Notes From The Underground- Dostoyevsky
"But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic."
On what grounds have Dostoyevsky made such a remark? Is there at all any truth in this?
Also, I wonder if we could have a general discussion on Dostoyevsky's Notes From The Underground.
On what grounds have Dostoyevsky made such a remark? Is there at all any truth in this?
Also, I wonder if we could have a general discussion on Dostoyevsky's Notes From The Underground.
Comments (34)
"If the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth". (Letter to Madame N. D. Fonvisin, March 1854).
I would like to discuss Notes from the Underground. A curious "novel".
I've seen plenty of examples of this in my lifetime! Always in other people of course! :joke:
Great! How do we go about it?
Chapter-by-chapter basis, say 2 to 3 chapters a day and discuss quote-worthy lines? In that way others who haven't read can join in, if they want. Then in the end, we can discuss themes, study characters, central philosophies and perhaps can compare with other Dostoyevsky works.
Somehow, it reminds me of Zeno of Elea and his paradoxes. Our senses, IF they are to be trusted and this is a very big "if", inform us that anyone can catch a tortoise even if given a head start. Yet, logic says this is an impossibility.
I sense a circularity hidden in the belief that our senses are unreliable. On what basis have we come to believe that our senses are unreliable? By reason/logic of course but the problem is that would mean we've already invested our faith/trust in logic. Doesn't this amount to saying logic is better [at gaining knowledge/understanding] than the senses because logic says so? It's like in a fight between two people, x and y, y is also the referee and declares himself, y, to have won the fight against x and that too according to y's rules.
How damaging is the circularity to the belief that our senses are unreliable and that logic trumps our senses on all fronts?
It seems to boil down to trust and where we should place it. I feel an answer will present itself if we delve into the origins of logic itself. It's plausible but not necessarily true that logic arose precisely out of the difficulty in trusting our senses. I mean the need for justification is, at its heart, a call for some kind of corroboration of a claim (or a sensory perception) being considered. If the senses could be trusted then there wouldn't be a need for justification beyond what is perceived through the senses. In other words, logic exists because our senses aren't trustworthy.
In a way then Doestoevsky is painfully wrong in claiming that logic does something like "distort the truth intentionally" and that to "deny the "evidence" of his senses only to justify his logic" is bad. To the contrary, logic is about preventing distortions of truth and realizing the unreliable nature of our senses, to seek justification, practice logic, anywhere and anytime.
Yes, Dostoevsky is wrong. The senses do not contradict logic, but some abuses of logic do. In opposing Chernyshevsky's narrow positivism he identifies reason or science with this kind of positivism. Notes from the Underground is dedicated to attacking Chernyshevsky's utilitarianism in the name of a "divine utilitarianism". He summarizes utilitarianism in two propositions:
Men always do what they think is best for them.
Reason can show what is best for every man.
Then Dostoevsky shows a man who, in the name of freedom and passion, chooses what is not better for himself or for others.
He extrapolates this case to every man.
And he concludes that reason=logic is not only wrong but bad.
This is the summary of Notes from the Underground.
What comes next is the justification that only belief in Jesus Christ can make men good. This is what I called "divine utilitarianism".
Well, as I wrote in another thread, what could possibly be better than logic or even reason itself?
"Better" in what sense? Epistemological, moral...?
Dostoevsky's epistemology is very weak. His political theology is a disaster. His ( relatively ) better chances are in ethics.
Well, if reason = logic is bad there must be a sense in which this is true. If so, what could be a better substitute within this sense?
Perhaps the original quote was saying something like Hume's ironic assessment : "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions".
Dostoevsky on reason vs faith :
Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be till the end of time. Nations are built up and moved by another force which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and inexplicable: that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one's own existence, and a denial of death.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7425828-science-and-reason-have-from-the-beginning-of-time-played
See:
.
"Worse than a plague." You can see here the religious conservatives' hatred of science and reason. Science is the devil, without nuance. Don't forget that Dostoevsky was a fanatical believer.
Obviously Dostoevsky never justifies the reason for his hatred in objective terms. His main argument was that reason and science keep man away from Jesus Christ and promote selfishness and violence.
I find it difficult to understand how this religious fanaticism can be attractive to some who claim to be agnostics, such as Albert Camus or some French postmodernist (Kristeva, Todorov). Of course they share the contempt for science and positivism. However, one can expect more equanimity from philosophers. This is not the case. Passion and dogmatism create the illusion of strength.
I don't find a simple answer.
Plenty of truth to this. With systems and abstract deductions comes a sense of order and the illusion that we understand exactly how to deal with the world. The evidence of the senses points out our prediction errors: what doesn’t fit, doesn’t make sense in relation to these systems, and subsequently requires attention, energy and effort to adjust how we’ve structured these interrelated systems so far - energy we’ve already allocated elsewhere. This is when we experience pain, humility, loss and lack: what we call suffering. By denying the evidence of our senses, we attempt to avoid this suffering. No sensory evidence, no prediction error, no pain.
