I’m writing this post to organize some of my thoughts
on a reading project I embarked on in 2018 to better understand two of my
literary idols. 7 years earlier, while a sophomore in college, I had taken a
class in which I read Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Both of these writers have
since loomed large over my perception of the world. They have also been touchstones
for many other artists I admire from Damon Lindelof to David Bowie. After
coming across so many references to the works of each writer, I realized that I
had to deepen my understanding of said work. I set myself the task of reading
every Walter Kaufmann translation of Nietzsche and every Richard Pevear/Larissa
Volokhonsky translation of Dostoevsky. As a supplement, I assigned myself Joseph
Frank’s five-volume Dostoevsky biography to better understand the social
context in which Dostoevsky wrote his novels. Eventually I would also read
Kaufmann’s Nietzsche biography.
I undertook this endeavor, not only to read two great
writers, but to read two great writers who disagreed passionately on life’s
most fundamental questions. Though it is important to strive for a healthy
amount of unity in one’s literary diet and not chase after contradiction for
contradiction’s sake, every great talent needs a worthy challenge to unlock its
full potential. This need for challenge is more obvious in the physical realm,
such as in a boxing match. Part of the thrill of The Rumble in The Jungle, for
example, isn’t just watching Muhammad Ali. It’s about watching him face his
greatest opponent, George Foreman. Likewise, in the realm of literature, to
prove a great author’s worth you pit them against another author whose ideas
pose the greatest possible challenge. In the final analysis, I crowned
Dostoevsky the victor, but as with two great talents like Ali and Foreman, the
greatest insight comes not from admiring only the victor, but from appreciating
the challenge laid down by a worthy opponent. With this frame of mind, let us
take a look at the topic on which Dostoevsky and Nietzsche most clearly
disagreed: that of Christianity, and its relation to nihilism.
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| "You may have enemies whom you hate, but not enemies whom you despise. You must be proud of your enemy: then the success of your enemy shall be your success too." |
Nietzsche, on the one hand, considered Christianity a major
wellspring of nihilism: a condemnation of the world that sapped an individual’s
ability to thrive in it. As an alternative, Nietzsche prescribed a daring brand
of egoism: to fully embrace and remain true to oneself without looking to the
tribe or the tribe’s gods for guidance. Dostoevsky, though he acknowledged the
importance of the human ego, still thought that it was insufficient to shoulder
the weight of life’s tragedies on its own. Dostoevsky claimed that, though the
ideal represented by Christ can crush the human ego if adopted too literally,
is still the only ideal towards which one can strive and still embrace life
with all its suffering. I can remember thinking in college, when I first read Crime
and Punishment, that Dostoevsky was somewhat naïve about human nature’s
dark side. By comparison, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil seemed to
more fully grasp these unpleasant realities and give the reader a better chance
of facing them.
My preference for Nietzsche deepened in the early
stages of my marathon, when I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Written in
the style of an Old Testament life of a prophet, this philosophical novel
follows the life of Nietzsche’s avatar, Zarathustra, and records many of
Zarathustra’s teachings, which he formulates over alternating periods of worldly
wandering to collect observations and share his wisdom, and solitude in which
he reflects on all that he has seen. It is in this novel that Nietzsche puts
forward some of his most memorable critiques on Christianity, and elaborates on
his theme of the death of God, which he first pronounced in The Gay Science.
Here Nietzsche puts his finger very clearly on the all too real faults to which
many Christians fall prey. Chief among these is the false face of morality,
which so many adopt merely to drain the fortitude of anyone who is stronger and
more courageous than them, and the misuse of pity, which so often saps the
self-respect of anyone unlucky enough to receive it. Then there is the constant
abuse heaped on the physical world, and on the body, which so many Christians
see as a filthy thing, and favoring instead the ephemeral promise of the
hereafter. With all these insightful criticisms in mind, my favoritism for
Nietzsche found a firmer foothold.
I felt the tide begin to shift, however, when I read
an earlier work of Dostoevsky’s. Though his later masterpieces cast a large
shadow over it, Notes from a Dead House—Dostoevsky’s fictionalized
account of his time in a Siberian labor camp—corrected the grave misconception
I held regarding Dostoevsky’s worldview, and began to solidify the tide of the
debate between the two writers in Dostoevsky’s favor. Dostoevsky paints several
unvarnished portraits of human beings at their most desperate and dangerous,
portraits drawn from individuals with whom Dostoevsky spent four years living
with in the labor camp. I also learned around this time, from Frank’s
biography, that Nietzsche had greatly admired this book, for obvious reasons,
and began to learn more how greatly Nietzsche actually admired Dostoevsky’s
work. Dostoevsky, it turned out, was not nearly so naïve as I had thought, and
much of Nietzsche’s own thought concerning the untapped wells of human
potential hidden in the darkest places had actually come directly from
Dostoevsky’s influence.
