Artwork by: Tori Zirul

She asked to share a recent interview: https://visualartjournal.com/2026/07/03/tori-zirul/

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To be a perfectionist is to both suffer for your standards and take pride in having them.

Sometimes those standards are about proving something to yourself. Other times they come from wanting to do right by others. In either case a perfectionist is someone that cares on a level that’s genuinely endearing.

In fact, I think the world is made a better place by people who live by this creed of never wanting to put something out there that’s beneath their abilities. So start a national holiday. Buy these people lunch if you see any of them in uniform out there.

But as flattering as this description may be, does this give us a full picture of what a self-described perfectionist is really doing?

For Iris Murdoch the answer is no. She was one of the great philosophers and novelists of the 20th century. A woman who thought the quality of our attention should become a central concern of our morality.

And to begin rethinking this whole thing, she might ask: Is it even accurate to describe a perfectionist as someone that’s overly concerned with perfection anyway?

In conversation these don’t seem like people who agonize over every single detail in their life being perfect. These are clearly people who are far more complex than just a cult-like idealism.

It seems the better description is that these are people who apply a very special level of intensity to select things they care about and then refuse to go below a certain standard they have set up.

And Murdoch would say that standards are fine in themselves; they certainly give you something to aim for. But a perfectionist should never forget that a standard can also become a way of freezing yourself into an overly narrow, calcified image of what “perfect” is supposed to look like.

An image of perfection that makes you feel very in control of the current situation but then limits your ability to be fully present with whatever it is you’re working on.

A useful starting point to make her case here is to just acknowledge that the world isn’t perfect.

Your grandma didn’t actually make the perfect apple pie. You’re not actually making the note you’re writing perfect when you labor over the details for the 12th time. Nobody actually has access to a perfect understanding of anything.

So any finished image of perfection someone has is really just them referencing the best examples their limited experience has given them so far, and then mistaking that partial picture for perfection itself.

And this all seems very harmless when it’s done at the level of inanimate objects like grandma’s pie.

But Iris Murdoch might say to consider this strategy when it’s applied to the way you think about another person. What changes when you set out to be the perfect friend, or lover, or parent?

In your attempt to be what you think is the perfect image of what a child needs in a parent, you may completely miss the particular child that’s in front of you and what they really need.

In trying to live out your image of a perfect romantic partner every day, you might never access all you still have to learn about being in a relationship.

As long as you’re forcing something to conform to a pre-existing image you have of perfection, you close yourself off from what the thing itself might reveal and how it might correct your understanding of it.

Murdoch writes that we do this in moments that go far beyond mere perfectionism. She says we “often apprehend more than we clearly understand and grow by looking.”

She explains this point more through her famous distinction between fantasy and attention.

Fantasy is her term for the mind’s tendency to replace reality with a picture that’s easier for the self to organize and control. We inevitably approach reality like this through pictures and interpretations. And fantasy begins when the picture becomes more about you than the thing that you’re looking at.

Attention is Murdoch’s name for the effort we put into the opposite direction. Borrowing the word from Simone Weil, Murdoch calls attention “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.”

Meaning that whatever is in front of you, when you put in the effort to truly see it as it is, summon the patience to be with it, and bring the love required to remain open to its unresolved complexity, then the encounter is no longer organized around your fantasy or around what the thing seems to say about you, and you become far more capable of receiving what it has to teach you.

Attention allows reality to show us forms of excellence we weren’t yet capable of imagining.

But I don’t want to give any perfectionists the wrong idea here. Murdoch isn’t saying all this to convince you to lower your standards. Again, having high standards makes the world go round. I think she’d be much more in favor of offering up another way of viewing perfection altogether.

She explains it best in her work using the example of someone learning the Russian language.

I once had a fluent Russian speaker tell me that if you begin learning the language as an adult, you are no doubt going to die a person where a native speaker will always be able to hear that you learned it later in life.

The point is that Russian is a painfully difficult language to speak perfectly. The situational details of its grammar and syntax alone are enough to make most people stick simply to vocab for their own sanity.

And yet, for Murdoch, this nearly unreachable standard can show us an entirely different way of thinking about the pursuit of perfection.

She says that when you’re trying to speak better Russian, you’re always answerable to something outside of yourself. You’re not trying to conform to some personal standard you have for the language; that’d be ridiculous.

Russian is the kind of thing that has what she calls an “authoritative structure” of its own. From its case system to the aspectual distinctions built into its verbs, it exists independently of what any single person currently thinks good Russian should sound like.

Because of this, as you practice Russian, she thinks you start to notice that the language begins to resist you in a weird way. It corrects you as you grow closer to it. It keeps revealing levels of complexity that maybe two weeks ago you weren’t even capable of recognizing were there.

This is a very different way of striving toward perfection from the one we began with.

It’s a new tracing of perfectionism rooted in the humility to be changed by something else. One that doesn’t mistake scrutinizing yourself for getting better. One where instead of deciding in advance what a perfect version of something has to look like, you stay with the thing long enough for it to change your understanding of what excellence even means.

So to Iris Murdoch, maybe perfection is less like a standard you impose onto reality and more like something reality can teach you how to recognize.

Art by Yoon Miller.

(no links. she requested only to be cited by name.)

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Let’s say a friend of yours, frustrated about the state of their life one day, described themselves to you by saying, “I’m a loser,” or “I’m a failure.”

Rightfully so, I think you’d come to their defense at that moment.

After all, what good does it do you to brand a label into the side of yourself like that, you might ask them.

You might say that no matter how you’ve acted before this it doesn’t help you to see your past as the extent of who you can possibly be.

But there’s a more sophisticated version of this same kind of labeling statement that goes on all the time. And it’s an insidious type of self-labeling because in our current climate when people do it, not only does nobody feel the need to rescue anyone from it, but it often gets a lot of social credit. Practically a round of applause at times.

I’m talking about labels like “I sabotage things because intimacy feels unsafe to me,” or “I shut down because I use an avoidance strategy in the face of conflict.”

Technical language derived from the field of psychology, turned into a descriptive claim about what kind of person I truly am.

Understandably, we give these sorts of labels a lot of respect. Seeking help for your own mental health has been stigmatized since at least the dawn of the field of psychology in the late 1800s. And when you see someone struggling, how miserable of a person would you have to be to not want them to get the help they need?

So, when a friend comes at us with what is clearly therapeutic language about themselves, it often doesn’t feel appropriate to criticize them. It shows your friend has vulnerability, bravery for putting themselves out there, work that they’ve put into introspection.

And it can feel like once they evoke this kind of language, my job is simply to listen. Who am I to comment on their past traumas anyway? This is clearly someone that’s in the process of developing greater levels of self-awareness. Good for them.

But self-awareness can become a kind of modern trap as well. Especially when the people closest to us are less comfortable offering their criticism.

The goal can become to just analyze yourself into the ground every day, become aware of all the ways you behave, link those behaviors to some normative psychological terminology, and then spend the rest of your life merely describing what you are.

A life where you transform yourself into one of the most self-aware people in the history of the world, truly. But are completely trapped in this static description of yourself based on ways you’ve acted in the past.

The philosopher Michel de Montaigne would want to point out that radicalizing self-awareness like this completely ignores an entirely different area of what it is to be a person every day: the fact that you are still something that is always becoming someone new.

Very few writers ever captured this as well as Montaigne did in his work. He was a pioneer of writing centered around self-observation; in fact, he’s widely credited with being the inventor of the modern personal essay.

So, he had zero problems telling people about embarrassing moments, his struggles with vanity, even his declining performance in the bedroom over the years…and he did all of it from a place where he always tried to never let the observation about himself turn into a label of what he is.

He talked about himself like he’s a moving target. He’d describe the way he acted in one situation and contrast it with another. He’d talk about a weak choice he made in a moment and describe it as a mood he happened to be in that day.

In his essay “Of Repentance,” he describes his own writing by saying, “I do not portray being: I portray passing.”

And part of his point is that if we’re always in a state of this “passing” like this, then becoming too focused on self-awareness has another big problem with it besides just being half the story.

He’d say no matter how socially approved the language is, none of these descriptions about ourselves are even close to capturing the full complexity of being a person anyway.

Content warning: the following is one of the most intense, critical passages that he ever wrote in his life. Montaigne gives a scathing critique here of his fellow authors, shooting a volley of missiles at them that forced many of these people into the fetal position. He said:

“Considering the natural instability of our manners and opinions, I have often thought even the best authors a little out in so obstinately endeavoring to make of us any constant and solid contexture.”

I’m sorry you had to witness him in a fit of rage there. There are some lines that should just never be crossed in this life.

In his best form of Renaissance politeness, after making sure to remind them all that they’re still the best authors in the world, he calls these people a little “out.”

Which, in this translation just means a little “off.” Meaning a bit sloppy in their understanding of the full complexity of a human being.

See, Montaigne thought that none of us can ever be reduced to a single label. Even people seriously trying to interpret a person get things totally wrong when they need them to fit into a neat description like that. We do this with ourselves all the time.

He says interpreters “choose a general air of a man, and according to that interpret all his actions.”

And isn’t that exactly what we’d never want our friend to do who’s labeling themselves with psychological language that’s supposed to be helping them?

The description of a tendency can be useful: “I shut down when conflict feels unsafe.”

But if that becomes the general air of me, then I risk lumping every future moment into the same one-dimensional story I have about myself.

But we’re more than that as human beings. In truth we’re probably a mix of a thousand different shifting forces. We contradict ourselves from one moment to the next. We often want two things at once. We’re forced to act, not knowing what we want, selecting from a multiple-choice question where every answer is suboptimal.

And while self-awareness is certainly better than being completely lost in your life, if needing total coherence about who you are becomes your main strategy for knowing yourself, you’ll almost always have to achieve that by being in denial of your own inner complexity.

For Montaigne, the danger is becoming so loyal to a story that explains something about you right now that you start betraying the person who could still become otherwise. He might say to never forget that self-knowledge should ultimately help you live life with more freedom. It shouldn’t just make you more obedient to your past.

Artwork: Shibbal Fatima
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Forty-two percent of U.S. adults experience loneliness at least once weekly, said the APA recently. This is up from 33% in 2025. And 30% in 2024. So if you still trust institutions in this world you’d likely have to conclude that things are getting worse in this area for some reason.

For the philosopher Erich Fromm this would be hardly surprising. After all, to him, one of the most basic facts about being a human is that we’re fundamentally separate from one another. And there’s a common reaction we have to this reality; as he puts it in his most famous book, The Art of Loving:

“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”

The fundamental problem of human existence being “separateness”. Seeking love from other people being a common strategy to cure a kind of existential dread we face. It’s worked for people in the past, I guess.

We all want that person where when something happens in life, they pop into your head as the one you want to tell about it first. The person who gets you to forget for a moment that the two of you are even a different person.

And if Fromm heard that loneliness had turned into an even bigger problem than it was in his day, then he’d likely point to the strategy most people are taught about how they should go about finding love.

If you want to find love…you need to make yourself into someone more lovable.

Some classic ideas people usually go with:

Work out, get paid more, shoot Botox into your face. Stop leaving your disgusting wet towel on the floor of the bathroom. Improve yourself by learning a foreign language. Further improve yourself by refusing to speak the foreign language as some kind of insecure flex.

To Fromm, it’s implied in modern society that you exist as one profile in something like a “personality market”. Where people learn to treat themselves as products. That your value is constantly being assessed within the market, and that you need to increase your overall worth if you ever want the privilege of being bought, sold and traded once somebody falls in love with you.

Now there’s nothing wrong with improving yourself. The tragedy is that when people start to see love in this narrow way two things happen.

One, a relationship becomes simply a transaction between two needy selves. You provide something that they need, and they provide something for you.

For Erich Fromm, this means you ultimately love what the other person does for your ego, not the other person as they are.

Two, once the other person is seen as just a commodity or a service that’s provided to you, then it’s not shocking that your relationship becomes like every other commodity or service you consume.

You enjoy it at first. Maybe for a few months you use it every day. But then after a while it becomes boring and you want something new. Novelty, use, boredom. Your partner becomes like the sewing machine you just sold on Facebook Marketplace.

For Fromm this is the wrong strategy, and it’s based on a completely mistaken view of what love even is.

Love isn’t something that happens to you when the right person appears in front of you. You don’t fall into it as you stand around passively.

Love is a verb, not a noun. For Erich Fromm, love is a practice. It’s an active striving toward the happiness and freedom of the loved person.

Which means that to say, “I love you.” for him doesn’t mean that you check all the boxes of what I need in life right now.

It means, “I am actively oriented toward your life. Today again I choose to be here with you as you are.”

Love is an activity directed toward something. And you can imagine how you’d be completely cut off from this more active view of love if you bought into all the modern assumptions about how to find it.

A pretty useful way of testing whether you’re viewing other people solely in terms of their exchange value:

Be careful if the only people you ever feel “love” towards happen to be attractive, or profitable to you, or agree with you all the time, or reinforce a picture of yourself you’re invested in. Be careful of only falling in love with how another person flatters your ego.

So, if you wanted a term that really describes the kind of activity that love is, for Erich Fromm the best way to describe it is as an “art”.

Where like art it often takes focus on a single task, and patience towards it. It often takes humility and a kind of faith in the process when you’re faced with obstacles.

Most of all though: great art sometimes requires working from a place of real solitude. Which means for him there’s a kind of sick irony embedded into all this.

To learn how to love others often requires you to first learn to love yourself. And in a much deeper way than the tired cliché of making sure you put on your own oxygen mask first.

It’s a form of existential self-love that isn’t found in any self-improvement routine. It’s a turning of that same active love that we can direct toward other people, and it’s applying it when viewing your own existence.

The same questions become things you apply to yourself now:

Can you get to know yourself, truly, without having to run away from what you find there?

Can you have the same level of care when it comes to your own growth? Respect toward your own life?

So, for Erich Fromm, loving yourself and loving other people are far from opposites.

In fact, it’s only when you can sit with your own life without needing another person to make it bearable, that another person can finally appear to you as more than just a solution to your loneliness.

Fromm would say if you’re looking for love: stop asking only how to become more lovable and start asking whether you’ve become more capable of even loving.

Because a society that teaches people to sell themselves will always struggle to teach them how not to consume each other.

For more on Fromm’s The Art of Loving, listen to Philosophize This! Episode #150, “The Frankfurt School: Erich Fromm on Love,” wherever you get podcasts.

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Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Last post we talked about Albert Camus’ famous take on the work of Franz Kafka. But he didn’t only influence Camus with his work.

There were several other major thinkers during the 20th century that took the images in Kafka’s work and then changed the world with their interpretations after having read him.

A couple of the most exciting were the philosophers Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt.

Two very different takes on the exact same work, and a good place to start talking about them is probably to touch on how Adorno’s take on Kafka was very different than that of Camus.

One way Adorno describes it is that Kafka is someone whose work has to be taken literally when you read him.

And this can be kind of weird to hear at first. Because you think about Kafka’s writing, and it’s likely you think of some of the totally bizarre stuff that goes on in it. Random moments coming out of nowhere. People getting whipped inside of a closet by a dude in a meat helmet.

Things going on in these books that could never actually happen if you were in real life.

So if this is the kind of stuff Kafka’s putting out there, then how can Adorno say anyone should be taking this stuff literally?

Well, if Camus’ interpretation is that reading Kafka makes you feel the same way as when you confront the absurdity of existence head on, then Adorno’s gonna say that reducing Kafka to merely a guy that’s trying to depict the human condition crucially misses one of the big things that makes Kafka’s work so strong in the first place.

Namely, that there isn’t a single, neat allegory that can explain his work away.

Let me give an example of what Adorno is trying to avoid here.

A lot of people out there may have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Fun little story about some animals on a farm: pigs, chickens, cows. A rural extravaganza.

And it’s common knowledge that this story about a farm is actually a story for George Orwell about totalitarianism. The boars represent Marx, Stalin, Trotsky and the like. The horse represents the proletariat. The sheep are the masses.

Point is, there’s all kinds of symbolism that someone can decode while reading Animal Farm.

And Adorno would say there’s nothing wrong with this. But what we can’t do is treat Kafka’s work as though it’s aiming to do the same thing.

Because he says what happens when you read Animal Farm eventually, and you figure out what all the characters were intended to be, there always becomes a point where someone can just be done with Animal Farm. Put it back on the bookshelf, where it begins its long life of collecting dust.

The thinking often is: now that I’ve decoded what the intended meaning of the book was…well, this one is pretty much solved now. I can just be done with it.

But Adorno says the problem with doing this when it comes to Kafka’s work is that he never intended for there to be a specific meaning like this. There wasn’t a single time, place, or set of social conditions that he wanted to depict when he was writing.

So to Adorno, to say that this is just an allegory for the human experience projects a bit too much of Camus’ own interests onto the work of Kafka. It misses something important about just how many situations this work has the ability to resemble, which is part of the genius of it.

Adorno says we need to treat Kafka’s work as though it’s hermetic, as in hermetically sealed. Meaning, when he writes a book, think of it as a self-enclosed, more literal universe that exists all on its own.

And what gets revealed when we get past the temptation of trying to have this point to some specific thing in the world outside the book, is that Kafka’s using his work to paint a picture of a kind of general structure of domination.

A social spell that people get put under, where self-justifying power structures of any type or scale eventually lose sight of what they began as.

A bit of context for around the time Adorno is doing his work:

If you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, then you know this period beginning in the early-twentieth century has thinkers questioning the limits of rationality.

These years are filled with people asking questions along the lines of: how much can we rely on rational systems to coordinate our lives for us? At what point do these systems rationally constrict the world to a level where it becomes detrimental to being a human being?

And there are plenty of answers we get to these questions.

Some will say that when this much of an emphasis is placed on rationality, it demystifies something about what it is to be a person to the point that your existence is flattened.

There are others that’ll say this type of thinking naturally leads to thinking of people and things around you in a way where they’re just instrumental to some rational goal you have. That things like colonialism or pollution aren’t bugs of the way we’re approaching reality; they’re the natural destination of this kind of thinking.

They say that part of the thinking is that Enlightenment political thought has produced societies where people are mostly seen as rational cogs that make up a machine.

And the question for a lot of thinkers becomes: what is it like to be someone that’s living in the middle of all this?

The term that Adorno used to describe what was going on here was, “the soothing facade of repressive reason.”

And while he’d never wanna reduce Kafka’s work to only talking about repressive reason, he definitely thought this was of the class of things that Kafka was pointing to in his work, being someone that was alive at the beginning of the 20th century when all this was building.

Think of Joseph K. in The Trial, for example, the character we talked about in the last post. He’s ragdolled through the court system. Rational procedures have turned his life into a situation where he is constantly disoriented, alienated from what’s going on, and guilty for something where he doesn’t even know what he’s being accused of.

For Adorno, we don’t have to think of this as a metaphor. Because this is literally what people are going through when they’re living in these rationally constrictive systems.

Whenever you use rationality to try to over-coordinate the things in people’s lives, there is a general arc you can expect to play out.

And we can see examples of this arc at all different scales.

First, there is a well-intentioned beginning. Something unjust happens because of the chaos of how reality unfolds, and well-intentioned smart people want to use rationality to try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Maybe they set up a rule or a procedure. Maybe it’s a government agency. Doesn’t really matter. The point is this is an effort to make the chaos a little more manageable.

But then inevitably, it feels good to be able to simplify reality down like this.

And inevitably, bad stuff keeps happening because there’s no perfect set of protocols that can ever predict everything that’s ever gonna happen.

So the people in charge of these rules and procedures inevitably start adding more rules and procedures.

Given enough time, rational systems like this produce rules on top of rules, and eventually they accomplish three things once this gets severe enough:

1. People feel guilty all the time, even when they aren’t doing anything wrong, because they’re not sure if they’re breaking one of the overabundance of rules there are.

2. They feel alienated from the original, well-intentioned purpose of whatever they started doing the thing for.

3. And this leads to a feeling of disorientation, where it feels like this rational system has removed something about what it is to be a full person that’s living through it.

Couple this with the fact that these rational systems actually attract the kind of person that wants to be the one making rules and procedures. People that often benefit from there being a sort of gatekeeping here, where they keep procedures opaque and away from scrutiny.

Or how about the fact that it’s psychologically easier for someone to follow a rulebook than to make a new set of judgments about the world each day, provisionally?

How about the fact that, in the interest of being as efficient as possible in this rational world, people are often reduced to numbers on a page, which then goes on to guide people’s behavior?

Consider all of this as a general arc that goes on when human beings organize in this way. But also understand that this is one that’s particularly amplified when we look at the world that Kafka was depicting with characters inside his books.

He’s painting a picture showing that whenever power structures become self-justifying, the rational systems that make them up are no longer calibrated and held accountable. And how once that happens, the parts of these systems inevitably drift in this direction that leads to experiences like Joseph K.’s in The Trial.

Now, this may be obvious when this goes on at the level of government.

We all know the example of a justice system that starts as something truly interested in making the world a better place, but then over time transforms into just show trials and procedures designed to keep people in power.

But now consider how this goes on just as much in the career of an individual politician.

They may start their career with the best of intentions. But as the years go on, and layers pile up from shorthands they’ve used over the years to simplify their decision making; they do this to the point that they drift into a person that doesn’t even resemble who they started out as.

Consider how this might go on in a workplace. Or with faculty at a school.

Consider how this might go on in romantic relationships, where you have rules you guys set up within the relationship. Or how about with parents trying to maintain the rules of a house?

Consider how we even do this sort of thing to ourselves.

Say I’m on a diet. Something that starts out as wanting to feel better and get healthy… with all the rational protocols I can start layering onto that experience, with all the tools and trackers that can reduce my experience down to numbers, eventually it can get to a point where I’m weighing every calorie, caring far more about the number on the scale than how I actually feel.

In a sense, in the modern world we are all people trapped in little Kafka novels of our own creation. Things that start with the best of intentions end up transforming into something that flattens your experience of the world.

And that opaque, self-justifying systems of power produce this same result over and over again.

To Adorno, it would be a shame to describe Kafka as an author that’s only critiquing one of these systems. His work has a far broader, more exciting application than that.

By thinking of his work as a self-contained universe, it allows someone to read his work, take inspiration from it to see the repressive reason going on in their own life, and then to pick up the same book, ten years later maybe, and use it to see an entirely different situation with a new set of eyes.

This is why Adorno thinks the work of Kafka is so effective.

Because to him, in a modern world where most people live their lives immersed in myth and authority at a level that they can’t even see, Kafka shows us characters that passively go along with their myth and authority as an invitation for us to see our own compliance more clearly.

He calls this the “mute battle cry” or “silent battle cry” of the main characters of Kafka’s stories.

He says they stay quiet and go along with the way things are. And to Adorno this then exposes just how ridiculous the fact they’re going along with these rational systems really is. Kafka’s stories are what he calls a “demolition” of that soothing facade of repressive reason.

Maybe it’s time to give another example of a famous story written by Kafka that we can see this whole dynamic in.

This one is called The Castle. And for whatever it’s worth, it was the last full-length book that Kafka ever worked on during his lifetime.

In fact, if you end up reading it, it even cuts off mid-sentence because he just never finished writing the ending. The book starts with a guy named K arriving at a village.

And yes, the main character of this story is also called K by everybody in it, just like the main character in The Trial.

This is deliberate by Kafka, where part of his goal is to transform what it means to be a protagonist inside of a novel.

Typically, they always have a strong name, a solid identity. We know exactly who they are. Well, Kafka wants to start us with an identity that’s a bit more relatable for people living in the modern world.

Let’s just go with K.

The story begins with K showing up to a village; it’s a small collection of shops. There’s a blizzard going on outside, and in the distance from this village, up on a hill, he sees a castle.

It’s a castle that he’s traveled all that way through the snow that day to get to.

See, he’s a land surveyor by trade, meaning he takes measurements for big pieces of land. And the officials in the castle asked him to come, because apparently they have some work they want him to do.

Regardless though, with the blizzard going on, when it’s dumping snow to the point you can barely even walk, anything the castle wants from him is going to have to wait until at least the next morning.

So he goes inside the hotel tavern in this little village he’s in, and the people there are instantly suspicious of him and his intentions.

They start questioning him. Asking him who he is.

He tells them he’s a land surveyor for the castle.

Nobody believes him.

He tells them to go ahead, call the castle, and see what they have to say about it.

So they call, and on the other end of the phone there’s no conversation, but just this strange, chaotic kind of white noise. It’s a mix between dead silence, shuffling papers, a bunch of people talking. It sounds kind of like a bureaucratic office building that’s having a crazy day doing whatever it is they do.

Finally somebody gets on the phone and tells the townspeople that K was, in fact, summoned to be there. And then giving no other information they very quickly hang up the phone.

The people at the bar are a little more tolerant of him being there after that. But they still don’t give him a room or anything. They just tell him he can stay in the taproom where people drink, sleeping on a pile of straw.

That’s his first night that he spends in the book. On a pile of straw.

He wakes up the next day, and all of a sudden two dudes show up named Artur and Jeremias, who are apparently supposed to be his own personal helpers that have been assigned to him by the castle.

Except they’re not that helpful.

They don’t do anything. They crawl around on the floor sometimes, spy on him, sometimes they’ll just vanish into nowhere for days at a time.

Really all they do is confuse K more than anything.

Eventually he finds out indirectly through the mayor of the town that apparently there’s been a mistake. That they don’t need any land surveyed at this castle.

And yeah, he was summoned, but it must have been some kind of clerical error or a scheduling mistake. Either way, it’s really no one’s fault if you think about it. Not even really something worth telling him directly. Let’s just have the mayor tell him, and I guess he can be on his way.

But K says no. He’s going to get to the bottom of the real reason why he’s there.

Much like people assume when it comes to answers about the nature of existence:

He knows there’s gotta be a better explanation. It can’t just be some random mistake.

So he tries to walk up to the castle, but the paths that lead to the castle just loop back in on themselves in really confusing ways. Or it seems like the second he starts to get close to the castle, the castle just recedes and he can never fully get to it.

He tries to get in contact with one of the officials, but they’re always unavailable and just out of reach.

K realizes he’s gonna be there a while as he’s waiting to find out the answers, so in the meantime he gets a job as a janitor at a school.

He lives in one of the classrooms of the school with a woman he met in a bar. And as they’re living in this classroom, in the story it’s like being in their bedroom at home. They’ll be having arguments like they’re in a relationship, cuddling, sleeping, right in front of all the kids that are all watching them in the classroom.

Then when the school day starts, the two of them have to move their bedding out of the way so that the teacher can start class.

It truly is like Kafka got this scene out of a dream that he had one night.

There’s a sense in which, in this story The Castle, the more and more that K tries to find meaning to the absurdity of his situation, the more he’s trying to make sense of things within the arbitrariness of the system, the more entrenched into the bureaucracy he becomes.

He starts to have a job he doesn’t like, a girlfriend he’s not too sure about, and he even gets himself trapped in an uncomfortable living situation.

Does any of this sound familiar to anyone out there?

Kafka’s writing at the beginning of the 20th century, right around the year 1915. And the philosopher Hannah Arendt is writing her work right around the year 1950.

Now, a lot changes over the course of those 35 years in terms of what it’s like to be a person. Stuff Hannah Arendt thinks is crucial if you wanted to understand what Kafka was doing as he was writing these stories.

To her, there’s no reason to think that any of this we’re reading is an allegory for the human condition ala Camus. There’s also no reason to assume, as Adorno did, that this is about self-justifying power and how it gets out of hand.

People will even say sometimes that Kafka was something like a “prophet” for the events that went down during the 20th century. But Hannah Arendt might ask, “why do we even have to call him something like that?”

To her, we don’t need to be looking any further than what is clearly going on in this writing that’s about the actual world he’s living in.

She thinks what Kafka’s doing in his work is giving a real analysis of the underlying structures of modern life, and where the lives of people are headed if it keeps going this way.

Kafka was living during a time where these things he’s writing about are still a bit under the surface. But Hannah Arendt is living during a time where these things have been brought right out into the open, and have essentially become pieces of what a normal life is for a modern person.

In the 1950s, Hannah Arendt wrote what would become one of her most famous books, called The Origins of Totalitarianism.

She writes in it not only about the mechanics of how a totalitarian situation emerges in the world, but also about how those movements sustain themselves by dominating the experience of the individual.

And to her, Kafka’s books are blueprints that strip our reality down to its core structure, in a way that reveals the patterns we start to accept as normal when living in one of these totalitarian setups.

I’ll give a few examples. Let’s start with one of her most famous ones from The Origins of Totalitarianism: the way bureaucracy is used to control people.

See, it’s easy to think of bureaucracy as something that’s an unfortunate but necessary thing about the modern world.

It’s easy to say, “Sure, you gotta let the fine people at TSA take their childhood out on you every once in a while. But generally speaking, modern society is very complex, and bureaucracy’s the price we gotta pay sometimes for all the benefits.”

But justifying it like this is part of the whole game that gets played with bureaucracy, to Hannah Arendt.

Bureaucracy often gets thought of as though it’s a civil service that’s just trying to help people, keep things equal.

But she says what it actually does sometimes is become a place where bad actors can enforce what she calls a kind of “rule by nobody,” or “tyranny without a tyrant.” She has a few phrases she uses here.

To understand what she means, consider what it’s like to be K in one of Kafka’s novels. He exists in a world where government bureaucrats have total control over major aspects of his life.

In The Castle, he gets summoned to do some land surveying, and then completely lives at the mercy of these people that he can’t even get in contact with.

In The Trial, K just gets sent from procedure to procedure, showing up and explaining himself to yet another group of unelected officials that never fully explain anything to him, where eventually they have the power to put him to death.

Hannah Arendt says in The Origins of Totalitarianism that, in a government by bureaucracy, decrees can start to seem like “the incarnation of power itself,” with the administrator as only its “accidental agent.”

Because consider the two agents from the beginning of The Trial. These agents tell Joseph K. that he’s under arrest, and then make him start to feel bad for even asking questions.

“Look, it’s not our job to explain to you what’s going on here. You’ll find out at your hearing.”

But then the hearing comes a bit later, and he’s told he’ll find out more at his actual trial. Then at the trial, it’s deferred to some time in the future. And then this goes on and repeats itself until one day he’s just… dead.

Importantly, there is no point that Joseph K. ever knows exactly what is happening to him.

A situation that Hannah Arendt says totalitarian systems purposefully generate in people to control them.

Because if you can flood people with new decrees every day, and a landscape that they can never really predict, then you can keep people in a state of paranoia and uncertainty that becomes a perfect reality to live in if you want people to never be able to organize against the present state of things.

See, it’d be one thing if there was somebody Joseph K. could actually get in contact with. Some person who’s handling his case that could then be held responsible if they made a mistake.

But in a bureaucracy responsibility is purposefully spread out.

There are so many unelected “agents” carrying things out, that when it’s set up this way, you’ll often hear things said like, “Well, this bad thing happened to you, but it really wasn’t anyone’s fault individually. It was just unfortunate. Had to be done. But how at this point can we really go after anyone for what went wrong?”

In other words, to Hannah Arendt for a would-be totalitarian setup, this becomes a tool that allows for people to administer control while never needing to have anyone that looks officially “in charge.”

As she puts it at one point it becomes a sort of “rule by nobody.”

Where no matter how deep you go into the labyrinth of bureaucracy, you can never quite find the person responsible.

In her section on imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she points out how this exact tactic was used by European governments in their different attempts at colonial administration.

These were governments that had real accountability when it came to the home front. But when it came to these satellite governments that they set up in an area they were colonizing, these were not administrations that were in practice held to the same level of scrutiny.

The colonized people were often treated horribly. And it was justified by the governments at home by saying that these people being mistreated are non-citizens. That they aren’t entitled to the same legal protections as people that are living back in France, for example.

So to Hannah Arendt, what these people got was a very Joseph K.-like living experience.

They don’t get clearly defined laws for living their life. They just get decrees handed down to them in a moment that change from week to week.

They don’t get good information to live their life with. No, they flood them with bad information so that they’re in a spot where they really never know what exactly’s happening to them, or who to even appeal to if they wanted to make it go away.

In a sense, their life becomes just at the mercy of a group of bureaucrats that are constantly funneling them into the next procedure they have to comply with, or else face horrible consequences.

Then they’re left to face the inevitable abuse that comes when people that have power aren’t held accountable, and can more or less treat them however they want.

Consider another similarity between the life of K and the lives of people immersed in totalitarianism.

All of these commands that are coming down from on high, that they have to go along with, are framed in terms of them being “necessary and automatic,” as Hannah Arendt calls them.

What does she mean by that?

Well, it would be one thing if a group ascended to power and told people explicitly about the ideological aims of the administration. Where they told people directly that if they don’t like the things going on they can always disagree, but that the administration is never going to listen to them.

Point is, there’s certain ways things can be set up, where there’s at least room for people to disagree and for some kind of conversation to be had.

But she says what totalitarian regimes do is they often frame the stuff that they’re doing as though this isn’t a matter of preference or political ideology. What we’re doing here is just the reality of the universe.

It’s implied that everything they are doing is necessarily true. That it should be automatic.

They say in fact, the only people that would ever deny the obvious reality that’s going on here are all the people caught up in their own political ideology. We don’t have an ideology. We just live in the reality of the world.

Stalin did this, she says, by claiming the historical necessity of the classless society emerging.

They said this isn’t a political move. This is just the end of history. To deny this is to deny history.

The Nazis did this, she says, with the divine providence of the German people, and how it was their destiny to ascend to their rightful place as the pinnacle of human civilization.

Either way, the move is the same here for Hannah Arendt.

This is masking political domination and pretending it’s just a reality that nobody has control over. Something the character K in Kafka’s novels knows all too well in his experience.

In the book The Trial, the priest that he talks to before he gets put to death tells him, don’t worry so much about accepting all of this as true. The real thing to focus on here is accepting this all as being necessary.

Hannah Arendt says in the real world, when this is put into practice in a totalitarian situation, the way this often shows up is through what she calls “technical administration.”

Think of a person that’s given a position of power within a government, but they’re not someone who’s elected. They’re someone who’s appointed because they possess some kind of expert opinion that gives them immense power over other people for a period of time.

And they’re not sold to people in the media as someone that’s using this power in a political way. No, they’re just someone who’s an expert about some aspect of reality. And anything that they do with this position of power, well, that’s just them calibrating society to the reality of the world.

Their job is really just a matter of efficiency. Nothing to do with politics, that’s for sure.

To Hannah Arendt, when technical administration gets away with claiming to be “neutral” or “apolitical,”... when you play into the hands of bad actors and accept their claims that things are just necessary like this, then it robs people of the ability to ask questions or to resist anything that’s being done.

This is why the experience of someone like Joseph K. is exactly the kind of experience that a totalitarian setup wants their citizens to have.

One of the biggest things that Hannah Arendt thinks Kafka’s work gives a voice to is something that would eventually become a very common experience in the lives of modern people.

It gives voice to a deep sense of loneliness. Or feeling placeless, or “statelessness,” as she says at other points in her work, being a Jewish refugee living in the United States herself.

Because think of how K feels when he arrives at the village at the beginning of The Castle.

He’s a stranger to everyone there. Lonely, uprooted. His whole existence is “superfluous,” she says, to everything that’s going on around him.

His whole life becomes a struggle to prove to the people around him his legitimacy for even being there. To find his rightful place in the world. But he never finds it.

Throughout the whole story, he just always lives with this constant, dull undercurrent of being lonely and superfluous. Of being a kind of person where he is never capable of fully feeling at home.

Hannah Arendt says that totalitarian setups absolutely thrive when there are tons of people in society that feel this way. It serves them in a number of different ways:

First of all, when people feel utterly abandoned, they’re much more likely to take on some ideology that gives them at least some kind of feeling of community that they can feel a part of.

Secondly, in a world where you’re being flooded with bad information, there’s a feeling like: well, at least if I go along with the people in power, not only am I on the winning team, but at least there’s some sort of tangible reality for me to believe in now.

More than that, for the underclass of people that are often treated poorly by totalitarians, having people that feel isolated, like they can’t ask for help from anyone around them or else they’ll be turned in to the bureaucracy, this is a perfect place to keep people if you always wanted them living in a haze that makes their life miserable.

Hannah Arendt compares K to the stateless person fighting for recognition in the world.

K demands very little. Only the essentials of life. But even those essentials are handed down at the arbitrary whim of bureaucrats.

In a sense, what he’s missing, as well as many of the refugees Hannah Arendt is talking about during her own time, is “the right to have rights.”

See, it’s popular to think of refugees as people that just need charity from the locals around them or something. That these people just need a little help getting some food, maybe a place to stay for a while.

But to Hannah Arendt, much like K in Kafka’s novels, refugees don’t need more charity. They need the basic right to belong to a political community that guarantees any rights at all.

And Kafka captures this feeling decades before this became such a widespread crisis.

Hope it’s clear by this point that there doesn’t seem to be a single way to read Kafka if you were gonna pick him up.

And honestly, I think he probably would’ve liked that that’s how his work was received.

But if you’ve read Kafka, is there a different take that you assign to his work when you read it? Different from Camus, Adorno and Arendt, I mean. Selfishly, I’d love to hear about it.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you next time.

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Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So for the last time in this series I want to lay out a picture of this project that Camus dedicated his life to, where he wants to affirm the kinds of creatures we are without falling into the trap of system building. Based on all we’ve talked about on this, now, five part series:

In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus shows us the importance of lucidity in the face of the absurd.

In The Plague he shows us that when we take seriously the kinds of creatures we are, it leads to solidarity with our fellow people.

In The Rebel he shows us that, as creatures, we have certain lines that can’t be crossed, and that by saying no to something we affirm the lines that cannot be crossed in the human dignity of others.

And if these are all uncontroversial statements to make about what it is to be a human being, then in Camus’ next book, The Fall, he’s going to extend this line of reasoning to the concepts of judgment and human error. Or our fallenness if you wanted to put it in more religious terms.

To Camus, obviously nobody out there is beyond judgment or making mistakes. But man, isn’t it so common for people to rationalize their behavior, or create elaborate systems in their life, all in an attempt to avoid both of these things? Do you know anybody like that in your life?

Just a heads up: we’ve already talked about the plot points of The Fall on episode #170 of the Philosophize This! podcast. So if it seems like I’m going lighter on the plot in this post it’s only to prevent any redundancy and to be able to focus more time today on what the characters and story mean within the larger project of Camus.

Because if you’ve listened to that episode, you know that the main character of the book, Clamence, starts the book talking to people in a bar about what he used to be like. And it’s not a coincidence that in these stories he sounds like a perfect example of what Camus laid out in his essay The Rebel that we just talked about.

Clamence is the picture of solidarity with others through lucid rebellion. Another one of those images Camus loves to paint in his work.

Clamence is a lawyer. He only takes on cases where he helps the downtrodden of society. In his spare time he likes to use his left arm to help old ladies cross the street while using his right arm to make balloon animals for the kids. This is a man who is very visibly, on the surface at least, a morally good person, someone who seems to sacrifice a lot in his life in the name of helping others.

But he goes through what I called in the episode a reverse baptism. It’s a reverse baptism because instead of there being a moment where he’s dunked in water that morally purifies him; he has a series of moments in his life that reveal to him just how much of a morally questionable person he truly is.

There’s the image Camus paints of him getting punched in the face and humbled during a road rage incident.

There’s the image of him crossing a bridge at night and hearing someone laughing at him behind his back.

Then there’s the most famous scene from this book; the moment of the woman on the bridge. When she falls off the bridge into the water, Clamence could choose to jump in after her and save her, but instead he does nothing and just continues on with his night like nothing ever happened.

In other words, Clamence on the surface can sure put on an act of being the Rebel that Camus writes about.

But if you forced him to look at himself with the same degree of lucidity we’ve been talking about looking at the world with, he’d be forced to acknowledge certain limitations that he has that are rather uncomfortable to admit.

He’s forced to admit that a lot of this morality of his is performative, or “half hearted” as Camus writes. And this reverse baptism has placed him in a feeling of exile, like we talked about last post.

But rather than sit in it, where the illusion of how great of a guy he is gets shown to be what it is, he instead reacts to exile in a very predictable way. He creates tactics and rationalizations out of abstractions that allow him to continue on living, not having to consider his own limitations.

The one we see in the book is his strategy of being what he calls a judge penitent. Once he realizes how morally shallow he is, he spends the rest of his life sitting in a bar, in the deepest circle of hell in Amsterdam, where he acts as both judge and penitent, or prisoner, at the same time.

By telling random people that sit next to him at the bar about how bad of a person he is, through this twisted little confession booth he judges himself before anybody else can bring that judgment upon him against his will.

The idea is: if I just cut myself down enough and tell you all the bad things about me, then you don’t have anything left that you can judge me for. This is a deliberate strategy from Clamence.

More than that, this strategy comes with several other benefits for him as well. See, if I judge myself really harshly; if I’m the lowest, scummiest person in this room in everyone’s eyes, then everything that I judge people for after that is officially me swinging up with my criticisms.

Have you ever known somebody that wants to criticize people, and they’ll start by saying,

“Now look, I’m the first to admit I’m a totally horrible person myself... but look, can we talk for a minute about these other people over there we both don’t like??”

This is the judge penitent strategy.

Now, sprinkled throughout this book are a lot of other common strategies in the modern world that people use to avoid guilt or avoid admitting their own mistakes. Further images Camus paints of avoiding this truly lucid confrontation with life as it is.

There’s the strategy of not really doing much of anything in your life. So that at least if you’re not doing anything you’re not doing much that could be considered bad by people that could judge you for it.

But of course this whole strategy is centered on the idea that by just not doing bad things, you somehow default into being a good person. As we know, this is not the case for Camus. This is a very life denying way of mostly avoiding judgment and the discomfort of facing yourself.

We also see the common strategy of surrounding yourself only with people who agree with you on everything. Or the strategy of enabling each other’s behavior all the time and thus never judging each other for anything.

These people will say things like: “These are all the coolest people I know, the people who really love me.” Because they never tell me things that would make me have to confront my own limitations as a person.

Camus thought there was something important about modern life that we need to understand that leads people to these sorts of strategies in the first place, and that maybe compassion is the only lucid response we have that makes sense in a world that’s so filled with guilt and judgment like this.

For Camus, there are few voices better in the history of literature at depicting what it’s like to be a modern person than what you’ll find in the work of the author Franz Kafka.

He writes an appendix to The Myth of Sisyphus early in his career where he lays out most of the reason why Kafka was so inspiring to him when he was writing his work.

For whatever it’s worth, he also lays out some of the big things he disagrees with Kafka on that make them very different in terms of what they were going for as artists.

Maybe the first thing to do when introducing Kafka is to place his work in the context of some recent episodes we’ve done.

Kafka is someone who was heavily inspired by Dostoevsky. He’s living almost a full generation after Dostoevsky did his work. But then Kafka is doing his work almost a full generation before Camus, who would then go on to be inspired by Kafka when he writes his first book, The Stranger.

So in terms of the time period here, if it’s helpful to you, you can kind of think of Kafka as a bridge between the work of Dostoevsky and Camus. The similarities and differences between them can be useful for understanding their respective projects.

But it’s also important to start by saying what Kafka is not. Because Kafka, like Camus, is also a person who’s more of an artist than he is a philosopher. In fact, it would be misleading to call Kafka a philosopher.

His writing is not meant to be a philosophical system that he’s developing. It’s not meant to prescribe a worldview to people. But it absolutely is intended to get people to see their reality differently on the other side of having read it.

And for whatever it’s worth, in the history of the world, I can’t think of many other non philosophers that have been more inspiring to philosophers in their work than Franz Kafka.

I mean, the list is pretty short. There’s one author that famously compared the impact Kafka has had on modern thought to the impact that Shakespeare or Dante had during their times.

This is why, if you wanted a comparison from me of who Kafka most resembles from the world of philosophy, I might compare Kafka to someone like Zeno from ancient Greece.

See, Zeno was someone way back then that was famous for his paradoxes. The paradox of the runner that can never reach the finish line if they always have to travel half the distance. How is that possible? There’s the paradox of the arrow that seems to prove, when Zeno explains it, that motion must be an illusion, that our senses must be tricking us somehow.

These are powerful images that Zeno created during his time that point out something important about the limitations of the ways we rationally try to make sense of our world. And while Zeno, as far as we know, never tried to create any philosophical system, these images inspired countless philosophers that came after him, who dedicated their work to examining what these paradoxes could mean.

What I mean is: Zeno no doubt helped move philosophy forward indirectly. And this is how I think of Kafka’s place in modernity as well.

So I guess one thing to know about Kafka is that if anybody ever tells you they read Kafka one weekend and they’re pretty sure they know exactly what he was trying to say in his books; don’t believe their lies.

This is someone that has clearly not engaged enough with him to see how deep his work really goes.

We’re talking about only one interpretation of his work today, and that is the reading that Camus writes about at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus. He once said that the genius of Kafka, if you had to break it down, is that the way he writes forces you to read him, but then it forces you to reread him and get another interpretation. And then to reread him again, each time potentially creating an entirely new insight about your world than you got before.

He thinks his work does this because of a very deliberate style that Kafka had. And it’s a combination of two different things. One, the density of the symbolism that goes on in his books. And two, the fact his writing is always designed to keep the person that’s reading it a bit confused all the time.

Have you ever heard people use the term Kafkaesque? This is what they’re talking about. Let’s give an example of his work so you can become familiar with what they’re referencing there.

One of Kafka’s most famous books is called The Trial. And the book starts by immediately dumping the reader into one of these classic, Kafkaesque situations.

The main character of the story, Joseph K., or just K as they call him throughout the rest of the book, wakes up in his bed, wipes the sleep out of his eyes, and instantly realizes that he’s under arrest.

Two men in suits, who claim to be public officials, are sitting in the next room drinking coffee, and they tell Joseph K. that while he’s technically under arrest, there’s really no need for them to detain him at this moment. Not like he’s gonna get very far even if he tries to run.

So when Joseph, naturally, asks them what he’s under arrest for, the two of them say, “don’t know.”

Not really our job to explain all that to you. Look, our job’s just to arrest you. You’ll find out all that information soon enough, don’t worry.

When he starts to complain a bit more, the two of them start to make him feel stupid for even asking. They make him feel bad for complaining to them. Why are you making our jobs more difficult?

So Joseph eventually accepts the situation and just paces around in his room until he’s told there’s gonna be some kind of weird initial hearing for the arrest, and it’s going to take place right now in the front room of the house he’s staying in.

The guy leading the hearing shows up. Neighbors and people passing by come into the front room to watch the hearing. The guy casually pulls up an end table and a chair as some kind of makeshift desk that he’s sitting at while he’s judging him. The guy starts smoking in the front room, casually, talking to Joseph like all this is very normal.

He tells him he’s under arrest, that he’ll face trial at a later date. He doesn’t tell him when or where that is, but that obviously he can keep going to work in the meantime. After all, he’s just under arrest here, he says. That doesn’t mean he should stop going to work.

Fast forward to him showing up at the attic of an apartment building for his court date; the one they didn’t give him a time and place for. And the first thing they say to him when he gets there is, “Good, you’re here, finally. You’re an hour and a half late!”

Now, this is just one example of dozens of these slightly confusing strings of events that Kafka writes into his work.

By the way, don’t get me started on some of the more bizarre examples you’ll find in this book, The Trial...

There’s one point in the book where Joseph K. opens up a random closet, and inside the closet are the two guards from the beginning of the book that arrested him. They both have their shirts off. They’re down on their knees getting whipped by a guy wearing an all black suit.

Now if that just sounds like a Saturday afternoon with the parents for you, how about this one:

Later on in the book, when he’s visiting his lawyer, he goes behind a random curtain this time, and he’s all of a sudden transported into a room where there’s an endless row of legal clerks all working on a bunch of files.

They branch out in all directions. He can’t see the end of them. The room itself is very hot, it’s filled with smoke. And all these legal clerks are sick, coughing, sweating, slowly dying from all the heat and smoke from the coals burning in the room.

This is a scene that just happens in the middle of the book with no explanation.

So all this is very weird if you compare it to a traditional story. Why would Kafka do this sort of thing? Why write a book where the reader is made to feel a bit confused all the time?

Camus says that if you want to understand Kafka, pay less attention to the specific stuff that he’s writing about, and more attention to the way he makes the reader feel.

Because the way you feel when you read a Kafka novel, to Camus, is the way you feel when you confront the absurdity of the universe head on.

Think about it. When the main character K wakes up in the story and realizes that he’s under arrest, there’s some stuff about that scenario that looks like situations you’ve seen in your life before.

And if you were reading the novel like you read all other novels, following a typical plot arc, looking for things to make sense, then every so often when you’re reading Kafka you’re going to be blindsided by something that’s nothing like what you expected to happen.

Well similarly, if we go throughout our lives, to Camus, constantly expecting the world to conform to some narrative or some set of abstractions; if we idealize or demonize people and things around us as though the world is ever going to be that simple, we are similarly going to be hit with moments where the limits of the ways we’re simplifying things becomes all too obvious to us.

A close relationship ends. We have a health scare. Maybe the thing we believed in the most turns out to be nothing like the thing we thought it was.

To Camus, Kafka is a genius at putting people in this headspace.

Both to be a human being that faces the absurdity of the world, and to be reading a Kafka novel, is to be hit with moments that exceed our rational expectations of them.

It is to face moments sometimes that feel like they’re out of a nightmare. It’s to march forward throughout the whole process screaming at the top of your lungs, searching for some meaning that’s going to make it all make sense, only to be met with a deafening silence as we continue to turn the pages.

To Camus, Kafka captures the essence of what it is to be an honest person in the modern world. He just puts it in a dramatized form that seems ridiculous to most people. But his point is take a second to notice that it’s not really any more ridiculous than our world. It’s just different from the world that most of us have found a way to normalize, or escape from, all the time.

