Nietzsche vs Dostoevsky: Goodness vs Greatness

Nietzsche says God, the father figure, is dead.  Dostoevsky shows what happens when god dies: children go crazy, there are murders, chaos,  nihilistic meaninglessness and deep suffering. How do you cure nihilism?

Dostoevsky wants  to revive the dead god back to life. Why? We cannot love a human being forever because humans  are fundamentally flawed.

We need a non-human, neutral god to unite different generations and  cultures. No human being can unite everyone. Nietzsche, however, takes us back to our  evolutionary past, back to the wild west of natural creativity.

Why? Because  it’s in nature we can find new gods. We’ve become too human, too contaminated  with religion, morality and slave mentality, so we need a fresh start, going thousands  of years back to find new human titans or geniuses.

Nietzsche’s ubermensch is the kind of  humans who have overcome their human qualities. Dostoevsky says we need to cultivate goodness  among people while Nietzsche says forget about goodness, we need to cultivate greatness  to flourish human culture. But what’s interesting is that both Nietzsche  and Dostoevsky looked for an answer not on the outside, but inside the human  subconscious mind, and in human passion.

Hey everyone. Thank you for watching this video. Fyodor Dostoevsky is one of the greatest novelists  of all time.

He was a pioneer of psychological realism, a literary movement that probed into the  human psyche to analyse what’s going on inside our head to understand our deeper motivations behind  the choices we make in life. What makes us tick, what makes us suffer, what makes us do terrible  things, and finally what makes us do good things. Friedrich Nietzsche is one the greatest  philosophers of all time.

He was the first  philosopher to robustly question the  entire western philosophical foundation: too much rationality and not enough passion.  For Nietzsche we are not driven by reason to do great things, but it’s our natural passion  that motivates us to create great things. A fierce critic of religion, Nietzsche saw artistic  creativity the ultimate goal of human existence.

Dostoevsky and Nietzsche diagnosed how modern  reason-driven enlightenment, instead of liberating us to reach our true potentials, was creating a  new kind of nihilistic man who was self-centred, egotistic, and self-indulgent. They both rejected  the humanists’ claim that since humans are rational, we can create a free, and happy rational  utopia. Both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche understood that humans are also quite irrational, passionate  creatures always seeking meaning and purpose.

Despite diagnosing the problem of modernity,  they offered quite different solutions. Dostoevsky looked up to the sky for a non-human  solution i. e.

god and deep inside the human heart for universal love, while Nietzsche offered  a nature-based, evolutionary solution. So in this video, I will look at their  lives, careers, writings and philosophies. Who offers a better solution to the problem of  nihilism?

Is it possible that they complement each other? Who is the masculine father and  who is the feminine mother among the two? But first let me answer how their  background shaped their views.

Life and Career Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in 1821 in the  suburb of Moscow into a middle-class family. Dostoevsky’s father was a doctor who worked among  the Russian poor so Dostoevsky saw human pain and suffering first-hand and almost every day,  which became a central theme in all his novels. Friedrich Nietzsche was born some  22 years after Dostoevsky in 1844, in the suburb of Leipzig.

His father was  the village priest, so Nietzsche also came across a lot of human pain and suffering  due to his father’s job. Perhaps Dostoevsky witnessed more physical pain while Nietzsche  witnessed more existential, religious pain. Dostoevsky’s father wanted him to learn  hard sciences like medicine and engineering, but his mother and nanny read him a  wide-range of stories so he came across narrative works by Pushkin, Cervantes, Goethe  and more, but Nikolai Gogol’s satirical and dark comic tales had a huge impression on him  which he later emulated in his own fiction.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, was surrounded  by priests, something that ran in his family for generations. But his father died when he  was around 5 so he was raised by his grandma, aunties and mother, so he grew up without a strong  male role model in his family. In other words, he experienced the death of a male authority  and priestly guide within his own family, which later he articulated that god  was dead and humanity was without a chaperon.

This mirrored his own life, growing  up without a disciplinarian in the family. When Dostoevsky was 12, his parents borrowed  money to send him to an expensive French boarding school for the filthy rich, where the little  Fyodor found himself an outsider among the aristocrats who came from country estates. The  aristocrats in Russia were educated in French and they acted like French too, snotty-nosed  snobs.

