Dostoevsky's Radical Philosophy of Love

what is hell I maintain it is the suffering of an inability to love Theodore dovi is known as a historic thinker on many many topics in his novels and articles he discusses God morality nihilism and existentialism but today I want to focus on an often neglected part of dov's overall philosophy his ideas about love because for this Russian author love was a subject of endless Fascination and it crops up in almost every one of his works dovi is adept at displaying how love can compel us to commit heinous self-destructive actions but also how it can

redeem us grant us meaning and ultimately even save the world and if that's not a reason to keep watching I don't know what is get ready to learn how love can kill what passion has to do with politics and why for dovi love was the fundamental redeeming quality of all Humanity as always bear in mind this is just my interpretation of dovi and you are totally free to disagree also there will be spoilers ahead for many of dov's novels though I will do my best to avoid giving too much away on major plot points but

with that out of the way let's begin by exploring the darkest aspect of dov's philosophy of love what happens to us when we are deprived of it one the unloving life is not worth living the quote at the start of this video comparing hell to an inability to love comes from the Elder zosa in in dov's magnum opus the brothers karamazov according to him the quickest and most potent way a human can plunge themselves into unimaginable torment is by cutting off their ability to love others deprived of this love they will begin to Fester like

an infected wound as resentment envy and hatred fills the place where affection could have been and nowhere is this more evidence than in the character of the underground man famously dov's Nolla Notes From The Underground begins with the main character declaring himself sick spiteful and unattractive and throughout his story he narrates the various ways he sought to enhance the misery of other people he vividly describes the sick pleasure he took in a toothache because he could make the lives of everyone around him that bit worse with his loud and Theatrical moans and complaints he says

that in his position as a civil servant he would exercise his Petty power on the people around him in a needlessly cruel manner he would would care nothing for the feelings of other people and would even go out of his way to make their lives worse just to savor their suffering his entire philosophy can be summed up in the following phrase Let the world go to hell but I should always have my tea of course this philosophy is hardly a successful one and the underground man ends up in profound misery as a result of it

the core of the underground man's suffering is that he has absolutely no fellow feeling for other people and it is tragically understandable how he has become this way to to hear him tell it he only has cruel and disloyal so-called friends a meager pension and no reason to carry on living in such a situation it is easy to see how someone could lose their sense of Love entirely but this lack of Love Dooms him all the same ever eager to present complex psychological profiles dovi shows how this aggressive spite eventually morphs into the underground man's

way of punishing himself towards the end of the Nolla he begins to befriend a poor and downtrodden prostitute named Liza and it seems like there might be the first smatterings of genuine affection here they have a long conversation where the underground man shocks her with his brutal and cruel honesty but then briefly softens inviting her to visit him at his home but when she does appear and offers out a hand of friendship and companionship he suddenly changes his tune berating her and insulting her until she leaves now he is not just unloving out of lack

of opportunity it has become a direct selfharm Choice he soon regrets his cruelty and begins to run after Liza but at the last moment he decides it was better to spread his bitter resentments to another person now she will know the truth as well that the world is not loving or kind and it never will be the hot brand of his insults will turn her Against Humanity as well and a new underground man will be created where before there was such promise of selflessness and Redemption the underground man has become so deep in his hatred

of himself and the world that he does not know how to love anymore it is like an atrophied muscle he has lost control over and here we get potentially the saddest line in the entire story Liza certainly did fully understand that I was a Despicable man and what was worse incapable of loving her the underground man is so torn apart inside with the insults and injustices of the world and so unable to look past the malays of his own self-hatred that he is permanently deprived of Love thus he dwells in a dovi in Hell mourning

the loss of what could have made his life worthwhile and when dovy equates lovelessness with hell he is not talking merely about romantic love some of the happiest characters in his other novels are contented monastics filled with a gentle love for everyone but it is the all-encompassing totalizing completeness of the underground man's hatred that Dooms him because it is not just poor Liza he despises it is all of mankind every indignity or suffering thrown at him becomes another twisted smile he can curl in the face of the next person he passes he is the very

definition of a hurt person hurting people and he is also the starkest example of just how important love is in dov's overall Philosophy for some thinkers like Plato love is a wonderful compliment to a good life but is ultimately subordinate to more important matters like virtue and the pursuit of Truth for others like nature interpersonal love is often looked down upon with him remarking that very few great thinkers have ever been married the Romantic Poets often depicted love as a powerful motivating and destabilizing force throwing our souls into torment and Ecstasy with every passing moment