Camus points out how the protagonists in many of Kafka’s novels just agreeably go along with the absurdity of the world they’re in. Much like we do.

I mean sure, the character K from the book initially asks why he’s being arrested. But it doesn’t take much for him to forfeit any kind of freedom he might otherwise have to the set of procedures that he finds himself living in the middle of.

He lives in a state of guilt, accused of something, not really sure of what. And his solution is to just outsource his decision making about what to do next, his morality, to the officials that always tell him the next place to be, the next thing to do, and the next way he needs to be thinking.

Camus thinks this is the fate of many people living in the modern world. Substitute the court system in this story for something like a modern day political party, or a cause, and you essentially have the life of how many people frame their whole place in the universe.

They don’t know what to think until the officials tell them what to think. Moments that seem like something out of a nightmare happen right in front of them. They’re confused for a second, but only until they can get to the officials who tell them, “Don’t worry, all this is very normal. This is all part of the plan.”

To Camus, to outsource your morality to some set of faceless bureaucrats with a clear agenda is a recipe for living a life where there is no freedom for you really anymore. There’s just compliance to a set of procedures every day, like Joseph K. in the book.

Decision making becomes just following the next procedure. Procedures you either follow and then get a nice pat on the head for following them that day. Or you can deviate from them, and you’ll very quickly realize how much control these people have over your thinking.

Camus calls this move at one point something that happens to people when they “embrace the God that consumes them.”

And the thinking is, whether it’s a political party, or a philosophy, or even an actual god, when it comes to these things that allow us to continue to live without facing our existence head on, better to embrace a God that consumes you, for some people, than to live in a state of true lucid revolt.

One of my personal favorite lines Camus ever wrote, that’s around this same subject, is something he says in a famous speech he gives called The Crisis of Man.

Some context. This is after WW2, and he’s trying to call for his generation to take responsibility for not only what happened during that whole situation, but for rebuilding the way that we think moving forward so that stuff like this doesn’t happen again.

Now of course we know at this point in the series where he’s coming from with his whole project. Finding an alternative to system building has always been a huge part of him.

And one giant area that he thought was overinflated during this time is how people in the modern world typically view politics. Which he thought was at least one small part of the rise of people like Hitler and Stalin.

He says in the speech he understands why politics is so inflated in people’s lives, and maybe you could make a case that it’s still necessary.

But the piece of advice he would give his generation is that as soon as we can, he says, we need to bring the role of politics back down to its proper size.

He says, “Politics should do our housekeeping. It shouldn’t settle our domestic disputes.”

And what he means is, politics, throughout history, generally has been about certain things, about collecting taxes, building roads, maintaining the order of things. It’s about doing the sort of background stuff that then allows the actual people to go about living their lives, creating what the society is that they live in.

But in today’s world it’s different. Today politics gives you an entire worldview. Politics gives you a theory of love, he says. It gives you the way you think people should be living their lives, what freedoms you think people should be having. It gives you a picture of what you should think justice should be.

This is not traditionally something that went on in the realm of politics. In the past this has been done when people come together to discuss the world they live in, be it religious or philosophical.

But when these things get wrapped up under the banner of politics the whole thing invites people to make their positions on these things antagonistic to each other.

Every conversation foreshadows some distant November off in the future where these ideas are going to go to battle against each other in the giant superbowl of politics.

Where your worldview is not just a disagreement we have, and if you disagree with me I might be grateful that you help me develop my position like it might work in philosophy. No. In politics, now you are my political enemy. You’re destroying the world I want my kids to live in. In a binary competition where everyone in it has to pick one side or the other.

Our conversations always existing under the banner of politics allows people to get away with bad philosophy.

And you can see this in who’s the most successful in political conversations. It’s not people actually trying to understand the world better. It’s the people best at rhetoric. The people who are best at steelmanning their own side, ignoring the limitations of it, and then framing the other side in the worst way they possibly can.

For Camus, when you apply this at scale and it becomes an entire lane that modern people can use to avoid the existential tensions they’d otherwise have to be navigating; well, you can imagine why he thinks the protagonist of a Kafka novel, outsourcing themselves to a set of faceless bureaucrats, reflects something important about the condition that a modern person finds themselves born into.

But here’s the thing: if everything we’ve just said here today about living in the modern world is true, then does it really make much sense to be angry at any of the people that take one of these off ramps as a method to get away from it?

Camus might say, as modern people, we are not born into the Mediterranean sun that he talks about so much in his work. This life of immanence and affirmation about things that he’s been singing the praises of is not where most of us get started in our lives.

Generally, we live in a world that is completely dominated by rational abstractions, transcendence, and ego. Those are basically your choices if you want to worship at the altar of something.

And if someone born today, when they have that rare moment of lucidity, finds themselves living in a world that feels like they’re in a Kafka novel… can you really blame them for wanting to escape that somehow?

Rather than think of these people as stupid or evil, maybe the better way to think of them might be desperate. Desperately born into a Kafka novel that they will do anything to find a way out of.

And this is where compassion is going to become such an important piece of what Camus was going for in his book The Fall.

Remember in The Plague, when Camus talked about solidarity, and how real solidarity is only a response that starts to make sense when you consider the common existential condition that we share with other people.

Well in the same way, in The Fall, Camus says that we’re all similarly capable of making big mistakes, capable of judging and being judged, and capable of losing sight of the fact that this is part of the kinds of creatures that we are.

Clamence as a character may be one of these modern people, trapped in a cycle of rationalizing their own behavior. But to Camus, a very important response, when we are affirming our reality fully, is going to be compassion for people like Clamence, who are in a similar state of affairs as we are.

Maybe compassion is the equivalent of solidarity at the level of guilt and judgment.

Now, Camus has a lot of love for Kafka, no doubt. But he also disagrees with him. He thought Kafka didn’t take the absurdity of the universe as seriously as he could have. He says this because he notices that when Kafka writes his books, he always leaves room for some kind of hope that can rescue the protagonist at the end of the story.

He says you can see this in his book The Trial, where he has priests that come and talk to Joseph K. when he’s about to be put to death, telling him there’s this slight hope out there that there will be some kind of acquittal for him that comes in at the last second.

He says you can see this in another book he wrote called The Castle (we’ll talk about it next post), where there’s always this mysterious voice that beckons and calls to the main character, trying to get him to come to a castle that’s going to offer him salvation. Again, a kind of hope that he leaves in there for people caught in this absurd world.

As well intentioned as this may be from Kafka, to Camus this is still a hope that he thinks “traps people in an infinite search for grace.” They cling on to that hope, they “embrace the God that consumes them,” and having that resource he thought prevents readers from facing exile, or any uncomfortable tension that might lead to existential growth.

But there’s an interesting question to ask about all this.

Which one of these two options is truly accepting the limitations we have as beings? Is it to accept the total silence of the universe and the limitations of meaning? Or is it to accept the limitations of my own phenomenological experience, and the possibilities that may lie beyond it, that I may catch glimpses of in strange moments?

If you’ve made it this far in the series I’d love to know your answer to this.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you next time.

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Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So if you’ve read these last three posts we’ve done recently on Albert Camus, you can hear some of the ideas he’s been throwing around and be on board with what he’s saying in theory.

But it’s quite another thing to be able to apply these things to your life in any sort of real way.

To Camus, someone doesn’t just think their way into a more lucid framing of their reality. And his terms like solidarity or revolt or rebellion are not often things you understand by just reading about them in a book. Camus knew much of his work was going to be something where a person had to arrive at an understanding of it through lived experience.

Much like in the work of others we’ve talked about on recent posts: Dostoevsky, the religious mystics, even certain lines of Zen Buddhism; we’re familiar with the idea that there are certain insights about what it is to be a human being that can only be arrived at by experiencing them directly.

And to Camus in particular, one of the important experiences a person can have in their life, but one that a lot of people spend most of their lives running away from, is what he’s gonna call the experience of exile.

Now just to understand what he’s talking about here I want to start with an example of exile that’s far too extreme, and then I’ll readjust from there.

Imagine being a member of a village, deep in the jungle somewhere, and say one day you do something that makes everyone in the village really mad at you.

They all decide they’ve had enough of your genius behavior for one lifetime, and they cast you out into the jungle and say to never come back.

Well when you’re out there in the jungle all by yourself…this is far from a good feeling you’re having. Constant anxiety, zero security. One way to put it is that this is a feeling of exile from the safety of the community you once lived in.

In fact, you could say this is a type of homelessness you’re experiencing there. That being in exile is being hit with the reality that this village you used to be a part of, in terms of it providing security for your life, it turns out it’s not as stable of a thing as you once thought it was.

There was a time where your place in that village felt like it was the absolute truth to you. But all it takes is for a few relatively small things to go wrong that feel largely outside of your control, and now you find yourself barely surviving out in the wilderness.

It starts to dawn on you that there are some real limitations to your situation that make the security that once felt like home start to seem like it was a set of illusions.

Well this is a perfect metaphor to understand what Camus means by the concept of exile in his work. For him, exile is going to be a state of metaphysical homelessness.

It’s going to be when we lose a sense of home usually against our will. Where then, once we’re in this new place without a home, we may long to go back to the way things once were, but exile is going to be a special type of experience where we find that it’s impossible to go back to the same set of illusions we once lived in.

And as you’re no doubt guessing by this point, for Camus this is going to apply to far more areas of our experience than just being physically exiled out in the jungle.

I mean, obviously. Camus would say that we aren’t merely physical creatures. And he’d want us to remember that one important thing about the environment that we always live in is that it also includes this existential tension of the absurd.

So what this means is at the level of the universe, you are not entitled to a permanent state of anything in this life.

Yes, when it comes to physical safety, but also when it comes to knowledge about the world, to love, meaning, beauty, belonging, whatever it is.

Any form of these things that you ever experience in your life, to Camus, is strictly provisional.

They are subject to change. They are things that need to be revised on an almost everyday basis by you. And to not do that work, to spend your life making arrangements where you see these things as more owed to you or unchanging than they really are, well this is to do what most of us do, and spend your life on the run from exile.

When we encounter these sorts of limitations and are hit with the fact that our old set of illusions are shattered; as Camus puts it at one point, when we realize that there really is no “promised land” for us in this life when it comes to anything, the realization of that fact, the living immersed in that fact is going to be one of the most important things you can ever experience if you wanted to affirm life at a level that few people ever get to see.

Almost like an existential compass, it’s something that points the way towards a reintegration with your fellow people and the world itself. It moves someone away from reducing these things into theoretical abstractions.

We’ll talk about several different examples today of very important ways exile shows up in our lives.

We’ll also talk about some common methods people use to run away from it all the time.

Should be said though, Camus has already shown us some pretty beautiful images of exile so far in the work we’ve already covered.

He describes Sisyphus, as clearly in a state of exile as he’s alone, pushing his rock up a hill condemned by the gods. There’s also Meursault in The Stranger who’s in a state of exile, where he’s a stranger within the very society he lives in.

Then there’s his book The Plague we’ve talked about, where Camus shows us a more collective state of exile. Where Dr. Rieux, Jean Tarrou, and others encounter the plague, and then they’re quarantined into a state of exile, where their city’s cut off from the rest of the world.

He eventually shows us how it’s only through being in this state of exile together that they eventually face the absurd head-on and find solidarity. Exile, again then, becomes the uncomfortable thing that gets them to this deeper understanding of their true connection to others.

And if all you had were these well-known versions of exile from the work of Camus, well you’d be fine honestly. Your life would probably still be okay.

But as the resident guy in your life that’s spent way too much time reading philosophy in my life, I wanted to turn you on to another book that Camus wrote later in his career, where it’s the most focused effort he ever gives us in his work of creating images of this concept of exile that are highly relatable.

It’s a book he wrote in 1957 called Exile and the Kingdom.

Six short stories, all of which paint a different image of people caught in a state of exile. And it’s usually, by the way, a complicated double form of exile for these characters as we’ll see.

And these examples are great I think because look: bubonic plagues, mythical figures pushing a rock up a hill, these are wonderful and all… but there’s something about having real examples dramatized from the lives of people that’ll allow us to unpack exile on this post a lot more effectively than we otherwise would.

Consider the first of these six short stories. It’s a story about a woman named Janine, who finds herself pressured to go on a vacation with her husband. It’s the story that Camus chooses to open the book with and he gives it the title: “The Adulterous Woman.”

Now you hear that title, and you may think this is a woman who’s going to have an affair with someone in this story. Well, not in the way you may be thinking.

This vacation that Janine got pressured to go on isn’t just a vacation for her.

Her husband’s a salesman. He travels to the Sahara Desert in the country of Algeria to try to sell stuff to people. And it was a situation where he didn’t want to be on this trip all alone, so he asks his wife Janine to go along with him and keep him company. Let’s go together and just call this whole thing a vacation, he says.

She admits when she imagined going on this trip she thought it was gonna be a bunch of soft sand and palm trees everywhere, paradise basically.

But then she actually gets there, and she’s soon hit with the reality of being in the desert. The heat, the cold, sand everywhere in your shoes, in your hair, rocks and dead grass essentially as far as the eye can see.

More than just with the landscape though, Janine is shocked when she gets there by the very different, nomadic sort of people that live in this desert region of Algeria.

She doesn’t like them that much. She finds the way they act to be abrasive, different from the way she’s used to seeing people act where she comes from in her home country of France.

Pausing for a second to give some important context here about this story and the rest of the book.

Camus himself was a man born in Algeria who then moved to France later on to further pursue his artistic career. And because of this, he’s a man who feels a special connection outside of writing this book to both Algeria as a country and France as a country. He loves both of them.

Now during this time that he’s writing the book Algeria was a colony of France, struggling for independence. There’s a war going on. And as is the case with many colonial situations like this, even if you’re not someone actively shooting a gun, there’s almost always horrible violence going on around you, there are power struggles; to call it “tension” that exists between the people of Algeria and their French colonizers would be an understatement.

But remember though: Janine in this book is a woman from France, on vacation in Algeria, looking at the people that live there, annoyed by many of their differences.

She thinks they’re weird at times. Arrogant and inconsiderate at other times.

I mean you can almost imagine this stuck up married couple from France in the middle of the desert on vacation. Someone walks a bit too close to them and they say something nasty about them quietly to each other.

They’re a couple of very closed-off people, judging everything around them, trying to keep their world as small as possible. And this is Camus’ point here. On this particular trip, Janine is going to start to notice that keeping the world small like this is primarily what her and her husband are doing when they’re in their marriage together.

She starts by taking a long look at her husband. And in that moment she just sees through the game they’ve both been playing more than she ever has before.

She hears the way he’s talking to people as he’s trying to sell stuff to them, where he has this really obvious set of tactics he’s using just to get something from people. It’s a bit cringe from her perspective.

More than that though, she looks at him and she sees how he just starts complaining the second things get immediately outside of his comfort zone. She starts thinking about him more as a partner: you know, 25 years ago they got together, he was a law student, she was a young woman, and he asked her to marry him.

They agreed to be the thing for each other that was always going to be there no matter what happens.

When the world gets hot or cold or sandy, when these annoying nomadic people start coming around them getting a bit too close, let’s make an arrangement, they said, so that we never have to deal with any of this stuff alone, facing it head on.

And look, she doesn’t hate the guy by any means. He has good qualities. He’s generous with her, she says. When she really asks for something he’ll always do it.

But there are things about the way they talk to each other in this marriage that show her something important about this arrangement they have. He’ll say things like, “Don’t worry, if I ever die I’ve made sure you’re gonna be financially taken care of.”

And she hears that and she’s like, “Okay, that’s great.”

But it’s also in another sense a really fearful thing to say. To say something like that is completely missing something important about what life is, isn’t it?

To her, think of the kind of person you’d have to be to hear that and just be completely relieved. Where running from the volatility of life is one of your biggest concerns every day when you think about what your partner provides to you.

Don’t get her wrong, she appreciates that her husband would do this for her. But there’s a whole other way of looking at life here, where financial hardship like that, having to start over, having your back up against a wall sometimes, is just part of what it is to be a human being.

What person structures their life around being able to run from life all the time?

This goes beyond just a marriage for Camus though. I mean imagine if any time life like this came your way and you were about to have to face something difficult head on, imagine if you always had someone to bail you out, so that you never had to experience the hardship fully.

You, of course, wouldn’t resent the support system. But to structure your life this way would be in denial of something about what life is. Maybe something very important about life. To Camus, this is a way to avoid a feeling of exile.

And when it comes to Janine and her marriage: how much of this whole arrangement that they have as a couple is just an elaborate setup so they can avoid this feeling of exile?

There’s a sense in which she’s not even sure if her husband loves her anymore. But at the same time she wonders, sadly: does it even really matter if he does or not, given the nature of this service that they provide each other that helps them keep their world mutually small?

Now noticing this, Janine finds herself in what you could call a double state of exile.

On one hand she doesn’t feel at home even in her own marriage, and feels like she sees beyond the set of illusions she used to live in that allowed her to deny some aspect of her life.

But then she also doesn’t feel at home when she’s not in her marriage, or when she’s out in the desert of Algeria, around all these people that don’t play the same set of social games that she does, and so their existence becomes an affront to her and her husband.

And it’s this metaphysical homelessness she’s in, combined with the inability to go back to the way she used to see things, that puts her in a place that is very uncomfortable, where it drives her to move forward in her life in a transformative way.

Exile here becomes a catalyst for finding a way to relate to her existence and the people around her in a more lucid way.

And what she starts to get drawn to in the story is the desert itself. Which in my opinion is just beautiful work by Camus here, to have the desert be the thing that she has a love affair with.

Again, The Adulterous Woman as a title is not referring to her cheating on her husband with another person. She cheats on the set of cold, shallow arrangements that they have with each other that ground the very essence of their marriage.

See, they’re walking around one day in the story, and someone recommends to them that they climb up on top of this fort and go check out the view of the desert that’s all around them. It’s beautiful, they say.

Janine suggests they do it. Her husband tries to get out of it. Janine insists. Her husband finally relents. She gets up on the top of this fort, looks out at the expanse of the desert shooting out in all directions, and in this moment she starts to feel overwhelmed by how connected to this place she feels.

As she looks out she can’t help but think that the desert, while it’s very empty, some might even call it a barren landscape, on some other level is also a place that’s very free. She even sees some of the nomadic people in the distance living in the desert. They have no idea who she even is, probably never will.

In other words, the desert becomes a place for her that’s unrestricted by a bunch of the normal hallmarks of civilization. Things that are usually built in an attempt to try to protect people from the sun, the elements, and all the problems that come with the freedom of a place like the desert. These people in the desert, to her, become people that are “possessing nothing, but serving no one, they are the destitute and free lords of a strange kingdom.”

And if you’ve read the last few posts we’ve done on Camus, you will no doubt see what he’s doing. This whole scene clearly represents some of the symbolism we’ve talked about throughout his work. The desert represents the absurd, where on one hand, yes, it’s an empty void, but on the other hand it brings to a person a new level of freedom. The sun represents the immanence of reality and the Mediterranean spirit outside of the typical abstractions people live in. There’s also the intense weather of the desert, representing what we sometimes have to face while affirming the world and our own existence.

See, Janine feels the spirit of this lucid revolt calling to her in a sense here. And experiencing the desert fully like this wakes her up into a feeling of deep longing that she has, a longing for something that has no object but is absolutely there.

But still, as Janine’s looking out at the desert, and her husband’s complaining and wanting to go back to the hotel, calling her silly asking her what she’s even doing staring off into the horizon, she can’t help but feel that this moment is one that is shattering a set of illusions that she will never be able to go back to.

Once they get back to the hotel in the book she starts to feel sick. They decide to go to sleep for the night. The room is cold, sand is everywhere, it’s maybe the worst hotel room ever designed.

But they’re snuggling in bed next to each other, and she can’t help but notice how easy it would be to just do what they’ve always done: to keep each other warm, wake up the next day, and live yet another day the same way they always have.

But on this particular night, with her husband asleep, she sneaks out of the room into the cold. She runs back to the spot where she saw the desert earlier that day and decides to take it all in again, this time all by herself.

After she returns to the room, she crawls back into bed. Her husband wakes up, walks over to the sink to get some water like he normally does, and he notices that his wife’s crying. He asks her what’s wrong. She says, “Oh it’s nothing dear, don’t worry.” And that’s where the story ends.

Now the similarities here to the behavior of a person having a different kind of affair are deliberate. And the ending of the story being so ambiguous is also very deliberate. To Camus, to be in a state of exile is not to arrive at some neat end to the story, and it’s not to have perfect information about what exactly is going to be happening next.

This is a really important detail about exile that Camus wanted to get across in this story. Exile, when you pay attention to it, is often the price someone has to pay for being honest about their existential condition.

To Camus, choosing to spend your life on the run from exile is a recipe for two things you’re gonna start having more of in your life.

1. You’re not going to fully appreciate things like love, belonging, or meaning as much when you do provisionally have them. You’ll always, to a degree, be taking them for granted.

2. It’s a recipe for being absolutely blindsided when the events of your life inevitably show you the limitations of this set of arrangements you have.

Notice how Janine could live her life for twenty-five years in a set of arrangements masquerading as love and belonging, only to be blindsided during one moment of lucid reflection that all of this was an attempt to deny certain realities about what her life is.

See, when she looks back twenty-five years in the story, thinking back to a time when her life made more sense to her; nostalgia like this is a very predictable response people have when they’re hit with a state of exile.

Camus seems to be making the case that one way to think of nostalgia is that it’s a type of metaphysical homelessness at the level of time.

Nostalgia is feeling so not at home during the current moment that you’re living in, that you run from that feeling and then harken back to a time when it felt like things were less absurd. In other words nostalgia is a response to exile.

And consider how a point like this makes his entire project so unique. If you asked so many people alive today to give an explanation of nostalgia they would likely try to come up with some sort of psychological explanation for it.

That’s the hallmark of our times. What is nostalgia? Well, you seek nostalgia all the time because you have some insecure attachment that wasn’t formed properly in your childhood, so now you long for this other time you used to live in. Or how about: nostalgia is a maladaptive avoidance behavior you’ve developed over time that distorts your view of the past and the present, and then fuels this depression that we’ve been trying to heal in you. Any psychological narrative where we simply explain our behavior in terms of how it connects to a set of protocols.

Camus would be very skeptical of this approach being the final word on any of this. And of course he wouldn’t say that we should stop doing psychology, but he would see it as incredibly valuable to not lose sight of the permanent set of tensions that we are always having a psychological experience within.

He’d invite people to see their own experience as not just a problem to be solved. He’d invite them to try to be in their experience more fully. To not try to rationally subordinate it by linking it to a set of theoretical abstractions like this.

Part of affirming the absurdity of existence fully for him is knowing there are things about it that exceed rational explanation. It is part of the kind of creature you are to want more out of life than life can give you. And what if exile is not just some epiphenomenon of some underlying complex you’ve developed over your life? What if exile is a fundamental existential condition of the kinds of creatures we are?

Let’s talk about another story in this book that shows more sides of what Camus called exile. Totally different characters in this one, but the story’s still set in Algeria. The title of the story is The Guest.

The main character of the story is a schoolteacher named Daru.

Daru is a guy that is ethnically French but was born and raised in Algeria. For most of his life he’s lived in a schoolhouse on top of a big hill, and his life has been to teach the Algerian children that live in the villages surrounding this hill he lives on.

And Daru, for whatever it’s worth, loves his life as a schoolteacher. He doesn’t want anything other than what he already has.

So if you’re someone that enjoys your own life, you may be able to relate to him as a character, because he becomes extremely frustrated in the book when this war breaks out in Algeria between the indigenous population and the French colonial rule.

This war is rather inconvenient to him as someone who not only doesn’t want his life to change, but he also feels like a citizen of both these countries. He sees it from both sides and doesn’t really want to pick a side. And the whole situation gets even more inconvenient for him when he looks out his window one day and sees a French colonial guard leading a prisoner with his hands bound up this giant hill to his schoolhouse. He has no idea what any of this is all about.

The French guard arrives and tells Daru that he’s being commissioned by the state to deliver this prisoner to be executed. There’s a town several miles away where the authorities are waiting for him, and Daru, after the weather calms down, is being commanded to walk this prisoner to that town and hand him over.

Of course Daru wants nothing to do with this. He tells the guard he’s not going to deliver him and that he refuses to take a side. To which the guard just tells him to do whatever he’s going to do and leaves.

Daru spends all night hoping the prisoner will just make a run for it. That he will change the situation so that Daru doesn’t have to make a choice.

But the next morning, he wakes up, feeds the prisoner, and starts walking him toward the town where he’s supposed to turn him in. As he’s leaving his house, he hears something behind him move, a little rustle of the leaves. He looks back, sees nothing, and decides to keep going.

Later on, a couple miles away from the town in the middle of the desert, Daru stops the prisoner from walking and gives him a choice. He gives him some money and some food, and he tells him there are two paths here to take. Follow this road to the left and it will take you to the town. You can turn yourself in and face your execution. This other road to the right will take you to a group of nomads. They’ll welcome you in and protect you from the French authorities. You can live your life going on with them.

Daru starts walking back to his house and the prisoner just stands there. As he gets close to where he’s about to be out of eyeshot, curiosity gets the better of him, he looks back, and sees the prisoner chose to go to the town and turn himself in.

Daru goes back to the schoolhouse, opens the door, happy to be done with it all…when he sees written on the blackboard a message that was left for him while he was gone.

Scribbled in chalk it says: “You turned in our brother. You will pay.” Clearly a message written by the surrounding Algerians that he teaches, who were watching the whole thing go down and got the wrong idea.

Now just like in The Adulterous Woman, the story ends right here, right at a point where we don’t know exactly what is going to happen next.

And let’s talk about the state of double exile that this character Daru was living in, because it’s similar to a state of exile that Camus faced during his own life.

Daru looks around him at the political options available to him, and he’s someone who doesn’t feel like either side really represents how he feels about the situation. And by the end of the story, he’s clearly someone who because of the choices he has made has become disliked by both sides of the conflict.

The French people can’t trust him, and the Algerian people think he just turned their guy in.

This metaphysical homelessness, where Daru would love to have a side or he’d love for everyone to just leave him alone in his schoolhouse every day so he never has to take a side: Camus is showing us a character here who, completely against his will, is being forced into a state of exile from both of the places he once thought of as home, despite being physically right in the middle of them.

He’s forced to confront the fact that the illusions he was once living in were never a real state of stability or peace in the first place.

And for Daru, even when he tries his hardest not to make a choice in the story, Camus is showing here how sometimes, when it comes simply to the judgments of the people around you, making a choice isn’t even something of your own doing.

Sometimes a choice has already been made for you by the events of the world, and there’s nothing you can do about it except face the exile head on.

And like I said, Camus definitely put a lot of himself into this character of Daru. Not only was he also French Algerian, but the political events of his time also put him in a similar situation.

Very early on in his life Camus was part of an upstart Communist movement. Once he made that choice, any right-wing person from there on out was pretty much guaranteed to despise the guy.

But then later in his life when he condemned the violence carried out by the totalitarian left after World War II; even those people, some of them his closest friends at the time, rejected him for being too moderate, for not standing up sufficiently to all the evils going on in the world.

Now we know, by this point in the series, why Camus in his work tried to be so moderate, measured, and balanced in his approach. Augustine must have been almost always present in his thoughts.

But regardless, during his time he found himself living in a world where the events around him forced him into a state of double exile from the only two options that seemed available if you wanted people on your team.

Does anyone out there know what it feels like to truly love your country and feel a real sense of belonging to it, but then also feel appalled at some of the moral realities of the things that it’s doing? This is a state of exile that you’re living in.

And this brings me to another very important point about exile that Camus wanted to talk about with this book: exile is almost always something you have to be forced into if you ever want to experience it fully.

This can sound kind of weird at first. Because exile, at least on the surface, seems like a pretty voluntary thing to do.

If I can theoretically put myself in a place where I see through the illusions I once was living in, aren’t I putting myself in a state of metaphysical homelessness simply through my own will? Why shouldn’t that be possible?

But the way Camus talks about exile at times in his work, it just seems like he thought to get the full effect of it, it needs to go beyond some point of no return. In a place where we, as people, don’t really have full control over what’s happening to us.

So it might be tempting to hear all this from Camus and think hey, if exile’s so important, why don’t I just put myself in a state of exile every day and it’ll be part of some existential anime training montage for my life?

But it’s almost a paradox. You can’t put yourself into exile by just pushing yourself on the elliptical at the gym or something. Because there’s no point there where you truly feel like there’s no going back.

See, in a way it brings us back to that hypothetical village that we started the post with.

The title of the book today is Exile and the Kingdom. And Camus is saying that when it comes to the hypothetical village in the middle of the jungle: it can function for someone kind of like a kingdom. A kingdom that keeps them safe from all the realities of living in the middle of the jungle.

That people often create kingdoms all over the place in their experience of the world. Kingdoms that keep them safe from pain, from heat, cold, sandiness in the desert; also kingdoms that promise them meaning, love, belonging, in a way that’s completely permanent.

The point he’s making though is that most of these kingdoms are illusions. That we should always remember that if there is actually a kingdom to be had out there, a kingdom based more in a lucid confrontation with reality, then that kingdom is always going to be something that’s provisional, and it’s certainly not something that’s ever going to be made by someone in an attempt to avoid anything about their reality.

Next post will be the last in this series on Camus. It will be on his book The Fall and his commentary on the work of Franz Kafka, one of the artists he respected the most.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you next time.

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Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West! This is Philosophize This!

So this is part three of this series we’ve been doing on the work of Albert Camus. Just a heads up: the first two parts will definitely be helpful to read first if you want to get the most out of this one.

That said, solidarity was the concept Camus laid out in his book we talked about last time, The Plague.

Where he says that affirming life as it is means to affirm that other human beings live in the same world that you do.

It means to acknowledge that other people face a similar set of existential dilemmas that you do, and that to ignore the people around you, or to justify their suffering with reasons for why they deserve it… to Camus, this is fundamentally denying something very important about the reality that you live in.

Now as we know, none of this is grounded for him in an elaborate philosophical system. This emerges simply from a lucid affirmation of our own nature, what seems to be the nature of the universe, and the tension that always exists between those two.

And as I teased at the end of last post, this concept of solidarity is going to become the foundation for extending all he thinks we can say from this place of lucid revolt.

Specifically, solidarity is going to allow him to now make a case for justice.

But it can be confusing to hear this at first. How in God’s name is he gonna pull something like this off?

Justice requires laws. Laws are theoretical abstractions. Camus is the kind of guy on Halloween that’ll steal candy from someone dressed up as a theoretical abstraction.

He doesn’t like them. Certainly not when they claim to be universal.

He lays out his case for this “justice” of his in a very long essay he wrote in 1951 called The Rebel.

And it should be said: the same way Dostoevsky might be most famous for writing Crime and Punishment, but superfans always have one of his other books as their favorite… Camus may be most known for writing The Stranger or The Myth of Sisyphus, but it’s this essay, The Rebel, that is the one that people really serious about his work will often say contains his biggest contribution to human thought.

Camus begins The Rebel coming out swinging. He’s got no time to lollygag around anymore, not in a world that has no sufficient theory of justice yet.

And immediately he gives us one of those powerful images he’s been known to use in his work.

He gets us to picture a slave who has spent their whole life taking orders, and then suddenly decides they will refuse to obey some new order they’ve just been given. They say no to the master that’s trying to force them to do something.

Camus asks in the first line of the essay: what is a rebel?

He says a rebel is a person who says no. But like this slave, it’s a person whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. Because when this slave says no, Camus says, they’re also saying yes to something very important, from the moment they make that first gesture of rebellion.

Let’s break down exactly what he’s saying here.

What is the slave saying when he says no to the master? To Camus, he’s saying something along the lines of: “this far, but not farther,” or “I’ve done this for a while, but I’m not gonna do it anymore.”

In other words, the slave saying no implies a borderline for Camus.

He would say that as human beings, it just seems to be the kind of creatures we are, that there are things you can do to me where I will stop you and say that you’re crossing a line, and that I refuse to allow it.

You’ll notice this is a similar move to the one we’ve seen him make in the last two posts, grounding this in lucid experience, and not a system.

You’ll also notice this is one of those common feelings in human experience that, while it’s not a universal, it more or less functions like a universal to Camus because of how common it is.

And when it comes to this kind of borderline we’re talking about, here’s the most important thing: it doesn’t really matter to him where that line specifically is. It doesn’t need to be the same line for everyone, or be unquestionably defined by abstractions. The point is: there is a line, where I say “this far and no farther,” where then to cross that line would be a violation of my human dignity.

His point is that saying no in this case, acknowledging that line, is not a renunciation of anything. In fact, if you think about it, it’s an affirmation of two things for him:

One: it’s an affirmation of a borderline that exists in my own experience.

But two: it affirms that a borderline also exists in the experience of others.

Because for any person on this planet who shares this same feeling I have, where they have certain lines that can’t be crossed, I affirm the legitimacy of their line by affirming the legitimacy of my own. By saying no.

And for the sake of being thorough here: maybe you’re someone who doesn’t have a line. Maybe you’re the kind of person where someone could come and kill you for no reason and you genuinely wouldn’t see it as a violation.

But if you’re someone who does dare to make a judgement like this, where you say no to something, to do that requires you have to have an orientation of care towards the things around you. Which then implies a set of at least provisional values that your care is guided by.

In fact, to even find your voice and say anything at all, to Camus, is to desire and to judge towards a value.

“To breathe is to judge,” he says in one really cool line.

Which means every act of saying no, then, tacitly invokes a value. And if the value of saying no is guarding certain limits where human dignity cannot be violated, then every act of rebellion like this, simply by engaging in it, is an affirmation of the existence of this borderline collectively.

So this is what he means in the opening paragraph of The Rebel. To say no is also to say yes to this collective human dignity. And this is what is meant by his famous reformulation of the line from Descartes that he uses later in the essay:

Instead of “I think, therefore, I am,” he says, “I rebel, therefore, we exist.”

Now what we have done here so far is set up a line of human dignity that cannot be crossed, and we’ve done this without grounding its legitimacy in theoretical abstractions.

So this justice is not only similar to the anatomy of the concept of solidarity we talked about last post, but for Camus solidarity and justice are intimately connected as pieces of our experience. One necessarily implies the other.

Meaning justice is not part of a system of ethics. It’s not an external set of rules or norms. Justice is an internal, metaphysical posture towards the world. It is, once again, something descriptive, not normative. It’s something embodied, not abstract.

And it’s a posture that, for the rest of the book, he’s going to be calling: rebellion.

Now, much of this book, The Rebel, is going to be Camus making a case for how we got to a type of modern ideological extremism that claims to preserve human dignity by trampling all over this line we just set up.

There’s a difference, he says, between true rebellion genuinely aimed at human dignity, and when rebellion turns into something that more resembles revolution.

Something you see in the gulags and labor camps of Stalinism. Something you see in the French Revolution with the Reign of Terror.

But it wouldn’t be wise to stop just at the examples during Camus’ time. Picture anything during your own time, not necessarily even political, that starts as one thing clearly intended to preserve human dignity, and then transforms into something else in the name of a higher ideal, or a cause, or a set of abstractions.

Picture things that remove those limitations on rebellion in ways that are contradictory.

For Camus, there’s no better, more public, more commonly accepted version of this contradiction than what we see in acceptance of the death penalty.

His essay Reflections on the Guillotine is one of the most cited things in history on capital punishment. And it should be said: he understands where people are coming from when they do support the death penalty.

Picture the most disgusting crime you possibly can, where somebody completely ruins innocent lives in the process, and then tell me you have sympathy for anything that happens to that person.

When we’re looking at the terrible consequences of what they did; looking the kids that were impacted right in the eyes, tell me that your priority right now is to think about the “rights” of the person that hurt them.

Someone coming from this place will say: look, these people forfeited any right they have to life the second they violated that other person’s right to life.

To Camus, people will often say this kind of stuff like such a sentimental, confident idiot. Like anyone thinking about anything deeper than their initial anger towards something must be on the side of murderers. But to him this person’s already shown their hypocrisy just in the way they’ve described it so far.

He might start by saying: so you mean to tell me that, in the name of protecting the sanctity of life… you’re going to kill this person against their will?

Do you realize that the move you’re making there is the exact same move that extremist ideologies make when they trample on people’s rights in the name of a cause?

They become the oppressors that they claim to be trying to stop. They make exceptions for themselves. They turn their enemies into not human beings anymore, but into little rational cogs that don’t have rights. Cogs that conveniently fit into some abstract system that solves the absurdity of the world for them.

Camus has a line in the opening paragraph of the introduction of The Rebel. He says:

“There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined. But the Penal Code makes the convenient distinction of premeditation. We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose, even for transforming murderers into judges.”

His point is this: a criminal, at least sometimes, has an explanation that they just did something stupid in a moment. It was because of love that I did it. Or because of anger. Maybe they say it was a crime of passion where they weren’t thinking very clearly.

But no matter how premeditated a criminal can get, it pales in comparison to the level of premeditation, justification, and planning that goes on in a legal system that hands out the death penalty.

Consider for a second that there is a room called a courthouse, with judges and lawyers and gavels and big Corinthian columns and all this pomp and circumstance, where in certain cases the entire point of it is to carry out a ceremony where, on behalf of our cause of justice, based on our set of theoretical abstractions, we have decided we are justified in killing you.

Camus says this is essentially human sacrifice dressed up in a bunch of legal niceties.

That this is a hangover from a more primitive form of justice we really could only justify a long time ago. But that in reality, this is one of the most premeditated forms of murder he can possibly imagine.

He says, for what they’re doing with the death penalty, for the criminal to have done something equivalent to that, the criminal would have to decide they’re gonna commit the crime. Then warn the person they were gonna hurt about the exact date they were going to do the thing… then confine the person for months in a small space at their house, just feeding them, letting them out in the backyard for a while, just taking their time deciding how and when they were actually gonna kill them.

He says: “Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”

This issue was so important to him that he’d been talking about it for several books by this point in his career. Remember the character of Meursault from The Stranger.

The murder he commits wasn’t premeditated. He just shoots a man on the beach because the sun was in his eyes and the guy had a knife.

But when you compare that to his trial, when you picture the mob of clapping seals that decide that this man represents their deepest fears, there’s a sense in which he was dead before he even stood trial.

The trial was just an elaborate theatre where these people could sit around rationalizing their decision to kill him and make it “legal.”

Whenever rebellion, or the genuine attempt to protect human dignity, crosses this line and starts making exceptions for itself, that is the moment in a movement when something fundamentally changes about that movement for Camus.

He says you can see this all throughout history. The French Revolution started with a genuine attempt to secure liberty, equality, and fraternity. But he says the moment that rebellion decided it was justified to kill Louis XVI and his ministers, that’s when the rebellion transformed into the Reign of Terror.

Another example is communism. It starts with the philosophy of Marx and Engels, for them genuinely rooted in trying to preserve the sanctity of the individual and liberty. But the second a version of the movement decides it’s justified to kill the oppressors in the name of bringing about a better society, that’s the switch in thinking that enables the gulags to come, the barriers between people with propaganda, the reduction of people to rational cogs.

This is how it happens, to Camus.

There’s a fantastic image of this that he paints in one of his plays around this time called The Just Assassins. Sometimes it’s just called The Just. Point is, it’s centered around justice, much like his essay The Rebel.

And for some context here, because people have been saying they appreciate hearing about Camus’ work in terms of these five cycles or series that he laid out. Cycle one was The Stranger, Myth of Sisyphus, Caligula, focusing on the individual confrontation with the absurd.

Cycle two is thought of as The Plague, The Rebel, and The Just Assassins, focusing primarily on solidarity and justice.

Anyway, that’s the reason why this play, The Just Assassins, will be filled with dramatic images of people trying to understand the limits of justice. How do you genuinely embody metaphysical rebellion at this level without falling into abstractions?

The play centers around a group of Russian revolutionaries who are planning to assassinate a duke. For whatever it’s worth, this duke’s a pretty terrible person. He’s done a whole lot of bad stuff to innocent people in the name of protecting his own country.

And one of the main characters, (they call him Yanek in the play as a nickname), he makes a plan to kill this Grand Duke Sergei by throwing a bomb at his carriage as he goes to a theater.

On the day of the assassination, he sets himself up on the street, poised, ready to throw the bomb. He sees the Duke’s car coming down the street. He’s just ready to throw it, when suddenly he sees the Duke’s niece and nephew, just small children at the time, unexpectedly in the car with him.

He doesn’t throw the bomb that day. Instead he goes back to his revolutionary friends and tells them he couldn’t do it if there were going to be innocent children killed.

And one of the revolutionaries named Stepan gets really angry at him.

See, he’s a bit more entrenched into the revolutionary movement here, and he comes back at him and says (paraphrasing): “Look, stop being such a moron. You claim to care about children. How many children has this Duke killed in cold blood up until this point?”

He says, “are our own moral scruples more important than the cause itself?” For the sake of future justice, Stepan says, we have to be willing to kill innocents as well. Otherwise the Duke could just wrap himself in innocents as a human shield and we’d never really be able to kill him.

To which Yanek replies back to Stepan: “Some people love justice so much that they refuse to become murderers for it.”

Camus once said if the big question he wanted to answer in cycle one of his work was his classic line of whether or not to commit suicide, then cycle two is focusing on the natural follow-up question to that: whether or not to commit murder.

Is murder ever something that can be done coherently in the name of justice?

Well the short answer to that is: never say never. I mean, for Camus to say never would almost start to sound like he’s trying to declare universals.

He acknowledges at one point that yes, we live in a violent world, and that there may be moments where a genuine act of rebellion has to kill someone in self-defense. But if a rebel did this, it would absolutely have to be a last resort for him.

To which anybody who’s a part of one of these revolutions he mentions can easily say back to him: well what do you call what we’re doing?

Stepan from The Just Assassins could say this is a last resort! Louis XVI has to go, the Grand Duke has to go. The oppressors are in charge right now, murdering people. We gotta get rid of them!

But is this truly a last resort, he would ask? Or is this just rationalizing your behavior, removing the very real limits that are in your way and making exceptions just for you?

Because ultimately for Camus that’s the real problem here. If you had to break down what’s going on, the problem begins when rebellion no longer has the limits built into it that it does at the level of an individual’s lucid engagement with reality.

Philosophical, abstract systems allow these limits to be thrown out, and then it’s only a matter of time before people that were otherwise committed to helping others have their effort get channeled towards an idealism that denies important details about the messiness of what life really is.

And this happens in many ways. He gives examples throughout his work:

These systems often pretend to transcend the lived experience of individual people, which then makes followers of it claim to know more about what’s best for people than they do.

These systems silence the idea of “measure” and “proportion” altogether, often claiming things like, yeah this definitely looks bad, but “this is the only possible way to actually get things done!”

Really, there’s no middle ground? Killing people was the only means to get this end accomplished? Or is this you avoiding real strategic options to make it simple for you?

These systems exist in denial of a lucid take on reality for Camus, because they claim to have some universal solution to problems; one that flattens the actual ambiguity of the world into a dogma.

And then lastly, and this is where the work he did in The Plague will come into this, these systems are based on a total and flat out rejection of the idea of solidarity.

Because when individuals are no longer seen as people sharing a common set of existential conditions; as people sharing a kind of fragile dignity that we only preserve together, throwing out that limit of respect towards each other is the only way these people then become pawns to carry out some “grand vision.”

It’s the only way people are seen as just deserving whatever they get, even if it’s death.

And when you’re no longer looking at people as full human beings anymore worthy of dignity, all of this is not rebellion anymore to Camus. This has transformed into a type of revolution and ideological extremism.

This is how Camus’ father we talked about last time could ever have supported the death penalty in the first place.

You know, in theory he loves the idea of killing someone in the name of a good cause.

But then when he actually has to look at the guy’s head getting lopped off… the distance that moral abstractions usually allow for people to put between themselves and other people gets cut down quite a bit. Much harder to say you believe in the cause when you’re the one that actually has to carry it out.

The point is there are built-in limitations to these kinds of activities that get removed at the level of theory.

And if the problem is a removal of limits, then to Camus we have to find a way to reinstate these limits somehow when it comes to our effort towards justice.

He has several of these he suggests we pay attention to throughout his work.

One example is if you’re a person that makes the claim we need to kill somebody in the name of preserving human dignity, if that’s the kind of stuff you think needs to be done and that it is truly a last resort, then in that case he says not only do you need to be the one that’s willing to do the killing there, but you also probably need to be willing to die as the consequence of having made that choice.

This can sound weird at first, but think of what he’s getting at. This is him trying to reestablish limitations that abstractions allow certain people to ignore.

How common is it to see someone in power, sitting behind a desk, ordering the killing of other people in the name of freedom or something, and then after they give that order they get to just sit back in total safety, not even having to witness all the horrible stuff they’re ordering?

Rebellion always needs to remain rooted in a lucid experience of an individual, for Camus.

This is why he’s going to eventually propose a philosophy of limits on rebellion. We can’t just have a world where people go around in a totally unmoderated way, ripping out all the wires of society, avoiding this more balanced, measured, lucid confrontation with the world as it actually is.

One of the more interesting comparisons Camus makes in this cycle of his work is to consider the similarities between rebellion when it’s done genuinely and within limits, and art when it’s done genuinely.

Think about how similar an artist is to what Camus said about the rebel at the beginning of this book. Like the rebel, the artist starts any art project that they do by saying a kind of “no.”

Because to Camus, to do art is at least at some level to not accept the world purely as it is. Art always comes with the implication that something new needs to be brought into existence.

But more than that, just like the rebel, by saying no an artist also is saying a kind of yes to some alternative universe being brought into view. Or as he says, the artist “rejects the world on account of what it lacks, in the name of what it could be.”

One of the key points to consider here is to think about the vibe that an artist brings towards the world all the time. Think of the metaphysical posture they’re always more or less positioned in as an artist. It’s not passivity, but it’s also not trying to impose themselves onto the world without regard to what it is.

To Camus, an artist, even at the most avant-garde, “revolutionize art itself” sort of level, still never completely smashes the rules and forms of a genre down to nothing. There’s always a respect they have for certain constraints or boundaries that make this still someone engaging in art, as opposed to just creating chaos.

For example, you can be a really revolutionary author that rethinks the entire way language is used to tell a story… but you’re still using language. That’s a constraint you stick to out of respect for the entire process you’re engaged in.

A great painter, no matter how chaotic the work may be, even if it looks like Jackson Pollock on Ambien, it is still painting within the constraints of a particular frame.

The point for Camus is: an artist can’t simply detach themselves from reality and produce total randomness. An artist always takes on a kind of responsibility to communicate truth, or at the very least to strive for sincerity.

So the point is, that carries with it a set of limits that any piece of artwork has to operate within. An artist holds onto certain parameters that make their work intelligible and open to human meaning.

Now at the same time, an artist also doesn’t just paint by numbers. They don’t follow some rigid set of rules given to them that supposedly defines what their genre is.

Well consider how similar this is to the traps the rebel has to avoid falling into as well.

He’ll take some time in this book to lay out examples of characters from Dostoevsky’s novels that illustrate this point he’s making. Now I know not everyone reading this will have read the Dostoevsky series we just did, so I’m gonna try to find a balance here. But just know, there’s a ton of really interesting crossover between Dostoevsky and Camus.

As we already know, during his generation, Camus is opposing the nihilism and the fatalism that he sees dominating the philosophy of his time. And Camus thinks Dostoevsky is a guy that clearly saw what was about to go down in the world. Through the characters in his novels, he dramatizes this internal tension in the spiritual crisis of the time that leads to things emerging like World War II.

Consider, for example, the character of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. He has a famous line where the way it’s often paraphrased is, “if there is no God, then all is permitted.” And Ivan in the book wrestles with this reality when he considers the possibility that it’s true.

Even as the very thoughtful, rational character in the book he finds it to be overly nihilistic. What does it mean for the world if we can’t find genuine moral leadership in the abstract realm of philosophy?

But then on the other hand, Dostoevsky presents the character of Kirillov from his book Demons.

Kirillov, if you remember, was the character that didn’t believe in God, or any collective causes necessarily. So what he believes is that the ultimate act of expression for an individual while they’re here is to sacrifice themselves in the name of their own cause. That as long as the cause is ultimate enough, and as long as I’m really choosing it, then nothing can be a greater act of self-realization than to die in the name of my own values.

Well to Camus, Dostoevsky shows his genius here. It’s just such a perfect character to illustrate not self-realization, but self-deification.

Because to be willing to deny life like that in the name of an abstract cause like this is the very problem that lies at the heart of modern fatalism, fascism, totalitarianism. Even something like the death penalty, like we talked about, is based on this same internal logic.

When we think about our own world, what else might people with just a bit of charisma be able to convince people to do? Especially when the game so many people are playing is to outsource their views of what’s going on in the world to some rhetorician whose main skill is to be fantastic at talking. Fantastic at stoking emotions in their audience that make their fear feel like certainty about what’s going on.

Once again we can see: the problem here for Camus is that this rebellion needs to be something grounded in the limits of the individual. And here’s the biggest point:

Ultimately, Camus thinks Dostoevsky’s work, the great arguments in it, the beautiful presentation, ends up being one part of the many cultural forces in the early 20th century that made people feel justified surrendering to a religious unity.

Ultimately the work of Nietzsche, he thinks, contributes to and fuels the nihilism and fascism of the 20th century.

Ultimately the work of Hegel fuels and contributes to the fatalism of the 20th century.

But the important thing about all of these thinkers, to Camus, is that none of these takes on their work are real. These aren’t based on accurate readings of the points they were trying to make.