This continued when Dostoevsky entered a military engineering academy in Saint-Petersburg,  where he showed little interest in engineering, and again found himself alone among his snobbish  classmates. He saw the social inequality and how the upper class looked down on him and the  Russian poor. This led Dostoevsky to write about the poor but most crucially he joined a  radical group with the aim of changing Russia into a more egalitarian society.

He joined a  socialist circle called The Petrashevsky Circle. Meanwhile in Germany, Nietzsche attended  a boys’ school, then a private school and later a very prestigious Christian school and,  not surprisingly, he excelled in theology which was a family business after all. While there,  Nietzsche studied music and literature, so he began composing songs and writing poems.

But he  was also introduced to many languages, like Greek, Latin, Hebrew and French, which resulted in him  studying philology and theology in Bonn University later on. His goal was to become a priest like  his father. But here is an interesting twist, he came across Ludwig Feuerbach’s  influential book, Essence of Christianity, in which the German anthropologist argued that  god didn’t create humans but quite the opposite, humans created god.

This had a profound influence  on Nietzsche as he abandoned theology and solely focused on philology, the study of languages.  Suddenly Nietzsche was an atheist and god was truly dead to him. What is even more interesting  is that Dostoevsky’s group The Petrashevsky Circle was founded 5 years after Feuerbach’s  influential book was published.

So Feuerbach’s atheism also trickled down to Russia  to influence Dostoevsky’s circle of friends. In 1845 Dostoevsky published his first  major novel, Poor Folk highlighting the class disparity in Russia. It was a big hit,  but with the success he was also flagged to the government.

In 1849, he was arrested for  his activities against the Russian State, he was put on a mock execution and then  sent to a Siberian labour camp for 4 years and then another 6 years of compulsory military  service so a total of 10 years of exile. In Siberia, he came across ordinary inmates who kept  their spirits high despite the torrid conditions, because of their religious belief and also their  admittance of guilt. The radical intellectuals, however, never took responsibility for their  actions, instead they blamed everything on the state or other people.

The socialist intellectuals  usually blamed the upper class as parasites, state as brutal, and peasants as stupid for not  standing up for their rights. In other words, the intellectuals were blameless. Nothing was their  fault.

This had a profound impact on Dostoevsky and he became deeply disillusioned not only with  the intellectuals but also with western ideas. He moved more and more towards orthodox religion  and the Russian communitarian way of life. He understood that western rationality promised  freedom, wealth, happiness and fulfillment but delivered some freedom and some wealth, but  little happiness and even less fulfillment.

Nietzsche had a far easier life. So to  prove a point, in 1867 his enthusiasm got the better of him as he volunteered to join  the Prussian army, but he fell from his horse, broke a lot of bones and then returned to his  studies. That was not fun.

Reading Schopenhauer is a lot easier than riding horses with a huge  gun on your shoulder. In 1869, against all odds, he became a university professor in Basel,  Switzerland at the age of 24, and incredibly he hadn’t even completed his doctorate degree.  When you get lucky, you get lucky, or he knew the right person, but there was no doubt he was  a genius.

He renounced his Prussian citizenship before heading to Switzerland. Nietzsche remained  a stateless person until his death. Back then, people didn’t carry a passport so it was easy to  slide through borders.

Nietzsche traveled a lot, partly due to his ill health as he was seeking a  better climate but partly because he needed to be on the move so he could think. Nietzsche was one  of those philosophers who thought with their feet. He would articulate his thoughts and even  write some of his books while walking.

I think his bipedal thought process is quite  crucial because his philosophy is grounded in evolution and the human body, not in some  divine power. In other words, the human body was the centre of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The  ability to walk straight had a massive impact on our evolution as well as our brain.

So thinking  with your feet is a genuinely creative process in human evolution. Nietzsche wasn’t a conventional  behind-the-desk or arm-chair philosopher. He was a free moving thinker, perhaps the most un-German  German philosopher and that makes him even more appealing to a wider audience.

Most of books  read more like collections of sayings, aphorisms, poems and short tales, not some organised  philosophical treatise of complex structure. After 10 years in Siberia, Dostoevsky returned  to civilization in 1859 and spent hours and hours writing fiction. He wrote fast and his stories  were read like crazy, but the man had never had enough money.

His poverty made him always  anxious about money. After a few years in Saint-Petersburg, he fled to Europe, not escaping  the government but his creditors knocking on his door every day. In Germany he spent hours  in casinos trying to get some quick money, but nothing worked.

