I was deeply engrossed in existentialism in my early twenties, and now with some distance, I want to ask, what are some of the negative aspects of existentialism?
I'll list some questions that come to mind:
1. Does the fact that there were no prominent Anglo existentialists show that only continentals who were too busy not conquering the world were susceptible to it?
2. How does existentialism's inward point of view bode with BAP's more outward focused point of view? Constructing yourself through outward action vs inward reflection.
3. Does existentialism fundamentally appeal to a more neurotic and self-doubting personality, through which you only entangle yourself more into these questions?
Man, SO MANY questions!!! Dostoyevsky was a prophet who certainly saw what was coming. I would like a discussion of comparing and contrasting the “solution” of faith in the epilogue of Crime and Pubishment to the soliloquy Alyosha gives at the end of the Karamazov Brothers, about retaining the innocence and wonder and sincere feelings of childhood. Do you see these as analogous solutions or is one more sophisticated or insightful than the other? Do you think either conclusion has any power for us in modernity? Can we deal with 21st century nihilism using either of these approaches?
Quite a long convoluted way of asking this but I’m sure, if the question interest you, you can work it in somehow!
Very interested to listen; besides Astral Codex Ten, you are the two substacks I subscribe to.
I appreciated your brief mention of Kierkegaard in your addendum and agree that it is a real tragedy that Nietzsche never got around to reading him. Nothing specific, really, but interested in any thoughts or perspectives on Søren that either of you see fit to discuss.
Kierkegaard is great, it would be great to hear them sharing thoughts about him. Especially when it comes to religion as an socially organising force and a way to give meaning. Here's one of my favourite quotes from him:
I sat and smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought … “You are going on,” I said to myself, “to become an old man, without being anything and without really undertaking to do anything. . . . [W]herever you look about you . . . you see the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier, yet more and more significant. And what are you doing?” . . . [S]uddenly this thought flashed through my mind: “You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must . . . undertake to make something harder.” This notion pleased me immensely. . . . I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.
the impact of people like Dostoyevsky, (the educated middle classes) on pre existing Russian culture and the consequences of their loss in the revolution could be a good.
There was another 'cancel' thing the other day, I guess some news channel people were wearing afro wigs on their broadcast, I'm not sure what for but of course they were all fired, from what I understand one of them was the local weatherman for quite some time (I didn't look into it all very deeply but that's not really the point). It doesn't sound like much but to some people the local weatherman still actually means something, and as soon as I heard about this I thought "well great another human interaction replaced by an app." More and more people are paying less attention to what humans actually say and just observing what they are told by the programs on their phones, that's not a new thing obviously, but I thought about all the people who maybe used to watch this guy who now are probably just opening the Weather app on their iPhone to know the forecast.
Which makes me think of the Devils, and the relationship Stavrogin has (or doesn't have) with Peter Stepanovich. Peter fawns over Stavrogin and tries to draw him to his revolutionary cause, and Stavrogin doesn't give a damn about Peter and makes it pretty clear that he doesn't think much of his cause. Bringing it back to present day, these 'cancel culture' incidents only serve to make way for big tech to fill the void for human interaction, at least from my point of view. Every time some professor or scientist gets fired, YouTube and Facebook take the opportunity to creep in with some recommendation on how to adjust people's behavior and prevent their influence from being spread. And it's not like Apple or Amazon or Google give a shit about the people doing the 'cancelling', they are just positioned to fill the void better than anyone.
So I guess my question is, why are the 'revolutionary' types - Antifa or BLM or the 'Karens' of the world - so bent on breaking people down, just to impress some higher authority that clearly does not care about them? Does this have modern roots, or is it a human trait that finds its footing in modernity?
Hope that makes some kind of sense, and I definitely think I need to read Devils again. Looking forward to hearing this conversation!
Question related to the Unmitigated Disaster, Unraveling episode: How do law abiding citizens with a family, mortgage, and job act to steer America in proper direction? Yarvin speaks of reactionaries and various revolutionaries from both right and left. How can a man live almost in a Camus, The Rebel, fashion that brings massive positive reorientation of America? Not ok with answers that involve vote Republican or Democrat in 2022/2024
For someone new to Dostoevsky, is there a preferred sequence to read his work or perhaps supplemental philosophical, psychological or historical material you’d recommend for understanding the deeper themes?