Given these new insights, I already held a more
critical frame of mind when I read The Antichrist, Nietzsche’s most
scathing critique of Christianity. Though this book stands head and shoulders
above many other pieces written in the same iconoclastic vein, it was the first
break I noticed in Nietzsche’s condemnation of Christianity. His gift for sly
humor is on breathtaking display here, but it is precisely in his eagerness to
take the wind from the sails of German Christians, particularly when taking
them to task for anti-Semitism, that he actually gives himself away. Nietzsche argues
that Christians have no cause to hate Jews because Christians only took what
was implicit in Judaism to its logical endpoint in the figure of Jesus, whom he
said was the ultimate Jew. Nietzsche goes on to say how much he admires the
Jewish people compared to Christians. He makes plain his preference for the Old
Testament, which he said could have taught the Greeks—whose tragedies he
greatly admired—about the true depths of life’s horrors and the glory gained in
facing them. While Nietzsche makes his point partly in jest, there is much
truth in it. Nietzsche hits upon the real value of Christianity, which, as he
himself says, took a great work of religious art like the Old Testament and
brought it to its logical conclusion in the figure of Jesus.
Not long after this, I read the perfect counterpoint
to Nietzsche’s Antichrist: Dostoevsky’s first attempt to create a
“perfectly beautiful man,” who embodied the spirit of Christian love Dostoevsky
believed indispensable to dispelling nihilism. The first time I read The
Idiot, it only deepened my preference for Nietzsche’s view over
Dostoevsky’s. The titular idiot, Prince Myshkin, embodies Christ’s values of
love and self-sacrifice so unequivocally, that he actually does irreparable
harm to two women. The first is Nastasya Fillipovna, a famous beauty whose guardian
sexually abuses her as a young girl and keeps her as his mistress, until he
decides to pawn her off as a wife to another man. The second is Aglaya
Epanchin, the spirited young daughter of a retired colonel. Nastasya inspires
Myshkin’s Christian—and asexual—feelings of love, while Aglaya stirs up a more
romantic and earthbound love in the hapless young man. Both women fall in love
with the prince, but because he cannot decide between sacrificing his earthly
nature to be with Nastasya or his divine nature to be with Aglaya, tragic ends
befall them both. Another man, Rogozhin, who also loves Nastasya, murders her in
a jealous rage, while Aglaya runs off with a Polish military officer, who then
abandons her to social ruin. Devastated by the consequences of his inaction,
Myshkin suffers a mental breakdown and retreats to a sanatorium in Switzerland
to live out the rest of his days in self-imposed exile.
The first time I read this book, I took it as a
confirmation that Dostoevsky could not reconcile himself to how unrealistic the
Christian ideal really was. I thought that Dostoevsky had somehow blamed the
world for Myshkin’s fate, and that he was calling all of his readers to
impotently bemoan that fate, and follow blindly in Myshkin’s steps towards
mental ruin, just as Nietzsche accuses so many Christians of doing. As I read
more about Dostoevsky’s life at the time in which he wrote the novel, including
some of the thoughts about it that he confided to friends and relatives in
various letters, I changed my opinion on this book considerably. Dostoevsky, as
it turned out, was under no delusions about the burden of reconciling one’s
earthly nature with all its needs and desires, with one’s divine calling to
place oneself at the service of others. It was precisely the danger of not
having a certain amount of patience with one’s earthly nature that Dostoevsky
unflinchingly portrayed in that novel, making it—though imperfect—a staggering
achievement of artistic and moral integrity, placing Dostoevsky’s most cherished
values in the most unforgiving crucible.
Nietzsche too would turn a critical eye on some of his
most cherished views in what became my favorite of his books: On the
Genealogy of Morals. Where in Antichrist, Nietzsche’s concessions to
Christianity’s potential value slipped in despite his best efforts, in Genealogy,
he actually turns his gift for sly criticism upon himself. Though Nietzsche
never loses his sharpness or his impatience for hypocrisy, he spends a great
deal of time on one of his favorite themes: that of amor fati: the
conviction that everything that happens, both to oneself, and in the broad
tapestry of history, should be embraced, that we should never dwell on what
should have happened in the past, but stoke our courage for present action. As
he follows this train of thought to its logical endpoint, Nietzsche muses that,
according to his own logic, even Christianity falls under the all-redeeming
umbrella of amor fati. Yes, even the religion Nietzsche poked full of
holes still had some claim to respect. Nietzsche at one other point
acknowledges that many of the values and disciplines he himself valued most
highly such as asceticism and introspection, would, at one point in time have
been considered an indulgence, favored only by the weak, which was how he
viewed many Christians. Part of what makes this book my favorite is that he
actually admits the limitations of his thought, and invites the reader to draw
their own conclusions about the topics on which he expounds.