but Notes From The Underground demonstrates that for dovi love is not just powerful not just valuable but is an indispensable component of a worthwhile life without any love at all no compassion for a partner or affection for a friend or even a loose sense of commonality with the rest of the human race we are doomed to be miserable and despise ourselves to ask someone to live without loving others might as well be asking them to live without the use of oxygen for those of you familiar with Buddhist philosophy you might recognize some parallels here with

the idea of loving kindness and the unskillful emotions I also want to focus on dov's choice to say that hell is the inability to love he seems to agree with Aristotle here that the greater part of Love is in the loving it might be heartbreaking and isolating for us to feel that we are not loved but to use this as a reason to never love others is to needlessly increase our suffering a h hundredfold it is the genius of dovi to argue that our philosophies should begin with love rather than getting to them further down

the line and Notes From The Underground is perhaps the darkest demonstration of this terrifying idea and as we move forward to looking at some of the less Savory ways love can manifest we should bear in mind that dovi thinks that a rejection of love love entirely is the worst situation of all this is why he equates lovelessness with hell abandoning our natural affection for other people Dooms us entirely it cannot get any worse than this but anyway enough of my gloomy rantings we can now slowly move out of hell and begin to explore some of

the ways dovi thinks the noble emotion of love can be morphed into something much uglier how it can turn into a wish to control or to dominate or otherwise bring out the most violent aspects of the human psyche let's look at the people who talk about love but believe only in ego if you want to help me make more videos like this then please consider subscribing to my Channel or my patreon the links are in the description two the love of the egoist in modern parlament the term narcissistic love has become pretty commonplace various definitions

abound but they all orbit around one key Insight some lovers are only out for themselves knowingly or not they aren't truly loving for the sake of those they love but instead for some selfish benefit this might be to plug some Gap in their self-image or from hedonistic desire or simply out of spite but however this manifests dovi normally envisions it ending in disaster and moreover he sees this type of Love everywhere in public life perhaps the most well-known example of this type of Love is in the character of Luan from Crime and Punishment Luan is

a lawyer betrothed to Mari Duna the sister of our protagonist rasnov sorry that's a lot of names to take in however it quickly becomes clear that Luan loves Duna purely for the control he can exert over her he talks about how he has always wished to marry a poor woman down on her luck as this encourages her to remain constantly grateful to him for magnanimously agreeing to take her in just when she was least desirable he thinks that women make much better wives you see when they cannot survive without their husbands he becomes terrified when

Duna looks like she might come into some significant money because he does not really want to freely love and be loved freely in return what he desires most is to control his beloved moreover when he feels like he is losing this control he turns spiteful and bitter attempting to ruin raskolnikov's reputation as a petty form of Revenge today we would probably not hesitate in calling Luan somewhat of a narcissist later dovi would explore this ugly variant on love in even greater detail in his terrifying short story the meek one here he portrays how a narcissistic

and domineering husband mentally tortures his own wife until she eventually decides to end her life dovi describes every inch of the man's control he would deprive her of affection and have her beg it from him piece by piece he would attempt to uncover dirt on her so he always had something to hold above her head worst of all he always presented things so he could hold the moral High ground and look down on her from it not letting her forget a single one of her faults again we see how a twisted and malformed version of

Love Can manifest from a spiteful and controlling person in this case the egoist does not truly care about their beloved but instead wants to see a glorified image of themselves reflected back at them they want to prove that they are worthy of worship and affection Superior to everyone else around them especially the one they are supposed to love both lusion and this husband managed to come across as simultaneously repulsive and deeply pitiable they want selfless devotion they want to be loved but they refuse to give it themselves as a result rather than receiving the free

affection of another agent they must extract it bit by bit through numerous Avenues of coercion I would wager we all know people who love a little bit like this for dovi these people are also suffering from a certain inability to love though they are not quite in the living hell of the underground man they are ultimately still cut off from True joy and this begins theme for dov's philosophy the more self-centered a love is the less Joy it can bring both for the lover and the Beloved this will eventually culminate in him praising a semi-religious

