Discussion: Dostoyevsky & Nietzsche

DOSTOYEVSKY
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 -

1. in the Republic, devises an ideal state, banishes poets and tragedians.
2. ideal state based on theory of forms - world around us is illusory, comprised of copies of an ideal world located elsewhere
3. 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.

Dostoyevsky: Notes from the Underground

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Notes from the Underground, Dover Thrift Edition,

I found this book depressing but it seemed SO familiar.  The main character, the underground man himself with his self-pity and his determination for self-sabotage was someone I felt I had read about before.  Maybe it's just a Russian archetype.  He was quite frustrating but Dosteyevsky wrote it all so beautifully: what he thought and felt, how he appeared to others, his opportunities for redemption and how he would throw it away.  I actually thought he might allow things to work out with Liza and get out of his funk but he was determined to keep himself down.  I loved the character of Appollon, so passive-aggressive, he must have driven the neurotic underground man crazy.

On pg 31, he is thinking back on his younger days and how he has come to be where he is now.  he scoffs at Romanticism "We Russians, speaking generally, have never had those foolish transcendental "romantics" -- German, and still more French -- on whom nothing produces any effect; if there were an earthquake, if all France perished at the barricades, they would still be the same, they would not even have the decency to affect a change, but would still go on singing their transcendental songs to the hour of their death, because they are fools."  He goes on to describe what the Russian 'romantic' is and it's quite a humorous description as he describes quite pragmatic romantics, always with an eye out for advantage.

"That is why there are so many 'broad natures' among us who never lose their ideal even in the depths of degradation; and though they never stir a finger for their ideal,..., yet they tearfully cherish their first ideal and are extraordinarily honest at heart." pg 32

He really is a sad character and though he is pitiful, there is something of his insecurity in many of us.  He says pg 31 "Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike everyone else.  'I am alone and they are everyone'.

He describes himself as pitiful, loathsome, hysterical etc. He is very untrustworthy as a narrator and he tells us so frequently (pg 33, pg 26, pg 27, pg 22, pg 25)
After he tries to pick a fight and get thrown out of a window [he is unsuccessful in his defenestration attempt], he says "I never have been a coward at heart, though I have always been a coward in action." pg 34
He starts to stalk an officer he has become obsessed with.  He refers to himself several times as a fly (pg 34 "I had been treated like a fly"; pg 36 "that I was a mere fly in the eyes of all this world, a nasty, disgusting fly -- more intelligent, more highly developed, more refined in feeling than any of them, of course -- but a fly that was continually making way for everyone, insulted and injured by everyone."; "All of them took scarcely any notice of my entrance, which was strange, for I had not met them for years.  Evidently they looked upon me as something on the level of a common fly." pg 42)

The underground man indulges in fantasies about how life could be where he was admired and loved.  "Everyone would kiss me and weep (what idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against the obscurantists. pg 40

He runs into old school friends and they are planning a party for Zverkov, a rich friend (who came in for an estate of 200 serfs while still a school).  The underground man hates him because of his advantages, what he calls being "favoured by the gifts of nature."

He didn't do well at school.  He was intelligent and knew the material but couldn't get along.  "Once indeed I did have a friend.  But I was already a tyrant at heart; I wanted to exercise unbounded sway over him..." pg 47  He is so insecure about everything combined with false bravado about his superiority.  He invites himself along to a get-together.  He wants everything to go perfectly, to be able to redeem himself in their eyes.  He sneaks away from work 2 hours early to be able to get ready  "The great thing, I thought, is not to be the first to arrive, or they will think I am overjoyed at coming.  But there were 1000 of such great points to consider , and they all agitated and overwhelmed me." pg 47.
He overthinks and obsesses about everything.

Of course it all goes terribly wrong, and where he can make it worse he does.  It's horrifying to observe him sabotage himself with absolutely everyone he encounters.

It was interesting to think about what Dostoyevsky would have been thinking and feeling as he was about the same age as his protagonist when he wrote this.  It's very dark but then I find so many Russian stories have this same dark fatalism.

Discussion: Anatole France "The Gods Will Have Blood"

Stephen started the discussion off by mentioning his experience during the 60s at SFU where the revolutionary/Berkeley spirit was strong and students believed they would overthrow the old guard and change the world.  A friend of his told him that come the revolution they would have to shoot Stephen because he wouldn't be able to go as far as the extremists.  Anatole France's book "The Gods Will Have Blood" and especially the character Brotteaux spoke to Stephen and this very thrilling time in his life.

Bruce led the discussion and disagreed with Davies' suggestion that Gamelin was a modern-day terrorist.  He felt that Gamelin was an idealist, a fanatic and extremist but not someone who just wants to destroy, rather someone who believes in a new order to the exclusion of any other considerations.

Anatole France was known as a left-wing writer and he was unusual in attacking the French Revolution from the left.  Bruce spoke a little about the Dreyfus affair and France's support of Dreyfus.  He circulated the famous 'J'accuse' article by Emile Zola - an article in L'Aurore newspaper.
The Zionist movement arose from Jewish feelings about the Dreyfus affair.

