The Brothers Karamazov

"This sprawling philosophical novel, grappling with good and evil, faith, and free will, fits Cormac McCarthy's interest in humanity's darkest impulses and moral quandaries. It lands in the same neighborhood as his own explorations of violence and redemption."

"Its deep exploration of free will, morality, and the nature of good and evil fits Lex Fridman's interest in the philosophical implications of AI and human existence. This classic aligns with his podcast's frequent discussions on consciousness and ethics."

"Now, The Brothers Karamazov is a real detective novel, a very rare phenomenon for 19th-century Russian fiction. We have a mysterious murder here, we have several suspects, we have a courtroom investigation, and we do not know eventually, not for sure, who is the culprit. Yes, The Brothers Karamazov is very long-winded. No one reads the novel as a suspense. It is a study of the human soul’s complexity, a tale about the magic and curse of passion, a clash between Mind and Heart. It is a detective story, but a strange one."

"Yes, this might seem an odd choice for a list of books about morality without God. Dostoevsky was a devout Christian and The Brothers Karamazov, his last and possibly greatest novel, was a heartfelt plea for the necessity of faith. The phrase “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” is often attributed to Dostoevsky. He actually never wrote that, but the sentiment certainly runs through much of his work, and most especially through The Brothers Karamazov . But if Dostoevsky wanted to warn of the moral perils of godlessness, he was nevertheless also unflinching in his portrayal of the dilemmas facing believers. So much so that The Brothers Karamazov can be read as much as a novel of disbelief as of belief. The novel is built around the emotional and intellectual rivalries of the three Karamazov brothers – Dimitri, Ivan and Alyosha. Out of these rivalries Dostoevsky creates a passionately spiritual drama about God, faith, doubt and reason, set against the background of the social fragmentation of a Russia attempting to move from a feudal to a modern world. The key debate takes place between Ivan, a fervent rationalist and would-be philosopher, and Alyosha, a gentle, generous, almost Christ-like figure, who is a novice in a monastery. Ivan refuses to accept God’s authority because He has created a world full of undeserved suffering. “It is quite impossible to understand,” he observes, why the innocent, especially children, “should have to suffer and why they should have to purchase harmony with their sufferings”. He adds that “if all the sufferings of children have gone to replenish the sum of suffering that was needed in order to purchase the truth, then I declare in advance that no truth, not even the whole truth, is worth such a price”. It’s the most celebrated section of the novel – and perhaps the most ambiguous in its meaning. In the parable, told by Ivan to Alyosha, Christ returns to earth during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He is arrested by the Inquisition and sentenced to be burned at the stake. Christ’s work, the Grand Inquisitor tells him, is at odds with the vision of the Church. In resisting the temptations set by Satan, Christ introduced the idea of free will into the world. But Christ misjudged human nature. Humanity can never be free, for it is “weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious”. Free will is a devastating, impossible burden for mankind. “Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?” the Grand Inquisitor demands of Christ. Nothing, he says, “is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering”. In giving humans freedom to choose, Christ has excluded the majority of humanity from redemption and doomed it to suffer. Far better, the Grand Inquisitor insists, for Christ to have given people security rather than freedom. Those too weak to follow Christ might still be damned, but at least they would have found happiness and security on Earth, rather than being forced to carry the impossible burden of moral freedom. The Church has “corrected Thy work”, the Grand Inquisitor tells Christ, by taking away freedom of choice and replacing it with security, by rooting human life not in freedom but upon “miracle, mystery, and authority”. The parable, like the novel, is complex, intricate and subtle, and lends itself to many readings. Dostoevsky himself appears to identify the Grand Inquisitor with atheism – he draws parallels between Alyosha and Jesus, and Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor. Without God, he seems to suggest, there is no possibility of moral choice and therefore no possibility of freedom. Atheism buys security at the expense of morality. Yet this is a reading that sits uncomfortably with the idea that if God does not exist, then everything and anything is permitted. God, in other words, is a form of security, an insurance that while humans may have moral choice they are also constrained in the choices that they have – and in being able to define what is good. If freedom is what truly defines humans, so much so that it should take precedence over security, then of course, it should also take precedence over the security provided by God. For freedom to be truly freedom, it cannot be freedom given by God, it must also be freedom from God. Freedom is not simply the freedom to choose whether or not to accept divinely sanctioned moral rules, but to set those rules themselves and to define what it is to be good. In other words, the freedom to set our own boundaries not have them set for us. It is to accept that the human condition is that of possessing no moral safety net, no God to protect us from the dangers of falling off the moral tightrope that is to be human. And that is the argument that is made in my fifth choice."