He moved from country to  country like a nomad and even wrote his novel The Idiot in 1868 while in Switzerland, only  a year before professor Nietzsche took the job in Basel. It’s possible the two men might  have been in the same city at some point, but Nietzsche being a young man might not  have noticed this old, brooding Russian dude loitering outside casinos. Dostoevsky  married a few times and had a few kids.

From 1860 until his death in 1881, he published his  greatest novels, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers  Karamazov. He died in 1881 aged 59. Nietzsche taught in Basel for 10 years  from 1869 to 79 before his health forced him to retire so he spent the next 10  years traveling and writing.

In 1889, Nietzsche went mad which left him  incapacitated for the next 11 years until his death in 1900. He was 55 years  old. He never married and had no kids.

Brief overview of their works Now before I look at their works and  philosophies, let me clarify one thing. Dostoevsky was a novelist therefore he didn’t  articulate his ideas overtly like Nietzsche did. Instead, Dostoevsky used his characters  to articulate his ideas through storytelling devices so his characters are like a thin wall  between us and Dostoevsky’s philosophical views.

So I will mainly focus on his protagonists  as a way to gauge Dostoevsky’s own ideas. Dostoevsky's first novel, Poor Folk, published  when he was 24 years old, looked at the class inequality in Russia. His first major work after  his return from Siberia was Notes from Underground published in 1864, when he was 43 years old,  in which he questioned modern rationality, outlining the irrational side of human life.

Two  years later he published his most famous novel, Crime and Punishment in which he depicted a  godless world in which his protagonist Raskolnikov influenced by western ideas such as  socialism, rationalism and utilitarianism, justifies murdering a woman for her money so he  can improve his own life and become a great man who could change the world like Napoleon did. In  1869 he published The Idiot in which he shows how a Jesus-like figure couldn’t survive in modern  day Russia. In 1872 he published Demons in which he showed how radical ideas justify violence  and cause chaos in a fictional Russian town, in a way predicting the Russian revolution  some 50 years before it happened.

In 1880, he published his last novel, often considered his  magnum opus, the Brothers Karamazov in which he pits four brothers against one another, each  representing a different philosophy of life, one atheist, one hedonist, one religious and  one with deep resentment. In all his novels, Dostoevsky showed the destructive side of modern  rationality, especially atheism in Russia, and how radical ideas were destroying the  social and religious fabric of Russian society. Nietzsche’s first major work was, The  Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872, in which Nietzsche reinterpreted  the Ancient Greek civilisation, not through the status quo of rationality but  through the Greek tragedies before Socrates.

Nietzsche thought western philosophy took the  wrong step when it followed rational philosophers like Socrates. As a result west solely championed  reason at the expense of passion and emotions. This became Nietzsche’s foundation for his  critique of modernity and its rational engine.

In 1878, he published Human, All too Human, a  collection of aphorisms on a variety of topics, which allowed him to develop a more coherent set  of ideas and be more focused in his future books. In 1882 he published Gay Science in which  he first articulated the death of god and his doctrine of eternal recurrence, which means  everything in the universe is eternally cyclical, very similar to the eastern philosophy of  cyclical time in Hinduism and Buddhism. In 1883, he published his most popular book,  Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a philosophical novel, in which he forces the Persian prophet to reject  religion and become a messenger for ubermensch.

I have dedicated a whole video to this, in which  I summarize the book and discuss its three central themes, eternal recurrence, will  to power and ubermensch in great detail. In 1886 he published Beyond Good and Evil in  which he questions morality as a stifling force, arguing that good and evil are not opposites as  everyone think, but simply the manifestations of the same universal or natural will in humans  which Schopenhauer had put forward a few decades earlier. In 1887, he published On the Genealogy of  Morality in which he takes a more naturalistic or Darwinian approach to understanding morality, good  and evil, guilt and conscience, while concluding that all of them are anti-life and anti-nature. 

His last book was Ecce Homo published after his death in which he looks at his own life and  work as someone who exposed the problems and deficiencies of western philosophy. It’s  like a self-portrait of a philosopher. Problem of Rationality Both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche lived during a time when European philosophers and thinkers like  Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Stuart Mill and others were responding to the Enlightenment philosophers  of the previous century like Voltaire, Kant, Rousseau, Hume, etc.

who emphasized rational  humans at the expense of god and religion. But advancement in science, especially Darwin’s  theory of evolution by natural selection, shook the religious foundation, so 19th century  Europe witnessed the development and growth of atheism which replaced god with rational humans.  In the absence of god as a source of social and moral values of what is right and what’s wrong,  many people searched for new values in life.

