https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KebJiLxLS5Y
Of course you know that Nietzsche was the philosopher who announced the death of God, right? And who was a great, great critic of Christianity, a vicious critic of institutional Christianity, in the best sense, you know? And he announced the death of God, and he said that we’d never find enough water to wash away the blood. It wasn’t a triumphant proclamation, even though it’s often read that way. And Nietzsche’s conclusion from that, from the death of God, the fact that our ethical systems were going to collapse when the foundation was pulled out from underneath them, he believed that human beings would have to find their own values, to create their own values. And there’s a problem with that, because it doesn’t seem, and this is something Carl Jung was very thorough in investigating, it doesn’t really look like people are capable of creating their own values, because you’re not really capable of molding yourself just any old way you want to be. Like you have a nature that you have to contend with. And so, it isn’t a matter of creating our own values, because we don’t have that capacity. It might be a matter of rediscovering those values, which is what Jung was attempting to do. Now, and so I think Nietzsche was actually profoundly wrong in that recommendation. I think he was psychologically wrong. Now, you know, Dostoevsky wrote, in many ways, in parallel to Nietzsche, and was a great influence on Nietzsche. Their lives parallel each other to a degree that’s somewhat miraculous, in some sense. It’s quite uncanny. Dostoevsky was obviously a literary figure, whereas Nietzsche was a philosopher. A literary philosopher, but still a philosopher. Dostoevsky wrestled with exactly the same problems that Nietzsche wrestled with. But he did it in a different way. He did it in a literary manner. He has this great book, The Brothers Karamazov, and in that book, there’s a… The hero of the book is really Elioche, who’s a monastic novitiate. A very good guy. Not an intellect, but a person of great character. But he has a brother, Ivan, who’s his older brother, who’s a great intellect, and a very handsome soldier, and a brave man. And like Dostoevsky’s villains… Ivan isn’t exactly a villain, but that’s close enough. Ivan, or Dostoevsky, makes his villains extraordinarily powerful. So if Dostoevsky’s trying to work out an argument, he closed the argument in the flesh of one of his characters. And if it’s an argument he doesn’t agree with, then he makes that character as strong as he possibly can. As strong and as attractive and intelligent as he possibly can. And then he lets him just have at her. And so Ivan is constantly attacking Elioche. And from every direction, trying to knock him off his perch of faith, let’s say. And Elioche can’t address a single one of Ivan’s criticisms. And he doesn’t have the intellect for it. And Ivan has a devastating intellect. It’s devastating to him, himself, as well. What happens in the Brothers Karamazov, essentially, is that Elioche continues to act out his commitment to the good, let’s say. And in that manner, he’s triumphant. It doesn’t matter that he loses the arguments, because the arguments aren’t exactly the point. The arguments, in some sense, are a side issue. Because the issue is, and this is the existential issue, the issue is not what you believe as if it’s a set of facts, but how you conduct yourself in the world. And so Dostoevsky, he grasped that, and it’s one of the things that makes him such an amazing literary figure, an amazing genius. Because he was smart enough to formulate the arguments in a manner that no one else really could, with the possible exception of Nietzsche. And that’s quite an exception. And yet, he could still, using his dramatic embodiment, he could still lay out solutions to the problems that he was describing that are extremely compelling. Both Crime and Punishment, which is an amazing, thrilling, engrossing book, and the Brothers Karamazov, all of Dostoevsky’s great books really circulate around those profound moral issues. So I’ve learned a tremendous amount from reading him.