Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: Part I

“Man strives on earth toward an ideal that is contrary to his nature.” - Dostoevsky, offering his proof of immortality. 

“The fact that we sense the possibility of transcending this law [the ubiquity of egoism, self-preservation, self-interest] and yearn to do so is evidence that we do not belong entirely to the earth or fall exclusively under its jurisdiction. According the Dostoevsky, the desire to transcend the self – the desire to accede to a law higher than that of self-preservation – proves that we are not doomed to the death sentence decreed on earth.” - Susan McReynolds Oddo, from the introduction. 

Every once in a while, I'll have a reason to throw caution to the wind and break free of the strictures of my chronological reading list. I can't just do this for any book; it needs to be a book so monumental that it is criminal for me to not have read it. Seeing as Brothers K has been an influence on Freud, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Vonnegut, and Cormac McCarthy (according to Wikipedia), it's probably worth the detour. This is the fourth time, I think, that I've tried to read through Dostoevsky's final novel, and hopefully I'll finally finish the damn thing. I've come across passages so moving and profound that I have no excuse to stop in the middle again.

To give the briefest overview of the first of the novel's four parts, Fyodor Pavlovich is the father of Dmitri, a sensualist much like his father, Ivan, a conflicted humanist and atheist, and Alyosha, a humble monk and the hero of the story, and possibly the illegitimate father to Smerdyakov, a mean-spirited orphan found and raised by his servants Grigory and Martha. Alyosha has just been embarrassed by Fyodor and Dmitri's squabbles over money in front of his mentor, Elder Zosima, who, ill and near death, advises him to leave the monastery. Dmitri reveals to Alyosha that Ivan is in love with his (Dmitri's) fiancee, Katerina Ivanovna, and that he is in love with another woman, Grushenka, who his father is also in love with. Having taken care of the plot, I have grouped the rest of my thoughts about the novel under a few headings that I expect will remain important throughout the novel.

Sensualism

“To angels – visions of God’s throne, / To insects – sensual lust.” – Friedrich Schiller, “Ode to Joy”

I’ve never heard the word “sensualism” or “sensualist” used outside of this book, and the definitions I found don’t reflect what Dostoevsky is getting at with his portrayal of all the Karamazovs, except for Alyosha, as sensualists. The line from Schiller’s poem, quoted by Dmitri, sheds light on what “sensualism” should connote: it is that which separates the holy from the damned and perhaps more significantly, the human from the inhuman. (An aside: Kafka greatly admired Dostoevsky, too, and since Schiller was German, Kafka was probably familiar with him as well. I wonder if this insect comment has anything to do with  The Metamorphosis.) We should remember that Cicero rebuked Epicurus for prizing freedom from pain before all else because he believed there is more to being human that being free from pain; what can be achieved by a sheep grazing in a field cannot be the greatest good for men.

Like the Epicureans, sensualists are not strictly hedonists, but mawkish people, those who act without thinking, show no restraint, and indulge every whim as drunkards do. We can get an even clearer picture by looking at examples. Fyodor, the novel’s premier sensualist, is a self-diagnosed buffoon and debaucher, one who speaks with a smattering of exclamation points, deployed by Dostoevsky to indicate his wasteful energy, misplaced exuberance, and shameful ostentation. He misquotes books and Bible verses alike in order to fulfill a role: he is called an actor, someone who puts on a show according to what others expect of him and what he thinks they expect. He is “wicked and sentimental,” always ready to take offense, even when there is no offense to be taken.

  

Dmitri is in many ways his father’s son, but even though he speaks with the same spectacle that Fyodor does, he is sympathetic rather than pathetic. He has an “ardent heart," one that is more tormented by sensualism than Fyodor is. While his father at one point instructs his sons to chase every woman, proclaiming that all women are beautiful enough to pursue, Dmitri declares beauty to be “a terrible and awful thing,” one of many riddles God has given to men. Fyodor’s heart is shameless; Dmitri’s is troubled. The former believes that there is no such thing as ugliness, while the latter, in a devastating passage, claims that “what to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart.”