Hegel didn’t believe in some passive acceptance of absolute knowledge we were going to arrive at at the end of history. That’s just not what he said.

For Nietzsche contributing to nihilism; he of course spends most of his entire career refuting nihilism in various ways.

And Dostoevsky, as we know, was rooted in such a complex, existential, tragic form of Christian faith that to call his work an excuse for religious unity is just missing something deeply important about it.

That’s the point though, to Camus. Even in these extreme cases, even the most brilliant, self-aware thinkers who dedicated much of their work to opposing the very kinds of abstractions that lead to mass political apathy or violence, even their work becomes co-opted and used for things like the events of the 20th century. All because of this larger game we’re playing where rebellion becomes rooted in something unlimited.

Abstractions as the basis for our rebellion in the world just reliably end up doing this to people.

So when it comes to laying out his case for what a philosophy of limits might look like in practice, well again, this wouldn’t actually be a philosophy for Camus. The more accurate way to see it for him is just a lucid acknowledgement of something, and then a commitment to living in a provisional authentic way. And like the artist, respecting certain boundaries that are built into that authentic engagement with the world.

The first limit he sets up is: that even if you can find a single situation where committing violence was absolutely the only move that preserved human dignity, someone truly rooted in rebellion could never authentically feel good about that violence.

They’d never call it “virtuous.” They’d never claim it’s the “logical” move. You start using language like that and it’s very telling about the place you’re in as you’re doing it.

Camus’ conclusion here is very often compared to Kant’s philosophy, for whatever it’s worth. The sort of natural ethos that emerges for him is that we should never be treating people as just a means to an end. That to see human beings as ends in themselves is to be seeing the world as it is.

Second limit he’d want to set is: if you’re seeking rebellion, seek rebellion as much as is necessary, but make sure you don’t go even one step further than that.

Live your life recognizing how easily we become co-opted by these sorts of abstract narratives. Always try to be on top of honestly looking at your behavior, so that you might catch this going on before it goes too far.

See, this final section of the book is titled Thought at the Meridian. Meridian in that title represents the midday sun, yet another reference for Camus to the Mediterranean sun in his work.

It’s a call for us to live our lives in a way where we avoid the extremes. Avoid being nihilistic, avoid being fatalistic. Don’t be cynical and sit around doing nothing, but also don’t become the oppressor that you’re trying to rebel against.

Through balance, moderation, measure, and lucidity, through solidarity with the dignity of those around us, and by sticking to what we can do from within the limits of our own station in life, this is how we can truly be as sure as we can that our rebellion stays in the spirit of rebellion that it began in.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you next time.

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Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So this is a philosophical companion for reading the book The Plague by Albert Camus.

Heads up: this post builds off the one we just did on his book The Stranger. So maybe read that one before this. But who am I to tell you how to live your life.

That said, coming into this post, we already know a couple important things about Camus.

We know that Camus thought of himself as more of an artist than a philosopher. We know that he didn’t want to be a philosopher. That philosophers, in his eyes, are people that place too much confidence in systems built out of theoretical abstractions.

And that he thinks abstract argument not only misses something deeply important about the human condition, but it also sets a dangerous precedent. People start living their lives believing that philosophy can provide some neat justification for the things that go on in the world.

We know that Camus thinks all this is nonsense at some level. This is just what he calls philosophical suicide.

So what we see instead in his work is him not being someone who wrote philosophical works in the classic way. He’s not writing out propositions and then trying to organize them all into a system. Camus is much more interested in presenting what he calls “images” of the human condition.

His thinking is that by dramatizing these ideas, by creating images, there won’t be so much temptation for people to try to reduce them to some delusional system of universals. As Camus himself once said: what is a novel but just a philosophy expressed in images?

Well, communicating in images like this is going to be a big part of this radical project he’s embarking on throughout his career.

This is why things like The Myth of Sisyphus, his famous essay, create such powerful, memorable images.

A man named Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity. When the boulder reaches the top, it rolls back down, forcing Sisyphus to start the process again. Repeating this until the end of time.

This is a powerful image. And fantastic for the glutes, by the way, if you’re looking for a nice deep range of motion.

But to understand the book we’re talking about today, The Plague, and why this marks a major shift in his work, it’s going to be important to understand what Camus was trying to say at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus.

Because as it turns out, I think there’s a really overrated line from The Myth of Sisyphus that basically everyone knows. The line is: that we should imagine Sisyphus happy.

And what some people think when they read that is that Camus is saying our lives are essentially like the life of Sisyphus. That life is essentially suffering, and that a great metaphor for continuing to live on is that it’s the equivalent of pushing a boulder up a hill in a completely meaningless, fruitless grind. But that we should just keep pushing the rock, and try to be happy about that somehow, like Sisyphus in the essay.

This is not what Camus was saying with that line though. He’s not saying this is all of what our life looks like.

The image of Sisyphus is partly a metaphor for a specific piece of how our lives may feel at times. Specifically, for our encounter with the absurd when we face it head on.

For that tension between what our nature seems to desire from the universe, and what the universe can actually give to us. That constant tension can sometimes feel like that cycle of pushing the boulder up and having it fall.

But Sisyphus is equally an image being used by Camus to illustrate what our lives are not. To Camus it is also important for us to recognize how much we are not like Sisyphus.

We are not beings condemned by the gods for all eternity. Our lives are not pushing a boulder, enduring constant suffering, with zero redeeming moments.

No, the image of Sisyphus is also supposed to present a contrasting image against a reader’s own life.

Because for Camus the reality of life is: we do have many good moments available to us as human beings. Yes, life is partially suffering to Camus. But life is also partially joy, love, belonging, beauty, excitement.

And look, if you were going to try to affirm life in all that it is, not just merely the moments of suffering, it would require you to understand that these things are an important piece of the immanence of our reality as well.

Now, it may be that you come from a history where you’ve been led to believe that transcendence above this world and its suffering is what you should expect. To live your life implicitly looking for a system of meaning that justifies the suffering you’re in, or makes it go away somehow.

And the thinking from this kind of person will often be like: “Well, how could Sisyphus ever be anything other than miserable when he doesn’t have some way of transcending his reality?”

But the point to recognize for Camus is that it isn’t just a given that Sisyphus would be unhappy.

It’s equally possible that if Sisyphus affirmed his life, if lucidity was his primary goal instead, it’s possible for someone to live their life in a way where life itself is good enough exactly how it is.

We don’t need to transcend it, or get away from it. And we don’t need to make it into something that it’s not, like we’re condemned by the gods for all eternity.

In general, Camus will say this point over and over again in his work in different contexts: forget the extremes. Forget the temptation to violently impose yourself onto a problem just to try to get rid of it.

The goal for him is more going to be to find a way of being rooted in the immanence of things. Along the lines of the example he sees set by certain Mediterranean cultures he admires, in the lyrical poetry that he writes.

A way of life more centered on balance. On moderation, measure (specifically defined from the work of St. Augustine, who he admired deeply), and on lucidity towards life as it is.

This is another one of the images Camus paints of the possibilities in the human condition.

And what this will lead to is a very lucid understanding of the fact that challenging moments, like the one Sisyphus is forever trapped in, these are often the places where we form our deepest connections with the people and things around us when we’re open to it.

That lucid revolt also produces a life that’s worth living, as well.

And one place you’ll see this as front and center as it gets in his work is in this book titled, The Plague.

The book begins when people start noticing dead rats showing up all around them.

In the book, these people live in a very small, perfectly normal town on the coast of Algeria. It’s soon realized that a bunch of rats carrying a disease have come off one of the boats docked near the town.

Now, as they’re going about their day, going to the store or going to check their mail, they start to see these dead rats popping up. Rats that clearly have some sort of disease that has killed them.

It soon becomes evident to everybody in this town, at different speeds, that they are now all living in a town that is quickly being infected by the bubonic plague.

A city-wide quarantine and lockdown is going to mean there’s really no hope for any of them to escape this problem. They’re all going to be forced to confront the coming plague as directly as they possibly can.

Camus would later say in an interview about this book that much of the symbolism of the actual plague is pointing to the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, when he was living through it.

Camus was famously a member of what you could call a literary resistance against the Nazis. He was one of the biggest voices in a resistance newspaper called Combat, some of his best writing, I think.

But it should be said, Nazi symbolism aside, the plague in the book also represents a confrontation with the absurd more generally.

Keep in mind where this book, The Plague, fits into the larger project of Camus.

All the books, plays, or essays that we know about from Camus, if you read what he wrote about them in his notes; Camus personally organized his work into what he called five different stages, or cycles. This is how he was thinking about it as he was writing it.

Cycle one for him was the book The Stranger, the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, and his early play Caligula.

And for cycle two: The Plague was the first major book that he thought was a part of it. Which also means it represents a major shift in focus for him.

He goes from these earlier works that focus mostly on the individual, and a personal encounter with the absurd, to cycle two focusing on facing the absurd at the level of community, and our relationships to other people.

So writing a book about a plague that terrorizes a small community is going to be fantastic as another one of these powerful images he likes to create in his work. It explores revolt against the absurd at the level of our commitments to the other people around us.

Now you can think of the characters in this book, and their different responses to the plague, each as individual images presented by Camus as well. Each of them represent some common, very human reaction to when we’re forced to confront the absurd in our lives.

There are common ways people run from the absurd. Or distract themselves away from it. There are common wagers people make with themselves to avoid being lucid about their reality.

Let me give some examples of these characters from the book that you can notice as landmarks of this as you’re reading through it.

The character Father Paneloux, for example, is someone we hear from early on in this book. As a character, a good way to describe him is that he’s one of those fire-and-brimstone religious preacher types.

When the world’s getting shut down in the book and people are starting to die of the plague, what does he do? He gives a sermon saying, look, if any of you are confused about this plague, I know exactly what’s going on here.

This plague, he says, is divine retribution from God.

God has sent this plague to punish the people of this town for all their sinning. He says, more or less, this is just an elaborate ruse by God to get the people coming back to church.

Some people might just put one of those fancy electric guitars in the worship group to boost attendance at their church. Nope. God sends a plague. Lesson of the day: you do something, you do it right, people.

In all seriousness, Father Paneloux represents for Camus the common reaction of a metaphysical form of denial. He uses a story that’s loaded with metaphysics to explain away the absurd events of the world.

And this story conveniently reinforces all his existing views of the world, so there’s no reflection that’s actually required on his part. He has a ready-made form of escapism from the absurd in every moment.

Another minor character we see early on is a guy named Cottard.

Now, Cottard is a criminal in the book.

He starts out as someone that’s always looking over his shoulder, worried the police are about to come and arrest him. So when the plague breaks out, all of a sudden the police don’t have the resources to come after him anymore.

The plague, in other words, becomes an opportunity for this guy, Cottard. It becomes a way to take advantage of people’s fears and lack of resources.

So he organizes a black market, smuggling things in and out of the city, and makes a lot of money from it. And all of this is an effort to use the absurdity of the world to further ingratiate himself. Yet another common reaction leaders and individuals utilize that Camus wants to put on display.

In other words, Cottard is meant to represent the person who encounters the absurd and then only thinks of themselves.

And as a reader, you’re left looking at his example and you can’t help but feel like something’s missing here. Like, is this an authentic reaction from Cottard to all that’s going on around him? Or is this just another clever way of denying pieces of the world around you?

Seeing Cottard’s example is an important moment, because for the main characters of the book, Camus has them respond to the absurd in a way that doesn’t only think about themselves.

And first up, to explain this point is the main character of this book: a man named Dr. Bernard Rieux.

Because I think his personal arc in the book is a great case study. He goes from, at first, a denial of the absurd, to developing a lucid revolt against it. And I think if we can see that clearly with him, it makes it easier to look at all the other characters and how their approaches function.

So Dr. Rieux is, obviously, a doctor in this small coastal town we’ve been talking about.

He’s one of the first people that hears about the plague when it’s starting. He’s one of the only medical professionals around. So he starts running tests on these rats that are dying, trying to figure out what this is.

And after he finds out it’s the bubonic plague they’re dealing with, he very briefly gets involved with some of his colleagues in trying to develop a serum. Something they can just give to people and it will cure them.

In other words, his first instinct when he encounters the absurd is to do what many of us do in our own lives. We retreat into a kind of problem-solving mode, and we make the mistake of thinking we can get away from it.

For Dr. Rieux it’s a kind of scientific cocoon, trying to come up with a cure. But any one of us might also see the absurd and think of it as a problem that needs to be solved with our own personal skillset.

This is, of course, an understandable reaction. But for Dr. Rieux, it’s something he’s forced to outgrow pretty quickly.

Because very soon in the book he realizes the plague is not going anywhere. There’s no magic serum that’s going to cure everyone. There’s no getting rid of the plague entirely.

And when he realizes this his goal changes. He goes from a denial of the absurd to a stance of revolt against it.

Dr. Rieux starts to feel that if he wants to be a lucid, authentic person, someone not in denial of what’s actually going on around him, then the only response that really makes sense is solidarity with his fellow people.

Meaning, in a very quiet, measured way, his choice is to keep going about his life caring for all the people who are suffering from the plague around him.

He runs tests. He checks vitals. He gives medication. Dr. Rieux chooses to put his head down and keep on living in spite of the senseless death that’s taking over the town.

For Albert Camus, solidarity like this with our fellow people is going to be an everyday form of revolt that we can embody against the absurd.

Dr. Rieux becomes a character not interested in grand theories about the plague. Not interested in trying to beat the absurdity of the plague. He’s driven toward solidarity with others by a sense of personal duty and empathy.

Now somebody could say back to this, “Ha! I knew it! I knew you were gonna do this at some point here, Camus! Look at you now, smuggling in a system of morality yourself. Things like duty. Things like empathy. You know what? You’re no different than one of those philosophers you claim to not want to be like!”

But this is why it’s important to understand that for Camus, solidarity like this is not an ethical rebellion that he’s presenting. This is a metaphysical rebellion.

Remember last post, when we described this lucidity as a descriptive claim that he’s making, and not a normative one.

Lucidity we said was to be a creature that affirms its own nature, and the nature of the universe. To strive for meaning in a universe that can’t give it to us. To strive for knowledge in a universe where there are many things we can’t know. To live in this metaphysical posture toward what things are is the essence of lucidity.

And for Camus, just descriptively, that is an act of revolt against the absurd.

See, this isn’t him saying this is how you should behave. It’s him saying that once you truly affirm the world, then anything you do after that, just in the business of continuing on living…that defaults into an act of revolt.

Well, let’s talk about how this ladders up from the individual, personal revolt to one that involves solidarity with others.

At the level of the individual, there’s of course always a way you can get lost in endlessly questioning whether or not things really matter. You can spend every day of your life agonizing over whether or not you have the right set of abstractions that ground the value of these things in a universal.

But as we’ve been talking about a lot in these posts lately through the work of Dosotevsky, Keiji Nishitani, and others: there’s also this more pre-theoretical experience that Camus is very aware of, where things in the world just matter to you.

Where you have an orientation of care toward the things directly in your vicinity.

You care whether the floor is there to walk on or not. You care about getting your next meal. These things have value to you.

And for Camus, that value isn’t grounded on any set of theoretical abstractions. Saying nothing about universals, it just seems to be that the kind of creature that I am is one that has an orientation of care about the physical space I’m in.

This is a pretty uncontroversial statement for Camus. And remember, part of what he’s trying to do here is start from extremely uncontroversial claims that don’t have to be grounded in a particular system.

Well, if we’re the kind of beings that just care about the things in the world around us, how would that not extend into a care we have toward the other people around us?

I mean, if I’m walking along one day and I see a child drowning inside of a big puddle, I do not stand there stone-faced, feeling nothing inside, watching as the child slowly dies.

No, when we affirm the kinds of creatures we seem to be, Camus thinks we often default to a type of empathy and solidarity toward the people that are suffering immediately around us.

We do this, Camus thinks, because to not do it would be a contradiction.

I, myself, know what navigating a human existence is like at times. I know what it feels like to suffer.

So in the example of The Plague: when I look around me and I see other people in the same existential dilemma that I face. When I see other beings who are like me and we all have no idea what this disease even is. We don’t know if we’re all gonna be dead in a week. We all just want to run and get out of this horrible situation, but none of us can. For Camus: to be fully lucid toward a world where people on the daily are suffering against the absurd like this is to acknowledge a common set of existential problems that we all face. A common struggle, where we all need to find some way to keep on living in spite of it.

And his point is that when you fully affirm this common set of existential problems we all face…empathy and solidarity seem to be the default stances to take.

In fact, if you think about it, to Camus it’s only when we have a set of theoretical abstractions that frames the people around us as the enemy, or as less human, that is typically the only way people can rationalize to themselves why it’s okay that people around them are suffering.

“Oh, it’s because these people deserve it. It’s because these people had it coming!”

And this is why, to him, propaganda of any type, if you pay attention to it, always tries to put up barriers between people.

They try to silence the group of people that are suffering. They try to limit communication between people. They demonize them. They present people in a way that’s very narrow, making us not be able to lucidly see them in their full existence.

On a smaller scale, this is also why abusive people often want to limit who the victims of their abuse can talk to about it. They don’t want someone talking to their friends, or an advocate somewhere. That might take them out of the narrow framing they need them to stay in, for the abuse to keep on working.

Picture a really restrictive totalitarian state with a population essentially being held captive. Now imagine what would happen if tomorrow everybody woke up, for some reason, and just stopped playing the game that the state requires for it all to keep going.

Silence is the enemy to lucidity for Camus.

Camus says in one of his speeches called The Crisis of Man, a famous speech he gave after World War Two, that wherever you see injustice in the world, you will also see silence. Barriers that have been set up to prevent people from truly knowing each other.

This is why free speech, for him, is one of the natural positions that emerges out of this commitment to lucidity.

And it’s not him saying that free speech is an unalienable right that’s granted to us by God in heaven. No. He doesn’t ground this in a right.

He’s skeptical of rights as a framework, obviously. He’s a lot like Simone Weil in this way.

No, he’s saying that for any setup that wants to promote people affirming reality as it is, open communication between people is the only way that’s going to get done.

And that’s not grounded in some cosmic right I’m pretending to declare. That’s just the policy that lets people actually be in contact with the things in the world around them as they are.

See, it’s only when you start layering on abstractions about the world, abstractions that are usually claiming to be getting us to a more “moral” place, that most of the stuff we see as immoral can even start to make sense to people as something that’s justified.

So what is truly the enemy of us living in a more moral world? Is it not having abstractions about morality, or is it having them?

Now this is probably a good spot to bring back that criticism of Camus, that this is all grounded on far too little.

The idea is: “Look, I get that you’re trying to avoid abstractions here. I’ll accept the point that they’re dangerous sometimes. But this whole thing from you is based on what? A feeling of care that you have? Your experience of this moment?

Well what are your reasons for why we should even be trusting that feeling? What if that experience of yours is deceiving you? Or what if important parts of that experience are just being dictated by someone else?”

To which Camus would have a lot to say back, but maybe first he’d say: can we just take a moment to appreciate how much of an obsession you have with needing to validate even your own experience in these theoretical abstractions?

It seems like the abstraction has become more real to you than the lived experience that lies underneath.

The number on the scale means more to you than how you feel. The like count on the post means more to you than whether you’re really feeling it.

Or how about the one my friend Dave uses all the time: 76 degrees feels more real to you than the actual experience of 76 degrees.

Camus might say: if I’m feeling viscerally against sitting by watching a child drown in a puddle, why is my lucid experience of that moment not enough of a ground for you?

Sure, it doesn’t provide ultimate meaning. But I’ll tell you what it does provide. It provides a kind of provisional meaning, you could say.

A type of meaning grounded in nothing other than a lucid reflection on this moment. Meaning that comes loaded with the full expectation that it’ll be revised as future moments come about.

Why is that not valid?

But still, someone could say back to this: “Well what about sociopaths? What about horribly selfish people? Those people exist out there too, right? I mean, what if someone looks at the child drowning and genuinely doesn’t care? You can’t morally condemn that person. What are you gonna do then?”

To which Camus might say: yeah, you’re right. This isn’t a moral universal.

But that sociopath watching the child die is by far the exception to the rule here. We will always have to deal with the very occasional person that doesn’t feel the same way as most of us. We can deal with that case by case.

But I’d much rather deal with that than accept the set of premises we currently live under: where people by the millions feel morally justified to do whatever they want by these fake moral universals created out of abstractions. The kind that end up causing things like fascism and totalitarianism.

What he’s saying is: even though provisional meaning like this is not a universal, when it comes to certain things that seem to be common to almost all human beings, things like working together, justice, safety for the average person, things of this class, because these are such common feelings…even though they’re not universals, they more or less function like universals. Just without the grand philosophical system that gets brought along as baggage.

So now that we have a pretty deep knowledge of why solidarity makes sense to Camus, let’s take a closer look at some more examples of this solidarity you can expect to see in the symbolism of his book The Plague.

The main character, Dr. Rieux, as we said, becomes a symbol of a sort of ordinary, everyday absurd hero for Camus.

But what exactly is meant by this term “absurd hero”?

Well, when the absurd comes knocking at your door each day, it may be tempting to go out and try to be a superhero about it. To go out and try to save the world.

But for Camus, if you’re not trying to do good in the world that you’re ultimately capable of succeeding at, then you may just be mistaking movement for progress.

For Camus, part of the mistake in the thinking of totalitarianism or fascism is that it lacks proportionality. It’s a violent, extreme way of imposing yourself onto a problem in the world that you can’t actually solve with a set of abstractions.

In other words, it’s a lack of lucidity. It’s a denial of the absurd, and a denial of your own abilities, “within the limits of your own station”, as Camus says.

So instead of Bernard Rieux trying to be a superhero doctor; no this is a man who understands that heroism is often found in the everyday.

In fact, in some sense, even calling it heroism is missing the point.

He says in the book: “there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency.” Then he says later, “the only means of fighting a plague is common decency.”

And again, by doing house calls, taking vitals, giving medication, by putting himself at risk out of compassion for the common existential problem the whole town faces, the idea is that the plague may be a kind of senseless destruction that’s going on in this world. But I’m not gonna let this cause me to deny what truly matters to me.

I’m going to keep on living, in the most measured, balanced way I can, from within the limits of my own station.

But there’s more than one image that Camus paints of the absurd hero. There’s another character by the name of Raymond Rambert.

Rambert is a journalist in the book. He came to this small town to research a story he was doing, when all of a sudden a plague starts breaking out all around him. Horrible timing.

Now his first response, like others here, is to deny the absurd. He tries to justify why this isn’t even his problem.

He says something to the effect of: You guys don’t understand. I don’t even live here! You can’t quarantine the place. This is the problem of the people in this city. I’m not one of you.

He says there’s a woman I’m in love with back in France. She’s waiting for me. And he’s willing to do anything, legally or illegally, just to get out of the city to get back to her.

I mean, his perspective is: I’m not on this planet to save the world from plagues.

I’m just here to be a journalist, and to love a woman. That’s what human life is all about, not obsessing over other people’s problems.

But you can no doubt predict what Camus is going for there.

This is him actively creating a bridge between cycle one of his work, which focuses on the individual revolt against the absurd, and cycle two. He’s showing a character here that gives a set of common excuses any of us might give for why the people around him are not his problem. How they’re somehow part of a totally different world than the one he’s living in.

Eventually Rambert, after seeing Dr. Rieux and others risk their lives daily to fight against the plague, he starts to see what’s going on as a fundamentally human crisis. One we’re bound in together by our shared condition.

And again it’s not because he finds God, or finds some set of moral abstractions where now he knows what the right thing to do is.

No, it’s through the removal of abstractions if anything. It’s through being forced to lucidly look at what’s going on around him, that he realizes this is ultimately his problem too.

Another very important main character in the book is a man named Jean Tarrou.

Jean Tarrou is a character that has been opposing the absurdity of the world for most of his entire life. He describes himself toward the end of the book as someone that wants to be a saint without God. Doesn’t need much of an explanation with all that we’ve already said about Camus.

But for much of the book, he’s an important character because he embodies a different kind of approach to the task of the absurd hero.

He’s the one that sees the plague, or “plague” as he calls it, as something far larger than just an epidemic that’s going around.

Plague is something we will always be fighting against, he thinks.

As Dr. Rieux says toward the end of the book, even if we eradicate this plague from this particular town, plague is something that will always come back. Unexpectedly. Looking a little different than last time, but still, in many ways, the same thing.

There’s a sense in which Camus uses something naturally occurring like a plague as a metaphor, as a warning to future generations.

When it comes to the type of thinking that leads to plague, this stuff is always a possibility. We should always be keeping our eyes open.

One issue that really defines Jean Tarrou in his fight against absurdity in the book is that he’s strongly against the death penalty.

And for Camus himself, the issue of the death penalty was one of the things he was most vocal about in his entire lifetime.

He gives multiple speeches talking about it, and he writes one of the most cited essays in history about the problem with the death penalty, called Reflections on the Guillotine.

We’re going to talk about it in detail next time, as a complement to his views on justice that he lays out in his essay The Rebel.

Which instantly presents a mystery if you’re closely reading Camus for the first time: how does this case he’s making for solidarity and empathy for others ladder up into a point we can make about justice?

I mean, justice, with it being something that seems centered around laws and norms, those seem to be the very sorts of abstractions his whole project is moving away from, how is Camus going to do this?

Well, the death penalty becomes yet another striking image he paints of where he’s going.

He tells a story once from when he was young.

His father was apparently a really solid dude, cared about people in a similar kind of way that we just talked about in The Plague. And part of caring about those people led him to want to participate in the politics of his time.

So one day Camus’ father decides to go and see a public execution. I mean, he’s all for the death penalty, at least when it comes to really horrible people that do heinous stuff. Time to go see where my tax dollars are going.

And Camus writes about how this is an image that forever changed him.

Camus was sitting at home. His father goes to see someone get killed. And he says he’ll never forget it.

His father came home, immediately excused himself into the bathroom, and then vomited uncontrollably at what he’d just witnessed.

See, it turns out there’s a difference between people linking themselves to a theoretical conversation about what they want done, and the reality of violating a boundary that’s so deeply important to us all.

The entire process of the death penalty, for Camus, is rooted in hypocrisy. Next episode we’ll find out why.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you next time.

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Hello everyone, I’m Stephen West, and this is Philosophize This!

Today we’re going to start talking about Albert Camus and how perfectly he fits into the conversation we’ve been having lately.

Most people have heard of his book The Stranger. It’s one of the most famous books in history, so that’s to be expected. But far fewer people know about something else from him that I think is just as exciting: the novel he wrote right before The Stranger.

It’s a book he chose never to publish during his lifetime for reasons we’ll get into. It was only published after his death by his estate.

Nonetheless, if your goal is to understand Camus as well as you can then reading this book is important for seeing how his thinking was evolving during the late 1930s. It also contains context that’s often missed if you want to understand his full project as a thinker.

The book is called A Happy Death. So I guess it fits that it mostly focuses on the idea of happiness.

Now if that sounds a little confusing given what you already know about Camus, you have every right to be confused.

Why would Camus start, write, and finish a book about happiness, then choose never to publish it, and then make his next published novel about a character who seems to care almost nothing about happiness?

That’s one of the questions I want to answer by the end of this post.

If you’re here because you’re reading The Stranger, even in just the first few pages you’ll notice it’s written from the perspective of a guy named Meursault. A character who is famously indifferent to the world around him.

You’ve probably heard the first line of the novel. Some people practically have a conniption fit over it: “Mother died yesterday, or was it the day before… I can’t remember.”

It’s a famous line for good reason. Just a few words into the book, we already know a lot about who Meursault is as a character.

He doesn’t play the game of society the way other people do. He doesn’t put on any affect just to please people. Meursault represents an indifference to the usual ways people get their meaning in the world, and as a reader you feel like there’s something deeply unrelatable about his experience. What kind of person cares so little about their mother that they don’t even remember what day she died?

When people talk about the book after reading it, you’ll often hear them describe Meursault as some kind of “absurd hero” for Camus. The idea is that by facing the absurdity of the universe and embodying it so completely, he reaches a point at the end of the book, sentenced to death, where he stares the absurdity of the world in the face and is truly happy, feeling a kind of harmony with it. On this reading, Camus is offering Meursault as an example to emulate: we should all seek to be in harmony with the absurd in this way.

But that isn’t the full picture of what Camus was going for with Meursault. For whatever it’s worth, I think there’s a lot missing from that take. A lot of Camus gets lost if you only read the novels. There’s crucial context in the lectures he gave and in the lesser-known essays he wrote over the years.

More than that, I think the symbolism of the sun in The Stranger is often overlooked, and you can really only appreciate it when you understand his interest in the Mediterranean lifestyle during this period of his thought. Even Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote one of the most famous reviews of The Stranger, in my view reads a bit too much of his own work into Camus. I think his review still causes people to misunderstand the novel all these years later.

What I’m saying is that Camus once famously said he was an artist, not a philosopher.

Some people take that as modesty, “Oh no, I’m not a philosopher, my ideas aren’t that good!”, but it was actually a very intentional claim about his work.

He didn’t want to be a philosopher. He thought the philosophers of his time were lost in abstractions, lost in a kind of fatalism and realism that, in his view, helped create the conditions for the rise of Hitler and people like him.

We’ll talk more about this as we paint the bigger picture of Camus’ overall project, but for now the key point is that he refused what he saw as the temptation to become a philosopher, because he disagreed with the entire dangerous game he thought they were playing. And understanding that decision begins with his book A Happy Death, written just before The Stranger. So let’s get into it.

On the surface, A Happy Death shares quite a few similarities with The Stranger. The main character of the book is also named Mersault. Sunlight appears constantly as a symbol. And Mersault, similarly, kills someone on a beach as a major plot point near the beginning of the novel.

But the similarities end there. In A Happy Death, Mersault doesn’t kill someone who’s attacking him with a knife, the way Meursault does in The Stranger. This Mersault kills someone out of mercy. It’s something the two of them make an agreement about.

Zagreus, the man he kills, is very wealthy and disabled. He’s in constant pain and lives a life mostly confined to his home. It’s by no means a happy life, but Zagreus still believes he understands happiness.

In the final moments of his life, he shares his theory of happiness with Mersault. The deal is simple: if Mersault agrees to kill him, he’ll inherit all of Zagreus’s money once he’s gone. Part of the tragedy is that Zagreus just can’t bring himself to pull the trigger on his own.

So he says to him, essentially: “Come here, my boy. Before you kill me, sit on my knee. Happiness lies in three things.” First, he says, happiness lies in money.

A lot of people like to morally grandstand here and say that money doesn’t buy happiness. But for Zagreus, it’s no coincidence that the people who talk that way usually already have money. Nobody who has struggled just to eat or find shelter talks about money like that. It’s obviously much easier to find happiness if you have enough money to secure the basics.

That leads to the second thing on Zagreus’s list: time. Once you’ve secured the necessities of life, everyone needs time. Time to pursue your own interests. Time that isn’t completely consumed by working for someone else.

And “time” here also implies having enough health to take advantage of that opportunity in the first place.

The third thing he thinks we need to be happy is solitude. If you’re always distracted, always fulfilling some social expectation, then you never have the space to fully possess yourself. And as he puts it, how can you ever be happy if you’re constantly being something for someone else?

Mersault hears all this, honors Zagreus’s wishes, takes his life and his money, and then spends the rest of the book testing the limits of this theory. And what he finds, speeding things up a bit so we can talk more about The Stranger, is that Zagreus’s theory of happiness, while not stupid or completely unfounded, has some obvious holes in it.

Because while Camus is writing this book, he’s also learning about happiness in his own life. One thing he does is visit a monastery and spend time observing religious monks, paying close attention to how they seem to be achieving happiness.

Watching them, he realizes these monks are happy even though they have almost nothing. In the same way that someone can have all the money, time, and solitude in the world and still be miserable, someone can have practically nothing and yet, if their will toward happiness is there, that will seems to be the primary factor, all things considered.

In an essay called “The Desert” Camus writes that happiness is a kind of harmony between a person and the life they lead.

It’s a beautiful line. It captures something important about what it is to live a life. And for a lot of people, that would just be an inspiring insight. “Wait, I can be happy forever if I just will myself to be happy all the time? Come on, let’s get to work on that!”

But for Camus, in his own development, the reaction is very different.

I can imagine that for him, this insight about happiness triggered a deep skepticism toward happiness as a goal. After all, if happiness is just a matter of will, if it comes down to how we frame our reality, then, hypothetically, the world could be burning down around me, everyone I know and love could be in complete misery, and as long as I frame things in the right way, I can be happy forever.

But what is that, exactly?

If that’s true, is happiness really the ultimate goal of any serious person? It starts to feel like the kind of goal you’d only have if you were very young and trying to avoid responsibility.

For Camus, happiness starts to look like just another set of theoretical abstractions, and then your ability to will yourself to only see those abstractions.

But what about what’s actually happening in the world? Shouldn’t that matter to us too?

It’s almost as if, at this point, Camus has his own version of one of Wittgenstein’s ladders.

There’s a famous metaphor in the history of philosophy: near the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein suggests that when philosophy works, you sometimes climb a kind of ladder. You follow a philosophical discussion, arrive at a new insight about the world, and from that new vantage point, when you look back at the conversation that got you there, the whole thing suddenly seems naïve or even silly. The “ladder” was necessary to reach that perspective, but once you’re there, you can kick it away. You don’t need it anymore.

This isn’t an attack on people still having conversations about happiness. Those conversations are probably the only way you ever get to this other place. But it does seem like Camus, at this stage, starts to think of happiness as more a matter of will and focus, and not as the ultimate existential goal we should all be aiming at. To focus exclusively on happiness is to ignore something deeper about the human condition.

This is why the other Meursault, the one at the end of The Stranger, is so important.

When he accepts the absurdity of the world, sees himself within it, and walks toward his execution feeling totally happy, that is not Camus holding him up as a model for how human beings should live. For Camus, Meursault is simply someone who has reached a certain harmony with the particular life he happens to be living.

And you can see that all throughout the book. Meursault is deeply in harmony with his own indifference. He agrees to marry a woman simply because she wants to. He kills a man on the beach because the sun is in his eyes in a tense moment. He helps lure a woman into an apartment where he knows she’s going to be beaten.

And he remains completely indifferent to all of it.

So for Camus, Meursault is a picture of happiness, a kind of harmony with the life he leads. And yet from the very first sentence of the novel, anyone reading this man’s experience can feel that something deeply human is missing in him. The question that starts to form in the reader’s mind is: what exactly is missing from Meursault?

For Camus, the answer is revolt against the absurd.

But to understand revolt, we first have to talk a bit more about the absurd itself, and how it fits into Camus’s larger project.

Camus is an absurdist. You may have heard the usual definition: the absurd is the tension created by our natural desire for meaning and the meaninglessness of the universe. The collision of those two things creates a permanent conflict, and that conflict is what he calls the absurd.

That’s not wrong, but for Camus it goes a little further. Meaning is a very common way people encounter the absurd, but in the context of everything we’ve been talking about in these posts, the absurd for Camus appears any time there’s something that seems built into our nature as humans, and we then collide with a world that cannot provide it.

Seen this way, it doesn’t just apply to meaning; it also applies to our desire for knowledge. In theory, we’d love to know everything about the world around us. But part of affirming the world as it actually is means recognizing our own limitations: the limits of our tools, of our senses, of our tiny sample of experience, of our capacity to reason, of theoretical abstractions as a way of framing reality.

For Camus, the existential problem isn’t just that we live in a world where a lot of things are still unknown. That would be one thing. The deeper problem is that, given the kind of limited creatures we are, some things are always going to be unknowable to us with the tools we have.

That, too, is a brutal encounter with the absurd. And once you see it there, you can see it in ethics. You can see it in our relationship to death.

It’s uncomfortable to live in that space. It’s a form of suffering.

And as it turns out, another feature of the kind of creatures we are is that we strive to avoid suffering.

For Camus, it’s this drive to avoid our own suffering, this part of what we are, that gives rise to the “game” he thinks philosophers and religious people are playing. They construct elaborate systems out of abstractions or grand religious narratives, and these systems are, in his view, transparent attempts to escape this uncomfortable tension, to avoid facing the world as it is.

Philosophers and religious thinkers generally treat this tension as a problem to be solved.

Camus asks: what if you didn’t try to solve it? What if the goal isn’t to encounter the absurd and then hurry to build a system of meaning that lets you escape it?

What if meaning, like happiness, is not the ultimate goal?

What if someone made lucidity their primary focus, seeing the world as it is?

How would that change the shape of their life?

This becomes Camus’s unique way of affirming reality without idealizing it, demonizing it, or building rational abstractions that demand the universe be something it’s not. He wants to avoid the temptation, even among philosophers, to construct systems that ultimately let them run away from the absurd.

And it’s this commitment to lucidity that leads him to a move similar to what we’ve been exploring lately on the podcast: stripping away abstractions from his view of reality, which eventually lands him in an experience that looks a lot like an embodied present moment. But his version of that present-moment experience is very different from anything else we’ve seen in this series so far.

Since we’re here, it’s worth saying: Camus was very aware of the broader conversation we’ve been having.

This is a guy who once called Dostoevsky a prophet of the 19th century. He spent significant time and money trying to get Dostoevsky’s Demons turned into a stage play. And for anyone coming fresh off that series we just did, you know Demons, of all his novels, is probably the one where you really have to be a Dostoevsky superfan to fully understand and appreciate what’s going on.

More than that, Camus was one of the people who personally spent time and money to make sure the work of Simone Weil was preserved after she died. We might not have her writings in the form we do today if it weren’t for him. He once said she was the closest thing to a living saint he had ever seen in his lifetime.

What I’m getting at is this: Camus understands and deeply appreciates the kind of religious self-emptying we’ve been talking about. He’s not ignorant of it, and he’s not dismissing it out of hand. He just ultimately doesn’t accept it for himself. In fact, he’s very suspicious of it. You can almost hear him saying: how convenient.

How convenient that the primary existential dilemma we face as human beings is this longing for some unifying sense of connection, and how convenient that you’ve found it.

I think he’d say: look, it doesn’t matter how intelligent your religious move is. It doesn’t matter how much reading it took to arrive there, or how much daily effort you put in to honor the unity you think you’ve discovered. At bottom, for Camus, it’s still the same attempt to manufacture unity out of the absurd. It’s the same move.

And while he has enormous respect for many of these religious and philosophical thinkers, he ultimately believes the stakes of making that move, of giving in to the temptation to become a philosopher or a religious follower in this sense, are just too high.

This becomes painfully clear to him when he watches his generation more or less roll over and allow Adolf Hitler to emerge and do what he did in the world. From Camus’s perspective, the weak utilitarian arguments offered by philosophers didn’t work against Hitler. The fatalism of the era made people passive, sitting around waiting for the “end of history.” And a certain kind of realism made people nihilistic, unable to act on anything at all.

These philosophers, supposedly the moral leadership of their time, faced the absurd, felt uncomfortable, and then built systems of moral universals. And yet, when it actually mattered, they couldn’t get the job done. Why?

Because when you strip it all down, Camus thinks they’re still wrapped up in the same twisted game we play with philosophy and politics.

To see what he means, imagine someone pushing back on Camus here.

They might say: Okay, Camus, you’re criticizing philosophers. Fair enough. But what are you doing to oppose Hitler? What’s your alternative?

All we’ve heard from you so far are these basic claims about what kind of creatures we are. We seem to avoid suffering. We seem to seek meaning. But what foundation do you have for any of that? You’ve given no justification, built no system, and yet you criticize philosophy.

And as someone who seems to be basing a lot of his thinking on what he “naturally feels,” can you really condemn Hitler and what he did? What if Hitler just naturally feels like he wants to invade France?

Camus might respond to these one at a time.

You asked what justification I have for saying this is the kind of creature we are. If what you’re really asking is whether I’m willing to play the same game you do, pretending I’ve created a system that gives me a clean philosophical justification that always makes things right, whose rules apply neatly to every possible situation, then no. I’m not playing that game. That’s exactly the kind of game that helped get us into this mess in the first place.

If we’re willing to acknowledge that we live in an absurd universe, and that no approach to human behavior will ever solve everything, then which is more dangerous? Not having a ready-made counter-system to throw in Hitler’s face? Or continuing this mass delusion that philosophy can provide a final justification for people’s actions?

For Camus, that’s the real mistake, and it’s more dangerous, because it keeps people living as though these justifications are actually possible.

What he wants to do in his work is more radical. He wants to find a way of being that doesn’t require constantly grounding itself in abstract systems about the world.

In the years leading up to The Stranger, he becomes fascinated with an example he thinks gets fairly close to this: what he calls the “Mediterranean spirit,” or Mediterranean way of being. He even gives a famous speech about it in 1937.

This isn’t some doctrine he wants people to adopt. It’s more of a sensibility. He thinks that people who’ve lived in certain Mediterranean cultures, when you look at their way of life, their art, have found a way of living where it’s not that they don’t think deeply, or that they’re ignorant, but they simply value different things than most Europeans typically do.

If in Europe it’s common to live with a kind of guilt about the body, or to seek transcendence beyond this world, as in Christianity and German Idealism, then the Mediterranean spirit is one that values joy, the physical world, the landscape itself.

He thought there was an immanence to the way these people experience their lives. They seem far less interested in spending their time chopping the world into abstractions and manipulating it, and far more interested in being embodied and present.

To Camus, these are people better able to notice and enjoy something as simple as the sun on their face or the wind in their clothes, and more capable of truly feeling that life itself, experienced in this way, is enough.

An important detail to note is that this is not an ethics where Camus is saying, “This is how you should live.”

In fact, for most of the Europeans he’s speaking to, living like this would actually require stripping away many of the ethical systems they’re already imposing on reality.

In his novels, one way to read the sun (whenever it shows up) is as a symbol of this, or at least of a possible way of being that resembles the Mediterranean spirit. The sun becomes a kind of looming invitation to the characters: an alternative way of life centered on immanence.

You can see this in several moments in The Stranger. Early in the book, when Meursault’s mother dies, there’s a stretch of time where he notices how hot it is outside. It’s so hot that he has to rush the funeral arrangements, because her body is already beginning to decay.

Here, the sun almost becomes another character. It stands there, overseeing the events of the novel. When Meursault could otherwise detach from reality the way he usually does, or when a more typical person might need time to rationalize or emotionally process their mother’s death, the heat represents the relentless process of immanent reality, the ongoing affirmation of the world as it is.

Point is whether you’re ready to acknowledge that your mother is gone or not, the bodies are still decaying, Meursault.

A little later in the book, at his mother’s funeral, there’s a scene where the sun is beating down on Meursault as he stands near the service. He is so detached from what’s happening that, in the inner monologue we’re reading, he’s paying more attention to how hot it is outside than to his own mother’s funeral.

Again, the sun is almost like an extra character in the book. It’s as if Camus is quietly asking: what if, instead of detaching, Meursault actually paid attention to what was really happening around him? What if he committed himself to lucidity at his mother’s funeral?

How different might his experience of that funeral be? Is there another, more affirmative version of that moment available to him? In the book, it’s as though the possibility of recognizing this immanence is right in front of him the whole time, but he never actually sees it.

Another example is when he kills the man on the beach, and the sun glints off the knife and blinds him in this really irritating way. So he shoots the guy. That’s literally the reason he gives at his trial. They ask why he killed the man, and he says, “because the sun was in my eyes.” Everyone laughs.

But this is the literary equivalent of the sun, as a character, hauling back and smacking Meursault in the face. The possibility of affirming reality more fully, of affirming the life of the man he’s about to kill, is right there. The sun is practically begging him in that moment to engage more deeply than his usual level of detachment. And yet he doesn’t. He stays inhuman. In a sense, what leads him to commit this murder is a failure to fully embrace what the sun symbolizes here.

Now of course, there’s other symbolism at work in Meursault that’s better known. Meursault is very clearly meant to be a human embodiment of the absurd.

The whole process of Meursault killing someone, then being sentenced to death by a jury of people who don’t like him, don’t understand him, and ultimately want him found guilty is obviously, for Camus, a picture of how society indicts the absurd whenever it appears. We’re always running from it, putting it on trial, finding ways to get rid of it so we don’t have to look at it. At bottom, society cannot tolerate people who refuse to conform to its emotional expectations.

But even with all this layered symbolism, the key thing to remember is that Meursault is not meant to be an instruction manual for how to live.

He is the absurd. He even explicitly says he finds himself in the absurd in the book. And the point for Camus is that to be human and to be reading this novel is, at some point, to feel that you do not relate to Meursault and the way he feels. That gap is intentional.

Because this brings us back to the earlier point: what’s missing in Meursault, as a human being, is what Camus calls revolt against the absurd.

Now you might want to say: hold on, Camus. You are not about to start giving me moral instructions for how to live after you just finished trashing every philosopher who tries to do that, right?

To which Camus would say: right. I’m not doing that.

A crucial thing to keep in mind is that when Camus says something is missing from Meursault’s behavior, he’s not making an ethical claim; he’s making a descriptive one.

We already know that affirming the absurd means affirming the tension between our desire for meaning and the reality that the universe doesn’t have it to give.

To live authentically in that tension doesn’t mean you stop desiring meaning. It means you keep living with that desire, fully aware that the universe never has and never will provide it.

To affirm reality, then, is to acknowledge: the universe doesn’t care, but I do.

I am the kind of creature who cares about the things around me.

And Camus’s point is that when you stop trying to run away from that fact, when you instead try to live as lucidly as possible inside it, anything genuinely authentic you do beyond that point is, by default, an act of revolt against the absurd. Descriptively, that’s just what’s happening there.

This is why Camus begins this line of thinking with his famous question that he says everyone must confront: whether or not to commit suicide. His answer, of course, is that you shouldn’t. And the next step is that you also shouldn’t commit philosophical suicide.

What he means by that is fascinating. To affirm reality means you don’t need a grand philosophical justification to help you escape it. You don’t need a religious unity or some overarching narrative. To live authentically, as in the Mediterranean way of life, is to find life itself enough.

And more than that: when it comes to my obvious experience of caring about things in the world, why wouldn’t that be enough to ground whether something is worth doing?

You don’t need to ground life in fake moral universals that keep people living in moral delusion.

So this revolt against the absurd, without committing philosophical suicide, becomes the background that Meursault’s character is meant to contrast with. It also becomes the starting point for Camus’s later works, like The Rebel and The Plague.

And it’s the launchpad for a pretty radical project he pursues for the rest of his career: what does genuinely life-affirming behavior look like if you start from a place where you refuse to rely on abstractions?

Is that even possible? That’s the question Camus chooses to wrestle with for his entire life. It’s worth it to him. Because while it’s a hard question, and it doesn’t make him the poster child for happiness all the time, the alternative of sliding back into cheap fatalism or realism, or committing philosophical suicide, is unthinkable.

He was about to find out what it would mean to move through the world as an artist, and not as a philosopher.

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Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So there’s a quote from one of the members of the Kyoto School that we’re going to be talking about today.

He said, “Religion without philosophy is blind, and philosophy without religion is vacuous.”

We’re going to be talking about the relationship between philosophy and religion, something many members of the Kyoto School were always rethinking and developing as they were doing their work.

I highly recommend reading the two posts we’ve done so far on Keiji Nishitani. Just a heads up, I’ll be using terms like Sunyata and referencing concepts from his work throughout this post.

But all that said, I don’t even want to start with Nishitani or anyone from the Kyoto School for that matter. Today I want to start with something simple. I want to give some long-deserved attention to a very important cartoon character that’s come to be known as the duck-rabbit.

Who or what is a duck-rabbit, you may ask.

You ever seen one of those optical illusion things where half of the people that look at it see a duck and the other half see a rabbit?

There are tons of these things out there. It can be a sound. It can be a video. But the point is, aside from this just being some fun optical illusion on a kids’ menu at a restaurant, these are things that can show us something important about the way we see the world as human beings.

Ludwig Wittgenstein used the duck-rabbit in his work to talk about the meaning of words. But the duck-rabbit as a metaphor can actually be useful for all sorts of situations when we want to get out of seeing things in a classic, dualistic, abstract framing of the world, like we’ve been talking about in these posts lately.

And I’d like to take this moment to empathize with a certain kind of person out there reading this series so far.

This kind of person may say, “Look, I hear you. You keep talking about these different framings of our reality. One is a rational, utilitarian framing, where we create systems out of abstractions, I get that one.

But then you start talking about this phenomenological framing, sometimes you even say embodied or religious framing, where apparently in this type of awareness, we’re not breaking things down in this theoretical way anymore. This is more of a pre-theoretical, immediate connection to the world around us.

I hear you say all this, but I have to be honest: I don’t see it.

Not only do I not see it, I don’t know how to imagine my reality without chopping it up into abstract concepts and then making sense of it.

I want to remain open here, but when you start talking about religion and then you also start talking about the fact that we can’t describe this framing of the world using, I don’t know, words…my BS meter just starts going off, I’m sorry.

If this is such an immanent aspect of our experience, then why can’t I see this framing of things right in front of me?”

Well, consider the duck-rabbit for a minute as an example. Somebody can look at the duck-rabbit for the first time, and they might clearly see the thing that’s drawn on the piece of paper as a duck.

And if they were never told that it’s possible to see this image in any other way they might only see the duck every time they look at it.

But like this hypothetical person, they can be confused once they’re told that other people see it as a rabbit. Similarly, they will say things like, “I just don’t see it.” They can strain and look really hard for how this could ever be a rabbit, and still only see a duck.

But then there’s the moment where they see the rabbit for the first time. And then it can be hard for them to go back to seeing the duck.

If they keep practicing at this, there could even be a point that they start to be able to freely switch between seeing it as a duck or a rabbit.