He's critiquing rationalism. I've felt the same way recently.
The world is a complex, messy place and system-builders often attempt to sort of gloss over this with a set of rationalistic rules that first and foremost guide their way of viewing this world. The problem is that this often results in creating a false sense of certainty and glossing over the subtleties of certain fields and proclaiming themselves experts in areas where they are not (for them experience and data is of secondary importance; a knowledge of the relevant a priori principles is.)
Such system-building, top-down approaches to the world were popular in Kant's time and remain popular in some fields today.
I believe that a few centuries ago, a blink of an eye in the life of science and religion, the relationship between these two giants of the modern age was friendlier and even describable in mentor - protege terms. I'm no historian but things began to sour between religion and science with the Copernican heliocentrism and its been downhill ever since with geological and biological discoveries wedging the ever-widening gap between science and religion.
Nevertheless, what is notable is that another bastion of reason, philosophy insofar as it is what it claims it is - rational in the truest sense of that word - isn't heavily involved in religion-bashing. Yes, if what I hear is correct, philosophy has taken turn towards materialism and that spells bad news for religion, but there's nothing really anti-theistic in philosophy per se. Philosophy doesn't take sides or if I were to be more accurate, philosophers are as happy to fight for religion as they are to fight against it.
Also, to be fair, religion isn't entirely devoid of reason is it? Many arguments exist in religion that prove or are supposed to prove the truth of their doctrines. So, I wouldn't say that religion is pure faith, totally bereft of reason. It rarely makes sense to think reason is wholly absent in any system of beliefs and this rule, if it's one, applies to religion and its followers.
All in all, Doestoevsky claims a clear-cut boundary between reason and religion or between science and religion but this, although it has a ring of truth, fails to do justice to the complexity of the issue. Reason is a means to truth, recognized and respected as such by everyone in their own way, whether simply in the act of living itself or involved in some highfalutin mind game. If religion is in opposition to reason, thus understood, then the odds are extremely unfavorable for religion for if it's like that, religion must, perforce, be irrational, a world for the insane. Fortunately, there's enough reason in religion for that not to be the case.
It seems that Post-Enlightenment Science gradually but deliberately abandoned the philosophical search for moral truths, in order to focus on facts that were more stable than debatable ethical & metaphysical principles. Thus Science became amoral, much to the chagrin of moralizing Priests. At first, Science dealt mostly with passive non-human objects, while Priests had to manage passionate human subjects. But, as time went by, scientists began to extend their amoral agnostic methods to social topics, including the mechanistic theories of Social Darwinism --- which infuriated the Priesthood, and Dostoevsky.
Although the Enlightenment opened a split between Moral philosophy and Natural philosophy, the rapid worldly success of expanding mechanical knowledge seemed to make the philosophers jealous with "physics envy". They got tired of recycling the same 2500-year-old ethical questions. So, some philosophers turned their focus from the subjective mental aspects of humanity (faith) to their objective actions (behavior). Thus, psychology abandoned Freud's attempts to read minds and interpret dreams, and were pleased to make rapid progress with Behaviorism, which allowed them to manipulate people without worrying about what they were thinking. This was, as you said, "a turn toward materialism" --- treating men as machines --- and away from spiritualism --- men as embodied spirits.
Ironically, the "physics envy" of rational philosophers has recently allowed them to find clues to spiritual questions in the paradoxes of Quantum Theory. So, modern philosophy, following the impartial agnostic principle, allows us to argue for both sides of the science/religion divide --- as exemplified in this forum. My own philosophy is not religious, but it is also not anti-theistic. :cool:
Physics Envy : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy
Quantum Mysticism : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism
Dostoevsky vs Social Darwinism : https://books.google.com/books?id=lp1RpM8o9BQC&pg=PA636&lpg=PA636&dq=social+darwinism+dostoevsky&source=bl&ots=hDzTx3RI2G&sig=ACfU3U3O7VFO_RalsEMFaMXiARtD105BNQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiVndXYk7HoAhUnUt8KHZt5ALYQ6AEwCnoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=social%20darwinism%20dostoevsky&f=false
I haven't read Notes From The Underground, but I have read some of his other works (C&P, Karamazovs, Idiot, and a few others), so I can comment on those. Dostoyevsky the writer transcends Dostoyevsky the thinker. You (and I) may not much care for his politics, his religion, his philosophy, but that does not detract from the power of his best works. Reading a Dostoyevsky novel is a life experience; you don't walk away from it unaffected.
The same can be said about Tolstoy - and about any great artist. That is what makes them great: we value them not (or not only) for their ideas, but for their art.
