Dostoevsky and Doubting Faith

Ray Briggs
Is morality just convention, or something more?

Josh Landy
If there isn’t a God, is everything permitted?

Ray Briggs
Is it possible to believe and doubt at the same time?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW, San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy,

Josh Landy
And at the University of Chicago, where Ray teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about Dostoevsky and Doubting Faith.

Josh Landy
Fyodor Dostoevsky was a 19th century Russian novelist best known for books like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov,

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I love his novels. He writes such great atheist characters in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan has this fantastic speech about the injustice of the world. How can there possibly be a benevolent God if children suffer and die?

Josh Landy
Yeah, that really is quite a bravura speech that Yvonne makes there, somehow he manages to reject, like eight different explanations for how they could possibly be an omnipotent and benevolent god who allows all this suffering.

Ray Briggs
Well, maybe it’s because we have free will.

Josh Landy
Ivan says no.

Ray Briggs
Maybe suffering makes life interesting.

Josh Landy
Ivan says no.

Ray Briggs
Maybe it’s okay because there’s an afterlife and God’s gonna reward the good and punish the wicked.

Josh Landy
Ivan says hell no (no pun intended). He says this: “I need retribution, not somewhere and sometime in infinity, but here and now on earth.”

Ray Briggs
No wonder the existentialists love Dostoevsky so much. He gives us so many reasons not to believe in God,

Josh Landy
Yeah, but surely Dostoevsky doesn’t want us to accept those reasons. I mean, he’s a good Christian, right?

Ray Briggs
He doesn’t seem like one. All the interesting characters in his novels are unbelievers and the brothers, karmazov, the pious kid, Alyosha, he’s sweet and all, but he’s a bit of a non entity. Ivan’s the one who’s got it going on.

Josh Landy
So what are you saying, Ray, that Dostoevsky was of the devil’s party without knowing it?

Ray Briggs
Ooh, a Milton reference. You’re quoting that thing that Blake says about Milton, that he wrote the devil too well, so he ends up on that character’s side, on the side of evil.

Josh Landy
Yeah. I mean, maybe that’s one way to understand what’s going on in Dostoevsky. Maybe he wanted to write good Christian novels where, you know, piety wins out and skeptics are miserable, but you know, his writerly talent got the better of him. Is that what you think happened?

Ray Briggs
I don’t know. He had a writerly talent that made him worse at writing persuasively. That kind of makes him look like a fool.

Josh Landy
I don’t know. Think about it this way. Dostoevsky really wanted to persuade his sophisticated atheist contemporaries that Christianity is true, but you can’t just do that in a book where there’s a bunch of Christians talking about how great it is to be a Christian. You have to do it like in a good philosophy book. You need to make a strong case for the opposite view, just so you can destroy it.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. Except he failed to destroy it. Here’s what I think happened. He was a good Christian before writing each of his novels, and he was a good Christian after, when he put his pen down, but while he was writing, he couldn’t help it. He believed his atheist characters. So his whole life was a back and forth between faith and doubt.

Josh Landy
I really like that theory, but let me try one alternative. What if he wasn’t oscillating between faith and doubt, but had both of them simultaneously?

Ray Briggs
Wait, what? How can you possibly believe and doubt at the same time? The very nature of doubt is that it’s not belief.

Josh Landy
But here’s what Dostoevsky himself said in a famous letter. He said, “I am a child of the age, a child of nonbelief and doubt, even until my coffin closes.” he considered himself a true Christian, but also a child of nonbelief.

Ray Briggs
How do you think that’s going to fly with his fellow Christians?

Josh Landy
Well, it depends. Who think about Soren Kierkegaard, a philosopher who was writing at roughly the same time as Dostoevsky. For Kierkegaard, the very best kind of Christianity is the one where you doubt, because without doubt, you can’t have faith. And faith is what Christianity is all about.

Ray Briggs
Huh? This reading of yours just might work, and I think it could explain what’s going on in The Brothers Karamazov, if you look at just Alyosha, it’s a Christian novel, and if you look at just Yvonne. It’s an atheist novel, but if you take everything together, it’s a novel that embodies doubting faith. So it’s a model for how to live a truly Christian life, not just one where you never interrogate your faith.

Josh Landy
I hope our guest agrees with us. It’s Garry Hagberg from Bard College, author of several articles on Dostoevsky and many fabulous books.

Ray Briggs
Now, people don’t usually read Dostoevsky for laughs, but we sent our roving philosophical reporter, Sheryl Kaskowitz, to talk to one Russian literature expert who wants to encourage readers to look on the bright side of life. She files this report.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Dostoevsky famously wrote, pain and suffering are always inevitable for a. Large intelligence and a deep heart. He’s well known for drawing on his own pain and suffering in his novels, and he had plenty to work with, having spent four years in a Siberian labor camp as punishment for his socialist views. So humor isn’t really something we tend to associate with Dostoevsky, if there are laughs involved, it’s usually someone making fun of the seriousness and density of his novels, like this scene from a Halloween episode of The Simpsons, where Homer is paralyzed after being bit by a spider. He can’t move or speak, but his eyes are open and we can hear his thoughts. Lisa tries to help turning the great Russian novelist into a classic setup… for a fart joke,

The Simpsons
Dad, I’m going to entertain you with the help of The Brothers Karamazov. “Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov a landowner well known in our district in his own day and still remembered among us…” My god, she’s still on the first sentence. Make her stop! How to express my—Dad! Ew.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
But there are some readers who see Dostoevsky differently.