Consider this as a metaphor for these different experiential framings of reality we’ve been talking about. It could be that you’re having a hard time seeing the rabbit, and it’s not because you’re a bad person, or a stupid person, or too smart of a person to see this delusional rabbit people are talking about.

It’s possible that it’s hard for you to see the rabbit because you live in a world where you’re surrounded by ducks, and it’s a world that often incentivizes seeing the duck instead of the rabbit.

However, there could also be a moment where some other way of viewing things snaps into focus for you. You all of a sudden see things around you in a different way, and like that moment with the duck-rabbit it becomes evident to you that this was something that was always there, right in front of you.

You just didn’t see it until now. More than that: now you can’t unsee it.

The point is: what if we’re engaged in this almost constantly when it comes to the way we’re framing the world around us? What if this isn’t just an optical trick, but part of the way our experience works?

What if the duck and the rabbit are not contradictions of each other, but when you’re able to see both of them they start to look like things that actually require each other for them to exist the way they do in the first place?

That the duck co-constitutes the rabbit and vice versa.

Maybe the biggest mystery of all here is what any of this has to do with the relationship between philosophy and religion.

Keiji Nishitani, as we know, thought a lot about religion in his work. And he’s somebody that if he could see the modern world and the state of the discussion that often goes on among people about religion, he’d think there’s a lot of room for us to grow.

As mentioned on one of the earlier posts, when you ask a question like “what is religion,” Nishitani doesn’t think there’s an easy answer to that question.

It’s easy to have an answer. Everybody has thoughts on what religion is if you ask them, but how many of those people have really examined it closely?

To Nishitani, to even begin to start answering the question “what is religion” in a remotely detailed way, you’d have to at least do a philosophical analysis of religion, an analysis of the history of religion, and most importantly what religion has actually been to people in their lived experience of it for thousands of years.

You’d have to take seriously what was meant when, for example, a 4th-century Christian mystic describes their communion with God. What they really mean when they described that?

Then you might compare that to the experience of a Zen monk, their daily practice, and their approach to how they view enlightenment. Then you might compare that to what is meant by a Sufi when they claim to have annihilated their own ego in the presence of divine love.

What I mean is you’d have to consider religion in a multidimensional way. As a source of meaning, as a mode of disciplined practice, as a political tool, as a framework for the glue that holds a society together.

In other words, if you want to respect the question “what is religion,” truly, then this whole thing would be a very big job for someone to do all on their own, something some people have dedicated their entire lives to.

What becomes clear is that coming up with an answer to “what is religion” is not just looking around you at a handful of religious people that you’ve happened to have met in your life and assuming they represent everything about it.

Just think of the kind of mistakes you could be making there. Would you feel like you knew everything there was to know about constructing things just because you met a couple douchey construction workers in your life?

For example, if you’re born into the modern United States, something you might see around you a lot are people who say that if you want to be considered a religious person, all you have to do is believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

That a core component of this type of religious experience. Some would say the most important component, is a belief in something.

That as long as up in your head somewhere you are assenting to a belief in the correct religious object: that’s the detail that truly matters and makes you “religious”.

To the point where it’s not uncommon to see people in the United States who act like very good people, their behavior is aligned with a religious community like this, but if they haven’t been saved by Jesus yet and believe; they’re met with skepticism from the community.

Where at the same time somebody can be treating people around them in bad ways, but as long as they believe in the right thing; they’re seen as just a fellow Christian who happens to be struggling right now.

If it was possible to reduce religion down to this, it’s no wonder so many people would look at it and think it lacks anything to do with moral accountability. It’s also no wonder they might think it’s kind of silly.

“What, I just have to believe in this thing hard enough, and that’s what really matters to you guys?”

Even more than this, if you only met people like this throughout your life and you concluded that this is mostly what religion has to offer, you might be surprised to find out this is actually nothing like what most religious experiences have been over the course of human history.

That this is actually a very modern, post-Enlightenment, specifically post-Protestant Reformation version of a religious experience.

See, during the Protestant Reformation, when Martin Luther writes his 95 Theses, sends these corrections to the church and shakes up the whole Western religious world, that was an event that would start a multi-century shift in what it was to have a run-of-the-mill religious experience in European and American Christianity.

What was once a situation where most people didn’t speak Latin and were unable to even read the scripture they were following, Luther talked about creating what he called a “priesthood of all believers.”

And what this led to is that more so than ever before in the world after this, people began to think of their religious experience as a personal connection that they have to God. It started to become more common to speak to God directly during this time, to interpret the Bible personally when deciding what your relationship to God is.

But this was not the common way that it was to be a Christian before this.

And when the individualism of the Enlightenment comes along, and the rise of liberalism in the West, this idea that my religious identity is grounded in an individual belief that I have about some religious object becomes standard practice.

For whatever it’s worth this also mirrors other conversations about identity that have come out of Enlightenment-style thinking as well.

The assumption is that my religion is really an aspect of my individual identity. And that religious identity is ultimately something that’s decided by my choice to be it. This becomes more and more pronounced as a core piece of what it is to be this type of Christian as the years go on.

But Dostoevsky, who we’ve been talking about a lot lately in these posts, thought the Protestant Reformation was a huge step in the wrong direction for Christianity, hence his commitment to Orthodox Christianity.

Because the fact is, for most people who have ever considered themselves religious on this planet, religion has not primarily been about a belief in something.

In fact, as far as we can tell, for most of human history, whether or not you really believed in the god-status of something didn’t really matter as much as how you treated people.

Daily practice was more of what mattered historically. Religion was more defined by how you engaged in the roles of your community and the religious traditions and rituals. Your identity was not something that was determined by some belief you had; identity was something that exuded out of you as you lived a religious practice every day of your life.

As a point of contrast, consider the world that Keiji Nishitani lived in and how different it was.

Early 20th-century Japan is a place where the country is facing an enormous amount of pressure internally to modernize and “catch up” with the rest of the world.

As they’re doing this, they’re looking at every way that Japanese culture functions and comparing it to European culture as they try to decide which things they want to emulate and make their own.

When they do this comparison, Nishitani realizes on his end that when it comes to the word religion, at least in the way that word is being used by Europeans, the Japanese language doesn’t even have a word at this point to describe exactly what these Europeans are talking about.

That there’s so much historical baggage that’s connected to their word religion, concepts like religion and philosophy, are not just separated from each other, they’re often thought of as antagonistic.

Broadly speaking, from a more European use of these terms, the religion side of things would be the daily practice. The meeting up in church, rituals, confessional, prayer, whatever it was.

And the philosophy side of it would be more the metaphysics that underlie the religious practice. The conceptual analysis of the world, the deep reflection some thinkers do on the nature of what exists.

But again, compare this to some of the traditions of Nishitani’s Japan. Zen Buddhism as just one of them.

In Zen Buddhism, there isn’t this kind of strict separation between the daily practice of a follower and the philosophy of Sunyata that underlies it.

For thousands of years, can you imagine the idea that you’d be meditating for hours, reciting koans every day, questioning the nature of the self, deepening your experiential understanding of the groundless ground of reality, and then to say,

“That’s my religious practice. Oh, and then there’s this totally separate thing that we call the philosophy of Sunyata!”

Uh, no. To Nishitani, whatever the Europeans have been calling separately philosophy and religion for so many years, he realizes that for the Japanese this has been more of a unified tradition. One where it feels pretty impossible for these two to be seen as totally separate from each other.

And this brings us to the quote that we talked about at the beginning of the episode.

Said by the great philosopher and scholar of Zen Buddhism Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, one of the big inspirations of Nishitani. He said, “Religion without philosophy is blind, and philosophy without religion is vacuous.”

This is of course alluding to how these two things are linked more than we typically realize in the West, but it’s also speaking to the point that either of these two, if they were isolated and without the other one, kind of like the duck-rabbit, they would just be missing something deeply important about the very process that makes them what they are.

Shin’ichi talks about it more in the longer section of this famous quote. He says:

“Philosophy seeks to know the ultimate; religion seeks to live it. Yet for the whole human being, the two must be nondualistically of one body, and cannot be divided. If religion is isolated from philosophy, it falls into ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, or dogmatics. If philosophy is alienated from religion, it loses nothing less than its life…”

Consider the first sentence of that: philosophy seeks to know the ultimate; religion seeks to live it. Sounds a lot like a line of thinking we’ve been talking about in Dostoevsky lately.

If philosophy as it’s traditionally been done in the West is a type of conceptual engineering, where it creates concepts, analyzes the connections between concepts, all in an attempt to capture truth in whatever way words are capable of, then that may be one of the most important things we can possibly do, and it may be something that underlies all other fields of study.

But it still is something that is limited to concepts. Or in other words, it’s something that’s limited to a theoretical abstract framing of our reality, and how those pieces connect together into a larger system.

Consider how necessary it may also be to not just spend your life constantly system-building. To see more than just the duck on the piece of paper you’re looking at.

It can sometimes feel like anything you need to know about the world can be arrived at by just reflecting on things more. That’s how you solve problems.

But what Shin’ichi is saying here is that at a certain point you have to stop doing philosophy and start with what many people throughout history have called a religious practice.

It’s an effort to learn to receive a less abstract framing of your reality, and to make space to directly experience the more immanent nature of reality to shine through.

And this is why so many contemplative practices over the years focus on the quieting of the mind as a key starting point. It’s not necessarily to rid you of anxiety, or to 4x your productivity this quarter; this is about getting used to receiving reality and affirming it as it is, rather than living purely in abstractions about the world.

It’s not until the mind is quiet that anyone can ever understand this connection to what’s often called the eternal now, where the present moment is literally all there is in this framing.

But hypothetically, if someone could get to this place, would it be completely out of line for someone like Shin’ichi to call this living the truth?

And couldn’t we also at that point call philosophy the attempt to know the truth and conceptually articulate what we can about it?

More than that, wouldn’t these two activities be massively helpful to each other?

To get back to Shin’ichi’s larger point here: you can imagine how if someone just tried to live their life solely in a religious dimension and didn’t take the time to frame this experience in terms of philosophy, then they’d very likely just fall into ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, etc.

But if you’re a philosopher and all you do is try to conceptually frame the world instead of trying to live it and embody it, then it’s very common for this kind of thinking to just turn into hollow intellectualism.

This often ends up becoming someone who feels lost. The results of their thinking feel vacuous. They arrive at conclusions that don’t change anything about how they live, and a lot of the time this is someone that’s left feeling pretty dead inside.

These two different ways of framing our reality, like the duck-rabbit, are not opposites, and they’re certainly not an either/or thing. And to Nishitani, it’s very important for us to realize this connection between philosophy and religion. It’s one of the things we’ve definitely lost over the years, and it’s one of the most crucial things for us to have a daily practice to try to remember.

And while he’d probably say that the main way a modern person can benefit from understanding it is through a deep, existential engagement with both of these fields, if you wanted to learn more about this outside of your own lived experience, one useful thing can be to study and reflect on the work of one of these people that have asked the question “what is religion” and then dedicated their entire lives to studying it.

One of Nishitani’s favorites in this department is going to be a philosopher by the name of Friedrich Schelling.

Schelling was a man whose work was very complicated. His ideas change significantly from his earlier work to his later work. And even if they didn’t, this was a man who started his career as a German Idealist, in many ways responding to problems he saw in the work of Hegel.

So what that means is that he’s existing in a time that requires quite a bit of prior knowledge to even understand why he would care about all this stuff in the first place.

There’s no way I can cover it all today, but I am hoping I can show you a couple exciting things about his work from this line of conversation we’re having. I’m also hoping I can show why Nishitani, living over 100 years after Schelling, still draws on his work for inspiration, though ultimately thinks he was limited on many of his conclusions.

Schelling predicted a decline of religion and institutions like the church before most people even realized there was going to be a problem at all.

I saw it put one time that Friedrich Schelling was living during a time in history where he thought it was becoming harder and harder for someone to be a religious person by simply going to church and following the normal religious activities.

And that he sees this as a potential crisis.

In response to this he starts asking the kinds of questions we’ve been referencing so far in this post.

What is religion, and to what extent can the conceptual analysis of philosophy disclose religion in a way that is accurate?

In what ways can philosophy be a bridge for people between the world of the knowable, a world that can be framed and articulated, and the unknowable, the part of existence that has to be experienced and embodied to be witnessed?

Schelling’s answer was absolute nothingness. He thought when it comes to religion, what he calls the Ungrund in his work, the groundless ground is going to play a central role in understanding what a religious practice is truly a reflection of.

So keep in mind when I say “absolute nothingness” in the context of Schelling, this is a nothingness that’s along similar lines to the emptiness of Sunyata. This is a no-thing-ness.

And while this is by no means a perfect comparison, it is far more accurate to compare this nothingness to Buddhism than basically anything you’re ever going to find in Western philosophy that we’ve talked about.

For Schelling, absolute nothingness is a reference to the conditions that allow existence to unfold into the future. That there is no independent existence of people, things, nature, whatever it is. And the part of this that makes it different from Buddhism is that for Schelling: all of these things are part of a dynamic, self-revealing process that is constantly moving towards something.

And this progression towards something is going to be a very important piece of his work. Because there’s things he thinks are true about reality that develop out of this assumption he makes.

For example, if you’re studying human history, then for Schelling you’re really just studying the ways that human consciousness has unfolded as one piece of this universal process.

More than that, he thinks if we want to understand this universal process we can never understand all of it simply through abstract concepts like the ones that are used in philosophy. That much like Nishitani’s point about Sunyata: absolute nothingness resists categorization and can’t be fully captured in philosophical terms.

Still though, for Schelling, human events and ideas are a particularly accessible access point if we ever wanted to study as much of this absolute nothingness as we can.

These events are the symptoms of absolute nothingness, you could say.

And a very important thing he thinks we need to study when it comes to human ideas is going to be religion. Because he thinks religion for any given time period that it’s in is an expression of humanity’s relationship to this absolute nothingness.

A relationship that is always evolving and becoming more sophisticated. So much so that if you look at the history of religious practice, from the primitive mystery cults all the way to modern-day monotheistic Christianity, all of this has been a progression, for Schelling, towards a greater and greater understanding of the nature of absolute nothingness as framed by religious practice.

And he’ll go into all sorts of examples of this progression in his later work.

First example: he talks about these ancient mystery religions that there used to be. He talks about the Samothracian practice. Or the Eleusinian practice in Greece.

And he says far from these being about a belief in any sort of religious object, these were religious groups that were centered around trying to access the mysterious, unknowable aspects of our existence.

Where the whole experience of practice was actually pretty crazy if you read the stories. People would volunteer. And then they’d go through a secret, intense ritual process as part of their daily practice. Super secret.

In fact, there’s reports that in some cases there’d be the death penalty if you revealed what some of these secret rituals were.

From what little we know that’s been leaked over the years they would apparently take these people on things like a 20-mile hike, they’d have them hold some giant heavy religious artifact the whole way, they’d put these people out in the elements trying to bring people to a place they’d never been before in their own mind.

The logic of the whole thing being that there are certain insights into what existence is that can only be experienced. So, through all this craziness, we’re going to give you that experience.

To Schelling these religions were primitive ways of trying to gain access to these deeper truths about absolute nothingness. That the real purpose of doing any of this is to show people an aspect of existence that lies beyond anything philosophy could ever articulate in a classroom.

He gives another example of this dynamic, a bit later in history, in what he calls the great polytheistic attempts at conveying absolute nothingness.

He has respect for how effectively the polytheists expressed this in their time with things like a god of the sun, god of the sea, pantheons of gods sometimes. But then eventually he thinks, humanity’s relationship to nothingness progresses again, where people start to see that behind all these seemingly different gods that made up different forms of polytheism, there was a unified source of becoming that was responsible for all of them.

For Schelling, this shift in religious consciousness is going to become the rise of monotheism in the Western world.

And even within monotheism, with Christianity as just one example of it: Schelling thinks if you do the work, you can still observe various different distinct periods of how Christianity is practiced that correspond to different stages of our growing relationship to absolute nothingness.

For example, he describes early Christianity as the era of the book of Peter. Meaning many of the most influential passages from the theology of this time are taken from the example of Peter as an apostle.

He thinks it’s because of this inspiration from passages surrounding Peter, that this also is a time in our history where Christianity largely spread by conquest.

The goal in part became to create a Christian empire and ultimately for it to occupy more physical space in the world. In other words, for Schelling, this era assumed a metaphysics at the base of our religious consciousness, that prioritized space in the era of Peter. And you can see the philosophy there being inseparable from the religious practice.

But interestingly, years after this Christianity changes. It eventually develops into an era he thinks that more centers around passages from the gospel of Paul.

This becomes an era of practice where it isn’t so much about spreading Christianity externally anymore. Now we’re more focused on the internal experience of the religious person, especially when it comes to the importance of the concepts of faith and grace.

Once again for Schelling, the philosophical framing of Christianity during this particular period becomes inseparable from the religious practice. And for whatever it’s worth: this, the era of Paul, was the period that he thought that he was living in.

Now again, Schelling thinks all of this is heading towards a greater and greater understanding of this absolute nothingness. So the natural question you might want to ask him could be, “What do you think is next?” What is the next evolution of religious thinking that we have to look forward to?

Schelling believed that one possible answer to that would be an age of religious practice that centers more around the gospel of John.

Where in the gospel of John, when Jesus says things like “I and the Father are one,” he thought relative to the other gospels, there are far more passages from John that align with a new way of imagining religious practice that doesn’t break our view of the world down into so many rigid dualities.

What he’s referencing is that there are tons of dualistic ways that Christians will often break down their experience of reality. You have good and evil, being and non-being, and probably one of the most influential of these is this distinction they make between the sacred and the profane.

This idea that God, divinity, is something that exists out there, not of this world, that’s the sacred. And that this world, the world that’s in need of saving, that’s the realm of the profane.

Schelling thinks it’s possible, and even likely, that we are moving into a direction when it comes to religion where the distinction between God and the world is not a valid distinction anymore. That the two of these will be reimagined as co-constituting one another, not unlike our example of the duck-rabbit.

He thinks there are plenty of passages in the Bible, especially surrounding the apostle John, that can move this religious practice into a direction where the sacred, or the groundless ground, is actually part of the experience of what we call the profane in this era.

In other words, this would be an era of Christianity for Schelling where the metaphysics are more along the lines that God is immanently all around you. That there’s no true separation between the sacred and the profane. And where the path to the sacred is not through conquest or through some internal belief you have, but by opening your awareness to see the sacred that’s among us.

Imagine a form of Christianity that resembled that.

And if you’re someone who was born into this world where you feel like the religious options you have always seem like an ancient relic of the past, outdated, tribalistic, painfully simple in terms of framing this connection to the unfolding of reality— well hearing this from Schelling, that you may just be someone who’s born during a big transition period between a shift in religious consciousness, I’d imagine it can almost feel to some people like you’ve been robbed of a religious connection to the world that may have been possible for you.

Next post is going to be the first of a series we’re doing on all the major books of Albert Camus.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you next time.

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Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West! This is Philosophize This!

So today we’re going to be talking about the book The Brothers Karamazov.

Which means among other things we’re going to be talking today about the faith of Dostoevsky.

Faith was a big part of how he lived his life. And if you listen to the people that have spent years studying his work, they often describe his view of faith as a kind of existential, tragic form of Christianity.

Now, to a modern person who just reads that it can sound on the surface like it’s an oxymoron.

Tragic Christianity? Existential questions? Isn’t Christianity the thing you believe in so you don’t have to be in agony with existential dread every day?

Someone could even say when it comes to how most people seem to be using this Christianity thing: Jesus was basically a fidget spinner that had 12 disciples following him around.

How can that ever be anything but something that helps people cope with a painful reality they can’t fully affirm?

The first thing we have to do if we want to understand where he’s coming from with his faith, is to make sure we’re not reducing Christianity, and all of religion for that matter, to just a superficial, lazy kind of religion that gives people easy answers.

There may be plenty of people out there you can find that use religion like this, but again, Dostoevsky, and many others, are not this kind of Christian.

In fact, if you remember the episode we just did before we started this series where we talked about Keiji Nishitani and his views on the value of a deeply religious quest, the truth is that there’s a similarity to the ways that Nishitani and Dostoevsky each viewed religion.

Dostoevsky thought that Russian Orthodox Christianity was not some sacred institution that people should blindly commit themselves to. More than anything, he saw an organized religious approach like this as something that gave people a language they could use to navigate the purpose they served in a larger network of being.

And when someone truly walks that kind of religious path, to him it just ends up being something very tragic and existential. It was an existence that at times was absolutely miserable for him, but then at other times it was deeply beautiful. It was a range of experience that he no doubt sought to emulate in the complexity of his novels.

It’s worth just basking for a second in the level of honesty that this man tried to live in.

The level to which he affirmed everything as much as he could. The good, the bad, the mysterious; the level to which he tried to understand the different psychological framings of the world that other people lived in, and how much effort he put in to never idealize or demonize them just so he had an easy way to file them neatly up in his own head.

This is a level of affirmation about the world that can be really tough to relate to when someone tries to just jump in and read his books off the shelf not knowing the kind of man he was.

People will read his books like The Brothers Karamazov, which as we’ll see is an enormous commentary on so many aspects of human existence, and they’ll try to turn it into the kind of idealized movie they’re used to watching in our modern world.

They’ll say this book is a battle between good and evil. That this is a debate that’s going on between Ivan’s perspective and Alyosha’s perspective. And that the reader's job is just to pay attention and find out which one Dostoevsky thinks is the correct perspective to have.

But this was not at all what he was going for as he wrote it.

We’ll talk more about it here in a minute but what needs to be said right now is that faith (like love to Dostoevsky) is not a noun. Faith is a verb.

And to say something like, “Dostoevsky’s faith mattered to him a lot,” and to think that’s the same as saying, “Dostoevsky's Christianity mattered to him a lot,” – well, by the end of this post we’ll understand why this misses a big piece of how he saw faith as an active process, and not a doctrine to believe in.

What we’ll also see is how he thought that multiple, different framings of reality might be necessary if we ever want to engage with our existence more fully than any one of these characters do in the book. That any single framing of our existence will always run into its built-in limitations.

Anyway, the plot of The Brothers Karamazov, this is going to be shocking I know, but it centers around the Karamazov family.

Another shock will be that a significant portion of the book is dedicated to the three brothers of the family: Dimitri, Ivan, and Alyosha.

But then more than just the brothers, the family also includes another central character of this book, the father of these three boys whose name is Fyodor.

Now Fyodor was obviously Dostoevsky’s own name in real life, but this character he wrote into the book wasn’t meant to be symbolic of himself. In fact, in a letter he said that what he meant for Fyodor to symbolize was a piece of something that’s inside of all of us to an extent.

He thought we’re all a little like this Fyodor guy because at least when it comes to the way he treats his family, he regularly comes up short in ways that are completely disappointing to them. Most people can relate to this feeling if we’re being honest, I think.

For example, Fyodor doesn’t really know any of these sons that we just mentioned. At least not very closely. Certainly doesn’t know them like you’d expect a father to know their sons.

Dmitri, his oldest son, is from his first marriage. Ivan and Alyosha are sons that are from his second marriage.

And when they were children, Fyodor would often just leave them to be taken care of by someone else. He’d go out, have a night on the town, instead of caring for the kids he’d do all the stuff he really wanted to be doing with his time. Even if he was around, most of the time he’d just outright neglect the kids.

But now that the three brothers have grown up and become adults, things haven’t gotten any better. Life is still pretty chaotic between the Karamazov family.

For example, Fyodor is in a love triangle with one of his sons and another woman named Grushenka. That’s one way to bond with your kids, I guess.

He gets verbally abusive with them on a regular basis in the book, gets into scuffles with them. He gets drunk all the time. He’s the kind of guy that you’ll be out with, he’ll be walking down the street, half in the bag, and he’ll just yell at some stranger that he doesn’t even know that’s on the side of the road.

He manipulates the people who are close to him to get what he wants. He abuses the people close to him when they’re inconvenient to him.

And the point of Dostoevsky presenting a father in this way is more than him just wanting a manipulative narcissist in the book to add a little flavor.

Technically the people that Dostoevsky is critiquing with this character are a group of what he saw as self-indulgent landowners that were growing in number during the 19th century in Russia when he was living.

But this criticism applies more generally for him to the growing number of people in our modern societies that are so focused on themselves all the time.

The self-centeredness of people that think almost entirely in terms of their own achievements and projects has led to what he thinks is a considerable decline in the focus people choose to put on family relationships, like the ones between father and son that he lays out in this book so much.

Part of his argument here is that if you wanted to find out what’s wrong in a particular society that’s having problems, one place to start is to look at the relationships between the members of an average family in that society.

And not only is looking at family relationships going to be the perfect site for Dostoevsky to explore some of the darkest and most wonderful things that we can do to the people we’re close to, but this also becomes a perfect way to illustrate one of the big macro-level points that he wants to make in this book about how to philosophically frame the world, and that is: that we should think of the family as a microcosm of society at large.

It’s common for people to want to make a positive impact on the world around them. The difficult question to answer becomes, “How do I actually do that in a way that isn’t just me cosplaying as someone that wants to have a positive impact?”

Someone might think, “Well I live in a democracy. To make a difference in a democracy means I have to put in the work and become an informed voter. Which means I have to watch the news and consume content that makes me an informed voter.”

“For two hours every day on the way to work, when I’m eating, whenever I get a little free time; I will do the work to keep up on the events that are going on politically. I do this not because it’s fun, but because it’s what it takes to make this world a better place.”

What often goes along with this kind of thinking is that if you’re somebody out there that’s not keeping up with all the stuff that’s going on in the news every day, then you must be an irresponsible person. That to care more about your video games and your TV shows than you do about taking responsibility for the world you live in makes you somebody that is part of the problem, not the solution.

But Dostoevsky looks at things in a very different way than this.

He’d no doubt appreciate this person’s theoretical concern for all the people around them. But he’d also think that engagement at this theoretical level is not the most enduring way of improving the world if that is, in fact, what they are going for.

For example, when it comes to those two hours you spend every day watching a screen, getting educated on what’s happening in the world. Let’s ignore the criticism that you aren’t really getting an education there. That this is really just someone indulging in entertainment like most people do in the modern world. Let’s say the news is actually getting to the bottom of what’s happening at the political level.

Then do a comparison of the two hours of someone’s day that they spend watching content, and all the good they’re doing every couple years or so when they can be one vote of millions, and now imagine that same two hours every day where they instead reflected on all the ways they’re needed in the world immediately around them, the roles they serve right now that they’re always, already performing, and now imagine them spending that two hours every day genuinely applying themselves to being better at what is needed from them by the people and things around them.

Some questions to ask: which one of those two are you more familiar with? Which one of those two are you more capable of actually changing? Or qualified to know?

You could say that when it comes to knowing how you’re needed by the things around you, especially when it comes to the people, there may be no one that is more qualified for that task than you are. You are in a special position to be there for them.

And Dostoevsky might say, imagine dedicating two hours every single day to doing just that. How would your life change? How would the lives of the people around you change?

To not only be able to spend that time reflecting on how you fit into this particular life you’re living, trying to understand things more on their own home ground. But then to be able to spot weak points in your abilities, where you might want to use this time every day to develop the skills that’ll allow you to be there better for this network you’re a part of.

And the point is not that Dostoevsky would ever think we should be structuring our lives around trying to save the world anyway.

But if you are one of these people that has making the world a better place as a priority in your life; how many of society’s problems wouldn’t be problems if more people lived in this way? We would have strong, qualified people dedicating the time every day (moral people, you could say) and these would be people that would intervene before many of these issues became larger problems.

The question for Dostoevsky is, if you consider yourself a revolutionary and you want to change the world for the better, which one of these two is more revolutionary?

There are of course moments in history where it’s important to take to the streets and act politically, but consider how easy it is to fall into the trap of waving a sign around not really changing anyone’s mind about anything, especially in the type of societies we live in that promote self-centeredness and alienate us from each other.

Much like we talked about in the recent post we did on his book Demons, think of how easy it is to believe you’re doing things for the sake of saving the world, when you’re really just an ego that’s turning all of humanity into a theoretical abstraction so that you can try to control it.

Now there’s a lot of things you could say back to this idea that’s been presented so far.

Let’s pause here for a second though, because I think his point becomes a much stronger one when we consider it next to an important individual section of this book. It’s come to be known as The Grand Inquisitor.

The Grand Inquisitor may be one of the most famous parables in all of classic literature.

As a section in this book, it was written by Dostoevsky in a way where you can read it completely on its own and it still makes total sense. He did this on purpose.

In fact, there’s a lot of people who hear about The Grand Inquisitor section of this book first, and then only after reading it will they then get turned onto The Brothers Karamazov as a book more broadly. That’s how good it is!

Anyway, here’s how it goes though. One of those three sons that Fyodor doesn’t know much about is named Ivan. Ivan is the classic example of a highly educated, rational, skeptical kind of person who’s a bit tortured by living in a world that he’s so good at critiquing.

See, Ivan’s the kind of person that has a hard time believing in any religious stuff that gets sent his way, though he does try to respect what it’s saying and he takes it very seriously. He certainly doesn’t think it’s all simply a bunch of nonsense.

Ivan also is someone that looks around him at the world and sees the suffering of untold numbers of innocent people with seemingly no end in sight.

So feeling the frustration that comes along with witnessing this kind of stuff, he tells this story in the book, called The Grand Inquisitor, as a way to put into words what he thinks is going on with these religious institutions and all the suffering in the world.

He tells it to his younger brother Alyosha in the book.

And real quick before we get into it, what makes this poem so interesting is that it’s not just saying: look at all the suffering in the world. Therefore, it makes no sense for a God to exist.

No, what Ivan’s saying is something that’s in a way far more radical than that. The argument he gives is sometimes called an “anti-theodicy” by scholars that study this section.

What does that mean? The word theodicy, if you just break down the different parts of the word, literally means justification of God.

And throughout history there have been a lot of attempts by thinkers to justify God.

One of the most common things that people try to justify, especially when it comes to the Abrahamic religions, is how a loving God could ever exist and still allow for a horrific amount of completely unnecessary suffering that’s going on at scale.

Well again, Ivan’s not saying you shouldn’t believe in God because this suffering can’t be rationally justified. He’s saying: even if this God does exist, this isn’t a God that is worth honoring anyway. Doesn’t matter if you can rationally justify it with a theodicy, because any God that allows for this kind of world to exist should just be rejected.

The Grand Inquisitor delivers this argument as it gets recited by Ivan in story form.

In the story he tells Jesus comes back to earth. It’s the famous second coming of Christ we’ve all been waiting for, hooray! And where does Jesus choose to come back to when he decides to do it?

Well, 16th-century Spain of all places, right in the middle of the Spanish Inquisition.

Almost immediately he shows up among the people and starts performing miracles on the side of the street like he’s David Blaine. But this time when he’s doing the miracles he doesn’t get an entourage of followers; he just gets arrested when he does it.

Not long after he gets arrested he’s interrogated by a really forceful, high-level clergyman that people in the story call the Grand Inquisitor.

The Grand Inquisitor looks at Jesus as he’s interrogating him and says: you know what, I believe you. You’re the son of God. And since you’re the representative that’s available here on behalf of the creator of the universe, I have to tell you something that’s been bugging me: you absolutely failed when you created this world when it comes to the concept of human freedom.

Because, he tells him, it’s the possibility of human freedom that leads to all the evil that goes on in the world.

Here’s the process: people are born, they’re able to make choices, they inevitably are tempted by evil, then they have the freedom to choose that evil sometimes, and then innocent people by the billions, including children who have no frame of reference for any of this stuff, suffer unnecessarily.

Look, you chose for the universe to be this way, Jesus. And the Grand Inquisitor tells him because of this completely broken setup, the church had no choice but to step in over the years and correct for your big mistake there.

He says the church realized long ago that people can either have freedom or they can have happiness. You can’t ever have both.

And when it comes down to it, human beings don’t actually want freedom as much as they say they do.

People just want full bellies, he says. They want happiness and peace.

And the way you ensure that is not by giving them freedom, but by giving them authority and miracles and mystery. You give them a doctrine to live by with strict consequences if they don’t, and when they obey a power greater than themselves like that, it removes the whole freedom thing from the equation and ends up producing a human being that is actually happy.

The bottom line is this for the Grand Inquisitor: institutionalized religion, the church, is an enormous lie, but it is a noble lie, it’s a necessary lie. People are better off living with this lie. Just ask any blindly religious person how great it is to be them every day. They really think they have it all figured out!

And how can Jesus, of all people, sit there with a straight face and not wail in agony over how unjustifiable all this suffering really is? He can’t justify it. In fact, go ahead Jesus, just try to give me your argument back to all this stuff I just said!

At which point Jesus, staying quiet during this entire speech, listens patiently. And when the Grand Inquisitor finishes, he stands up, walks over to him, kisses him on the mouth, and then walks away. A move that Dostoevsky thinks is a complete and powerful counter-perspective to everything that the Grand Inquisitor has just said.

Now how does kissing the guy make any sense at all as a counter argument?

There’s a lot here to examine. See, it’s a very specific move that Dostoevsky’s going for when he has Jesus not say anything, but just get up and kiss the Grand Inquisitor.

When Jesus doesn’t say anything, it’s not like he’s just being nice to him. This isn’t Jesus having mercy and not wanting to embarrass the Grand Inquisitor in front of his friends.

No, the point is that he’s not even going to argue with the Grand Inquisitor, because argument is something that is always limited to the theoretical, abstract framing of events in the world, which is incapable of even receiving the response that Jesus is giving here.

Jesus is looking at the world through a completely different kind of experiential framing than the Grand Inquisitor is. And by kissing him it underscores the built-in limitations to the way the Grand Inquisitor is trying to frame, supposedly, all of human existence.

Now if that sounds confusing let me try to clear it up. The good news is we’ve been talking about the possibility of this pre-theoretical framing of our reality a bunch lately on these posts. I’m talking about the more phenomenological, religious, embodied framing of our reality.

We’ve talked about Heidegger’s Dasein and the immediacy of experience in that regard. We’ve talked about his later work with his concept of letting be and its connection to the practice of attention in the work of Simone Weil.

We’ve talked about the great mystics who, throughout history, by a process of self-emptying, have tried to get to communion with something greater than themselves that they are connected to. We’ve talked about Nishitani and how he thinks most of Western philosophy throughout history has gone on in the experiential framing of consciousness, and that he thinks it’s deeply lacking in these other framings of our experience that he calls Nihility and Sunyata.

Well look, this is part of why Nishitani saw Dostoevsky as such an exceptional thinker from the Western tradition. He seems to be going deeper in his work into the value of these other framings that are outside of mere theoretical abstractions. Most thinkers in the West never do this.

See, there’s nothing wrong to Dostoevsky with arguing or with framing the world in terms of abstractions while trying to get to a better understanding of it. We need to do this kind of stuff.

But what he would say is: we are always limiting ourselves whenever we make the mistake of believing that we are accessing everything to human experience simply by coming up with abstract definitions of things.

To only have grandiose conversations about human life as a defined thing and human suffering as a defined thing, is to always be limiting yourself to getting a fuller understanding of the thing.

It’s a similar move to the one that we saw from Nishitani a few decades later. The move he makes with nihilism in his book The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism that we talked about.

He says that what many Western thinkers have typically done is they look at a concept like nihilism and they’ll approach it merely from the abstract, theoretical framing.

They’ll come up with definitions as to what nihilism is. They’ll look at tons of different examples of nihilism throughout history. They’ll find similarities and differences between them, and then they’ll argue with each other and try to refine their definitions to capture the essence of what nihilism is.

But Nishitani points out that while this is one piece of nihilism for sure, nihilism is just as much an experienced, embodied reality for a subject that is going through a nihilistic experience.

His point was if we want to take nihilism as seriously as we can, we have to honor this phenomenological framing of it, and not just stop short with having arguments about nihilism as simply an abstract concept.

Well notice the similarity there to the Grand Inquisitor and his broad, abstract arguments about what human life is or whether suffering makes sense or not.

One of the big points for Dostoevsky is this: there’s a way to talk about suffering where it’s part of an abstract rational framing of the world.

For example, there’s a tsunami that takes out 10,000 people and they’re suffering. Or there’s a deer out in the woods somewhere whose leg gets crushed by a giant rock. There’s a way to have a conversation about suffering where the goal is to work out a way to rationalize it in some giant utilitarian calculus you’re doing on the level of the universe.

But there’s another way to talk about suffering from this more pre-theoretical framing, where we’re simply trying to affirm the universe as it is. Where we’re not trying to demonize suffering. We’re not trying to idealize suffering. And when we just experience suffering as an aspect of our existence, suffering in another real sense just is a part of the life of the types of creatures that we are.

In other words, far from telling these people that they shouldn’t be trying to rationalize suffering on these massive scales, the other question for Dostoevsky that often gets ignored is: how do we find a way to authentically experience a world where suffering is always something that’s present in it?

Well, it’s certainly not by rationalizing it away. And again it’s certainly not by idealizing it or demonizing it.

The answer for Dostoevsky is going to be faith, or to strive through the difficulty of learning to actively love the world, and affirm our existence unconditionally.

Much more on that framing of faith and love here in a second, but first a couple loose ends to tie up here that are interesting.

Notice how this isn’t an argument that’s trying to refute the idea that suffering is unjustifiable. If Dostoevsky did that, then that would concede the point that suffering can be rationalized away, and it would turn the book into something more along the lines of a theodicy.

But remember, he’s not making a theodicy here.

For Dostoevsky there isn’t a rational justification for the suffering in the world. In fact, he acknowledges the complexity here and the validity of this other framing.

He would absolutely say that the Grand Inquisitor makes some really valid arguments in his pitch to Jesus. But again the real point for Dostoevsky that he wants us to understand here is: these are just arguments.

In fact he makes this point in the book at multiple different places. There’s a character named Father Zosima who’s a religious man who represents one of the voices of the saint in The Brothers Karamazov. He has a really great conversation with a woman named Madame Koklakov along these same lines.

She tells him about her own existential struggle she’s going through. How she’s really bothered by the question of what happens after you die. And similar to Ivan, she’s also really bothered by all the suffering she sees in the world, and she wishes she could do more about it.

And Father Zosima says back to her when they’re talking: look, I hear you. He validates what she’s saying and says that he’s also felt the way that she does. He says these problems can be some of the hardest things to try to reconcile when you’re living mostly in this way of framing things.

But he says to her: I can’t offer you any words or an explanation that will rationalize this stuff away for you. The only thing I can offer you, he says, as a man that is living a deeply religious life, is to say that when you approach the world more from the experiential framing of love instead, you don’t get a rational explanation for why all this suffering exists or for what happens after you die.

But from that framing of love, the presence of suffering or the mystery of death, requires less of an explanation. Because suffering becomes a reality to be experienced, not just an intellectual problem to be solved.

Now this is also where we benefit from having read the other four of his novels that we’ve covered so far.

Because we know by this point that when a saint figure in one of his books is talking about love, they are not talking about a superficial kind of love.

To say I’m going to live life in a more loving way towards the people and things around me doesn’t mean that you’re going to go out and start doing more nice things for people. Compliment people more. Hold the door open for them.

No, loving the world around you is not becoming a cartoonishly nice person.

Active love, like the kind that Father Zosima is talking about in the book and the kind of love symbolized by Jesus when he kisses the Grand Inquisitor, is a way of framing our experience that tries to affirm everything about it, as unconditionally as we can.

So, the Grand Inquisitor in the story is not stupid for the arguments he’s making. He’s not even wrong. He’s just framing reality in an incomplete way. One that has blind spots.

Jesus responds to this person in the story with love by modeling the exact counterpoint that the Grand Inquisitor needs from him in this moment.

In other words, this moment isn’t about Jesus to Jesus. He’s considering how he is needed most, and how he can best fulfill that role in the moment. Kind of like what Dostoevsky was saying earlier about how we can choose to be towards our family.

And think of how this kind of love applies to an actual situation you might find yourself in.

Whatever’s going on in your life; whether it’s something with your best friend, your child, even something like the local swamp that’s got a lot of trash inside of it and you want to clean it up. The point is to see these things not in some idealized way where we think about how they should be all the time.

“The swamp should be clean! My child should be better at math! My best friend should be better at knowing what to say here!” Or more ambitiously, “The universe should have a plan that all this suffering is a part of!”

It’s easy to make this move when we frame things purely in terms of abstractions and try to control them. But to love existence is also to affirm things as they are. To see things as they are. To experience things on their own home ground.

Love is the orientation of care we have towards this world when we truly seek to understand it on its own terms.

And if you’re Dostoevsky: just saying that is one thing. But if you wanted to actually live more in this way, it’s clear that he thought this was not going to be an easy thing for someone to just decide they’re going to start doing one day. You don’t just flip a switch on and all of a sudden you’re loving everything.

Turns out it’s a very painful thing at times to love the world around you as it is.

Things are often frustrating, and people are often disappointing. More than that, affirming these things as legitimate pieces of a network that you’re embedded in often isn’t something that comes with a lot of credit that you get for doing it.

For example, when you choose to be patient towards someone close to you in a moment that they’re struggling in. That kind of love is often something that goes on behind the scenes.

It’s something most people don’t even notice is happening. Many people are ungrateful for the love they do receive; it’s something they only notice years later, if they even take the time to do the reflection required to see it.

And again, in the type of societies we live in that incentivize getting recognition for things, where to be visible and seen is what validates your existence, Dostoevsky would no doubt see this as a unique challenge for someone to have to face in this particular culture we live in.

Now, notice the similarities here to the shift in experiential framing that we heard about from Keiji Nishitani. Where an important piece of what an authentic religious quest is always aiming for is this shift in perspective from thinking: how do the things in the world serve me, to for what purpose do I exist in this larger network.

The similarities here to this active love that’s being dramatized by Dostoevsky are obvious.

Because when you do the work to see the world more in this way, Dostoevsky says that things like compassion, and patience, and forgiveness become things that aren’t some moral performance you’re putting on every day because you know they’re the right things to do.

They start to become the genuine way that you orient yourself towards everything around you, because you increasingly see how everything around you is a part of you. It’s co-constituting you.

The illusion of separation that’s so common in our modern societies gets lifted. And then at that point, to purposefully harm something else around you would be the equivalent of stabbing your left hand with a fork so that your right hand can get a piece of chicken. Harming something around you is ultimately just you harming yourself in this framing.

See the Grand Inquisitor was right in a way: it may be that human freedom is something that leads to more suffering in the world than there may otherwise be.

But Dostoevsky would say that freedom is both the cause of suffering as well as the only way to love, or to have faith, or to gain any possible enduring connection to the world around us.

After all, someone can’t force me to affirm something about the world. It has to come from an authentic place of freedom. Without that, if I’m just forced to do it by a church or something, it just becomes me following orders.

Imagine being commanded by someone else to love something. It doesn’t work like that.

And that’s part of why Dostoevsky puts family relationships on display so much in this book. Weathering the frustration that you’re no doubt going to face when trying to love something like this; that’s something that is no doubt going to be easier when you practice with your immediate family, friends, and the things you know best.

Point is: it’s going to be difficult. And someone who has never had to face difficult realities, or has had the privilege to live in an idealistic framing of the world for most of their life, is likely someone uneducated on the limits of what a human experience can be.

It’s in this way that love is described by Father Zosima in the book as a kind of teacher.

Love is a gateway into this more immediate connection to being we’ve been talking about in this larger series on religious phenomenology.

And to Dostoevsky, it’s a particularly beautiful one of these gateways because love really is something that’s available to almost anyone, regardless of their lifestyle.

Now on that note, one thing that needs to be underscored when I say this is that love is not just a teacher. The active part of active love is very important here to recognize as well. And the kind of commitment that active love requires is on the level of something that to Dostoevsky really only makes sense to describe as faith.

There’s a history of talking about faith and reason as things that are mutually exclusive. There’s also a long history in the West of breaking things down in very dualistic ways where we say there’s a doctrine called reason, and a doctrine called faith, and one of these doctrines has to be superior to the other.

But to Dostoevsky, doing anything meaningful in the world always requires an act of faith. It requires us to recognize that we don’t know everything all the time. And more than that, that it’s okay to not know. We shouldn’t have to have perfect information to be able to make a decision in our lives.

The real challenge for him lies in sticking to the path you’ve chosen when you’re inevitably going to run into things that are frustrating.

Faith is the commitment that’s required to live in a framing like this long enough to uncover what it has to show to us.

But because of how difficult doing this is in practice, it is a faithful commitment specifically to active love that he thinks is crucial.

And for whatever it’s worth this is the framing he thinks is most embodied by the character of Alyosha in the book. Though it’s clear he had a lot more he wanted to expand on in this area. He had plans to write a second part of The Brothers Karamazov following mostly Alyosha, but he died before he could write it.

Now it’s clear by the end of the book that there are no winners here for Dostoevsky.

I mean it’s clear he thinks the message of Father Zosima and his student Alyosha is what you’ve most likely missed in your life in the modern world if you’re coming to this book.

But the idea that Ivan has been destroyed here and is totally wrong; that’s just too simple of a take.

Remember, with an entire career behind him of writing in characters like Raskolnikov or the Underground Man, he could have made Ivan into somebody that was a complete moral failure if he wanted to.

But he didn’t. No, in fact he purposefully makes Ivan in this book a very respectful, thoughtful version of somebody over indexed on a rational framing of the world. It’s clear he saw a lot of value in what Ivan was bringing to these conversations.

And someone can say back to all this, “Okay, but which one did he really believe in though? You can’t live in both doubt and in faith simultaneously. It’s a paradox. He had to choose one or the other.”

But is that true? Is doubt never a part of living in faith? Or is faith as Dostoevsky understood it, precisely that iterative battle that goes on every day against the possibility of doubt to serve a higher purpose?

Dostoevsky once said that he only arrived at faith very late in his life, and he says he got there through what he called a furnace of doubt. That was the actual word he used.

Couldn’t it genuinely be that some days he felt like Ivan and other days he felt like Alyosha?

Can’t faith and commitment be stronger some days more than others? And can’t doubt and argument be more needed on some days than others?

Needs to be said: The Brothers Karamazov is an absolutely massive book in terms of characters and plot. Even the philosophical themes are impossible to cover in a single post like this. For anyone who has read all five of these philosophical guides on Dostoevsky’s novels, thank you for your patience, and thank you for getting it. There is always room to talk about more that is going on philosophically in this book. As always, I await requests from the people I write these for.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you next time.

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Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West! This is Philosophize This!

There’s a story from Dostoevsky’s life that’s usually one of the first things you hear about him when you start looking into his work. I personally think the story resonates a bit better when you already know a little about what he was going for when he wrote, which at this point we do, this being the fourth book we’ve covered of the five great novels from Dostoevsky.

The story is about the time in his life that he almost got shot by a firing squad. Classic story I’m sure he used to tell around the campfire to all the kids.

There’s a couple different versions of this story. One version comes from the main character of the book we’re talking about today; it’s called The Idiot.

We’ll talk more about the book here in a second, but first it’s important to understand how some of the intense experiences that Dostoevsky had in his life led to the conclusions in the rest of his work.

Conclusions about what he thinks a good life is. His views on beauty and love and more specifically what he means when he says a now famous quote that’s been associated with this book, The Idiot: what did he mean when he said that he thought that “beauty will save the world”?

There’s a lot of discussion centered around this statement, and we’ll be a lot closer to understanding it by the end of this post.

When Dostoevsky’s writing the book Demons we just talked about, and when he talks about a revolutionary cell that’s planning stuff to potentially bring down the government in the book, that’s not him sitting around method acting what it would be like to be a revolutionary.

No, early in his writing career, he really was a member of what’s now known as the Petrashevsky circle. Meaning he was part of one of these revolutionary groups, which is part of what gives him so much insight into the psychology of these kinds of people.

So, like any revolutionary at the time that’s living in Tsarist Russia, he was always at high risk of being prosecuted. Turns out Russia doesn’t take too kindly to you if you’re plotting to overthrow the government every day.

And as the story goes Dostoevsky gets arrested. He gets processed, charged, and sentenced to death. He gets led out into a field. There are stakes driven into the ground. The kinds of stakes they tie you to when you’re about to get shot by a firing squad.

He and his friends have been dressed up in the sort of white uniform that they put people in right before they shoot them. The bags are ready to go over their heads.

Dostoevsky is apparently told at this moment by the people with the guns that he has five minutes left to live. They tell him go ahead, make your peace, say a prayer, do whatever it is you’re going to do.

And he says when you’re in this kind of moment, your whole relationship to time starts to change. That five minutes that he was given felt to him like it was actually an enormous amount of time.

He says each minute felt to him like it was a different lifetime that he was living. And much like we normally do in life, when you always feel like you have all the time in the world to do the stuff you want to do, he said that in that moment he came up with a plan for how he was going to use each of these five minutes that he had left.

First couple minutes were going to be for saying goodbye to his friends around him. The two minutes after that were going to be for going over his life, thinking about what he did while he was here on this planet.

The last minute he was going to dedicate to looking around him, and taking in a glimpse of the world for one last time. These last three minutes, he says he’s going to really think about it, and he’s going to finally come to a decision as to what his whole life has been for up until this point.

And while he’s doing this, he looks off into the distance, and he sees a small church a little ways off just sitting there.

This church had a spire on top of it, and he remembers that the light from the sun was bouncing off the spire shooting off in all directions. It was beautiful to him.

Dostoevsky thinks in this moment that in about two minutes, he is essentially going to become one of these rays of light that he’s looking at. He starts to reflect. He thinks, “I certainly won’t be a thinking, feeling person anymore. What will I be, if anything at that point?”

But then this question leads to another question for him, and any time that he might have been able to spend marveling at the light show that was going on came to an end real quick.