Gamelin's unfinished painting of Orestes and his sister Electra was an important theme in the book and this led to a discussion about the myth, about Orestes as a symbol of a person forced to commit a sin in order to obey another duty.

Brotteaux and Longuemare, as well as Athenais, were like a Greek chorus - the voice of consience.  They don't fit in with the world of the revolution and so they are all doomed. They had a love for humanity whereas Gamelin loved France and the ideal of the Revolution but he didn't have  a love for humanity.

The rational abstracted from the real world can be dangerous - if a person (especially one with power) focuses in on theory and a structure, on laws and regulations and ignores the humanity, real evil can result.

Anatole France referred often to Rousseau in the novel - Rousseau probably represented the brutal, raw nature.  We discussed the country interlude - which was an odd break in the novel.  This was likely a bit of  critique of Rousseau who wrote about the healing effects of Nature.  France felt that you can't just go into Nature and have it change anything.  The odd character of Tronche could represent the peasantry of France and how it is used and abused by the aristocrats/intellectuals etc.

I would like to read a bit more about this time period and try to get a better understanding of the various people and the events.  It was such a dramatic upheaval in centuries of class structure and led to important changes that we are still dealing with today.

France: The Gods Will Have Blood

France, Anatole: The Gods Will Have Blood, Frederick Davies; Penguin Classics, London, 1979

I enjoyed this book - though the subject matter was grim.  It was strange to think of Mary Wollstonecraft being in Paris at the same time as the events depicted in this novel.  I thought the characters were interesting and the events in the novel were quite incredible even though they must bear a very close resemblance to what actually occurred and to many of the people involved.

Gamelin was a frightening character because he seemed quiet and sane yet was capable of so much evil action.  I thought that St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre (which is our next book) was similar in that he had a cold character and a somewhat self-righteousness nature.  I think as a missionary he would have been an intolerant man who would have exacted severe punishments on his "flock" 'for their own good'.
As with most readers, I really liked Maurice Brotteaux des Ilettes, the atheist epicurean.  He says

Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness...We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others.  In ignorance we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.

Barthes would have agreed with him about our ignorance of others.

Brotteaux also speaks on the value of human life, saying that he doesn't feel it has much value.

Nature...has certainly never given me evidence to believe that a man's life has any value; indeed on the contrary, she shows in many ways that it has none.  The sole destiny of all living beings seems only to become fodder of all other living beings fated also to the same end.

Like a good epicurean, atoms to atoms.

Gamelin asks Broatteaux whether he believes in Reason.

I hope at least, Citizen Brotteaux, that when the Republic establishes the worship of Reason, you will not withhold your acceptance of so wise a religion?

I love reason, but my love does not make me a fanatic, Brotteaux answered. 'Reason is our guide, a light to show us our way; but if you make a divinity of it, it will blind you and lead you into crime.'

This book very graphically and effectively describes what can happen when people become fanatical about change or about a cause.  I remember a movie I saw in the 90s about China and it showed the same situation where a major societal change has taken place and people are paranoid, fanatical and severe.  It was called The Blue Kite by Tian Zhuangzhuang.  You would see people turning neighbours in before they could turn you in.  I especially remember one scene where one of the main characters is at a meeting where they are dealing with a major problem and he leaves to go to the bathroom - when he comes back everyone turns silently to look at him and he immediately realizes that they have decided to make him the scapegoat and he is sent to a work camp.  I also remember a scene, I think from the same movie, where the officials have banned dogs (probably because of rabies concerns) and they are killing any dogs they see but they are also inspecting everyone's homes for dogs.  A family hides their little dog in a bench when the inspectors come and everything seems ok and then the dog whines and the inspectors stop as they are leaving and then follow the noise and find and seize the dog.  I can't remember whether they shoot it or just take it away but I can't imagine what the people would have felt like during those times.

The Gods Will have Blood reminded me of that atmosphere.  Movies I have seen about the Spanish Civil war and the revolution in Russia often dealt with those themes as well.
France writes:

The Convention intended to have one remedy for everything: Terror.  Blood would have blood.

France describes the magistrates, untrained men given the power of life and death.  Towards the end of the Terror, the prisons were so full of the accused that the magistrates were instructed not to even hear witnesses or defences, not to try and ascertain facts but just to use their consciences, their intuition to decide whether an accused was guilty or innocent.  France describes the trials of several

obstinate, empty-headed soldiers with the brains of sparrows in the skulls of oxen [...] What did it matter whether this soldier was innocent or guilty! [...] It was imperative to teach these generals of the Republic to conquer or to die.

Gamelin had a passion for the Republic but no love of humanity. He declaims:

I am a magistrate. I am responsible only to my conscience...Judgment is mine, not yours. I know neither friends nor enemies.

Brotteaux speaks to Gamelin about the regime and suggests a more Machiavellian process would have been more successful.