Beyond that, would one even consider saving a particular book for a certain epoch in one’s life when you have the lived experience to truly absorb it? I don’t think it’s true for everyone, but I’ve found this to be my experience for reading the classics.
Your podcast is really helping me appreciate Notes From The Underground much more than I otherwise would. Thanks for all your hard work!
A bonus question sparked by your commentary regarding the psychology of The Double:
I was struck by how much the outcome of the character slowly being replaced in society by an idealized version of himself seems to mirror the modern phenomenon of celebrity — and even more so, celebrity in the age of the internet (e.g. a little celebrity for everyone). The public’s idealized, external projection of identity slowly supersedes one’s own flawed, internal identity. Eventually, no ownership of self remains and the individual disassociates to give up control completely.
Observing what often happens to people as they become famous — addiction, suicide, self sabotage, etc — I’d pose that the lack of ownership over their own identity slowly erodes their ego.
As someone who has come from obscurity to a place of relative prominence (Crown Prince of the History Nerds) in the last year, do you think there’s any truth to this based on your own experience?
Do you think The Double was possibly a meditation on Dostoyevsky’s loss of control over his own identity after his meteoric rise to become the darling of the Petersburg literary scene?
Great question, as, re: CY, there is definitely an interesting introduction of friction vis a vis referring to oneself as a dissident and eschewing direct engagement in the public establishment vs the inevitable accumulation of notoriety/status in one who does it well as a [mostly pay-walled but still very publicly findable] blogger.
In fact, I would love to just hear an hour [or two!] riff on how DC & CY define & think about "identity" in general; it's not just something famous people struggle with!
Spengler claimed that the Russian soul-idea was still taking shape, and characterized it as the 'plane without limit', shaped by the steppe, innately antagonistic to machines and rooted in soil, in contrast to the image of 'infinite space' and perpetual motion at the heart of now-sterile Faustian civilization. He also tabbed Russia as a likely successor to Faustian civilization, once it declined.
What are your thoughts on Spengler's framework of cultural-morphology in general, and on this take on Russia in particular?
At the end of Crime and Punishment, there is a story about a pandemic. Some microbes infect the "super rational" people. This pandemic makes people go mad and turn on themselves. They no longer know right from wrong. They can not agree on who to blame and who is at fault. Armies of people turn on themselves.
I cant listen to this without thinking about COVID. It is very prophetic of the current time.
This would be an interesting Dostoevsky passage to discuss.
He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection. All were excited and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite. They gathered together in armies against one another, but even on the march the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting and devouring each other. The alarm bell was ringing all day long in the towns; men rushed together, but why they were summoned and who was summoning them no one knew. The most ordinary trades were abandoned, because everyone proposed his own ideas, his own improvements, and they could not agree. The land too was abandoned. Men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction. The plague spread and moved further and further. Only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.
Really looking forward to this conversation. I would love to hear from both of you about the ways in which you feel reading fiction has enhanced your understanding of history generally, and how reading both fiction and history can serve as compliments to each other in providing a “fuller grasp” of history/culture than either of the two could confer by themselves.
Ask how “emergent behavior” manages to be identical across national boundaries. If truly emergent, what are the chances of so many parallel yet separate evolutions.
The seismic event that was the Protestant Reformation played out differently in Russia than Europe. How did/does this impact the different cultural trajectories of the Western and Russian mind and their mental models of existence? If the Dostoevsky that existed is fundamentally Russian, would his intellectual corpus have emerged if he grew up in a culture that had instead been infected with the Reformation? If yes, how would it differ?
What do you two think of Spengler's discussion of Russian culture's pseudomorphic relation to the West, and, by extension, his discussion of Dostoevsky vs. Tolstoy, in which he proposes Dostoyevsky as an authentic bearer of the primitive Russian soul, while he calls Tolstoy a man of the West - e.g., "Tolstoy's Christianity was a misunderstanding. He spoke of Christ and he meant Marx. But to Dostoyevsky's Christianity the next thousand years will belong."
Looking forward to it! May be unrelated, but French invasion of 1812, and it’s impacts on the rest of the century in Russia.
Not unrelated at all. Will definitely come up.
I was deeply engrossed in existentialism in my early twenties, and now with some distance, I want to ask, what are some of the negative aspects of existentialism?
I'll list some questions that come to mind:
1. Does the fact that there were no prominent Anglo existentialists show that only continentals who were too busy not conquering the world were susceptible to it?