Ivan and Smerdyakov are considered to be sensualists, too, but we will get to them another time. 

Fate and Free Will

“Why is such a man alive?” – Dmitri, about Fyodor

How does Alyosha escape the curse that the rest of his family cannot? Perhaps because he looked for a way out. He joined Elder Zosima’s monastery because “it alone struck his imagination and presented itself to him as offering an ideal means of escape for his soul from darkness to light.” He did not join because he is a religious mystic, nor is he suited to the life of a monk (that is what Elder Zosima tells him). He joined to escape the darkness of sensualism, and no matter how ardent Dmitri’s heart is, he never tried to escape.

More will be said of fate and free will later, but to me it is the most interesting aspect of this novel. How much of our lives is predetermined and how much is up to us? This is so much more than a question of Calvinist predestination or strict scientific determinism; it is a question of the extent to which we are who we are. How far can I go when I say that I am this certain way and not that other way? Where does my biology -- written in stone -- end and my personality begin? This question first struck me in reading Shakespeare’s Othello, wherein Iago, famously (and paradoxically) claiming “I am not what I am,” exploits the self-definition of those around him.

Belief and Skepticism

“Miracles are never a stumbling block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous... Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle, but the miracle from faith."

Most of the philosophical conflict in the novel stems from arguments about religion, which pit Alyosha’s serene, Christlike demeanor against Ivan’s troubled humanism, Fyodor’s faux-rationalist buffoonery, and Smerdyakov’s contempt for tradition and authority. 

Though we will have to wait to hear more from Ivan, we do find out that he wrote an essay in favor of the authority of ecclesiastical courts (essentially saying that church and state should not be separated). Elder Zosima dismisses him as writing for the sake of irony (what a fucking hipster), but he also sees that Ivan's heart is genuinely tormented by a world without God. Indeed, he argues for the power of religion, and though he appears supercilious, there is sadness in his words. “There is no virtue if there is no immortality [of the soul].” And again: “There would have been no civilization if they hadn’t invented God.” It reminds me of the part in White Noise by DeLillo, when the nun tells Jack that she doesn’t believe in God, and that she resents that he thinks she would believe in something that ridiculous, but she keeps up apperances because people need to know that someone still holds onto the traditions. 

It's also interesting to note that Ivan is described as a “conciliator and mediator” between his father, Fyodor, and brother, Dmitri. This language is reminiscent of the roles of Jesus, who is at turns called a counselor and a mediator.

Fyodor gives the impression that he is a believer, but exactly what kind of belief he holds is dubious. At one point, he seeks to determine once and for all if God is real by asking Alyosha and Ivan if they believe in immortality (predictably, Alyosha says yes and Ivan says no). In another scene, he muses on being pulled down to tell by iron hooks. “Hooks? Where would they get them? What of? Iron hooks? Where do they forge them? Have they a foundry there of some sort?" It is this sort of pointless and nonsensical analysis that makes Fyodor out to be a fool. (Also: having been told by Ivan that there is no immortality at all, Fyodor, the fool, declares, “Anything is better than nothing!” The line rings Shakespearean: "Nothing can come of nothing," declared King Lear.) 

Smerdyakov is possibly an illegitimate son of Fyodor's and indeed, his behavior has a sensualist tinge, and his arguments have all the bluster and irreverence of Fyodor's, asking, for example, as a child, “Where did light come from on the first day” if the sun, moon, and stars were created on the fourth? (“I’ll show you where!” Grigory screams and slaps him.)

Smerdyakov, in fact, is more disdainful of religion than the conflicted humanist Ivan and boorish Fyodor. He asks the questions that have been endlessly raised, like the question about light, and: “Who will hold a heathen Tartar responsible…for not having been born a Christian?” Even more, he uses his reason with devastating force: He questions Matthew 17:20, in which Jesus says, “For verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” That is, no matter how tiny (and tininess is emphasized by Smerdyakov) your faith is, it will be possible to (seemingly literally) move a mountain. 