Both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche grappled with  this fundamental question. If god didn’t exist, then what was the purpose of human life? And  how do we organise society if there is no god as a moral arbiter, telling us what’s right  or wrong?

The European Enlightenment offered rationality as an answer to the absence  of god and religion. In other words, what was rational was good and what was  irrational was bad. Europeans saw how science allowed technology to flourish to  solve so many fundamental human problems.

Science allowed humans to understand the world,  the human body, and provide concrete solutions. God on the other hand never offered a real  solution, only promises of afterlife. So it became common-sense to believe that rationality could  solve all human problems, including morality.

It could feed you, clothe you, cure your illnesses  and every human problem was only a stone’s throw away from a new invention or discovery. There  was nothing better than reason to replace god. As Europe prospered, colonised more territories,  instead of people being quite happy and blissful, they turned savages against one another.

Despite  the enlightenment, rationality being widespread, European nations fought terrible wars,  leaving millions dead and millions hungry, ill and in pain. And to make matters even  worse, those well-off at the top of social hierarchy still had existential problems  so in the absence of meaning and purpose, they indulged themselves in hedonistic, instantly  gratifying activities like eating too much, shopping, or even gambling. There was  something irrational about human behaviour.

Whether at the top of the food chain or at the  bottom, people acted irrationally from time to time. They all had irrational tendencies,  despite years and centuries of rationality. Both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche realised that  rationality didn’t offer a great solution to the problem of meaning.

Rationality made everyone  nihilistic. Those in power tore through society and the world for their own selfish purposes  and those without power waited their turn for a good moment to revolt and take revenge. The  guillotines of the French revolution showed that the poor and disadvantaged revolutionaries  were as ruthless, bloodthirsty and vengeful as those they had toppled.

Rationality instead  of bringing peace, prosperity and happiness became a robust tool for people to exploit others  for their own selfish end. It was just a tool, not a purpose. Whoever had access to the  products of reason, i.

e. science and technology, they used it to control others or inflict pain  on others. This was no better than religions, gods, demons and all the things  deemed irrational or dogmatic.

Dostoevsky articulated the problem of  rationality, first in Notes from Underground in 1864 but later in his 1866 novel,  Crime and Punishment whose protagonist, Raskolnikov justifies his crime of murdering  two women on the ground that he belongs to the group of extra-ordinary people, therefore he is  above law and morality in the absence of god. Since there’s no god, some exceptional  humans, which Raskolnikov think he is one, can create their moral values. In other words,  anything is permissible as long as his aim is good.

He wants to alleviate his poverty and later  change the world for the better. In other words, he is a Napoleon in the making, so his good end  justifies the means. To show how irrational humans which people not only saw, but also organised the  world.

Everything was rationally explained, either through rational science or philosophy. Then  Nietzsche read Schopenhauer who was influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism. Schopenhauer saw something  deeper than rationality that motivates humans.

Something bigger than reason. He called it will.  Schopenhauer’s will is a fundamental force in the universe and more importantly in the living beings  that motivate them to continue living.

We have no control over this will, it is beyond ourselves, it  is a universal will. It’s like gravity, invisible to us, yet it keeps us grounded on earth. It  basically is blind will that keep us alive.

This eastern lens gave Nietzsche to look  critically at the entire western civilisation and philosophy, all the way to Socrates. He then  realised that western philosophy was extremely one-sided or left-brained, rational, analytical,  in other words focused too much on 2+2=4. As a result European modernity ignored the other  side of human existence, the emotional, the passionate and artistic right brain.

He noticed  that the pre-Socrates ancient Greeks championed both reason and passion in their tragedies. Apollo  the god of reason and science, and Dionysus the god of passion and art balanced each other but  with Socrates’s method of questioning things, and later Aristotle’s scientific approach,  and much later the European modernity shifted more towards reason-based Apollon world  while labelling human passion as something irrational therefore must be contained,  stifled or even eradicated. In other words, humans were becoming all too human, too tame,  too timid and less natural and less spontaneous.

So both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche diagnosed  modernity as being too rational which resulted in nihilistic self-indulgent materialism, an  insatiable desire for instant gratification of the self. Now I will look at their solutions to the  problem of nihilism and reason-based modernity. Love vs Creativity Dostoevsky’s solution to the problem of nihilism was to return to the past.