Because he all of a sudden becomes consumed by the follow-up question: what if I wasn’t going to die right now?

What would I do with my life if somehow I were able to keep on living?

He says he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He becomes overwhelmed by what he calls the eternity of days that would be ahead of him; all that he could do with that time if he took it as seriously as he was taking time right now.

He says in that moment he knew that he would count up every minute of it. He wouldn’t waste a single second of it.

And eventually this thought, that started as a very nice thought, at some point it just starts to weigh on him.

You can imagine why. The number of seconds he’s wasted up until this point. The fact he’s having this insight just right now when he’s about to die.

He says the feeling that comes over him eventually is that he wishes that they’d hurry up and shoot him so he doesn’t have to feel the weight of this thought any more.

At which point, in what he thinks are the final seconds of his life, a person rides up on a horse carrying a piece of paper. It’s a stay of execution from Tsar Nicholas I.

The whole thing it turns out was set up, staged as a mock execution.

And the people in power did this to not only psychologically torture the people like Dostoevsky, but also as a political maneuver to make the king look like he’s a really decent guy. Look at how benevolent our leaders are that they let these people live even despite their treason.

Now just because they aren’t being put to death, it’s not like they’re just going to take off Dostoevsky’s handcuffs and let him go free. He gets sentenced to four years in a Siberian prison and then is required for five years after that to serve in the Russian military.

You can imagine what kind of an impact this event has on him and his writing that comes after this.

Just as some time context here: he gets out of the prison/military in 1859, and he comes out with Notes From Underground just five years later in 1864.

It’s not a coincidence that this execution story is one that he wanted to tell in this book in particular, The Idiot. And it’s not a coincidence that this story is told by the main character of the book, a guy named Prince Myshkin.

First of all, just for clarity, a lot of modern readers might expect that someone we’re calling Prince Myshkin would have to be a prince that’s part of a royal family, living in a castle somewhere.

But that’s not the case when it comes to this Prince Myshkin.

In Russian society at the time, a person could theoretically come from a family that has a kind of “royal” status in terms of respect, because of what their family used to be back during the feudal system. To be called a prince like this usually meant that you were part of some kind of aristocratic family from the past. But it doesn’t necessarily mean your lifestyle today looks anything like what we’d typically think of as royalty.

Prince Myshkin in this book is a great example of this. He starts the book almost completely broke, sitting on a train, returning from years that he had just spent getting treatment from what somebody today might call a mental hospital.

But even these details about Prince Myshkin are me getting ahead of myself.

Because the real thing we need to understand about Myshkin is what Dostoevsky was going for when he wrote him.

To put it simply he was trying to create a Christ-like figure that was living on planet Earth among all the humans. Or, as he wrote to his niece in a letter later about the character of Myshkin, he was trying to create an example of the “positively beautiful man.”

In fact, since we’re talking about his notes and letters about this book, he wrote a couple other people letters about his mindset when he was getting ready to write this book.

He says that there’s a lot of attempts he sees out there where great authors will try to bring a Christ-like figure to life in one of their novels.

He cites Don Quixote as an example of this. Pickwick from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. Jean Valjean from Les Misérables. He gives several other examples.

But to Dostoevsky, every one of these attempts by these other authors come up short for him in some crucial way at depicting someone who is Christ-like.

And knowing what we know about Dostoevsky so far with his work, think of what is uniquely interesting about him exploring a character like this.

What is it that he’s so good at as an author? Well, for the 1860s, his realism is one big thing that sets him apart. As we know, he’s always trying to genuinely explore the complexity and the messiness of the internal human experience.

But how could that ever work if you have someone like Christ as a character? That might be one of the most idealistic characters you could possibly try to create!

What would happen if you dropped someone like Jesus into the middle of actual, messy, human relationships, psychology, and society?

Well, Dostoevsky thinks most people in the kind of modern society we live in, from the outside at least, would probably look at a Christ-like person, and think they’re just an idiot.

And not only is this a funny idea, but if you think about it, this is actually an incredibly honest thing for Dostoevsky to do as a thinker as well.

Remember towards the end of last episode how we were talking about commentary on his work over the years, and how people typically break the characters in his books down into two different categories: they’re either the madman or the saint.

The madman being people like Raskolnikov, the Underground Man, Stavrogin.

The saint being people like Liza, Sonya, and now Prince Myshkin.

No doubt you can hear this and you might assume that Dostoevsky thinks we should all be saints. He’s probably even got an online course he’s selling. Five ways to be more saintly in your morning routine.

But no, Dostoevsky’s not simply saying that the madman is evil, and the saintly way is always the right way to live.

He thinks there are downsides to being a saint sometimes. Where even if you could be some sort of morally ideal figure that’s levitating above everyone else, there’d still be a “curse of sainthood,” as it’s called, that is crucial for a thinking person to understand.

And this was a big part of what Dostoevsky wanted to get across in this book.

To put this another way, and to connect the episodes of this series together a bit: if Crime and Punishment was Dostoevsky testing the ideals of Raskolnikov and showing where they come up short, and if Demons was him testing the ideals of western liberalism and the idea of building our lives around these -isms; then in this book, The Idiot, the ideal he’s testing and finding the limitations of here is his own ideal. The ideal of sainthood.

This is why many people see this as one of Dostoevsky’s most honest books as well.

And for whatever it’s worth, have you ever had a similar thought along these lines he’s getting into? You ever thought about an example of some moral sage, like a monk or Jesus or something, and have you ever wondered how they would act if you planted them in a scenario that’s not designed to show how moral they are, but in an actual scenario that’s supposed to be annoying to them?

What does the Christ-like figure do when someone is harassing them at the mall and won’t leave them alone?

Trying to manipulate them, take advantage of them, and they refuse to stop? Picture someone harassing a monk, and then picture the person doing the harassing as someone who sees the monk can be abused and won’t defend themselves, so this person keeps going.

What would a moral sage do in this situation?

The point is not that you couldn’t come up with an answer as to what Jesus would do in this spot. The point for Dostoevsky is: how helpful is that kind of Jesus response if you actually acted that way in the real world?

Because as we’ll see, Prince Myshkin in the book, as the resident Christ-like figure, doesn't end up making the world around him a better place at all.

In fact, what Dostoevsky wants to get across is that sometimes the kind of religious self-sacrifice, the humiliation that someone like Christ endures for the sake of helping other people doesn’t really help much. Sometimes in the real world, when you’re dealing with insecure people, or severely damaged people, or sick people even; Christ-like behavior colliding with the true complexity of human life can actually end up just making people’s lives even worse than they were before they met you.

So let’s talk about some examples of this curse of saintliness that go down in the book. And let’s at the same time talk about beauty; the other main subject he wants to explore here at a deep level.

Prince Myshkin’s entire journey that he goes on throughout this book has been described by some people as one giant conversation about beauty that’s going on at multiple different covert levels.

It’s been said that every main character in this book has a different way that they think about beauty, that then determines a lot about how they’re different as people.

The story begins with Prince Myshkin on a train. Again, he’s returning from the last couple years he’s just spent in a hospital where he’s been getting treatment for epilepsy. This is a parallel to Dostoevsky himself, by the way, who also suffered from epilepsy.

As Myshkin is sitting on this train he runs into a guy that’s going to be one of the central characters for the rest of the book. His name is Rogozhin.

If Prince Myshkin is the resident Christ-like figure in this book, then Rogozhin is going to be the resident shallow, selfish, kind of cringe character of this book. Because from the moment Prince Myshkin meets him he is the definition of someone that is only really thinking about himself.

He speaks very loudly on the train. He’ll have emotional ups and downs. He’s a very intense kind of person. He’s strong-willed. He’s the kind of person where if he wants something, he doesn’t have too many moral hangups that are going to stop him from trying to get what he wants.

And if you wanted some evidence for this, he tells Myshkin not long after meeting him that he’s on the train that day because he just inherited a ton of money from his father, and now he’s traveling to use the money to impress a woman he’s met through social circles that’s named Nastasya.

Nastasya is going to be another one of the main characters for the rest of the book.

Rogozhin shows Myshkin a picture of Nastasya. He talks for a while about how beautiful she is to him. He says that he wants to marry her. And strong-willed as he is there’s nothing that he wants more in this entire world than for this woman in the picture to be his.

But Nastasya in the book is much more than just this picture. And she’s more than an idea in Rogozhin’s head as to how he wants to possess her and claim her as his own.

Through conversations about her we find out that Nastasya lost her parents at a very early age. She was taken in by a man named Totsky, who from the day he took her in has been grooming her to become his mistress, which she now is.

The even more messed up part about it is that even though she’s the one that’s being taken advantage of and really has no choice but to go along with it, the society around her judges her as the one that’s been tainted by this whole situation.

Still, even in spite of this unfair judgment from people, Nastasya turns out to be a force of nature. To almost everyone she meets, she comes off as so smart and charismatic that she still has guys that are lining down the block trying to be with her.

In other words, this Rogozhin guy on the train has some competition, and he knows this.

For example, there’s this other guy named Ganya that also wants to marry Nastasya. But he wants to marry her because her father has a ton of social connections that Ganya thinks would be really good for his position in the world.

For Ganya, the way he sees love, a marriage is more about social mobility than it is about romance or a commitment to someone else.

And for him to have someone at social events that is so beautiful and good at speaking, to have someone who’s so well connected, someone that checks all the boxes on my checklist of things that I want a woman to be; this makes Nastasya seem like a perfect candidate for what he wants from a relationship.

If these two weren’t enough to deal with for Nastasya, Prince Myshkin decides to throw his hat into the ring when he starts to feel love for her as well.

Because when he sees the picture and hears about her past, he can’t help but start to see an incredible amount of beauty in this person that goes far beyond anything these other two guys are looking at her as.

So just to recap here: if a love triangle can be something that’s hard for people to deal with, then what we have here, folks, is a love quadrilateral, with a Jesus-like figure named Myshkin being one of the points of this love quadrilateral.

And in true Dostoevsky fashion, as chaotic as this can all seem, for him this is going to be a perfect setting to explore things like beauty and love at a deeper level than he ever has in any other book.

For clarity’s sake, the following arguments go beyond simply how we view people as beautiful. It applies to everything in the world. It’s just in a novel like this, a love interest like Nastasya is the metaphor he uses to get this all across.

See, to Dostoevsky, when someone says that something is beautiful to them, and then someone else looks at the same thing and says they think it is beautiful as well, it can be tempting to think that both people are talking about the exact same feeling they’re having. That what they’re feeling is equally as deep.

But words can be very misleading when we’re trying to sync up our experiences of the world.

What one person calls beautiful or love, no matter how passionate their behavior may look, could actually be based on things that are surprisingly shallow.

Take Rogozhin as an example of this. Rogozhin is an intense dude, for sure. But everything that he thinks is beautiful about Nastasya is based on having no understanding about who she is more fully as a person.

Think of what he knows about her: she’s essentially a well-formed molecule to him. And now he wants to own her. He couldn’t care less about her inner complexity or what she loves and cares about. Those things never cross his mind.

To Dostoevksy, Rogozhin has a superficial understanding of her, which then leads to a superficial way of describing his feelings as “love.”

It really is a superficial connection to reality overall. She is a thing to him. A shiny thing that he wants to possess.

So what naturally happens when this level of connection is what grounds your relationships?

Well, jealousy, possessiveness, angry passionate outbursts of entitlement for how this person is owed to you in some way. That’s the kind of stuff that happens.

And usually this kind of person makes excuses for these sorts of outbursts.

“It’s just how passionate I am about you, the reason I do this is because I love you so much!”

Well, this is the kind of behavior that we see out of Rogozhin for the entire book.

Take Ganya as another example of a perspective on beauty and love. Ganya thinks Nastasya is beautiful, but only as much as it helps him check the boxes on this list of things he wants from his wife socially.

I mean, sure she’s beautiful now and is great at parties, but what happens if she’s not? What happens if she can’t be on all the time. What if she goes through a period of her life where she’s feeling sad and not very social? What happens if her father gets caught for sexually abusing his daughter, becomes disgraced, and now being connected to this family becomes a liability for Ganya?

What happens with love like this when it’s so conditional? Is this even love? Ganya would certainly say it is.

We can throw these words like love around so casually in everyday conversation. But to Dostoevsky, to truly respect something like love or beauty is to critically examine it and get to a better understanding of what specific people mean when they say it.

Clearly for Rogozhin, when he says he loves Nastasya, all that it means is that he wants to possess her. Clearly for Ganya, when he says Nastasya’s beautiful, all that it means is that he sees her as one piece of a project that fuels his own ego.

But when Prince Myshkin says that he finds Nastasya beautiful, this is something that’s coming from a totally different place. He didn’t fall in love with her picture on the train. He didn’t fall in love with how good she is at social events.

The place he’s coming from is more of a tragic perspective, where he acknowledges the good and the bad about her, and tries to understand her more fully as a person, on her own terms.

Yes, she’s strong and charismatic on the surface, but he also realizes that she’s emotionally wounded from all the things she’s been through.

Yes, she’s great in conversations a lot of the time and that’s something to admire, but she also does stuff sometimes that hurts the people around her because her inner experience is actually very conflicted.

Now to Myshkin, none of these things are seen as black marks on her record. There aren’t caveats next to the person that he chooses to love. Loving someone, in a more Christ-like way, is to affirm these things about someone and to not just see them in terms of how they benefit you and your own immediate projects.

Prince Myshkin then is able to find her beautiful at this deeper level because he’s done the work to understand who she truly is at a deeper level.

And part of loving her in this way is that he sees the situation that she’s in.

He sees how she has multiple people trying to marry her based on stuff that’s going to end up poorly for her and whoever she decides to marry. So what this leads Myshkin to do in the book is to offer to marry her himself.

From his perspective: here is a beautiful person, who’s in a bad situation with her fake father, who is going to marry someone bad for her, simply because they’re a little less bad than her current situation.

But nobody should have to marry for those kinds of reasons. And Myshkin, who it turns out is getting an inheritance soon himself in the book, offers this money to her as an act of self-sacrifice and self-humiliation.

Meaning he doesn’t want to tie this woman down, have kids with her, and make her his wife in that sense.

No, in a very Christ-like way, he wants to sacrifice his own finances so that this beautiful person doesn’t have to sacrifice her own life.

Some modern readers may hear about this move from Prince Myshkin and be shocked. I’ve heard plenty of people over the years read this book and say that Rogozhin sounds like an incel. And that Prince Myshkin sounds like a total simp. They say this guy isn’t a great human being; this guy is an idiot.

Well, hence the title of the book.

See from the outside: why would anyone ever sacrifice themselves in this way for someone?

It’s not healthy, they would say! It’s not setting good boundaries! He’s just going to lose all his material stuff that he’s worked so hard to collect over the years!

But for Prince Myshkin, that sort of utilitarian calculation when it comes to people just isn’t the way he’s looking at the world.

But there’s a counter argument to what’s been said so far about beauty. Don’t people say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? That it’s entirely subjective?

When someone looks at a painting, or the view from the top of a mountain, or when they look at a good looking person say something is beautiful, all that is, is a subjective, aesthetic preference of the person, nothing more.

How can Dostoevsky talk about beauty as though it’s anything other than an aesthetic preference? Rogozhin may be shallow, but his view of beauty is just as valid as Prince Myshkin’s.

Dostoevsky doesn’t see it this way. To him beauty is not simply an aesthetic judgment that someone is making about the world. It’s partly aesthetic. But whenever someone says that something is beautiful, whether they’re aware of it or not, to him they are also making an implicit moral judgment about the thing, right along with the aesthetic judgment.

This is sometimes called by people who analyze Dostoevsky’s work his moral-aesthetic spectrum of beauty.

Here’s where he’s coming from: whenever we say something’s beautiful, we’re not just saying that we like the photons or the sound waves and how they’re being processed by our eyes and ears right now. We are always noticing something deeper about the thing that connects to some set of higher ideals, that are embedded into a network, that we are a part of.

For example, notice how a newborn baby, if you looked at it purely from an aesthetic perspective, it’s often something that’s very ugly.

Sorry to any newborns that may be reading.

And yet we find a newborn baby beautiful for what they represent to us at a higher level.

Notice how something aesthetically beautiful can be seen as ugly: Triumph of the Will.

It’s a movie from the 1930s, made in Nazi Germany, influenced heavily by Nazi propaganda. Pretty widely considered to be a breakthrough moment for cinema in terms of the stuff it did. But for so many people, they would have a really hard time ever seeing it as beautiful because of what it represents and connects to beyond just the mere aesthetic appearance of the thing.

To Dostoevsky, beauty and morality are inseparable, no matter how many people may throw around the word “beautiful” in a surface-level way.

Think of how this applies to Rogozhin and Ganya and their relationship to Nastasya. Does Rogozhin think that Nastasya is beautiful? Or is he really just talking about something like the form and symmetry of her face? Does Ganya really think she’s beautiful? Or is he more talking about how useful she is to him right now, or that she makes him feel good about himself?

See, once we get beyond a superficial engagement with the world, because the things we think are beautiful are always connected to something we see as ethical, then it stands to reason for Dostoevsky that our ethical progress is best described as a type of beauty that we’re striving for internally.

In other words, beauty and ethics are far more connected than most modern people realize.

And what this means for him is that someone’s ability to spot beauty in the world and their ability to strive for beauty in their own character, are really two skills that are very linked together.

This is why, when Dostoevsky’s creating a character that is morally a bad person in his novels, he will often make them incapable of seeing beauty in the world around them.

See, if Rogozhin and Ganya in the book represent a superficial framing of beauty. An egoist, utilitarian, rational framing of the world that limits our understanding of things to how they can be manipulated to benefit me and my own projects.

Then on the other side of this, being able to see the beauty in the things and people around you, to practice seeing a more full picture of what they are and how they co-constitute the world you’re in, that becomes a gateway into this more immediate connection with being that we’ve been talking about for quite a while on this show.

What I’m saying is: for Dostoevsky, just like Prince Myshkin did with Nastasya, doing the work to uncover the beauty that’s in the world around you becomes another one of these exercises that is built around self-emptying.

Think about this point in the context of everything else he’s been going for in his work.

Remember Crime and Punishment was about the power of confession. How to confess to something is to acknowledge the limitations of your own ego and consent to your place in a higher network. Self-emptying.

Notes from Underground, among other things, talked about love. How Liza’s unconditional embrace of the Underground Man and all his flaws, was a self-emptying that became a direct attack on his whole existence and all the barriers he puts up.

Demons was about the self-emptying process of taking true responsibility for ourselves; of not just outsourcing who we are to a set of -isms that can demonically possess us.

Well here we are reading The Idiot, and Dostoevsky is saying that the ability to uncover the beauty in things requires a similar type of self-emptying.

That to be able to spot beauty is to have the ability to suspend your ego for a while, take a step back, and see the thing you’re looking at on its own home ground.

And again, it’s in this way that someone’s ability to see beauty in the world has a direct relationship to their level of moral development.

Because no person that is obsessed with themselves all day long can ever step outside of themselves long enough to see the beauty in the world around them.

They’ll often just think the world is boring, or horrific.

More than that, is it possible to be a passive nihilist, thinking everything around you is completely meaningless, but still be someone who sees immense beauty in everything?

Dostoevsky would say no.

Beauty for him is something that is always connected to truth and goodness. He says that beauty, truth, and goodness co-inhere each other.

That these three things, while they may seem like they’re very different things, are all actually pointing you towards the same thing. That same thing, in this case, being God.

Now, on the surface that may sound like the biggest load of BS you’ve ever heard in your life.

From an atheist perspective, that could sound like the pastor down at your local church, who has no idea what he’s talking about, just taking three words that sound really wonderful that everybody approves of, and then trying to get a monopoly over them by saying they’re all really just God.

But Dostoevsky’s not the first guy to be saying this kind of stuff. He’s continuing a very long tradition in Christian theology and philosophy, specifically in the Russian Orthodox variety that he’s a part of. And it’s a tradition that, for many reasons, will group these three things into a trio: beauty, truth, and goodness.

Which brings us to the quote that’s often associated with this book: that “beauty will save the world.”

If beauty, truth, and goodness are all things that co-inhere each other, then you might ask,

“Can’t we just interchange the words there in that quote of his? If beauty will save the world, then couldn’t we also just say that truth will save the world? Or goodness will save the world? Why does Dostoevsky think beauty holds a special place here?”

Well, think about what truth and goodness do that beauty doesn’t.

You try to show somebody the truth, and if the truth is inconvenient to them or uncomfortable, they’re likely to just deny the truth. The truth becomes antagonistic.

Similarly, when it comes to goodness: to show someone goodness, and make them aware that some way they’re behaving is not good, that becomes antagonistic as well, like you’re just going around moralizing at people.

But talking about beauty doesn’t come off as moralizing. Nobody feels attacked when they’re told they can see more beauty in the world. Beauty is something that just hits you, viscerally. It has the power to make you feel love or awe; it has the power to captivate someone at that immediate experiential level, even when they’re about to be put to death.

Meaning beauty is not something that’s theoretical. Beauty is phenomenological. Beauty has the power to change someone without argument. It has the power to direct someone towards a fuller understanding of how the world is connected.

And it’s in the context of this unique accessibility and redemptive power that beauty has that Dostoevsky believes that beauty can save the world.

Especially considering, for him, the specific kind of world we’re in. A very superficial world that he thinks needs saving. And this is why Prince Myshkin in the book is meant to embody the positively beautiful man.

It’s the reason why his actions, as in touch with true beauty and love as they may be, just make him look like an idiot to the people in the world he’s living in.

But to be called an idiot by a society that’s fundamentally sick may in fact be the greatest compliment that anyone could ever get.

Consider a couple other difficult moments from the book where Prince Myshkin feels the curse of sainthood as he navigates the real world.

He offers to marry Nastasya and tells her the loving, kind intentions behind why he wants to do it. And you may expect someone to jump for joy that someone would want to do something so nice for them.

But when Nastasya, a person with a history that makes her question her own worth, hears about what he wants to do, she doesn’t feel worthy of love like this.

Truth be told, she kind of thinks this guy’s an idiot if he really wants to give her his inheritance. The whole thing is confusing to her. Nobody has ever treated her this way.

So far from this being something that makes her feel happy and calm, this marriage proposal sends her into a tailspin.

She accepts the proposal, then she goes back on it and decides she wants to be with Rogozhin instead, then she thinks about it and goes back to Myshkin, then goes back to Rogozhin.

In other words, Myshkin’s Christ-like maneuver here doesn’t end up making the world a better place at all. It just ends up creating more problems. And it gets even worse.

Because Rogozhin, being in the presence of a Christ-like figure, and being such a morally shallow person himself, these things combine together in his own psychology, and it breeds resentment towards Myshkin as a person.

Turns out Jesus’s presence in the real world wouldn’t be all performing miracles and making people start singing the gospel.

Rogozhin’s not grateful at all to be around a walking, talking Jesus figure. He hates this goody two-shoes guy that in his mind is trying to steal his possession in Nastasya.

Being around moral strength to a deeply insecure person just ends up making him angry. And when you combine that with his strong will and lack of moral hangups, Rogozhin tries to kill Prince Myshkin.

Now in the story, Myshkin has an epileptic seizure right before Rogozhin can do it. Rogozhin gets scared at that point and runs away.

And on the other side of waking up, Prince Myshkin, being a saintly kind of person, treats Rogozhin with forgiveness and love. You can almost imagine Jesus saying it,

“There’s no need to report you to the police. I forgive you for what you have done here, my child.”

Fast forward to later in the book. Rogozhin, who may have been picked up by the police if Myshkin wasn’t so forgiving, crosses the point of no return. Nastasya for the 12th time goes back and forth between him and Myshkin. Rogozhin’s possessiveness and jealousy take over, and he can’t stand to lose his shiny object yet again. So he kills Nastasya. To him, the ultimate expression of possessing her.

Dostoevsky ultimately thought that he failed at presenting the positively beautiful man in this book.

And if you read his accounts of what it was like to write this book, he was under a ton of financial pressure at the time. Most of it, he was traveling around Europe trying to pick up the pieces for his family after his brother died.

He actually had two epileptic seizures in the process of writing the last couple chapters of the book with Rogozhin and Nastasya.

I guess one way of measuring the intensity of a book is how many epileptic seizures you have while writing it.

That said, one thing I think most people agree he succeeded at is in showing how the ideal of sainthood, when we try to live in a way that experiences things on their own home ground, these ideals come up short when we’re in the real world sometimes. And if we don’t have a vigilant, tragic perspective towards the things in the world that matter to us, then even something done out of genuine love or generosity can be something that destroys us or other people.

Next post we’re going to cover the book that’s been most requested of me over the years out of any of them. It’s a book that’s considered to be the culmination of Dostoevsky’s work. It’s also the last book he wrote before he died. It’s called The Brothers Karamazov. Talk to you soon.

Recommended Reading

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Classics, 2003.

Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Princeton University Press, 2009.

Williams, Rowan. Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction. Baylor University Press, 2008.

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Hello, everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So today we’re talking about the book Demons, another one of the five great novels of Dostoevsky.

And as usual, apologize for the slight redundancy at the beginning of these posts, but this will be covering the philosophical themes of the book. This isn’t intended to be a replacement for reading the book.

I just feel the need to clear that up every time I write a post like this.

Another important thing to mention is that this is now the third book from Dostoevsky that we’ve covered. So, Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment will be referenced throughout this entire post. Just a heads-up.

With that said, how do you begin to describe a book like Demons, one of the most complex books that Dostoevsky ever wrote in his lifetime? I mean, there’s a lot to this book; it’s about 750 pages long and full of symbolism.

And, for what it’s worth, it’s also the book Nietzsche stumbled upon in a bookstore that made him a fan of Dostoevsky as a thinker.

It might be best to start this way: if you read my last post on Crime and Punishment, you’ll know that while it may look like one kind of book on the surface, it’s actually something deeper than that for Dostoevsky.

Crime and Punishment kind of masquerades as a book about a guy that murders a couple of people, but the true drama of the book is in his internal experience and his slow, painful coming to terms with his relationship to something greater than himself. And further, it’s about him finding a way to consent to that fact.

Well, if that’s what Crime and Punishment is, then Demons is a book that masquerades as a political novel. It’s a book that seems to be about a group of revolutionaries, a bunch of people upset about the state of Russian society. It shows them planning and executing acts of political violence to ultimately bring about revolution.

That may be what the book looks like.

But actually, to Dostoevsky, it’s more about (and he made a big point about this in a personal letter he wrote later to a friend) exploring the thing he maybe wrestled with most in his entire lifetime: the belief, or non-belief, in the existence of God.

The way this connects to the political philosophy in Demons will make a lot more sense by the end of this post.

See, if part of the beauty of Crime and Punishment was that it went deep into the emotional experience of someone like Raskolnikov, and if the book never idealized him as a good or bad person. If it instead revealed how many moving parts there are to his thinking, and if it did this on an individual scale (as well as Notes from the Underground), then Demons is where Dostoevsky tries to show an example of this on a larger scale.

He shows the chaos that often comes along with collective psychology.

That ideas, when they find expression in the world on this scale, are particularly dangerous.

To understand what I mean by this, all you have to do is consider the entire first part of Demons.

The book is separated into three large parts. Part One has become something of a legend in literature because it confuses basically everyone who jumps into it and just tries to start reading.

Because if you just opened the book and started reading, you’d see it introduces the reader to about ten different characters, and all of them are pretty complex in their own unique ways.

Most of the first part of the book is made up of arguments between people on a giant estate that’s owned by a woman named Varvara.

Varvara is the employer of a very smart, highly respected intellectual by the name of Stepan. She pays this guy to be a tutor and to come over to her house to teach her son from time to time.

Stepan has a son named Pyotr, who’s going to be the leader of this little revolutionary cell we’ve already mentioned. Pyotr wants to use Varvara’s son, whose name is Stavrogin, as the face of this revolutionary movement he wants to kick off.

Stavrogin is apparently very handsome and articulate. If you needed a messiah-like figure that people can rally behind then this Stavrogin guy is exactly the sort of person you would want to pick.

Now, while these four characters are all going back and forth about their own complex business; Varvara tries to get Stepan to marry someone who’ll help her out politically, suddenly, and very randomly, a disabled woman named Marya appears in the room.

And just by listening to her speak, we can tell that she clearly has some kind of connection to Stavrogin (Varvara’s son). But everybody denies that anything is going on between them, so the reader is mostly just left to wonder about it.

Then a drunken captain enters the room, staggering around.

It turns out he’s Marya’s brother, and he starts yammering on about all his own stuff.

Then we swap over to another conversation entirely, where a few other characters we just met are all in their own conflicts with each of these original characters we just mentioned.

And Dostoevsky, at no point throughout this entire scene (which goes on for many, many pages), ever lays out any of the details of these characters in a straightforward way.

He never introduces them fully. He never tells you exactly who they are. And this whole conversation references tons of events that have obviously happened before the book even started.

So the characters seem to know each other, but the reader doesn’t.

The reader is just left to infer certain things and try to piece together the best picture they can with the information they have.

Part One ends with Stavrogin getting punched in the face by another character named Shatov, who, in that moment, needed to let him know that while he used to respect him, he doesn’t anymore.

The punch is absolutely necessary.

The whole first part of this book can seem like a totally dramatic, confusing, and chaotic mess to be in the middle of while you’re reading it. But this is actually exactly what Dostoevsky was going for as an author when he was writing it.

But why would any writer want to make a reader feel a little disoriented like this?

Well, it can only be understood if you know the philosophy Dostoevsky was putting on display over the course of these first couple of hundred pages.

Every single one of these characters is a deep reference to a real person in Russian culture at the time.

Sometimes it's a blend of a couple different people, and sometimes it just embodies a common type of person. But this whole opening part of the book has been described as a kind of encyclopedia of the ideas that were in conflict during this period of Russian history.

And by the way: if the whole scene feels a bit chaotic or disorienting to you, well, to Dostoevsky, isn’t that sometimes exactly what it feels like when we try to understand the state of the ideas that make up the world we live in?

Collective psychology is chaotic and disorienting at times.

We’re born into a world where conversations have been going on politically and philosophically long before we were ever here. We just get dropped into the middle of it without having perfect information about all the complex characters and their histories.

And unless you’re willing to become a political moron and sacrifice your self-respect to some ideology, then we’re forced, as honest people, to do the best we can.

We’re forced to feel a bit disoriented and try to piece together the most educated picture of what’s going on.

Every character in Demons represents something or someone in the political or philosophical space that Dostoevsky was living in at the time.

The good news is you don’t need to be a Russian historian to relate to the people he’s talking about here. It turns out that 1870s Russia has some surprising similarities to 2025.

For example, Varvara (the wealthy owner of the estate) represents for Dostoevsky the existing aristocratic order that’s still in power in Russia at the time. But you may have seen somebody in your own time who resembles the kind of role she plays.

Because regardless of the time period, she represents the kind of government or cultural elite that has the power to choose and fund certain intellectuals over others. The fund the kinds of people that they think are going to save the world for them and keep them in power.

And to Dostoevsky, these elites often do this without understanding the full consequences of where the ideas they’re supporting will eventually lead society.

When it comes to Stepan, the highly respected intellectual who’s been tutoring her son (and the one she’s trying to get to marry someone else for the sake of her political benefit), he’s going to represent the kind of intellectual who’s bought and paid for.

And during Dostoevsky’s time, this was unmistakably the Western liberal intelligentsia who were spreading from Europe and dominating Russian thought.

This is the type of intellectual who thinks we should be moving away from people having a religious connection to the world and moving more towards things like rational utilitarianism.

It’s those who believe rational utilitarianism is a better way for people to organize their lives or their relationships. That it’s a better way for us to plan how we coordinate society more generally.

Well, this is a fitting description of the character of Stepan in the book.

And following on from the last couple of posts, Dostoevsky might want to weigh in on the discussion when it comes to collective psychology.

He might point out that when utilitarianism becomes the primary way we frame our reality, and you couple that with a decline in people’s religious connection to the things around them, it certainly leads to great results in some areas.

For example, it can definitely reduce the infant mortality rate, it can make electricity cheaper and more widely available; it’s great at making iPhones for people to read Substack posts on.

In fact, it’s so effective at doing these things, you might think it’s capable of predicting and coordinating every problem a human being could ever possibly run into in their lives.

But Dostoevsky predicts that if you set society up in this way without replacing the connection people have to something bigger than themselves, you might also start to notice people having a hard time not seeing the world through a utilitarian lens.

And from this, you might see several things start to happen.

People in that society would tend to see themselves as separate from everything and everyone else. Their relationships would become instrumental, transactional, and antagonistic. Social norms and traditions would become arbitrary and pointless.

Even things like the truth and social unity would become a thing of the past.

Because this type of Western liberalism, to Dostoevsky, might be an impressive achievement in our ability to rationally critique things: to break them down into parts and understand them.

But it is absolutely horrible at putting these things back together in any sort of enduring way.

It lacks any coherent moral foundation. Moral pluralism becomes not only a reasonable possibility, but the only true reality at the scale of society.

So, you end up with people (as we’ve seen over and over again in Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment) who live to endlessly rationalize their own behavior based on a limited framing of reality, rather than aiming for any sort of feeling of connection to the world around them.

You get people feeling completely alone while simultaneously embedded in a network that they always, already care about and are a part of.

What I mean is, the level of conditioning that goes on from birth to be able to see things in such a third-person way all the time is a very real thing in the modern world.

And Dostoevsky says Western liberals often assume that if anybody feels bad, there must be some sort of inefficiency in the ways our societies are set up.

In other words, if anybody has a problem, it’s just because we’re not rationally coordinating our societies in a perfect enough way. And we can fix it.

They assume that if we come up with a better way to produce the right outcomes, we can solve most people’s problems.

But Dostoevsky would say even if you gave people every material thing they could possibly want, they would still just suffer in other areas.

Maybe they’d suffer from boredom or alienation instead. Maybe material envy would just turn into envy for people’s natural advantages.

The point is, for every ever-more complex solution you come up with for problems, the new problems you create by solving those problems will just become more complex themselves to solve.

Suffering just is a part of the human experience for Dostoevsky, and trying to rationally coordinate it away entirely is always going to be a losing battle.

Now you might be thinking, Okay, but come on… What is this guy saying? That we shouldn’t even try? That we should just consult the Ouija board or the giant wheel of fortune in the town square whenever election season comes around?

Well, no.

It’s not that we shouldn’t be trying to coordinate our societies to aim for outcomes we think are good. That’s fine. The question Dostoevsky’s asking is whether that’s truly where enduring moral or social progress comes from.

Like when you say, "I want the world to become a better place," Where does that progress come from? Does it lie in the policies or rational protocols we come up with?

Or does it lie in the carrying out of those policies by people, the inner virtues of those people, and in the ways they feel connected to those around them?

Which of those is more enduring?

Because what Dostoevsky would undoubtedly say is this: if you had a society that wasn’t especially well ordered from a rational perspective but was filled with people who felt connected to one another, who shared genuine love, and where virtue was something people truly cared about cultivating every day, then despite whatever rational or utilitarian flaws it might have, it would still be a great place to live.

On the other hand, you could have a society where tons of rational progress has been made and is materially abundant, but still have high levels of drug addiction, mental illness, suicide, alienation, and constant distraction.

Because without the connection and the moral foundation, people can have everything but still feel like they have nothing.

And to Dostoevsky, the removal of things like religion (as in, the tools people have historically used to find a connection to this network they’re a part of) comes with obvious costs.

And Western liberalism, despite being a great critical endeavor, doesn’t offer a sufficient replacement for these things.

What we’re left with, on the other side of framing reality only in this way, is no true moral leadership, but just people who are left holding the bag, living in a meaningless universe.

This is why Dostoevsky writes a character like Stepan into the book: to represent the kinds of ideas that were highly respected by people at the time.

This is also why his relationship with Varvara and with the aristocratic order is so important in the story. It’s Dostoevsky pointing out what he sees as an obvious hypocrisy.

He’s showing that Western liberal ideas like rational utilitarianism require the social stability that the former aristocratic ways of thinking once guaranteed just to get off the ground.

But the entire sales pitch of Western liberalism is that it’s somehow transcending those older, outdated forms of thinking by getting rid of the religious "nonsense" we used to need to control people.

So, which is it?

Are we moving past them? Or are we still benefiting from what they provided for people?

Are we still living off the residual moral leadership that’s embedded in norms that are barely clinging on?

Because Dostoevsky thinks that any society that makes utilitarianism its primary framing above all else will be a society in a state of moral decline.

Not only will the society slowly consume itself, since the entire operation is built around pluralistic argument and individuals rationalizing their own worldview, but he would also predict that societies organized in this way will find ways to rationally justify violence and the horrible treatment of people.

And all of this will be in the name of some utilitarian outcome that they have supposedly collectively agreed upon.

Just like Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, but now on the scale of society, they’ll say this utilitarian outcome they’re shooting for is ultimately for the greater good of everyone.

They’ll say, I mean, it’s unfortunate what we have to do, but this is just what has to be done sometimes.

And Dostoevsky is saying that this is the entire rationalizing game that’s played over and over again when this is your moral foundation.

When this is done by an individual, that person just turns into an egomaniac who is consumed by their own agendas.

But what happens when these ideas find expression at this far more dangerous scale? When they’re being expressed by an entire society that’s centered around utilitarian projects?

(Side note: Dostoevsky is saying all of this years before the Bolsheviks, before Lenin, and even before the assassination of Tsar Alexander. This is a man who sees exactly what’s coming in his society; he’s basically on a Miss Cleo level of clairvoyance.)

He is foreshadowing a day when our understanding of how we connect to the world around us, will be replaced by some cheap connection to a utilitarian goal we are trying to carry out as a whole society.

Now, of course, one way that can look is Leninism or Stalinism, where the people just become rational cogs in a giant, ego-driven project. Their experience gets reduced to something as though they’re simply these rational cogs.

And of course Dostoevsky would have a problem with this happening. Especially when it’s being carried out in a monolithic way at the level of government, with millions of people dead, being rationally and morally justified right up to the bitter end.

But his point was much deeper than saying, The Soviet Union was bad because look at all the people who died.

Dostoevsky’s talking about the rational premises, the climate of ideas, that made it possible for that horror scene to ever become a thing in the first place.

Remember: he’s the harbinger of the story here. He’s old man Withers saying, Don’t go up to that old mansion on the hill.

Because (to return to the symbolism of the characters in the book for a second), if Stepan and Varvara represent Western liberalism and the aristocratic order of things, then consider what Dostoevsky means for each of their children to symbolize.

For example, Stepan has a son named Pyotr who is the leader of this revolutionary cell that’s planning to do something violent to bring about their worldview.

Well, what is Dostoevsky doing there with that character?

He’s turning something that usually happens at the level of ideas into a person.

It’s so much easier to see how certain ideas create a climate for other ideas to spread when we can visualize the whole thing like it’s a relationship between father and son.

This is what Dostoevsky is going for.

Stepan, as a father, creates a climate that a nihilist committed to destruction, like his son Pyotr, can justify himself in.

In other words, he’s saying this is the cycle that liberalism lives and dies in.

In the name of open-mindedness and progress, Western liberalism allows for truly toxic behavior to be justified. This then leads to social decay, which then leads to an inability to even recognize the moral decay as decay. This then makes leaders and intellectuals incapable of solving problems, which then creates a need for some kind (or any kind) of revolutionary response from a group.

This is the cycle.

It’s the open-mindedness of a father that allows dangerous ideas to flourish in the son. It’s the father’s idealism and all his big talk that allow him to ignore how his ideas have failed the very son he is raising.

Because to Dostoevsky, it’s not like Stepan, or Western liberalism, leads with the idea that morality and connection should be slowly disintegrated. It just ends up working out that way after a ton of well-intentioned, rational discussions that end up removing moral leadership.

So Western liberalism isn’t so bad on the surface, but it’s the offspring of Western liberalism that you have to be worried about.

And you’ll see through Pyotr's actions throughout the book (whether it’s manipulating people, selling people on violence, bribery, or even the outright killing of those who are a political threat to him) that it’s bad enough when these ideas are embodied by a single person. But his larger point is that at the scale that we’re talking about, these ideas are not always embodied by a single person.

At least when it's a single ego-obsessed person who’s rationalizing their behavior, they can take a step back and reflect on themselves. They can confess like Raskolnikov did. They can humble themselves and find the limitations of their own ego.

But when this starts happening at the level of ideas, the kind that end in “-ism”, the kind that so many people build their identities around in the modern world, there isn’t any kind of tribunal to hold those ideas accountable at that scale.

This is what makes them so dangerous.

Ideas alone can’t be humbled. They can’t take accountability. How visible they are in the world just often comes down to whether enough people manage to believe in them or how aggressively these ideas are being sold by people like Pyotr.

Couple this with the fact that ideas, when they take on the form of an -ism, almost always evolve into something that moves away from the original intent of the people who pioneered them.

The point is, without some kind of moral foundation to ground these things and hold people accountable at the level of the individual, how can we ever hope to hold the ideas themselves accountable?

And more than that, is this really the scale we want to trust to bring about our social progress?

Dostoevsky thinks if we do, we’ll inevitably create ‘progress’ in the form of people like Pyotr. A character based on an actual murderous revolutionary figure in Russia at the time, Sergey Nechayev, who he was fascinated by.

In fact, if we’re talking about these isms that people build their identities around, this brings us to the title of the book.

Dostoevsky would say that when ideas start operating at this scale and possess people in this way, they begin to be more like demons than ideas.

This is obviously a reference to the title, but it’s also a reference to a story in the Bible told in Matthew, in Mark, and in the Book of Luke (specifically chapter 8, verses 26 to 39). That’s the version Dostoevsky mentions in a letter when he’s writing to someone about it later.

The story is about a man who gets possessed by demons in the Bible. Then Jesus comes along and exorcises the demons from him. Expecto patronum I believe is the spell he used here.

Then at that point, the demons are released from the man, go up into the air, and fly around for a bit.

It turns out there’s a herd of pigs nearby.

The demons go into the pigs, which start squealing and freaking out. Then they run down to the river and proceed to drown themselves.

Now, the demons in this story are the isms that possess people’s thinking in a demonic sort of way. And the pigs are us.

They represent us when we believe in utilitarian constructions and build our relationships and lives around them. That when we try to prove to ourselves how powerful we are living fully through these isms, we often end up destroying ourselves in the process.

We’ll look at this more closely in a second, but there’s another character from the book that can help make this point a little better.

Remember, Pyotr’s character wanted to make Stavrogin (Varvara’s son) into the messiah figure of the revolutionary moment he was the head of.

Well, what could the symbolism be there? What does Stavrogin represent to Dostoevsky that exists in the real world?

If Varvara represents the aristocratic order, then Stavrogin represents the next generation of would-be leaders that are absolutely crippled by the moral and spiritual bankruptcy that his mom (or the existing order) has created for him to live in.

Remember that Stavrogin is described as a very handsome, smart, and articulate man. Multiple characters in the book look up to him as the person who’s next up to lead. And to Dostoevsky, he’s the kind of person that’s capable, in this generation, of bringing about what we would undoubtedly call positive change.

But because he is a product of a world that is so morally directionless, all of the capabilities and talent he’s developed don’t end up doing any good in the world.

It just ends up turning Stavrogin into maybe the most horrible character Dostoevsky ever wrote about, in any novel.

Look, Dostoevksy certainly brings some bad characters to life in his writing, but Stavrogin’s on a totally different level.

He confesses to a crime in the book that was so bad it got censored by Dostoevsky’s publisher. They wouldn’t even let Dostoevsky release the book originally with this confession in it. Even when he tried to edit out and reword the more graphic parts of it, they still wouldn’t let him publish it.

But the gruesome details aren’t really the point of this post (you can look them up or read the book if you want them). The point is that this guy, Stavrogin, is capable of doing so much in this world, but he can’t bring himself to truly care about anything.

He doesn’t become the messiah figure for the revolutionary movement. He takes interest for a bit, but then ultimately sees the whole revolutionary effort as made up by a bunch of morons.

For Dostoevsky, Stavrogin is the human embodiment of the promises of nihilism and the disappointment that soon comes after trying to live them out.

On the one hand, a nihilist seems to have a ton of freedom from the traditions of the past, and this is often marked as the selling point of steering into nihilism in your life or in policies.

If you can get rid of the arbitrary traditions and religion, then you will be unencumbered by these silly things people used to believe in.

Think about how much you can get done.

But one problem Dostoevsky wanted to point out was highlighted in the last post in the experience of Raskolnikov. The problem was that sometimes, even if we think we’ve moved beyond the moral traditions of the past, we haven’t really.

And if you don’t happen to have perfect self-awareness, you might end up being someone like Raskolnikov, who murders two people (or whatever it is) and then finds life unlivable on the other side of doing that thing.

Well, another problem with this kind of nihilism lies in the character of Stavrogin.

Dostoevsky’s asking: even if you could reject that moral order of the past and live in a totally self-aware, controlled place of nihilism, how would this amazingly free life really look in practice?

You may find yourself ending up like Stavrogin.

He’s a person who lives in a constant cycle of belief and non-belief about everything.

He can’t ever commit himself to genuinely care about anything.

He can’t morally ground his behavior in anything enduring, so he’ll do things for a couple of days and then lose interest in whatever it is, then move on to something else and lose interest in that too.

And what this kind of person turns into, when we’re talking at the scale of ideas discussed so far in this post, is an example of what having no moral direction produces in a highly capable person.

Their abilities just end up getting used by other people who can manage to persuade them to come over to their cause for a while. (These days it would probably be done through something like Instagram by a person like Pyotr.)

The point is that a highly capable person is particularly at risk of this happening. They’re very attractive and useful to a person like Pyotr.

And, if this did happen, how would they know it was happening? And how could they morally object to it?

That’s one of the big tragedies of Stavrogin.

Even more than that, when a person really can’t care about most things in this world, it just produces a malaise that they start to live in everyday, where most of the time they feel almost nothing.

Sure, there are moments where it seems like Stavrogin knows he wants to be feeling a connection here or there. But unencumbered by any sense of morality and apparently beyond all that stuff, he ends up doing horrible things in his life just to feel something at all.

Stavrogin’s whole existence becomes one huge misunderstanding.

Because he sees through the futility of all these traditions, it gives him a type of fearlessness in the face of them. This gives him the appearance of being a fearless and powerful person that other people around him mistake as a type of moral strength.

There’s a theologian and an author named Rowan Williams that talks about Stavrogin as a character in his work. He says that Stavrogin becomes a kind of character that is a twisted parody of the concept of apatheia.

You may recognize the term apatheia from conversations surrounding Stoicism.

But if you don’t, the general idea is about understanding what a wise person looks like. They certainly don’t look like someone who’s flying off the rails with a bunch of intense emotions all the time. They’re not someone completely controlled by the different vices they have.

A wise person, if you ever spotted one in the wild, would likely be someone who has rationally learned to control themselves. They would be someone who’s learned not to be too up or down as life comes their way.

Now, if you’re a Stoic, you achieve this through maybe thousands of hours of rational contemplation and practice; it’s a skill that is hard-fought and earned.

But if you’re Stavrogin in the book: then to the people immediately around him, his behavior looks more or less the same as that of someone who is wise.

Little do they know, in actuality, he hasn’t mastered his experience of the world. He’s just dead inside. He’s not up or down, and it’s not because he’s wise; it’s because there’s just nothing that matters enough to him to make him feel up or down.

This is where the issue of belief or non-belief in God starts to come into the picture for Dostoevsky.

If you’re good at recognizing patterns, you may notice something similar between Stavrogin’s downfall and how he views the world, and those of other characters from Dostoevsky’s novels that we’ve looked at before.

Whenever you’re reading a famous book from the 1870s, there have always been a lot of people who’ve commented on Dostoevsky’s work.

And when it comes to trying to organize the characters in his novels, a common thing people notice is that many of the characters he explores are faced with something that forces them to consider their belief or non-belief in the existence of God.

And depending on which character we’re analyzing, they take one of two paths for Dostoevsky, which determines everything else about them.

They either take the path of the madman, or they take the path of the saint.

Characters like Stavrogin, Raskolnikov, and the Underground Man are the people that fall under the madman category.

And as you can probably guess, Dostoevsky ultimately traces the problems going on in these characters’ lives (no matter how political, social, or economic they seem) to their non-belief in God, which grounds every decision they choose to make after that and shapes every way they make sense of the world.

For Dostoevsky, non-belief in God forces you to posture yourself in your life in a way that leads to very predictable outcomes. Each one of them does it in their own unique way, but they’re all still an example of the madman.

The common mistake (if you wanted a general description) is that the madman chooses a divisive way of making sense of the world that fundamentally lives in denial of their connection to the things and people in the network of existence around them.

For Dostoevsky, the mistake comes when we live in denial of the love and connection to everything that represents what he calls God.

Because this forces us to find a way to relate to the world that’s ego-centered, fragmented, and alienated from others, and ultimately to live in a way where we create false idols out of things that destroy us.

We become the pigs from the story.

In the process of creating false idols out of ourselves and of the ideas of others in the form of these isms, we build our identities and relationships out of our connection to these isms.

And when we do that without moral guidance that’s rooted in true love and connection to the roles we play in this network of being, we will always, in the process of trying to bring about these isms and prove our own power, end up destroying ourselves in the process.

Now you can certainly see this mistake in characters like Raskolnikov or Stavrogin. But the ultimate example of what Dostoevsky sees as this sort of flaw (and the example he was probably most proud of creating in his lifetime) is the character of Kirillov in Demons.

Kirillov has what he thinks is a great idea in the book.

His idea is that because God does not exist, his will must be entirely his own. But more than that, because his will is his own, it is also his duty to sacrifice himself in the name of his own values.