Selfless Love but we'll save that for later in the video it is also worth noting that a points both Luan and this husband Express seemingly quite deep feelings of self-loathing this continues the idea that dovi expressed in Notes From The Underground how self-hatred can very quickly transform into a total lack of affection for anyone dovi also explores how possessiveness in love can bring out its destructive and explosive dimensions for instance in the brother's karamazov much of Dimitri karamazovs suffering is caused by his lust filled attachments to a woman named grushenka in an attempt to win

her over he betrays almost every one of his principles he deceives his fiance spends other people's money and beats his own father in a jealous rage though Dimitri's love is not outright narcissistic or manipulative it is still possessive and envious and without spoiling too much this leads to pretty disastrous consequences likewise in the idiot we see jealousy slowly Drive the character of regoin insane and this culminates in a horrific and violent act against a woman who needed more than anything for someone to be kind to her in both cases it is not that these lovers

set out to use the object of their affection egoistically instead it is that their fear and their self-image got in the way they may not have wanted to control but they itely wanted to possess and dovi paints this drop of selfishness transforming pure love into something potentially violent and terrifying to Branch out from romantic examples we also see dovi criticizing the intellectuals of his time period for their egoistic love of the people of Russia amongst the intelligencia of his time he saw that almost everyone would profess this deep affection for the poor and needy but

that this rarely extended to actually spending time with them and treating them as equals instead much like the narcissistic lovers in his novels the intellectual Circles of St Petersburg would insist that they already knew what the peasantry of Russia needed and thought it was their job to Enlighten them very few things seem to make dovi as angry as this condescending attitude for him behind all of these huttin words was a fundamental lack of respect for the traditions and way of life of the Russian peasantry which in many ways dovi thought was superior to the westernized

academic Circle of the Cities this thought culminates in his astonishing novel demons where he skewes the members of the intelligencia as fundamentally self-interested he accuses them of really just wanting to use whatever sentiments they deem necessary to gain control and power and of thinking they knew how the peasantry should live their lives better than they did here we also begin to see another theme in dov's view on love he not only views it as of extreme interpersonal significance but it also becomes a key part of his wider philosophical and political views as time goes on

the idea we see running through all of the examples of this section is that love can become corrupted through a sense of superiority and a lack of respect for the agency of the Beloved and this makes sense given the particulars of dov's religious views for him part of what made Christ's love for mankind so moving is that he was fully human he was not a spirit standing above us dictating orders but instead suffering alongside us and delivering his message as a god-made man I am not Christian myself but I don't think you have to be

to see the beauty in this idea dovi constantly points out how our desire for Love Can mingle with our fears and insecurities to create this noxious mixture of condescension and control and that this threatens to strangle what could have been a joyous kind of love this poisoning of kindness and affection by a wish to control also forms the backbone of much of his critiques of other religious movements for instance Roman Catholicism and protestantism and even some Orthodox churches and I think this warning is worth listening to for our own lives how often do we taint

our own love with some form of egoism or selfishness sure we might not be total narcissists or believe that we are fundamentally Superior to our partner but how often do we think we love someone for who they are only for it to emerge later that we may have partly loved them for what they could do for us it is a difficult question to pose but one well worth asking when something as important as love is on the table but then this also begs the question how do we love in a way that is not so

egoistic well dooi has a surprising answer three love and sacrifice in the 14th century the English Mystic Julian of Norwich fell ill with a fever and began to experience Visions a devout Christian she experienced Revelations About the Passion Jesus felt for Humanity as he died on the cross sacrificing himself to save our souls in one of these Visions Christ tells her it is endless satisfaction to me that I ever suffered passion for thee and if I might suffer more I would suffer more the phrasing here is incredibly important for Julian Christ did not just suffer

because it was necessary he did so as a loving and willing Act of self-sacrifice so great was his Devotion to mankind that he was not only able to Bear suffering for us but was glad to do so just like how you will often hear parents not just say that they would die for children but that they would do so without a hint of regret or resentment in their hearts again I am not personally religious but I have had this line running through my head for months now because it is one of the most insightful meditations

on Selfless Love I have ever come across and it also summarizes in a single sentence what dovi thinks the purest kind of affection can amount to a key theme in many of dov's later works is the idea of loving through sacrifice this forms a very clear contrast from the egoistic kind of love we explored in the previous section whereas the selfish lover attempts to extract from their Beloved the sacrificial lover intends to give themselves over to them as if as an offering obviously such a move is fraught with danger and despite praising this sort of

sacrificial love dovi does not shy away from how it can end horribly arguably his novel The Idiot is all about how a kind man who loves in a wholehearted and selfless way is driven mad by the cruel and cowardly behavior of other people the titular character Prince mishkin spends much of the novel attempting to help the Fallen woman nstasia philipov and her troubled and Reckless lover rosu sorry if I've completely butchered the pronunciations there more than anything else he wants them to see their own value bring them out of their cynicism and love them he

