Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Five Principles of Personal Freedom

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On December 22, 1849, the 28-year-old Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky faced a firing squad for anti-government activities, alongside 21 of his comrades from a radical dissident group called the Petrashevsky Circle. Blindfolded and tied to a post together, his friends were terrified, but Dostoyevsky maintained total equanimity. “We will be with Christ,” he stated, matter-of-factly. Improbably, the men were granted a stay of execution: Before any shots were fired, a courier arrived with an imperial reprieve, reducing their sentence to temporary confinement in a labor camp.

Because he was at such ease with the imminent prospect of his death, you might assume that Dostoevsky must have been a calm and composed person—and, quite likely, an unquestioningly religious one. But you’d be wrong on all counts: Dostoyevsky was a tortured soul—a philosophical wanderer who accepted nothing and questioned everything, including his own faith. Yet precisely this deep uneasiness with life led him to create a blueprint for living centered not on comfort and enjoyment, but on meaning. This sense of meaning gave him the composure he showed in what he believed to be the final moments of his short life, as well as at the true end of his longer one, 32 years later.

You may have a bit of Fyodor in you—many of us do: a little uncomfortable in our own skin, a bit at odds with the world, easily pushed into an existential funk. A dose of Dostoyevsky’s philosophy, though quixotic and challenging, might be just what you need to achieve some peace, not only in your final moments but now and anytime.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The Tchaikovsky cure for worry]

Unlike many of his 19th-century-thinker contemporaries, Dostoyevsky never laid out his master philosophy in a particular text designed for that purpose. Rather, he revealed it largely through novels such as The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, as well as short stories, novellas, and occasional essays. Through the recurring themes in his writing, a set of rules for living a meaningful life emerges.

1. The journey is the destination.
In The Idiot, published in 1869, Dostoyevsky speculated on Christopher Columbus’s emotions on his voyage across the Atlantic: “You may be quite sure that he reached the culminating point of his happiness three days before he saw the New World with his actual eyes.” How so? “What is any ‘discovery’ whatever compared with the incessant, eternal discovery of life?”

Here, Dostoyevsky identifies one of life’s great paradoxes: Happiness requires purpose; purpose requires a sense of direction; a sense of direction requires goal-setting—but happiness cannot be had by realizing those goals. I have written previously about the arrival fallacy, in which people believe that achieving big objectives will give them a lot of happiness and then are bitterly disappointed to find that doing so is a letdown. After a big achievement, many people experience depression. True satisfaction comes from progress in the struggle toward the goal.

2. To be alive is to embrace freedom.
Besides Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky’s best-known work is The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Within that novel is a self-contained story titled “The Grand Inquisitor,” about Jesus returning to Earth at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. Encountering Jesus, the Grand Inquisitor arrests him on grounds of Jesus’s belief that human beings must be free to choose what is good. No, argues the Inquisitor: That path leads to guilt, anxiety, regret, and doubt. To be happy, he insists, people must cede their freedom and follow a prescribed path. “We have corrected Thy work,” the Inquisitor chillingly tells Jesus, condemning him to death by burning.

Before you scoff at this as satire, consider that the Inquisitor could be right. We know that, in fact, unbounded freedom is most assuredly not the secret to happiness. As psychologists have long pointed out, freedom—especially in an individualistic culture—easily becomes a tyranny for precisely the kinds of reasons listed by the Grand Inquisitor. The secret to contentment might well be to think conventionally, settle down, and thoroughly conform. You might as well relax and enjoy the world’s distractions—and stop torturing yourself with all of this philosophical nonsense.

Obviously, Dostoyevsky did not agree; he was on the side of moral choice—the side of Jesus, not the Inquisitor—even when it was painful. More on that pain in Rule 4.

3. Beware the palace of crystal.
Dostoyevsky believed that what the world offers in exchange for your freedom is utterly counterfeit—a “palace of crystal,” as he called it in his 1864 novella, Notes From the Underground. His time, similarly to ours, was dominated by technocratic utopianism, a popular belief that the complexity of human life and love could be simplified and solved through the expertise of science and government—if we submit to these forces. Dostoyevsky was having none of this promised future, “all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude.” Such efforts, he argued, would drug us and strip us of our humanity.

