Crime and punishment

When you finish reading a book and stare at the wall of your room for ten minutes, you can tell it was a good book.

The philosophy of Fyodor Dostoevsky warns us about positivism and the progress of technology. In fact, at that time, like now, it was widespread, the idea that with rationality, as humans, we could understand the deeper universal structure and get closer to the comprehension of God.

Dostoevsky, with this book, tells us about a very intelligent student who suffers from his poverty. He is a rationalist, a positivist, and believes in the primacy of technology; he is the perfect Nietzschean new man who can create his own values, or so he thinks.

Raskol'nikov commits a murder of an old usurer, with all the good intentions of making the world a better place; in fact, it is true, but our hero will discover that for some things all the good reasons aren't enough, and he will experience an inner punishment way worse than jail.

Everything he thought about himself was an illusion; he's never been the Übermensch. He cannot get through life only with his own reason, because our life doesn't belong to our rational mind. It can only create the reality we live in, which is a lot different from the universal structure of the divine plan to which we belong, so our values are much deeper than our reason.

In conclusion, Dostoevsky, after two centuries, is still warning us about the tragedy of meeting the deepest point of our souls, where every mask falls, the ego dies, and what we see is not what we thought we were.