Good Morning,

Happy Tuesday, everyone. This is our 50th edition of Thought Breakfast!! With that, I have one small announcement: Thought Breakfast is now on Instagram! No posts yet, but my DMs are open if you ever want to send topic ideas, questions, or anything else you’d like me to explore! You can find it on Instagram @thoughtbreakfast, and don’t be shy! I want to hear from you all!

Today, for our main course, we’re going to learn a little bit from someone new: Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Russian existentialist has had an influential impact on the school of thought, so we would be remiss to skip over him. Burning that off, we’re going to do a little meditation on freedom. Wrapping up with our Book Nook, we’re going to read a short excerpt from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Pull up your seat. Thought Breakfast is served!

The word “Freedom” carries with it cultural assumptions. The modern fantasy of absolute freedom insinuates that freedom means the absence of constraint, and therefore responsibility becomes a limitation to freedom. Dostoevsky challenges that idea, asserting that freedom without responsibility doesn’t feel expansive, but more overwhelming, anxious, and isolating. So Dostoevsky doesn’t ask whether humans want freedom. He asks whether we can survive it without meaning.

In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the protagonist, Ivan Karamazov, says, “Everything is permitted.” With regard to freedom, he didn’t mean this as a celebration, but a diagnosis. If there’s no ultimate meaning and no higher good; moral categories dissolve in front of us and choice becomes arbitrary. The result is that freedom turns inward and collapses into guilt. Simply put, when nothing is forbidden, nothing is justified either.

Another major part of Dostoevsky’s philosophy highlights the feeling of guilt. But to Dostoevsky, guilt isn’t the result of breaking rules or social shame. It’s the burden of knowing you could have chosen otherwise, and living with the knowledge of the endless line of possibilities that could have resulted from a different choice. Most of the characters in his novels aren’t tormented by exterior punishment, but by interior awareness. Coming back to freedom, guilt is freedom remembered too late.

His emphasis on this idea of freedom is highlighted in a story within a story. Within The Brothers Karamazov, is a story called The Grand Inquisitor. This short story is meant to explain why people fear freedom. Humans often trade freedom for certainty. The inquisitor claims that people want bread, authority, and stability without the burden of choosing meaning. Dostoevsky’s warning within the text is that when freedom is unbearable, people will submit to systems that remove responsibility. We actually see his warning playing out in the modern day; algorithms, ideologies, moral outsourcing, and the “just tell me what to think” mentality that so many people have.

Dostoevsky’s conclusion in his philosophy is that freedom requires a moral orientation, responsibility, and a willingness to carry guilt (or regret, as we understand it). Without these things, freedom ultimately corrodes the self and anxiety turns into despair.

Wrapped in one sentence, freedom without responsibility wouldn’t make us gods. It would make us haunted by ourselves.

Ask yourself:

Let that sit for a moment.

“He had become so tormented by anxiety and restlessness that he could not remain long in one place. He felt as though something terrible were hanging over him, pressing upon him and crushing him… He wanted to escape from himself, but there was nowhere to go.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Part II

*SPOILER ALERT

This passage comes after the main character, Raskolnikov, commits a murder. Dostoevsky shows us here that no external punishment is needed for suffering to begin. Guilt emerges internally as a psychological and existential weight.

His torment is not the fear of being caught and punished, but it’s the collapse of a self that tried to separate freedom from responsibility. He wanted freedom to be without moral consequence, but instead found himself trapped in his own consciousness. That is arguably worse than being physically trapped in a jail cell.

Munch on that for today. Dostoevsky has a dark but effective method of portraying his philosophy and I highly recommend reading some of his works if you’re interested. Have a great day, remember that freedom and responsibility are mutually necessary, and live life accordingly. Come on back tomorrow for another steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast!

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Remember to stay mindful, smell the flowers, and take it easy.

Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast