{"id":233915,"date":"2023-05-01T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2023-05-01T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=233915"},"modified":"2023-04-21T04:02:23","modified_gmt":"2023-04-21T03:02:23","slug":"dostoyevsky-on-animal-rights-and-the-deepest-meaning-of-human-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/05\/dostoyevsky-on-animal-rights-and-the-deepest-meaning-of-human-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Dostoyevsky on Animal Rights and the Deepest Meaning of Human Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cTreasure this ecstasy; however absurd people may think it.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cLove the earth and sun and the animals,\u201d Walt Whitman wrote in his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life<\/a> \u2014 advice anchored, like his poetry, in that all-enveloping totality of goodwill that makes life worth living, advice at the heart of which is the act of unselfing<\/a>; poetry largely inspired by the prose of Emerson, who had written of the \u201csecret sympathy which connects men to all the animals, and to all the inanimate world around him.\u201d<\/p>\n

A quarter century after Leaves of Grass<\/em>, Fyodor Dostoyevsky<\/strong> (November 11, 1821\u2013February 9, 1881) took up this bright urgency in his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a> | public domain<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 one of the great moral masterworks in the history of literature.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dostoyevsky \u2014 who felt deeply the throes of personal love<\/a> \u2014 contours the largest meaning of love:<\/p>\n

Love every leaf\u2026 Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and untroubled joy. So do not trouble it, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their joy, do not go against God\u2019s intent. Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals: they are without sin, while you in your majesty defile the earth by your appearance on it, and you leave the traces of your defilement behind you \u2014 alas, this is true of almost every one of us!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In our era of ecological collapse, as we reckon with what it means to pay reparations to our home planet, the next passage rings with especial poignancy, painting the antidote to the indifference that got us where we are:<\/p>\n

My young brother asked even the birds to forgive him. It may sound absurd, but it is right none the less, for everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else: touch one place, and you set up a movement at the other end of the world. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but, then, it would be easier for the birds, and for the child, and for every animal if you were yourself more pleasant than you are now. Everything is like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds, too, consumed by a universal love, as though in ecstasy, and ask that they, too, should forgive your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however absurd people may think it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Shelley\u2019s prescient case for animal rights<\/a> and Christopher Hitchens on the lesser appreciated moral of Orwell\u2019s Animal Farm<\/em><\/a>, then revisit Dostoyevsky, just after his death sentence was repealed, on the meaning of life<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> My name is Maria Popova<\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What <\/em>is<\/em> all this? (More<\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTreasure this ecstasy; however absurd people may think it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":117695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[619,570,1736,307,1177,2553,3003],"class_list":["post-233915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-animal-rights","tag-animals","tag-fyodor-dostoyevsky","tag-humanity","tag-inspirational","tag-love","tag-violence-against-animals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233915"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233917,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233915\/revisions\/233917"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}