Some people will do this with their weekends; they’ll sacrifice time with family over the holidays to build the company they care about, or something like that.

Kirillov, though, thinks the ultimate way to sacrifice yourself is to kill yourself in the name of a cause.

So his life becomes him sitting around, looking out at the world, listening to arguments, and waiting for the right cause to come along so he can finally fulfill his ultimate purpose and kill himself for the sake of that cause.

What an idea for a character.

And this is exactly what happens in the book. He waits around until Pyotr convinces him to do it for his revolutionary cause.

Dostoevsky sees Kirillov as the ultimate example of the flaw in the thinking of the madman. His thinking is that as long as he’s radical enough and as long as he’s got the right revolutionary cause, if he destroys himself in the process, this somehow makes his sacrifice redeeming for all of humanity.

Think of how this becomes particularly dangerous as a message to tell young people in a Western liberal society.

Something else needs to be said here that no doubt a lot of people are thinking at this point. You might be thinking:

Okay, I buy what you’re saying here, Dostoevsky. That these theoretical systems we use to break down the world are never capable of offering an enduring moral foundation. And that when I build my worldview around these isms, I’ll always have shallow friendships, a shallow love life, and a shallow connection with being in the world around me.

But if ultimately what you're scared of is that these isms are going to lead people to a kind of hubris, something that might drive them to commit acts of violence, if what you're scared of is people doing horrible things and then rationalizing it after the fact, then how, in God’s name (no pun intended), do you see something like religion as being excluded from that?

Some of the least moral people I know are religious, or at least say they are. And these religions, these supposed geysers of morality you’re talking about, are the same things that lead to treating gay people horribly based on a sentence in a book. They’re what led to people throwing acid in women’s faces.

Or how about the Crusades?

Am I just supposed to accept this as part of the world? And why? For fear that I might be making a bigger mistake than they are?

Well, this is probably the point in this series of posts to say something important.

Much like Keiji Nishitani, who would say that just because you call yourself religious doesn’t mean you’re on a truly religious quest, it’s possible, and even very common, for people to have a superficial relationship to a religious institution.

Similar to Nishitani, Dostoevsky might say that if you’re a modern Christian and you don’t take your faith very seriously, if you’re rarely uncomfortable in your faith and it seems to come easily to you, that’s something that should make you truly pause.

The faith of Dostoevsky is something we’ll explore far deeper in the next two posts. And for anyone thinking Dostoevsky is a kindred spirit simply because he’s using the word “God”, then you may be surprised by the level that he committed himself to this quest.

Dostoevsky’s faith has often been described as a tragic, existential form of Christianity. It’s very mystic.

Some people think he resembles a type of Buddhism more than he does Christianity.

What I mean is that it’s deeply along the kinds of conversations we’ve been looking at in recent posts; it is a way of viewing faith that never idealizes the institutions or the approach laid out in something like the Bible whatsoever.

Faith for Dostoevsky was a struggle. A constant struggle.

It was a difficult engagement with the sometimes deeply flawed institutions and scripture that we inherit as people. But this was nonetheless a struggle for him that needed to go on if someone ever wanted a deeper communion with God and their own being.

And if there is ever anyone who is born into this world who is actually trying to do that in good faith, religion just will be a part of that process.

Now, with that said, while Dostoevsky is not your average Christian by any stretch of the imagination, it’s also true that to remove Christianity from the way he engaged with existence would be to take away something deeply important to what he saw as truth.

We’ll have plenty of time to talk more about that in the next couple posts.

Recommended Reading

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Classics, 1995.

Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Princeton University Press, 2010.

Morson, Gary Saul. The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia. University of Texas Press, 1981.

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Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Out of a deep respect for all the readers who are fans of great literature I feel the need to repeat that this post is not intended to be a substitute for reading the actual book.

My dad used to tell me I have one skill: getting in the way. That led to an inferiority complex that caused me to spend years of my life reading philosophy. Well now I have two skills, Dad. Who’s laughing now?

The main character we’re talking about today is a fan favorite. For some this is one of the most memorable, relatable characters in maybe all of classic literature— it’s a young man by the name of Rodion Raskolnikov, or just Raskolnikov for short.

On the surface, Crime and Punishment kind of masquerades as being about this guy Raskolnikov.

He takes an axe, murders two innocent people, and then deals with the personal and legal fallout of doing something like that.

That’s what the book masquerades as.

But part of what makes this book such a work of brilliance from Dostoevsky is that the murder is actually a secondary thing to the main point of the book for him.

There’s a sense in which the book could have been about a lot of different things. But a double murder, for Dostoevsky, is going to be an absolutely perfect site to explore the contradictions of Russian nihilism, when taken to their natural ends as consequences in the real world.

It’s been said that the true drama of Crime and Punishment is actually the complexity of the internal experience of Raskolnikov.

That it’s about him coming to terms, slowly and painfully, with the true reasons why he committed the murders in the first place— and that he’s been lying to himself for a very long time.

We’ll get into all of it, but I want to make sure at the beginning of this we avoid one pretty popular mistake to make about this book and Raskolnikov as a character.

People will often say that Raskolnikov is an embodiment of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

They’ll say he builds his worldview around the idea that God is dead. They’ll say he sees himself as an Übermensch, and that Friedrich Nietzsche is someone whose work can be thought of as essentially just a character— that’s one component of a Dostoevsky novel.

But to say this is to misunderstand both Nietzsche and what Dostoevsky was going for in the character of Raskolnikov.

First of all, just to cover the space-time end of this mistake first: Crime and Punishment is written in 1866. The first time Nietzsche mentions "God is dead" is in his book The Gay Science, which was written in 1882.

In other words, Dostoevsky writes this book sixteen years before Nietzsche ever explicitly even wrote those words.

Secondly, there’s no evidence that Dostoevsky ever even knew who Nietzsche was. Nietzsche knew who Dostoevsky was toward the later period of his life, and it should be said he was a fan of what he was doing. But the interpretation of this character as being a literal reference to Nietzsche is not something that really adds up.

So maybe you say, “Well, it’s not that Dostoevsky was referencing Nietzsche directly, but the character of Raskolnikov was referencing ideas that were going on at the time that Nietzsche later crystallized in his philosophy!”

Well, this is an even worse misunderstanding.

Because Raskolnikov was exactly the kind of person that Nietzsche spent most of his career critiquing.

Let’s take a closer look at who he was as a character.

If you read last post on Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the book that immediately precedes Crime and Punishment, then you’ll remember me saying that it’s helpful to think of the Underground Man as sort of the prototype version of the character of Raskolnikov. They have several key similarities that were important to Dostoevsky.

Raskolnikov, like the Underground Man, is very smart. He is in poverty. He often thinks about things in isolation. And he also thinks he sees through many of the systems of ideas that other people seriously believe in.

And similar to the Underground Man, all of these things lead him to feel a similar sense of superiority that he has over his fellow people around him.

He has all of these same qualities— but unlike the Underground Man, Raskolnikov is someone who’s not completely trapped in his house. He’s someone who’s still capable of taking action on things, which means he’s still someone who’s capable of making mistakes.

So here’s his big idea that he gets at the beginning of the book: his situation sucks. He’s poor and has had to temporarily drop out of law school.

More than that, he gets a letter from his mom telling him back at home his sister has decided to get married to a rich guy that’s a horrible person just so she can support him in going to law school.

I mean, what kind of world do we live in, where good people like this are in such dire situations?

Oh, but then there’s this pawnbroker that he knows.

Being someone who’s behind on his rent pretty often, he knows this woman who’ll trade money for stuff, Alyona Ivanova.

And everybody knows this woman as a real mean, greedy, exploitative kind of person. Not only does she give people basically no money for their things when they come to her, but then she charges them massive interest simply because they’re desperate and she can get away with it.

More than that, she just hoards all the money she does get. She doesn’t recirculate it.

She’s the kind of person that will even exploit people who are mentally handicapped. She does this with her half-sister who lives with her, who is clearly not happy living with how she’s treated, but she has to endure it anyway. She is trapped in an abusive situation.

So Raskolnikov has a plan: why not just kill this pawnbroker?

After all, everybody wins here. Her half-sister gets set free. Raskolnikov’s sister won’t have to marry the rich dude.

At the end of the day, the world will have one less greedy, miserable person that is really just, rationally speaking, a net negative on the system if we’re being honest.

People sometimes ask if you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, wouldn’t you want to do it? Here’s Raskolnikov being downright proactive.

It’s clear to Raskolnikov that everybody who’s around this person is made worse just by being around her. And if her money wasn’t being hoarded, then he could give it to somebody that needs it more— not the least of which would be himself.

After all, he knows he’s going to use it to go to school to become a lawyer. And think of all the good that would come if he were able to do that. This is his thinking.

So he does it.

He overhears the half-sister the day before saying that she’s going to be out of the house for a couple hours.

He grabs an axe. Classic weapon of choice. And then he goes over and kills the pawnbroker.

Sadly, in the process of doing it, the half-sister who was supposed to be gone ends up walking into the room. Now she’s got to go too.

After killing both of them he takes her money, runs away, leaves a certain amount of incriminating evidence— and then locks himself in his house and begins the long nightmare of trying to process the consequences of what it is that he’s just done.

For some context here, as we talked about last post, Dostoevsky always has in his sights the rational utopianism of his time, where part of it is believing that through utilitarian, rational calculations, we can arrive at the truth, and we can arrive at a utopian socialist system of organizing people that can be perfected if we just get better at this moral calculus.

That by just weighing the rational pros and cons of an action, we can justify our actions as long as we can prove that the pros outweighed the cons.

This is exactly the kind of calculation that Raskolnikov has made with the pawnbroker’s life. He decided he was qualified to calculate whether or not the world was a better place without her.

There are two big problems with this philosophically for Dostoevsky, both of which blossom out of the Russian nihilism that was gaining popularity when he was writing this book.

One of them is that utilitarianism we just talked about.

Consider how quickly his perfectly calculated plan transformed into something with an innocent person getting an axe to the head.

Funny how difficult it is to do an accurate weighing of the pros and cons of something when you realize you’re trying to make that calculation about a world that you can’t fully predict.

The second big problem is the rational egoism that often accompanies this Russian nihilism, that magically places Raskolnikov at the center of this decision-making process.

The assumption that’s made has two parts:

1. I am someone who can look out at the world and rationally calculate what the objective right thing to do is.

2. The individual is the arbiter of that choice.

To Dostoevsky, the utilitarianism would be bad enough, but it’s the egocentric part of this that makes it particularly bad.

Because an important detail to this is that Raskolnikov believes that he is special in the book.

Actually, to be more accurate, he thinks he might be special. He knows that special people exist sometimes— people like Napoleon, people like Muhammad. He knows there are people every so often throughout history that will come along and go against the traditional moral order of things and create what he calls a “new word.”

What he means by that is they create a new set of moral criteria for themselves to live by.

This is why Raskolnikov wanted to commit the murders. He wanted to find out if he’s capable of being one of these special people.

He thinks that because he sees through these outdated systems where a god tells everyone what to do, he thinks his job now is to create his own morality and essentially become a god himself.

He says repeatedly in the book he wants to run a test to see if this is the kind of person he is.

And this is no doubt where people mistake this as being something that’s connected to Nietzsche and his theoretical concept of the Übermensch.

There’s a common misunderstanding of Nietzsche that’s possible here, where people think he declares that God is dead— and so now what we have to do is recreate morality in our own image.

But Nietzsche’s critique is actually something far more radical than this.

To Nietzsche, if the Übermensch is someone that exists out there, then they’re probably someone who’s transcended the very idea of codified morality altogether. They’re not someone that tries to recreate it or to participate in it as an activity.

To affirm reality at the level that Nietzsche’s talking about in his work is to accept the fact that, first of all, obviously to him, there are not moral categories that are written into the universe like good and evil.

So the real question is: when people sit around and moralize about which things are good or evil in the world, and sit around and use their time to judge people’s behavior, how can we explain the activity they’re involved in there? What is morality really?

For Nietzsche, one way to look at it is that morality is often a complex expression of the wills of a bunch of passive, reactive people.

Meaning, what morality is at bottom is a reactive way of describing the world and what happens in it.

The people that engage in moralizing about things are always fundamentally doing something passive. They are looking out at the world, waiting for things to happen, deciding whether this or that behavior corresponds to some pre-existing set of moral protocols that someone else came up with, and then they categorize that behavior in some way—usually based on the duality of good vs. evil.

But regardless of whatever kind of moral scorekeeping most people do, these things aren’t actually good or evil to Nietzsche. Moral categories like that are just the kind of things we say when a lot of people out there collectively agree. It’s a formation of their wills, collectively.

But someone affirming reality at the level Nietzsche’s talking about with the Übermensch just wouldn’t look at the world in terms of moral protocols.

The only criteria that would matter to them about whether something was worth doing or not is whether it really is something that corresponds to their own will.

A difficult enough task in its own right.

So morality generally isn’t a behavior that the Übermensch would have much time for.

It’s too passive for someone that’s affirming life in this way. It’s too much sitting around judging the things that are happening to you, rather than being the person that’s making things happen.

Nietzsche’s Übermensch, then, is not someone that recreates morality in their own image, like Raskolnikov. The Übermensch, if this is someone who can exist, would have, in a sense, transcended the very concept of morality itself in terms of how they act in the world.

So when Raskolnikov in the book rejects the moral rules of a god he thinks is fake. When he then thinks it’s a good idea to come up with a bunch of rational arguments for moral rules that are supposed to more accurately describe what’s good or bad.

Well, that’s not Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Nietzsche would say he’s just recreating the very reactive processes that he’s a product of.

And, by being a rational utilitarian, he’s not surprisingly pulling from the very ideas that were fed into him by the counterculture of the world he lives in.

Raskolnikov is not an example of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. He’s an example of a very particular kind of nihilism that’s gaining popularity in Russia during this time.

And by the way, this shouldn’t be a disappointment to anyone, because that’s exactly what Dostoevsky was going for anyway.

A very interesting part about all this is that this critique from Nietzsche actually shares a kind of resemblance to the critique that Dostoevsky is going to have of Raskolnikov.

Because Dostoevsky would be very skeptical of anybody out there—Raskolnikov included— that thinks they’re a special individual that’s above everybody else around them.

After Raskolnikov commits the murders, there’s a detective in the book named Porfiry that asks Raskolnikov a difficult series of questions as he’s investigating him.

He asks, “When it comes to these special people that you believe in, how is anyone supposed to know the difference between one of these actual special people and someone who just thinks they’re special? Are you the person that gets to decide whether you are someone who’s special or not? What if you’re wrong? What if you’re not very special—and that’s exactly what makes you think you’re more special than you are?”

(not an actual quote. just speaking as him)

The rational egoism at the heart of his worldview starts to run into its built in contradictions— and it goes much further than this for Dostoevsky.

Because maybe you say back to the detective there, "Well look, I’m special because I’m different. If you look at my worldview, I am truly an original kind of person. I don’t follow the typical norms and customs people do!"

But Dostoevsky might ask this person what they mean when they say they are “different.”

Different from what? Oh, do you mean different from the culture that you’re supposedly not a part of, but yet it still defines what your position is here anyway?

What Dostoevsky would say is that Raskolnikov is not actually recreating a new morality from the ground up as the sort of man-god that he thinks he is.

He’s, in reality, still very much shaped by the relational network of ideas, people, and things that he’s a part of— and that that’s true of his thinking, no matter how many rational theories he can come up with for why a different morality is really the one that applies to him.

To Dostoevsky, we are creatures that are co-constituted by the world we’re in.

Where else could Raskolnikov have gotten these ideas from? What else could he be, other than this relational network that he’s a part of?

It’s easy to sit in isolation and create a list of utilitarian rules about what your values are.

But the fact that it can feel to you like you are the one that solely, individually came up with those ideas, the fact it can feel like these are your special ideas that you’ve reasoned to can be an illusion that smacks you in the face the second these theories are tested in the real world.

And the first evidence you can see of Raskolnikov coming to terms with this for himself is when he commits these two murders and then his life turns into an absolute living hell.

Yeah, turns out: it didn’t matter how many utilitarian arguments he had about why killing these people was the right thing to do. On the other side of actually doing it, he clearly does not feel like this was morally justifiable.

He’s not the person he thought he was. He is sick every day with guilt, he can’t sleep, and when he does sleep he has nightmares. He’s fainting in public. He’s living his entire life on the run. Not only from all the people who suspect him of doing this thing, but then further on the run from the family and friends that clearly know that something is very off with him.

If it’s not obvious, this is not the picture of a person who’s a man-god, who’s created their own set of moral values.

No, this is a picture of someone who has come up with a rationalization for their behavior, but truly, at their core, is a member of a network, a culture, and a set of ethical truths— where they now realize they just made a decision that completely violated what they actually believe.

It’s easy to get caught up on the murder because it’s so juicy. But Dostoevsky intended this as a critique of modernity that was much more broad. The murder is just a very pronounced version of a kind of experience we all have in a less pronounced way when we rationalize our behavior.

It is uniquely possible in the modern world to exist in a way where your whole life becomes about endlessly rationalizing your mistakes and coming up with a story that sounds good about them.

Raskolnikov told himself that he committed this crime to make the world a better place. And he had all the rational arguments to prove to you that he did.

But what he comes to find out over the course of the book is that he didn’t actually kill those people for utilitarian reasons. He did it as a type of ego-driven fantasy, where he wanted to run a test to see if he was special.

And he found out—with some of the highest stakes imaginable—that he’s not, in fact, as different as he once thought. That he’s still very much a part of the moral order he was supposedly rebelling against.

His attempt to recreate what god-centered approaches have done for people throughout the course of history was nothing more than a rationalization for his own ego.

And if, for the sake of conversation, we can accept Dostoevsky’s point here, then a very interesting question stems out of this about what it means to be an authentic person who’s living in a culture.

Does following the norms, customs, or religion of a culture have to be something that is life-denying?

If being an individual means you have to be different from everyone else, then a common criticism of religion by some people is that it flattens the world into a place where people can’t become individuals.

That it’s a renunciative tradition. People are forced to see feelings inside of them as evil. They have to hate things about themselves.

Is following a religion something that makes it impossible to be truly different?

But Dostoevsky might ask, couldn’t it also be the case that to truly be an individual is not to be different? And that it’s always—whether we realize it or not— to be an instantiation of a culture, and then to find a way to make that culture your own?

What he’s saying through Raskolnikov’s character is that there’s a way to affirm life by first being truly aware of your actual position in this relational network of being— and then after that, to fully consent to your participation in that set of roles.

That is the true mistake that Raskolnikov makes in the book. It’s not a moral mistake. It’s not a legal mistake. To Dostoevsky, it was a religious type of mistake. It’s an alienation from his role in this network of being he’s a part of.

Given the work he did in Notes From Underground just before this it seems like a large part of what he intended to convey here is that Raskolnikov, at bottom, has a really deep lack of self-awareness. Probably from not engaging with nihilism at a serious enough level.

And there’s a clear example of this in the book.

There’s another character that Raskolnikov eventually falls in love with and realizes he wants to be more like— it’s a woman named Sonya. Sonya, in part, represents an alternative way that someone might react to a bad situation.

Because both of them are in bad spots in their own way. Remember, Raskolnikov—he’s broke, dropped out of school, sister is marrying the rich dude who’s a horrible person—and his response is to rationally justify killing someone and then to take all their money.

But Sonya, she’s in a bad spot too. Her dad is an alcoholic. He spends what little money the family has on vodka each day. She has multiple siblings struggling as well, and she’s a Christian woman who starts prostituting herself just to be able to care for the rest of her family.

By the way, not only does her dad spend all his money on vodka, but then he steals the money that his daughter just got from prostituting herself and goes and spends that money on more vodka.

Which, by the way, here in America is a classic sign that you probably have a little bit of a problem.

But it turns out it’s too late for him anyway. Sonya’s situation gets even worse when they find her father dead after he gets run over in the middle of the street by a wagon.

And Raskolnikov, seeing her situation, at one point in the book asks, why don’t you just end all of this? Why not just jump into a frozen river or something and end this horrible life you have going on?

And her response back to him is: but what would happen to my siblings if I did that?

At which point Raskolnikov stops, thinks about what she just said to him, and realizes just how special of a person she really is.

This is when he realizes he has so much that he wants to learn from her. He realizes that this is what true strength actually looks like.

If you’re at all offput by Dostoevsky’s choice to make a main character into a prostitute for two books in a row now; just know that he does this for very good reason.

Dostoevsky’s the kind of author who’s not interested in idealistic storylines.

He doesn’t want to use one-dimensional characters that’ll fit neatly into a Disney movie. He’s interested in a kind of realism—in the actual messiness and sometimes chaos that makes up the reality of our world.

And the poverty that Sonya’s in, combined with her choice to become a prostitute—this obviously shows us a couple things.

It shows how the choices we have to make in this world are not always optimal, and they’re often dictated by circumstances that are outside of our control. But what it also shows is that when Sonya consents to become a prostitute, being a devout Christian who is acting out of a place of love and care for her family—while this is a horrible situation, and the extremity of the situation is designed this way— this is still a choice that in some small way, to Dostoevsky, becomes hers.

What he seems to be saying is that no matter what it is, in this sometimes horrible world, there is always at least some personal salvation that is possible in consent and affirmation of our place in a network.

To act out of a genuine love we have for others is a type of self-sacrifice that is not renunciative or life-denying, but one that consents to how we’re needed by the things that are already meaningful to us.

Now think of how this way of living contrasts with Raskolnikov and the situation that he found himself in.

He was faced with a bad situation, became in denial of his true place in the network, and then told himself all sorts of stories that sounded good— that he didn’t really believe in deep down.

I think Dostoevsky would ask: who’s truly the one you think is in a place of life denial here? Is it the religious person that affirms? Or is it the utilitarian that denies?

No doubt what Dostoevsky is getting at here is that to be a religious person does not guarantee that you’re going to be renouncing things about yourself.

A lot of people may use it that way in practice. But in terms of the standards we can set for ourselves, it’s possible to affirm life as an individual within a religion by making it your own.

In fact, I think he’d say that’s always what you’re doing anyway when you’re in a culture, despite whatever rational illusions you may construct that make you think you’re outside that culture or totally independent—like Raskolnikov or the Underground Man.

So Raskolnikov finds himself in a place where he is completely consumed by guilt. The detective in the story continues to have conversations with him increasingly suspicious about his involvement in the murders.

And as he’s living every day in this terrible prison he’s created for himself in his mind, he starts to think that maybe the only way out of this prison in his head is to go to a prison in the real world.

In fact, both the detective and Sonya suggest to him that even if with the evidence they have against you they’ll never be able to convict you, maybe for your own sanity it’s best to just confess to the crime you’ve committed.

This is yet another key piece of Dostoevsky’s philosophical message disguised as part of a murder.

His point is that a genuine confession from Raskolnikov would accomplish two big things for him.

The first thing is that admitting he’s done something wrong allows him to find a limitation of his own ego. This is a key sentiment behind kenosis in Dostoevsky’s Russian Orthodox legacy.

Taking accountability for something you’re wrong about is one of the only ways it’s possible to grow as a person. It’s one of the most powerful things you can do in your life. To not just be endlessly rationalizing your own behavior is a huge advantage to have in life.

The second thing a confession accomplishes is the possibility of atonement.

Dostoevsky’s point is that if Raskolnikov is living in a place where he’s consumed by guilt and fear for how he’s violated this order he’s a part of, then the only way out of that is to believe in the legitimacy of some sort of an authority that can punish you and rid you of this guilt.

Imagine making a giant mistake that you feel horrible about.

If you don’t believe in an authority’s ability to absolve you of the thing you’ve done wrong, then there’s no possibility of you feeling better. You’re always trapped in a place where you can’t ever repent for it and make amends for anything.

Imagine trying to ask your accountant to give you forgiveness for that time you punched your grandpa at Christmas last year. It wouldn’t work. It doesn’t make any sense.

Even if you say you’re going to pick up trash, apologize, do a million good deeds that allow you to give yourself salvation without some external body; you are still appealing to some framework of legitimacy that allows you to say: this makes it right again.

In other words, whatever it is that’s absolving you of your guilt has to come from somewhere else in this larger network that you’re a part of. And he’d say good luck trying to figure out the location of that coming solely from a place of rational utilitarianism.

There must be something else— something bigger than yourself that you’re always referencing.

And the subtext here is that it’s not enough for a detective to build a case against Raskolnikov, arrest him, send him to jail for twenty years, and then Raskolnikov gets released and walks around the rest of his life guilt-free.

No, the detective says that the law alone cannot provide Raskolnikov with what he needs here to feel better about what he’s done. To his point, there are people that sit in jail for their entire lives and still manage to avoid the law.

Because the law is something more than just being punished, to Dostoevsky. Unless Raskolnikov is willing to submit to the legitimacy of the law as something that can truly punish him for what he’s done, then any time he stops for even a second and looks at himself in the mirror, or pays attention to his own thoughts for a while, he will be hit with this same guilt and fear that he has not yet atoned for.

He may spend decades of his life distracting himself from what he’s done, running away from it in his thoughts, rationalizing it with a few pre-canned stories he likes to tell himself about why it was okay.

But as Raskolnikov tried to do this in the book it didn’t work; there was a certain point that the detective didn’t even have to arrest him.

He just talks to him and shows him exactly who he is by asking him questions that get him out of this world of theory and into the particulars of what he has done.

Eventually, Raskolnikov realizes that he has two choices. He can either spend the rest of his life running from this guilt and fear, living like a distracted prisoner up in his own mind.

Or he can face it directly, confess to what he’s done, and—much like Sonya—achieve at least some form of personal salvation by consenting to the authority of the network that he’s a part of.

To Dostoevsky, this is going to be consenting to the authority of God.

Ultimately, Raskolnikov decides to confess to the crime. He’s sentenced to eight years in a Siberian prison, which probably is more like eight hundred years in a normal prison. But before he goes, he professes his love to Sonya, who vows to stick by him and to be there once he gets out of prison.

Anyway, it’s alluded to in the epilogue of the book that even though Raskolnikov confessed to his crime, and even though he’s laid the groundwork for at least some kind of atonement for what he’s done, he definitely has a whole lot more work to do if he ever wants to live a life that’s deeply in connection with being.

And it’s clear that Dostoevsky felt satisfied that he’d expanded on some of the themes from Notes from Underground in this book. We now see the contradictions of Russian nihilism carried out in practice, not just up in the head of a dude isolated in an apartment.

In the next post we’re going to take these ideas, expand them, and talk about it at an entirely different level of scale. A more extreme scale. With darker consequences. The third book we’re covering of the five great novels of Dostoevsky is titled Demons.

Recommended Reading

Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Princeton University Press, 2010.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Birmingham, Kevin. The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky, a Crime and Its Punishment. Penguin Press, 2021.

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Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

If you want examples of characters that take nihilism as seriously as we’ve been taking it in these posts lately then the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky is going to be of interest to you.

The following is not intended to be a replacement for reading his books. And especially as we start covering the longer of his five great novels, these posts will become increasingly incapable of giving any decent representation of the plot points of his books.

What this is intended to be is a guide to some of the philosophical themes that Dostoevsky wanted to communicate that often get missed in the brilliance of his stories.

Today we’re talking about the first major work of what people sometimes call the “mature” period of his writing— a book called Notes From Underground.

If you’ve never read Dostoevsky before, then the biggest piece of context I can give you starting out is that one of the main things he wants to put 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 and governments during the time that he was alive.

If you wanted an example of this then there’s one in the political realm you might be familiar with.

There’s a belief among certain thinkers from around this time, like Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Charles Fourier— there’s a utopian socialist vision that if only we rationally understand human beings at a deep enough level, and 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 it is a kind of “crystal palace,” as it’s called by Fourier.

Where 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 essentially be a rationally ordered utopia, and we’d have the social sciences to thank for this brave new world that we’ve created.

And this is a way of thinking about people and society that Dostoevsky thinks is absolutely ridiculous.

Should be said he’s coming from a similar place that we’ve talked about in recent posts. Remember the problem that Nietzsche had with Socrates?

Nietzsche thought that Western thinking throughout its history had 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 being a more moral person.

That people are mostly just good, rational people. And that most people, when they’re faced with a moral problem in their lives— here’s the process:

1. They collect all the information they can about it.

2. They consider all the possible options they can think of.

3. And then they reason very carefully and act out the best decision they can.

The assumption is that if people are making bad choices out there— well that’s because they just haven’t practiced reasoning about morality enough. Also, that it’s our job as a society to educate people. We should make people aware of the moral arguments that exist and then teach people how to reason about them better.

But Dostoevsky’s going to say 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 worked. Where I know that something is 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 who's in the throes of truly living, it is in reality enormously complex. Difficult to describe. The kind of complexity and difficulty you’ll see written all over the characters in Dostoevsky’s novels.

Part of what he wants to say with his work is that to be a human being is to not do the rational thing all the time.

People often do things that they know are not the right thing to do. People will sabotage themselves and others for 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 that 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 that 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 the idea that you are 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.

Characters from Dostoevsky’s work are going to reflect this true complexity in a way that can only be described as artwork. 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 trapped up in his head.

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 does he reject the idea 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 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 detached from people. In the lived experience of the person in one of these societies, these theories are a matter of life and death for the soul.

This point will take on more shape once we get into his later work.

Anyway, as an example of this type of 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. Truly a shining example of a deeply miserable person— someone that has made a prison for himself inside his own life and mind.

The first thing to know about him is that he is 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 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 too much about things, and now he’s made himself miserable.

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 the customs people blindly follow. He sees through things like religion. He even sees through this rationalist utopian nonsense we talked about, where more generally, rationality becomes something people cling to in their lives.

To him these are systems that exist in large part just to control people’s behavior, and in his mind, at least he is someone who’s free from all that.

Much more on this point here in a second but first let’s talk about what sort of life it creates when you live every day of your life in the kind of attitude the Underground Man lives in.

He’s so critical of everything that provides meaning and connection in the world around him that he’s thought himself into a corner where he’s completely alone and can do nothing with his time but contemplate things— 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 novels all day long. He takes in all these fictional stories, but he’s constantly disappointed when he has to look at the real world and the way it actually is.

And because he’s alone in this apartment of his, he will argue with people up in his head, 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— plotting his revenge against these people as though they 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 is 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.

Think about how crippling doubt at this level can be. Take something simple like wanting to do the right thing when it comes to your vote on some local levy. Well, if you’re committed enough to doubt, you will never be able to figure out what the right way to vote is.

You’ll just sit around contemplating things for the rest of your life, unable to take action on anything. You’ll rip apart every attempt at an idea of what justice is, for example, the second that you try to formulate it.

But for Dostoevsky this is only the beginning of the problems the Underground Man has created for himself in his life. Because not only will he rip apart every rational argument that comes his way, but he is also in a place where he can’t fully deny the validity of there being at least some rational objective truth to things.

After all, as he mentions in the book: two times two just equals four, right?

Seems pretty clear that is an objective fact of the universe.

More than that, how about the laws of the natural world, or 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— the stone wall being a metaphor that there are certain things that seem to be rationally, objectively true and deterministic.

See Dostoevsky knew that there are plenty of people out there who at this point in their thinking— after questioning things like God for a while— they’ll see this rational stone wall, how stable it seems, and then they will cling on to rationality as their new, ultimate way that they get to the truth. Determinism becomes a replacement as the thing that allows them to predict everything.

But not the Underground Man. He’s far more tortured than this.

Because 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 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.

He refuses to be someone that makes rationality into something more than what it is. 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.

So the Underground Man becomes someone who’s trapped in a kind of limbo up in his head.

He is stuck in a place that Dostoevsky calls contemplative inertia.

Because when you both can’t deny rationality, but 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 and then withdrawn into a totally reactionary place of inactivity.

He’s reduced the self into a state of contemplative nihilism and nothing else.

For Keiji Nishitani, that’s the existential move that’s gone on here for the Underground Man. To put it in the language of 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 is 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’s entire life of sitting at home critiquing and contemplating things, never taking action— 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.

He says the self inside him is not dead; it’s still moving around in some sense. It cycles through different forms of despair every day in this contemplative inertia it’s stuck in.

But even if you wouldn’t call this someone who’s dead, you certainly wouldn’t call this someone that is alive, because he’s also not capable of affirming anything and having the chance to escape this inertia.

Again, to Nishitani, this is a negated self that is trapped in a place of reacting to and contemplating the things that happen to it. Trapped in a cycle he can’t get out of.

Does that description of his life resonate with anybody out there reading this and a place that you’ve been in before? Another relevant question is would you say this is 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 despite the fact that the Underground Man has been framed up until this point as someone who is completely miserable, for someone like Nishitani, he actually has quite a bit of respect for someone like the Underground Man.

Because for Nishitani, 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. This is a deeper engagement with nihilism that Nishitani says you really don’t see in Russian literature before the work of Dostoevsky.

One where he’s obviously gone deep enough to start questioning the foundations of rationality and forms. Obviously something Nishitani is quite familiar with, but something quite distinct from most of the western tradition.

And this isn’t something you just stumble upon either. The only way that Dostoevsky 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 then navigated his way through it.

Dostoevsky once wrote that if you want an example of what Hell is: Hell is a place where a person is unable to love.

And the Underground Man, building his world the way that he does, treating people the way that he does, essentially guarantees that he’s always going to be living in this kind of Hell.

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. He’s 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 they’re looking at things.

You can see another tension start to emerge here in the way he’s living.

On one hand, he’s super aware of many of the flaws that he has. He’s very aware that basically no one has any reason they would ever want to hang out with him. The way he sees it— he’s not going to participate in any of their delusions, so what use could they possibly have for him?

But on the other hand, he definitely thinks of himself, at some other level, as superior to these 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. He finds a lot of comfort in this feeling of superiority.

As an extension of this form of torture he’s set up for himself, he admits he actually envies a lot of the people out there that can live in a more normal way than he does. At some level he’d love to be someone that can take action on things they believe in, and not get caught up in the type of paralysis that he does everyday.

But, if he’s being honest, one of the only ways they can ever do that is probably because they’re way stupider than him. He thinks his superior intelligence comes with the cost of paralysis.

Better to be a mouse, thinking of yourself as sub-human but smartly critiquing everything alone in a crawlspace, than to be dumb and oblivious, acting out a set of delusions like all these other people do. This is his thinking.

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. He just shows up. He’s told about it when he runs into someone that’s going to it the day before.

He shows up and everybody’s looking at him.

“Oh, so nice to see you…”

These are his former classmates at the party. And he hates all these people. But still, he just had to go.

And he shows up bringing all this famous energy he’s known for and when people start trying to talk to him at the party, what does he inevitably do?

He’s awkward. He doesn’t really know how to have a conversation without being defensive.

They’ll ask him something about himself, he’ll say something back that’s a little off. People will pull back a bit.

So they try again— they’re like, “maybe I’ll make a joke with him.” He insults their joke, attacks them personally. The group pulls back even more.

The guy is utterly incapable of connecting with anyone at the party.

So the whole situation is turning out to be pretty uncomfortable, and to make all the awkwardness a little easier for him to deal with, he starts drinking.

And ohhh, does that help his situation.

Eventually, he drinks to the point that he gives this horrible speech that makes everyone mad at him.

Then he decides, “You know what, screw these guys. I’m just gonna sit over here and drink alone, and if they want to talk to me, then they have to talk to me first!”

But no one talks to him. He just sits there, getting more and more drunk.

He actually hears a guy say at one point: “I will never forgive myself for letting him join us tonight.”

Then, at one point, the whole group of guys he was talking to moves from the table they were sitting at over to the sofa to have a more comfortable conversation. Nobody invites him over.

So what does he do?

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 that 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 of them with a passion. All the while, telling himself 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 them.

For three hours he does this.

Eventually, the night ends. Everyone is going home. And now you may think this is where you’d call it a night if you’re the Underground Man.

But 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 goes to a brothel.

He actually was going to the brothel to confront the people that were at the party that he thought had gone there. But upon arriving, he realizes they’re not there and starts talking to what may be the most spiritually enlightened person of anyone that Dostoevsky includes in the book: a prostitute by the name of Liza.

Liza is going to teach us something very important about the Underground Man and the whole collection of games that he is playing in his life.

It’s worth mentioning how they met— imagine this scene: he’s drunk, he’s upset, and in his insecurity starts lambasting this woman 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 in her line of work.

Classic Underground Man kind of stuff to open with.

But Liza, hearing all the criticisms— it’s clear in the book she’s a smart person and has a pretty complicated reaction to him.

On one hand, she’s obviously hurt by the criticism. But on the other hand, she feels like he’s someone that has shown a 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 he’s at least 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— 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. On this particular day this is a guy that’s spiraling.

And when she sees him like this and she still lovingly opens up to him, he just rejects her and lays into her even more. Like pure cruelty at this point, trying to hurt her with his words even though it’s not how he actually feels.

(Keep in mind this is a guy who had just spent the last three days hoping she would show up, and now he’s telling her that he was laughing at her behind her back the whole time.)

Still, even after all of this, Liza 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.

This reaction from her makes him both furious and 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 someone to want to love somebody 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, kind of like giving her twenty bucks, and sends her on her way. Basically pointing out she’s a prostitute and that it’s time for her to go.

At which point she refuses the money, drops it, and leaves the apartment, slamming the door behind her. He chases after her, calling to her, but she doesn’t stop this time.

Now what did Dostoevsky want these scenes to reveal about the Underground Man?

One critical thing he wanted to show is how this attitude of his has turned his life into a constant, painful tension between love and freedom. A tension many people in the modern world find themselves living in.

Living today it’s always really tempting to see freedom in terms of how much independence you have.

How much can I do my own thing without someone 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 expectations I’m answering to from other people it must mean that I’m not very free.

So when the Underground Man doesn’t follow social expectations and critiques everyone who does, when he critiques systems to the point he doesn’t believe in anything, when he pushes people away to the point 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.

Dostoevsky would be highly skeptical of anyone out there that’s under the impression that 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, ideas, systems, the universe. To see yourself as independent is really a modern luxury that says a whole lot more about how little you’re paying attention to your own existence than it does about the state of the world.

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 humans are capable of anyway.

Consider the behavior of The Underground Man at the party.

At some level he craves social connection from his former classmates.

Recall the three hours he spent pacing around the party alone and consider the metaphor Dostoevsky’s using.

If you’re alone in your life, and in theory, you would like more people around you to make a connection with— well, in one sense, the people are right in front of you. But if you’re unwilling to even try to meet them on their own terms even a little, if you sabotage your ability to connect with anyone by getting drunk, pacing around alone coming up with everything that’s stupid about what they’re saying— what do you expect is going to happen? They’re gonna throw you a parade?

And then imagine coming up with some rationalization after the fact. For the Underground Man it was that his drunken pacing was exactly what he wanted to be doing with his night anyway. Think of how possible it is to endlessly rationalize your own behavior.

To Dostoevsky, you can’t have love and connection and have total independence simultaneously. The two are incompatible.

Love is the opposite of the utilitarian framing that we usually give to everything in the modern world.

And this is why Liza in the book is such a confusing person to the Underground Man.

When she opens herself up to him, she’s not doing it because he provides some emotional service to her, or because she has some project that he makes sense in the scope of.

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 is rejecting her because to accept someone who’s trying to give this to him would be a direct attack on his entire existence.

See, sometimes self-loathing is actually a carefully constructed worldview. Something that can keep you safe from being hurt by other people and having to rethink the way you’re seeing things.

From the perspective of the Underground Man, if the only reason anybody would ever choose to love anyone is if they’re providing some service to them that benefits them, then it makes sense why nobody would ever want to be with him. He’s fine being seen as worthless.

But if someone like Liza wants to give her love to him unconditionally, then what does that mean about his entire rationalization for how the world works?

It means he might be wrong. That there might be another way of relating to people that’s possible and that his whole story about the world is incomplete.

Liza’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. Consider the elaborate rationalizations some will create for why their perspective is the only one that’s seeing the full truth of things.

But all this is an example of, to Dostoevsky, is retreating into rationality and reifying it into something more than what it actually is. This is mistaking a rationalization for the truth, and then getting stuck— possibly for years of your life— missing out on who knows what.

At least for the Underground Man, what he’s missing out on is a possible connection with another person. The kind of love and connection that might transform him out of this place of contemplative inertia.

What would it take to let this kind of love in for the Underground Man?

Some people say the Underground Man is the prototype version of the main character of one of his most famous books Crime and Punishment— a guy named Raskolnikov that we’ll talk about next time.

The only reason I bring this up is because if we wanted to find a way that the Underground Man might find some relief from the prison he’s set up in his own life, then what’s missing in the way he’s framing the world are things that Dostoevsky most explores in later books. Namely, the transformative potential of confession, suffering, and active love.

And notice, in light of many recent posts here we’ve done, how love, suffering, and confession are all activities that are rooted in a type of self-emptying.

Could confession, love, and suffering be gateways into this deeper connection with being that we’ve been talking about so much lately?

Dostoevsky seems to think so. Again, to him: Hell is a place where a person is unable to love.

Recommended Reading

1. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Classics, 1994.

2. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Classics, 1993.

3. Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. Translated by Jan Van Bragt, University of California Press, 1982.

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Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Practically everyone has heard of when Nietzsche declared that God is dead at the end of the 19th century. And when you hear a statement like that it can sound like it’s something that’s hostile towards religion.

Imagine Nietzsche jumping up from his desk river dancing on amphetamines. Religion is stupid. It’s outdated. It leads people to lives that aren’t good for them or the world.

But as we’ll see by the end of this post, through the eyes of someone like Keiji Nishitani, the statement God is dead is not an anti-religious statement in any sense. In fact, to him it is a foreshadowing to what you could call a golden age of religious participation that may come about in the near future.

It’ll make more sense by the end of this.

And the way we get there is to talk about religion along the same lines that we talked about nihilism in the last post. Remember to Nishitani, it’s a mistake to only consider a piece of what something is to people, and then to pretend to understand the essence of the thing in its entirety.

We talked about how it’s possible to have a shallow relationship with nihilism and death, and how it’s possible to experience these things more deeply if you examine the ways that people usually frame them in an incomplete way.

Well, what would happen if we did this same thing when it comes to religion?

For the sake of covering as many sides of this as we can today let’s start with what an atheist might say about religion in the kind of world we live in.

Similar to the person from last time that sees nihilism as a problem to be solved, this person might think of religion as something that’s mostly just a security blanket for people.

That religion is obviously a sociological construct designed to not only control people but to give people easy answers to difficult questions in a complicated universe.

Things like morality, for a religious person under this view, aren’t difficult problems—just listen to what God has to say about it and then it’s objective and easy.

Who you are, identity, isn’t a complex or difficult thing—just read the book of Job or Matthew and it’ll more or less tell you who you should be.

In other words, religion, it’s said by some, is a type of mythology that simplifies reality down for scared, weak people that either are too busy or unwilling to affirm reality in all of its complexity.

These people have to deny big pieces of reality, so they turn to religion to be able to do it.

Now contrast this with somebody that’s maybe a bit more favorable towards religion. Since I mentioned the book of Matthew, let’s stick to modern Christianity as an example.

And by the way, this isn’t me intending to exclude other religions. It’s just the one I’m most familiar with to be able to make Nishitani’s point here without speaking out of my lane too much.

Talk to an average Christian going to church on Sunday, ask them what religion is, and they might say something like: “well, religion for me is the path to personal salvation.”

I was born in sin. I believe in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. And through the sacrifice of God’s one and only son, I am absolved of my sins and earn admittance into the kingdom of heaven.

To Nishitani, both of these opposing takes probably cover a piece of what religion is to some people.

First of all, no doubt some people do use religion as a security blanket. And I think he’d say that’s probably something you see more commonly in the Western world, where this opinion is more popular just given the type of religion that’s prevalent.

And no doubt to some people, religion is most experienced by them as the one and only ticket they have to salvation.

But both of these, while they’re not wrong—to Nishitani you could say they are incomplete when it comes to describing a full picture of what religion is. That both of these only cover a piece of the terrain religion encompasses.

In his book Religion and Nothingness, perhaps his magnum opus, Nishitani starts out by giving a few slightly more sophisticated takes on what religion is that are popular among scholars.

And just like with nihilism, these common takes are going to be important for us to consider if we want to understand religion more fully—that is, if we want to understand what’s missing from these definitions.

He says one popular way people in the West will describe religion is that it's the relationship of man to an absolute. Like God, for example.

That’s one way of distilling religion down if you wanted to.

Another common way to describe religion is to say that it is simply the process of getting ever closer to an idea of the Holy.

That’s another distillation.

Nishitani says some scholars describe religion as the abandonment of self-will in order to live according to the will of God.

Some other thinkers have framed it as the intuition of the infinite found in the finite.

All of these attempts at a description are incomplete if you’re Nishitani. In fact, if you were to examine them all and try to find something similar about them, Nishitani says notice something here that his colleague Martin Heidegger may have pointed out about the modern Western world and the way that we typically think about things:

These are all attempts to describe what religion is by framing it in terms of its utilitarian function, or in terms of what use it serves a particular person or to a society.

This is what we do with practically everything in the Western world. You ask someone what something is, and as if by default they’ll respond with what use it serves to them.

We’ll say something like art is a way for you to express your emotions, or to liven up a room.

Education, we’ll say, is a tool to prepare people for the workforce. A friend is someone who’s there for you when you’re having a bad day. We frame things in terms of their utility.

And remember, Heidegger would say that this is a symptom of the technological enframing we give to everything. And that while framing it in this way certainly helps us in specific areas like the sciences and technology, and while it’s very important, it also has consequences when it’s the only way you see things.

It blocks your ability to see deeper levels of the world. And to Nishitani, religion is going to be something that often falls into this category.

He thinks similar to the way we treat nihilism in the west, where we often try to view it totally from the outside— religion is also something that gets treated this way.

But if we always do this then our understanding of it will always be incomplete. Because religion, in some other very important sense, is something that can only be known in the subjective experience of the person that’s immersed in a religious quest.

That it's from the inside, the phenomenological experience of a religious quest that an important vantage point reveals itself about religion and its full scope.

The obvious first question you may have is: what is a religious quest?

To Nishitani, while there are many different ways that a religious quest can play out in terms of the specifics in someone’s life, there is a general movement you could expect to see going on in the internal experience of someone that's truly on one. And that is:

A reformulation of the self and its whole relationship to its reality.

To put it way too densely here at first—but then I’ll obviously go back and explain more of the context—a truly religious quest to Nishitani is one where a person moves from a dualistic, utilitarian framing of the world where the individual self is always the center lens that you see everything through; to one where the self is more emptied.

Whereby emptying the self we then liberate the self from the illusion of separation.

Where then, from this new liberated standpoint, the further religious quest is to discover our place within the interdependent network of being, whereby truly affirming reality at this level, we then realize that this network is something we are always already in a meaningful relationship with.

A religious quest truly begins then for Nishitani when you stop framing religion and the world around you in terms of “What use does this serve to me?” and start framing it in terms of “For what purpose do I exist?”

This is the shift in someone’s thinking is going to be a critical piece of what he would call any truly religious transformation.

Now don’t be deceived here.

You may hear that and think, “Well, that’s what I’m already doing! In fact, that’s what I’ve been doing in church since I was about eight years old. I’m always asking for what larger purpose I exist!”

But as your designated, philosophical sherpa here I have to advise you: you’re probably not doing this at the level that Nishitani’s talking about. Most people that call themselves religious don’t meet the criteria.

Because as you may have guessed, just like most people have a pretty shallow relationship with nihilism or death, most people have a pretty shallow relationship with religion to Keiji Nishitani.

The same way you can be a goth kid that wears all black, writes death poetry— you can be a platinum loyalty card holder at your local Hot Topic and have stock in Orange Julius and still not be facing death very seriously— and similarly you can be a person that sees your religion as a cornerstone of how you live your life everyday, but never experience religious transformation of the class that Nishitani is talking about in this book.

To explain what he means by this point forgive me for staying in my lane and using Christianity as an example again. Christians…it’s all love.

Say I’m someone who looks around me at the mostly Christians in the United States where I live. I’ve been to quite a few church services in my day, and the people there are not generally emptying the self and affirming the complexity of the interdependent network that they’re a part of.

No, these are generally people eating cookies and talking about the football game that’s going to be on later.

In other words, what’s going on at these church services for a lot of people is not all that transformative given the criteria Nishitani is interested in.

Far from this being a weekly exercise in rethinking the self and its relationship with the world, for a lot of people this becomes an emboldening of the self and the ego. A reinforcement of the grasp they have over the objective moral truth of the universe.

It becomes something they wield around in conversations as an authoritative stance that ends up shutting down any further discussion about complexity.

As a Christian you may hear that and think this is more than a little unfair.

Because let's say some Christians do use a service in that way sometimes. But there are also plenty of people that sit in the pews of their church when a service is going on, and they do feel a sense of humility in the moment. Going to church does make them a little less self-centered and a little more in line with their role in a larger plan that’s being carried out.

And what, is that not religion? Does that count for nothing if you’re Nishitani?

To Nishitani, it doesn’t count for nothing. But to him, if we’re being honest, it is a pretty shallow experience of the kind of transformation that something like religion has a unique capacity to provide for people.

Think of how special a domain religion is as something that can lead to spiritual development if taken actually seriously.

Think of the mystics we talked about a couple episodes ago and their experiences—a lifetime of devotion, daily focused practice towards a deeper and deeper communion with God and their own being. Think about Heidegger’s point about how the theoretical, scientific abstractions that we usually live our lives in are secondary, and how there is a more immediate connection with being that is possible. Think of Nishitani’s work on nihilism just from last post.

Religious language and devotional practice seem to have a unique ability to transform people in this area when taken seriously. There’s a unique level of guidance that’s possible at the higher levels of these religious communities. Shouldn’t we be paying respect to the differences here?

