I have to make a confession here, at the beginning of this post I fully intended to pull Zosima out of the extremes of ethical altruism and place him firmly in the midst of something with less reckless disregard for the self. I say “intended” because as I began reading and probing more deeply, I realized that Dostoevsky had already done it! Zosima wasn’t the monk I thought him to be. There are many facets to this revelation, but we can clearly see the most relevant one above. We don’t end with losing the self, we end with fulfilling it!

As we will see, Fyodor Dostoevsky starts off very strong in The Brothers Karamazov. Almost as soon as the book begins, he has us contemplating God, faith, and the afterlife. This is an odd topic indeed for a whodunit centered around what bears a striking resemblance to a discombobulated family reunion. There are all sorts in the Karamazov family, and Dostoevsky leverages their variety well. It seems that for every vice, there is a man with it, and one for every virtue as well, though these can be more subtle in their nature. There is, however, one man of virtue who stands out from the rest. He mentors the eventual hero of the novel and is even a bit of a celebrity himself–Father Zosima. It is he that we find discussing God, faith, and the afterlife with Madame Hohlakov in the opening chapters of part 1 of the book, and it is his ethic which we will be looking at next.

“Who is John Galt?”–this is the opening line and indeed the most prevalent question in the entirety of Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged (11). It is repeated from one side of the country to the other and by many different people. It is an expression of hopelessness in a world filled with despair. The dystopian world of Atlas Shrugged is the creation of altruists, looters, and moochers. Galt might believe “created” to be a strong word, since, in his view, it is actually their lack of creating that brought about this dystopian state. He particularly blames those in politics, who make deals to take assets from the producers by force; and distribute them to their friends and those who don’t produce.

In this series of posts, I will attempt a sympathetic critique of two extreme and conflicting philosophies– Objectivism, specifically the Objectivist ethic as embodied by John Galt from Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and the ethic of Father Zosima from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. As a result of my critique, I will attempt to combine their remainders into a single philosophical position more sound than its component parts.