Lynn Patyk
I was laughing all the time when I read him. You know, I was just constantly noticing how amused, how how I was giggling, and I started to think, well, either I have a twisted sense of humor or Dostoevsky is actually funny.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Lynn Patek is a professor of Russian studies at Dartmouth College and coeditor of the book “Funny Dostoevsky: New Perspectives on the Dostoevskian Light Side.”

Lynn Patyk
As I talked to more colleagues in the field, especially female colleagues, they found him funny too.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Their book talks about slapstick, parody, satire and Dostoevsky’s “funny and furious women.” but Patyk says a lot of readers miss all of that in just trying to get through those long sentences that Homer Simpson complained about,

Lynn Patyk
You may be so wrapped up in working out the more complicated sense of what his characters are saying that you miss the really humorous form that they are saying it in.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
I asked her for an example of what she found funny, and she told me about this scene in The Brothers Karamazov, where Dmitri is on trial for his father’s murder, and he’s responding to testimony from a household servant.

Brothers Karamazov
“Except about the door, all he has said is true,” cried Mitya loudly. “For combing the lights out of my hair, I thank him. For forgiving me my blows, I thank him. The old man has been honest all his life, and was as faithful to my father as 700 poodles.” “Watch your words, defendant,” the judge said sternly.” “I am not a poodle,” Grigory also grumbled. “Then I am—I am a poodle! cried Mitya. “If he’s offended, I take it upon myself and ask His forgiveness. I was a beast and cruel to him.”

Lynn Patyk
Readers, I think, just completely overlook this. You know, they don’t take it in how strange and comical it would be if someone who’s on trial for murder calls themselves a poodle.

Will & Grace
Oh, hi poodle! Bye, poodle!

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Patyk says that’s just how we’ve all learned to read Dostoevsky. Before his imprisonment, he actually wrote vaudeville plays and comic short stories.

Lynn Patyk
But his later novels, most famous novels, dealt with serious, philosophical and religious subjects.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
So critics and readers have always approached him with seriousness.

Lynn Patyk
They like to think of this sort of heavy Russian author who is very, very challenging and that there was nothing light hearted or funny about him.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
but for Patyk that misses something important. She compares the way we’re used to understanding Dostoevsky to our view of the moon.

Lynn Patyk
We only see one side of the moon, which is the light side. In the case of Dostoevsky, we typically see only his dark side.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Of course, the recent Artemis II mission allowed a few lucky people to actually see the Dark Side of the Moon. Here’s astronaut Christina Koch in an interview from space last night.

Artemis II
We did have our first view of the moon far side, and it was just absolutely spectacular.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
So maybe we should think of Lynn Patyk and the contributors to “Funny Dostoevsky” as doing something similar. They’ve journeyed to the other side of Dostoevsky, and they want us all to see the light

Artemis II
That is the dark side, that is not the moon that I’m used to seeing.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Sheryl Kaskowitz.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Sheryl. You know, I have to say it is true. I mean, Dostoevsky isn’t always funny, but sometimes can be really hilarious. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher, Ray. Briggs, and today we’re thinking about Dostoevsky and doubting faith.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Garry Hagberg. He’s professor of esthetics and philosophy at Bard College, and author of “Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood. Garry, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Garry Hagberg
Thanks very much. It’s really nice to be with you both.

Josh Landy
So Garry, you’ve been writing about Dostoevsky for many years now, but I know it’s not just an academic interest for you. So what’s something Dostoyevsky and you think about in your everyday life?

Speaker 3
Good question. What kind of passes from the literature into real life is the sense in which dostoevsky’s characters actually move in a field of implication. It’s not a matter of just what is explicitly said, what the sentence says. It’s a matter of what it means beyond what it expressly says. And that’s dostoevsky’s world. And I want to suggest that’s our world too.

Ray Briggs
So field of implication. Can you give us an example?

Speaker 3
Yeah, for example, I think everybody has had the experience of, I hope everyone has, of being in love. And when you’re early, early in love a young person, you read, for example, love letters, or you listen to what’s said at a restaurant, over coffee, you listen with a kind of hyper acuity that is reaching out to discern every possible line of significance beyond what is expressly stated. And a number of the central characters in dostoevsky’s world sort of have that kind of acute attention. And I think that that’s, that’s something we all, we all have in common, and you know, Dostoevsky is actually representing that over a long form and beautifully.

