Aiming for the Moon
Aiming for the Moon
128. The Accursed Questions - Fyodor Dostoevsky on Suffering, Freedom, and Love: Prof. Gary S. Morson (Prof. of Russian literature @ Northwestern University | Author of "Wonder Confronts Certainty")
What's the meaning of life? Why is there pain and suffering? How do you balance justice and love? These "accursed questions" have haunted humanity for centuries. Fyodor Dostoevsky sought to answer these questions through his characters' lives. His answers are prophetic for our time.
In this episode, I sit down with Northwestern University professor of Russian literature Gary Saul Morson. We discuss what Dostoevsky reveals about developing intellectual honesty, how to deal with suffering and brokenness, as well as his arguments for and against God.
His latest book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, sets the stage for this interview sets the stage for this interview.
Topics:
- The "Accursed Questions" of Russian Literature
- Dostoevsky's Intellectual Honesty with Faith
- Battle-Testing Worldviews through Fiction
- The Dangers of Abstracting Individuals
- Notes from Underground: Human Freedom vs Determinism
- The Core of Ethics: Human Surprisingness
- "What books have had an impact on you?"
- "What advice do you have for teenagers?
Bio:
Gary Saul Morson is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Russian Literature at Northwestern University. His 21 authored or edited volumes and 300 shorter publications have examined major Russian writers, the philosophy of time, the role of quotations in culture, great aphorisms, and the ultimate questions about life taken seriously in Russian literature. His classes on Russian writers in translation have enrolled over 500 students, and he is the recipient of numerous teaching and research awards. Morson writes regularly for numerous national publications, including The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, First Things, Mosaic, and several others. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995
Prof. Morson on the best Dostoevsky translations:
“The best translations of Dostoevsky are by Constance Garnett or revisions of Garnett. For Notes from Underground, use Garnett revised by Ralph Matlaw; for The Brothers Karamazov, Garnett revised by Susan McReynolds; and for The Possessed (Demons)be sure to use the Modern Library version of the Garnett translation with appendixes containing versions of a chapter he was not allowed to publish.”
Socials -
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Website: https://www.aimingforthemoon.com/
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Well, welcome Professor Morrison to the interview. Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm delighted to be here.
Speaker 1:So we were talking a little bit off air. But you wrote a fascinating book called Wonder Confront Certainty about all the different Russian authors answering life's big, big philosophical questions. But categorizing them as philosophical questions makes you assume that they're not also life questions as well. So, to start off, could you discuss what some of those questions are?
Speaker 2:Sure, I'll just say that in Russian literature, people are always addressing life questions which are philosophical questions Like well, does life have a meaning or is it just random incidents? Is, if you don't accept God or the supernatural, is there any basis for morality or is it just all relative? And if so, how do you deal with that fact? You know, has everything been determined from you know, the beginning of time, or are there really alternatives? It does not just seem that way, but there really are, either by chance or choice, or both. What is the right way to live, what's the moral way to live and what's the meaningful way to live? What's the moral?
Speaker 2:way to live and what's the meaningful way to live? All these questions are constantly on the minds of Russian authors. They call them the accursed questions. Accursed because you keep asking them but they never have a final answer. But that doesn't mean you don't learn anything by asking. You may not get a final answer, but you deepen your understanding of the question and that's what Russiansky you see this a lot in.
Speaker 1:Brothers Karamazov and of course, ivan famously has his speech during the chapter on the rebellion and they talk about just the most terrible suffering, specifically about children, and he has one of the most pointed arguments against God. Essentially he accuses God of basically allowing all the suffering, and it's interesting that a Christian author like Dostoevsky has that pointed of a response and then the way he addresses it later on.
Speaker 2:Well, you've got exactly. You're asking exactly the right question. I mean, and this is how he saw it. Okay, think of it this way If you are a prizefighter, you don't get any credit for beating up a kindergartner. I tell my students, right, if they want to, they can take either side in a question, I ask, but they'll be judged on the strength of the arguments on the other side that they're opposing. That is to be intellectually honest. You don't answer the dumbest arguments on the other side, but the strongest, right.
