this after-school presentation was written and recorded by internalized. The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. If men are deprived of the infinitely great, they will not go on living and will die of despair. The 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky is considered as one of the greatest writers in the world. His work explores existential and psychological issues with theology. This interplay between the human and the Divine allows us to get to the depth of the human condition. It is a testament to his genius that his work is still widely read and discussed today, for it expresses fundamental and timeless concerns of the human being. Dostoevsky had studied engineering, but his passion for literature made him resign from the career he was trained for and devoted himself to writing, despite remaining in great financial difficulty. He became part of a group of revolutionaries and was eventually arrested, finding himself incarcerated.

and in solitary confinement, this was, however, the 
true beginning of his inner life. From the deepest   Darkness, he found the light with which he later 
wrote his greatest works. He was led to be shot   by a firing squad, but at the very last minute, a 
messenger arrived waving a white flag. It had been   a mock execution, a twisted form of psychological 
torture. Afterwards, he was sensory prison labor   camp in Siberia in extremely harsh conditions. In 
his book The Idiot, Dostoyevsky sets himself to   depict a good soul in a cruel world and describes 
the thoughts of a person before execution,   mirroring his own experience. It seemed that he had 
only five more minutes to live and said that those   minutes were like an eternity. He calculated 
the exact time he needed to take leave of his   companions and decided that he could do that in 
two minutes. Then he spent another two minutes   thinking over his life and another minute for a 
last look around. There was a church not far off.

its gilded spire shone in the bright sunshine. He remembered staring with awful intensity at it, and the rays of light sparkling from it. He could not tear his eyes from those rays of light. They seemed to him to be his new nature, and he felt he had somehow merged with them. Feeling of disgust with what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty were dreadful, but he said that the thing that was most horrible to him was the constant thought, What if I had not to die? What if I were to return to life again? Oh, what an eternity of days, and all mine! I should count every minute separately and waste none. He said that this reflection finally filled him with such bitterness that he wished to be shot as quickly as possible. To understand Dostoyevsky's works, we should know that he wrote in a time of increasing atheism, nihilism, utilitarianism, materialism, and what would later become communism. Man's ego became the center of the world, and the goal was the

maximization of happiness through a calculated 
and rational approach. Moreover, technological   progress would guide man to attain a Utopia 
and finally be happy. However, the exact opposite   happened. These ideas were partly the result of 
the bloodshed of the 20th century. The totalitarian   States took over people's freedom and justified 
murdering all dissenters in the name of progress. Man is a strange animal. He wants to be happy but 
ends up being miserable. He likes to count his   troubles but does not count his happiness. 
Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.   Seeking happiness solely through money, material 
acquisition, power, or fame only gives us a   temporary sense of happiness. After covering 
our basic needs, we must proceed to the task of   self-realization and self-transcendence, or else we 
will feel stagnated and empty. There's no satiation   point for a spiritual longing by physical means. 
By losing touch with our soul, the essence of our

being and to our spiritual relationship with a 
higher self, we become neurotic and split in crime   and punishment. Dostoyevsky portrays the results of 
this inner split through the character raskolnikov,   whose name literally means split or Schism. 
Dostoyevsky uses this character as a mouthpiece   for the ideals espoused by the Society of his 
time. For raskolnikov, God is dead, and in order   to fill the void, he must become God himself. One 
cannot help but to notice the similarities between   resconikov and Nietzsche's tragic Declaration 
of the death of God, a historical event that   inevitably would lead to nihilism. God had to 
be replaced by the man God or ubermench, who would   conquer nihilism through sheer willpower. Whereas 
kolikov writes a paper on how extraordinary men   can trespass the accepted moral standards for 
the common good with a clean conscience, while   ordinary men blindly follow societal norms 
and conventions like sheep. Raskolnikov sees

an opportunity to put his ideals into practice. After overhearing people talk in a Tavern about a wicked and greedy old woman who works as a pawn broker and takes advantage of everyone, he decides to murder her. Because in the utilitarian approach society would be better off without her as she is a Laos and her money could be used to help his family and to pay for his studies in order to become a lawyer and perform Good Deeds for society. Raskolnikov carefully plans the murder and kills her with an ax. But while looking for her money and goods, her half-sister unexpectedly walks in, so he quickly kills her too. Here Dostoyevsky brilliantly portrays the psychology of a murderer. Raskolikov, as planned, kills the wicked old woman, but also a totally innocent human being who was in the wrong place at the wrong time at the very moment of committing the murder. Prescholikov

also killed a part of himself. He was not the extraordinary man he believed himself to be. Instead, he is tormented by his own conscience, and his guilt overwhelms him to the point of psychosomatic illness. The book does not so much explore the legal consequences of crime, but rather what happens to a person after trespassing the moral boundary. In fact, the original Russian title of the book connotes a stepping across, as is the religious implication of transgression. Sometimes one lacks knowledge and thus cannot make the right choices; other times, however, one knows the right thing but still doesn't make the right choices. This is an age-old problem and a result of a conflict between intellect and will, what we know and what we choose. It is likely that we have all experienced something that appeared to be good but was in fact bad. Therefore, we must learn to use the intellect as a basis for making good choices and to discipline our will. We want

to be healthy, but are unhealthy. We are addicted to 
something destructive, but cannot get ourselves out   of it. We believe in love, but rarely express it 
to others, etc. This cognitive dissonance further   results in an inner split. Raskolnikov knows what 
he did was wicked, but does his best to avoid the   consequences of his crime, which results in him 
slowly descending into madness, suggesting that   if we find ourselves in such a situation, it is 
better to confess and face whatever one has to   face. Eventually, Raskolnikov confesses to his 
crimes and is sent to prison. Interestingly, this   is when he goes through a spiritual journey, the 
only way he can deal with his mental anguish and   be redeemed, but it is not clear that he ultimately 
attains spiritual freedom, for his ego is still at   play and considers what he did not as a sin, but 
simply an error. The word religion comes from   religare, which literally means to put things 
back together again in order to reunite our

