Dostoyevsky lived 1841-1881. Russia had been Christian from about the 10th century. The Tzars took power from the nobles but gave them increased power over their serfs. The nobility became very oppressive. Huge downtrodden serf population.
19th century. In 1812 Napoleon had invaded Russia and was defeated but not through any superiority of Russia, more vanquished by the elements, deprivation. Much tension in 19th c., paranoia, fear of uprisings. Michael Vacunin, father of uprising, nihilism, Turgenev: questioning of the old values.
Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow, father was a doctor, an alcoholic. He came from a religious, strict family, raised on hospital grounds and would talk to the patients. Well-read. Small of build, strong personality, hot-headed but pale and introverted at school. Suffered from epilepsy. Psychological writer. Was a socialist and early existentialist. Was a member of a writer's club and was arrested and ended up on the firing line. Eventually the execution was called off (it's thought the calling off was planned from the beginning). He then was sent to Siberia for 4 years hard labour and then had to join the army. Following this, Dostoyevsky became a journalist and went to western Europe. Became a gambler and addict.
Dostoyevsky was very affected by the people he met in prison and in Siberia as well as by his addiction to gambling and the degradations this brought him to (lying, pleading, debasing himself, importuning family and friends). He also had numerous sexual intrigues throughout his life.
Every Dostoyevsky novel has a woman at the end as a Christ-like figure who saves (or, in the case of Letters from the Underground, tries to save) the "hero/narrator."
What is better - cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Why is it limited to these 2 choices, or to these qualifiers?
Dostoyevsky was a Christian writer and Christianity has a belief in redemption through suffering. The narrator does not believe in Christianity but Liza is trying to save him by offering love. Dostoyevsky felt that the threat to mankind was science (The Crystal Palace of science and technology at the London Exhibition of 1851) and reason, and the salvation was Christianity - if you accept the message. Science tells you that you are going to die but offers you nothing else whereas Christianity offers you life after death. (Other religions offered other options such as reincarnation).
Normal man is "man of action" vs the acutely conscious man who is tormented by doubts, questions and emotions. Men of action are the doers, the inventors, the scientists, the warriors etc.
The book is a critique of material progress..."cheap happiness."
Romantics believed that through nature and beauty you could find meaning/happiness. Developed towards pantheism which believed God was in everything.
Liza's situation is much more dire than the Underground Man's yet she bears it, accepts it, she doesn't lament her lot, she still has hope.
NIETZSCHE - Dr. Samir Gandesha led this discussion.
On the Genealogy of Morals is most accessible of his texts. Hermeneutics of Suspicion - geared towards unmasking language, culture, morals
Freud and Marx also included
French philosopher Paul Mercure
Nietzsche born 1844 - Marx wrote manifesto 1847
Radical humanist, critique of property - social and economic, trained as philologist
1889 - breakdown, dies 1900
Freud publishes Interpretations of Dreams in 1900
Sister Elizabeth cares for him after breakdown. She was very right-wing and portrayed him as a German nationalist, a proto-Nazi, which he was not.
His relationship to Plato - wants to understand philosophy. Criticizes socratism on 3 fronts -
- in the Republic, devises an ideal state, banishes poets and tragedians.
- ideal state based on theory of forms - world around us is illusory, comprised of copies of an ideal world located elsewhere
- in the notion of a justice hierarchy, reason sits at top and governs with assistance of the passions - argument of the philosopher-king
Feels socratism is working its way, via christianity (St Aquinas, Emmanuel Kant) into the Western Civilization (phenomenal world and ideal world), critical of Kantian morality
110.14-25 - locates his issue in Plato/Christian ideal that god is truth, that truth is divine
"the truthful one, in that audacious and ultimate sense presupposed by the belief in science, thus affirms another world than that of life, nature, and history; and insofar as he affirms this "other world", what? must he not, precisely in so doing, negate its counterpart, this world, our world? ... It is still a metaphysical belief on which our belief in science rests -- we knowers today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, we too still take our fire from that great fire that was ignited by a thousand-year old belief, that belief of Christians, which was Plato's belief, that God is truth, that truth is divine ... But what if precisely this is becoming ever more implausible, if nothing proves to be divine any longer, unless perhaps error, blindness, lie -- if God himself proves to be our longest lie? -- --- At this point it is necessary to pause and to reflect for a long time. Science itself now is in need of a justification...
Nietzsche's conclusion was that a noble class/caste identified good qualities and bad qualities was derived from his philological studies.
Transvaluation and priestly class (slave-revolt) takes the reverse of this valuation
It is the slaves' feeling of weakness that leads them to this shift - their lack of power
Dark side of civilization (hermeneutics) - based on system of cruelty
Science includes cultural sciences as well as technological - systematic investigation
What does he mean by mastery, by will to power?
Are the masters those who control money, the state?
Nihilism - a process where the highest values are in the process of devaluing themselves
The sovereign individual -
Man is left with "will" and a question of where we derive our values from.
It's a will to power - this is how you counter will to nothingness (nihilism) - denial of the body, denial of the senses.
Nietzsche wants life-affirming ideals not life-denying as the ascetic ideals are.
What is the basic force?
Will to live but not in a metaphysical sense, not in a 'hereafter' sense.
Truth but not a propositional truth based on the state of the world but a Truth.
Will to power (based on his later writings but heralded in GM) - the ability to impose the aspect of being on becoming - if life is this constant process of becoming.
Role of Art, of style, fixes and establishes certain interpretations of the world
Justice is the right of the stronger, Nietzsche was influenced by the Renaissance and Machiavelli.
Heraclitus - Reality is this river, this constant state of becoming, you never step in the same water twice in a river.
52.19-25
"...life itself is defined as an ever more purposive inner adaptation to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer). In so doing however, one mistakes the essence of life, its will to power; in so doing one overlooks the essential pre-eminence of the spontaneous, attacking, infringing, reinterpreting, reordering and formative forces, upon whose effect the "adaptation" first follows; in so doing one denies the lordly role of the highest functionaries in the organism itself, in which the will of life appears active and form-giving."
Will to power through naming and renaming, those who master language, the artists, now it's the media. The creative people, enable us to see the world differently.
Italians futurists, over-powered by Roman empire, urged active forgetting.
Some people try to expand their minds by chemicals (Timothy Leary), or physically (other cultures use physical deprivation to achieve this as a rite of passage). Any new ventures are often very quickly co-opted by greater society, mass culture.
Live your life knowing that everything you do will live on for ever and be repeated. Every moment must be lived to its fullest - the artist is always creating new value.
Nietzschean ideals taken up by European modernists at the turn of century (19th c. to 20th c.)
Innovation, avant-garde,
Sarah Kofman, a French philosopher - tried to appropriate Nietzsche from a feminist perspective.
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