2. How does existentialism's inward point of view bode with BAP's more outward focused point of view? Constructing yourself through outward action vs inward reflection.
3. Does existentialism fundamentally appeal to a more neurotic and self-doubting personality, through which you only entangle yourself more into these questions?
Sorry to interject but love seeing a frog avatar here. Feels good man 😎
leaving this as further exploration of the theme https://i.imgur.com/sUulKWq.jpg
Did the differences between Orthodox Church and other churches influence the transition to modernity and existentialism in Russia in unique ways?
Man, SO MANY questions!!! Dostoyevsky was a prophet who certainly saw what was coming. I would like a discussion of comparing and contrasting the “solution” of faith in the epilogue of Crime and Pubishment to the soliloquy Alyosha gives at the end of the Karamazov Brothers, about retaining the innocence and wonder and sincere feelings of childhood. Do you see these as analogous solutions or is one more sophisticated or insightful than the other? Do you think either conclusion has any power for us in modernity? Can we deal with 21st century nihilism using either of these approaches?
Quite a long convoluted way of asking this but I’m sure, if the question interest you, you can work it in somehow!
Very interested to listen; besides Astral Codex Ten, you are the two substacks I subscribe to.
I appreciated your brief mention of Kierkegaard in your addendum and agree that it is a real tragedy that Nietzsche never got around to reading him. Nothing specific, really, but interested in any thoughts or perspectives on Søren that either of you see fit to discuss.
Kierkegaard is great, it would be great to hear them sharing thoughts about him. Especially when it comes to religion as an socially organising force and a way to give meaning. Here's one of my favourite quotes from him:
I sat and smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought … “You are going on,” I said to myself, “to become an old man, without being anything and without really undertaking to do anything. . . . [W]herever you look about you . . . you see the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier, yet more and more significant. And what are you doing?” . . . [S]uddenly this thought flashed through my mind: “You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must . . . undertake to make something harder.” This notion pleased me immensely. . . . I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.
Maybe some reading this will like this lecture on him as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnSCT0zS3QA
the impact of people like Dostoyevsky, (the educated middle classes) on pre existing Russian culture and the consequences of their loss in the revolution could be a good.
I think Stavrogin is Apple. Bear with me...
There was another 'cancel' thing the other day, I guess some news channel people were wearing afro wigs on their broadcast, I'm not sure what for but of course they were all fired, from what I understand one of them was the local weatherman for quite some time (I didn't look into it all very deeply but that's not really the point). It doesn't sound like much but to some people the local weatherman still actually means something, and as soon as I heard about this I thought "well great another human interaction replaced by an app." More and more people are paying less attention to what humans actually say and just observing what they are told by the programs on their phones, that's not a new thing obviously, but I thought about all the people who maybe used to watch this guy who now are probably just opening the Weather app on their iPhone to know the forecast.
Which makes me think of the Devils, and the relationship Stavrogin has (or doesn't have) with Peter Stepanovich. Peter fawns over Stavrogin and tries to draw him to his revolutionary cause, and Stavrogin doesn't give a damn about Peter and makes it pretty clear that he doesn't think much of his cause. Bringing it back to present day, these 'cancel culture' incidents only serve to make way for big tech to fill the void for human interaction, at least from my point of view. Every time some professor or scientist gets fired, YouTube and Facebook take the opportunity to creep in with some recommendation on how to adjust people's behavior and prevent their influence from being spread. And it's not like Apple or Amazon or Google give a shit about the people doing the 'cancelling', they are just positioned to fill the void better than anyone.
So I guess my question is, why are the 'revolutionary' types - Antifa or BLM or the 'Karens' of the world - so bent on breaking people down, just to impress some higher authority that clearly does not care about them? Does this have modern roots, or is it a human trait that finds its footing in modernity?
Hope that makes some kind of sense, and I definitely think I need to read Devils again. Looking forward to hearing this conversation!
Question related to the Unmitigated Disaster, Unraveling episode: How do law abiding citizens with a family, mortgage, and job act to steer America in proper direction? Yarvin speaks of reactionaries and various revolutionaries from both right and left. How can a man live almost in a Camus, The Rebel, fashion that brings massive positive reorientation of America? Not ok with answers that involve vote Republican or Democrat in 2022/2024
“Beauty will save the world” - Dostoyevsky, 'The Idiot'.
