Represents the shallow adoption of western liberalism, rational egoism, and utilitarianism without its ethical foundations.
“Science says: Love yourself before all, because everything in the world is based on self-interest. If you love only yourself, you will set your affairs up properly, and your caftan will also remain in one piece. And economic truth adds that the more properly arranged personal affairs and, so to speak, whole caftans there are in society, the firmer its foundations are and the better arranged its common cause. It follows that by acquiring solely and exclusively for myself, I am thereby precisely acquiring for everyone, as it were, and working so that my neighbor will have something more than a torn caftan, not from private, isolated generosities now, but as a result of universal prosperity.”
Values wealth and social status above all else, and approaches relationships (including his engagement to Dunya) as transactions in which he seeks to maintain power and control.
Andrei Semyonovitch Lebeziatnikov:
Represents radical nihilist and utopian socialist movements
Fascinated by communes, collective living, and the radical restructuring of society
Advocates for women’s liberation, though his understanding is comically shallow
Portrayed as a naive idealist, uncritical in his adoption of ideas in the zeitgeist. Follows whatever is fashionable without deep understanding.
“He was one of that numerous and diverse legion of vulgarians, feeble miscreates, half-taught petty tyrants who make a point of instantly latching on to the most fashionable current idea, only to vulgarize it at once, to man an instant caricature of everything they themselves serve, sometimes quite sincerely.”
“I only believe in the theory that there are no sacred rights at all, not that existing ones should be abused! The future commune will not need personal or property rights.”
Dmitri Prokofich Razumikhin
AKA the goodest boy
Balanced, pragmatic; clearly represents Dostoevsky’s own opinions.
Believes in working within reality to improve conditions. Values honest work and practical solutions over grand theories.
Traditional values: Represents honesty, loyalty, authenticity, friendship, and compassion.
“Razumikhin had the property of speaking the whole of himself out at once, whatever mood he was in.”
“An honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business listens and goes on eating—and then he eats you up.”
Moral integrity: Maintains his principles despite poverty and adversity.
Questions fashionable intellectual trends without rejecting progress entirely.
Thinking for yourself:
“They insist on total impersonality, can you believe it? And that’s just where they find the most relish! Not to be oneself, to be least of all like oneself! And they consider that the highest progress.”
“Lying in one’s own way is almost better than telling the truth in someone else’s way”
“We like getting by on other people’s reason—we’ve acquired a taste for it!”
Critique of progressivism:
“I’ll show you their books: with them one is always a ‘victim of the environment’—and nothing else! Their favorite phrase! Hence directly that if society itself if society itself is normally set up, all crimes will at once disappear, because there will be no reason for protesting and everyone will instantly become righteous. Nature isn’t taken into account, nature is driven out, nature is not supposed to be! With them it’s not mankind developing all along in a historical, living way that will finally turn by itself into a normal society, but, on the contrary, a social system, coming out of some mathematical head, will at once organize the whole of mankind and instantly make it righteous and sinless, sooner than any living process, without any historical and living way! That’s why they have such an instinctive dislike of history: ‘there’s nothing in it but outrage and stupidity’—and everything is explained by stupidity alone! That’s why they so dislike the living process of life: there’s no need for the living soul! The living soul will demand life, the living soul won’t listen to mechanics, the living soul is suspicious, the living soul is retrograde!
On the irreducible mystery of life, the insufficiency of logic:
“You can’t overleap nature with logic alone! Logic will presuppose three cases, when there are a million of them! Cut away the whole million, and reduce everything to the one question of comfort! The easiest solution to the problem! Enticingly clear, and there’s no need to think! Above all, there’s no need to think! The whole of life’s mystery can fit on two printed pages!”
Against cancel culture (lol):
“Zametov is still a boy, I can rough him up, because he ought to be drawn in and not pushed away. You won’t set a person right by pushing him away, especially if he’s a boy. You have to be twice as careful with a boy. Eh, you progressive dimwits, you don’t understand anything! You disparage man and damage yourselves … “
Divides humanity into “ordinary” and “extraordinary” people.
Believes extraordinary individuals (like Napoleon) transcend conventional morality and are entitled to transgress laws for the greater good.
Feels like a pre-Nietzsche critique of Nietzsche.
Though according to Philosophize This! that’s a gross misunderstanding of Nietzsche—probably time for a reread of TSZ.
“I deduce that all, not only great men, but even those who are a tiny bit off the beaten track—that is, who are a tiny bit capable of saying something new—by their very nature cannot fail to be criminals—more or less, to be sure. Otherwise it would be hard for them to get off the beaten track, and, of course, they cannot consent to stay on it, again by nature, and in my opinion it is even their duty not to consent.”
“I only believe in my main idea. It consists precisely in people being divided generally, according to the law of nature, into two categories: a lower one, ordinary people, who are, so to speak, material serving solely for the reproduction of their own kind; and people proper—that is, those who have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment.”
“Those of the second category all transgress the law, are destroyers or inclined to destroy […] For the most part they call, in quite diverse declarations, for the destruction of the present in the name of the better. But if such a one needs, for the sake of his idea, to step even over a dead body, over blood, then within himself, in his conscience, he can, in my opinion, allow himself to step over blood”
“The first category is always master of the present; the second—master of the future. The first preserves the world and increases it numerically; the second moves the world and leads it towards a goal.”
Utilitarian rationalism
Justifies murder through a coldly rational calculation: one worthless life sacrificed could save or improve many others.
Represents the dangerous extreme of utilitarian thinking when divorced from moral foundations.
“Having come to such conclusions, he decided that in his own personal case there would be no such morbid turnabouts, that reason and will would remain with him inalienably throughout the fulfillment of what he had plotted, for the sole reason that what he had plotted—was “not a crime” … We omit the whole process by means of which he arrived at this latter decision.”
Nihilism:
Rejects traditional moral and religious constraints, seeing them as tools that keep “ordinary” people in check.
Zossimov
He just like me fr: “Having noted upon entering how dazzlingly beautiful Avdotya Romanovna was, he immediately tried not to pay her any notice during the whole time of his visit”