The Brothers Karamazov

Perhaps the greatest philosophical novel of the Western tradition, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov raises and treats such fundamental issues as the existence of God, the problem of evil, the relation between religion and morality, the nature of morality, the relation between psychology and philosophy, the relations between motivation, explanation, and justification, the relation between faith and reason, and the nature and power of rationality, and the role of reason in human life. Dostoyevsky's great work does not simply raise such issues, however. In treating them, it teaches us about them; we learn from the novel, and understand more after readingit than before. We might wonder how this teaching gets accomplished. After all, none of the major characters is a teacher, at least as that term is traditionally understood; there are no Gradgrinds or Miss Jean Brodies here. The Brothers Karamazov teaches us, but it is not easy to say how. My aim in this essay is to examine the nature of the teaching of this text. In doing so, I will appeal to some philosophical accounts of teaching. But my main concern will be with the text itself: with the lessons it teaches us and with the way those lessons are taught. I hope that the discussion will point beyond Dostoyevsky's novel, and suggest more general lessons concerning the pedagogical possibilities of philosophical fiction. In particular, I will urge that reasons and the fostering of rationality are central to teaching and to education more generally; that fiction affords access to a particular class or type of reasons--"felt" reasons (which are basic to rationality and which fiction is particularly well suited to exploit and utilize); and that understanding the nature and role of such felt reasons in The Brothers Karamazov allows us to understand the brilliant way in which