I would like to know on what data you base this statement. My experience is the opposite. At the beginning of the 19th century theodicy was omnipotent. If an applicant for a professorship declared himself an atheist, he was barred from admission, and if a professor declared himself an atheist, he was expelled. At the beginning of the 21st century, theodicy is a non-existent or secondary subject in almost all faculties of philosophy. In Europe at least. Generally, religious philosophy is hidden in other subjects such as the history of religions or metaphysics (which is also in decline).
Quoting Gnomon
Philosophy is opposed to religion in a fundamental sense: autonomy. Whatever philosophical method is defended, it must be based on the free examination of arguments on the basis of autonomous reason. There it clashes head-on with religiosity, which always puts divine norms above human ones. Every attempt to rationally demonstrate the religious faith has failed. That is why priests do not look kindly upon a rebellious philosophy that pretends to be based on itself. And if they don't take measures, it's because they no longer have the power they had in the 19th century.
I just got fed up by discussing or reading books by Christian philosophers who, as soon as they are cornered, wield the ineffable experience of faith. The most seemingly rational and prestigious like Paul Ricoeur For example.
At heart they are not very different from Dostoevsky: if reason says the opposite of faith, they choose faith. But they do not dare to say it as blatantly as he did.
The agnostic principle is not that anything goes, but that one must attack with reason what is not valid. That is, religion. That's how Thomas Huxley understood it. That fear of the "anti-religious" didn't go with him. When he had to denounce irrationality, he did so.
Also in the paragraphs where he accuses the Jews for their demonic power of hatred towards the Russians in particular and Humanity in general? Do you enjoy these paragraphs? Also in the poems in which he manifests a doglike submission to the divine presence of the Tsar?
I'm not talking about analytically separating ideology from aesthetics in his books. I'm talking about synthetic enjoyment of an aberrant ideology finely expressed. Can aesthetic pleasure silence moral outrage?
It is one thing to defend science and another to believe that science explains everything and that there is no more rationality than science. This is a position that is rarely found among philosophers and is very common among forum scientists.
I don't recall reading either of these, although I am aware of such sentiments by reputation. It is odd though that you should expend so much energy digging up the worst. What is your interest in Dostoevsky ?
Quoting David Mo
I don't know if I would call the experience of reading Dostoevsky an esthetic pleasure. He was not a fine stylist in the usual sense (for that try someone like Turgenev). There is a wicked pleasure to be had in his caustic humor, but when Dostoevsky is in his more serious mood, reading him is about as pleasurable as a hallucinatory fever.
I did mention the materialistic turn philosophy is supposed to be undergoing; that being the case, it seems almost inevitable that religion will be sidelined by philosophers. Isn't religion, after all, incompatible, at a very fundamental level, with materialism? God is, by definition, immaterial.
Thanks for the history lesson. It seems that if anything negative can be said about the situation then it's that science is a cop-out with scientists no better than people who go after the low hanging fruit - the easy pickings as it were - leaving the hapless priests to deal with the really tough questions. However, you mentioned or alluded to a link between science (paradoxes of quantum theory) and religion; if so then science is circling back towards religion - scientists are on a path that will take them back to the priests they abandoned long ago. I hope it'll be a friendly meeting. I guess scientists made the right decision to part ways with the priests - we learned a lot more than we would've had this separation not taken place.
I don't know of any scientist who links quantum mechanics with religion. There are pseudoscientists, New Age mystics and theologians who try.
To say that there is an open path where quantum mechanics and religion can go together has no basis. It's important not to create confusion.
Anyway, Dostoevsky was not opposed to social Darwinism. He made a parody of a peculiar Russian Darwinist. He was against any attempt to link religion and science because he thought that science had perverse results in morality.
Ok but is science devoid of all religious content? Does religion have absolutely no connection to science? If you ask me, science is simply a materialistic answer to questions that were once answered with the word "god". Pierre Simon Laplace one replied, to the question of god's role in his science, "I had no need for that hypothesis" and that is the essence of the attitude of science towards religion - not anti-religious but simply non-religious.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to argue here in relation to what I’ve written. I haven’t said anything about ‘science’ in particular.
Does anyone have the poems? The only info I could find on D's anti-semitism was from a letter where he responded to a Jew who accused him of anti-semitism:
"I am not an enemy of the Jews at all and never have been. But as you say, its 40-century existence proves that this tribe has exceptional vitality, which would not help, during the course of its history, taking the form of various Status in Statu .... how can they fail to find themselves, even if only partially, at variance with the indigenous population – the Russian tribe?"
There's probably some merit to the charge of him creating Jewish stereotypes with some of his characters, but are we really going to crucify him for this? Would we crucify Shakespeare for Shylock? Honestly, in Russia in the 1860s-1880s I would just expect a certain level of religiously based anti-semitism to be relatively normal. Devotion to a strong, centralized leadership is also more common in Russia given that the country has survived invasion after invasion due to these leaders being able to fight off these foreign invaders. I'm just providing historical context here.
