The concern is appreciated, but don't worry, me binge reading Dostoevsky is not (at least in this case) a cry for help. After all, if I bought「The Gambler and Other Stories」(read more here) then you can sure as hell bet (haha) that I'll be reading the "other stories" as well. It's simple economics.

So let's talk about the Ridiculous Man. For the unfamiliar,「The Dream of a Ridiculous Man」is a short story following the suicide attempt of a man who has lost purpose, or at least that is the premise. I went in blind and as I read, was very much reminded of「The Brothers Karamazov」insofar as the two works have considerable thematic overlap.

The moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all.^[1]

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- Elder Zosima

In some ways,「The Dream of a Ridiculous Man」can be read as a self-contained exposition that distills what would eventually become the philosophy of Zosima (and to an extent Alexei) in「The Brothers Karamazov」. We see the same sense of mutual responsibility. We see the same assertion of love as the only antidote to evil. And the two works also share another thread -​- namely, how easily we can fall into an insincere life.

In「The Brothers Karamazov」, Ivan argues that anything goes, yet he is horrified when this philosophy is taken to heart by Smerdyakov. To be clear, the actual basis for Ivan's view is compelling. It is entirely coherent. But it is also entirely unlivable. The Ridiculous Man repeatedly affirms the world's meaninglessness and inconsequence. But he is still saddled with pity for the child whose mother is dying. It seems no matter how much he manages to convince himself, he can't embrace the thesis that truly nothing matters in practice. We can, and very often may, find ourselves with perfectly consistent views on life that are also dishonest.

I've been the Ridiculous Man. In the past, nihilism left me contemplating biting the very same bullet as him. And the very same unresolvable discrepancies are what stopped me. It is truly bizarre: to so wholly think (and believe) that nothing matters, and to then also feel otherwise. It is easy to find virtue in trusting nothing beyond reason and science. But then why must these tactics be privileged as the be-all and end-all of knowledge? For me, pure rationalism and pure physical reductionism have led me to a host of persuasive but incongruous metaphysics. I'm not advocating for reason and science to be discarded, but in his dream, the Ridiculous Man does seem to hold "science" as some false prophet. The point, I believe, is that it's easy to forget that formal logic is incomplete, that physics is a model, and that these systems cannot perfectly correspond with reality. Ironically, I'm reminded of「On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense」. We sometimes vest truth in approximations and forget that they are approximating. These staples of modern knowledge aren't inherently bad, as a matter of fact, they're some of the most useful frameworks for understanding we have at our disposal. But their limitations slip from our minds as a result of how powerful they are. Yet it is in those very limitations that their arbitration cannot be taken as final law.

As it turns out, with only these two tools, nihilism is hard to dismiss. To be fair, it's hard to dismiss with other tools as well. But Dostoevsky nonetheless thinks it must be dismissed because it is insincere. And if reason and science can't support this refutation (Dostoevsky actually seems to think they engender nihilism), then something else must. "I have seen [truth] with my own eyes, I have seen it in all its glory!"^[2] the Ridiculous Man proclaims, espousing the joy in a world without sin, the cancerous nature of human corruption, and the desperate societal need for love. To Dostoevsky, this is real truth. Yet he makes a structural choice for it to be heralded by a ridiculous man, based on a dream, and all conveyed through story. It is certainly hard to imagine that this is incidental. Rather, Dostoevsky seems to be trusting that his story will resonate and, in doing so, lend credence to knowledge structures separate from the ones that now hold popular cachet. The reason why「The Brothers Karamazov」and「The Dream of a Ridiculous Man」work so well, why Alexei doesn't come off as a flimsy foil to Ivan, why the Ridiculous Man does not recite a mathematical proof, why Dostoevsky writes a tale instead of a treatise is exactly because a refutation of nihilism demands it.

Now, Dostoevsky was a Christian, and sees Christianity as the antidote to a meaningless and/or broken world. This is overt in both stories discussed here. And while the extent to which any person might be persuaded of the epistemological value of Christian faith will vary, I do think there is a genuine gap in the capabilities of reason and science that Dostoevsky is pointing toward. And in light of that gap, it's important not to categorically subordinate life to reason and science. Now do I have a satisfactory answer for what you should use to augment these tools? No, unfortunately not. And to be honest, there could very well fail to be any source of knowledge that we can access that is free of shortcoming (or who knows, knowledge itself could even somehow just be structurally incapable of cleanly closing itself^[3]). Ultimately, what we're told by this man's dream is that the means we have for uncovering truth, especially truth of metaphysical weight, are imperfect. And that is a fact we may just have to live and die with.

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• Dostoevsky
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