Smerdyakov says that if he were tortured to renounce his faith, “I should only have had to say at that instant to the mountain ‘move and crush the tormentor,’ and it would have moved… But suppose at that very moment I had tried all that, and cried to that mountain, ‘Crush these tormentors,’ and it hadn’t crushed them, how could I have helped doubting, pray, at such a time, and at such a dread hour or mortal terror?” Grigory doesn’t have the fortitude to rebuke him anymore. (An interesting side note: Smerdyakov is epileptic, as was Dostoevsky.)

Love and Lust

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sigh of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude." – Elder Zosima

As the poem by Schiller says, sensualism is characterized by lust, which is contrasted with love. As we will see later, Alyosha argues that love of life should be what all men aspire to, whereas lust for life is reserved for sensualists like Fyodor (for example, his speech about the beauty of all women). This distinction will be made clearer later.

Love and lust also plays an important role in the lives of the sensualists. The complex love-pentagon that the characters are caught up in should make us wonder who actually feels what for whom, and what their feelings actually amount to. The only love we can be assured of at this point in the novel is the love of Katerina Ivanovna for Dmitri. Katerina Ivanovna is an angelic figure: “He [Dmitri] can tell God everything without shame. Why is it he still does not understand how much I am ready to bear for his sake? Why, why doesn’t he know me? How dare he not know me after all that has happened? I want to save him forever.” No one else has the same sort of heavenly love that I believe is what Dostoevsky thinks is true love, and it makes it all the sadder (but all the more logical) that Dmitri wants Grushenka over her.

I'll make a second post about Brothers K later on. Tune in later (hopefully by the end of the week) for a post on The Aeneid, by Vergil. 

Stray observations:

• Some more from Dmitri on beauty: “Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been defined and is undefinable, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the two shores of the river meet and all contradictions stand side by side.” Two shores of a river run parallel and hence will give the appearance of meeting at infinity but never actually touch. We'll see later that Ivan, too, struggles with the notion of infinity and the limitations of his "Euclidean mind." It is interesting to note that the concept of infinity has a complicated history, and the arguments over its role in mathematics, religion, and everyday life in France and Russia are discussed reasonably well in Naming Infinity by Graham and Kantor (not Cantor). 
• Dostoevsky’s evil is much milder than that of other authors. Speaking of Fyodor, the narrator remarks that “in most cases, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose.” We should recall the previous post on Cicero, when he said, “We should not take as our model of wickedness trembling ninnies who torture themselves and fear every shadow whenever they do anything wrong.” “Trembling ninnies” feels a bit too harsh (and more effeminate and British), but I feel it still applies. We can recall Crime and Punishment, too, which, though it was a great novel, also gave Raskolnikov too tremulous a conscience. 
• We get a sense of the insatiable quality of sin from Zosima: “Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not even want consolation, it feeds on the sense of its unquenchableness.” Compare this with the Epicurean notion that freedom from pain is the greatest good, since pleasure (or pain, which is tantamount to pleasure here) only induces desire for more pleasure. To quote a Bright Eyes song (sorry), “Sorrow is pleasure if you want it instead.”
• Zosima claims that without a religious government, criminals are not deterred because they are not rebelling against holy law, but against human law. And rebelling against human law confirms the idea that “his crime is not a crime, but only a reaction against an unjustly oppressive force.” Now, I certainly don’t agree with this, but it is an interesting thought, one that prefigures the vague, oppressive forces of Kafka. 
• Grigory and Martha’s child who dies was born with six fingers. Grigory called it a “dragon… a confusion of nature."