"I should first confess that The Brothers Karamazov is my favorite work of literature, so I am sure it would end up on a number of different ‘best books’ lists. In the case of moral character, I don’t think it is a stretch to include it here, for at least two reasons. The first is that the moral character of the three brothers is so central to the novel itself. Dmitri, for instance, exhibits intemperance and impulsiveness. Ivan is deeply thoughtful but also marred by pride. Alyosha models faith, hope, and charity. Importantly, though, none of them is just a two-dimensional crude representation of a particular virtue or vice. They are all complex characters who evolve over the course of the novel and sometimes act contrary to their dominant tendencies. Dmitri struggles to resist some temptations, for instance, and sometimes Alyosha experiences doubt. Just as with the rest of us, they have both good and bad sides to their characters, even if they might be closer to the virtue or vice ends of the spectrum. Secondly, as you noted, there are a host of deep philosophical questions at work in the book, questions about, say, the existence of God, the nature of morality without God , and the role of free will. These all tie into moral character as well. To take just one issue, if there is no divine realm whatsoever and if this life is all we have, then Ivan raises the question of whether there is any objective standard of moral right and wrong. That would include an objective standard for virtue and vice too. This also raises questions about the point of trying to become a better person in this life, and about whether there is as much motivation to do so as there is from a religious perspective. Also on the table is whether someone like Ivan can become a virtuous person, or whether a religious outlook is necessary for virtue. Now I think there are important things that could be said from a secular perspective in defense of an objective morality and living a virtuous life. My only point here is that The Brothers Karamazov succeeds in raising these and many other big questions."

"I only read this for the first time while writing The Mars Room . I would work every morning and sit in a chair and read The Brothers Karamazov every afternoon. It infused me with a sense of the magical world of Russia in a way that no other Dostoyevsky novel ever had, even as I love many of his works. Somehow, the way that Russia is not part of the Occident, the way that it is full of incredible art, music, traditions, tragedies, just clobbered me. In a good way. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The long section by the Grand Inquisitor was a useful demonstration of novelistic ambition, and the refusal of compromise. But most importantly, I was shattered, and also rebuilt, by Alyosha’s “talk by the stone,” when he tells the children around him to remember how good and earnest they feel, and to save and hold that feeling. It taught me something I knew on a much deeper level but did not have the language or the reasoning to state: that innocence is something very durable and interior, and also evanescent."

"This is a great novel of belief and unbelief. Dostoyevsky himself was a passionate Orthodox Christian, but of course he felt the flames of unbelief as much as anybody and the novel is about the relationship between Alyosha, who is one of the brothers who believes in God, and Ivan, who doesn’t. In particular it poses in acute form the problem of suffering. Ivan tells a story of most horrific cruelty to children and he turns to Alyosha and says, “It is not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.” In other words he could not believe in a God who allowed such things and he argued that no kind of future happiness could justify the cruelty we saw on human earth. Yes, and that is the heart of where the real difficulty is for a religious believer. All the usual moves are obvious – for example, if you have free will you must be free to choose wrong as well as right. It is not possible to have the kind of conscious life we know without the possibility of accident and mishap in terms of earthquakes and so on. Things like that belong to existence as such. But, given all this, the question to put it brutally is, “Was God justified in creating a world in which such things happen and which he presumably knew would happen?” That, I think, is how the problem ought to be posed and it is posed that way in Dostoyevsky’s great novel. And it is not only about that dialogue, of course. There are some wonderful characters in it. It is a great novel and the greatest novel of belief and unbelief that has ever been written. I think in all our experiences we have some idea of good coming out of evil. It is not that God wills the evil in order to bring the good, but all of us in our life know that sometimes you go through a very difficult patch and you manage to get some good out of it. Obviously the God in which we believe must think there is some ultimate good that can come out of what Keats called “this Vale of Soul Making”. Secondly there is a sort of feeling that a lot of people have, that life is more than a calculus of pain and pleasure and that something big is at stake. Why is it that most people in life don’t commit suicide when things are difficult? In my view it is because they feel that something big is at stake – it is more than a paltry happiness or unhappiness, however important those things are. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Of course, this is a very shorthand description of my point of view and only a little bit of what I would want to say. In my understanding of Christianity I can hold on to Christian belief on the basis of two fundamental Christian doctrines. One is that God himself and Christ himself shares in human anguish through the incarnation. Secondly, that through my belief in the resurrection and eternal life I believe that this life is not all there is. It is only on the basis of those two features that I think it is actually possible to believe there is a wise and loving power behind the universe."