If science is neutral with respect to religion, it is not understood why they have crashed so often in history.
Science would be neutral with respect to an extremely abstract, subjective and spiritual belief that had nothing to do with the really existing religions. This is not the case with Dostoevsky. His religion involved fundamental questions of fact.
"The crowd of triumphant Jews and kikes that has thrown itself on Russia (...) to suck the lifeblood of the liberated but hopelessly indebted peasantry"
"How disgusting that the Kutais Jews are acquitted. They are beyond doubt guilty." [Referring to a group of Jews falsely accused of murdering a child in order to drink his blood. It is also featured in "The Brothers Karamazov"].
"Jews “are coming, they have filled all of Europe, everything selfish, everything inimical to humanity, all of mankind’s evil passions are for them—how could they not triumph, to the world’s ruination!"
"But the Jews refused the correction [of the Old Testament] and remained in all their former narrowness and inflexibility, and therefore instead of pan humanness have turned into the enemies of humanity, denying everyone except themselves, and now really remain the bearers of the Antichrist and, of course, will be triumphant for a while."
(Quotes taken from Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky. A Writer in His Time, Princeton University Press, 2010)
Dostoevsky was an intelligent man. He should have been aware that his hate to Jews was fueling the frequent pogroms in Russia. If we have any moral sense we will condemn the pogroms and those that encouraged them. There were many other decent Russian that were not of his opinions on this subject. And the same can be said from his hate to Polish, democracy or socialism and his political servility.
My question remains: How can you enjoy with the repulsive passages of a great writer?
Speaking of Dostoevsky, the "abstract system" that claims to have an exact answer for "everything in this world" is science. What abstract systems that create the illusion of knowledge were you referring to?
My apologies, I haven’t read Dostoevsky, so I’m probably out of my depth - just responding to the quote out of context.
Interesting that the ‘systems and abstract deductions’ is what he refers to as science. Science could just as easily be ‘the evidence of his senses’, depending on how you approach it.
Many ideologies create the illusion of knowledge through systems and abstract deductions, including religion, logic and philosophy, as well as science. It is science, of these four, at least, which values the evidence of the senses in a process of checks and balances - although I will concede that many areas of science are somewhat removed from the senses these days. But these other three ‘illusions of knowledge’ inspire a readiness to deny the evidence of the senses in order to justify logic, more so than science.
It’s often when we apply scientific method to them that these systems either fail or transform into a more dynamic search for an answer to ‘how to deal with the world’ without expecting to close the knowledge gap completely. that’s my experience, anyway.
Because he's a really good writer. I'll tell you what I enjoy most about him: He's able to flush out different ideologies/viewpoints through certain characters in a thoroughly honest sense. Other writers try to do this but it just ends up being propaganda. What I really like about D is that I never felt like he came in with a set conclusion in mind and he wasn't trying to push an ideology on the viewer; instead he just lets the characters interact with the world in their own unique, but honest way (in that it's true to their nature/beliefs.) I'm talking about the Brothers Karamazov here.
In Notes from Underground the main character - who is not Dostoyevsky, it is kind of a crazy existentialist shut-in - rants against this type of thing and I generally took it to be rationalism - not science. He also certainly has in mind certain utopian political systems.
Do not confuse Dostoyevsky with the narrator in Notes from Underground. He is, again, flushing out a viewpoint like he does with his other characters.
At the time when Dostoevsky wrote Notes from the Underground (1864) - and for the rest of his life too - he opposed Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, a "radical" intellectual. Chernyshevsky is also radical in his positivism. He identifies reason and science. Therefore, Dostoevsky thinks he is criticizing science when in fact he is attacking Chernishevsky's positivism.
Both of them carelessly handle a concept of science that sometimes includes philosophy, logic or morality with pretensions of absolute objectivity. Therefore, Dostoevsky may think that some facts contradict "science" or "logic".
No. He was parodying Chernishevsky, a positivist. (See my previous comment). He was not crazy. Dostoevsky himself speaks of him as a kind and quiet man.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
This is the usual myth about Dostoevsky propagated by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin -a Soviet disident critic- and himself. In reality Dostoevsky declares himself to be careful in arranging the things in his novels in order to put a voice above all other: Jesus Crhist's voice, of course.
The Man of the Underground is the Chernishevsky's caricature. It is not respectful with the true Chernishevsky's ideas. Dostoevsky's made the Man of the Undergroud said things that Chernishevsky never said. His contradictions were the contradictions that Dostoevsky believed to be those of positivism and atheism. Some of them were his own contradictions.
Honesty, my foot! Dostoevsky was a fanatic. Intelligent, but fanatical.
I did not get Dostoevsky's idea of science from Notes from the Underground alone, but from his Diary of a Writer and from the controversy with A. D. Gradovsky as well.