Cicero, On Moral Ends

"On Moral Ends" is Cicero's evaluation of three different systems of philosophy that developed in the wake of Plato and Aristotle: Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Platonism, as expounded by Torquatus (who I think is fictional?), Cato, and Antiochus, respectively. The work is divided into five books, the first two concentrating on Epicureanism, the next two on Stoicism, and the final one on Platonism. I've decided to follow this format: I'll give a brief summary of the work (it may be a little lacking, but I'll try to find a happy median between reading the entire thing and a tl;dr summary), follow with brief thoughts, and conclude with stray observations (a la the Onion's AV Club). If the feedback is positive, I'll continue in this way; otherwise, I'll try something else. Let's go.

Epicureanism places pleasure as the highest good, but it is more than just hedonism disguised as philosophy. Pleasure can be divided into two categories. "Kinetic pleasure" consists of sex, decadent meals, and other things we normally consider pleasurable, whereas "static pleasure" -- contentment, tranquility, freedom from care and pain -- is the Epicureans's greatest good. This keeps their philosophy from being frivolous, unbridled pleasure-seeking: immediate, kinetic pleasure can be delayed for the promise of future, static pleasure. 

Torquatus presents a few arguments for pleasure being the highest good. He maintains that what other philosophers (e.g. the Stoics) call "virtue" is nothing more than a means to freedom from pain: we are only brave or noble because it will bring us praise while being cowardly or immoral will bring us condemnation. 

Moreover, wisdom is attained in the recognition that "desire is insatiable": once we have a small amount of pleasure, we will want more and more; as no man can be happy when he is in want, kinetic pleasure cannot be the greatest good. Desire for so-called virtues, for example, is foolhardy. Pursuing courage or bravery will lead to recklessness, which will invariably bring unhappiness. It is only through knowing that true happiness comes through satiety that one can find peace. 

Cicero, however, is unconvinced. The first and most serious criticism he levies against Torquatus is that Epicureans are needlessly unclear about what "pleasure" means. It's all well and good to divide the common notion of pleasure into kinetic and static, but if we are, as Torquatus claims, to pursue only static pleasure, then why does Epicurus famously claim that an Epicurean on the rack would be untroubled because he knew true pleasure? Torture is as far from freedom from pain as physically possible. When Torquatus rebuts with Epicurus's claim that great pain is short in duration and only mild pain lasts long, Cicero scoffs. It is a pithy saying, he says, but it is utterly untrue. 

Freedom from pain is also inhuman. Aristotle said that man is made to think and act, but even a sheep grazing in a field can be free from pain. Surely we are meant for more than a farm animal is. Furthermore, Epicureanism is too calculating. True philosophy, Cicero claims, is spontaneous. Finally, freedom from pain is capricious; once attained, it is easily lost. How can true happiness, true philosophy, be so ephemeral? Happiness is therefore dependent on the whims of chance, and yet Epicurus claims that chance does not affect the wise. 

Having dispatched Epicureanism, the book moves to Cato the Younger and Stoicism, which claims that virtue is the only good, doing away with pleasure entirely (including Aristotle's notion of "external goods," goods which are not the highest good, but still worthwhile). Stoicism can be summed up in a syllogism: What is good is praiseworthy; what is praiseworthy is virtuous; therefore, what is good is virtuous. 

Cato appeals, as Torquatus did, to the cradle. While Torquatus claimed that babies inherently seek what is pleasurable to them and what will maintain static pleasure, Cato argues that from infancy onward we make choices and selections that enlighten us as to the nature of virtue. Virtuous choices, as the syllogism implies, lead to praise, and immoral choices lead to condemnation, so that the process of becoming wise is identical with the process of learning what is virtuous. Virtue, therefore, means living in accordance with nature, a point which the Stoics put great emphasis on. 

