The Will to Live
In 1868, in Russia, Dostoyevski published Crime and Punishment , and later in 1880 published The Brothers Karamazov , not long before his death. In the 1870’s, a continent away in Europe, Nietzsche was developing himself and his philosophy, and it wasn’t until after Dostoyevski’s death that Nietzsche published Thus Spoke Zarathustra , and Beyond Good and Evil . My experience of these authors, however, was the opposite order. I first read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the early 1990’s, and a few years later Crime and Punishment . There could hardly have been a better parry to “God is Dead” than Dostoyevski’s “If there is no God, everything is permitted,” and that ended the “debate” for me, for the time. These many years later I found that both Dostoyevski and Nietzsche were responding to similar philosophies, Dostoyevski to Russian nihilists, Nietzsche to German skeptics. If you don’t believe in an Evil One who works to deceive the human race, I can sympathize. But e