Speaker 2:So Dostoevsky thought okay, if he is really going to establish faith, it can't be by attacking straw men. It has to be. He has to confront the strongest arguments on the other side, and if your opponents haven't made them, you make them for him, which is what he's doing here. So he was proud he was making much stronger arguments against God than the atheists of his time did or any time. And he did it precisely because he was making much stronger arguments against God than the atheists of his time did or any time. And he did it precisely because he was intellectually honest and he wanted to contend with the strongest arguments against faith. Only that's. That's the only way you could establish it.
Speaker 1:One of the other really interesting things about that to me was, without spoiling the book and that's kind of something throughout this interview we won't spoil any of the books because we're trying to convince you to read all of them. That's a big kind of subtle push from me as an interviewer here. But one of the interesting parts about that conversation is Alyosha, who he's speaking to his brother is a devout Eastern Orthodox monk and he doesn't. Oh, he's not a monk, oh, he's not a to his brother is a devout Eastern Orthodox monk.
Speaker 1:Oh, he's not a monk. Oh, he's not a monk, he's living in a monastery. Good to know. Yes, he's not a monk. Yes, thank you. He's not even a novice. He just happens to be living in the monastery for the time being. That is an interesting point, because I misinterpreted that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, could you discuss a little bit more of that? Just as a minor segue. Well, he's so much taken by father zosima that he moves into the monastery to be with him. But he's not, you know, and he, he might want to become a monk, but father zosima tells him not to, tells him don't go out into the world, right, and if you want to come back at some other time, maybe you do that, but first you have to know life. So he's not. He's not actually a monk. Maybe someday he might be, but he's devout enough to be living near Father Simu, who's really his mentor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's fascinating because I knew that passage later on but I had assumed that he was a monk, at least in that first bit. But yeah, that's a really good, that's more context on that entire story, that whole conversation between Alyos bit, but yeah, that's, that's a really good, that's more context on that entire story going. That, that whole conversation between Alyosha and Ivan. Alyosha he doesn't have as philosophical of a rebuttal. If he has even a rebuttal, at least in the philosophical sense, directly to Ivan. And it seemed to me that the rest of the narrative, the rest of the storyline, is almost an answer to Ivan. It's not an intellectual response but it is the experience of life in what happens to Ivan is his rebuttal.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think you're right. Do you remember early in the book when they're all in Father Seymour's cell in part one and Dmitri hasn't shown up? So he goes out to greet the people who are waiting for him? One of them is Madame Horslakova, who you know is the mother of Lise, who loves Aljosha, and she demands that Father Zimut tell her, give her proof that there is immortality or a meaning to life, or beyond just the material world. And he says well, there's no proving it. He says there's no philosophical that will prove that life has a meaning.
Speaker 2:But you can become convinced of it, that life has a meaning, but you can become convinced of it. How do you become convinced of it? By living the right sort of life, a life of what he calls active love. Right, and then you will sense the meaning if you live it. But you won't be able to formulate it in such a way that will convince someone with an argument, because they would have to live it too. So, yes, it's. You know what happens to Ivan. That becomes part of the argument. You know the different ways in which people live. That that becomes, you know, a good part, and you know just in the story itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it almost seemed like a reductio ad absurdum argument, like he's reducing it to absurdity in the sense that he takes Dostoevsky, takes worldviews and he battle, tests them. He says, okay, well, we could have a philosophical conversation about this. We can say, we can argue with premises, we can argue with our little syllogisms, with Plato and everyone, but really what really matters with your worldview is can it survive when you're put through different things, when different things happen? Can your worldview survive? And because he is such a psychologically rich author, he can really test the worldviews. And it seems like, rather than the philosophical rebuttal, really test the worldviews. And it seems like, rather than the philosophical rebuttal, what happens to the way people respond in these circumstances is the proof for or against their worldview.
