The Most Misunderstood Philosophy Quotes (and what they actually mean)

0:00 On a quiet night, I can sometimes hear a strange noise. I put my ear to the window and I can just about make out the sound of long deadad philosophers turning in their graves. For a long time, I struggled to think of why this might be. But then it hit me. I think it's because some of their most famous and insightful quotes are being routinely misused, sometimes in ways that are completely antithetical to what they wanted to express. So, I have picked out just seven of the hundreds of quotations by various different philosophers that I think may have been slightly misconstrued in much of popular discourse. Also, it's my birthday today and I can't think of a better way to mark the occasion than by ranting about

0:45 some philosophy. It's not too different from the rest of my days, come to think of it, but I'm excited nonetheless. Right, let's learn about some of philosophy's most famous sound bites. My name is Joe Folly and this is Unsolicited Advice. But first, if you want to avoid misunderstandings on your newsfeed, then you should check out today's fantastic sponsor, Ground News. Ground News is a website and app that gathers related articles from thousands of sources around the world in one place so you can compare how different outlets cover the same story. Every story comes with a clear breakdown of the political bias, factuality, ownership, and headlines of the reporting sources with ratings backed by independent news

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3:03 the video. One, the philosophy of the gin. There is a quote from Socrates that often flies around the online gym sphere that reads as follows. No man has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable. This is often used as a sort of philosophical justification for gyming. And look, I am not opposed to gyming in the slightest. I'm not the strongest guy in the world, but I do enjoy a few workouts per week. It's also true that physical excellence was emphasized in the Socratic vein of ancient Greek philosophy. In Plato's Republic, he argued for the importance of physical excellence both for the development of the body and to keep the mind sharp. I

3:49 also quite like this quote in particular because it's not from Plato's dialogues, but from Zenapans, and I basically never hear anyone talk about Zenifan Socratic dialogues outside of classics faculties. I also cannot stress enough just how cool Zenapon was. He was a philosopher come military historian and he's also one of our primary sources for the later Pelpeneisian war after Thusidities. Thusidities is also very cool if anyone has the chance to check him out. He wrote a history of the Pelpeneisian War that's about this thick. I did ancient history A level um in the UK and he was one of my primary sources for one of the modules and he's just brilliant to read. He's one of the first kind of real politique historians and it really shines through. He's he's often credited as being the first modern historian with Herodotus being the very first historian

4:36 at least in the kind of western tradition I suppose. But digressions aside, this quote is found in a work by Xenopon called Memorabilia and it's a popular defense of Socrates's person and philosophy to the good people of Athens. He aimed to show that not only was Socrates not guilty of impiiety or of corrupting the youth, but that he was a positive force for good in the city. As a result, it's largely focused on the benefits that Socrates and his lessons brought to both his friends and his wider society. In my translation, the quote reads, "It is also shameful due to neglect to grow old before seeing oneself in the most beautiful and strongest bodily state one might attain." I haven't been able to find a phrase corresponding to no man has a

5:23 right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. So I think that may just be apocryphal. The thing is this is not Socrates's primary argument in this chapter. He is admonishing a young man epigenies for neglecting his physical training because he is a private citizen and so not currently bound to fight anyone or need to undergo extreme physical exertion. Socrates responds by saying that you don't know when war might come and that by neglecting your physical training, you are neglecting your duties both to yourself and to your fatherland. The first because you're more likely to die or be captured and the second because you will be unable to give the city the best defense possible. Referring to those in better physical shape, he says, "Many bring aid to their friends and do good deeds for their

6:09 fatherland and due to this are deemed worthy of gratitude. acquire a great reputation and obtain most noble honors. He also suggests that exercise aids in clear thinking, something which now has been borne out empirically. In each case, physical fitness is seen as an instrumental good rather than good in and of itself. As in Plato's Republic, it is used both to serve one's community and to foster intellectual discovery. In this case, it's not that the quote is totally misunderstood, but that the context helps clarify exactly what Socrates means. He is not concerned primarily with how someone looks, but rather how they might serve other people. This makes sense given Zenapon's overall goal, which was to paint Socrates as a force for good in Athens.

