Seeing the "Thou" in the Other

In the course of daily affairs, we talk to a lot of folks. Most of these interactions are mundane and superficial, they don't involve a terrible amount of emotion or thought and they generally consist of everyday topics. When we are faced with these daily cycles over and over again, we seem to forget that other people are just as we are, that they are also struggling to get to a place in their lives and that they have their own stories, which motivate who they are as people. In a simple sentence, we forget to see the radical humanity of others.

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber

The great Jewish philosopher of the existentialist brand- Martin Buber- once said that in order to hold a serious conversation with someone, you would have to know their entire life story. In order to really get at the fundamentals of the other's humanity, you have to really be attuned to them as people. This is a difficult task for anyone, which is why we fail so repeatedly at it. So many times we fail to recognize the unique humanity of a brother or sister and as a result, we fail to love them properly.

Buber divided relationships into two types: the first being the "I-It" relation. "I-It" relations are the relations between two things in the simply reductive physical and material sense. I have an "I-It" relationship with the keyboard I am typing on since it helps me create words to send to others or to communicate messages. The characteristic of "I-It" relations are that they consist of discrete boundaries. The relationship between myself and my keyboard goes no further than the utility it brings to me as a device capable of disseminating information.

Many of our own relationships with others can often reduce themselves to "I-It". We think of the mailman merely in terms of utility, as a being much like my keyboard, who gives me something I want. Of course, in that sense, an "I-It" relation is unavoidable, the usefulness of others' work to ourselves is not a factor of human relations to be condemned at all. However, it often occurs that "I-It" relations pervade into every aspect of our lives. We think of a friend merely in terms of utility, for what he or she does for me. A friend becomes nothing more than a tool we use to make ourselves better. This is of course where relationships often fail us.

In contrast, the other class of relations is known as "I-Thou" for Buber. These relations are spiritual in nature, they are not reductive, and they think nothing of the utility of the thing I am entering into a relation with. They also do not see the other as something being defined by strict, discrete boundaries. The two best relationships to example this in are the relationships between God and person as well as between person and person. In terms of God, it is common to see people on both sides of the divide between skepticism and belief reduce God to a mere intellectual concept or believe that they have complete understanding of what God is. To these folks, the relation between God and man has become "I-It" rather than "I-Thou" and to them, we must reply: Can we ever exhaust the subject of the transcendent? Can we ever fully understand what God is in a few sentences? This does not mean of course we are prohibited from making statements about God, but what it does mean is that we cannot think of God as reducible to a sentence or think of the relationship of the human being to the divine as merely a one-stop shop.

But aside from the religious concern of the "I-Thou" relation, there is the profound value of looking at ordinary objects or other persons in light of the "I-Thou" idea, particularly the latter. As I mentioned above, we often think about the other in terms of an It. In terms of what they can or cannot do for me, or merely what their use is as people. We think of the mailman as simply a mailman rather than as an actual human being. We think of a friend purely in terms of what the friend can do for me. This is limiting us to "I-It" relations.

We have to learn to think of others not as things with discrete boundaries or a specific utility or of a specific description, but as beings that are in a few words: dynamic, mysterious, miraculous, and even beautiful. As we engage them deeper, we uncover more about them, we learn more, and we grow deeper in touch with them as beings. The relation is thus dialectical in a true "I-Thou" relation, we continually learn and grow more in the engagement with the other. And in the course of that, the other grows alongside through the relationship.

But it does not (and should not) stop at merely relationships with other persons. We should look at everything through the "I-Thou" lens. Even the most mundane objects can be things of great value in the eye of the beholder, if the beholder is willing to commit to understanding it better. That is why for the great artists, poets, and musicians, a tree or a rock or a bedroom can become a place of a value greater than merely a physical object or locale.

I think no one talks about this way of looking at the world better than the Christian author CS Lewis. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis remarks that if we see through everything, we in effect see nothing. If we start reducing everything down and seeing everything as static and innate as opposed to dynamic and intrinsically wonderous, we lose our vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful. To put it back in Buber's terms, if we see things merely in terms of "I-It" rather than "I-Thou", we lose all the elements of wonder, love, and beauty that color our world. As something of a Kantian thinker, I believe we color many aspects of our own reality. Therefore, the way we perceive affects the way we see. In order to see our world and others properly, we have to learn to think of them as "Thou"'s as opposed to "I"s.