Speaker 2:Yeah, battle, testing an idea is a good idea, in fact. That's, by the way, generally the way in which philosophical novels generally work. They have a hero or heroine who believes in a philosophical idea, and then the novel traces what happens, what are the consequences of that belief. That's not just Dostoevsky, you know. The Russians love philosophical novels, but there are great English philosophical novels too. They all work in that way. Ideas are abstractions, but realist novels give you the nitty-gritty of daily life, which is much more complex than any abstraction. And next to that, next to real experience, any abstraction seems kind of thin. And that's how they test right. You know other literary genres, you know, think the abstractions are better than everyday life, and they wouldn't do it that way. But realist novels, all you know, believe in reality and daily life as being too complex for any theory.
Speaker 1:I recently wrote a piece on my sub stack that I've talked about on the podcast before.
Speaker 1:It was titled the Dangers of Abstracting Individuals in a Divided Society and it was based a lot on Brothers Karamazov as well, as I guess I had been reading Demons, one of Dostoevsky's other works, and this idea of especially in a modern sense, social media.
Speaker 1:For example, it's really easy to kind of make two-dimensionality, to make people two-dimensional, and it's very easy to reduce them to their hashtags and to their likes and to their tweets and stuff like that them to their hashtags and to their likes and to their tweets and stuff like that and you're missing. When you respond in a way like you respond in an emotional way to that, you're missing. There's so much more complexity there and Dostoevsky talks about being possessed by ideas and there's, of course, abstracting individuals. He was abstract and therefore cruel in Crime and Punishment. It's a fascinating concept when you because he himself was a rebel and he eventually turned from being a rebel and not became an anti-rebel by any means, but just warned about the implications of that and was quite almost in some ways he seems pretty prophetic in a lot of the way Russian culture went.
Speaker 2:How do you see him as prophetic? I do too.
Speaker 1:Well, from my understanding of history now I'm not a Russian historian by any means, but you see quickly, like the starvation of Russian, you see throughout kind of human history. When you have great utopian ideas you can justify terrible things. It's because you're not it's not the present circumstance, it's the future circumstance, and that's where terrible things happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you think you're in possession of the ultimate truth about how to reorganize society and save people, then well, if you're going to save all people and make them all happy, any bloodshed is worth it. And so you commit any bloodshed, right? Because you have too much faith in the theories. Exactly, and that's what happened in Russian history, of course, with the revolution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and throughout Dostoevsky's writing you see this theme of people. Well, one of the titles, the translated titles, the possessed Now it's been debated whether it should be translated as Demons or something with the characters themselves Demons is accurate.
Speaker 2:I will tell you something as somebody who writes a lot for columns in the Wall Street Journal. When these things come out, the author never chooses the title. The title is always whatever the editor of the journal thinks. You know the newspaper thinks is going to attract readers. I don't know what my titles are going to be until I see them. I suggest something but you know, nine times out of ten they don't take it, and so you know. I guess the publisher of Constance Garnett's translation decided that it would sell better as the Possessed right, which is the reverse, because you know, the demons are the possessors.
Speaker 1:Very different meaning.
Speaker 2:yeah, Right, demons is accurate, but it's been known as the Possessed because that happens to be in spite of you know that title, the best translation of it to be in spite of you know that title the best translation of it.
