the idea of love represented by the Grand Inquisitor, and the actual living experience of love represented by the risen Jesus Christ who the Grand Inquisitor has just sentenced to death. Because the second coming has taken place during the Spanish Inquisition, and the Grand Inquisitor is

not happy about it. He thinks Jesus will only get in the way of the church's mission for world peace. And so he goes about trying to prove that he, the Grand Inquisitor, is the one who really represents love. And Jesus doesn't. And all of the Inquisitor's arguments are very reasonable and very humanitarian. He says stuff like, Jesus, you say men don't live on bread alone. You think love and spirituality are more important. But Jesus, that's super elitist. Not everybody's capable of all your love and spirituality. You can't ask everyone to love their neighbors like themselves. People are starving, Jesus. They want bread. But you don't really care about everybody, do you? You only care about the saints, the church. And I, on the other hand, we want to look after everyone. Jesus, you're so incredibly selfish. That when the devil offered you all the kingdoms of the world, you said no. But stupid, you could have ended all the wars. You could have fed everybody. You could

have created world peace in a single day, but you were only thinking about yourself, weren't you? You wanted to show off what a saint you are. Me, on the other hand, I'm willing to actually take on that burden for everybody else. All the kingdoms of the world, the church, and I, we're gonna save them all because we're loving and you're not. But every time the inquisitor says love, he's really just talking about power, his own power. And Yvonne, telling the story, knows this about the grand inquisitor and also sees this in himself and his own ideals, and it bothers him a lot. But at the same time, he feels like the grand inquisitor is technically right about everything, and it's not possible to argue with him. And because of this, Yvonne has given up all his idealism and has just become a cynic because what the story implies for him is basically Nietzsche's idea of the will to power, which is to say all there is is judgment.

and each one of us is inevitably shaping the world around us, according to our judgments. And therefore, at the same time, I'm trying to shape all the other judges according to my judgments, rather than allowing myself to be shaped by theirs and becoming what they will me to be. Right, if I ever serve anyone else's will and not my own, it's because their will to power is stronger than mine, and I've been shaped into an object of their will. It's like we all live in the same dream, and whoever is the most powerful dreamer, the world and people around them all become parts of their dream. They become what he perceives and truly wishes them all to be. And we all can't help trying to be that guy, to be the final judge, the grand inquisitor. It's inescapable because it's implicit in the very fact that I can't help but judge everything. That's just what my mind automatically does, that's what it's made for. And of course, those judgments become my

actions, and through them, I'm always attempting to remake the world according to those judgments in my own image. And I'm doing this even when I think I'm doing the exact opposite. I might talk about love, equality, and selflessness, but everything I say is pure self. It's my dream, my love, my equality, and my only real belief is me and my power. And there's no alternative, nothing else we could even possibly believe in because it's all inherent to the nature of belief. And so for Yvonne and Nietzsche, there's no way out of cynicism, and to love in Dostoyevsky's sense of the word is impossible. But what's interesting is, without understanding it, Yvonne does manage to suggest a way out. When the inquisitor fell silent, he waited some time for his prisoner to reply. He had seen how the captive listened to him all the while, intently and calmly, apparently not wishing to contradict anything the old man would have liked him to say something, even something bitter, terrible.

suddenly, he approaches the old man in silence and gently kisses him on his bloodless 90-year-old lips. that is the whole answer. and after that, the inquisitor's whole philosophy totters for a moment, but ultimately it doesn't change his mind. he still wants the church to take over the world and still thinks christ will only get in the way. but without understanding why, he can't bring himself to kill him anymore. he leaves the door open and lets christ go free, telling him to never return. but being unsure if that's really what he wants. and yvonne is also left with the exact same ambivalence about his own story. he knows christ made some kind of important point, but he doesn't know what it is. what yvonne can't quite articulate to himself is that real love does exist, but in a sense love is silent. well, passionate nietzsche kind of love definitely isn't silent. every poem in every song ever is about that kind of love. you're the most beautiful woman in the world.