He  offers religion as an antidote to modern problem of meaninglessness. His Orthodox upbringing had  a profound impact on him. But also his mother’s reading of the bible to him as a child, remained  with him throughout his life.

On the outside, he saw how poor Russians found solace in the  Orthodox religion despite their economic miseries and existential suffering. Orthodox christianity  is based on the idea of community being more important than the individual. In other words,  Dostoevsky says you can find meaning if you truly serve other people, love other people.

Love others  despite their flaws. Love them despite their past mistakes. Dostoevsky’s religious solution did  not make him very popular in Russia at the time.

He became even less popular when the Bolsheviks  took over in 1917. His popularity has started to grow now as more and more people find  themselves disillusioned with modernity. Nietzsche, however, took a very different path. 

Instead of going back to the past and religion, or taking a soft, feminine approach of  coddling people with religious cushions, Nietzsche went too far back in human evolution.  He returned to nature. Yes, Nietzsche, placed his solution to nihilism in nature.

For  him nature is raw, honest and full of passion. So he went back to a pre-religion world  where humans were one with nature and acted naturally. Why?

Becuase there was  no robust morality to stifle them. There was no religious punishment to deter  people to push their artistic boundaries. Nietzsche’s biggest problem with religion was  that it protected the weak and as a result it shackled the geniuses, too, from being creative. 

In other words, religion is not about greatness or creativity or pushing boundaries, rather it is  providing solace to the weak-minded individuals. For Nietzsche, religion was coddling people, not  pushing them to confront their fears, instead it was shielding them from danger, risk, spiders and  demons while providing a safe space. Today people say the young are over-protected so we have a  generation of very sensitive types, the so-called snowflakes who cannot cope with the slightest  criticism or hardship.

Nietzsche says, religions have coddled humanity for centuries and millennia.  Then in recent centuries, rationality has done the same thing, providing us with too much comfort.  Our technology has made us too soft and too sensitive that it is hard to imagine ourselves  surviving in the wild or striving for greatness.

It’s time we break from this religious spell  and rationality-driven comfort-seeking mentality and dive into the untamed nature where we have the  freedom to grow whichever way we see potential. In some way, you could say that Nietzsche is  reacting to Dostoevsky saying that religion is not the answer but the problem. Nietzsche  sees Dostoevsky’s religious solution as being too feminine seeking a god-like male authority  figure who keeps all the dangers away for us so we can flourish in the safety.

So  Dostoevsky’s solution is not only feminine who needs a masculine god, it is also for children  seeking a father. Nietzsche’s solution is for individuals to become masculine and father  themselves by confronting their fears and conquering new artistic  and philosophical territories. Now here, the two fundamentally differ.

Dostoevsky  promotes goodness. He asks you to love people no matter how bad or good they are. No matter  what kind of mistakes they have made in the past.

It’s through love, not reason, that we  can find meaning in life. It’s through faith that we can find clarity in life. Being a cynic by  questioning things is not the answer.

But naivety, innocence and simplicity are the answers. You can  only find those if you believe in a higher being. Nietzsche, however, doesn’t believe in goodness. 

He says we should not aim to be good, moral and nice people. Instead we should aim for greatness.  This greatness may come at a cost, but that’s fine because the purpose of life and human life in  particular is not to be good or soft or morally correct, but to flourish, grow and dominate. 

For example, if you’re a YouTuber, Nietzsche says you should not aim to be good to everyone,  or always promote morally good stuff, instead your aim should be to grow and become the best  version of yourself and the best in your field. Ok that’s a not the best example but you get the  point. Nietzsche was fascinated with art, music in particular.

In his philosophical novel, Thus Spoke  Zarathustra, he proposed ubermensch, genius artist and great philosophers who could provide humanity  with new values. I discussed this in relation to novelists such as Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust and  Charles Bukowski who dedicated their lives to the production of great art. For Nietzsche, artists,  geniuses, and philosophers, which I’m sure he included himself, should have complete freedom to  create and write.

No morality police or religious doctrines should stifle their natural creative  geniuses. Art is not about justice, or goodness, but greatness. Why?

Because nature is not just,  fair or equal. Human species and life in general have survived and thrived not because they were  just or morally good. Because nature experimented in millions of different ways.

Those strong  enough survived and those weak died away. Since we are nature, we should also experiment, more  specifically in the arena of art and culture. Nietzsche divides humans into two groups:  the slave majority and the genius minority.