6:55 It follows the same pattern as some other of Zenapon's dialogues which take pains to emphasize just how communityoriented Socrates was and the benefits he brought to his friends and his country. I wanted to mention this because I feel like if anything the full dialogue serves as a much better and more rounded argument for the importance of physical fitness at least in some cases though I hope that not many of us will ever be called to defend our community in arms. The idea of staying fit or healthy or strong not for us but for what we can do for others is a far more motivating message in my opinion. It does not take away from any personal benefits of strength or exercise as Socrates does discuss those as well. But it encourages us to think how we could

7:41 use our own physical pursuit in service to those around us. And that's just a far less egoistic message than the quote in isolation suggests. It reminds me of someone I once knew who started training religiously when he and his wife began trying for a child. When I asked him what had sparked this sudden urge for strength, he said, "I want to make sure I never have to put my kid down because my arms are too tired." And whenever I think of that, I cannot help but smile. Two, God is dead and we have killed him. I'm pretty sure that most of you will have heard of this one. It appears in nature's the gay science in an apherism titled the madman and the full passage reads as follows at least in my translation. God is dead. God remains

8:27 dead and we have killed him. How shall we, the most murderous of all murderers ever console ourselves? The most common misunderstanding I see of this phrase is when someone uses it to basically mean something like we need Jesus. Someone might suggest something disgusting or otherwise provoke a feeling of hopelessness and this newly disenchanted soul will say God is dead and we have killed him to signify this. And to be fair, nature does worry about the potential oncoming nihilism in the wake of God's demise. However, it's important to note that nature is not talking about a metaphysical death of God, but rather the wave of non-belief that he predicted would follow the mature enlightenment and the atheism of his free spirits that

9:14 he discusses in his earlier works. Nature is not saying that God has abandoned us, but that we have abandoned God and must now learn to live without religion. But all is not lost because nature had a potential solution. Mankind itself will fill the role that God had. We will become the authors of morality and craft our own values rather than having them handed down to us by a religion. Now this is easily confused with the kind of modern humanism that we often associate with non-religious morality today. But in his other works, nature clarifies that only a few people will ever get to become these new moral legislators for the world and that this is a long and difficult task for us to

9:59 undertake. He is also unashamedly elitist, saying that only the best will rise to this level of moral commander. To quote another section of the apherism, must we not become gods ourselves if only to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed. So for nature, the death of God is both a terrifying risk and a fantastic opportunity. On the one hand, he worries that without God, humanity will simply cease to have values and decay into nihilism or hedonism or simply following whatever our momentto moment whims dictate. But on the other, nature thinks that we could rise to the challenge and creates what he calls more lifeaffirming values hereafter. He leaves what those

10:46 values will be quite vague, but he thinks they'll involve a prioritization of self-overcoming as well as a strengthening of the will to power and the baser instincts all organized into a coherent hole. Though nature saw himself merely as a prelude to future philosophers who would hammer out these new values in detail. Another common misunderstanding is that nature thinks God has totally lost his influence. This is also not true. In various parts of book three of the gay science, he takes pains to emphasize that although he does think religion will decline, he also thinks that it will hold sway for many years to come. He often talks about this as the shadows or echoes of God which dwell in caves or the churches and temples which serve as God's tomb. To

11:32 again quote the madman, "I have come too early." This tremendous event is still on its way and headed towards them. Word of it has not yet reached men's ears. This deed is further away from them than the farthest star, and yet they have done it themselves. In other words, God's total death is approaching, and it cannot be averted. But this does not mean that religion is now over. Rather, its echoes will continue for some time. Nature is neither saying that all is hopeless without God, nor that God is now obsolete and we are entering a new era of naturally enlightened atheism. The death of God is described as an ongoing event, one that will unfold over