you're like a summer's day. Blah blah blah. But try to articulate Dostoyevsky's kind of love directly in words. And what can you say. Hey, are you hungry? Are you cold? Do you want a jacket, right? If you say something direct like this is love, I'm so selfless, then that thought isn't love. You aren't doing it for somebody else. It's just more self-serving judgment. What is Christ supposed to say to the inquisitor? No, dummy, that's not love. This is love. Here's this reason you're wrong, and this reason, and this reason, and this reason. But that couldn't possibly be love. That would just be coercion and Jesus vying for power. Instead, Christ shows the inquisitor what love actually is. And he doesn't do it to make a point, but because he loves the inquisitor. He isn't kissing him to go, Haha, gotcha. He kisses him because he sees past all of the inquisitor's judgment to what he really is: a really sad, lonely old dude.

probably hasn't had a real human connection in the last 80 years. The kiss is what the inquisitor really wanted and needed, and Christ isn't serving the inquisitor's will to power. He's serving the actual person who lives behind the mask of ego and judgment, the child that just wanted to be loved long before his ego and his judgment were ever even formed, that silent part of himself that the inquisitor hasn't seen in a long, long time and can no longer remember or understand anymore, right Yvonne? And the inquisitor are staring love right in the face, what they actually want most in the whole world, and are shaken to the core by it, but they don't understand why, and they don't even know what they're looking at because they try to grasp on with their judgment and it turns to dust. They destroy it. It's like the prideful killer Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. He thinks he's this great man above petty human morality, but he keeps

impulsively acting out of kindness and pity, and doing things for other people, and he doesn't understand why. Like, he starts helping this drunk girl who's lost in the streets and clearly in danger, but then at that moment, it was as if something stung Raskolnikov, as if he had been turned about in an instant. Why did I go meddling and all that? Let them gobble each other alive. What is it to me, right? Why am I being so weak and stupid? I murdered two people for money so I could focus on my work, and now I'm getting distracted by some stupid drunk girl, right? As soon as his pride and judgment come back online, love becomes a total mystery. It's like Nietzsche having a loving moment with a stranger, and his whole philosophy totters for a moment. Then, presumably, his judgment comes back, and he goes, Wait a minute, I'm Friedrich Nietzsche. I'm the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil. What am I thinking right now? This is so stupid.

and the thing is, it isn't actually harder for openly cynical people like Raskolnikov and Nietzsche to identify love. It's actually harder if you aren't like them and you lie to yourself like the Grand Inquisitor and tell yourself you're being loving when you're not. And a lot of us are doing that all the time. What's scary is that you can be an incredibly honest and perceptive person like Nietzsche and still struggle to identify and believe in real love. And the problem isn't just that our judgment will destroy love as soon as we look at it, but a lot of the time it won't even give us the chance to look at it in the first place because, like we said, being vulnerable and giving yourself to others is terrifying. And if you listen to your judgment, to love almost anyone ever is insane. You'd have to be a total idiot like Mishkin. And even if, against all odds, we've gotten to experience real love and we know what it is, we'll probably

only believe in it sometimes when it's easy and safe to believe. But we have to be able to believe in it all the time, forever, especially when we're the most judgmental and the most scared. We have to be able to believe it even when we just don't believe it. And obviously, we can't do that because that doesn't even make any sense unless we had something bigger than belief and bigger than judgment. For Dostoyevsky, what we need is a little bit of faith. But what does that mean for him? Well, let's first talk about what it doesn't. For Dostoyevsky, faith is only loosely connected to our rational beliefs, and he just doesn't think the rational side of faith is very interesting or worth discussing in his books. But the rest of faith is very interesting to him. In some sense, all of Dostoyevsky's books are really about the existence of God, but not a single one of his books actually contains an argument for or against God in a traditional sense because for Dostoyevsky

the scientific and philosophical refutation of the existence of god has been given up. It no longer occupies at all the atheists of today. Instead, men are denying with all their might and mane the divine creation, the world of god, and its meaning. He means that in the 19th century, people were already realizing that the non-stop arguments for and against god were just a bunch of words that never went anywhere or convinced anyone of anything. Proofs are no help to faith, especially material proofs. Thomas believed not because he saw the risen Christ, but because he wanted to believe even before that, the other world and material proofs. What next? Imagine I'm an incredibly staunch atheist and believing has absolutely no appeal for me whatsoever, and I actually see Jesus die and come back to life with my own eyes, and I'm convinced it wasn't an illusion, it actually happened. Cool, but that wouldn't prove anything to me about god because unless I wanted to, no worldly event ever could, right? God is an otherworldly concept. It will always be reasonable for me to