Perhaps returning more to the main focus of human relations, we not only desensitize ourselves to others through our daily lives but also through the ideologies of our time. We are still very much in the grip of "Me Generation" thinking. We still think of things merely in the impact it has on us. The self is the center of the social universe, in this view. However, this way of looking at the world is clearly destructive. The self is half of any relationship and the self derives his/her meanings from the relationships it has from other things. We have to learn to decentralize ourselves and learn to see all people as being the subjects of a dialectical process of understanding, one that values others for the sake of the other and which passes beyond the reductive "I-It" relation.

We also must learn to see people as "Thou"s in the sense that they cannot easily be put into boxes or reduced down to a few descriptors. All hatred and many a corrosive world view from racism and various forms of prejudice to simple devaluing of the people in our lives functions on putting people into clearly defined boxes with discrete boundaries. Human persons should not be described this way: they should be thought of instead as not being strictly demarcated by easy descriptors, as having a flare and a spark all their own and as being complex and dynamic beings with equal parts mystery, wonder, and beauty.

When we begin to look at ourselves, others, and the world in this way, there can be no end to our appreciation of the people in our lives and the beauty we have on this blue marble we call Earth.

What Anakin's Failures Can Teach Us About Love and Faith This Holiday Season

The heavens do sometimes align. This Holiday season we are getting our first Star Wars film in ten years and judging by the reviews (I'm seeing it a few days after I write this), it is much better than the disappointing prequel trilogy. As we enjoy the action, adventure, and sci-fi fun that the Star Wars franchise brings us this Holiday season, it is also important to reflect on what makes films like the Star Wars franchise such an important part of our collective consciousness.

There are multiple examples I could cite in order to emphasize the importance of the franchise, but in accordance with the Holiday festivities, I will cite one that has prominence as we continue through the holly-jolly month of December: the fall of Anakin Skywalker.

So what do the two have in common? Anakin Skywalker's fall in Revenge of the Sith is hardly festive. The former Jedi Knight and hero slays dozens of Jedi (including children) and eventually chokes his wife and nearly kills their unborn children before being left to die near a volcano by his former best friend and master as he falls to the Dark Side. This hardly seems like it has a redeeming ethic for Holiday festivities other than good popcorn fodder for those wishing to stroll down memory lane before seeing the new movie.

Let's backtrack a little. For all of those who haven't seen the movies and for all of those needing a refresher, let's review the fall of Anakin step by step. 

So basically, Anakin Skywalker is a Jedi Knight and hero in the Clone Wars for the Galactic Republic. Early in Revenge of the Sith (the third chapter of the Star Wars franchise), Anakin and his friend Obi-Wan (also a Jedi hero) save Chancellor Palpatine from a kidnapping scheme and return him back to the capital world of Coruscant. Anakin meets with his secret wife Padme (Jedi are forbidden to marry) and learns she is pregnant. Immediately after, Anakin has a vision in which his wife dies in childbirth. Unable to let this go and unable to tell his Jedi friends, Anakin plays straight into the hands of Palpatine, who is secretly an evil Sith Lord bent on using Anakin in his galaxy-wide power play. Palpatine convinces Anakin the Dark Side is strong enough to save her and after a vicious confrontation between Palpatine and the Jedi, Anakin turns to the Dark Side in order to gain the power to save his wife. He slaughters dozens of Jedi and does Palpatine's bidding, only to strangle his wife in anger after she expresses horror over the man he's become. He becomes in Obi-Wan's words "the very thing he swore to destroy". The rest is common knowledge. He becomes Darth Vader, the man in the suit, after being deformed in a lightsaber duel with Obi-Wan.

But what exactly is Anakin's flaw? He does all of this for his wife, the only person he loves with all his heart. Is saving Padme such a bad thing? Any normal person would understand Anakin's frustrations. He can't tell the Jedi or he'll be expelled from the Order. Padme can't go to anyone else because if the relationship were to go public, their lives would be ruined. Is Lucas making a point about forbidden romance? Doubtful. The restrictions of the Jedi are draconian, probably even in the eyes of Lucas himself. A message about how love clouds our vision? I doubt that's a message Lucas wants to send to young viewers.