What percentage of people do you really think take their religion seriously to the point that it transforms them? And what percentage of people are using it at this point in their lives more or less like a self-help book—or as Nishitani might see it, like yet another ego-centric way of projecting themselves onto the world so they can have mastery over it?

Now before we get more into what Nishitani thinks a religious quest looks like, let’s clear a couple things up around using the word religion here to describe this transformation he’s talking about.

For the sake of argument, let’s buy his premise that barely anybody is taking their religion seriously in the modern world. Well then why does Nishitani need to use the word religion here at all?

Religion, as a word, carries with it so much baggage—he must realize that. If most people who think of themselves as religious are not authentically religious, then why not just call them the religious people and whatever small percentage of people are actually engaging with religion— why not call them, I don’t know, contemplatives or something?

Because this would distract from how unique of a path religion is, in all of its varying forms, as a gateway into this specific kind of relationship to being.

Just as a comparison: think of the way we use the term university when people go off to school.

What is most people’s experience going to a university? It’s not studying all day long. It’s not a devotional practice. Most people go to college because society tells them if they do, then they’ll get credentialed and hired in a field they want to work in. It’s essentially personal salvation for the career world—I’m just doing it for the certificate on the wall so I can make more money.

And they’ll do the assignments, they’ll study for the test at the end of the week, but if you came to most people ten years later— how much of this stuff they’re learning are they really gonna be able to remember for you?

However, you could make an argument that there is a very small percentage of people that apply themselves deeply when they go to a university, and that those people are uniquely capable, when they’re in a university setting, of becoming part of something bigger than themselves—part of an intellectual tradition, someone that can be a torchbearer for whatever field they’re a part of.

University then, seen from one angle, can be almost a complete waste of money. Seen from another angle, it’s one of the only places with the resources to produce someone with a very particular, highly desirable skill set.

It’s a transformative experience, in other words.

Well, so too, Nishitani thinks, with religion and religious practice. And it would be silly for us to not use the word religion, call people contemplatives or something, simply because of the shallow way religion is often practiced by people of this particular time.

Real question Nishitani might ask: is religion the thing that is shallow? Or are the people shallow? Do most people just usually experience religion in a dulled and appropriated way?

More than that, in reference to our atheist friend from earlier: what are these different religions all truly doing?

Is everything—from Buddhism, to Hinduism, to Christianity, Islam, Judaism—are these all different attempts to just give people a security blanket? To control people?

When these were created was there a council of people that all sat around trying to come up with a scary story to keep everyone in line?

Of course not. For Nishitani, the origins of these traditions lay in the stories of individuals. Individuals who were exploring their own experience of being at an extremely deep level.

And these people, in whatever tradition they existed in, encountered nihilism in a unique way at the bottom of their search. Then they discovered some kind of purpose or connection to something greater. And then they formulated a way to live authentically on the other side of this insight.

These are typically the kinds of stories we find at the origins of these religions that we know today.

In other words, these weren’t politicians trying to control people. These were individuals who, in their existential experience of the world, moved from asking questions like, “What use do these things in the world have for me and my own ego-driven agenda?” and they started asking questions like, “For what purpose do I exist in this larger network?”

Now, whatever dulled and appropriated form this may take in the lives of billions of people in the modern world is beside the point. Yeah, practically everybody is distracting themselves with one ego-driven agenda or another—their own career, their political beliefs, their TV shows, fantasies, drugs—and yes, they do it with what we often call religion as well. These shallow forms of religion become something people just project onto the world so they can control it.

But to Nishitani, this is transparently a way to avoid a truly religious engagement with the world.

Ironically, the mass-produced versions of these religious approaches end up becoming things that allow people to ask religious questions less frequently. To Nishitani, religion ends up blocking religious engagement.

And this place where most people live— trapped thinking only in terms of how the world serves their own agendas— this is an area of our experience that Nishitani refers to in the book as the experiential field of consciousness.

Think of there being three different experiential fields of awareness—three existential standpoints that you could use as a model to understand your experience of the world, if you wanted to.

One is consciousness, two is nihility, and three is Śūnyatā.

And understanding the movement we go through internally between these three different fields of awareness will help us understand what he sees as an authentic religious quest.

The short version of this is that a religious quest is going to be moving from primarily framing things in terms of consciousness, traveling through the field of nihility, and revealing a deeper connection with the field of Śūnyatā— in the process removing the illusion of our separation from being. Some people may say God here.

He describes each of these in the book. Nihility and Śūnyatā were the focus of the last post on overcoming nihilism. But what are some more details about this field he calls consciousness?

Consciousness is the field of awareness where most of us usually spend almost every second of our lives. It is representational. Meaning not only is this where representations of the actual things in the world become more real to us than the things themselves, but this is also the kind of awareness where there’s always an individual subject—or a you—and you’re always looking for how you relate to objects that you then try to control.

Or in the language Nishitani uses, these are objects that we “reify.”

What he means is, we’re always trying to turn these objects, that really have no fixed, durable meaning, into something that is fixed and durable—something we can manipulate for our own agendas.

And in order to reify them in this way, we have all sorts of tools we use in the west: Platonic forms are one commonly assumed thing. Or the idea of there being essences to things. Or we smuggle in meaning as it’s supposedly ordained to us by some external God.

Consciousness then is the field of our awareness where we create these elaborate theories about how subjects relate to objects for the sake of utility. It’s also the field of our awareness that keeps us in a constant state of distraction from these deeper religious questions.

And it should be said: basically all of Western philosophy, Nishitani says, goes on solely in this field of consciousness. In fact, if you look back at the history of Western thought, you’ll see that thinkers have mostly ignored these other two fields of nihility and Śūnyatā.

To be entirely clear, Nishitani is not saying we should reject consciousness or try to get away from it. We need consciousness and representational thinking. What he’s saying is that to only spend your life with an awareness of this realm of consciousness, and to ignore the other two, would put you in a place where you’re always projecting yourself—or your ego—onto the world, and trying to control it in some way.

But a truly religious transformation is to take this individual self from the field of consciousness and to liberate it—to understand the groundless ground that what we call the self ultimately rests upon, and then to expand our ability to see our connection to the vast network of being that we’re a part of.

Now, how exactly would this look in practice? Seems like a couple examples might be helpful for us to have here.

We’ve already talked on the podcast a bit ago about the work of the philosopher Simone Weil and her concept of attention.

Simone Weil writes about how when you come across someone and start having a conversation with them, there are different standpoints that you can be having that conversation from.

On one hand, you can be talking to someone, and if you’re operating in this field of consciousness that Nishitani’s talking about, you might have the entire conversation with this person filtering all of it through what use this person has to you.

How does this person benefit my own projects or agendas? How is what they’re saying here similar to what I already believe in? You may only consider differences in the ways that they view the world insofar as they are commensurate with your ways that you view things.

There’s a way to have every conversation you ever find yourself in from a dualistic, utilitarian framing where you’re ultimately just projecting yourself onto this other person.

But then there’s another way to orient yourself toward this whole process.

You can talk to a person and just try to listen to them as they are.

Where there’s no projection of the self that’s going on. You’re really just trying to receive this person on their own terms as they’re attempting to present themselves to you.

Simone Weil says a couple things happen when you do this. First, you potentially become a catalyst for this person being seen at a level they’ve never really experienced before. You become a catalyst for their own transformation.

But more than that, instead of being an ego or a self projected onto the world, you become more like an antenna for the universe to express itself through.

This is important. To Simone Weil in these kinds of moments you become a node that is part of a larger network.

Your existence becomes about fulfilling a larger role that you always already occupy, rather than always needing to be asserting yourself onto every situation.

This is a real-world, practical example of the kind of move that Nishitani’s talking about when someone undergoes a religious transformation. This is an everyday life example of self-emptying. This is an example of what Nishitani calls, “receiving the emptiness of things on their own home ground.”

Consider the anatomy of what just happened during this whole interaction. We went from the field of consciousness, where we asked: for what purpose does this person’s existence serve me and my own agendas?

Then we moved through the field of Nihility as we questioned the stable boundaries that supposedly exist between ourselves and this person.

And then we found ourselves more openly aware of the field of Śūnyatā. Something that was always there, immanent, where we started receiving the emptiness of things on their own home ground.

For Nishitani, this movement applied across the entire landscape of our being is the anatomy of a religious quest.

Once again, this is a move from seeing things less in terms of what utility they serve to me, and thinking more in terms of for what purpose do I exist.

Where instead of starting everyday plotting how I’m going to project myself onto the world. I might start to think more about the roles I am always already occupying, given the relationships I currently have.

Am I a parent? Am I a partner? Am I a member of a nation?

But then outside of the human-to-human relationships I have, aren’t I also part of this larger network of things in very different ways as well?

Aren’t I a part of an ecosystem where every breath I take depends on trees and phytoplankton producing oxygen, where they also depend on me?

Am I a co-creator in the life of the soil, where the food I eat to survive comes from a collaboration between microorganisms, minerals, and many other things that have been going on for thousands of years?

Am I a part of the water cycle? Where every sip of water I drink has traveled through countless rivers, clouds, even the bodies of other organisms before it’s reached this exact moment where it happens to help me?

More than just my place in an ecosystem though — just think of the technology I use.

The smartphone I have is not an isolated object. It is the culmination of labor, materials, global systems — from the cobalt that’s mined in the Congo, gallium from Kazakhstan, to the hands of the workers that put it together in factories.

Even when it comes to my thoughts— can I really say these are entirely my own thoughts? Or are they shaped by books, conversations, videos, culture created by who knows how many others since the dawn of history?

See, we fill many roles in this larger network whether we like it or not, and whether we realize it or not. And when Nishitani talks about having an authentic religious quest, it’s about the process of awakening to this interdependence.

Because when the illusion of separation is taken away from the world, you just start to feel like treating anything else around you in a self-serving way, at the expense of whatever it is, just seems like it’s you ultimately hurting yourself in some way.

Now, you can imagine how complicated this network might get. You can imagine how many moving parts there are, and how this might take somebody who has this insight— say, a Mahayana Buddhist— their entire lifetime to be able to explore.

And while there are many Buddhists that view Śūnyatā as a transcendent category— meaning it’s a state of being that you need to ascend to in some way, usually by nullifying the self or normal existence— it’s important to remember that for Nishitani, this field of Śūnyatā is immanent, not transcendent.

Meaning for him, Śūnyatā is always there as a part of our experience. It’s just usually there are things in the way of our ability to see it.

This is why we have to self-empty if we want to open our awareness to it — it’s to clear up room to notice Śūnyatā as it’s always there.

And certain approaches to Buddhism are filled with religious exercises that can help you try to see things in less of a dualistic way. But the key thing to remember is that the goal for Nishitani shouldn’t be to chase Śūnyatā, because that would be the very kind of projection of the self that blocks our ability to experience it. The goal would be to remove those sorts of projections, and to open ourselves to experiencing what’s already there.

Now to wrap this up today: you can probably see now why the statement God is dead, to someone like Keiji Nishitani, is not an anti-religious statement at all.

Because if we buy what Nietzsche’s selling there— and that to be an intelligent person living in the modern world makes it practically impossible to believe in the Western religious stories about a God that gives you a meaning to your life— then where does that leave the modern person?

Well, for many people it is exactly where Nietzsche predicted them to be. Their starting point will be an existential crisis and a need to confront nihilism.

Their starting point would be the very kind of engagement with nihilism that Nishitani thinks is necessary to be able to reach this deeper awareness of our own being.

What this also means then for Nishitani — and he says this in one of the first sentences of the book — is that the person that thinks they need religion the least is actually probably the person that could benefit from religion the most.

Because to be the person that sees through how superficial a lot of people’s relationship to their religion is, is to be someone actually seeking a greater level of awareness about existence. And in that case religion, tragically, usually becomes something someone might write off because they see people not taking it seriously and then assume that’s all of what religion must be.

Next time we’re talking about Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you next time.

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West! This is Philosophize This!

So the guy we’re talking about today is aligned with basically everything we’ve been covering on these posts lately to the point it’s almost funny.

He’s a man who was a big fan of Nietzsche’s work. In fact, as the story goes, he used to carry around a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra with him pretty much everywhere he went in the early stages of his life.

He’s a man who traveled all the way to Germany to study under the professorship of Martin Heidegger during the 1930s.

He’s a man that was the principal chair of philosophy and religion at Kyoto University for more than 20 years— a position where he deeply engaged with the mystical tradition of the west we just talked about with a special focus on the theologian Meister Eckhart.

See, it’s like I planned it or something. The man we’re talking about today is a member of what has now become known as the famous Kyoto School from Japan. He’s a man by the name of Keiji Nishitani.

One of the first questions you might have here is: what is the Kyoto School?

And how a lot of people might answer that question is to say these were eastern thinkers working with western ideas and mixing everything together trying to create something new and exciting.

But a lot of people that are fans of the Kyoto School would hate for it to be described in this way. We’ll talk about why many people think it doesn’t really help anyone to try to break down these thinkers in terms of broad categories like east vs. west.

And in service to that I just want to get right into the meat of something that was near and dear to the heart of Keiji Nishitani— something that fits into this larger conversation we’ve been having about these different gateways into a more immediate connection to being.

I want to talk about nihilism at a different level than we’ve ever gone into before.

And to understand why nihilism was such an important thing to focus on for someone like Nishitani, I think a useful starting point for this is to talk about what it’s like to have a relationship to death as a comparison.

How many people out there reading this have come face to face with death in an intimate way at some point in your life? Have you ever been forced to acknowledge just how much of an ever-present reality something like death is for you at any given moment?

The point of asking this is not to belittle anyone’s understanding of death. This isn’t the death Olympics.

The point here is to say that we’re all at different levels of familiarity when it comes to death, and that oftentimes the level of familiarity you have with it comes down to situations that have happened to you that you didn’t choose.

You lost people close to you and were forced to think about it. You were in a war zone and were surrounded by it. Maybe you had a near-death experience yourself.

Point is: not everybody is forced to think about death as they go throughout their lives. On the contrary, modern society often shields people from it.

And even if you do decide, from a purely philosophical perspective, to dedicate some time to sit around and do some death reflection (whatever that looks like) — even if you spent hundreds of hours doing that over the course of your life there’s no guarantee that you’re really grappling with it at a serious level.

You can understand, theoretically, that you’re going to die someday. You can say you’re in touch with death. But then something unexpected can happen, the harness next to you on a roller coaster doesn’t work or something, and all of a sudden it becomes far more real to you after having had that experience.

What I mean is: you can fake a relationship that you have with death having never actually even encountered it.

Well compare this shallow relationship with death to the experience it’s possible to have with nihilism in the modern world.

Nihilism being, for Keiji Nishitani, one of the most important things you could ever possibly think about as a person that’s living on this planet. Same question though: how deeply have you really faced the concept of nihilism?

What’s a common line of thinking for somebody to have in the west when they claim to be thinking in a nihilistic way? They’ll say something like, “Nihilism… means that there’s no meaning to life, right? And if there’s no meaning to life in general then why should I ever do anything in my life?”

And like we touched on briefly in the Nietzsche post we recently did, what this will often turn into is someone who in practice chooses to sit around, and tries to be as comfortable as they possibly can.

You watch content. You play video games. Eat comfort food. It could be drugs— the point is to this person if there’s no meaning to life then why do anything that’s going to be difficult?

But as we also talked about on that episode, to someone like Nietzsche: choosing to be comfortable all the time like this is not moral nihilism. Comfort is not the default of what a human existence is. Prioritizing comfort is choosing comfort and security as your set of values. Which to him is then going to be choosing a very passive, reactive approach to life that denies certain necessary aspects of what a life often is.

If Nietzsche was going to criticize this hypothetical western person’s thinking, where they say they’re nihilistic but in practice they’re not, one thing he could say to them is that they really aren’t taking it seriously enough as a philosophical concept. That they’re smuggling in values and a moral framework where they supposedly shouldn’t be having any.

And as we know: Nietzsche says that to truly contend with nihilism fully means you have to not live in this passive, reactive way. That it’s an active process. We have to creatively differentiate, we have to create our own values and projects from a place of affirmation. In other words: taking nihilism seriously to Nietzsche means overcoming nihilism via the self, and the will.

Nishitani says what we’re left with when we execute this whole strategy is a sort of positive response to nihilism. A classic kind of response that comes out of a western style of thinking.

The idea is: that nihilism is a problem to be solved.

That when I’m feeling nihilistic that’s something we need to fix. That’s something everybody out there needs to find a way to transcend and overcome.

And on one hand Nishitani asks what else would you expect people to be doing born into the western world? We’re born into a world that smuggles in spiritual assumptions that we most of the time don’t even realize we’re making unless we’re intimately aware of our own history.

For example, the history of western thought is filled with people making very monotheistic, Abrahamic assumptions, that there’s supposed to be a moral order to the world that’s given to us from the outside by a supernatural god.

More than that we often assume that if you look around you one day and that moral order doesn’t seem to be there— that must be a problem that we need to solve.

We do this with other things too in this set of thinking traditions. We often smuggle in very Platonic assumptions in the west about the forms or essences of the things around us.

The things we see: a tree, a rock, a squirrel— we assume these are stable, durable forms. That I am one of these durable forms, and that how these stable identities connect together and relate to each other is what provides the meaning to us and our lives.

The assumption is that if someone were to view the world not thinking in terms of there being stable identities— then that would just turn everything around us into a nebulous blob where nothing means anything!

We need forms and essences or else what are we even doing here?

In other words, the idea in the West is usually that when nihilism strikes—if meaning is missing—then that must mean you’ve got to create some meaning. You have to will yourself into a meaningful life, or chop up the world around you into forms, all of this so that you can fix nihilism as a problem that needs to be solved. Again, the positive response to nihilism.

But to Keiji Nishitani this analysis, while it’s one type of response to nihilism and while it’s not wrong, you could make a case that it is incomplete.

That there is more to nihilism than just this, and that there are more reactions that are possible other than just trying to solve nihilism by creating meaning. That this is the nihilism equivalent of in our death conversation saying, “Yeah, yeah I know I’m going to die someday.” But having never actually faced it at the depth that you could.

Let’s say all of this is true. Then if I wanted to become more familiar with it, how would I start actually doing that?

In his book The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism Keiji Nishitani thinks it’s valuable to start by looking at several other types of nihilism that have been proposed by thinkers in the West.

To Nishitani, Europe was a place where by the 20th century its spiritual traditions had already been thoroughly called into question. First during the Enlightenment, and then even more deeply in the 19th century by figures like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Because of this, Europe had already faced a crisis of nihilism that led many philosophers to have valuable things to say about it.

What Nishitani is ultimately doing here—writing in the context of post–World War II Japan, a time and place grappling with extreme nihilism after the atomic bomb—is responding to a moment of national soul-searching about where to go next. He turns to other cultures that have gone through something similar to Japan in their past.

And what he sees when he looks at the history of European thought are some common tactics that they use when addressing the problem of nihilism.

For example, so often what thinkers in the West will do is they’ll try to reduce nihilism down into a rigid definition of some kind. They’ll ask questions. What exactly are we talking about when we say Nihilism? Is there any way to get a solid definition going here?

They’ll look back at history. They’ll find examples of when people have claimed to be feeling nihilistic— say after the fall of the Roman Empire, or the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror— they’ll take these examples, and then they’ll try to combine them all together into a common description that fits all of them.

And again while this isn’t wrong. You could say that this is a limited way of understanding nihilism that leaves out something important. And notice this as a classic thing that people will do when their goal is to try to reduce things down into an essence— a common thing we do in the Western world given all that we spiritually are smuggling in from our history.

Another thing European thinkers have done when talking about nihilism is they’ll try to reduce it into just a static, bad feeling that a conscious self is having.

They’ll imply that nihilism, at bottom, is a feeling of existential despair.

But to Nishitani this is another very limited way of approaching what it is we’re talking about. For one thing this is trying to label the self, and nihilism for that matter, as something that’s universal, durable, or some tangible feeling that everybody generally has.

Notice the Western, dualistic approach that is constantly at work here. We’re putting in a lot of energy trying to turn these concepts into durable, unchanging things.

Again, this isn’t the wrong way to look at it—because to Nishitani, saying that would imply there’s a single right way to look at it. But if someone were truly interested in getting a more full-bodied picture of what nihilism is, here’s what we can be sure of: framing it in only this way will always come pre-loaded with certain very real limitations.

To Nishitani, it will always ignore an entire piece of what people are even talking about when they describe nihilism: the subjective, lived experience of nihilism to a particular self that is grappling with it.

Because nihilism in some other important sense has to also be understood as an experiment that each individual self needs to run for themselves.

Let me explain this more. And for the record this is going to be a common thread we’ll see all throughout Nishitani’s work. Say you wanted to get a better understanding of something like death, or nihilism— later on it will be about religion. If we want to truly respect something like nihilism we can’t just take only a piece of it and then pretend like we’ve arrived at the essence of all of it.

When we talk about nihilism, the historical definitions may cover a piece of it, the existentialists talking about despair may be a piece of it, but another absolutely crucial one is that nihilism is a highly individualized experiment that needs to be run, by a particular self, that is encountering it.

Meaning no two encounters with nihilism are ever going to be the same. And what you experience and call nihilism will without question be unique to your individual experiment.

Why is this an important point? Because it removes the expectation that:

1. There is some sort of static essence or form to what a nihilistic experience will be.

2. It removes the expectation that we should be able to perfectly describe all of this experience using purely language.

Notice what’s going on there! It’s almost like Nishitani is trying to get us to question the otherwise rigid meanings and identities that underlie the way we usually talk about our experience.

He’s getting us to question: how stable is this idea of nihilism that we’re talking about? Is this a universal feeling that everyone has? Is it something you can perfectly define or write about in a book? Or are there elements to what nihilism is that can only really be understood when they are experienced by a particular person going through this encounter?

Consider how this same line of questioning can be applied to the stability of the meaning of other important things. Picture someone born into a Christian home that at some point starts to doubt how stable of a foundation their religion is at providing the objective truth of the universe.

This nihilistic exercise of pulling the foundations of that meaning apart, might then lead this person to think of religion as more of a sociological construct. Imagine this person then does this with other religions and their foundations, and then with political ideology. Imagine they do this with any systematized attempt to give the complexity of the world around us some sort of easy way of understanding it.

Maybe you see at this point where all this is going.

Now imagine this applied to your own foundational, moral values. How stable or universal are those?

How about this applied to the identities you occupy in the given society you live in. How static and unchanging are those?

You might then start to apply this nihilistic questioning of meaning to the very self that is doing the questioning. How stable or durable is that self when you take a closer look at it?

In other words, this experiment of nihilism if taken really seriously can be applied to any stable meaning that supposedly exists.

And it should be said: if you were to do this then this is going to be a pretty uncomfortable process.

When nihilism is not viewed as a problem to be solved, but is instead something that you try to steer into, the way it’s seen sometimes in more Buddhist traditions, this new orientation opens up in someone what is described in Zen Buddhism as: the great doubt.

For someone like Nishitani the great doubt is a period of utter transformation for a person. It is a period of recognizing just how deep this well of nihilism goes when you truly begin to doubt— when you truly question the stable forms that you usually make sense of the world with.

And while that may sound uncomfortable there’s actually some good news here on the other side of it if you think of what this means for our nihilistic friend from before.

From this new perspective, a person feeling horrible because they recognize there isn’t a god with a plan for them; well, for one thing that person under this different view is just having a very shallow relationship with nihilism— the same way it’s easy for someone to have a shallow relationship with death.

And to Nishitani this bad feeling that they’re going through is not a sign that they’re lost, or that they need to hurry up and create some new meaning before they start to feel worse.

No, this feeling they’re having is actually evidence of the fact that they’re someone who’s questioning their reality beyond the conventions they were born into. To him, this is a sign that they’re actually one of the people that might press on, into the great doubt, and then arrive at an understanding of the nature of being that few people on this planet ever get to experience.

The feeling of nihilism means you’re at the beginning of a journey.

If it is taken seriously and truly lived experientially, nihilism may be another one of these gateways into the more immediate experience of being we’ve been talking about.

Remember to someone like Heidegger this is going to be the mode of existence that’s not constantly mediated by the will and a subject/object framing of things. To the mystics from last time this is going to be that pushing past the self, where they would then find union with something greater than themselves through intense devotional practice.

This is the domain that Nishitani says Mahayana Buddhism, Zen Buddhism as a sub-chapter of it is talking about.

When Western thinkers encountered nihilism during the crisis point of European culture, Western spiritual traditions led them down certain predictable responses to nihilism. Well, here is Nishitani saying how Eastern spiritual traditions when encountering the same class of problem, seem to be equipped in a very unique way to deal with this Nihilism that the Western world generally isn’t. (Bear with me on the east vs west language for the moment. Its time is coming.)

What comes out of this is that nihilism becomes not something to run from. It’s not a problem to be solved under this framing.

Nihility, as Nishitani puts it— think of it as an immanent aspect of being itself. Nihility is ultimately something we should embrace and to learn to be with, and it’s something we never experience fully as long as we live in the stories we create trying to provide neat, dualistic, formal structure to everything.

We know this at some level. And isn’t that kind of the point of why we create many of these stories in the first place?

But in keeping with our larger discussion here: just considering Nihilism at a theoretical level can give you no guarantees that you understand it at a lived experience level. That there’s a lot to Nihilism that has to be discovered through the particular experiment of the individual self living it.

And ironically the next step I think if we wanted to find another layer of taking nihilism as seriously as we can, is we have to call into question the supposedly stable foundation to what it is we call “the self”.

Now there are lots of different ways you can do this. And I’m not going to be able to do it for you.

What I can give you are some thoughts and examples that philosophers have given over the years that might help you as a small part of your journey.

People will spend years in contemplative practices trying to question this conditioning that we are totally separate from the things that are around us. And much like we were saying on the mysticism episode: having the guidance of a religious practice or even just religious language to help you navigate it can definitely make this whole process a lot easier for you.

What seems clear to Nishitani though is that one of the big barriers in the way of being able to question the foundations of the self is the ordinary language we use to describe our day to day life.

Because the way we talk about things usually tries to say something about what things are by comparing them to the things that they’re not. And our languages often structure our reality dualistically with subjects always relating to objects.

But Nishitani and others say there are ways you can start to see outside of this typical framing of things.

Meditation definitely can help loosen things up. There are things called koans that are commonly used in Zen Buddhism. This is a thought exercise where you contemplate something that will blur these dualistic lines and get you seeing things maybe more along the lines of how a baby sees the world.

Common examples of these will be things like what is the sound of one hand clapping?

Or another one is if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

These are designed to get people thinking outside of the typical abstractions and rigid essences that we typically frame things in.

But there’s another exercise Nishitani says can be useful here. He talks about the practice of questioning the questioner.

Just for a second: do something that’s actually pretty common for us to do as humans and just reflect on the nature of the self. Think about you as a self, and ask the question: what is that exactly that you’re reflecting on right now? Here’s a better question: when you’re thinking about that self— what is the part of the self that is the object that’s being questioned? And what is the part of the self that is doing the questioning?

Again, do this exercise for a while and try to get to the bottom of what exactly makes up this self thing that we’re talking about.

Nishitani says when you do this what you’ll realize is that what’s at the bottom of the self is nothing.

In fact, the foundations of the self, actually start to look a bit like the foundations of religious ideology or political ideology— like something you’ve believed for a long time was far more durable than it actually was. Nishitani says what you realize is that what characterizes the self is a sort of nothingness. Or you might even think of it as a “no-thing-ness”.

Meaning it’s not a fixed, durable form or essence that’s at the bottom of the self. The self really gains whatever meaning it has to us in terms of how it relates to everything else around it.

When you do this exercise you start to realize that the self is something that is constantly changing and moving. You realize the typical boundaries between you and the ecosystems of ideas or things that you depend on are really just a matter of convention, or a matter of the ways that our languages typically organize sentences to be able to express things.

And if that all sounds very weird to you: well, seeing things more in this way is no doubt going to be a process.

The common example that you’ve no doubt heard along these lines is a common quote. (Maybe you were scrolling through a bunch of clichés on Pinterest or something when you heard this.)

“Enlightenment is when the wave realizes that it is the ocean.”

You ever heard this one before?

Now this is a misleading metaphor when it comes to Nishitani, but it might help us to start thinking at least a bit more in this direction.

If what you are is something like a wave, a temporary, constantly moving formation, where everything about you was determined by forces in the ocean that you have nothing to do with. And that if that wave for some reason had the capacity for self-reflection and could realize that everything it has ever thought of itself as ultimately depends on this larger process that it’s a part of. Well then that, in the Pinterest board or the Instagram feed, is the definition of enlightenment. You’re officially a really spiritually enlightened wave if you can recognize that fact.

Again, ultimately this is too simple of a metaphor to describe Nishitani’s point. But it does illustrate a concept described in Mahayana Buddhism known as dependent origination that is going to be very helpful here.

Dependent origination centers on the idea that there is nothing about that wave, or anything for that matter, that is magically independent, or self-causing, or self-sustaining with its own essence.

That wave is only a thing because of everything else that it relates to and depends on in a complex network it’s a part of. That the supposed boundary between the wave and the ocean, or the wave and the gravity that moves it, or the wave and all the other waves before or after it— these are all in reality pretty superficial boundaries to be obsessing over. That at a deeper level these things are actually connected and interdependent. Or in other words: they are dependent in their origination.

This is how we also have to be thinking about the self to Nishitani.

See, it’s not that the self is a total illusion to him. The durability of the self is an illusion. The essence at the foundation of the self is an illusion.

Let’s go into this more deeply with a better metaphor. Instead of thinking of the self as a wave in the ocean, try thinking of the self as similar to the way that the meanings of words work in structural linguistics.

Think of what a word is. A word gets its meaning not because somebody came up with a meaning for it one day and wrote it down in the dictionary. No word has a fixed essence to what its meaning is where it will always have that meaning no matter what happens.

The meanings of words are constantly changing based on how they’re being used in a particular linguistic community. And the meaning of any given word doesn’t lie inside the word itself somewhere, but it lies in the relationships that exist between it and all the other words around it in a network.

Take the word squirrel, for example. The word squirrel doesn’t have any sort of fixed meaning to us. It gets its meaning based on how we use it in relation to all the things that it is not: it’s not a cat, it’s not a bird, it’s not a rat.

The meaning of the word “squirrel” then comes from its place within this web of distinctions.

Now obviously words get even more complicated than this. Because let’s say tomorrow, a comedy movie comes out and in that movie there’s a joke where for whatever reason there’s some old dudes that like to play pickleball at the gym, and people in the movie start calling them “squirrels.”

And let’s say it catches on in culture: people everywhere start calling old men that play pickleball a bunch of “squirrels,” similar to what happened with the word cougar.

Well the meaning of the word squirrel would change if that were to happen.

If scientists discovered some new kind of squirrel, some squirrel that lives underwater somewhere, aqua-squirrel— the meaning of the word squirrel would have to change again to account for this new relationship.

And this process is always going on.

To Nishitani the point is: it’s not that the word squirrel doesn’t exist, it’s not that it doesn’t point towards something at this particular moment. Same way it’s not like the self doesn’t exist for him where it’s also pointing to something in this moment.

It’s that if you were to ask: what is the essence of the self (or of the word squirrel) at its foundation— well, there isn’t one really.

In fact, to even ask that question seems to misunderstand the way that words even work. It’s in a word’s ability to change: the constantly evolving, nebulous, interdependent, relational existence of a word that really defines what it is.

So too with a self if you’re Nishitani. To him, the bottom of the self when you really pull back the layers is nothingness. No-thing-ness. Formlessness. Meaninglessness. Or if you wanted a word that could describe all of these things Mahayana Buddhism already has one.

The word is sunyata. The most direct translation of this word is going to be: emptiness.

Because if you wanted to try to put this term sunyata into more traditional Western, metaphysical terminology you would say that to Nishitani: the metaphysical foundation of being is nothingness.

But of course this would be the wrong way to put it. This wouldn’t be something that can be adequately described using ordinary language, and of course we’d never want to imply that there is some sort of durable foundation of nothingness that he’s building this worldview on top of.

The other big problem with saying it in this way is that it’d be very easy for people coming from the Western world to hear the word nothingness, and instantly think that it means something negative. That nothingness must mean that there’s a void or something. Someone could think that maybe what Nishitani is saying is that nothing really exists.

But this is incorrect. Again, this is a radically different kind of nothingness. The no-thing-ness that he is talking about is calling into question any kind of durable contrasts that supposedly exist between beings.

Remember the concept of dependent origination we just talked about. Nothing exists totally independently of anything else.

For example, think of a fire that’s burning in the woods at a campfire. What really is the difference between the wood that’s burning, the fire itself, the oxygen feeding it, and the atmosphere surrounding it?

Of course we do make distinctions here for the sake of language, and language does ultimately work by marking contrasts, describing things based on what they’re not. It’s useful for us to mark a contrast between the wood, the fire, the oxygen, the heat and everything else.

But to Nishitani at some deeper level these things are all interconnected. They really only arise in relation to one another.

What sunyata or emptiness is saying is not that none of these things exist. It’s that none of these things has a fixed, independent existence like we typically cordon them off. That there’s this deeper layer to reality that exists beyond these abstractions. Not unlike someone feeling nihilistic who thinks beyond the certainty of the stable meaning of their own religion or political ideology.

Sunyata then, in Nishitani’s work, is not some metaphysical realm somewhere else out there— like a “heaven” or any of the otherworlds that people like Nietzsche criticize. You could say it’s at a deeper layer of this reality. That Sunyata is an immanent aspect of our very existence; it is our birthright. It is something that is always there and available to us, but something is usually blocking our ability to be able to experience it.

So here we circle back to something that starts to sound like Heidegger and the mystical experiences we’ve been talking about.

It’s only by recognizing the groundless ground of the self and getting access to this more immediate connection to being that we can find another form of connection to the things around us—one that is interdependent, and free, because there’s not some fixed essence that we have to conform to or else not be “fulfilling our true purpose,” whatever that means.

So you can see the difference here from the approaches that we talked about from the more European side of things.

If his book is called The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. And if typically in the West we encounter nihilism and then use the self as a way of willing ourselves onto reality to solve the problem of nihilism. Then here’s Nishitani saying that when you view nihilism as an experiment that’s being run by a particular self— nihilism when more fully experienced eventually overcomes itself. It becomes a critical, co-constituting aspect of what our relationship to being even is.

One thing that needs to be said though is that as much as I’m trying here as a writer to come up with metaphors to help paint a picture of these ideas like sunyata or nihility— there’s a sense in which to someone like Nishitani, I could sit here all day trying to explain this and there is no metaphor that would ever be able to fully capture what it is he’s talking about.

Language and theoretical abstractions are always going to be insufficient at some level. Which is part of the reason Western philosophy has neglected sunyata and nihility for so long.

The same way you can sit around and think about death from a theoretical perspective, but still not fully understand what it is— things like sunyata and nihility are things that need to be lived and experienced to be even partially understood as well.

But all of this we just talked about in this book is only to set up what became the most famous book ever written by Nishitani. We’ll talk about it next time where we go on a similar sort of journey examining the concept of religion at this deeper level.

Thanks for reading. Talk to you next time.

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West! This is Philosophize This!

A lot of people believe that an important part of our thinking is to be able to have freedom of the will; to be able to will yourself onto situations whenever you choose to.

But is it also just as important for a person to have freedom from the will?

Last time we talked about Martin Heidegger, and a question like this is exactly the sort of thing he asked all throughout his later work. After Being and Time. After Dasein. After showing the limitations of only framing things in terms of subjects and objects, willing ourselves onto reality—he moves on to a very interesting stage of his philosophy where the main thing that he wants to explore in his work is what he calls “releasement” or “letting-be.”

See to Heidegger: if the world around us is made up of a bunch of people that have a technological enframing of everything—where every thing and every one is just an object that we need to will ourselves onto, structure, manipulate, and optimize—and if by doing that it leads to a world where we’re constantly seeing everything in terms of how to manipulate it to produce the most efficient outcome, then what would happen if someone decided there was more to life than doing that all the time?

What if someone didn’t buy the whole sales pitch that you’re a bad person if you aren’t constantly trying to educate yourself about the problems of seven and a half billion people? What if there’s more to what we are than constantly trying to save the world all the time through rational utilitarianism?

What if somebody instead decided to focus on trying to understand the nature of their own being better—putting in the work to maybe try to uncover a far more meaningful, richer, fuller experience of what it is to even exist?

Well, first of all: real question. Should this person have to apologize for spending their time in this way?

In other words, is this just a poorly disguised move of a selfish person who’s ignoring all of the really important work we have to do of projecting ourselves onto the world and fixing it?

Or could this more meaningful connection with the world be something that we’re sadly missing in the modern world—something people have not only forgotten as they spiritually drown every day in their political video game—and could it be something that explains why Heidegger’s Dasein we talked about last podcast could ever be such a foreign concept for most people to wrap their heads around?

Is a pre-theoretical, more immediate connection with our existence just a bunch of religious nonsense? Or are there things specifically about the type of modern world that we’re living in that prevent people from accessing this kind of experience more often?

Releasement, or letting-be, to Heidegger is going to involve us going from the standard subject/object framing of things—freedom of the will in the Nietzschean sense—to freedom from the will, more along the lines of the work of people like Simone Weil.

Still someone might say: look if people are going to get on board with this whole idea, Heidegger, you’re still going to have to convince us all that this is possible. I mean, what evidence do we have of the fact that anyone is ever operating outside the framing of subject/object?

What, a bunch of people reporting their own experience of it? Are we talking about religious mystics that take drugs and go horseback riding with Jesus in a vision?

As a modern, scientifically minded person that doesn’t do drugs, how am I supposed to take any of this stuff seriously?

Well, since you brought it up, hypothetical person, let’s talk about mysticism today.

If you wanted to find a gateway in to this more immediate connection to being that people are claiming to have had throughout history—well, there’s many different gateways out there, you could say. And one of the pieces of low-hanging fruit here is going to be the long tradition of what’s come to be known as mysticism.

There’s actually quite a lot to what mysticism is. You could spend decades reading about it and have only really touched a piece of the kinds of profound experiences that people have said they’ve gotten to.

And to be clear: today’s episode is not supposed to be an overview of mysticism in full, as though that’s even possible. What it is, though, is an attempt to clear up some common misconceptions about mysticism—how it’s been framed as irrational, delusional, or the antonym to philosophy. And the hope is to open someone’s mind up to the importance of mysticism as one of these potential gateways out of some of these narrow-thinking traps we sometimes fall into, specifically in the modern world.

We’re going into all of this in detail. And the vehicle today for doing this—to give this post some structure—are going to be some of the arguments making a case for mysticism from the philosopher Simon Critchley’s new book on mysticism. Always want to turn you onto great philosophy stuff I’m into.

The book has a similar goal to his book on tragedy we recently talked about: in a world where we don’t have an idealistic way of framing reality anymore, does that sentence us to lives where we have no meaning or purpose connected to anything?

Well, if you wanted to think in a different way where things didn’t seem so alienated, how would you do that in a secular way? Greek tragedy, Heidegger, mysticism—these are three approaches that Simon Critchley has dedicated a significant portion of his time here on this earth trying to open people’s minds up to.

But how about this question that our hypothetical skeptic asked from before? As a modern person, how are you supposed to take anything someone says seriously who calls themselves a mystic? I mean, isn’t that the last thing you’d ever want to put on a job application?

The first step in digging into this area is going to be to say that most of these people throughout history that we would call “mystics” today didn’t in fact think of themselves as mystics.

Mystic is a word that was actually created fairly recently— around the 1700s. And it was created in a very specific cultural climate that was hostile towards the more religious approach that many of these “mystics” were immersed in.

This is around the time of Immanuel Kant. Critchley says Kant and people like him around this time thought that philosophers were kind of like the policemen of thinking. That it’s a philosopher’s job to protect us from all the dogma and the fanaticism out there.

So anybody claiming to be walking around having religious experiences that can’t even really be described using ordinary language—well, we’re skeptical of that kind of stuff as good philosophers, it was said. These people are going to be a problem.

Critchley thinks this misunderstanding that was taken up by many thinkers from around this time has led to the term “mystic” being used, at least in philosophy circles, almost as an insult.

Mystics are irrational! They can’t even explain what it is they’re experiencing! Mysticism is just where you go if you’re a charlatan that has nothing useful to say—you just go hide behind a bunch of flowery-sounding words and hock your latest video course.

But again it should be said: the reality when it comes to mysticism is that almost all of these people that we would call mystics today didn’t call themselves that.

And they also weren’t people that thought of themselves as opposed to reason in any way.

None of these people were irrational. Most of these people were achieving what we now call “mystical experiences” by devoting themselves to a highly rational engagement with the texts and practices of their time.

For example, medieval Christian mystics like St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross—these are people that devoted multiple hours, every day of their life, to contemplative prayer and rational meditation. In the Jewish tradition, Kabbalists would spend years of their life decoding and contemplating the meanings hidden in Hebrew scriptures—deep rational engagement with these texts every day. Sufi mystics practiced dhikr, where they would repeat divine names over and over again in specific, highly structured ways, just to try to cultivate more clarity and stillness.

Point is: this is not the picture of someone that’s hostile towards rationality. This is the picture of someone highly committed to a devotional practice that they gave everything they had to.

So if mysticism isn’t about rejecting rationality like philosophers of the past might have us believe, then what is it really about if we’re clearing the air here?

One of the things Critchley says that’s important to consider is just how difficult it is to define something like mysticism, because when we do it in such a general way, we’re always grouping together people from such different points in history with different cultures, religions, and languages.

On the one hand, it’s difficult to put them all into one basket and say that they’re the same thing. But on the other hand, when you listen to what they were describing in their testimonies, there’s enough of an overlap between what they say that we can pretty confidently say there’s something these people were witnessing that’s along the same lines.

And if we had to give an example of a type of common mystical experience just for the sake of this post: a starting point might be the description given by the theologian Bernard McGinn, who says that mystical experiences typically fall into two different categories:

One is where someone transcends the self and experiences a feeling of unity or communion with the divine or something greater than themselves. The other is in the opposite direction—where the self dissolves or is pushed aside, similarly making room for an experience where the normal lines are blurred between ourselves and something greater that we’re all a part of.

Now, after getting to here, mystics will often report all sorts of emotions that then flood over them—from a deep feeling of peace, to ecstasy, to love, to awe and connection, to even fear—as they are hit with something that feels, on one hand, so alien to their normal everyday experience, but also deeply real.

Most of them say it feels more real than reality, and significant in a way that feels impossible to fully put into words.

That said: there are also many different types of mysticism that approach these experiences from different premises than this one. Some types of mysticism will even steer into the self as a starting point.

What we’re laying out here focusing on the boundaries of the self, is again, just a very common type of mystical experience that people all across history have described. And it’s arguably the best place to start if we want to have a frame of reference for opening people up to this being more than just religion.

That said: no matter how scientific of a person you are, when you hear about so many people from history across cultures having a common experience like this one we just described, you have to ask: what explains this?

Is the best theory that this is just a bunch of delusional monkey brains, collectively tripping on a hallucinogenic called religion? Or are these people really having an experience with something that they’re describing as the divine— with something beyond rational comprehension or words?

And the question Simon Critchley wants to ask is just using secular language here to start out: if this was a type of aesthetic experience that was available to you as a person, in theory, would you be interested in experiencing it if you could?

Would you want to feel an utterly transformative connection to the divine if that was something that was possible?

And I gotta imagine a lot of skeptics out there might say back, “uh, yeah. I guess. But what are we even talking about here? The problem’s not that I don’t want to feel this way. The problem is that there’s nothing out there that’s what you’re calling the divine. If somebody says my self has dissolved away and I’m feeling a connection with God… show me the man in the sky with a staff that they’re talking to or else I’m tempted to file this one under the delusional monkey category myself!”

In other words: show me the material, causal explanation for this divine thing that they’re experiencing. Because if they can’t, then are we just abandoning the notion that our experiences have to correspond to some reality? This is unscientific and dangerous.

And while this is an understandable response from the subject/object framing of things, to Simon Critchley this misses the point of what’s even being talked about in this more phenomenological framing of things, where the subjective experience itself is what we’re studying—not how mental events correspond to some material cause.

Put another way: when I am highly committed to a devotional practice for months or years of my life, and when I am doing deep readings of liturgical texts every day, when I am doing hundreds of hours of meditating, praying, visualizing, fasting, being in solitude, sitting in nature with the intention of surrendering the boundaries of my self over to allow space for something greater to reveal itself in a moment— and then when having done that I feel an overwhelming connection to everything and everyone around me, when time dilates and feels almost like it ceases to exist, when something expands out of me that feels not like I’m tripping but like I’m actually seeing things for the first time without the filters—something difficult for me to explain what it is I’m experiencing in rational terms— is that experience that I’m having not real?

Is it less real than the objects that are in the world?

Subjectively, this is a real experience I am having. It’s one that many other people have had historically. And from a phenomenological perspective, subjective experience is something that’s worthy of being studied simply in its own right.

In other words, the validity of this type of experience comes down not to whether it connects to some cause in the material world. The reality of this goes on at the level of subjective transformation. So if you’re studying that transformation the more relevant question becomes: not what is the material cause of it, but is there a devotional practice that is possible that can reliably lead human beings to this type of subjective experience? Is a state of consciousness like this something that we can cultivate?

But see: Critchley might want to stop you right there if you started using words like consciousness. Heidegger also wouldn’t want to bring this kind of word in to describe what it is we’re talking about. It just reduces what this is to something that brings in far too many dualistic assumptions about the mind being separate from the body.

But maybe there’s a way here to use the idea of consciousness to open someone up that’s skeptical of this whole line of conversation to things that aren’t very easily described by rationality alone.

Everybody that’s listened to the consciousness episodes of the podcast knows that consciousness is one of the most mysterious and exciting things that we have to study in the sciences these days. Tons of different theories about it, you can start to consider how mysterious the concept of consciousness even is, and then you can go a step further: you can realize that consciousness is really just a word.

It’s a label we came up with that tries to rationally constrict something that’s possibly too complicated to ever tie down with rational language.

It’s possible we’re using one word here to describe 100 different things that intersect and could be studied more accurately at an individual level. It’s possible there are things that we’re lumping in under the banner of “consciousness” that are just not things that can even be studied at the subject/object level—things like the existential structures of Dasein that we talked about in the last post on Heidegger.

Now you can say back to this: well, so what? This is what we do in the sciences. We need a word that we can use to start having these conversations. And then, over time, with a better understanding, our words will improve, the way we talk about it will become more sophisticated. This is how the history of science works!

None of this is to put science down. This is simply to illustrate that the universe out there, regardless of whether our words are sufficient to be able to describe it, in some other basic sense the universe is just going on all the time—always moving, in all of its unbridled, enormous complexity.

And just because we have a word that we use to describe a particular set of phenomena doesn’t mean that it’s encapsulating all of it. In fact, rationality, just in general, is a constricting type of process. We are always trying to use rationality to create simplified abstractions about the universe that are manageable for human minds to comprehend and work with as we go throughout our lives.

And here’s the larger point: not only do there seem to be hard limits to what rational parameters like words can ever hope to describe, but the type of rational terms we have to experience the world with play a part in determining the phenomenological experiences that are possible for us to have.

And Simon Critchley makes the case that when you consider the list of people who have claimed to have these “mystic” experiences that we have records of—people like Julian of Norwich (she was a medieval Catholic), Meister Eckhart (he was a Dominican monk), Rumi (who was a Sufi mystic), Marguerite Porete (she was another Christian):

One thing that starts to seem clear, he says, is that having a concept in the way that you frame the world—for the divine, or for God, or for something greater than yourself—just having the concept available to you in the way that you frame things seems to highly increase your chances of having one of these mystical experiences that lead to this deeper connection with being.

If I’m a skeptic I say back, “Okay. And if I believe in a leprechaun, it’s way easier to believe there’s a pot o’ gold at the end of a rainbow. But what does that have anything to do with my reality?”

Well, think about what our tendencies often are for categorizing the range of experiences that we have as modern, scientifically minded people.

If you were out on a hike walking along a trail, sunlight breaks through the trees, wind lifts the smell of dirt from when it rained the night before as you come to a clearing at elevation. And when you witness the view of this clearing—rolling green hills as far as the eye can see, a thick carpet of life and beauty stirs in you a feeling of fear that you’re out stuck in the middle of it with no immediate way out— and if in that moment you were to feel a sense of overwhelm start to come over you, overwhelm that turns to humility, humility to wonder at what in the name of Christ all this even is; and if that feeling started to build into a direction that starts to get somewhere beyond words…what do we often do in this kind of moment as scientifically minded people?

We instantly start trying to rationally subordinate the moment and the feelings going on, and turn them into things we can understand, manipulate, and optimize for efficiency.

“This feeling of overwhelm—well, I did only get about six hours of sleep last night, so everything’s a little much for me today. And that curiosity that I feel is really something that’s a survival mechanism for me trying to get knowledge about my environment. And that humility—well, my stepdad was pretty hard on me when I was a kid, so of course my first instinct would be to feel humble in the face of something so powerful.”

Nowhere here was there ever an opportunity for you to feel a part of anything deeper. You were always just keeping it at arm’s length through rationally categorizing it into something you can control.

Simon Critchley has an entire confession section in the book On Mysticism where he describes one of these experiences of letting constant doubt prevent him from feeling something that could’ve otherwise been life-changing in one of these moments. This is a common place we can find ourselves in.