12:18 decades or possibly even centuries. And nature thinks it presents both an extreme challenge to mankind and also a potential for future philosophical greatness. Whereas for thousands of years he thinks humans were relegated to interpreting the values of an abstract god, now they are free to craft their own. The exact nature of that freedom is not spelled out in this quote, nor in this apherism, but it's found all across the free spirit works and well into thus bakes arithustra, which starts from the standpoint that God is dead, but that the uber mench is coming. And if you do fancy a video on all of the work leading up to this proclamation that God is dead, I have one right here. But moving on, three, Okam's razor. Okam's razor is

13:08 one of the most influential pieces of philosophy in history. As John Joe McFaden has pointed out, it was a key part of how we abandoned the tomic model of the solar system. And it even crops up in popular debates to arbitrate between competing positions. The quote most associated with Okam's razor is probably the following. Entities must not be multiplied beyond's necessity. Although AAM himself never said this, and indeed many thinkers before Aam proposed similar ideas, this has come to represent Okam's razor on the popular stage. However, I often see people ignoring the beyond necessity component of the razor. The idea is not that simpler theories are always preferred, or even that simplicity is by necessity

13:54 a good thing in a scientific theory, but that all else being equal, it is worth picking the simpler theory over the more complex one. There are many reasons for this, but I think the following is probably the most intuitive. Each time you propose that something exists, you are taking an epistemic risk that the thing does not exist. So if you can get the job done with fewer moving parts, then this will in general minimize false beliefs. This is not always the case. For example, during gestation, the human fetus briefly has a tail due to an evolutionary hangover. It would be simpler if it did not, but it does and we can see that it's there. While the theory that we do not have a tail as a fetus is simpler, it is less empirically adequate. There are things it leaves unexplained like the observations of the

14:42 tail in human fetuses. Another justification for Okam's razor are the dire consequences of abandoning it. If we do not in general favor simpler theories, all else being equal, then we can end up with unwieldy explanations. There would be nothing to stop me proposing pixie general relativity, which has all of the same propositions as general relativity, but also millions of invisible pixies. Simplicity allows us to reject my pixie theory in favor of standard general relativity theory. The misunderstanding arises when simplicity is valued higher than more useful or more truthtracking properties like empirical adequacy or predictive success. For example, in my recent video on manifestation, we saw how some

15:27 writers reduced all events that happen to us down to the mystical law of attraction. This is a remarkably neat and simple metaphysical structure. It is monist. Everything is made of the same stuff. And in some cases, this single law explains almost everything and even the moral arc of the universe. But manifestation falters on a series of other epistemic virtues. It's almost entirely unfalsifiable, fails to make definite, replicable true predictions, and is not empirically adequate. Yet, in my research for that video, I saw quite a few people online arguing for manifestation based largely on its simplicity, with some even citing Okam's razor directly in its defense. This is not just limited to philosophical

16:14 theories. Okam's razor can very swiftly tip over into what Daniel Carneaman called substitution. That is, when we're confronted with a really quite difficult question that almost certainly has a very complex answer, we substitute in a simpler one and then answer that question instead. We humans have a bias towards theories that are easier to understand. And we often use cognitive fluency as a proxy for truth, even when that is entirely inappropriate. Discovering the inner workings of the atom or crafting economic policy involves quite a lot of complicated maths and in the latter case a healthy dose of behavioral psychology. If we prioritize simplicity too highly then we will dismiss these theories as inherently likely to be false or useless

16:59 simply because they are difficult to understand. I'm not saying that there are never good reasons to criticize complex theories. But complexity itself is not really an issue so long as there are not competing theories which are just as empirically adequate predictive and truth tracking yet have fewer moving parts. Above all, Okam's razor does not forbid us from searching out complex theories when simpler ones are not adequate to explain the phenomena we observe. Some systems biologists have recently pointed out that in their field sometimes Okam's razor is misused to dismiss more complex theories even when they may explain certain phenomena to a greater degree of accuracy. The trouble occurs when we go from saying simple theories are on balance more desirable