I think the answer to that question lies in the nature of Anakin's love itself. Throughout the film, Anakin speaks many times about wanting to save his wife, but we must take notice of the way he phrases it each time he talks about it. When Anakin first tells Padme about the vision, he says "I won't let this one become real" and in an ensuing scene yells in response to Padme promising she won't die in childbirth "No, I promise you!". Keeping in mind that Anakin also foresaw the death of his mother through a similar vision in the previous episode, it is understandable he is so concerned. However, every time he speaks of Padme, he never mentions any concern for her. Almost always, it seems like it is HIM that is the one that will be the most hurt by her dying. This is confirmed when Anakin finally collapses at Palpatine's knees after betraying the Jedi and wails "I can't live without her!".

The point is, while Anakin I'm sure deeply loves Padme, he loves her incorrectly. Anakin is a practitioner of selfish love. Padme becomes more an object than an actual person. Anakin doesn't just want to save her because she's a human being he loves, but rather he wants to save her out of his own selfish desire to keep her from leaving him. 

But why is this such a bad thing? This is where we come to the rub. Anakin has deified Padme in such a way that losing her means losing the only thing that keeps him going. Anakin has put his faith not in the things a Jedi should, but in temporary things. Even though deifying his beautiful wife does not sound like a crime, it is related to a deeper problem. The more we deify the imperfect things of life, the more we suffer when they cannot live up to our expectations. Ultimately, deifying the imperfect means that we don't love them for who they are: human beings. 

There are two things Anakin has done wrong that are important to take note of. He loves her in a way in which she cannot fulfill (as a God) and he has loved her in a way that serves him more than her. There are two types of love in the world: the love we give to God which is true deification and complete trust in perfection and the love we give to others which is unconditional despite the numerous flaws and imperfections that both they and the world present to us. Anakin subscribes to the former and ultimately ends up in a well of suffering for it.

This is the important message for you all this Holiday season. Love God with the trust and faith that we would give to anything that is perfect. Love one another with the expectation of mistakes being made, but always with the open heart to forgive them. Don't confuse the two! If we love God as we love one another, we cannot fully comprehend His greatness and we lose our faith in Him. If we love others as we love God, we ultimately will end up both causing and being caused suffering when they cannot give us the kind of gratification we expect. This goes further than just relationships too! We must acknowledge imperfection when we address material things, money, work, etc. If we deify these things, we end up being vessels of hate and anger from the suffering that we endure when these things cannot live up to the expectation only trust in The Lord can satisfy (or in Anakin's case, The Force).

So this Holiday season, we must love God with the deified love He deserves and love others with the forgiving kind of love that human beings deserve. Let us not just watch Star Wars as entertainment but take very real lessons from it. Anakin's failures serve not to condemn love, but to show us how to love properly. We all suffer from his very real problem. We all put too much faith on the worldly things and we all suffer because of it. From his fictional failures though, I feel we can learn many valuable lessons. And oh yes, may The Force be with you!!!!!

Plato's Allegory of the Cave in Contemporary Film

Philosophy. One of the most widely teased college majors and one of the most misunderstood subjects of study. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people dismiss philosophy as something confined to the wondering minds of introverts or the dusty books of stuffy, old academics. Whenever you mention Plato or Aristotle outside of a philosophy class, you're most likely to be looked at either as a hipster with very pretentious choice of reading or as a person who isn't "hip" at all. But that is where our generation is wrong. Plato and Aristotle are very hip indeed and that's because the lessons learned from their writings are applicable to a whole range of contemporary issues and art works in pop culture.

To prove this point, let's look at two pop culture movies. And let's analyze them as examples of Plato's greatest philosophical allegory: the Allegory of the Cave. So for all the millennials out there who aren't versed in Plato, the following paragraph is a short recap of what Plato's brilliant metaphor is.

