November 24, 2021
The Underground Spirit | The Martyrmade Podcast with Darryl Cooper (Part 5)
- Check out The Martyrmade Podcast Episode Page & Show Notes
Key Takeaways
- On his deathbed, Dostoevsky requested that the parable of the Prodigal Son be read to his children
- “…it was the parable of transgression, repentance, and forgiveness that he [Dostoevsky] wished to leave as the last heritage to his children.” – Joseph Frank
- Years before Nietzsche wrote “God is dead” in The Gay Science, Dostoevsky’s characters spoke those same ideals (Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, and Kirilov in Demons)
- “Father! Why Did They . . . Kill . . . The Poor Horse!”
- The question that the 7-year-old Raskolnikov asks his father in a dream after witnessing the brutal beating of a horse
- Crime and Punishment transformed Nietzsche more than any other Dostoevsky novel
- In 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in the streets of Turin, Italy after protecting a horse from abuse
- This was the beginning of his descent into madness
- Dostoevsky was the prodigal son, on the road to redemption, welcomed back with a celebration
- Nietzsche was Prometheus, the lone genius embodying the struggle to improve human existence and the risks of overreaching
- “Nietzsche’s greatness isn’t that he was right about everything, but that he paid his bill down to every last penny for being wrong” – Darryl Cooper
Key Books Mentioned
- Books by Fyodor Dostoevsky:
- Books by Friedrich Nietzsche:
Intro
- Darryl Cooper (T: @martyrmade and IG: @martyrmade) is the creator and the host of The Martyrmade Podcast, and the co-host of The Unraveling podcast with Jocko Willink
- This is part 5 of the Underground Spirit episode. Darryl Cooper talks about Dostoevsky’s final message, how the characters of Dostoevsky’s novels embody Nietzsche’s key ideas, and the pivotal moment before Nietzsche’s descent into madness
- Host- Darryl Cooper (@martyrmade)
The Prodigal Son Has Returned
- On his deathbed, Dostoevsky requested that the parable of the Prodigal Son be read to his children
- The parable appears in the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament
- It is a story about a father who has two sons, one of whom is prodigal (wasteful)
- The prodigal son asks for his share of the estate, and the father grants his son’s request
- He wastes his inheritance and eventually becomes broke
- He returns home to beg his father to take him back as a servant
- To the son’s surprise, he is welcomed back with a celebration
- He was lost and now he is found
- “…it was the parable of transgression, repentance, and forgiveness that he [Dostoevsky] wished to leave as the last heritage to his children.” – Joseph Frank
- The final message is Dostoevsky’s ultimate understanding of his life and the meaning of his work
- Dostoevsky had also left his father’s house (just like the prodigal son)
- He realized that it didn’t make him free, only homeless
- He didn’t want the responsibilities of a son and instead ended up as a slave
- When he hit rock bottom, he returned home to all the things he left: family, country, people, faith
- Upon returning home, instead of facing rejection, Dostoevsky was celebrated and praised
Obsessed by the Idea of God
- When Nietzsche first discovered Dostoevsky’s work in 1887, he realized he found his lost brother
- Dostoevsky was a man that was at war with demons that Nietzsche himself has been battling all this time
- Years before Nietzsche wrote “God is dead” in The Gay Science, Dostoevsky’s characters spoke those same ideals (Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, and Kirilov in Demons)
- They recognized the same dangers and reached the same conclusion that Nietzsche did
- In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan (who is an atheist and a humanist) talks about Nietzsche’s Übermensch to whoever is around, especially to his younger brother priest Alyosha
- “We only need to destroy the idea of God in man, as soon as the man deny god, a man-god will appear.” – Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov
- In Demons, Kirilov argues that after the annihilation of God, man will become a god, and the new man will conquer pain and fear to become a god himself
- For Nietzsche, the death of god leaves people without a point of reference, thus we become our own gods
- Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says that the Übermensch will be as different from the present-day man as man is different from the ape
- Dostoevsky’s Kirolov says that the history of man is divided into two halves; from the gorilla to the annihilation of god and from the annihilation of god to the “…transformation of earth and man where man will be god.” – Alexei Nilych Kirillov in Demons
- In the months after he read Dostoevsky’s novel Demons, Nietzsche said that his work will split history into two halves
Thus He Preached Madness
- In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, there is a recurring line – “Thus he preached madness.”
- Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky put their ideas into the mouths of madmen in their work
- “Any man who wishes to be free must go voluntarily into the madhouse.” – Zarathustra in Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- Nietzsche’s isolation coupled with physical and psychological agony presumably distorted his reality
- Coupled with doses of opium and sedatives for many years
- Spending long periods of time by yourself, without personal interactions can become problematic
- His ideas became his life- this is what we see in Nietzsche’s later work
- Sinking deep in your thoughts can be a different interpretation of madness, especially if you can’t find your way out
- Many of Nietzsche’s ideas were already present in Dostoevsky’s work, but they understand madness very differently
- Dostoevsky doesn’t see the insane as conduits for the divine as Nietzsche often writes
- Nietzsche describes them as being able to speak more truly/purely due to their separation from the corrupt society
- Dostoevsky’s different take on madness could have been influenced by his experience with gambling addiction
The Prodigal Son That Never Returned
- “Humans all break, that’s what it means to be human”– Darryl Cooper
- If you go against the gods, you will most certainly lose
- Nietzsche only chose battles that he couldn’t win
- He was the prodigal son that never surrendered and returned home
- But it was done out of spite- the only human emotion that remains after all the other
- Hope, love, sadness, when it’s all gone; humans still have the capacity for spite
- Most of the unexplainable harm we do to ourselves and each other comes from that fact
“Father! Why Did They . . . Kill . . . The Poor Horse!”
- The question that the 7-year-old Raskolnikov asks his father in a dream after witnessing the brutal beating of a horse
- Crime and Punishment transformed Nietzsche more than any other Dostoevsky novel
- This is where questions of madness and sanity dominate the most
- Nietzsche was no longer surprised at all the similarities and coincidences between him and the characters in Dostoevsky’s novels
- The main character Raskolnikov, like Nietzsche, lost his father and brother at a young age and feels repulsed with his mother and sister
- Raskolnikov aspires to be an Übermensch, a great man above narrow-minded moral questions
- He wanted to prove that he is above the laws of morality and social conventions, and decides to kill Alyona Ivanovna, the evil pawnbroker
- Before the act of murder, Raskolnikov dreams of a horse being killed with whips and crowbars
- The violence of the dream is described in gruesome detail, depicting Raskolnikov’s conflicted nature
- He dwelled on the idea of murder after waking up but eventually killed the pawnbroker
- This was his downfall, as he was unable to cope with his conscience and the post-moral ideas of the Übermensch
When Nietzsche Wept
- Criminals represent strong minds under sickness
- This is the lesson Nietzsche learned from Dostoevsky
- Nietzsche applied that description to his personality
- He reported having frequent nightmares about horses, so terrifying that he wrote to his friends about them
- For Nietzsche, the failure of Raskolnikov is not the act of murder, but his inability to bear the weight afterward
- By the fall of 1888, Nietzsche’s behavior became unpredictable – manic depressive episodes and psychotic breaks
- Fate was pulling him, there was no element of chance in his life
- In 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in the streets of Turin, Italy after protecting a horse from abuse
- This was the beginning of his descent into madness
- Dostoevsky was the prodigal son, on the road to redemption, welcomed back with a celebration
- Nietzsche was Prometheus, the lone genius embodying the struggle to improve human existence and the risks of overreaching
- “Nietzsche’s greatness isn’t that he was right about everything, but that he paid his bill down to every last penny for being wrong” – Darryl Cooper
- People heard about the genius gone mad in Turin, and for the first time his was acknowledged by a broader public
