Why You Need to Read Dostoyevsky - Prof. Jordan Peterson

And so I would say with regards to fiction, if you take someone like Dostoevsky, who I think is a favorite of mine, by the way, I would highly recommend that you read all five of his great novels, because they are unparalleled in their psychological depth. And so if you're interested in psychology, Dostoevsky is the person for you. Tolstoy is more of a sociologist, but Dostoevsky, man, he gets right down into the bottom of the questions and messes around, transformative reading. Anyways, Dostoevsky's characters, this character named Raskolnikov is a character in Crime and Punishment, and Raskolnikov is a materialist, rationalist, I would say, which was a rather new type of person back in the 1880s, and he was sort of taken by the idea that God was dead, and convinced himself that the only reason that anyone acted in a moral way, in a traditional way, was because of cowardice. They were unable to remove from them the restrictions of mere convention, and act in the manner of someone who rose above the norm. And so he's tortured by these ideas. He's half starving, he's a law student, he doesn't have enough to eat, he doesn't have much money, and so, you know, he's not thinking all that clearly either, and he's got a lot of family problems, his mother's sick, and she can't send him much money, and his sister is planning to engage in a marriage that's loveless to someone who's rather tyrannical, who she hopes will provide the family with enough money so that he can continue in law school. And they write him brave letters telling him that she's very much in love with this guy, but he is smart enough to read between the lines, and realizes that his sister is just planning to prostitute herself, you know, in an altruistic manner, and he's not very happy with that. And then, at the same time as all this is happening, he becomes aware of this pawnbroker who he's, you know, pawning his last possessions to, and she's a horrible person, and not only by his estimation, she pawns a lot of things for the neighborhood, and people really don't like her. She's grasping, and cruel, and deceitful, and resentful, and she has this niece who's not very bright, intellectually impaired, whom she basically treats as a slave and beats all the time, and so Raskolnikov, you know, involved in this mess, and half-starved and a bit delirious, and possessed of these strange new nihilistic ideas, decides that the best way out of this situation would be just to kill the pawnbroker, take her wealth, which all she does is keep it in a chest, free the niece, so that seems like a good idea, so remove one apparently horrible and useless person from the world, free his sister from the necessity of this loveless marriage, and allow him to go to law school where he can become educated and do some good for the world. So, one of the things that's lovely about Dostoevsky is that sometimes when one person is arguing against another, or when they're having an argument in their head, they make their opponent into a straw man, which is basically they take their opponent and caricature their perspective, and try to make it as weak as possible, and laugh about it, and then they come up with their argument and destroy the straw man, and feel that they've obtained victory, but it's a very pathetic way of thinking, it's not thinking at all. What thinking is, is when you adopt the opposite position from your suppositions, and you make that argument as strong as you can possibly make it, and then you pit your perspective against that strong iron man, not the straw man, and you argue it out, you battle it out, and that's what Dostoevsky does in his novels. I mean, he's the people who stand for the antithesis of what Dostoevsky actually believes are often the strongest, smartest, and sometimes most admirable people in the book. And so, he takes great moral courage to do that, and, you know, in Raskolnikov, what he wanted to do was set up a character who had every reason to commit murder. Every reasonable reason. Philosophically, practically, ethically even. Well, so Raskolnikov goes and he kills the old lady with an axe. And it doesn't go the way he expects it will, because what he finds out is that post-murder Raskolnikov and pre-murder Raskolnikov are not the same people at all. They're not even close to the same people. He's entered an entirely different universe. And Dostoevsky does a lovely job of describing that universe of horror and chaos and deception and suffering and terror and all of that. He doesn't even use the money, he just buries it in an alley as fast as he can and then doesn't want anything to do with it again. Anyways, the reason I'm telling you all this is potentially to entice you into reading the book because it is an amazing, amazing book. But also because you might say, well, is what happened to Raskolnikov true? Are the stories in that book true? And the answer to that is, well, from a factual perspective, clearly they're untrue. But then if you think of Raskolnikov as the embodiment of a particular type of person who lived at that time and the embodiment of a certain kind of ideology which had swept across Europe and really invaded Russia and which was actually a precursor, a philosophical precursor to the Russian Revolution then Raskolnikov is more real than any one person. He's like a composite person. He's like a person whose irrelevancies have been eliminated for the purpose of relating something about the structure of the world. And so I like to think of those things as sort of meta-real. Meta-real. They're more real than real. They're more real than real.