The allegory involves a group of men who are bounded and are facing the wall of a cave. There is a fire behind them from which they can see the shadows of men passing them by through the cave. They assume that the shadows are the actual people themselves obviously as they have never seen anything outside of their contained angle of the world. Eventually, one man is pulled out. This man soon finds his way out of the cave and out into the world. His eyes take time to adjust to the light, so that eventually he is able to look at his reflection, his surroundings, and is eventually able to gaze at The Sun itself for a few seconds at a time. When he returns to tell his companions, they would laugh at him when he attempts to explain the real world to them and would kill him when he attempts to bring them to the outside world.

The entire story is of course Plato's way of symbolizing simultaneously the falsehoods brought about by ignorance and the philosopher's quest for truth. It is a brilliant and timeless metaphor that philosophy has only managed to write footnotes to ever since. But how does this myth that Plato developed nearly two and a half millennium ago factor into the entertainment of the 21st Century? To demonstrate the true timelessness of Plato's metaphor, I will cite two films released within the last 10 years: The Mist (2007) and Moon (2009).

Let's start with The Mist. This one is a science-fiction and horror film that fared moderately with critics and was an audience favorite, due primarily to the source material: a novel by Stephen King. The basic plot of the movie is this: a torrential thunderstorm tears into a government facility in which strange experiments are being done and inevitably an army of monsters is released which ravages a small New England town and leaves a few dozen civilians trapped in a grocery store. Of course everyone in the grocery store has no idea what is happening and their ignorance leads to some of them venturing out into the mist to their own undoing and some of them joining a radical religious sect led by the town zealot Mrs. Carmody that eventually tries to kill the main protagonists for attempting to escape.

Without any footnotes to that, you can see the parallels. The mist, in the film, is kind of like the binders in Plato's allegory. Even though indeed creatures lie in the mist that are of supernatural origin, the townspeople, in their blind ignorance reject any rational appeals to truth. They let their faulty senses and their blind vision guide them toward false beliefs. They rely not on rational thought but on their own biases, prejudices, and superstitions brought about by their cave wall perspective to form an interpretation of the events around them. The result is carnage and brutality. The film parallels Plato's myth in showing the dangers of fallacy and the prison of uninformed belief.

Another recent movie that showcases the Platonic mythology is Duncan Jones's Moon. This one deals with an astronaut who has been on a lunar station for three years providing fuel for Earth. He believes that he has a wife and kid back home he's going to return to and that he is just a temporary employee. As the film goes on, he learns he is merely a clone in a series of clones that have been manufactured by the lunar energy company that he works for. Eventually he and his replacement clone hatch an escape plan and one of them is able to get to Earth and is able to obtain justice.

Yet again, we see the perils of a man strapped down facing the cave wall. The impact of false beliefs and the problem of ignorance yet again shows its ugly face. Of course, when he discovers the truth, he has to wrangle with himself (much like the adjusting of the eyes in Plato's myth) and even resorts to violent behavior toward his replacement clone (much like what Plato implies would happen if the Prisoner attempted to free the men). In this film, just like in The Mist, we see yet again the same immortal themes that Plato was pondering in Ancient Athens: the difficulty in accepting truth, the prison of false and uninformed belief, and the trap of ignorance.

So the millennial who rejects the classical philosophy will now say: So what if the themes coincidentally appear in a few contemporary movies? It doesn't make Plato "with it". In fact, it does. The fact that Plato's examples are so clearly reiterated in popular fiction (probably without the conscious knowledge of the creators) shows how important Plato's philosophy and understanding of truth is even within the framework of 21st Century society. As we continue to live our lives in a society increasingly dominated by things spread from the cave wall such as certain sectors of social media and the endless distractions engendered by a culture too entertained for its own good, I for one, am happy that Plato's ideas pop up again and again in the schematics of new art. It's just up to those who keep Plato's teachings alive to inform the cave dwellers of this resemblance and to keep pushing the immortal lessons Plato taught out into the big wide world. Philosophy cannot die, especially not in the crazed world we live in. Good thing some filmmakers are keeping the legacy going, even if they may not be consciously aware of it!

Why Should Young People be Politically Active?

The other day I was watching a "Town Hall" on CNN featuring Hilary Clinton. In the show the host, the audience, and Tumblr users sent in questions to Clinton about her political positions on certain matters. One young interviewer asked Clinton something along the lines of what she thinks about the polarization between Democrats and Republicans and another interviewer asked her what she thought about Australia's system of compulsory voting. Her answers were to me very enlightening of our political situation today, especially to young people. The answers were actually so compelling I decided to make it into my own essay on the matter.

