Episode #218 ... Dostoevsky - Notes From Underground

hello everyone I'm Steven West this is philosophies this so if you've been listening to the podcast lately and you wanted an example of characters that confront nihilism at a deep level or characters that try to be authentic on the other side of nihilism at the level that nishitani is talking about when he talks about a religious Quest well let's just say you could do worse than reading some of Fodor dov's most famous books from Crime and Punishment to the idiot to Brothers karamazov to the one we're talking about today written earlier in his career than any of those the one we're talking about today is called Notes from Underground written in the year 1864 arguably his deepest exploration into nihilism and there's plenty of resources out there that could give you a summary of a book like this so that's not what I'm going to be doing today and I guess you could always read a summary if you didn't want to read the actual book but I will say this if you were going to read a book in the near future then Notes from Underground is a pretty short one and in keeping with what I've been talking about lately where there are some insights about life and reality that are really only things that can be directly experienced by immersing yourself in them then God I don't know might be fun to read some Russian literature at some point in your life if you haven't yet might be something that speaks to you in a unique way nonetheless I feel the need to say here there will be some inevitable spoilers in this episode if that's something that matters to you but mostly what this will be is an innocent conversation Among Us friends about the nihilism that goes on for the main character of this book as well as kg nishitani chiming in every once in a while with how he sees what's going on anyway if you've never read doeski before then one of the biggest pieces of context I could give you right here at the start is that one of the main things he wants to put at Center Stage throughout all of his works but it certainly applies to Notes from Underground too at Center Stage is the complexity and the irrationality of the internal human experience ...