With this framework in mind, Cato attempts to explain social phenomena. Love, for example, has a Stoic explanation. Nature would not allow us to create another human being without caring for it and loving it. Bravery is in accordance with nature, too, because we must love the country that we live in (after all, it contains people whom we love), and so we should be willing to defend it. Love is one of the ways that Stoicism is set apart from Cynicism, which also advocates living in accordance with nature, but through living an ascetic, solitary life. Suicide is also acceptable in Stoic philosophy, if circumstances prevent one from living virtuously. An abundance of evil does not merit suicide, but rather the inability to be good. 

I will include just one criticism that Cicero has of Stoicism, since my edition tells me that he is unfair in a lot of his criticisms and misunderstands some of Stoicism's chief principles. Cicero believes that Stoicism is just Aristotelianism in disguise; there is only a verbal difference between the two, not a doctrinal one. For example, though the Stoics maintain that they reject Aristotle's external goods, they have "indifferents," things that are neither good nor evil, but that they would rather have than not. Furthermore, he argues that the Stoics don't give enough attention to bodily pleasures. They care so much about the mind being in accordance with nature that they forget that the body can also be in accordance with nature by feeling pleasure; a horse, for example, can possess the supreme quality of horse-ness without giving up the bodily pleasures of being a horse.

Finally, we hear from Antiochus, who, at first, seems to provide the perfect median between Torquatus and Cato. He divides virtues into virtues of ability -- bodily virtues, that which you are equipped and able to do -- and virtues of volition -- mental virtues, such as those advocated by the Stoics. His argument is something of a form-implies-function argument; because we are designed with certain faculties and abilities, those faculties and abilities must be important. Unfortunately, Cicero shoots his theory down by saying that once we add bodily virtues into the mix, the theory becomes inconsistent; as Torquatus pointed out, if pleasure is a virtue, then we can never be satisfied. "On Moral Ends," therefore, ends without a resolution. Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Platonism have all been shot down. 

I have just one point of discussion for this book. Cicero says that one of the harshest criticisms he can levy against Epicureanism is that no one would ever make the claim in public that they are doing something for pleasure alone. If one were to do something for virtue’s sake, they would be praised, but they would be a pariah for seeking pleasure. “What makes such an act deserve disapproval except for the fact that it is base?” he asks. He concludes, therefore, that seeking pleasure (here, in the form of selfishness) cannot be the greatest good, because the greatest good cannot be something disgraceful. This leap in logic is strange to me. If something is disgraceful, then is it necessarily incorrect? Should the greatest good really be dependent on the prevailing attitudes at the time? Is “good” timeless and universal, or social and cultural? To press the point further, though Cicero talks about a virtue that is relatively foreign to us – valorous defense of one's city and its citizens (how often have the Huns invaded us in the last century?) – it is still a something we would consider virtuous, courageous, etc. Does society then inexorably drift toward a certain moral code that is unwritten and inalterable? Is there really such universal virtue?

Finally, here are some stray observations:

The Epicurean notion of the fixed nature of pain: if it is long, it is mild; if it is painful, it is short. It's very mathematical in its essence, even if it is bad logic. 

Torquatus: "Only fools are troubled by recollected evils." Cicero: “Themistocles, at any rate, when Simonides or some such person offered to teach him the art of memory, replied, 'I would rather learn the art of forgetting.'" Memory is out of our control. 

Cicero, to Torquatus: “The deterrents to wickedness that you mentioned are really weak and feeble: the torments of a guilty conscience, the fear of the punishment that wrongdoers either incur or dread incurring in the future. We should not take as our model of wickedness trembling ninnies who torture themselves and fear every shadow whenever they do anything wrong.” He goes on to provide a picture of true wickedness as one who is wicked for the sake of being wicked, one who revels in chaos. 

When Cicero criticized Epicureanism for being too calculating and claimed that real philosophy is spontaneous, I couldn't help thinking of Dennis Duffy as the subway hero.

Cato, on acting virtuously: “An appropriate action is any action such that a reasonable explanation could be given of its performance.” 

Cato, on the Stoic idea of love: “It is wicked and inhuman to profess indifference about whether the world will go up in flames once one is dead.”