Ray Briggs
All right, so let’s kick things off with crime and punishment. We’re definitely not going to be able to avoid spoilers here, so let’s just get it out there. The book is about a man named Raskolnikov who decides that some people are above morality, and he’s one of those people that sets him on the road to murder. So Garry, does Dostoevsky think that Raskolnikov is right when he says that morality is mere convention.

Speaker 3
My hunch is that he does not think it’s right. What he’s doing is actually putting forward an example of a certain philosophical orientation to the world that is then tested through the entire length of the novel. So what we see there is the claim, you know, if there’s no God, all things are permitted and so on. We see that claim throughout a number of dostoevs works. But what we see there is someone who lives with it and then suffers the consequences. And so the consequences might not be divinely meted out. They’re meted out by the character’s own psychology. And one’s own psychology is, as we see in the novel, The one place one can’t escape.

Josh Landy
And do you think Dostoevsky thinks all of us are going to feel guilty if we commit crimes, or is it just this particular character?

Speaker 3
Actually, yes, I think that he sees a kind of universal there. And I think that he shows in the last stage of Raskolnikov, he is desperate to escape the sense of what he’s done as a sort of determinant of who he is. And he can’t get out. He finally goes to confess. The confession doesn’t work, but that is actually the one moment in which he is able to speak directly for himself, and it expresses his own selfhood in a brief sentence. Otherwise, it’s all a matter of negotiation, of restatement, of reconsideration, a kind of self torture about the meaning of his words, the meaning of his actions, a psychological sense of confinement from which he just cannot escape.

Ray Briggs
So murder makes him miserable. And I want to connect this to the idea that if God is dead, then everything is permitted if murder is going to make you miserable, isn’t that an adequate reason not to do it like what do we need God for?

Speaker 3
Well, it would be an adequate for a normal person. Yes, that might be right, but for Ruth, golden Goff, quite a special individual. Let’s put it that way. You’ve got someone who has this internal drive to rise above humanity, to rise above the commonplace, to become a denizen of a higher world. And the way he can do that is to cast off all conventional morality, and, in a sense, in a single act of sort of self transcendence, become a member of this higher place, and then from it, look down on the rest of lowly humanity. That’s his idea. So for him, that’s the kind of obvious motivation to commit the murder in a way that will become newly self definitive, self describing.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Dostoevsky and doubting faith with Garry Hagberg, author of “Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning and Aesthetic Theory.”

Ray Briggs
Do you ever doubt your faith? Do you ever doubt your doubt? What are the limits of reason?

Josh Landy
Fragile faith and devilish doubts—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues, some

Mountain Goats
There are things you’ll do for money and some you’ll do for fun, but the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one.

Josh Landy
Did Raskolnikov have good reason to feel sick? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about Fyodor Dostoevsky with Gary Hagberg from Bard College.

Josh Landy
Got questions about these timeless novels? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org. Or you can comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can subscribe to our free podcast and find your faith in a library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
Garry, I have one more question about Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov kind of acts for a lot of the book like other people aren’t as real as him, and it seems like he has a lot of trouble figuring out what’s in their minds. Does the novel tell us anything about our ability to know each other? Like, does it tell us that it’s impossible?

Speaker 3
In my opinion, this is a question that is absolutely central to the entire book. Philosophers have a time honored problem, the problem of other minds. It’s called, and of course, it’s what you just said, right? It’s, you know, how can one mind enclosed into itself, in its own bubble of consciousness, if you will, make its way into anyone’s mind? So there’s a constant skepticism about, you know, do we know what’s in somebody else’s head? And can we know the philosophical question? Well, I think that what Don chefsky did in that book, and the reason I would suggest it’s such a profound philosophical novel, is that it actually makes a remarkable contribution to the question of other minds, and does so by putting the sort of inquiry that the detective porferi. He’s not just a detective. He’s a psychological detective, and he actually thinks his way slowly, page by page, line by line, into the mind of Raskolnikov in such a way that Raskolnikov ends up, in a sense, feeling porfiry moving around inside his own mind. Now that might sound extreme, but if you read it closely, you’ll see that is what’s happened. And this is part of what drives rust Gallego out of his sense of, you know, I’m a transcendent entity among humanity because I murdered someone, it drives him from that to this condition in which he has no alternative but to go to confess, which then doesn’t work anyway. But the idea there is that porfiry looks at every word he says, considers the implications of what he says. In a sense, knows more about what Raskolnikov is expressing than Raskolnikov himself does, and so you have this kind of visionary psychological investigator working his way in to another mind. Now the reason this is philosophically important is that the old problem always asked for a kind of solution. Well, the philosopher Wittgenstein spoke about not just solving philosophical problems, but dissolving them. And I think that by the time one finishes Crime and Punishment. One doesn’t feel the grip of the other mind’s problem, because you have such a detailed example of how one mind does work its way into the mind of another.

