Russian Thinker Dostoevsky Inspires Opinion Piece in NYTimes

50 years ago, in another time and place, your MesaZona blogger was a sophomore at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. We had a dress code [jacket-and-tie for classes] and requirements every semester for 4 years for Philosophy courses no matter what your major was. We learned to think and study as an academic discipline the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence across centuries of the human experience on this planet, including original religious texts like The Bible and The Q'uran, writings of Confucius, the teachings of Buddhism and The Way of The Tao. In advanced classes in high school we read 1,001 Arabian Nights, The Bhagavad Vita, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, the Iliad & The Odyssey, Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, and George Orwell. . . Heavy stuff, huh?

All that goes to show you can't turn your back on history or we'll be forced to re-live it. Case in point the thinker and novelist to the right:
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Novelist, short story writer, journalist
His subjects: Psychology, philosophy, religion
Literary movement: Realism

His notable works include:
Notes from The Underground, Crime and Punishment,The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov

Notes From The Underground, published in 1864, still has a sardonic edge and philosophical bite that grabbed onto Corsica Bradatan in this opinion piece published today in the New York Times, in a series called The Stone, a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley, who teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research  

Our Delight in Destruction

“I, for example,” says the nameless narrator in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground (1864),” “would not be the least bit surprised if suddenly, out of the blue, amid the universal future reasonableness, some gentleman of ignoble or, better, of retrograde and jeering physiognomy, should emerge, set his arms akimbo, and say to us all: ‘Well, gentlemen, why don’t we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to the devil and living once more according to our own stupid will!’ That would still be nothing, but what is offensive is that he’d be sure to find followers: that’s how man is arranged.”

The musings of Dostoevsky’s hero certainly seem pertinent now — not just because of Donald Trump’s rise to the White House but also in light of the populist sentiment and politics emerging in other parts of the world. But for all their mocking, jovial tone, the underground man’s observations have more serious and far-reaching implications. For, after all, what he tells us here is the story of a disastrous historical blindness. . .

What if we’ve been caught in a blind spot?
“I’m certain that man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos,” proclaims Dostoevsky’s hero in one of his more philosophical moments.If man is a complex animal, mankind is an even more complicated beast, with many layers and regions, one more irrational than the next.

The human is a knot of contradictions and opposing drives: reason and unreason; wisdom and recklessness; faithlessness and mysticism; logic and imagination. . . Dostoevsky — socialist, political prisoner, addicted gambler, epileptic, reactionary thinker and visionary artist — did plenty abyss-gazing and his testimony is overwhelming. It is clear “to the point of obviousness,” he confesses in “A Writer’s Diary,” that “evil lies deeper in human beings than our socialist-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil . . .

In the American election, reason gave way to fear, resentment, hate and spite . . .

What seemed to drive the support for Trump was darker and more complicated — the heart. And what makes this event particularly significant is not necessarily its political aspect (though that’s serious enough), but the fact that we find ourselves so poorly equipped to comprehend it. Thanks to the clumsy way in which we’ve been imagining ourselves, we are unprepared to digest it. Rarely has a failure of imagination been more humiliating.

 

Read more >> Our Delight In Destruction