It seems to me they would have done better to have killed off quickly and secretly the more irreconcilable of their enemies and won over the others by gifts and promises.  A Tribunal such as yours kills off people too slowly and inspires too little fear to achieve any good. [...] The harm it does is to unite all in whom it inspires fear, and makes out of a diverse crowd of contradictory interests and passions, a powerful party capable of effective, united action.

Despite this somewhat ironical suggestion, Brotteaux seems to have a tolerance and acceptance or human foibles.  He mentions a curé he once knew and says:

We should adopt his principles and govern men as they are and not as we'd like them to be.

Gamelin has been swayed by the absolutism of the Revolution.  He describes hearing Robespierre speak and says:

Through the voice of this wise man, he was discovering lighter and purer truths; he was comprehending a philosophy, a metaphysic, of revolution which raised his thoughts far above gross material happenings into a world of absolute certainties safe from all the subjective errors of the senses. [...] Robespierre simplified everything for him, revealing the  good and the evil to him in simple, clear terms [...] Gamelin tasted the mystical joy of a believer who has come to know the word that saves and the word that destroys.

It's a frightening picture and France structured his tale very cleverly and marched me through to an ending where all the people who were in positions of power and adoration have now been brought low and sent to the guillotine but not before killing many of their former compatriots and friends.  A new order is being established and the novel ends with two of the survivors, Elodie and Desmahis joining together and moving on.

It was an unsettling novel and it made me want to go back and read A Tale of Two Cities.

Anouilh: ANTIGONE

Anouilh, Jean: Antigone; tr. Barbara Bray, Methuen, London,  1987

Jean Anouilh 1910-1987
Born in Bordeaux. His father was a tailor and his mother a violinist (at a nearby resort). The family moves to Paris when he is 8. Begins Law at the Sorbonne but quits to become a dramatist. He was quite influenced by the work of Pirandello, which surfaced in Paris in the 1920s.  Marries the actress Monelle Valentin when he is 22. Prisoner of war (briefly) in 1940. Antigone begins her 1st run (500 performances) in 1944, with Monelle Valentin in the lead role.  Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh perform in  Antigone at the London Old Vic in 1949. Lives near Lausanne for the last 30 years of his life. Anouilh increasingly disillusioned by French society, and has a particular antipathy to De Gaulle but also the far left militants.

Anouilh describes to Paul Vandromme what the theatre meant to him "Thanks to those spring evenings [at the theatre] in 1928 I was able to escape a little from the long night of my existence."

The Methuen edition describes some differences between Anouilh's Antigone and Sophocles'. Anouilh omits Tiresias, the blind seer.  In Anouilh's version, Creon (Antigone's uncle and now King of Thebes due to the deaths of both her brothers, Oedipus' sons) does not experience the growth and change we saw in Sophocles' version.  In the original, Creon has a conversation with both Tiresias and with his own son Haemon and both these men urge him not to carry out the death penalty Antigone received when she disobeyed Creon's edict and buried her brother Polyneices.  Creon spurns their advice initially, determined to be a strong impartial ruler but he eventually repents and realizes that by holding to his decision, he is dishonouring the gods.  In Anouilh's version, Creon is a more sympathetic man who has given up the life he enjoyed in order to become King of Thebes when both of Oedipus' sons kill each other.  His growth seems to have taken place prior to the events of the play.  Anouilh also omits much of the power and reason of Haemon's speeches.

It's interesting reading this Antigone after having read Elizabeth Smart's "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept." (I've been reading a bit out of sync over the break). Both are young passionate women who are very judgmental and intolerant (as is Werther) of age and its apparent compromises. All three are very idealistic and uncompromising.

It's not an original observation that passion and youth go together but the 3 books I've just read in the last week have really pummelled me with this dogmatic pairing.  All 3 texts, 2 fictional, one poetically autobiographical, have main characters that are young, subsumed by passion and intolerant of age, reason, compromise, survival.  All 3 see age or even maturity as, literally, a fate worth than death.  I'm still coming to grips with this uncompromising view of passion and with the prospect that passion, real passion, is - possibly, likely, sadly - only attainable in the young.  I'm not quite ready to give up on the possibility of passion but I also don't see life in such uncompromising, black and white, all-or-nothing, terms.

Laura was speaking the other day about having watched Baz Luhrman's "Romeo & Juliet" in another class.  She'd 1st seen the film as a teen or young adult and had found it very moving and enthralling, very powerful.  She said watching it in class made her realize the generational difference between herself and some younger classmates - who found the film dated and laughable.  I saw the film as an adult, probably in my 30s and I wasn't emotionally affected by it but thought it was a worthy update of the famous play.  It's interesting how age so affects perception.  I'm finding that about books I'm re-reading that I read as a teen or young adult.  I may get more context, more perspective, more substance out of them now but I don't know if they will affect me emotionally or chromatically the same way certain books did when I was young.

I enjoyed reading a different version of Antigone - for the same reason I enjoy (usually) seeing repeated versions of various of Shakespeare's plays - you get something different out each time.  I did very firmly have in my head, the whole time I was reading it, the fact that it was written in Paris during the 2nd world war.  Images from Casablanca and other WWII films and books would flit around in my head as I read through the play.