17:45 than complex ones to nature itself never creates redundancies and simple theories should always be favored. The first is a decent huristic while the second is a purported rule of the universe and of science that may or may not hold in different areas. There is a huge literature around Okam's razor and I genuinely do recommend checking it out as it's far more complicated than I presented it here. Elliot Sober has some good papers on this if you're interested. But to sum up, simplicity is a secondary metric used to arbitrate between theories of equal or similar empirical adequacy and not something that in itself makes a theory more likely to be true. It's easy to overuse this simplicity criterion, but if what

18:30 we're interested in is truth and predictive power, then it must play second fiddle to these more directly truth and observation tracking factors. Sorry, I know that was a bit of a mouthful. Anyway, four, Cogito ergosum. This one is perhaps less an outright misunderstanding and more just a lack of context. This general thought comes from Daycart's meditations on first philosophy and his principles of philosophy where we find its Latin version. The phrase simply means I think therefore I am. And Daycart used this as the starting point for his epistemic system. He thought it was the one thing it was impossible to doubt, even in principle. The first misconception

19:16 people often have is that the argument starts with thinking, which makes sense given how it's often phrased. In the meditations, Daycart originally constructed the argument more along the lines of doubt. Essentially, at this point in the work, Daycart's project is to find out what even an all powerful evil demon could not deceive him about. What he could not under any circumstances doubt is true. It would be contradictory to doubt that doubt exists since as soon as you doubted it, you would thereby confirm its existence. But then he also thought that there could not be doubt without a doubter because he thought that doubt without a person doubting would be incoherent. So there must be someone doing the doubting and that person is I. Thus, Daycart infers

20:02 from the indubitability of doubt to the injubitability of his own existence. He also has a separate but related argument for his own existence, which is to say that the statement I exist is self-verifying. That is, whenever it is thought, it is necessarily true, since the indexical word I refers back to the thinker. Now, I have criticized the Cogito argument in the past for a number of reasons, but it does have some real intuitive appeal, and I do think it may be impossible to doubt, even if we can't establish its truth. It is very hard to imagine doubting your own existence. So, at a practical level, it does basically seem certain, even if it would only be certain pragmatically. And so far, this is basically in line with Daycart's intention. Daycart did intend this to be

20:49 an undoubtable truth. However, in popular discourse, I sometimes see people say that this is the only thing Daycart thought we could have knowledge of. But this is a misconception. While this is Daycart's starting point, it is not where his philosophy ends. From here, he builds his belief system from the inside out. He begins by establishing what this eye that he knows exists actually is. And he starts from the main thing he must already know about himself, namely that he doubts and therefore thinks. So the second truth is that he exists as a thinking thing. He argues that this is the essential property of the human being and that thus we have a kind of privileged access to our own introspective thoughts. So now not only can we be certain that we

21:35 exist, but we can also be at least pretty confident of what we are thinking. The rest of Daycart's philosophy that he thinks allows us to believe things about the outside world is based on the existence of God, which he establishes using, in my opinion, quite a spirious argument. But that's by the by. We don't need to get into the weeds of the rest of Daycart's epistemic system here. Though that is a great idea for another video, come to think about it. But the main misconception is this. Daycart did not think that we could only know that we exist. As philosophers go, he's not even particularly skeptical. In the history of philosophy, a skeptic is someone who doubts that we can have knowledge of very much at all or even have knowledge of anything. But Daycart ends the meditations pretty sure that he

22:20 can know quite a lot about the outside world and is extremely sure that there is some kind of god even if not much is actually said about that god besides that he wouldn't deceive us very much. I think that this confusion stems from mistaking Daycart himself for the sort of character that he inhabits in the meditations. At the start of the book, Daycart says that he is deliberately undertaking an academic exercise to see what he can be absolutely 100% sure of if he does attempt to doubt every single one of his beliefs. This is where he comes up with the evil demon hypothesis which says it's possible that there is an evil demon that is not only fooling everything that we see but also deceiving our rational and logical faculties. If Daycart stopped there and admitted that we cannot know anything,