Josh Landy
You know this whole idea of getting inside the mind of somebody very different. Brings us to our next novel. Notes from Underground. It’s maybe a less well known it’s one of my favorites, a short first person novel told by a grumpy guy, a tortured guy, but a very smart guy who has lots of theories about freedom and identity, and

Ray Briggs
Many of his theories seem really compelling, like his idea that freedom is the most important thing in the world. But then the second part of the novel makes us wonder about how much we should have believed him.

Josh Landy
So Garry, how important is freedom according to Dostoevsky?

Speaker 3
Oh, I think that it’s central to his vision of humanity. But the question for Dostoevsky is, not, do we have freedom. I think that that’s fairly straightforward. But the complex issue is, of course, what we do with the freedom, and what he’s showing constantly, particularly in Notes from Underground, the Underground Man has it and then exercises it and ends up a sort of psychological catastrophe beyond measure. You know, it’s an example of sort of what not to do with freedom. And as he says, he’s a spiteful man. He’s, as the phrase goes, he’s mad at the world, and he’s completely alienated from the world around him.

Josh Landy
Yes, it’s interesting take on what it would be to be free, because he seems to think that if we do anything that’s in our own interest, that means we’re not free, because somebody else could have predicted it, and maybe it’s just sort of we’re being driven by, I don’t know, our DNA, or something like that. And so the only way to be free, or to show that we’re free is to act against our own interests. Is there anything to that, or is this just kind of the ravings of a madman?

Speaker 3
I’d say it’s halfway between, and it is indeed raving. But the thing is, he is exercising his own freedom by repudiating his own freedom. So, you know, William James, the American philosopher, said, my first act of free. Will will be to believe in free will. Well, that’s more than just clever. There’s a point to it, and I think the Underground Man is kind of exemplifying that sense of freedom. But when he actually repudiates himself, he’s doing in action what he does in words all the time. He describes something, and then he reconsiders that description. He describes his interaction with other people. Then he reconsiders, he redescribes In his interaction with the sex worker. He describes it one way in the event, and then he realizes he wants to, in a sense, take that back from life, become a different person, have responded to differently, and so describe, redescribes it after fact, tries to get himself to believe the redescription, but then he can’t believe it, because he knows he started with the original, truer one. So he’s in a constant act of negotiating linguistic descriptions from him of his own life. It’s a kind of freedom, and yet he’s locked into reconsideration, and it’s true in his language. It’s true in his action.

Ray Briggs
So if he didn’t do this, if he didn’t constantly try to redescribe everything. Would he be less free? Would he seem less free like why is this partly constitutive of freedom, at least according to him?

Garry Hagberg
Yeah, actually, I think that for him, he’s an example of what it would be to be overly complex, overly given to reconsideration. How could a philosopher do such a thing? I’ve never seen that. Josh,

Josh Landy
I’ve never seen it either. Wait, wait, did I? Maybe I did.

Speaker 3
Exactly. And by the way, what you’ve just pointed out here is why Dostoevsky is such a magnificent representational artist, it’s a meme. These are memetic works and but they’re not mimetic of the external world. They’re not painting of a face. They’re actually a mimetic representation of human consciousness, of human psychology in all of its rich variations. So what you see here in these novels, and particularly in the Underground Man, what you see is a kind of portrait of a mind that is sort of troubling, constantly troubling itself, and then, like, like Raskolnikov, it’s a mind from which there is no escape. So the same point is shown again, but in briefer scope.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and this is clearly a case where it’s not going so great for this character, but something about what he’s looking for seems very apt. In other words, he’s maybe his answers aren’t very good, but the questions are good, right? These questions are about why freedom is important. How can we be free? How can we show we’re free? How, on what basis can we act? This guy seems to believe, and it seems pretty reasonable that we should act in accordance with what we really want. We should be authentic. We should be true to ourselves. But then he looks inside himself, and he kind of finds a mess, and so he’s on this quest to become something and even with this, one of the things I love about this novel, he’s even willing to become something bad in order just to be something right? He says early on, you know, if only I were a loafer, if only I were a lazy guy, if only were a spiteful guy, then at least I could say that about myself. Well, why? Why did he act that way? Because he’s a lazy guy. So what’s the what do you think dusty think thinks is the right answer to these questions. In other words, how can I find some kind of locus of authenticity? How can I find what it is that I am and act on the basis of it, if things inside me are so complicated?

Speaker 3
Yeah, Josh, that’s the word I was going to bring up, authenticity, and I think this shows why the existentialist movement actually counts DOS, FG, as a kind of prefatory set of issues that lead into Sartre’s claim that we are we’re not just free, but we’re condemned to freedom. Well, authenticity is actually central to what this character is after pursuing. And so if that’s the fundamental aspiration, he wants to achieve a sense of self, contained, autonomous authenticity, which he otherwise can’t get, particularly through his endless re descriptions of life, like, which one is the real one? Well, he is questioning, is there any such thing as a real description of selfhood, right? Authenticity would close all those issues and allow him to, as we say, be himself, to be here now, as it used to say in the late 60s, and so that’s his goal, that’s the aim, and he systematically fails to reach it every single time. So it’s a sort of cautionary tale in that respect.