The question is often posed by teenagers and young adults all across this country: why should I vote? Why should I follow what is going on in Congress or what the President is proposing or what all those idiots in Washington are doing on their spare time? It is a good question in light of the growing divide between Democrats and Republicans and in an era where Congress's approval rating clocks in at a glowing 11%. However there is something sinister in that view that allows government and the powers that be to grow further apart from the citizen.

How? Well, let's look at the definition of democracy. Democracy is a system of government through which the people of the state elect their own leaders. With fewer and fewer young people going to the polls and with voting turn outs going down, how can a democracy function properly? The answer is that it cannot. Or at least it cannot function the way a democracy should: in accordance with the will of the people. If the majority of people do not care to show up to the polls, we see a political phenomenon that we see today: politicians growing more radical toward the left or the right and a schism between the two parties which grows larger and larger day by day. That is because the majority of the common sense people that comprise America aren't going to the polls, leaving the door to the people who are more on the opposite sides of the spectrum. I promise you that America is not dominated by conservatives, yet conservatives dominate the voting demographics.

I'll give a specific example of this phenomenon which will take us back two decades. In 1994, midterm elections were in full swing. The voting turnout: only about 40% or so. What occurred that year was a massive Republican takeover facilitated by a minority of voters on the Religious Right and other conservative demographics. Republicans took the House and the Senate that year in what the media dubbed the "Republican Revolution". But how much of the general population actually facilitated this uprising? A little over 20 percent. That means, in other words, that Congress was dominated by people only 20 percent of Americans wanted in office. Is this really a democracy, but an oligarchy of politically active voters dominating the American nation?

I would say that it would be an oligarchy. But before you take up your pitchforks and revolt against our political overlords, know this: You can change it. How can you change it? By going to the polls every two years. By putting in people you like and that represent your views. Don't cynically thrust aside the idea of politics simply because our politicians now are mudslinging bastards. Elect new people. This is the basic and beautiful idea of American democracy: that the people of the United States of America get to say who they want to run their country. Don't complain of political partisanship and radicalism in both parties if you cannot back up your words with a ballot.

So I think that what Hilary Clinton said nailed on the head what is going on wrongly in America. We, the people, must take action to shape government in the form that we want it to be in. Anything less is not in the spirit of democracy. Many of our politicians love to talk about terrorists, North Korean nukes, and the other party as the enemies to our democracy, but none of those pose a threat to our spirit that has led us through the last 240+ years in which America has existed as a country. The biggest threat to our American democracy is apathy. If we refuse to care, if we refuse the ballot out of cynicism, we have laid the gravestone for our beloved democracy.

My whole point here is that no matter how screwed up the government seems, we cannot lose the democratic values that made this country one of the greatest on Earth. That means to every person who can, especially to young people out there: get politically active. Vote. Make a difference in the best way of all: the way of non-violent change- a little piece of paper known as a ballot.

Ten Reasons for Dante's Divine Comedy

Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante were the three vital components of the "common man" Italian literature of the pre-Renaissance, late Medieval Period. Of course of those three gentlemen it is Dante who is remembered the strongest, almost exclusively because of his Divine Comedy. Here are the reasons that Dante and his epic poem have stood the test of time.

1. The idea of writing literature that one's fellow countrymen can read, understand, and enjoy. This was a large step of forward progress in Dante's age, when few institutions, especially literature, were not democratized for the common man. Dante is able to accomplish this through the informal language of the poem and the fact that the work's original language was in Italian, rather than Latin.

2. The rhyme scheme of the work, which is done in the terza rima style. Terza rima's rhyme scheme goes aba bcb cdc ded, etc. The fact that Dante is able to keep this scheme up through the 14,000 lines of the entire work shows a master of poetry at work. Though this rhyme scheme is rarely preserved in English translations of the work, keeping it in mind as an English reader is still important.

3. The imagery Dante presents. The vivid imagery of hell's enormous sufferings and lamentations as well as the horrid, ghastly landscapes of the underworld in "Inferno" and later of purgatory and heaven will leave a strong impression on the reader.