23:05 then he would genuinely be a skeptic. But importantly, Daycart does not actually think the evil demon scenario is possible. He only toys with the idea at the start of the meditations as a thought exercise. In the final form of his philosophy, he believes in an all powerful God that would not mislead him unless it was part of his divine plan, which is fundamentally good. And presumably that God would also stop any evil demon who wanted to deliberately deceive us about every one of our beliefs. So there's only really one point in time where Daycart did believe that all he knew was that he existed. But that is right at the end of the first parts of the meditations and is also pretty much over as soon as the second part begins. So this hardly characterizes the whole of Daycart's thought. Nonetheless, it is such a

23:52 quotable line that it has stuck. And it's basically overshadowed the rest of Daycart's thought in popular discourse to such an extent that many people do believe that Daycart was an outright skeptic even when his whole project here was to argue against skepticism and to propose that actually we can know quite a lot. Five, hell is other people. This is a line from Jean Paul Sartra's existential play No Exit, which follows three people who are all damned to hell for various reasons. But in this case, hell is not some Dante-esque realm of fire and brimstone, but instead a mirrorless room with just these three people in it for all eternity. Their

24:37 punishment is one another, and each of them are perfectly placed to destroy the self-conception of the other two. It's a bit like The Good Place if you've seen that program. Inz desperately craves the affections of Estelle, who in turn lusts after Gassan. But Gassan holds Estelle in contempt and wants to prove to Inz that he is not a coward. Inz hates Gassan for stealing Estelle's attention away from her. The torture is that each character wants to see their self-image affirmed by the other two. Gassan sees himself as a brave man, but he was also executed for refusing to fight in a war. And so he wants to convince the other two that he is in fact courageous. Estelle readily goes along with this, but Inz disagrees. Garassan can only see

25:25 himself through their eyes and so his self-image is fundamentally threatened. Estelle wishes to be seen as attractive and youthful in the eyes of Gassan since that is how she bases her own selfworth. While Inz openly owns her place in hell and wants to see the other two do the same, she already views herself as wicked and she wishes to make the others see that they are no better than her. They of course refuse. Thus, no one gets any emotional comfort from anyone else. And each person realizes that they are forced to spend the rest of forever with two people who will expose their flaws and shatter any shred of selfworth that they have left. At the end of the play, Gassan thus says the following. You

26:13 remember all we were told about the torture chambers, the fire and brimstone, the burning m old wives tales. There's no need for redhot pokers. Hell is other people. Now, in popular discourse, this phrase, hell is other people, has come to mean a general contempt for others and a preference for one's own company. But that's not quite what Sartra means. For Sartra, the gaze of other people is both unavoidable yet also potentially rather disturbing. On the one hand, he thinks that our self-conception can only be secure if it is reaffirmed by other people. This makes sense. It is pretty difficult for us to think of ourselves as brave or

26:58 attractive or lovable if other people never agree with our own assessment. So in Sartra's philosophy, other people do have a lot of power over us, at least concerning those aspects of ourselves that we are most insecure about. This is what allows his hell to be well, a hell for the unfortunate inhabitants. If you were trapped in a room with people who took your worst insecurities and told you that yes, you actually are like that, you also probably wouldn't like it. But it goes deeper than even this. When we are going about our daily life, we largely view ourselves from the inside as it were. We are by definition the subject of our own experiences. So this is pretty natural. We view the

27:43 world through our own eyes and in some way we are not an object in our own worldview for much of our daily life. However, from time to time we will see ourselves very clearly through the eyes of another person. That is we will quite uncomfortably realize that to them we are not a subject. They don't have access to our inner experience and that we are in some sense an object in their map of the world. Satra calls this moment the look and says it is potentially an incredibly unpleasant experience. We become acutely aware that who we say we are and who we think we are may not be who we are in the eyes of other people. It is the opposite of that wonderful experience of deeply feeling