It was also about this time that I started dipping
into the work of Carl Jung, who commented quite explicitly on Nietzsche’s
philosophy and on his mental breakdown. For many of Nietzsche’s admirers,
Nietzsche’s insanity casts no shadow over his philosophy at all. They contend
that it was simply physiological, brought on by a case of syphilis he most
likely contracted from a brothel in Zurich. Jung, however, thought Nietzsche’s
rejection of the divine left a void in his psyche that eventually swallowed him
whole. Perhaps it’s just my own personal prejudice, but I always found it
disheartening that a man who placed thriving in the world, and embracing life
at the forefront at his thought would end his life so pitifully, and harbored
suspicions that it was some fracture in his psyche beyond the physiological
that led to his mental collapse. Jung also contended that there was far more
hunger after the admiration of the rabble that Nietzsche so often dismissed
than he was willing to admit. Another of Jung’s hobbyhorses that stuck vividly
in my mind was the phenomenon of enantiodramia: the phenomenon by which one
thing, when taken to its extreme, turns into its opposite. Obsession with
strength can turn into weakness, while the most unassuming and forbearing soul
can conceal untold wells of resilience. I therefore found Jung’s theory
compelling, but still sat on the fence regarding it until I reached the final
two books on my list: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and
Nietzsche’s The Will to Power.
Some may say comparing these two books is unfair, given
that many consider The Brothers Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, while Will
to Power is a collection of previously unpublished notes that serve only as
extracurricular reading for those familiar with Nietzsche’s completed works.
Though this claim bears consideration, I couldn’t help but read Will to
Power as a slow-motion replay in which I saw every break in Nietzsche’s
defenses where Dostoevsky’s ultimately superior vision triumphed. Nietzsche’s
misstep that sticks most vividly in my mind was a passage in which he claims it
is actually the strong, unique types like Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte,
who need protection from the lesser types who serve them. While I understand
that Will to Power contains many half-fleshed out ideas, not meant to
stand as Nietzsche’s final word, this example does perfectly embody the
breaking point of Nietzsche’s thought. Stretching his case for worldly ambition
to the degree he does here marks the point at which Nietzsche steps into enantiodramia.
I can perhaps think of no particular topic on which
Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s visions dovetail, however than in the manner in
which they each choose to deal with one’s enemies. Nietzsche has many
fascinating things to say on the subject. One that sticks most firmly in my
mind if from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Nietzsche advises his
readers to seek out enemies that one hates, but not enemies that one despises.
In other words, choose to do battle with an enemy you disagree with
passionately, but not one that you think is beneath you, and that poses no
challenge to you. To seek out conflict with the former is to take up one’s
great task in life. To even associate with the former is merely to debase oneself.
Yet, given Nietzsche’s comments about the challenge that even ordinary people
can pose to great figures like Napoleon or Caesar, perhaps they are more worthy
of hate and less worthy of condescension than Nietzsche thought. Elsewhere in
Zarathustra he criticizes Christianity for causing people to merely will
themselves into nothingness, to degrade oneself out of existence. Nietzsche,
for all his insistence on harsh standards and great challenges, also preached a
certain version of self-acceptance. He said that you should by all means prune
oneself, and do away with self-destructive habits, but one should also embrace
the various parts of one’s nature, however loathsome they may appear. It is
perhaps the particular traits that Nietzsche decides are worth embracing and
what traits most require pruning that separates Nietzsche from Dostoevsky. In
his zeal to correct the excesses that Christianity often inspires, he
occasionally overcorrects himself. Dostoevsky, conversely, upheld a more
all-encompassing standard for what one ought to embrace, both in oneself and in
one’s fellow man. Just as in The Idiot, he illustrated the dangers of
failing to take one’s mortal nature into account when following the example set
by Jesus, in his work as a whole, and most spectacularly in his magnum opus, The
Brothers Karamazov, he shows the price of abandoning one’s responsibility
to one’s fellow man. Nietzsche also said that part of what a strong nature seeks
out is ever greater and greater challenges. What greater challenge could there
be than to make oneself the caretaker for those less powerful than oneself? Dostoevsky
understood that you need to see people where they are at, and to respect
whenever someone is operating at the limits of their abilities, however great
or small those abilities might be.
I can think of no greater contrast between these two
men than the manner in which they died. Nietzsche, who on the one hand preached
love of the world and accused Christianity of defaming the world, lived in
seclusion, and died alone and crazy. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, who, though
he preached belief in things unseen, still held up the world and life as worth
living in, and lived a life associating with everyone from hardened criminals
to fellow literary celebrities and even royalty, died, as one mourner at his
funeral noted with an expression of absolute peace on his face. Yes, I can
honestly say that I learned a great deal about the weaknesses of Christianity
and those who sometimes hide behind it to conceal their own weaknesses, but
Dostoevsky did so much to reveal the real strength that lies when one actually
lives by the creed of Christian love and forgiveness, rather than merely
professing to believe it.