For someone new to Dostoevsky, is there a preferred sequence to read his work or perhaps supplemental philosophical, psychological or historical material you’d recommend for understanding the deeper themes?
Beyond that, would one even consider saving a particular book for a certain epoch in one’s life when you have the lived experience to truly absorb it? I don’t think it’s true for everyone, but I’ve found this to be my experience for reading the classics.
Your podcast is really helping me appreciate Notes From The Underground much more than I otherwise would. Thanks for all your hard work!
A bonus question sparked by your commentary regarding the psychology of The Double:
I was struck by how much the outcome of the character slowly being replaced in society by an idealized version of himself seems to mirror the modern phenomenon of celebrity — and even more so, celebrity in the age of the internet (e.g. a little celebrity for everyone). The public’s idealized, external projection of identity slowly supersedes one’s own flawed, internal identity. Eventually, no ownership of self remains and the individual disassociates to give up control completely.
Observing what often happens to people as they become famous — addiction, suicide, self sabotage, etc — I’d pose that the lack of ownership over their own identity slowly erodes their ego.
As someone who has come from obscurity to a place of relative prominence (Crown Prince of the History Nerds) in the last year, do you think there’s any truth to this based on your own experience?
Do you think The Double was possibly a meditation on Dostoyevsky’s loss of control over his own identity after his meteoric rise to become the darling of the Petersburg literary scene?
Great question, as, re: CY, there is definitely an interesting introduction of friction vis a vis referring to oneself as a dissident and eschewing direct engagement in the public establishment vs the inevitable accumulation of notoriety/status in one who does it well as a [mostly pay-walled but still very publicly findable] blogger.
In fact, I would love to just hear an hour [or two!] riff on how DC & CY define & think about "identity" in general; it's not just something famous people struggle with!
Read the Underground Man first
Spengler claimed that the Russian soul-idea was still taking shape, and characterized it as the 'plane without limit', shaped by the steppe, innately antagonistic to machines and rooted in soil, in contrast to the image of 'infinite space' and perpetual motion at the heart of now-sterile Faustian civilization. He also tabbed Russia as a likely successor to Faustian civilization, once it declined.
What are your thoughts on Spengler's framework of cultural-morphology in general, and on this take on Russia in particular?
At the end of Crime and Punishment, there is a story about a pandemic. Some microbes infect the "super rational" people. This pandemic makes people go mad and turn on themselves. They no longer know right from wrong. They can not agree on who to blame and who is at fault. Armies of people turn on themselves.
I cant listen to this without thinking about COVID. It is very prophetic of the current time.
This would be an interesting Dostoevsky passage to discuss.
Here is the passage:
He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection. All were excited and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite. They gathered together in armies against one another, but even on the march the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting and devouring each other. The alarm bell was ringing all day long in the towns; men rushed together, but why they were summoned and who was summoning them no one knew. The most ordinary trades were abandoned, because everyone proposed his own ideas, his own improvements, and they could not agree. The land too was abandoned. Men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction. The plague spread and moved further and further. Only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.
Really looking forward to this conversation. I would love to hear from both of you about the ways in which you feel reading fiction has enhanced your understanding of history generally, and how reading both fiction and history can serve as compliments to each other in providing a “fuller grasp” of history/culture than either of the two could confer by themselves.
Was the transition to modernity at its core the transition from romanticism to materialism?
really excited for this podcast. You’re doing great king.
Awesome question
Ask how “emergent behavior” manages to be identical across national boundaries. If truly emergent, what are the chances of so many parallel yet separate evolutions.
The seismic event that was the Protestant Reformation played out differently in Russia than Europe. How did/does this impact the different cultural trajectories of the Western and Russian mind and their mental models of existence? If the Dostoevsky that existed is fundamentally Russian, would his intellectual corpus have emerged if he grew up in a culture that had instead been infected with the Reformation? If yes, how would it differ?
What do you two think of Spengler's discussion of Russian culture's pseudomorphic relation to the West, and, by extension, his discussion of Dostoevsky vs. Tolstoy, in which he proposes Dostoyevsky as an authentic bearer of the primitive Russian soul, while he calls Tolstoy a man of the West - e.g., "Tolstoy's Christianity was a misunderstanding. He spoke of Christ and he meant Marx. But to Dostoyevsky's Christianity the next thousand years will belong."