28:30 how everyone around you is an agent with just as full a mind as you and feeling connected to them in that moment. However, Sartra's philosophy does not have a totally negative view of other people. A huge part of his existentialism is learning to be with others in a way that does not make them objects or make you an object to them. Sartra advocates for a full recognition of other people's agency and suggests that this is part of an existentially fulfilled life. So, while hell can be other people, it's much more complex than it first appears. And in his later writings, Satra becomes much more keen on the human ability to cooperate with others, work toward shared goals, and build communities that respected their

29:15 members existential freedom. I still think that his overall position towards the social realm leans towards the negative, and he does talk about other people as a threat to your authenticity a lot more than he discusses their potential existential strengths in your life. But nonetheless, hell is other people refers to a particular phenomenon in his developed existential philosophy rather than simply meaning other people are bad. And I think that is worth noting when we are using this phrase because in some ways it does more accurately reflect the complex web of thoughts and feelings that goes into deeply held social anxiety. Six. The limits of my language are the limits of my world. This is such a phenomenal quote from Ludvig Vickenstein and I can

30:02 totally see why it's caught on. When I see it in popular speech, it tends to be about everyday language. It often appears alongside the phrase whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent. Also from Vickenstein. However, this is from early Vickenstein. And so none of the words in the sentence mean what they would normally mean in our everyday language. I absolutely love Vickenstein and think the trackctartis is a masterpiece, but this is something we have to get used to when reading his works, especially his earlier works. He also deserves his own video at some point, but I'll attempt to gloss things over very quickly here. The definition of the term world for Vickenstein is found in the very first line of the tractatus where he writes, "The world is composed of facts, not of things." To

30:50 simplify things considerably by world here Vickenstein means the collection of true propositions. Additionally by language Vickenstein does not mean the full breadth of human expression but rather the collection of truth evaluable statements. The truth evaluable statements are those that make up pictures of the world. Examples include the cat is on the mat or the battle of Waterloo happened in 1815. These describe states of affairs that have clear truth conditions. It is absolutely clear what it means for the cat to be on the mat or for the battle of Waterloo to occur when it did. His actual criteria for what makes a truth evaluable statement or a proposition are quite complex and based on his broader theory

31:36 of logical atomism. But we don't need to go into that here to clear up the misunderstanding. The main thing to remember is that Vickenstein is talking more about the pristine language of logic here than how our language is used in everyday life. So when he says that the limits of our language are the limits of our world, he is effectively saying the limits of our truth evaluable statements set the limits of the statements we can determine as true or false. This sounds tortological because it sort of is. Most of the substance of Vickinstein's theory is in establishing what exactly is truth evaluable and what in his words cannot be stated but merely shown. What Vickenstein is not commenting on is the connection between the words in our vocabulary and how they expand our ability to think about

32:21 different topics. I think the confusion arises because this is also a pretty cool philosophical idea and moreover one that is more connected to our everyday concerns than Vickensteinian logical atomism. As awesome as that is, this other idea has also been picked up by empirical psychology around emotion with Lisa Feldman Barrett researching how the language we use to describe our feelings begins to shape the experience of those feelings themselves. So, the Vickensteinian idea often gets mixed up with this one, even though it's talking about something completely different. To quote one of my favorite introductions to Vickenstein by Michael Potter, who was one of my old lecturers, by language here, Vickenstein did not mean German or English, but language as a whole, abstracted from the contingent factors

33:07 of any particular human language. He meant in short, the symbol language of thought. And again, he is talking about truth here rather than say poetry. Contrary to what some people say, it is not that Bickenstein thinks that non-truth evaluable language is pointless, but he thinks that it falls outside the purview of serious philosophical inquiry. This is a key difference between the early Vickenstein and the later Vickenstein, who again to simplify things massively is much more concerned with ordinary language and what that language does in practice and in everyday speech. Nonetheless, this quote does contain a very valuable idea. Vickenstein is writing at a time where philosophy was trying to work out what could sensibly be asked about and inquired about. And the general theories