even sacrifices his prospects with the woman he truly wants to be with to achieve this and forgives rosen's murder attempt on him and yet in the end it is all in vain I won't totally spoil it here but suffice to say the innocent Prince michan's attempts blow up in his face and he has left a Broken Man sent abroad for extensive medical treatment in an attempt to recover his psyche he gave all he had in Acts of Selfless Love and yet dovi paints him as suffering for it the question dangling in the air is should

he have been so kind should he have been so loving and dov's answer is still unequivocally yes we get a glimpse of the true radicalism of his loving philosophy here he implores us to love others selflessly even as it's going horribly wrong for us for him this is what it truly means to be self-sacrificial in our love and let's be absolutely clear this is a tall order the great Russian is asking us to perform and it leaves us incredibly vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation but as we shall see in the next section his demands only

become more extreme we see a similar kind of Selfless Love in the character of alosa in the brothers karamazov he is the most spiritual of the three brothers and his most remarkable trait is his complete unwillingness to judge other people or consider them beneath him in any way all throughout the novel he encounters people who have done Terrible Things pursued selfish ends and committed only scant acts of kindness in their lives and yet each time despite all the good he is doing in the world he will continually affirm that he is not better than them

instead he shows them an unrelenting and indiscriminate kind of love this comes out most strongly in his meeting with grushenka another of dov's Fallen women despite her poor reputation and lowly societal Position alosa will not consider himself Superior to her and indeed at points even act as if he is beneath her confronted with genuine egalitarian affection and understanding grenka Spirits are restored and she actually begins to change as a person for the better he does the same thing for many others over the course of the story alosa will take someone who has been made rule

by self-judgment or the Judgment of others and he will extend a hand to them but this is not the condescending wish to save that dovi was so critical of in the previous section this is instead a genuine brotherly love that emanates from alosia like an aura this is the ideal sort of love for dooi Endless uncond descending and selfless and he admits that this is incredibly demanding in the same novel The Elder Zoser a much- regarded monastic talks about the difference between active love and a kind kind of dreamy love whereas it is easy for

anyone to fantasize about Grand romantic gestures or a general affection for mankind or to say that they love someone from the bottom of their heart active love is different and much more difficult zosima admits that it is Harsh and Dreadful and requires labor and fortitude it is the kind of love that is willing to give and give and give without a hint of resentment or entitlement I would argue we see this kind of love in small ways everywhere from the ground grand father who painfully kneels on brittle bones to play with his delighted granddaughter to

the wife standing by her husband as he's ravaged with illness it is in the eyes of the dog who leaps to the defense of their owner and in The Last Breath of the soldier taking a bullet for their friend but to have this active love be the guiding force of your life to be totally devoted to others willing to sacrifice anything for them and actively loving them every second of every day that is the sort of love zosa and dovi demand of us and at points he says it is the highest virtue a person can

have it is the Cornerstone of dov's faith and he finds its apotheosis in the image of Christ dying for us all still crying out for his captors to be forgiven and all throughout dov's novels we see the redeeming power of being loved like this in crime and punishment it is the selfless and Noble love of Sonia that helps raskolnikov ReDiscover his ailen conscience and become a better man in the idiot it is what convinces nstasia Philip POA if only for a moment that she might have worth as a person and in the brothers karamazov alyosha's

love consistently transforms the people around him from callous and uncaring to kind and generous for dostoevski this is what makes Selfless Love worthwhile even when it leaves us vulnerable and sometimes goes disastrously wrong for him it has the power to cut through people's insecurity and self-destruction and make them see that they are worthy of respect and reveal to them the kind of person that they could be if they truly tried one of the wonderful things about dov's novels is that almost no one is portrayed as Beyond Redemption and everyone has the potential to become something

truly good If Only They had this treasured Kind of Love No Doubt such a love is incredibly rare but if even a fraction of what dovi says about its transformative effects are true it may be well worth striving for but if you thought that this was a stretch dov's demands are about to get much more extreme because now he wants us to take this selfless sacrificial almost sacramental love and expand it to Encompass the whole of humanity four the universal lover in ancient Greece people would use the word Agape to describe the sort of universal

