Three Views of the Human Being and Modernity — Part 2: Dostoevsky through Marshall Berman

The seminar begins with a problem that recurs throughout Dostoevsky: people do not necessarily act in accordance with what is rational, advantageous, or even consistent with their stated beliefs. A gap separates knowing from acting, while fear, anger, desire, guilt, and self-destruction can oppose rational calculation. The speaker introduces an evolutionary analogy between older emotional systems and more recent cognitive capacities. This functions less as a precise neuroscientific theory than as an entry into the Dostoevskian question: what is it in human beings that resists rational engineering?

The discussion then turns to Marshall Berman and his interpretation of modernity. The modern city, the boulevard, urban planning, and rationalized order can make life cleaner and more predictable, yet they can also intensify anonymity, alienation, and separation. Berman’s reading emphasizes these external conditions and links the crises of Dostoevsky’s characters to the modern city and its social organization. The seminar takes this insight seriously: tradition, community, architecture, and social structure genuinely shape individual experience.

Its central criticism is that an outside-in explanation remains insufficient. Raskolnikov is not simply a product of poverty or the streets of St Petersburg; the Underground Man is not merely a victim of modern urban design; and figures from stories such as The Crocodile or The Dream of a Ridiculous Man are troubled by conflicts rooted in self-consciousness, guilt, freedom, and the desire to violate order. If these experiences are fully reduced to social conditions, the distinctive object of Dostoevsky’s concern is lost: the dangerous complexity and freedom of the individual.

The Brothers Karamazov provides an important illustration. Ivan is intellectually formidable, and some of his objections concerning suffering and evil are among the strongest voices in the novel. Yet his fate demonstrates that argumentative power does not by itself determine how a life can be lived. Alyosha embodies another kind of response—presence, simplicity, affection, and relationship. The seminar does not infer that reason should be discarded; its claim is that reason alone does not exhaust the human person.

Dostoevsky therefore emerges not as a simple enemy of modernity. His Winter Notes can appreciate some modern cities and criticize others, while Notes from Underground is better understood as an attack on the dream of turning human life into a predictable logical formula. The comparison with Baudelaire and Chernyshevsky clarifies the spectrum: Baudelaire absorbs the energy of modernity poetically, Chernyshevsky places greater confidence in rational planning, and Dostoevsky warns that any programme unable to recognize freedom and psychic depth may destroy the very humanity it seeks to improve.