33:54 that analytic philosophy came up with to answer this programs like logical empiricism, logical atomism, falsificationism, and carnap's incredible mixture of his own theories are still very useful litmus tests to see if a given idea falls into the realm of straightforward empirical or mathematical inquiry. Although most philosophers today tend to treat language in a slightly different way, it would be far too quick to dismiss the general ethos behind early Vickenstein. I think it is a genuinely helpful and interesting philosophical question to ask what are the limits of what is truth evaluable. It has certainly been influential in the progression of scientific inquiry and this Vickensteinian quote is just one attempt to answer that. Seven, your worst sin is

34:44 that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing. This is a line from Crime and Punishment by the Russian author and philosopher Theodor Dosski, and I've quite often seen it thrown around online as if it alone represents his philosophy. It comes up a lot in those quoty Instagram pages, and the comments often interpret it as Dstoyvki saying that all suffering is pointless and it's all for nothing. that is as an outright endorsement of nihilism. This plays into the popular yet in my opinion deeply mistaken picture of dsttoyki as a hopeless writer. Someone who presents people in pain with no hope of a better tomorrow. However, I don't think much could be further from the truth. This

35:29 line is spoken by the protagonist of crime and punishment, Rasconov, to Sonia, a young woman who was turned to support her family. Characteristically of Rasconikov's words, there is a tiny part of DSTVKI's more general opinion here, but also a lot that he disagrees with. In some sense, DSTVski would say that Sonia's suffering is pointless, since all throughout his life, he wrote about the dire conditions of the economically downtrodden in 19th century Russia. Although he became more conservative with age, this was largely a religious conservatism and he still very much highlighted the difficulties of poverty in his novels. To be honest, the caricatururing of late dsttoyki's worldview is its own separate topic. But yes, DSTVski did consider the sufferings

36:16 of Sonia pointless in the very broad more societal sense. that he thought our communities should be united by a universal brotherly love and that in such a situation no one would be forced to turn to such a profession or starve. However, DSTVKI does not think that Sonia's suffering is totally pointless. Nor does he think that suffering in general is pointless. The primary force in Dostsyky's ethical system is active love. This is, as the name suggests, a love that is not just in words but in deeds. And one of the key ways that DSVski shows this active love in his books is through sacrifice and suffering on another's behalf. This makes an awful lot of sense given his devout Christianity. The story of Christ's

37:01 passion is effectively God taking on the suffering and the sins of the world. Thus, although Dstyvki does not think that Sonia should have to suffer, he would still say that her willingness to suffer in order to provide for her loved ones is genuinely admirable. Moreover, this ties into a much broader misconception surrounding Dsstyvki, which is that he has a pessimistic view of human nature or that he thinks that our existence is pointless. This is almost the complete opposite of his genuine opinion. Firstly, DSTOvski is not a nihilist but a fiercely religious man who believes that to actively love one another is what gives life meaning along with his faith in God. And secondly, although DSTVKI does portray

37:47 many people at their lowest, he also believes in mankind's extraordinary potential. In some of his later works, like the dream of a ridiculous man and his final public address at the unveiling of Pushkin Statue, DSTVKI expresses his belief that mankind genuinely could unite in universal love, that it is not contrary to our nature to do so. He admits that this possibility is remote but nonetheless he thinks it is something we could actually work towards. There are very few other thinkers that are willing to see this much nent greatness and goodness within humanity and even dstovski points this out calling his own view ridiculous. Nonetheless, he thinks that anything, be it pain or sacrifice or turmoil, can be

38:36 enobled, provided that it is bringing us closer to this world where we can all partake in the active love of one another. Far from being pessimistic, this is one of the most optimistic visions for the future that I have ever seen. It is so optimistic that even DSTVski tempers it with a small touch of self-mockery. But that's my list. If you want to check out some book recommendations, including some that these quotes have come from, then you can watch a video of that right here. Thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful day.