Ray Briggs
You are listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky with Gary Hagberg from Bard College. Let’s come back to The Brothers Karamazov, which many see as Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece. It starts with the murder of Fyodor Karamazov, and the question is, who done it? Did one of his three sons kill him? The Pious One, the atheist, the hedonist?

Josh Landy
Yeah, but before you know it, this novel is less about who done it, and more about whether God exists and if so, what? Why he let so many innocent children die horribly So Gary? Does the Brothers Karamazov give us an answer to that question?

Garry Hagberg
Actually, this question could be answered simply, no. In philosophy that might be the singular case in which you have a one word, one syllable answer to a complex question, but actually what you have is a kind of exploration of the kind of life that is lived if one is a theist, the kind of life that is lived if one is an atheist. And I think most importantly, although not stated directly, but shown in the character Alyosha, a kind of Christianity, as came up before in this conversation, that is Kierkegaardian in that it’s got doubt built within it, and he’s an honest enough thinker. Alyosha is an honest enough thinker and an honest enough philosopher, really, to actually recognize that it’s what Josh started today with the combination of a kind of doubt and a kind of belief synthesized into a whole. Now, you know, Ray asked, Well, wait, isn’t that a contradiction? How is that possible? Here’s what I think is going on. Alyosha actually, is a figure who wants to be a kind of very decent, very kind, very charitable, very responsive person, a person a person with a sympathetic imagination, who can think his way into the minds of others, by the way, and that kind of character is his kind of moral ideal that itself has a sense of religiosity or a sense of self transcendence. But it doesn’t require that you subscribe to a certain dogma. It doesn’t require that you actually claim God exists. And I know what God looks like. We create God in our image and make paintings of that figure so on. Not that at all. It’s rather he’s living a kind of life, or aspires to live a kind of life, and he often achieves it, that it’s just full of kind of sympathetic kindness and understanding, even when people are being cruel and nasty and harsh, intolerant, dismissive, he can somehow absorb all of that and still maintain a sense of human human decency. It’s a kind of religiosity without dogmatic religion.

Ray Briggs
I like that, and I like the idea that all of the characters are different examples of how to live. I mean, one reaction that I find quite natural is I don’t want to be any of these people, like Ivan is clever but miserable. Alyosha has like a great spirit, but is honestly kind of dim. Aren’t there any other options?

Josh Landy
Well, don’t you want to be Fyodor, the great hedonist who’s got nothing in his between his ears?

Ray Briggs
Oh, my god, worst of both worlds.

Speaker 3
So called Sensualist, just a, you know, hedonistic, hedonistic life, one meaningless distraction after another.

Ray Briggs
It doesn’t work for him. He’s not happy.

Josh Landy
So what’s the value of that kind of novel, Garry, where, you know, there’s no rooting interest in that way, or maybe Alyosha, but you know, as Ray was saying, you kind of can’t fully invest yourself. You can’t think, I want to be exactly like him. What’s why? Why write a novel that way?

Garry Hagberg
Right. Actually, you know, the the great poet Donald Hall was once asked a question about selfhood, and he paused and said, do you mean by selfhood, the drafty boarding house that with all of these characters I have moving in and moving out and strolling off, is that what you mean by selfhood? And I thought, well, that’s not a bad answer. And I think that what dust does these novels are full of? Are these characters who sort of stroll in and out and, you know, stay with you for a while you you yourself as reader, find like like porfiry in crime and punishment. You yourself as reader, find your way into the minds of those characters and sort of what it’s like to be a character. What that does is to inform the lives we live, not by producing sort of exemplars, or not by producing a sort of like a pattern life, something that we want to exemplify by following the character, becoming just like the character, but rather being living a life that is our own, that is authentic in a Dostoevsky way, that actually allows us to be ourselves in a way that is informed by a whole cast of characters across these great, great novels.

Josh Landy
I think that’s one of the reasons why the great scholar Mikhail Bertin, loved Dostoevsky so much because, in his view, Dostoevsky is not trying to tell us something or sort of preach at us, but he’s precisely giving putting all of these different voices into A kind of conversation. He’s staging a kind of battle of ideas in which none of them is supposed to kind of win, but instead, we’re supposed to join that conversation. And there’s a way in which it’s not the question of freedom is not only for the characters, it’s for us. The reader gets to have a certain degree of freedom. The reader gets to be authentic and find. Uh, their own way in this morass of important questions. Does that sound reasonable to you, Garry?

Speaker 3
Actually another monosyllabic answer: yes. I think that’s exactly right. Josh, I think that captures the heart of the matter. And what we’re given is a kind of parade of characters. But each character, as I said earlier in this conversation, each character actually represents a certain variety, a certain variation on human psychology. And we see this cast of characters, and we think our way into them, we feel our way into them. We sort of we interact with them as if real. That’s a separate topic for another day, but, but I think that the the understanding, the human understanding the human understanding that we gain from visiting, from occupying those characters imaginably for the duration of the novel, actually informs human life in a way that it’s hard to find elsewhere and and I think that’s one of the great contributions that literature makes to philosophy.