The slaves do not have original ideas. They simply  follow the crowd or herd. Or even mobs.

But then there are individual geniuses who are capable of  original ideas. These select few have the ability to transcend human life, to become ubermensch  and then able to create values for the rest of the society. Human history is full of these  great people, mainly men according to Nietzsche, who have invented, created, discovered  things that benefited humanity as a whole.

These great geniuses could be philosophers,  composers, scientists, artists or even novelists. So based on this, one could say that  Dostoevsky was a Nietzchean ubermensch whose art of fiction and storytelling  helped human flourishing in some sense. Dostoevsky realised the human psyche surely wasn’t  rational all the time and most of the time it was incredibly flimsy and weak.

In his novel, Demons,  he depicted the consequences of a rational utopia, which was nothing but deception and madness.  Dostoevsky’s experience of almost getting executed allowed him to see life with clarity. He valued  life greatly so this motivated him to do something bigger than himself.

He dedicated his entire  life to writing to understand the human psyche. In other words, he found his own life’s  purpose in his work, in his writing. He struggled throughout his life with poverty,  the legal system, family, addictions, epilepsy, and above all years of sitting alone to  write, and in that struggle he found his purpose.

He found his purpose in his works.  So he personifies a Nietzschean ubermensch who suffered a great deal in the service of  creating art. Dostoevsky diagnosed the problem of nihilism and produced amazing art. 

He says that those with big brain suffer more. In other words, he served humanity by writing.  So he was a Nietzschean ubermensch artist who transcended humanity to reach the recess of the  human subconscious to understand the animalistic, passionate side of human motivation.

He  was an artist of human irrationality. Dostoevsky offered religious  faith, naivety and love. For him, we cannot love a human being forever.

We might  love them for a month, a decade, or a generation but not for eternity. For that we need a  non-human god who can unite us all despite our cultural differences. Without God, it is very  difficult to motivate people to do good things, according to Dostoevsky.

Without God, we become  fat, self-indulgent, addicted to drugs and alcohol. In other words we need someone in the  family who tells us and reminds us to be good, to love others. Why?

Because as human animals, we  are erratic, irrational, selfish and forgetful. Dostoevsky says to be good, you must curb your  selfish desires. Nietzsche says harness your will to power to become an ubermensch or transcend  humanity for artistic flourishing.

Dostoevsky says take responsibility for your own actions,  while Nietzsche says forget moral responsibility, instead use your freedom to push boundaries in  pursuit of things greater than yourself. I should point out that Nietzsche didn’t clearly justify  violence, his main focus was artistic endeavour not political goal. Dostoevsky says find solace  by being among a loving community.

Nietzsche says find a cave for some solitude to find  something bigger inside you. Dostoevsky sends his protagonists to Siberia, underground or even in  a Swiss sanatorium so they can find the goodness and love inside their own heart, while Nietzsche  sends his Zarathustra to the cave to gain wisdom from nature and solitude so he can ready himself  for the battle and struggle for greatness. Audience It is obvious that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky  were talking to a different set of audience.

Dostoevsky wrote for the Russian people, mainly  westernised intellectuals. But his real audience was the majority of people who found themselves  lost in this world, fallen from the economic race, stuck in the mud so to speak. His religious  solution appealed to those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder where being good was a  real solution.

Dostoevsky says make life simpler, don’t chase your lofty dreams as Raskolnikov  did in Crime and Punishment and for god’s sake, don’t kill people or commit violence  for a better life as in Demons. Nietzsche, however, wrote for the philosophers  and elite artists who are not seeking goodness but greatness through creativity. His audience  is not the masses, instead people at the top or those with creative genius who are seeking  a purpose greater than themselves.

People who want to sacrifice their lives for the  flourishing of humanity, not from a moral or religious point of view, but from an  evolutionary and naturalistic point of view. Artists are often anti-social and deeply flawed  human beings if you judge them through morality but people love their art. For example both  Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin had deep flaws and weren’t very nice people but produced great  art.

Another example is Picasso who had some deep flaw, but still managed to make great art. For  Nietzsche, artists can genuinely tap into a deeper place in human psyche, a deeper well in human  evolution to make art that move people. He was more fascinated with musicians because music as an  art form is not only universal but also very deep.