say that no material evidence could possibly be relevant to God's non-material, otherworldly existence. I can even say that no evidence of any kind is relevant. I can outright deny that the terms otherworldly or non-material have any meaning because you can't show me an example of either of those things, and I can't possibly imagine one. Inherently, to ask me to accept anything as being proof for God is also to ask me to accept a system in a language in which those proofs have meaning. But then what if I don't want to do that? I probably won't, but let's say for some strange reason I did. It all just sounds too reasonable, and I feel like I just have to accept it, and I say, Fine, God exists. If I still didn't want to believe, though, wouldn't that new fact just be the biggest joke in the world to me? Wouldn't the proof still all be irrelevant because I just don't care? Because however you explain it to me, a world where God exists just sounds like utter vanity, and I hold

it in absolute contempt. And I live as if it weren't the case anyway, because at the end of the day, I reject the world of God and its meaning. And for Dostoyevsky, this is where things get interesting. Where faith and non-faith are both far bigger than just what we intellectually believe. What is it that makes someone embrace or reject the world of God and its meaning? Well, for Dostoyevsky, if we're going to answer that question, instead of looking at atheistic arguments, we should be looking at antitheistic arguments. You know, stuff like God must be incredibly evil and terrible for creating the world the way it is and all the human suffering, et cetera, et cetera. And Ivan Karamazov is actually supposed to be the character who takes this kind of argument to its extreme. He begins by telling his brother about all the suffering in the world, particularly that of children. Then he ends by telling him the story of the Grand Inquisitor. These two things together is

what dostoyevsky considered to be his ultimate argument against god. Yvonne actually uses the story of the Grand Inquisitor to explain to his brother why he doesn't believe in god. A lot of real-life people actually credit that story as the story that made them an atheist. But like we've said, the story and Yvonne never directly address god's existence. He only discusses his opinions of the world and the possibility of love. And that brings us to what faith really is for Dostoyevsky. For Dostoyevsky, faith is the actual opposite of cynicism. It's trust, patience, hope, security, openness. It's the thing that allows you to be attached to others, to be vulnerable, to sacrifice, and to love. It begins with your parents, who are the first people to show you what love is and the first people you have faith in. And when you have faith in their love and learn to love them back, then you can do the same with the rest of your family. And through them, you can

come to have faith in your extended family then your tribe your community your country then eventually in the experience of love itself and everything and anything that can be loved in god. For Dostoyevsky to have complete faith in god would mean believing and acting as though no loving act could ever be a mistake even giving your life for a total stranger because god is love and simultaneously god is the parents the family the community you can never lose. He's the one wellspring of love that will always be there and with that security a person can love even when it should be impossible including when there's no one there to direct your love to because you can still direct it to god. And also for Dostoyevsky it's only when we use these religious and spiritual terms that we're able to in some sense get past the silence and talk to ourselves directly about love because like love these words are first and foremost experiences. Think how powerful it is to say to yourself god loves me and for that to actually mean something to you.

i don't mean a theological abstract meaning. i'm talking about something tangible, the meaning right in front of you. god loves you. do you feel something when i say that? all right, we should be clear though and mention that for a lot of people who believe, god does not necessarily mean love itself. god can also mean my community or my people. and for dostoyevsky, all levels of faith are good, but the best and the highest level is faith in god as love. and to get to that point, it's not necessarily necessary that we have to have parents and a family and an extended family in a big community. but the fewer experiences we have actually connecting to other people, the much harder this becomes. he who has no roots beneath him has no god. for dostoyevsky, it isn't the rise of science that has made so many people atheist today, right? he doesn't even believe those scientific arguments matter. for dostoyevsky, what it's really about is modern isolation. what isolation, that which is now

reigning everywhere. For all men in our age are separated into units. Each seeks seclusion in his own whole. Each withdraws from the others, hides himself, and hides what he has, and ends up pushing himself away from people and pushing people away from him. Right. Any sense of community has increasingly disappeared over time, and the idea of family is shrinking and shrinking. Now it's an ideal in many modern countries to live alone, which would probably horrify our hunter-gatherer ancestors who would see that as some kind of terrible exile and spiritual death. And this isolation is accelerating at an ever-increasing rate. As the number of people increases and technology connects us more and more, we actually become less connected and much lonelier. And Dostoyevsky was talking about this in the 19th century, and things have only gotten worse since then. Cynicism is greater than it's ever been, and we barely have faith in anybody, let alone God. And this process isn't going to stop anytime soon. But is there still some