Speaker 1:It's a fascinating book because you see what happens when people get carried away with. Nihilism is a big part and the reason. I think this applies to modern cultures. I think a lot, a lot of people in my generation, Gen Z, we have this outlook. We've grown up in a culture that's very polarized and truth itself has been questioned a lot, as we've grown upone of mistrust throughout all of our institutions and even between people in our society. Who do you? Who's really has your interest? Are they trying to get your money, your votes? Like what's really happening? And there's an undercurrent of mistrust which oftentimes leads to nihilism or this obsession with a utopia future that can, as we've talked about, instigate very radical shifts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know. You may have heard of the novelist Solzhenitsyn, from the Soviet well, you know, who wrote about the gulags and all this. And he has one remarkable sentence about this, what he learned from all his experience, which was that it would be so easy if the reason there was evil in the world was that there's a group of evil people out there, your political opponents always, and all you do is eliminate them. Right, but it's never that way. But it's never that way because and this is his famous line the line between good and evil does not pass between groups, but right through every human heart, including your own.
Speaker 1:And you're never more likely to commit evil than when you think you're all good and the other guy's all right. It's a big theme throughout, again Dostoevsky, like the paradox, I think, of the underground man from Notes from Underground. He's just constantly at war within himself, he's retreated from society and a big part of it is just his inner turmoil where he's just. It's fascinating. Could you talk about that character Because I feel like you see him, not as dramatic as you do in Notes from Underground, but you see bits and pieces of that character throughout other works of his.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean, what's most famous about Notes from Underground is just the first part, although you don't understand it.
Speaker 1:I'm a sick man, I'm a wicked man.
Speaker 2:See, I know you read the wrong translation. It's not wicked, it's spiteful.
Speaker 1:Interesting Okay, okay.
Speaker 2:I know which translation you read, and it's, you know, the only one that does it that way Fascinating. The key concept of the book is spite, by which he means doing something not for your own advantage, but simply just to do it without any reason. That's what he calls spite. If you translate that as wicked, you've missed the point. Yeah, you have, you've totally missed it. That's why those translators are always the last ones to read. Read any other translation or ask me for a list. I'll give you a list of the best.
Speaker 1:Towards the end. Remind me and I will get a list, because that is one of my questions. Email me. I have it all written down. Excellent, we'll post it.
Speaker 2:I mean the first part is all about what is he's arguing against the worldview that lots of people still have, namely that if you know all the scientific laws of nature since they are all deterministic and human beings are nothing but collections of molecules and so forth then you may think you're making choices. But actually it's all been determined by the laws of nature from all the. Therefore there is no choice, just the illusion of it. He is trying to argue that that is wrong, and the theory that was dominant in his day, which is still taught in economics departments, is everyone always acts for their own advantage, as they best perceive it, which means if you know what people perceive the best advantage of, you, can predict infallibly what they'll do, because there's no free choice. So he's going to, which means if you know what people perceive the best advantage of you, can predict infallibly what they'll do, because there's no free choice. So he tries to show that he is just going to act not that way. He's going to act spitefully, as he calls it, not according to his own, just to prove that he is free, that he is free.
Speaker 2:There's not a piano key or or an organ, as he says, and that section, I can tell you has been so incredibly influential in modern thought. I remember many years ago I had a graduate student who came to my department from Princeton and you know she got her PhD and been working for Microsoft ever since. She's a wonderful student and the first week she was there she said I hope you're not going to make me read notes from undergrad again, because at Princeton I read it in seven different courses Philosophy, psychology you know, that's enough. That's how influential it was, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I find that book fascinating because I find artificial intelligence fascinating. Actually, this episode will come out around the end of a bunch of artificial intelligence episodes and that whole thing about. I mean, this is the translation I read, so let's see. The whole thing about a table of logarithms Like you can't predict man's Right, that's true.
Speaker 1:Okay, great, you can't predict man's actions through a table of logarithms. I just immediately thought of algorithms, and not like in the very actual sense, not even in an analogy. We have algorithms that attempt to predict what people like and what people will do?
Speaker 2:Oh, I didn't think about that.