Couple this with another place we often find ourselves in the modern world: any time you get five seconds to sit and just be with the world around you and pay attention to it— you’re often scrolling on your phone. The stuff we’re left to scroll through is often something that is such a shallow take of reality how could it ever offer a perspective shift? It’s often designed purposefully to reinforce your bias and get you even further locked in to the narrow way you’re framing things.

The irony of you reading this right now is not lost on me. Shame on everyone else, am I right?

With how much media is designed to just make you scared all the time and constantly worried about the future, how could you ever summon the vulnerability required to have one of these experiences if you are constantly needing to keep shields up?

Critchley says that adulthood, at least as most people live these days, is the abdication of ecstasy. He thinks we live so much of our lives as adults obsessing over ourselves and our own egos that it makes it next to impossible for us to experience this entire other side of what life can be.

His point is: for most people that are alive today that are what we call “responsible adults”; when are we ever in a place where we’re not doing something?

When are we ever in a situation where we can just put aside everything for a while and feel some of this juicy, no-self ecstasy that Critchley’s talking about? It’s incredibly rare.

Now contrast this with what it was like to live as some of these devoted religious followers that have claimed to have these mystic experiences.

Imagine Julian of Norwich. She was someone who lived through the Bubonic Plague. All day for weeks she would be tucked away in a tiny cell as what’s called an anchoress, spending most of her time devoting herself to contemplation or prayer, life cut down to the absolute essentials—silence, solitude, scripture, and the rawness of her own thoughts.

Imagine living a life like that. How much would insecurity rule your life?

Or take Meister Eckhart. A Dominican monk who lived during a time where to be an intellectual close to the realm of philosophy involved you spending thousands of hours of your life deeply studying the religious texts that dominated the halls of thought at the time.

In other words, you didn’t have a cellphone to turn to. You just sacrificed yourself over to this near constant process of religious contemplation.

Part of the reason I even bring this up is to say that Critchely advises: if you have a hard time getting to a place that one of these people are describing—don’t be too hard on yourself. Truthfully, you’re living in a world that makes it incredibly difficult to gain access to this in the first place.

But say you still really wanted to. You commit yourself and say I’m gonna find some time; I’m gonna make this whole experience happen.

Still, what if you don’t believe in any sort of higher power? Critchley said it himself: this stuff is way easier if you already have a belief in a God, but what if I don’t? Look, I don’t believe in God objectively, phenomenologically, ergonomically, any of them.

Well, one thing Critchley might recommend is to not see this as a zero-sum game, where you’re either having a mystical experience, feeling a total dissolution of the self, or else you’re not having anything. There are many different shades of mystical experiences, and it may, in fact, be necessary for you to experience these things at a lower level of intensity before it’s possible for you to navigate to the places of these famous mystics who people are still talking about.

If you wanted to start somewhere, despite being in one of the worst times to stumble upon one of these experiences— Simon Critchley thinks you’re living in one of the most privileged times to access it with some effort.

It used to be that to have one of these mystic experiences, you would need to be a devoted follower of a religion of some sort. But he says something happened— notably after the Protestant Reformation in the Western world—where these experiences became democratized in a way that had never really been available before.

All of a sudden it was possible for someone to feel variations of these things through artwork and aesthetic experiences more generally. All of a sudden things like music and poetry became where most people interested could use it as an access point.

And for the record: it’s no coincidence to Critchley that so many of the people we’d call mystics from the history of the world have turned to poetry, specifically, as a way to try to express these experiences when normal language doesn’t seem to do the trick.

Heidegger also, in his later work, makes a similar move. He says so often the language that we use frames reality in terms of the ontic—where every sentence we say is structured in a way that is about subjects acting on and manipulating a realm of objects. John emptied the trash can. Susan got a new job.

But see, poetry is a type of art that opens things up to a whole different kind of expression. So often poetry is written from a human, phenomenological point of view. In fact, the human experience is often presupposed when you’re reading a poem.

Take one example of this from an excerpt called The Great Wagon by the legendary Sufi mystic known as Rumi. Compare the subject/object sentence structure that we usually speak in to the way that he writes when he describes this scene:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.”

The story’s the same from so many mystics over the course of history. Whatever it is they’re experiencing in this place where the self dissolves, where they’re always already a part of something bigger that they can’t really express— poetry just feels to them like it gets a bit closer than ordinary language does.

But Simon Critchley says if you were a modern person, with all the resources typically available to us, there’s no reason for you to restrict yourself just to poetry if you wanted to explore this stuff more deeply.

He says, “there’s no such thing as an atheist when you’re listening to music you love.”

In other words, music, he thinks, is another very effective access point into the mystic. Because in a world that’s often completely shaped by money and disenchantment, music becomes something that reanimates it. You can just lose yourself listening to a song at a level that involves a kind of surrender of the ego. To Critchley this can be similar to a mystical experience.

Now, don’t get him wrong. He’s not saying it’s the same. He’s not saying this equates to following a devotional practice. But look, if you wanted to use the tools you have as a modern person to start moving in this direction a bit more, you could do a lot worse than trying to push yourself aside and feel your favorite music as deeply as possible.

Another access point he talks about is the power of a deep reading of a philosophical text as a substitute for one of these religious texts.

Once again, it’s not the same thing. But taken seriously enough—if you read a work of philosophy with some humility, if you’re truly working to surrender yourself over to the process of internalizing these ideas, particularly the type of philosophy that tries to challenge the limits of human thought—this definitely has the potential to get you more into this place where you’re “letting-be” and allowing ideas and new ways of thinking to reveal themselves.

I guess the throughline here that needs to be said is that it’s highly unlikely you’re just going to listen to a song one day or read some new philosophy book and just fall on the ground and start convulsing.

Just like I was saying last time with Heidegger’s philosophy, this change often goes down most of the time in small increments, over the course of months or years, like a glacial drift in the direction of seeing things without so many filters on all the time. But isn’t that what all real change feels like sometimes.

And for the record: yes, meditation, nature, fasting, prayer, religion, reading, music—any of these things and more can be a move towards a bit of freedom from the will. And it’s my belief that this book by Simon Critchley is written to be yet another one of these things that can start a shift in your thinking in this direction.

Anything that leads to this religious kind of self-emptying will help here. Next post will be on a completely different type of self-emptying, what happens when we take Nihilism to the point that it gets us to question the foundation of the self.

Recommended Reading

1. Simon Critchley, On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy (Profile Books, 2024).

2. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (orig. 1902; many in-print editions, e.g., Random House Modern Library, 1999).
   
   

3. Mirabai Starr, Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground (HarperOne, 2024).

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So, if I wanted to set myself up for failure here today, I’d tell you I was going to explain all of Heidegger to you in about 30 minutes. Luckily, I’m too old to make that mistake, and you’re too old to be believing it anyway.

But one thing I can hope to do today is to tell you something I think is very jarring—and pretty awesome—about Heidegger’s work. As well as something significant that will help you place him in however you think about the history of philosophy.

Heidegger was one of the most important members of a movement in philosophy that was trying to question metaphysics.

This is around the 1920s—it’s the beginning of his career—and in many ways, as a German thinker himself, he’s reacting to the ripple effect created by the work of another German thinker: a guy we’ve been talking about lately named Friedrich Nietzsche.

If you’ve read the last few posts then you know Nietzsche thought his work was the twilight of the idols from the history of philosophy. That one of the things included in that list of idols was the long set of traditions philosophers had built up in the field of metaphysics.

Nietzsche says we’re going to stop all this unverifiable speculation about ideal, other-worldly stuff. To just focus on the here and now— he really thinks his work is moving beyond this whole metaphysical tradition.

Well Heidegger was someone who agreed with Nietzsche that we have to get away from metaphysics, but he ultimately said that Nietzsche didn’t go far enough. Heidegger makes the claim that every piece of philosophy Nietzsche ever wrote was built on top of a metaphysical foundation that is completely wrong about the nature of being.

What was he talking about there?

He’s talking about making the assumption that as human beings: we are primarily subjects, that are living in a world of objects.

Now trust me: I get that your first response to reading that might be, “Well, what’s wrong with that? I mean aren’t we?”

My goal here if I can do anything in this post is to explain three things: One, where Heidegger’s coming from with this critique. Two, how this critique from his book Being and Time completely changed the way a lot of philosophers even think about the task of philosophy. And three, how ultimately Heidegger thinks a very easy trap to fall into if you’re an intelligent person in the modern world is to get trapped in Plato’s cave.

But not trapped in Plato’s cave like it’s typically said! Where all you see are the shadows on the cave wall. That’s the old version of this trap.

The trap for a lot of people in the modern world, for Heidegger, is to get yourself stuck in the allegory of the cave—or to think of yourself as a person who just needs to remove the cultural bias, the linguistic or historical biases that are in your way– and that if only you can do that fully, then you’ll eventually get access to the truth that lies on the other side of all these barriers.

Heidegger thinks this is nonsense and that it misunderstands a fuller picture of what human existence is. By the end of this today you’ll understand why.

It should be said that to him: it’s not just Nietzsche that’s building his philosophy on faulty metaphysics—it’s essentially the entire history of philosophy.

And if you’re someone reading this post who thinks of yourself as a subject in a world of objects; one person from the history of philosophy you can send a thank-you card to for that is René Descartes.

Cartesian subjectivity, as it’s called: “I think, therefore I am.” The assumption is that that’s the starting point of any further analysis we’re going to do.

Assumptions like: I am a self, a subject, a mind. I exist in a spatial realm of objects that is outside of me. And that one of the big tasks of philosophy is going to be to figure out what the relationship is between me, as a subject, and all the objects out there—or for that matter all the other subjects out there.

This is the dualistic set of assumptions that a lot of Western thinking is built upon.

And to some people this may not even seem like an assumption. But Heidegger says that while this may be the level at which we normally analyze things in philosophy or in the sciences, this isn’t the primary way we experience what it is to be.

If you wanted philosophical terms here: Heidegger’s going to make a case that there is something ontologically prior to any claim we make about how subjects relate to objects.

That any claim about how things relate to other things is ultimately a secondary, theoretical abstraction we’re making. That there’s something to our existence that comes before any of this—something that makes abstractions like science or the history of philosophy even possible.

The first thing he wants us to do is try to throw out all the philosophical terms people have used throughout history when they’ve tried to describe what being is. Because these are all created by philosophers who haven’t really taken the question of being as seriously as they could have.

So out go terms like subject, consciousness, person, the self as they’ve typically been used— out goes the mind/body distinction.

And for the sake of Heidegger’s point here: try as hard as you can for a minute to forget any of these terms. What he wants to do is to open our minds to the possibility of an entirely different framing of what human existence is at bottom.

The word Heidegger uses to describe our existence in his early work is Dasein. The English translation of this word is being-there.

Think of Dasein not as a mind with a detached material body in the way Descartes and many other philosophers assume, but as a type of existence that is always spatially situated in the world.

Heads up this section is going to need to be a bit mind-bending because it’s calling into question things fundamental to the way we see everything. It’s also something that exists beyond language for reasons we’ll get to. Just saying: I’ll do my best to offer metaphors when I can.

And one metaphor here that the philosopher Simon Critchley uses in his work on Heidegger is he asks his readers to try thinking of the “substance” of Dasein as existence itself—though of course, at some other level: we’re not talking about substance at all here; this is just a way to try to help shift your thinking about metaphysics.

The point of this metaphor is that, for Heidegger, before we ever identify ourselves as a self or a subject, before we ever even start talking, using words about the relationships between external things—there’s a more fundamental being going on that makes any of these abstractions possible.

Dasein is Heidegger’s name for the kinds of beings we are. And Dasein is something that can be understood not in terms of studying the atoms that make it up. But in terms of the existential structures that make up what it is for this type of existence to be.

Another metaphor that can be helpful here is that when it comes to the kinds of beings we are: Dasein, is more of a who than it is a what.

We are not a being that is in the world. We are: being-in-the-world.

But being-in-the-world is just one existential structure of many that constitute the kinds of beings we are. Heidegger gives others like: understanding, temporality, care, thrownness—each one of these things and more is an important existential structure of the type of being Dasein is.

Let me give examples of each of these as another way of opening up this alternative framing of our being. I’ll use the kind of example Heidegger uses in the book; I’ll just make it a bit more modern.

Again Heidegger says despite how natural it can seem to think of yourself as a detached subject analyzing things external to you— this isn’t how you spend most of your life interacting with the world. Most of your time is spent in the world.

When you walk across the floor interacting with the “external” world– you’re not thinking about the floor as an external object with properties you can study.

No, your experience is that you just walk on the floor to get somewhere you need to go; the floor as a theoretical object you could study fades into the background.

Another example: when you type on a keyboard writing an email, you aren’t thinking about the keyboard as an external thing.

In your existential experience of this “thing”, the keyboard becomes a type of equipment that fades into the background as you accomplish a task that matters to you. The keyboard becomes an extension of you, not some abstract thing.

Now to Heidegger, this is the primary level that we experience the world: being-in-the-world. And the point is, if you were trying to describe what type of being we are— we’re not isolated subjects who, every now and then, decide to pay attention to the world and reflect on things.

No, Dasein is a type of being that is always already in a world, involved, immersed in a kind of fascination and care for the things in that world. Dasein is a fundamentally relational being, that exists in a giant network of meaning—or as he puts it: a referential totality.

What he’s saying is that there is no objective, ultimate metaphysical separation between mind and body, or between who you are—whatever that means—and what the world is.

Being and world are fundamentally unified. They have never not been unified. And when you try to split mind and body, subject and object, as though these things are separate— well, this leads to a whole bunch of problems in philosophy that, unsurprisingly to Heidegger, the greatest minds haven’t been able to solve for thousands of years now.

Because consider another common way we categorize things like that keyboard in a different set of circumstances.

Like I said: when the keyboard is just an extension of us—when you’re using it to type an email and not thinking of it as a separate object—Heidegger calls that keyboard something ready-to-hand. It’s the equipment of Dasein in the world.

But when something happens to that keyboard—say it breaks—and we take a step back and see the keyboard in a more abstract, theoretical way as an object; it becomes something different to us at that point: something present-at-hand. It becomes part of this category of things that are abstract, theoretical concepts.

So if our primary experience of the world is with things that are ready-to-hand. The more abstract, theoretical framing of science and classical philosophy turns the world into a collection of things that are present-at-hand.

Now to be clear (and forgive me for repeating this point a bit throughout the rest of this because I think it’s really important and one of the big misunderstandings of Heidegger): none of this is saying that looking at things in an abstract, theoretical way is bad. Science and philosophy are enormously good and should be done.

Heidegger’s point here is descriptive: he’s saying this is a level of abstraction that is secondary—that there is something to our being that is ontologically prior, something that makes important abstractions like this even possible.

The most common way to view things in the world these days if you’re a philosopher or a scientist is to look for naturalistic explanations for things.

If something exists “out there,” outside of me—then the best way to understand it is to find its origins in nature and then explain how it fits into that naturalistic framework.

And as important as this is for doing many things, for Heidegger, this is not the only way to frame reality. It is certainly not the final word on what reality is.

In his terminology: this is always a study of the ontic, rather than the ontological. The ontic is the study of beings—how things like trees, asteroids, volcanoes relate to each other. The ontological is the study of being itself.

And a key mistake he’s going to say many people make when they get too caught up in the subject/object framing is that they try to explain everything through categories that only make sense when discussing how things relate to other things—or the ontic.

For example, the philosophical problem of free will and determinism only really seems like a big problem when you’re trapped in the framing that everything is an object requiring a causal explanation— where people are just another object in some giant science experiment.

The thinking goes: if I can tell where a rock will be on the other side of the galaxy simply by knowing its position and the laws of the universe, then if I had total knowledge of everything—like Laplace’s demon—why shouldn’t I be able to predict everything somebody is going to do before they do it?

But to Martin Heidegger: this is a category error– this is like asking how much the number three weighs, or what does justice taste like when it’s administered properly.

It tries to apply causal explanations that work at the ontic level to something like Dasein, which exists ontologically.

Quick aside: he’d actually have a lot to ask about the assumptions someone brings in about causality in the first place—talking as though there’s a single causal chain that can’t be broken, constantly moving into the future, like gravity. That’s a huge assumption. Secondly, to use scientific language for a second, is it possible to be totally caused by forces that are themselves unpredictable? This obsession with turning human beings into computers that can be studied and predicted like rocks in the universe is something he’d expect from a framing that treats people this way, leading to these outcomes in society.

Dasein, on the other hand, is the type of being that exists temporally, or in time. Part of what makes it the type of being it is, is that it is first thrown into a world not of its own creation. Where then via time it projects itself into the future based on the possibilities available to it.

What this means is that agency is just a part of the structure of what makes Dasein the type of being it is; Dasein is always intimately tied to past, present, and future. And if Heidegger is successful in his philosophy: then the problem of free will as it’s traditionally been discussed in Cartesian dualism just dissolves.

Another problem from the history of philosophy that starts to lose staying power is the seemingly impossible task of deriving meaning from a cold, disinterested universe.

Because seeing that as a problem is always starting your analysis from a place where you’re capable of framing the universe as abstract, cold, and disinterested—but the only way you can ever reach that judgment requires you to be embedded in the existential structures of Dasein that make anything intelligible or meaningful at all.

See to him, as Dasein, when I look out at the world and understand anything about it— that is not me accessing the truth of the universe; that is being revealing itself through me in some very partial way–- where the language, culture, and historical biases I carry are not barriers in the way of me seeing the truth like in Plato’s cave, but they’re the very things that make it even possible for me to experience being, even partially.

A common metaphor used to nudge your thinking in this direction is to compare Dasein to a beam of light that’s cast into a dark room—where it partially reveals what’s inside, but it also is existentially connected to the things it’s revealing.

It’s in this sense that Dasein is the kind of being that reveals a world that is meaningful and significant. There’s no “view from nowhere” where we can have perfect protocols and get objective knowledge. And for him obviously any way that being is partially revealed to Dasein will require an analysis from the perspective of Dasein.

This point from Heidegger is one of many from around this time that mark a shift in the history of philosophy: from typical questions about epistemology to now questions of ontology.

Instead of asking as earlier philosophers did: How do we know that our knowledge is the objective truth? What rational protocols make our knowledge as objective as possible?

Many philosophers around this time are starting to ask: What is it about someone’s experience that reveals the world in this way? How do the very structures of our phenomenological experience make any claim to truth possible in the first place?

This is a very important shift it turns out.

So obviously, if you completely bypassed your existence at this ontological level and started from the place that you are a subject who’s taking a step back examining a world of objects–- then of course it’s possible to reduce things to a collection of cold, meaningless objects.

But would that be a complete picture of your existence? Or is there more to it than that?

What would I be focusing on if I wanted to get more in touch with pre-theoretical human experience?

These sorts of questions are what make Heidegger think that philosophers need a new level of appreciation for examining not elaborate systems, but average, every day, lived experience—phenomenologically.

When you focus on lived experience, when you stop doing so much abstract, theoretical thinking about what life is, you start noticing just how important two things are to the kind of existence you’re living every day: being and time—hence the name of this book.

In fact: he thinks it becomes much more possible to notice all of those existential structures of Dasein we talked about and how impossible it becomes to see things through this framing in a cold disinterested sort of way. Space is a great example/metaphor to open this point up more.

On the one hand: when you make an abstraction out of the world; you can view something like space in terms of cold, disinterested units: feet, centimeters, kilometers, miles. You can do that.

But on the other hand, at this pre-theoretical level, for Dasein: space is always already imbued with meaning and significance.

Four miles is not always just four miles. If there’s a donut shop four miles away from you—and donuts aren’t important to you—then four miles is too far. But if that donut is your favorite donut, and they’re going out of business, and this is the last time you’ll ever taste that sprinkley-chocolately goodness— four miles isn’t far at all.

That is how Dasein interacts with space—not just in cold, calculable units.

When you’re in your living room and see the stuff around you: that stuff isn’t just cold, meaningless stuff. That’s your stuff. That’s your living room that you made in a way that means something to you and the projects you engage in.

It’s not until we make space into an abstract theoretical that it can ever become meaningless to us. Or lack enough of a “reason” behind it. Under the framing of Dasein: meaning and purpose dissolve as “problems,” at least as they’ve been presented traditionally throughout the history of philosophy.

Consider time as another example of this. Time in one sense could be viewed as just an endless linear progression of seconds grouped into minutes, hours, days.

But time, in the world of Dasein, grounds the meaning of anything we choose to do.

Heidegger says there are philosophers who talk about discovering who they really are through a confrontation with God, but in his work it’s more through a confrontation with time. Because by confronting death, and more importantly the finite nature of the time you have here as a being—you disclose what Heidegger calls your “ownmost possibility.”

As I said at the start, I can’t explain Heidegger in 30 minutes. There’s much more to Dasein—not least how we are always in relation to other Daseins and what that means.

But having done the work we have so far let me try to make point number three about this modern trap that’s easy to fall into for an intelligent person, as well as the trap he thinks society in general has fallen into.

Imagine being born into our world, inheriting a lot of Enlightenment optimism, Christian idealism, believing you are a mind inside a body. You imagine that there’s one way the universe reveals itself, and that getting to that objective truth should be one of our biggest priorities.

You look around for inspiration. You see scientists, philosophers—the people committed to finding the truth. And what do they generally say to do?

“Study objects out there and how they relate to each other. Find the best ways to know exactly what these objects are and then manipulate them to your advantage. Because not only will that get us closer to the truth, but it will also produce technology that can do miraculous stuff and make people’s lives better—more efficient, more optimized. This is what we have to do!”

And imagine hearing this and thinking, “Yeah, I’m on board. I’m going to remove my cultural bias, make sure language doesn’t get in the way of truth, remove how history shades my thinking. If only I can do all this fully I’ll finally get out of Plato’s cave and see truth rather than shadows.”

But if Heidegger’s right here then we can guess the outcomes this sole framing of the world will lead to for this person.

They’ll struggle with nihilism because they’ve bypassed the ontological level and are trying to create meaning out of theoretical abstractions. They’ll live in confusion about subjectivity, consciousness, free will, and determinism because they’re always committing a category error. They’ll see culture and language as barriers to truth rather than things that make their experience of being even possible to be revealed.

And for the last time in this post: none of Heidegger’s work is saying that we shouldn’t view things in terms of subjects and objects. This isn’t about finding some ultimate framing that does everything.

He’s saying maybe framing the world in a singular way was always going to be incomplete. That maybe certain elements of being are described better or worse with different framings. And that ultimately, we might need multiple framings to understand the complexity of our world.

Perhaps if you over-index on any one of these framings you’ll inevitably run into predictable problems when that way of framing things reaches its limits.

You can see where he agrees with Nietzsche here while also critiquing him: Heidegger definitely thinks we need to move away from concepts like the ideal— from abstract metaphysical concepts that we build a philosophy on top of. But he also thinks that Nietzsche, when he creates concepts like the will to power, the Übermensch, the transvaluation of all values, to Heidegger this is him obviously building an approach that’s overly rooted in the subject/object framing.

Last episode, we talked about Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche—where Deleuze in many ways rescues Nietzsche’s work from this critique by turning it into a metaphysics of forces instead of the subject.

But think of what Heidegger’s critique means about the state of the world if it’s true. We’ve been talking about capitalism, communism, corporatism, and how to construct societies in a way that maximizes well-being or flourishing—so many cliché words we’ve been throwing around lately.

Well, if Heidegger is right, then this whole way of framing our world in terms of maximizing outcomes—any mode of governing like this—will likely be corrupted by what he calls a technological enframing of people and society.

See technology, for Heidegger, is not smartphones and rocketships; technology is a way of thinking that dominates our modern world. We always look at people and things as objects, present-at-hand; people that are ripe to be understood, manipulated, and optimized for some outcome that someone has come up with.

In other words, if we ask, “What is the role of capitalism in the problems people face? Would the world be better without capitalism?” It’s not that Heidegger wouldn’t have thoughts on capitalism or specific policies, but zoomed out enough, he would likely see capitalism as just a symptom of a larger sickness at the level of being.

Because if you remove capitalism and then replace it with another system—it would still be a system created by people overly indexed in the subject/object framing. We’d likely see similar negative outcomes until we can view people and the world not as just a warehouse of stuff to manipulate.

A couple of clarifications. By the end of Heidegger’s career, Dasein and his work in Being and Time were not the primary way he thinks we should look at our relationship to being.

If anything, Being and Time is a proof of concept—it's an exercise in reframing what the concept of being is in one potential way that, by doing this work, bending our minds and seeing through our set of metaphysical assumptions: this can loosen us from framing things only through a singular way.

By the end of his work, Heidegger accepts how truly mysterious certain aspects of being are—things practically impossible to categorize in language or rational arguments.

He gives a lot of interesting thoughts during this phase of his life: That Being is something that reveals and conceals itself simultaneously. That Being is something we are a part of in ways deeply mysterious compared to our average experience. But then at the same time: starting with our average experience is ironically the only way to reach this place.

Lot of interesting thoughts— but what is he even talking about? I mean truthfully: if you’re saying this stuff and it’s apparently so crazy it defies language so you can’t even tell me about it: how can I, as a reader, ever tell the difference between a legitimate point and needless obscurity?

You can find plenty of insecure people in this world obscuring things just to sound deep.

Next post, we’ll dive into this whole sector of being Heidegger’s talking about, but we’re going to do it through an examination of Mysticism.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you next time.

Recommended Reading

• Michael Inwood, Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2019).

• Mark Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005).

• Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (Other Press, 2016).

(Original episode was released October 13th, 2024. Minor edits for clarity of text.)

Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

If you’re someone who heard what Nietzsche had to say in the last couple posts and went “Wow. Checkmate, philosophy!”

“I mean this guy Friedrich just destroyed all of you! Go grab your herd membership cards and find a place to moo at each other in a field for the rest of your lives! Let the cultural elites like Friedrich take over from now on”— well, if that’s how you feel then unfortunately it’s going to be a very short-lived party for you.

But that’s a good thing I think, ultimately.

As is always the case in philosophy: other smart people came along shortly after Nietzsche and pointed out all the assumptions he was making that led to the shape and scope of his work. One of these was his fellow German Martin Heidegger who next post will be about.

But today I want to talk about someone who was a little more favorable towards Nietzsche’s work. It’s an interpretation that many people out there believe to be the best interpretation of his work that has ever been done. People say it’s the one that reflects the direction Nietzsche probably would’ve been headed in had he not gotten sick and died as early as he did. It’s a book written in the year 1962 called Nietzsche and Philosophy by the now world famous philosopher named Gilles Deleuze.

To Deleuze—yes, Nietzsche’s work was flawed. He was in many ways a product of his time: the hyper-individualism, the herd-mentality stuff. We’ll talk about why these ideas don’t necessarily hold up as concepts when you take the implications of his work seriously. But Deleuze is not interested in spending much time dwelling on these sorts of problems. Because the real interesting piece of Nietzsche, ironically, is what we can affirm about his work, not what we can critique about it.

See, Deleuze is always in the business of getting away from just critiquing things.

He’s always interested in constructing something new when he writes.

And what he said about Nietzsche is that he’s a philosopher that managed to lay the groundwork for an entirely different way of thinking about affirmation and difference as concepts—where when you truly affirm difference at this radical new level that he introduces, it not only allows us to escape the dialectic of Hegel and most of his admirers, but it also allows us to escape from the narrow boxes that philosophers have had us thinking in for basically the entire history of Western philosophical thought.

Now, that’s a big claim. So what did Deleuze mean when he said this? And didn’t we already talk about Nietzsche smashing the idealism from the history of Western society? Is this Deleuze just repeating something we’ve already heard here before?

Well, no. It’s actually more exciting than that. What Deleuze is saying is if you really take the implications of Nietzsche’s work seriously then they actually go farther than even Nietzsche himself realized as he was writing them.

In the spirit of Deleuze let’s start with something like a game show segment today. The title of the segment is:

Dismantling Philosophical Assumptions That Have Been Going on for Over 2,000 Years or So.

Honestly, it could use a better title.

One of the most world-shifting points that Deleuze brings up in his own work is his critique of Western philosophy and what he calls the Image of Thought that’s gone on all throughout it.

A classic example to start explaining it is to look at Plato’s world of forms. How does it generally go when we talk about it?

There’s an ideal version of a tree, for example, that all particular trees are just imperfect copies of.

Meaning, when you’re walking through the garden section of the Home Depot, and you see that line of flower pots with the trees coming out of them—to Plato, those things are trees only because they resemble, or represent, the more ideal form of a tree, that we can arrive at through reason if we just think about stuff well enough.

This is what Deleuze calls an example of representational thinking.

And just for the sake of full clarity here, the same thing goes for the ideal form of justice that you can reason to versus a particular representation of justice when a particular judge bangs a gavel in a courtroom.

Same thing goes for the ideal form of courage versus a particular representation of courage if you pushed past your fears while doing something.

Point is: particular things are representations of an ideal for a thinker like Plato.

Now, one of the assumptions that comes out of this representational thinking that you’ll notice is that say you have a theory about what justice is— well, that theory you have about justice, when you argue for it, is only made valid to the degree that it corresponds to that ideal form of justice that’s been previously established by philosophers.

For Deleuze, the move here that philosophers are making that’s going to be important for us to notice is that in this representational thinking: how valid someone’s thoughts are always comes down to how well they correspond to some pre-existing set of criteria.

And this hasn’t just happened in Plato’s work. You can notice this same exact thing going on in the work of Descartes where thoughts are valid only if they’re clear and distinct as defined by the criteria Descartes lays out.

You can notice this in the work of Kant where knowledge is only valid if it can conform to the categories of our understanding as laid out by Kant.

But real quick, just for a second—remember how Nietzsche viewed the work of all these philosophers, and what he thought about their attempts at arriving at “truth.”

When a philosopher or anyone has a worldview: that worldview says a whole lot more about them personally—their own bias, history, or personality—than it does anything about the truth of the universe.

So think of the kind of situation this creates in the history of philosophy for Deleuze.

We have a history of thinking about stuff where philosophers have come up with a set of rigid protocols for what valid thinking is—an Image of Thought, as it’s called—where along with these protocols come a bunch of other assumptions philosophers have made. Lots of them.

From the fact that everybody has a natural ability to think clearly—where if only they work on their thinking they’ll be less prone to error. Or how about the assumption that it’s error about the facts that’s usually the problem that’s leading to bad thinking— not the rigid protocols that everything is being filtered through.

Point is for Deleuze: there are a lot of assumptions philosophers have been making over the years about what thinking even is.

But to him one of the main problems he would want to point out about this whole setup is that it is always, by design, a reactive process.

Meaning, it is always trying to take new states of affairs that we’ve never seen before, and we’re always supposed to measure the worth of these things based on how well they represent some previous standard arrived at by another philosopher in a different state of things using their own criteria.

But if everything is always understood in terms of how well it matches up to some former snapshot of the world, in a world that is always moving and in a state of becoming, then aren’t we severely limiting our ability to construct new, valuable ways of looking at things—arrived at from an entirely different perspective?

If it’s confusing as to why this would ever be a problem, just think of this applied to the realm of movies.

Imagine a movie director saying,

“I am the Plato of the movie industry. And unless a movie conforms to this ideal standard I’ve set up—unless there’s three acts, a hero, a climax, and a resolution—well then, that’s not really a movie now, is it?”

or

“Unless the plot of this movie is written in a way that is clear and distinct then it’s not a movie! And who decides that? I decide what’s clear and distinct!”

What would you say to someone who said something like that?

You’d say, “Get over yourself, ya weirdo. A movie’s a lot more than whether it follows some protocol you’ve set up.”

And for Deleuze, maybe the more important thing here is to consider how this process goes in the other direction as well—when people sit down to write a movie. Someone can be primed to always think in this representational way.

To think, “Okay, well if I’m going to write a movie, then it’s gonna need three acts, it’s gonna need a hero, it’s gotta be clear and distinct.”

This is always needing to conform to a set of protocols that limits the creativity of the artist. It limits people’s ability to arrive at new forms of what life even looks like.

This is why Deleuze would later go on in his work to critique things like psychoanalysis. Same sort of relationship.

Imagine living your life having a psychological experience of the world and then you go see a psychoanalyst whose whole bag of tricks is to find ways to explain the experience you’re having through how it corresponds to, or represents, the terminology and theory that they’re educated in.

In other words, to some pre-existing overly rational framework of how human psychology operates.

If you were always primed to understand your experience through a framework arrived at by someone else it may give you an understanding of a piece of it—no question—but it might also prevent you from coming up with new psychological tracings for navigating the changing world you’re actually living in with a changing psychology as a part of it.

If you’re noticing a pattern here—that Deleuze is concerned about the reactive ways that we organize our thinking and how they may prevent people from a more active approach where they’re involved in the creation of the new—well then, I’ve done my job here so far explaining this.

And you can see the comparison here to the Übermensch of Nietzsche that we’ve been talking about where it’s a person that doesn’t conform to a passive, reactive approach to life given to them by other people.

Well, this Übermensch becomes a nice, macroscopic, human-level example that we can relate to—to start explaining a process that is going on for Deleuze practically everywhere, all the time, at every different level.

Gilles Deleuze is a process philosopher. He describes himself in his work sometimes as just a metaphysician.

Meaning he sees himself as someone that is primarily doing metaphysics in his work. He’s not giving particle analysis. He’s not a biologist. He’s talking about what is going on within or beyond physics—metaphysics—so that it may give us a new explanation as to what’s going on in the world.

And to him a fundamental component that can be used to make sense of our reality in a new way is difference.

This is the thing most earlier philosophers have missed in their work, because they’ve always been trying to distill reality down into something fixed and stable.

We got seven episodes of the podcast we did on Deleuze—not going into all of it here—but the short version of this is that if you’re one of these people that go throughout your life thinking about yourself as a static identity:

“I am Friedrich Nietzsche,” for example. And that I, as Friedrich Nietzsche, am a human being. And that there’s an essence to what being a human being is. That I can think about that essence and arrive at a definition of it—if that’s the way you’re thinking about this aspect of your identity—well this might be a nice, pragmatic way for you to operate as you go throughout your life, but Deleuze’s entire picture of the universe would pull basically every one of those assumptions you just made about yourself completely apart at the seams.

If you want to think more like him: instead of thinking of the world like there are fixed essences to things—where a tree is a thing, a person is a thing, a rock is a thing—think instead of reality as being made up by a collection of forces that are defined by their interactions with each other.

Trillions of different forces that are all vying for expression in each moment as the world unfolds into the future.

In that kind of world then, Friedrich Nietzsche is not a static identity.

What we think of as Nietzsche—when he was alive at least—was the interaction between a collection of forces at a specific location.

He was ultimately a site of becoming. He was many different forces all vying for expression, overcoming each other, gaining expression.

In other words, think of Nietzsche not as a person with an essence like we might typically think of him.

Nietzsche is a historical collection of forces that are still having impacts on forces in the world to this day.

And when you look at him that way—again, Nietzsche is not a static identity.

To Deleuze, what we call “Nietzsche” in any given moment is a temporary formation of just a repetition of certain, similar forces that gained expression during this particular moment, but haven’t changed drastically enough for the illusion of a static identity to go away.

So on that same note, think of what you are along these same lines.

Any identity where it seems like it’s what you are right now is really just a temporary pattern of forces that have found expression— that through repetition can seem to you like they’re a stable identity.

Obviously we recognize that if other forces that are a part of you found expression then you would be a different person. And if enough of them changed and had repetition in another direction for a long enough period of time then your whole identity would feel like it was something different.

But never was there a static essence or identity to what you were, and always was there the ability for you to become something totally different and explore new modes of existence.

This is just a totally different way of looking at what a person is. Classic, subjective identity doesn’t apply here. And to take this back to Plato, you can understand this as a totally different way of looking at what a tree is as well.

You go into the Home Depot and see all those trees, and on one hand, yes, it’s very pragmatic to call all of these trees the same genus and species. They look kind of similar.

But on another level for someone like Deleuze: this denies the true level of difference that’s going on in the universe.

These trees are a process that is embedded into a larger collection of processes.

Every single one of these trees is a different repetition of forces that are all constantly shifting and adapting within a world and universe that is always shifting and adapting.

And this view of reality in terms of it being an interaction between different forces is one of the things Deleuze thinks Nietzsche’s work laid the foundation for.

So, if it’s not entirely clear yet: under this view of reality, any attempt at making identity or reality into something fixed and static—while it’s undeniably useful when you’re checking out at the Home Depot, which is nothing to gloss over—it’s at another level always in denial of the true state of change that the world is always in.

Notice where this critique starts to apply to the history of philosophy and the supposed Image of Thought put forward by philosophers.

To Deleuze, even our concept of thinking is always subject to change.

And why wouldn’t it be? There are no static categories of thought. There are an infinite number of ways the universe could be conceptually framed and mapped out by philosophers. And thinking in this limited way sabotages our ability to arrive at new ways of thinking or new forms of what life is.

You can also start to see that when you’re affirming your place as one small piece of this constant unfolding of reality into the future: to always be looking to the past to verify the present starts to deny something very important about what existence is altogether.

In other words, you can start to see similarities between the tendencies in our philosophy and the tendencies in the way people live their lives.

More on that in a second. But for now, since we have a basic picture here of Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche, this is a good place to start to make the case for why he thinks Nietzsche’s work is actually the enemy of Hegel and dialectics.

The bottom line is that compared to Nietzsche: dialectics simplifies the true level of difference that is going on.

And it’s interesting because usually people will think of the dialectic and see it as something you use if you’re actually acknowledging the true complexity of reality.

You know, “Justice isn’t some thing out there with an essence,” they’ll say.
“It’s just one piece of an opposition within a complex network of oppositions.”

In a more Marxist type of dialectics, when it comes to social relations one very simple way to look at the world is to see something like a school and to think, “Well, a school is just a school. It’s a place where we send people to go get an education.”

But, as we talked about, somebody thinking more dialectically might say that that’s oversimplifying things.

That when you truly dig into what a school is to anyone in a particular structure of meaning: that school is something that has the meaning it does to us only because of its relationship to all the other things around it in a given society in a network of oppositions.

For example, how a school relates to what a company is, to what the government is, to what the economic setup is, to the faculty of the school. These things are not as separate as an essence-driven view of reality might suggest. And as it’s said in dialectics what that means is: the form of what something is becomes an important piece of what the content of the thing is.

Now, as I was just saying, this is typically seen as moving away from oversimplifying things. But if we take the ideas of Nietzsche seriously—through this interpretation by Deleuze—then the dialectic becomes yet another example of one of these needless rational scaffoldings that we’re projecting onto a reality that is actually more complicated and dynamic than the dialectic allows for.

Let me give an example. One of the ones Deleuze uses is the dialectic between master and slave. In dialectics these two seemingly different things of being a master or being a slave are in reality two sides of the same coin. They are oppositions to each other; the meaning of them is unified. You can’t understand the meaning of one of them without presuming the existence and meaning of the other.

But under Nietzsche’s worldview, he says there’s no reason to chop up reality into these oppositions that need to be resolved, because difference accounts for all of these things.

For example, master and slave, to Nietzsche, are not two sides of the same coin.

Masters and slaves come from two completely different genealogies. They are explained by two completely different histories. They often come from two completely different moral approaches towards reality.

So the idea is: if each one of these forces are distinct and very different from each other:
why do we gotta make them the same thing? Just to remove difference and replace it with negation?

To Nietzsche, in the actual world, when a master overcomes a slave or slaves rise up and overthrow a master that’s not an opposition being resolved. This is the affirmation of difference. This is one will to power overcoming another will to power.

And subordinating difference to it simply being a negation of a more unified thing is, again, a needless rational scaffolding that denies how dynamic the reality of difference truly is.

So picture that world. It’s not a bunch of essences all competing with things that have other essences. It’s not a bunch of oppositions seeking resolution and clarification.

It’s just a near-infinite collection of wills that are all competing for and striving for differentiation.

The dialectic in that world, then, becomes unnecessary and distorting.

I mean, you can imagine the mistakes you might make in seeing forces in the world—revolutions, historical movements—and if you were fixated on this idea that everything is just directly part of and solely in reaction to some other thing that came before it: you might miss out on things that were uniquely characteristic to a particular movement that were important for understanding what they were.

The takeaway from this in a more practical sense will lead people to call the end result of Nietzsche’s philosophy an approach to life filled with a type of joy, lightness, playfulness.

The reason for this is because if we take what Nietzsche has to say seriously
then the picture of life is not one where you’re held to a rigid set of protocols like a moral code from a god your entire life.

It’s not a picture of life where there are these countless dialectical oppositions that need to be worked out, so you better go get to work.

The picture of life to Nietzsche becomes almost like a game you’re playing,
where through affirmation of what life is, you’re essentially rolling the dice over and over again, hoping to roll a seven. With the understanding that even if you don’t ever roll a seven, you’re still at least playing the game.

In other words, there’s a seriousness and expectation to what life is that just gets lifted. And instead it starts to make more sense to just affirm difference in each moment of your life heading into the future whether it lines up with a set of protocols created in the past or not. And for whatever it’s worth: this recurring affirmation of difference in each moment as it unfolds in the universe is what Deleuze believes is the true significance of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

Now, for Nietzsche, these trillions of forces going on in the universe—if you were to analyze them—they can be broken down into categories of either active forces or reactive forces.

And you’ll of course recognize the terms active and reactive from discussion we had around active or reactive approaches to life. The active being the approach of the Übermensch who creatively differentiates their existence. The reactive being the approach of the herd mentality that critiques, moralizes, sits around, and seeks recognition in external events.

But it should be said that, to Nietzsche, through this interpretation by Deleuze,
this goes beyond just how this shows up in actions. You can also see these active and reactive forces all over the place in other scales of reality.

So, what are some examples of what these might be? Well, take a potential example at the level of microbiology.

Think of a virus that attacks a body and spreads all around attacking different pieces of the body. That would be the result of a collection of active forces asserting a type of will on the forces of the body.

On the other hand, in response to this: there are often reactive forces—like, say, the immune system of the body. These are forces that mitigate or govern the active forces by fighting off the virus trying to return the body back to a level of stasis.

Now, of course, we know all of this is a metaphor. There is no stasis for Nietzsche or Deleuze. The body is always in a state of flux as are other active forces in the world looking to impose themselves on the body around it.

But nonetheless, this is an example of how we can visualize active and reactive forces in their constant interplay at the level of microbiology. And we can see this dynamic all over the universe.

Let’s look at another example of this at a bigger scale– at the level of political action.

Say there’s a revolution going down somewhere. What are the active forces in that revolution?

Well, you have the revolutionaries who are spreading the word, the ones rallying, fighting, creating new forms of order on the fly as the situation develops. These are people that are asserting their will and are actively creating something new.

On the other hand you have the reactive forces in things like the existing government—the institutions, the military of the governing body,
the laws designed to maintain the existing order of things.

These are not forces that are creating anything. They are reacting to external events, trying to govern them, trying to return things back to the way they were before.

And it’s through seeing these forces as either active or reactive that Nietzsche starts to look at aspects of our everyday lives as active or reactive.

For example, criticism is, to him, a reactive thing to do. If someone else is actively trying to do something or create something new, and your whole contribution is to sit around and offer criticisms about it, you are engaging in a reactive sort of tendency.

You’re just looking at external things that are happening and trying to mitigate them or govern them down.

Moral judgment is another one of these things that falls into the reactive category,
because what do you do when you aren’t doing much yourself to be morally judged for? You call out other people for not living up to some rigid set of protocols for their behavior.

You can start to see the overall picture that’s being painted here. Not only is he saying that there is a reactive bias to almost the entire history of human thought—remember, with that representational thinking, we’re always looking to the protocols of the past to justify future thought—but then we also create entire societies out of this surplus of reactive energy that then go on to create very reactive tendencies in the people that make those societies up.

So this is a perfect time to return back to the comments about the herd mentality from Nietzsche. Is it right to call 99% of people out there members of the herd?

Should be said: there is a reading of Nietzsche that says the only reason he’d ever refer to people as members of the herd is to inspire those that are trapped in chains they don’t realize they’re in.

But what critics will say in the years following Nietzsche’s work is—okay, let’s take what you have to say seriously here. Let’s say there’s no good and evil written into the universe and that pretending as though there is just distracts us from the real work we need to be doing of understanding the power dynamics that really determine what goes on. And let’s say that most people fall into this “herd-like mentality,” where they’re all adopting a reactive approach to life.

Well, then the first question you have to ask is—why is that, Nietzsche?

Is that because they’re born weak or bad people? Or is that because they are born into power dynamics that regularly expose them to forces that influence them to be passive and reactive?

Like, let’s say there’s a child born into a Christian home—and I use Christianity here because Nietzsche specifically calls it a slave morality—when that child grows up and favors the “virtues of the weak,” as Nietzsche calls them: was that because they were born weak? Or because they grew up in an environment, a set of power dynamics,
where those virtues were nurtured into them and rewarded from the moment they were born?

In other words, calling someone a member of a herd—short of this being a way of inspiring people—seems to be making the same mistake he’s accusing people of:
of not considering the power dynamics that really determine people’s worldviews.

Now, to many thinkers who comment on Nietzsche’s work, it’s obvious Nietzsche did understand that this was a matter of power dynamics—which is why he spent so much time engaging with the power dynamics of his time. Much of his work is spent untangling things like morality and the egalitarian politics that he thought were often used as tools to be able to control people in that reactive, governing sort of way.

But there’s another layer to all this that needs to be addressed here.

There’s probably someone out there who’s been thinking this since we started talking about this—is he saying that reactive forces are totally bad and that active forces are totally good?

If the example we’re working with is that a reactive force is like the immune system of the body, or laws and rules, or moral accountability—well call me crazy but these things seem important to me.

I get that just sitting around and critiquing things can be insufferable, but isn’t throwing this stuff out just missing a huge regulatory component of what our lives are? Of how our societies function well?

These are great questions, and the answer to them is: of course we need reactive forces in the world.

The question that is more relevant here to Nietzsche is, again through the interpretation of Deleuze: if you had to do an analysis of what kinds of forces are most prevalent in the world we live in, would you say the typical society is set up with an equal level of support for people choosing lives that are active and reactive?

Is it 50/50 exactly? No.

Is it more likely to be reactive?

Well, then how much more on the reactive side are we?

To Nietzsche, it’s clear we have a huge bias in the reactive direction. Society itself is a reactive force trying to govern people’s behavior. And if history is full of people choosing more reactive ways of living does that maybe have something to do with the way those societies have been set up? Is it maybe easier to control people when they’re encouraged to be passive and reactive?

And for Gilles Deleuze, one of the promising ways forward when it comes to all of this we’ve been talking about today is going to be for us to emphasize art as opposed to information.

Now hearing that— you may be like: good God is this guy really gonna say we need to do more fingerpainting to free ourselves from the chains of the world? But just think of what information truly is in the type of society we live in.

We typically think that information is something that’s liberating. If only people had the information then they’d be able to make decisions that were better for them and their families. But so often what happens in the information age is that whoever dominates the flows of information gets to dominate the limited worldview of the people that they’re reaching.

So when you’re given information in one of these modern control societies,
to Deleuze, it’s obviously not about transmitting knowledge. It’s most of the time hardly even verified. So what this information becomes is a method of mass communicating the meanings, norms, and directives of the day that the people are supposed to then internalize and believe in.

Information is like a police communication, he says at one point.

When you watch a news story or a political debate or whatever it is: this is not some neutral transmission of information– take it for what it’s worth! No, it’s a prescription of the meanings of the events that are going on.

Information in a control society, he says, is both a snapshot and a command at the exact same time. It carries with it an implicit order—that this is the view polite society is going to believe in next.

And this, combined with the other ways people are turned into bits of that information and then manipulated, information turns out to be a massively effective way of controlling people’s behavior. Turns out it is also very easy to convince people that they have a different sort of way of looking at things—a diverse way of looking at it—
even though they’re just funneled into the same algorithmic channels that so many other people are given their information in.

Fake difference.

But if it’s not obvious by this point in the episode—Deleuze is a philosopher that has as maybe his chief goal above all others: to find ways to facilitate the creation of the new.

Real difference.

Think about what we know about him:

This constant unfolding of existence into the future.

Difference and repetition to replace the traditional idea of a static identity.

This critique of philosophers being stuck in the Image of Thought from the past.

Philosophy, to Deleuze—true thinking—is a creative activity. It’s not prescriptive. It’s not a set of protocols to determine how valid someone’s thoughts are. Philosophy is about the creation of a new tracing of concepts that can understand reality in a totally different way.

He’s going to say that any activity that truly has as its goal to not sit around and repeat the traditions and ways things have been done in the past—but one that actually, genuinely aims to find new lines of escape from these traditions
or new forms of what life can look like—that is an activity that he is deeply interested in finding better ways to facilitate, no matter what the context is.

And if you had to give a name to that sort of activity—whether it’s in philosophy, science, painting, music—the only name that makes sense that we have, really, is art.

Deleuze says that art is not a form of information. It’s not even a form of communication to him.

True art, in the sense that it’s inspiring people to see life in a new way—this is something fundamentally different than information, which is only trying to give people a snapshot of the past that is loaded with meanings and directives. Art is something that helps people think and feel beyond the prescribed limitations of the information they get on a day-to-day basis.

So if you hear Deleuze’s philosophy and you feel a little disoriented; that’s actually part of his whole point.

True art gets people thinking outside of these rigid boxes. It inspires new thoughts and new ways of engaging with the constantly changing circumstances we live in.

You know how they say there’s a comedian’s comedian? Or a musician’s musician?

This is why I think one way to describe Deleuze is that he is a philosopher’s philosopher—or at the very least, an artist’s philosopher.

His work is designed to inspire someone to think different. Truly different.

Recommended Reading

• Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. Columbia University Press, 1983.
  

• May, Todd. Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  

• Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton University Press, 1974.