Ray Briggs
I have a question, maybe from the perspective either of Ivan or of a character in the in a story within a story that he tells. So we mentioned briefly this problem about God. It’s the problem of evil, like if, if God exists, then why do so many innocent children suffer? And Yvonne, at one point, has this great like monolog, about the Grand Inquisitor, who, when Jesus comes back to Earth, tells him to bug off, is that the right response? Is there a response to that response?

Speaker 3
That’s a great question. Ray, I wish I had a good answer to it, but what I can at least try. I think that that is the right response because of the need, the demand, the internal demand for a kind of authenticity and independence. So if I think that what das gives you shows quite frequently is if you sort of take on religious ideas and put those ideas into a context where you’re not following the dictates of a theological you know entity giving you 10 Commandments, or whatever it is, you’re not that kind of person. You’re a person who takes the ideas, considers the relation that the words expressing those ideas might have, how those words might take on meaning in your own life. And this is a broadly Wittgensteinian sort of point I’m making here, but those theological words can actually inform lives and help lives and make a contribution to self understanding and sort of working out a kind of narrative of one’s life that you can import sort of religious ideas without being a theist. You can indeed do that in the extreme case with being a kind of dogmatic atheist. And yet the meaning of those phrases and words and images and metaphors from religion can actually help. So So you tell Jesus, when Jesus comes back, thanks very much, but bug off. But by the way, we’ll keep a lot of your phrases working down here.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Dostoevsky and doubting faith with Garry Hagberg from Bard College.

Ray Briggs
Why is it so hard to achieve a stable identity? Why do people sometimes act against their own interest? How much can we truly know about ourselves

Josh Landy
Doubling down on dostoevsky’s doubts—plus commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Jamiroquai
There’s too much panic in this town, I’m going deeper underground. Got to go much deeper.

Josh Landy
Going underground? You might find a Dostoevsky character down there. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything.

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Gary Hargberg from Bard College, and we’re thinking about Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Josh Landy
Garry, I’d like to keep going on this question of the Grand Inquisitor story that Ivan tells Alyosha and The Brothers Karamazov, where, yeah, well, you know, he imagines a time during the Inquisition, and Jesus comes back to Earth, and the Grand Inquisitor says, Would you mind? Because look what we figured out is that, in fact, people don’t want to be free. You offer people freedom, they can’t handle their freedom right. Nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and human society than freedom, and that’s what we the church worked out. We did everybody a favor by taking their freedom away from them. So I guess my question is, is he totally wrong? It seems like Dostoevsky can’t agree with the Grand Inquisitor about this, but here’s a way of phrasing it where it’s maybe slightly more appealing. Isn’t there something dizzying about freedom? I mean, this is kind of a proto existentialist thought, right? If you’re left to your own devices and you don’t have some kind of guiding say. Of principles or or, I don’t know, statements or norms or something like that, isn’t it really hard for most of us to figure out all on our own, what it is we we want to do and we should do?

Speaker 3
This is a this, too, is a great question. I think that in that very important exchange with the Grand Inquisitor. I think that Jesus is, in a sense, the plan is to send Jesus back and we’ll be down here on our own. But the self incrimination of the Grand Inquisitor is sort of implicit, but not explicitly stated. And so it’s one of those things where in the realm of implication, you see what might be going on in the mind of Dostoevsky, or at least the point of a change, it could be that the church is actually pretending to step in and take the place of Jesus. So Jesus, thank you very much. Goodbye. And that action itself is actually deeply cruel to humanity, because what it does, as he says, is to, of course, retract the sense of freedom and the sense and with the sense of freedom, you actually are taking out the sense of autonomy, and that’s turning a human being into a kind of obedient follower of dogma. Yeah, exactly. And so the damage that that does to the human being is to deprive the human being of the possibility of a kind of authentic autonomy, and that would be a full self realization of the kind that within the dictates of the church, one cannot achieve. So I think that they both, both Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor are both, in a sense, being being set aside in order to make a make, make a better world down here that doesn’t remove religious ideas, as I said a moment ago, or the learning from religious metaphors or self description that comes from, you know, religious metaphor. It doesn’t remove any of that, but it does remove the the idea of just kind of a blind obedience to dogma.

Ray Briggs
So Garry, we got a couple of emails. Big Jim says Dostoevsky perhaps recognized that the worst kind of faith is certainty. And then John writes this, I believe that if there is a supreme being, then it is not petty and it does not condemn individuals to suffer forever for having committed sins in a finite human lifespan. I try to be a good person, not because any religion tells me to, but because it seems logical to me to try to be a good person. It’s good that one’s faith be a modest faith, because any of us can be wrong about anything. I just try to think reasonably, and that’s the best I can do. So what do you think Gary would Dostoevsky agree with John?