Speaker 1:There's social media and artificial intelligence, and this is where I think Dostoevsky and artificial intelligence intersect. Because man doesn't want to be predicted, like Dimitri's famous response, is chemistry, chemistry, everything's chemistry, and it's this rebellion of the human spirit, almost.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's right and that's what you know. That's the core of Dostoevsky. That is his first principle of ethics is always treat another person as capable of surprise, because otherwise you're treating them as a pure material object if you can predict perfectly what they're doing and you're dehumanizing them. So people well, I know what you're going to do I've looked at your fMRI. To do that is to treat a person as nothing but an object and that makes ethics impossible. One philosopher talking about Dostoevsky has called this characteristic surprisingness. People are made up of surprise. If they don't have surprisingness, they're not people. That's where ethics begins, with surprisingness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and to have a computer, for example, an artificial intelligence model, be surprising to you. You have to have actually my sister's currently programming a chatbot actually, and we've been experimenting with this. In order for it to seem random, you have to have already responses and laws in place. That it's not actually random. It only gives the appearance of randomness, which is completely unlike a human.
Speaker 2:Right, that's right and you could. Giving the appearance of randomness, of course, just invites you to say okay, what's the anecdote to demons and the underground?
Speaker 1:man seems to be Alyosha, and that seems to be Dostoevsky's response. We have this abstraction, we have this kind of inner paradox, the rebellion of the human spirit against the tables of logarithms. But how can we do that and not go into genus? I go off in like another route with abstractions. The response seems to be alliotian. Um zosima, how would like, could you talk about those characters?
Speaker 2:I mean as a response to abstractions or I, that was my interpretation.
Speaker 1:Now maybe it's an um an incorrect interpretation.
Speaker 2:Oh, I mean abstractions will always fall short, right? You know somebody thinks they have an ironclad theory about how people behave. You can write a computer program for it, but people are always more complex than that and if they weren't, you know, there'd be no ethics or no meaning to things I mean. So you begin with the idea that in abstract ideas the way we look at them is they're sort of like. When they're done right, they generalize from experience, they're kind of mnemonic devices for a whole set of experiences. They're a starting point for where to start thinking, but they don't determine things, right. I mean, you know, sometimes the only way you can perceive what's really going on in the situation is to begin with the abstractions and then see where they don't work, and that's where the human choices are being made, that's where something new or creative is happening. So it's not as if abstractions are of no use. It's that you have to use them in the right way, not thinking that they're going to eliminate anything surprising from the human being.
Speaker 1:In some ways it seems like this kind of obsession with abstractions. It's almost thinking about Plato in the cave how, the more abstract and the more formulaic you get in the sense of the realm of the forms. It almost seems to be a very extreme version of that kind of an idea that, okay, well, the forms are the essences of things and rather than the real world as we see it, being projections of the forms or the forms kind of embodied. What we didn't say is well, there must be like a direct because that we all have the perfect essence of things in a world beyond us. There must also be like a pattern always to the way we all act. A world beyond us there must also be like a pattern always to the way we all act. Not that there aren't patterns to the way we act, but it's not. I think we're making a lot of correlation versus causation mistakes.
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean there are patterns, but they don't explain everything Exactly. Yeah, there are certainly patterns to the way I behave. I mean, you could probably predict that tomorrow I will not go surfing, because I never go surfing. Right, I live in Chicago. Where am I going to go surfing? You know, there's a pattern.
Speaker 1:Of course, that doesn't explain everything that I'm going to do, right, hey, you're not a piano key, though, so maybe next morning you'll wake up and go to California and start surfing.
Speaker 2:Or maybe I'll even try on Lake Michigan.
Speaker 1:Exactly Now. That would be a story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that would be a story.
Speaker 1:So, as our time is kind of running out, I want to switch to the last two questions, and I'm really interested in this case as a kind of a professor of literature and of great works. What books have had an impact on you?
Speaker 2:It's so hard to, you know, single them out. It's so hard to single them out, but for me the books that are meant to most are the great Russian novels, particularly Tolstoy's novels, war and Peace and Anna Karenina, and Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, also the ones that just enormously, you know enormously affected me. And then I guess you can say one English novel, middlemarch by George Eliot. You know that is as wise a you know piece of literature as I know. So I would say, you know, those are the works that have meant the most to me and I keep coming back to them over and over again.
