Ep. 135: Quality and Quantity

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2022

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When the Devil visits Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov, he looks at first like a rather unimpressive gentleman. But lurking under his seemingly distracted conversation is a sinister depiction of the world broken down into infinite matter, formless and void. What answer can we possibly give to this satanic vision? Spencer Klavan explores Dostoevsky's alternative to modernist perdition.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	At every turn, we are confronted with the problem of whether anything stays the same,
0:04.6	whether behind all our works of art and theories of life there stands some truth, goodness,
0:09.6	or beauty to which everything refers and against which the morality of actions can be judged.
0:14.7	I have tried to stress that these are the only two options, either an immutable bedrock of
0:19.6	something that just is, however dimly we perceive it, however haltingly we approach toward it,
0:25.2	or else a howling wasteland of arbitrary power and aggression.
0:28.8	Strictly speaking, however, this does not prove anything. Maybe the howling wasteland is the truth
0:34.7	of things. Maybe our reason is a cruel illusion and our sense of truth, a side effect of our
0:39.3	torturously complex brains. The fact that we need to act as if some baseline reality exists
0:45.1	does not in itself prove that our precious baseline reality actually exists. If it does not,
0:50.6	we are deeply in trouble, but that is no proof that it does. I'm not going to furnish such proof
0:56.1	in this section. I would be foolish to try, as I have been hinting throughout the question of
1:00.4	an ultimate final reality is the question of God. I have adduced a few citations to indicate
1:05.0	that Jewish wisdom and Christian theology are in harmony with the pagan ideas whose truth
1:08.9	can help alleviate our current anxieties. But I have avoided relying too heavily on chapter
1:13.4	and verse simply because my intention is not to evangelize you into a particular sect.
1:18.1	I belong to one such sect, such sects myself, and I can confidently say that everyone in the world
1:22.9	should convert to it. But we are nowhere near having that conversation. The questions we are
1:27.2	grappling with the society are far more basic than which sects to join. They are not, for instance,
1:32.8	does God have three persons or do Christians need a pope? But is there such a thing as truth at all?
1:38.4	These are not questions I am going to answer by whacking you over the head repeatedly with the
1:42.1	nice scene creed. Nor am I going to produce from out of my hat some definitive proof that renders
	...

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