Speaker 3
That’s hard to answer, because if what John very nice phrases there, if what John is doing is actually moving toward the sense of autonomy and the sense of authenticity, again, that we’ve been talking about, then that strikes me as a great kind of path forward, and that path forward might be agnostic, it might be atheist, it might be theist. Those issues are not determinative of the ability to move along in the progress that John is there, sort of describing the idea of being reasonable. Well. Now that’s interesting, because the underground man you know, is bitter about everything, including reason, including acting reasonably, right. And so what John is suggesting there is a kind of antidote to the psychological type that is represented in the Underground Man.

Ray Briggs
It seems like the levels of happiness of the different characters and different people in real life depend a lot on what character they start with, like, maybe the Underground Man from a different starting point going through the same procedure would be not isolated and miserable. Like it is a possible reading of this that some of these people are miserable because they’re kind of broken, and wherever they started out, they they would end up there like Can, can reason lead you out of a miserable place for Dostoevsky, or are some people just kind of stuck there?

Speaker 3
No interesting, I think that the sense of the desire for transcendence that we’ve talked about a number of times they there’s a splash of kind of Platonism here, where, in fact, the self wants to become a denizen of a higher world, and you want to become a member of a world that is available, you might say, to the intellect, but not to the senses. So you’re not the indulgent hedonist. You’re a person who is actually striving for a kind of a kind of better thing. Now that better thing, that higher thing might will be a kind of ethical consistency across cases that’s one kind of ideal. Another kind of ideal would be one where you respond to human difficulty in front of you, and you attend to that like Alyosha, and you respond to the individual who needs help of any of any kind. It could be material help. It could be psychological help. It could be linked. Holistic, verbal, all kinds of things. It could be emotional health, well, to respond to that would be the route to becoming, in a sense, a better person, where you can transcend yourself. And I think that on another day, we could talk about all it does have the characters and the way that they are all fighting this same fight. They’re all trying to actually, not all, but the central characters are trying to actually rise above themselves.

Josh Landy
The other thing people seem to be looking for is a form of faith, at least many of these characters, and I think big Jim’s email takes us all the way back to where we began our conversation today. Ray and I were talking about the possibility that these novels embody a kind of doubting faith and and I think about this moment in The Brothers Karamazov, where a rather feverish Ivan is visited by the devil, or imagines he’s visited by the devil. And one of the things the devil says is this Hosanna alone is not enough for life. It is necessary that this Hosanna pass through the crucible of doubt. Now that’s an imaginary devil in the figment of a rather complicated and tortured character. But is it possible that Dostoevsky thought that a little bit himself, this idea that you know, if you really want to have genuine faith, you can’t as Big Jim says, you know, the enemy of that is certainty. You can’t just be someone who thinks they know it. You have to be someone who isn’t sure and needs to make the leap of faith. What do you think, Garry?

Speaker 3
Yeah, I think, you know, Big Jim, has a wonderful point there. Because, as you’ve just said, If you don’t have, like, just an element of doubt, if you don’t have a sense of openness to reconsideration, if you don’t have the ability to actually think and rethink and rethink again, not in this tortured way, like the Underground Man, but in a responsible human way, where you consider multiple descriptions of your life, you consider multiple narratives of your life. You consider multiple narratives as your life interacts with other people, and we all hope helps other people, that sense of openness is actually encouraged by a little bit of doubt about all things. And in fact, I think that Big Jim is right certainty, certainly of a kind that is offered by, for example, the Grand Inquisitor, or by the by the church can be a very dangerous thing for human psychology.

Ray Briggs
So Garry, if you could leave our listeners with one piece of advice from Dostoevsky about how to go about their explorations and leading their lives. What would you tell them?

Speaker 3
May I end where I started: be ever more attentive to implication, to the implications of human gestures, of facial expressions, of patterns of attention, not not just what people say, but all of those meaningful things. In addition, we live in a world of meaning flying all over the place of what it’s a wonderful thing. Dostoevsky teaches us how to actually be ever more attentive to those kinds of things. There’s a scene in Karamazov where Alyosha knocks on the door of a country house and there are people in it. He steps into the entryway, and there’s a description of what he perceives, and this is like a three page full description of all of the things he sees, including facial gestures, patterns of attention who’s looking in which direction, the certain sense of elegance on a person’s expression, the avoidance of another person’s expression, all of the artifacts in the room. This all fits together into really the depiction that dust if he has given us of a sensibility, of a perceptual sensibility. And if we remember how important those features of human life are, and the importance of attention to, as I said at the beginning, the world of implication, it would be a better world I think.

Josh Landy
Well, Garry, you’ve definitely restored my faith. This has been a really fun conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 3
Well, thank you both. What a pleasure. I hope we’ll be doing this again soon.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Garry Hagberg, Professor of aesthetics and philosophy at Bard College, and author of “Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I find myself unable to be one of these, like nice and morally good simpletons that I think Dostoevsky really loves, but I can at least follow the advice to pay closer attention to other people in the world around me. I think that’s maybe a good step to improvement.