Divine love that Christians would later attribute to God this was part of a whole set of different types of loving that included AOS or erotic love and filia or brotherly love and dostoevsky's radical suggestion is that we bring about a a world in which there is universal agape and filia that is affection and brotherly love for all he himself seems to recognize that this idea is a little bit ambitious he even calls one of his final short stories exploring this idea the dream of a ridiculous man here he explores someone going through a brief but

intense existential crisis who emerges on the other side with a completely new outlook on life the man discovers a wish to work tirelessly in service to a future where we all love one another selflessly and openly saying that this will be the salvation of the world and of course everyone else calls him ridiculous there are many theological themes that come up in dostoevski there's the problem of evil the issue of morality without God and so much more but one that perhaps appears more often than any other is the doctrine of loving your neighbor as yourself

and this becomes increasingly prominent in his later writings in the brothers karamazov the Elder zosa gives us perhaps the closest approximation of dostoevsky's own philosophy he says that we should love life and encourage all others to do the same and moreover that this must be the energetic active love that we spoke about in the previous section we must behave like alosia and seek to serve those around us as if they were our brothers essentially dovi wants us to emulate the behaviors of the previous section but not just towards our friends or our partners but anyone

that we come across and moreover to do all of this not begrudgingly or early but with endless enthusiasm and energy and even gratitude this also goes some way to making sense of what dostoevski means when he says we are not just responsible for our own sin but also the sins of everyone else he is encouraging us to treat the hardship of life like a shared burden and to extend empathy and compassion towards anyone's suffering even if that suffering is of their own creation and to recognize we're doing this not from a place of superiority but

because it is a privilege to serve this also explains how dosv can portray characters like the underground man with such Exquisite tenderness while still not pretending that they are not responsible for their actions dovi is doing in a literary way what Jesus or alosa do in a literal way he is sharing in the trials and tribulations of his characters without removing their agency and through his writings he encourages us to do the same to people suffering in our own lives it is a little bit like schopenhauer's idea that we are a community of fellow sufferers

dooi wants us to recognize the pain of other people and extend our compassion even to those who are cruel or self-destructive and this attitude closely aligns with dov's wider philosophy in a speech delivered a year before his death in celebration of the poet Pushkin dovi discusses his vision for the future of Russia and the world just as Prince Michigan or alosia or Christ serve as examples to light our way to selflessness and Universal kindness he wanted Russia itself to become a symbol of universal Global Brotherhood saying to become a Russian fully means only to become

a brother of all men to become if you will a universal man Doo's ridiculous dream is of a future of love between all people where we are all a bit more like alosha mushkin and Christ where we would take up the demands of a totalizing active and Universal love and follow it to the ends of the Earth he is perhaps one of the only authors in history to take the Christian commandment to love all people so seriously for dostoevski violence and resentment and retribution would never get to the root of the problems we face as

a species he thought that instead of leading by conquest or military might a brighter future could be brought about by examples of selfless people saying our destiny is universality won Not By The Sword but by the strength of Brotherhood and our fraternal aspiration to reunite mankind this again makes a lot of sense dov's religion for him the most impactful person in history was Jesus Christ he accomplished more than any General transformed the face of much of the world and yet did so through the power of his message of total love sure this idea has been

corrupted and used for all sorts of Nefarious ends but dostoevski still believes hopes and dreams that we might be able to recapture it viewed in this light some of dov's characters like zosima alosha Mish and more can form powerful examples for us to follow personally I find that part of the power of great literature is that it lends a certain dignity to ways of living when we are struggling to follow our own values we can turn to a literary character we admire and ask what they would do and suddenly we don't feel so much like

a fool I have certainly noticed this myself when I am struggling to be kind or when it seems to be backfiring on me I quite often call to mind the humble alosa or the poor and loving Prince Michigan and it certainly helps Soothe My burgeoning resentment it helps me realize that love is not stupid or ridiculous it might not always go our way and there are plenty of kind people that get taken advantage of but in my very limited experience it remains infinitely better than the cynical alternative I still have a long way to go

to live up to even a minuscule fraction of this kind of love but I'm eternally grateful to have these characters to help me on my way but whoever we are cynic or Optimist religious or atheist we can certainly learn a lot from this extraordinary Russian thinker and who knows maybe he's right maybe love truly can save the world because to quote the New Testament that dovi valued so much love is patient love is kind it does not envy it does not boast it is not proud it does not dishonor others it is not self-seeking it

is not easily angered it keeps no record of wrongs love does not Delight in evil but rejoices with the truth it always protects always trusts always hopes always perseveres I have to admit I don't know if dostoevski is right but I can say I really hope he is and if you want to explore more of dov's philosophy then click here to see my analysis of perhaps his most famous work Crime and Punishment and stick around for more on thinking to improve your life