hope yes for Dostoyevsky. The thing about faith is a little bit can actually go a very long way. You must know there is nothing higher or stronger or sounder or more useful afterwards in life than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation. We can't save ourselves; we're completely reliant on the love of other people. And many of us in the modern world, we don't have those other people. But one tiny act, one good memory, really can save someone, and maybe the world. And you could be that good memory. For Dostoyevsky, what's really, really important is onions. There's another parable told in the Brothers called Amazoff. It's about a really mean old woman who dies and goes to hell, and her guardian angel wants to argue on her behalf to God. So God asks the guardian angel, Is there any nice thing she ever did for anybody?

guardian angel looks back over her whole life and can only find one nice thing she ever did. One day, a beggar walked by her garden and suddenly, out of nowhere, she decided to give him an onion. And so, God says, Great, now we've got something to work with. And God tells the guardian angel, All right, all you've got to do is go over the burning lake she's in, fly over her, and hold out that onion. And if she can grab on and you can pull her up without the onion breaking, she can enter paradise. So the angel does what he's told. He goes over the lake of fire, he holds out the onion, she grabs on, and he starts to pull her up. And then a hundred other lost souls in the lake of fire start grabbing onto her legs, and they all start to get pulled up too, and they're all going to be saved together. But then she starts kicking them in the face. It's me who's getting pulled out, not you. It's my onion, not yours. No sooner did she say that than

the onion broke our actions. Even our single action can mean hell or paradise for a lot of other people. That isn't some sentimental cliche. It's actually a really terrifying thing that we don't like to think about. See, here you've passed by a small child, passed by in anger, with a foul word, with a wrathful soul. You perhaps did not notice the child, but he saw you, and your unsightly and impious image has remained in his defenseless heart. We never know just how important our actions really are, how much damage the memory of us may have done without us even knowing it, how many people we may have personally condemned to a life of cynicism, to the inability to love, to hell. One bad memory can be just as important as a good one. That's a crazy amount of responsibility. Maybe you had a chance to be that good memory for someone, and maybe you're actually that bad memory for them right now. You're completely reliant on other people, but everyone else is completely reliant on you too.

it really does sound terrifying, but it really isn't. In truth, we are each responsible to all for all. It's only that men don't know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once. And for Dostoyevsky, to know this for yourself, even if you're the only one in the world who knows it, that's already paradise. And we can all be there right now. Just be honest with yourself and forgive yourself. Because if you're honest, you realize that you're responsible for yourself and all your actions. Then you realize that you're also responsible for the person right next to you and all the people you love and their actions. Then all of the people you hate too and all the people you never met and their actions. And that weight keeps increasing and increasing, and the burden is so heavy. Look at what you've done, what the world could be right now, and what it isn't because of you. If you accept that completely, you should be crushed, but you aren't all the

wait suddenly disappears you forgive yourself and you forgive everyone else too. Because if you're responsible for everything, how could any of them be any worse than you? Then you feel really grateful for everything and to everyone, and it really is the greatest happiness. I'll finish with what Alosha caught a maza fears when he dreams of his late master in the kingdom of God. I gave a little onion and so I'm here, and there are many here who only gave an onion, only one little onion. What are all our deeds begin, my dear, begin, my meek one, to do your work. All right, that's the end of the lecture. Now I'm going to suggest some further reading. The most comprehensive book in terms of Dostoyevsky's thought is The Brothers Karamazov. I think it's his most potentially life-changing book, but it's also his longest. So if you're super invested already, you can read The Brothers Caught of Moss off, and if you like it, you can move on to the other big novels.

crime and punishment, the idiot, and demons. But if not, you might want to start with a short story, of which the most revealing of Dostoyevsky's thought would be The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. Or if you hate reading stories and you just want to skip through the novels to the philosophical parts, you can just read an anthology like The Gospel in Dostoyevsky. That collection has most, but not all, of the big philosophical scenes from Dostoyevsky's four big novels. And as for something that isn't philosophical and isn't fiction but can be almost as life-changing as The Brothers Karamazov, you could try reading Dostoyevsky's prison memoirs, The House of the Dead, along with the letter Dostoyevsky sent to his brother just after his mock execution, which is actually very cool and will be linked in the description. All of Dostoyevsky's books are really about finding hope in total darkness, and in some ways, this is his most hopeful book because the