4. The allegory of The Divine Comedy, which can be applied both religiously or spiritually. Dante's quest through hell, rise through the mountain of purgatory, and into the Kingdom of Heaven can represent to religious folks the journey of men and women to reach God. Or if you prefer a less religious perspective, the work shows that in order to achieve happiness and fulfillment, one must face the misery, the hopelessness, the terror, the disgust, and the depravity of the dark sides of life.

5. Vivid depictions of both Classical figures of Greece and Rome and of 11th-12th Century political and religious figures of Northern Italy. One is able, in reading this, to learn a good deal about Classical history and mythology and also of the political and social conditions of Florence and its surrounding areas (at least from Dante's perspective).

6. The commentary on sin/redemption and good/evil. While outdated and rather fascist by today's standards, the work presents clear-cut moral concepts and though merciless in its treatment of sin and unwavering in its support of those who follow God, it still through the voice of Dante's character in the poem, provides within its own rigid moral framework, a fascinating commentary on the laws of good and evil. An example of this is in the case of Francesca da Ramini and her lover Paolo who appear in "Inferno" in Canto V. Though Dante punishes them in hell for their adultery, his character in the poem does feel sorrow for them and empathy for their plight. So even if Dante is still condemning the sin, he still in his own way, provides commentary on the nature of sins. In "Paradiso" Dante inversely provides commentary on the nature of doing good and following God.

7. Theological and aesthetic value. The work holds a theological importance in the sense that it provides commentary on the nature of the Judeo-Christian afterlife. Aesthetically, it holds a good amount of merit because it is artful in its composition (material sense of aesthetic pleasure) and manages to reach deep within the soul with its horrific imagery ("Inferno") and heavenly imagery ("Paradiso"). (This represents the spiritual side of its aesthetic value).

8. Insights into the life of a fantastic author. While people may be hesitant to learn about the life of Dante Alighieri specifically, the poem I believe, in its display of Dante's psyche shows something of the souls of all poets. Especially with The Divine Comedy we get this feeling as Dante is not only the writer, but the central character of the work. So it is not only is his stylistic conceits that we get a portrait of Dante.

9. Geometry of the writing. Each line contains eleven syllables (hendecasyllabic) throughout and is also divided into three parts, like the holy trinity. In the end, the three heads of Satan gnaw upon the spirits of Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot, representing again a sort of trinity, this time an inverted one of evil. Dante uses the numbers and quantities of things both within the writing itself and in its composition to create meaning.

10. The idea of proportional punishments in hell and proportional rewards in heaven. The nine circles proposes an interesting concept, that people in hell are punished specifically for the sin that they are guilty of and vice versa in paradise. It is not only an interesting idea, but one, that for a good deal of believers, may have a degree of validity. The punishments that Dante creates for his sinners in hell and the rewards he creates in heaven are also interesting to read about.

It Certainly is neither Crime nor Punishment to read Dostoevsky's masterwork (Spoilers Included)

     

Crime and Punishment was released in 1866, at a time when Russian prose was still trying to get recognition due to the fact that the massive nation was behind the Western world in those terms by centuries. After Crime and Punishment and perhaps with the help of writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Russian writing was on the map in the world's eyes. Certainly Crime and Punishment is a work that represents Russian ideals and social customs remarkably well, but it popularity can be attributed not only to its understanding of Russian culture but to its understanding of the moral and philosophical concepts that make up the fiber of every human being's psychology.

What is the book about?: Crime and Punishment is a title almost anyone with a limited knowledge of literature has heard of. It is usually, along with books such as War and Peace and Ulysses, attributed to an elite caliber of literature. In reality, the book is not at all hard to read, though it is long and has a complex system of moral psychology behind it. The plot of the book is relatively simple: it concerns the poor student Raskolnikov, who justifies to himself the murder of an old and haggard pawnbroker. Through these justifications, he murders the old lady and incidentally her half-sister as well. Afterwards, he grapples with his moral isolation and near-schizophrenic state of guilt. He is led to pursue redemption by Sonia, a prostitute he falls in love with and is pursued by a brilliant detective who plays a game of psychological cat and mouse with him. It is in jail, after falling in love with a young woman and accepting the love of God that Raskolnikov finds redemption from his crime.