Josh Landy
Well, yeah, maybe I don’t want to be a holy fool either, in the right in the classic formulation. But yeah, I like what you say. And I just love this idea that the existence of these novels that don’t hand things to us on a plate, ask these incredibly important questions, ask them powerfully, and then leave us to figure it all out. With the help of Garry. Of course, we’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, and while you’re there, you can subscribe to a podcast for. Free and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes

Ray Briggs
Now, the long lost Karamazov brotherL it’s Ian Shoales the Sexty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… It’s interesting how big an influence Dostoevsky has had in our culture, and it’s our fault as much as his. Really, he had one eye in a glorious but troubled past, and so did we, with the other eye on a fraught future. Also Same here. The 20th Century was looming. God was fading. Sin was about to be supplanted by jeez, I sure messed that up, didn’t I? It wasn’t sin and forgiveness anymore. It was Crime and Punishment. Here comes the modern here comes modernism. Chunks of dust, gasses. Real life story made it into his writing, which would certainly have given true crime a room for his money. It was a precursor. America loves that stuff to the ground. Crime and Punishment was an inspiration for Colombo, for Pete’s sake, not to mention film noir. That’s why he won the Cold War, if you want, my opinion, we made a self loathing sexy. Russia sucked at that. Ditto Dostoyevsky. But as a writer and an avatar of what we now call existentialism, his life was full of the kind of drama eat up with a spoon. Arrest by secret police, narrow firing squad, escape, hard labor in Siberia, a gambling addiction. We love that stuff. He was also epileptic, and lost his son to epilepsy. His seizures were often preceded by mystical epiphanies during his time in Siberia, which was when he first presented his epileptic he was not permitted to publish anything, and was only allowed to read the New Testament, which was issued to him and still with him when he died so doubt and faith and terror and bliss all in one human package. We can relate these days, when reading a novel, we first codified our perceptions as bullet points and points, and then examined the art to see which bullet points are present. In that regard, Freud himself wrote, quote, four facets may be distinguished in the rich personality of Dostoevsky, the creative artist, the neurotic, the moralist and the sinner. How is one to find one’s way in this bewildering complexity? Unquote, in that vein, maybe Dostoevsky wrote, or had some Karamazov say, quote, once you get rid of God, anything is possible. UNQUOTE, compare that to what the renowned unbeliever, Aleister Crowley said in the 20th century. Quote, what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. UNQUOTE, well, that was dostoevsky’s fear, not his intention. He was a Christian, after all, one of the new kind who felt doomed but believed personal traces could mitigate him. But it’s hard to find those traces because we have no faith. It makes life a complicated journey fraught with mortal peril and debt management, and we are armed only with irony and bitter acceptance. Today, God is still dead, allegedly, but existentialism can be controlled through medication. Suffering has been removed from religion, and Jesus became our pal, and moral decisions became individual, rather than Christ driven. Christ is still in there somewhere, but he’s not the one paralyzed by overthinking. Is he that seems to be the main difficulty in the path of peace of mind. Also, Dostoevsky was a compulsive gambler for years. The Gambler, he wrote quote, deep down, he feels it is despicable, though the need to take risks ennobles him in his own eyes. Unquote. He also wrote, quote, one turn of the wheel. All will be changed, and those very moralists will be the first to congratulate me with friendly jests. And they will not all turn away from me as they do now, but hang them all. What am I now? Zero? What may I be tomorrow? Tomorrow I may rise from the dead and begin to live again. There are still the makings of a man in me, unquote late in life, he made a bet with his publisher. They could write a memoir about his gambling. In a month, the publisher would settle dostoevsky’s gambling debts. Dos kipsky wrote the gambler in 26 days. You can find it online for free. It’s pretty good. But then his publisher was nowhere to be found. He was hiding, trying to weasel out of the wager. Luckily, Mrs. Dostoevsky Anna, his third and best wife, everybody says so. She was the first stenographer in Russia. It’s a fact. Look it up. She suggested registering the manuscript with a notary public. Hurrah. When the publisher returned, the bet was won. And did Dostoevsky quit gambling? Well, no, not for another five years. See what kind of guy he was, very American, really, in a Russian kind of way. You could spend a lifetime studying him. I heard he had a system for playing roulette. Figure that out. You could all stop buying crypto and move to Vegas. We’ll be rich, rich, I tell you, I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2026.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
Thanks also to Emma Lozman-Plum, Michael Aparicio, Tom Lockhart, Matt Porta, John Lehman, Nancy Smith, Robert Smith, Andrew Rutkowski and Elizabeth Wright Meyer.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues at our website, philosophy talk.org where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. Thank you for listening.

Ray Briggs
And thank you for thinking.

Family Guy
This isn’t over. Ooh, if you’re looking for your Dostoevsky, I used it to make the fort from F troop.