I recently listened to The Brothers Karamazov as an audiobook. Back in the day (during the Zhengzhou floods), it took me months to finish reading it; this time I got through it in just a few days.
Funny how when you’re supposed to be doing real work, even massive tomes become entertainment. To avoid actual work, I could even force myself through a few pages of the Critique of Pure Reason.
I’ve always been hesitant to write about this book. As the culmination of Dostoevsky’s lifetime of thought, I doubt my ability to grasp its full depth.
Even today, I can only approach it from the details, jotting down scattered personal reflections.
What shocked me about The Brothers Karamazov back then was precisely that I was deeply troubled by questions of meaning and nihilism.
Just like Ivan’s declaration in the book that “everything is permitted,” I too believed at the time that good and evil were human constructs.
But the book uses a patricide case to show us the bloody consequences of nihilism, reminding us that morality is not entirely man-made after all—it’s neither relative nor void.
Ivan renounced his God, unable to accept the innocent suffering of children, wanting to return his ticket to eternal harmony.
And I too had shaken my long-held faith in humanity, unable to accept that a position of freedom could stand against everyone else.
Initially, I just wanted to find a framework to resolve questions of right and wrong sparked by the intense conflicts around the Hong Kong events.
That’s when I discovered an entire field of study: ethics, also known as moral philosophy.
My understanding of morality still stems from Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. The ancient Greeks divided science into three categories: logic, which studies pure form without any material substance; physics, which studies natural phenomena; and ethics, which studies the phenomena of freedom.
In other words, all questions about humanity fall into the moral domain.
In my currently muddled brain, moral questions have broad implications: ultimate faith, the meaning of life, universal values, standards of good and evil, the ideal world, the foundation and principles for living, human dignity…
Morality is ultimately not void. Regardless of what it’s rooted in, while it is indeed constructed by humans, the reasons behind it aren’t arbitrary but deeply planted in something more fundamental.
What’s frustrating is that while I believe in the existence of objective moral absolute truth, I can’t articulate what it is at all, always doubting what to stand for. Meanwhile, those who verbally deny these things have bodies more honest than their mouths—each one certain and categorical. The contradiction here is: if there’s no absolute truth in the world, what gives you the right to advocate or insist on anything? Your position against absolute truth itself has nothing absolute about it. I understand many people oppose this from a stance of freedom, as if someone even thinking about these universal questions is trying to set rules for others, an offense to their free will. But isn’t the order implied by this idea that everyone is free and equal itself an absolute truth? This is the second-order abstraction of moral questions, what Kant explores in the metaphysics of morals.
I must honestly admit that I am utterly incapable of solving such complex problems. My mind is a Euclidean, earthly mind, so how can I solve problems that are not of this world?
—Ivan Karamazov
Let’s leave these ultimate answers to those who are capable, though I’m skeptically doubtful they can be solved.
As Ivan’s “Grand Inquisitor” parable reveals, humanity’s existential predicament is that no miracle shows you absolute truth, no one can tell you the ultimate mysteries of this world.
Humans seem like “immature experiments created as a joke,” a bunch of weak traitors. Given freedom, you can’t bear its burden at all, always eager to surrender it to some answer, no matter how superficial. Given reason, but incompletely—as Kant criticized in the Critique of Pure Reason, reason can never cross the boundary to answer questions about the transcendent world.
Dostoevsky said Ivan is profound—not like contemporary atheists whose lack of faith merely demonstrates narrow worldviews and mediocre, dull intellects.
Ivan’s heart isn’t the tranquility and liberation of unbelief; rather, behind rational disbelief, there’s always an interrogation of doubt about that disbelief.
Though I cannot see the sun, I still know there is a sun. And isn’t knowing there is a sun the entire meaning of life?
—Dmitri Karamazov
The Karamazov family holds deep symbolic meaning. As I understand it, the father represents human primal desires and bodily instincts; the eldest son represents human emotion and passion; the second son Ivan represents human reason and speculation; the third son represents faith and spirituality; the illegitimate son represents the incarnation of evil when reason breaks free from moral constraints.
I naturally empathize most with Ivan. Elder Zosima’s words of comfort to Ivan once comforted me too. He yearns for life but lacks conviction in living. He has major intellectual problems unresolved—he’s the type who needs to solve intellectual problems rather than needing millions. But once upon a time, I was also a Dmitri (the eldest son). I remember when Liu Han said my greatest strength was passion and explosive force—it makes me lament how things have changed. People always miss childhood and youth because they had no intellectual troubles then; the world was simple and black-and-white. But wisdom should liberate people.
Love life, not life’s meaning; love concrete people, not abstract humanity.
This reminds me of Honey in A Brighter Summer Day, a gang leader who reads * War and Peace*. He says people from ancient times are really like us. Look—two hundred years have passed, and we’re still troubled by similar problems. And predictably, two hundred years from now, there will still be people worrying just like us.
This is why I say the intellectual gap between Dream of the Red Chamber and * The Brothers Karamazov* spans millennia. * Dream* is a portrait of life in clan society. Though three hundred years have passed, I can still empathize—the characters remain vivid as if before my eyes, because I too grew up in a large family and can understand the motives behind every word and action. But where does it have even half of * The Brothers Karamazov*‘s ultimate interrogation, pointing directly at the essence of human existential predicament? When you read the Zen dialogue parts between Jia Baoyu and Xue Baochai/Lin Daiyu in * Dream of the Red Chamber*, the deep feeling is of a bunch of middle school kids parroting responses, with the final answer being to become a monk and be done with it. But * The Brothers Karamazov* has both profound rebels like Ivan pointing directly at the problem’s essence, and genuinely attempts through Elder Zosima to solve these existential questions.
My recent hobby is downloading academic papers from CNKI after finishing a book. Douban reviews always seem shallow; it’s more interesting to read analyses people spent years developing. Of course, quality varies—I’ve read some analyses of The Brothers Karamazov where master’s theses cobbled together by twenty-something young women are simply unreadable, just piling up flowery language without understanding the deeper meaning. I can’t get through even a little bit.
However, one paper, “Dostoevsky’s Christian Thought Through ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’” contains some lines that resonate with me. I excerpt them here for remembrance of things forgotten:
Where there is guardianship over people, hypocritical concern for their happiness and enjoyment, while simultaneously despising them, not believing in their noble origin and noble mission—there lies the spirit of the Grand Inquisitor.
Where happiness is valued over freedom, the temporary placed above the eternal, loving humanity used to oppose loving God—there lies the spirit of the Grand Inquisitor.
Where it’s emphasized that truth is useless for human happiness, that life can be arranged without understanding life’s meaning—there it lies.
—from “Dostoevsky’s Christian Thought Through ‘The Grand Inquisitor’”