Is it worth reading?: For people who are interested in moral issues, this is a very important book. Dostoevsky uses Raskolnikov as a model of askew morality, as a model of moral values gone horribly wrong and through this book, Dostoevsky is able to successfully portray the folly of Raskolnikov's ways and provides an interesting argument against Raskolnikov's abstractions on human nature.

Analysis: Raskolnikov is an interesting character to begin with. He is a walking contradiction of himself. These contradictions become apparent within the first part of the novel. Raskolnikov views himself as a "superman"; a man of higher intellect and interests than the rest of humanity yet he lives in complete poverty. He does not care about people, but he still leaves a poor family money. Contradictions are a major part of Dostoevsky's work, as well as divisions and conflicts between certain things. The conflict within Raskolnikov helps to illustrate the complexity of human nature (Freud was a big fan of the psychoanalysis of this book) and also the corruption of moral values.

To elaborate more clearly on this use of divisions and contradictions, I'll analyze the name of the main character himself: Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. "Raskolnikov" comes from the Russian word "raskolnik" meaning "schismatic or divided", illustrating both Raskolnikov's isolation from others morally and his divide from Russian values. Breaking it down further, "kol" in "Raskolnikov" means bell in Russian. Bells serve a contradictory purpose in the book, Raskolnikov rings bells on the night of the murder but bells also connote churches as well. They serve contradictory associations within Raskolnikov's mind. "Romanovich" has the word Roman in it, which of course connotes the Roman Catholic Church. This is where we get into Dostoevsky's statements about Russian culture. Catholicism is associated with the west and is apart from the values of a mostly Orthodox Russian population. The west, during this time, was espousing a number of views that Dostoevsky found false and a danger to Russian culture. One of these is the very philosophy that Raskolnikov uses to justify the murder of the pawnbroker: utilitarianism. These new Western beliefs, such as Utilitarianism and materialistic philosophies that replaced human compassion and aesthetic values for others, Dostoevsky saw as harmful and morally repugnant. Rejecting materialistic philosophies, Dostoevsky argues that human nature is more important to the strengthening of a person's character or society. Raskolnikov is a follower of these new Western intellectual ideas and though he justifies the murder through logical means, he is unable to suppress his guilt over it. Yet again there is a contradiction. Raskolnikov, through his division from society and subsequent abstractions over human nature is driven to murder the pawnbroker, yet is unable to suppress his guilt, eventually submitting to spiritual punishment and falling in love with a young woman, which provides him redemption. As we can see, contradictions are the device by which Dostoevsky displays the ways in which Raskolnikov's mind finds justification in his criminality and eventual redemption.

What do I think?: Aside from the obvious intellectual weight of the novel, it is a thoroughly enjoyable read. The book is perhaps one of the most charged crime novels to come out of the 19th Century. The book is surprisingly well-paced and rarely dry, filled with vivid depictions of the poverty in Russia at this time period and the broken psyche of a man bent over his own guilt. The characters are believable as well such as Porfiry Petrovich (the brilliant investigator after Raskolnikov) and Sonia Seminovitch (the prostitute Raskolnikov falls in love with), though I do feel that Raskolnikov alone was the only character I can truly say was masterfully written, since he emulates such a complex psychology, alternating from hatred to love within instants and prone to delirium and hallucinations among other things. 

We must also not forget the moral value of reading this and Dostoevsky's work in general. The book, while giving us a raw and truthful look at poverty, crime, and pathology also demonstrates the power and triumph of love over all else, as when Raskolnikov redeems himself through his love of Sonia. There is also the religious aspect of reading it as well. Raskolnikov also redeems himself through his accepting of Christian virtues. I, myself, do not fully embrace all of Dostoevsky's conservative outlooks on spirituality, but I do see that in a larger sense, Dostoevsky is not simply arguing for Judeo-Christian values, he is arguing for a sense of spirituality over materialism, over materialistic philosophies. Which, of course, is the whole subversive message of the book as a whole, underneath the crime and its punishment itself.

A very, very good read. Masterwork.