Speaker 2:I've taught many times and every time I teach one of them I see something I didn't see before. And you know that isn't true. Unless the work is very good, a work that you can exhaust in one or two readings, you might as well just read somebody's thematic essay about it, that's all it's saying, right? And that, by the way, if a literature teacher doesn't show you why, you have to actually read the book, not just some paraphrase of its message, and they haven't taught the literature or they've taught bad literature. So those are what I keep coming back to Every year. I teach Anna Karenina and Brothers Karamazov. And every year I see something I didn't see before. That's what makes it still exciting. You know I finished in June my 50th year of university teaching Congratulations. And you know I still love doing it because I see something more. And you know I have really bright and creative students. You know people like you.
Speaker 1:Thanks it's. It seems to be a theme with great literature. The more life experience you get, the more you're able to reflect on the great literature and see the different aspects, like for me, things about growing up, going into a world, like worldview things, developing a worldview, that stuff in Dostoevsky and in great literature. That really impacts me because that's kind of where I am in my life. I'm kind of developing my perspective of the world. But then as you get older you see different things in it.
Speaker 2:There are different things in literature that stand out. Yeah, and you know you're going to make the ideal college students, providing you go to the right college, because you're never going to get a chance, you know, in life when you're able to spend all your time asking, or most of your time asking, these questions, but you know college students who spend all their time, you know, just accumulating things for their you know resume when they're looking for a job and never actually ask these questions. They're missing the college experience. Right, you can, of course, do some of that, you have to but this is the time when you can really, you know, ask those questions that you like to ask. Right, and you know that's what I think literature is for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what advice do you have for teenagers? What advice?
Speaker 2:do you have for teenagers? You know, take college or education seriously. Really ask those questions about. You, know what makes life meaningful? If you don't ask them now, if you don't get into the habit of asking them now, you won't ask them later. And then don't think the world is so simple. Whenever you're sure that you have the whole truth or all goodness on your side and the other side is all wrong, that means you haven't exercised your imagination enough to imagine how that person is looking at you.
Speaker 2:Empathy, both emotional and intellectual, is the path to wisdom. Anybody can see the world from their own point of view. It takes wisdom to say, okay, let me bracket that for a minute and imagine how the other person is looking at me. And that's what also great literature helps you do, because you start identifying with people unlike yourself and that becomes training for doing that in the rest of life. But that's the most you know. Your experience is always partial. So unless you can sort of add on the experience of others by empathizing with different points of view, you're going to be much narrower and make many more moral mistakes than you would otherwise. So that's the advice.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating because people at first often hear that advice and they sometimes misinterpret it and categorize it as naive, like well, you just don't really fully understand my perspective. And usually the next line is how dumb their perspective is. And then I have more of the answers. And one of the really cool things about Russian literature is they don't shy out, they don't make anything sunshine and roses. They're pretty intense about how bleak the darkness, the cold, the starvation and just the terrible things of the world can be. So these are the people who are giving this perspective and this wisdom. It's not this almost naive, overly romantic view.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you understand that once you think you've got all the truth, then there's no reason to have a democracy or freedom, just set up a dictatorship with your guys in charge, and that's what the communists or the Nazis did. And when people think they're that sure, they create horror, absolute horror. Nothing causes more evil than the idea that you can abolish it forever yourself, because if you're evil, I'm thinking you've got all the goodness in this.
Speaker 1:And, tied with that, that you can predict every single thing about someone too. Those two ideas seem to be incredibly destructive.
Speaker 2:Yes, and they go together. They do Well. Thank you so much, Professor Morrison, for coming on the show. I've really enjoyed our conversation. We had so many different aspects of Russian literature. Yes, and you know, I really wish you the best. You can tell me where you wind up going to school. Thank you, Okay.