Nietzsche might consider Raskolnikov a  slave-minded person who is more motivated by revenge than greatness. His subsequent guilt  through delirium and eventual confessions show his slave-mentality and delusional mind.  Incidentally, both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche agreed that society’s legal system wasn’t  based on justice but retribution and revenge.

Nietzsche’s biggest problem with religion is  that it tames you from achieving your true creative potential. Dostoevsky is content  with that. As long as society is peaceful, people content and loving one another,  it is better than modern obsession with an insatiable desire for more and more. 

Dostoevsky says blind faith and love while Nietzsche says blind artistic creativity that  keeps probing new horizons. Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are against short-cuts. You have  to earn your spoils in life. 

Not steal it. I cannot ignore their distinct facial  hair. From an evolutionary perspective, facial hair, moustache and beard, are for sexual  selection, just like a peacock’s tail.

Even women with terrible eyesight could recognise a man with  moustache or beard to mate with. Joking aside, it has also been suggested that men with more  robust facial hair kept dominance among other men, so they could mate with more women. But  today we live in a very safe society so most men shave to show how nice we  are.

Historically speaking—actually my own observation, I could be wrong—  moustache showed hard power and strength while beard showed soft power like wisdom and  generosity. Santa's beard reaches his belly, while Hitler and Stalin oiled their moustache  hard. Philosophers, artists and writers groomed long beards, while those with political or  economic ambitions oiled their moustache.

Both the moustachioed Nietzsche and bearded  Dostoevsky are goats (pun intended). Dostoevsky’s animal is not a goat, but more like a  friendly dog as he promotes a motherly instinct of nurturing and caring for others, while Nietzsche  is promoting a fearless fatherly instinct of fighting dragons in the wild, so his animal is  a tiger or a lion, not only because of their whiskers but also because of their ferocious  will to power in carving their own path in life. Conclusion: Who should you read?

I say read both. Dostoevsky  and Nietzsche together is a better package in guiding you towards a fulfilling life. I think  we need goodness and greatness.

In other words, we need a lot of good people and some  great people who push things forward, invent and discover things, artists  who capture people’s imaginations and great storytellers who articulate the voice of  their generations, just like Dostoevsky did. Nietzsche tells you to get up on your feet, stop blaming others and do something  creative in whatever field you’re in. Don’t avoid suffering because to be great you  have to suffer.

Life’s meant to be suffering. Write a great novel, produce great art, invent  something new. Have blind courage to confront your own fears, and have the dedication to persist  in your path and forget your own selfish desires.

For Nietzsche, life’s purpose is not to  be mediocre, but great. Dostoevsky says individualism of me-before-everyone-else  will make you very unhappy. The purpose of life is to be good to others and love everyone  despite their flaws and mistakes.

So to sum up, Dostoevsky warns you about the danger of new  ideas and Nietzsche tells you to carve your path, away from the crowd. Nietzsche presses you  to not only understand your societal norms, traditions, and values, but deeply embody them  before you break with them to carve your path. You cannot topple the statues of those who came  before you, before fully digesting their ideas.

Nietzsche tells you directly like a masculine  father would, make something of your life. Dostoevsky shows you by telling you stories like  a mother would so you avoid the same mistakes, dangers other people made, and to cultivate  your love for everyone. To flourish, a child needs both parents, a German father and a Russian  mother.

Incidentally there is a Russian fictional character named Andrey, in Ivan Goncharov’s  masterpiece, Oblomov who is a very well-rounded character, in complete contrast the main character  Oblomov, the laziest character in literature. Why? He has a German father who instills  discipline in him and a Russian mother who loves him dearly.

You too, you need both  the amazing psychological tales of Dostoevsky and the robust and probing philosophical aphorisms  of Nietzsche.  So the biggest antidote to laziness is Dostoevsky plus Nietzsche. They  will help make something of your life.

In my comparison of Dostoevsky to Tolstoy, I put  Tolstoy in the mother’s seat while Dostoevsky in the father’s seat. Between the two great  Russians, Dostoevsky takes a more psychological and individualistic approach of tough love  while Tolstoy takes a more communitarian, egalitarian and universalist approach. Nietzsche,  on the other hand, is the lone wolf or lone tiger who has little time for motherly love. 

He says don’t cry, don’t be a victim, toughen up, while Dostoevsky wanted to shield  Russians from bad ideas coming from Europe. To learn more about Nietzsche’s philosophy and  life purpose, watch this video. To learn more about Dostoevsky, I have summarised all his  major novels, so check the description box.

Thank you for watching.