Was he wrong? The past century and a half has brought technological progress that has improved human well-being in many ways, it’s true. But scholars today caution us about the dehumanizing effects of the excessive use of digital media and smartphones as they displace analog interactions and in-person relationships. Dostoyevsky would argue that facing the anguish of being fully alive out in the real world is much better than languishing, tranquilized, in the palace of crystal.

[Arthur C. Brooks: An Emersonian guide to taking control of your life]

4. The pain is the point.
When it comes to that existential anguish, he goes further: Even if he could make it stop, he says, he wouldn’t—because that kind of suffering is the inevitable and necessary cost of realizing what we all truly seek in life: love. In 1877, Dostoyevsky published a short story titled “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” in which the narrator has a vivid dream of a parallel Earth exactly like this one but without suffering. What initially appears wonderful quickly becomes terrible, as it dawns on the narrator that this other world has no place for love. At this point, he pines for the pain that accompanies love. “I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left,” he says, “and I don’t want, I won’t accept life on any other!”

Before you dismiss Dostoyevsky’s contention that love requires suffering, think about the agony you may have felt in the early, thrilling stages of your last romantic start-up. If that was too long ago to recall, consider that neuroscientists have also found that we mirror the anguish we see in our loved ones (though not that in strangers). We almost literally feel their pain: If, for example, you see a photo of your beloved in pain, that will stimulate your anterior cingulate cortex and insula, brain regions that process mental pain.

5. Look up.
The lessons so far might seem too difficult to absorb in the empirical circumstances of our daily experience. Recognizing this, Dostoyevsky argued that we should attune ourselves to the supernatural dimension of human existence, for only thus can we realize what we truly crave in the struggle of life. “So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship,” he writes in The Brothers Karamazov. This perception was correct: Researchers at the University of Oxford in 2011 concluded that to believe in a god or gods and an afterlife is inherent to human nature. Typically, we also conceive of the mind and the body as separate, which gives rise to a widespread belief in the soul. Based on this and other research, you might even say that humans have a “religion instinct.”

And if you doubt the supernatural? Welcome to the club, fellow wanderer. Belief is a question of commitment, Dostoyevsky thought, not emotion or reason. This was Dostoyevsky’s central point about his own Christian beliefs when he wrote in the last notebook he kept during his lifetime: “I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.” That statement, made very close to the end of his life, takes us right back to the scene of his youth: What he assumed were his last words, before the firing squad, were a profession of the beliefs he chose, not simply an expression of what he might have been feeling at that moment.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]

If, like Dostoyevsky, you have a turbulent soul, you can benefit by trying to embrace his path. Here are five resolutions, which have worked for me, that you might want to embrace:

1. My goals in life are mere intentions, not attachments. I will focus on the struggle, the journey.
2. Conformity of thought and deed is more comfortable than freedom. But I will question everything, and think and act for myself.
3. I will turn away the narcotic snares of tech distraction that steal my time and attention in exchange for my freedom of thought.
4. I will embrace the anguish that freedom and individuality bring, because I demand the right to experience love.
5. The world as I see it is not all that exists, nor does it explain all things. I will embrace the transcendent as I seek to understand it.

This is the formula that Dostoyevsky himself lived by, to the very end. When he died, at the age of 59, of a pulmonary hemorrhage, he was surrounded by his wife, Anna, and his children. On his deathbed, he read from St. Matthew’s Gospel the story of Jesus’s baptism: John, at first, protests that he should be baptized by Jesus, not the other way around, but Jesus answers, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” So John baptizes him, and Jesus receives God’s blessing.

After this reading, about a perfect submission of the human to the divine, Dostoyevsky looked at his wife—in whom he saw refracted through his earthly life just such heavenly love—and said, “I have always loved you passionately and have never been unfaithful to you ever, even in my thoughts.” With that, he breathed his last.