darkness is completely real. It's a lot of horrible experiences and then tiny little beautiful moments of humanity. If you're ready for it, it can be one of the most hopeful books you ever read. But if you're not ready for it, it could be a bit of a bummer, like all of Dostoevsky's books potentially are. Finally, it's important to keep in mind that Dostoevsky doesn't consider himself to be all that original in his thinking. Most of his ideas are inspired to some degree by how he personally reads and interprets the Bible. And after reading Dostoyevsky, reading the Bible, especially the New Testament, through the perspective of Dostoyevsky's thinking, can be very interesting and insightful for almost anyone. Romans, for instance, is one of the most philosophical books of the New Testament, and if you read it from a psychological perspective, it can read in many ways like the original Crime and Punishment. Of course, the Gospels are important, of which the most philosophical is probably

Matthew because that has the Sermon on the Mount. And from the Old Testament, Dostoyevsky really loved the Book of Job, and that's definitely worth reading too. All right, I'm done now.

Introduction to Dostoevsky (as Philosopher)

Why Alexander Y

Understanding Dostoyevsky's Thought Through Contrasting Perspectives with Nietzsche

Dostoyevsky's work is known for its impactful ideas on human life, in contrast to storytelling or poetic writing.

He is often compared to Nietzsche, as they share similar views on human psychology but have opposite values on how people should live.

While Nietzsche sees love as passion and a means of self-development, Dostoyevsky believes it is about selflessness and compassion, rejecting the idea of pity.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, criticizes pity as disrespectful to both others and oneself, advocating for a more self-centered approach to life.

The Love Triangle of Pride, Shame, and Love in Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot"

Nietzsche sees giving oneself to others as a sign of lack of self-love and pride, while Dostoyevsky views it as the ultimate happiness and strength.

In "The Idiot," the character Nastasia struggles with immense pride, shame, and the inability to fully love herself, representing the trap Dostoyevsky believes many people fall into.

Dostoyevsky sees the suffering of being unable to love as a form of hell, driven by judgment, pride, and shame, leading to destruction.

The Challenge of Loving Oneself: A Dostoyevskian Perspective

Loving and forgiving oneself unconditionally is a difficult yet essential aspect of personal growth, according to Dostoyevsky.

Idealizing love and creating an ideal version of it leads to the contradiction of real love, making it a dangerous form of cynicism.

The story of the Grand Inquisitor represents the conflict between judgment and the true experience of love, as depicted by Jesus Christ, emphasizing the genuine, non-judgmental nature of love.

The Grand Inquisitor's Philosophy and the Concept of Love

The Grand Inquisitor uses the idea of love to justify his own power, leading the protagonist, Yvonne, to become a cynic.

Despite feeling the inquisitor is right, Yvonne is left conflicted.

However, the story suggests that real love is silent and selfless, as demonstrated by Christ's actions towards the inquisitor.

The Struggle to Recognize and Believe in Real Love

People, like the Grand Inquisitor, often struggle to recognize and accept real love, letting their judgment and pride get in the way.

Even honest and perceptive individuals can find it difficult to identify and believe in love, as vulnerability is terrifying.

Dostoyevsky suggests that what is needed to overcome this struggle is not just belief, but a deeper faith beyond rationality.

Dostoyevsky believes that the rejection of God is not just about intellectual belief, but also about a contempt for the world of God and its meaning.

He argues that faith is the opposite of cynicism, representing trust, patience, and love, starting from the family and extending to a belief in God as love itself.

Dostoyevsky emphasizes that the modern rise of atheism is more related to isolation and a lack of connection with others, rather than just scientific arguments.

The Increasing Isolation and Loneliness in the Modern World

The sense of community and family is diminishing, with a growing idealization of living alone in modern society.

Despite technological advancements, people are becoming increasingly isolated and lonely, leading to a lack of faith and cynicism.

Dostoyevsky's belief in the power of a single good memory and the responsibility we have towards others highlights the terrifying yet crucial impact of our actions on the lives of those around us.

Dostoyevsky's most life-changing book is The Brothers Karamazov, followed by other significant novels like Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and Demons.

For those who prefer shorter works, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is a revealing short story, and The Gospel in Dostoyevsky offers a collection of philosophical scenes.

Additionally, Dostoyevsky's prison memoirs, The House of the Dead, provide a non-fiction option for impactful reading.