fragmented inner self, we must undergo a complete transformation of our entire being, which can only be attained with a relationship to a higher self with God. This is the job of the religious life. Paradoxically, we can only become ourselves by surrendering to a higher self. Ecstasy is to stand outside oneself without ceasing to be oneself. After his serious illness, Raskolnikov has a dream of a virus that causes its victims to think that they are the sole possessors of Truth. There is no objectivity; everything becomes subjective. However, this does not lead to Freedom. Instead, people try to impose their views on others, and no one gets along, so they tear themselves apart. Without religion to provide an objective view of morality and rival authoritarianism, it is the strongest who finally impose their view on everyone. Without God, everything is permitted. This is an allegory of the dangerous ideas that Dostoevsky witnessed in his time that caused millions of deaths, which he brilliantly prophesied in Notes from Underground. Dostoyevsky

portrays one of the darkest and least sympathetic 
of all his characters. The nameless protagonist, 
simply known as the underground man, and though it 
is a fictitious character, Dostoyevsky states that 
he not only may but must exist as a product of the 
ideologies of his time. The underground man is a 
bitter, spiteful, and self-hating retired 40-year-old 
civil servant who was rude and intimidating 
towards his customers, though it was all part of 
a game, as he admits he could never be genuinely 
Wicked. He describes listening to others through 
the cracks under the floor as if he were a mouse. 
His inability to interact with other people causes 
his attempts to form relationships and participate 
in life to end in disaster, driving him deeper 
underground until he is completely locked away 
from the world. The underground man distracts 
himself by reading novels but is disappointed 
by the real world, representing his profound 
alienation from society. I am a sick man. I am a

spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is deceased. No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite that you probably will not understand. My liver is bad. Well, let it get worse. These are the words of the underground man, which introduces us to his psychological distress. Right from the beginning, he is unable to properly define himself and constantly revises what he says as he's nothing more than a chaos of conflicting emotional impulses. Just like Raskolnikov, he experiences an inner split. The underground man is very envious of the so-called man of action, for whom ignorance is bliss and simply goes about his day living without ruminating too much in life. But the underground man finds solace in his intellectual superiority. Nevertheless, he is constantly paralyzed by his thoughts and cannot act. He is a man of acute consciousness stuck in his own reflective hyper-consciousness. Thinking too much is a disease, and since he cannot choose

he is characterless and has no identity. He writes, I did not know how to become anything, neither spiteful nor kind, neither rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Out of pure boredom, the underground man has given birth to his self-created hell out of his own internal ruminations, which led him to write his notes. Man is by no means a rational animal but innately irrational and destructive, and it is not reason that saves him from his impulses and desires, but rather faith. The underground man says that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped. He would sacrifice all his advantages just to choose for himself, even if it were happiness, wealth, health, or security, in order to preserve his individuality. Shower upon man every earthly blessing, crown him in a sea of happiness so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface. Give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing

else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with a continuation of his species and even out of share in gratitude sheer spite. Man would play you some nasty trick simply in order to prove to himself, as though that were so necessary, that men still are men and not the keys of a piano. Life is not a mathematical formula or problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. If we could access the perfect formula for happiness so that everything would be so clearly calculated and explained that choices would cease to exist, we would act against reason in order to prove our free will. This is how deep craving for self-expression. Men love to create and build but also loves chaos and destruction. Perhaps it is because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his goal and only loves looking at it from a distance. He loves building it but does not want to live in it. We will never renounce to destruction nor suffering thinking about a world without

suffering will only sink us further into suffering, for happiness cannot exist without suffering. It is our capacity to endure suffering that makes us truly great. For years, the underground man would desire revenge over any small injury, and remember it down to the smallest details. And every time, would add even more details, teasing and tormenting himself with his own imagination. He admits that he invents adventures for himself, for he really has nothing else to do with his life. Many times, he even takes offense simply on purpose, though he knows that he's offended at nothing, but convinces himself at last to the point of being really offended. He continuously lies to himself so that he cannot even distinguish it from truth, and loses all respect for himself and others. And having no respect, he ceases to love. In the end, he destroys and betrays himself for nothing. Nothing in the world is harder than speaking the truth, and nothing easier than flattery.

the underground man ends his notes by stating, 
as far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have 
not dared to carry even halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for Good Sense and 
found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves, so that perhaps after all a small life in me than in 
you. It is interesting that Dostoyevsky, though an Orthodox Christian, usually has his main characters 
espousing the opposite of his own views of life. He does not criticize his opponents but gives 
strong and reasonable arguments for them to the point that we can even relate to them and develop 
sympathy with them, rather than telling us what to do. Dostoyevsky paints the psychological hell that 
we sometimes send ourselves into; his work allows us to explore ourselves through the characters 
portrayed, where we may see a reflection of our own life experiences. We learn from Dostoyevsky 
that we should always put our own existential

condition first, and not the ideas others tell us to believe in to adjust our life views. As we ourselves experience life, to be aware of Utopias that seduce us and leads us astray, to see Life as a polarity and suffering as a necessary compliment to happiness, and to focus on what truly matters in the end, our relationship with our deepest self and God, without which there's no salvation at all. I hope you found this collaboration valuable. If you're interested in learning more about the works of Dostoyevsky and other prominent thinkers, head over to my channel, Eternalized. Thank you for watching. [Music] [Music]

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Timeless Philosophy of a Tormented Genius - Written by Eternalised

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