Why You Need to Read Dostoyevsky - Prof. Jordan Peterson

and so I would say with regards to fiction if you take someone like Dostoyevsky or we think it's 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 Dostoyevsky's the person for you Tolstoy is more of a sociologist but Dostoyevsky man he gets right down into the bottom of the questions and messes around transformative reading anyways Dostoyevsky's cha

racters this character named her Skolnick oov 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 took and convinced himself that the only reason that he 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 wh

o 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 spend them sending much money and his sister is planning to engage in a marriage that's loveless to someone who's rather tyrannical who he hopes will provide the family with enough money so that he can continue in law s

chool 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 in you know in an altruistic manner 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 - and she's a horrible person and not only by his estimation she pawns a lot of things fo

r the neighbor who and people really don't like her she's grasping and cruel and deceitful and and resentful and like and she has this nice 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 land let the pawnbroker take her wealth w

hich he all she does is keep it in a chest free the nice 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 you know so one of the things that's lovely about Dostoevsky is that he you know when sometimes when one person is arguing against another or when they're having an argument in their head t

hey make their opponent into a straw man which is basically they take their opponent and curricular their perspective and try to make it as weak as possible and and laugh about it and and then they come up with their argument and destroy this 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 supposition and you make that argument as strong as you can possibly make i

t and then you fit your perspective against that that strong iron man not the straw man and you argue it out you battle it out and that's what Dostoyevsky does in his novels I mean he's the people who stand for the antithesis of what dust is dust yes he 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 risk Olenick of 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 murderer 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 and and deception and

and and suffering and terror and all of that and he doesn't even use the money he just buries it in a in an alley as fast as he can and then doesn't want anything to do with it again and 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 his risk is what happened to Raskolnikov true are the stories in that book true and the answer to that is well from the factual perspective clea

rly 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 who's irrelevant sees have been eliminated for the purpose of relating something a

bout 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 you