Alex Tarnava on the “stone wall,” scientism, hardship, and the limits to our ability we cannot simply wish away.
Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.
VG: “Understanding this hurts, and it should hurt,” you state in a reading from StressHacked wherein you discuss the meaning of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s concept “The Stone Wall”: that is, the immutable, unchangeable, and undeniable aspect of our human nature/existence that we cannot simply wish away, just like two times two is four; it is a barrier to our realization or enlightenment, what Johann Fichte calls an Anstoß.
I have relayed to you that I am not the biggest Dostoevsky “fan.” Not because his work is too dark, but because I find narrative “philosophy” too tedious—Franz Kafka wins over Dostoevsky for me solely because his books are shorter. But, I am a fan of Notes From Underground, not least of which because it is Dostoevsky’s shortest work. One of my favorite passages is the following, where Dostoevsky sardonically critiques scientism:
science itself will teach man…that in fact he has neither will nor caprice, and never did have any, and that he himself is nothing but a sort of piano key or a sprig in an organ; and that, furthermore, there also exist in the world the laws of nature; so that whatever he does is done not at all according to his own wanting, but of itself, according to the laws of nature. Consequently, these laws of nature need only be discovered, and then man will no longer be answerable for his actions, and his life will become extremely easy. Needless to say, all human actions will then be calculated according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, up to 108,000, and entered into a calendar; or, better still, some well-meaning publications will appear, like the present-day encyclopaedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and designated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world.
“There will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world.” “Life will become extremely easy.” Do you believe there are any mysteries in the universe—questions we will never get an answer to—or do you believe, as Charles Peirce did, that every mystery is just a question waiting to be answered? Relatedly, do you believe there should be something unknowable to the human experience, because otherwise we would be (loveless) automatons? This is another way of asking: are you a romantic?
Dostoevsky’s critique of science bringing us all the answers and an easy life is isomorphic, I believe, to something Arthur Schopenhauer stated in his essay “On The Sufferings of the World.” You outlined your problems with Schopenhauer in your book The Stone Wall (named after Dostoevsky’s concept), but I’ll leave this passage here if you want to tie a bow on the relationship between ‘knowing-it-all’ and feeling contentment, that Schopenhauer alludes to in his essay:
If all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? What would they do with their time? If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.
AT: I first want to pause and have the reader consider the prescience of this sardonic passage from Dostoevsky. To me, this speaks loudly to his almost unmatched insight into humanity.
Now that this is out of the way, I’m going to have to wryly ask if you are trolling me on purpose, or just simply want to give away all the insights in The Stone Wall before release? This is a question, whether everything about the human experience is knowable, that I discuss in a certain interlude you pushed me to engage in.
To this I will add another layer: consider, is there a difference between knowable, from a conceptual level, and conquerable, meaning our ability to subdue, manipulate, or redirect an innate tendency regarding our existence to our will? Additionally, if something is partially knowable, and partially conquerable, leading to a state in which we must acknowledge our lack of agency, through understanding, just to transmute it to greater agency, have we conquered and understood the thing? Or simply found a clever way to trick ourselves into believing we did, within the prison we can never truly understand, or escape?
Of course, the entire message in StressHacked is that an easy life leads to unhappiness and hardship, and conversely, when we are hard on ourselves, intentionally so and with proper strategy, life will become exponentially more fulfilling, “easier,” and more worthwhile. Dostoevsky clearly understood this more than a century ago. Of course, Aristotle understood this millennia ago. Dostoevsky, to his credit, saw clearly “which way the winds blew,” synthesizing the direction of scientific research, with psychological understanding, to a prescient forecast of our future despair. You said in the epilogue of The Stone Wall something to the effect of “when a philosopher warns of which way the wind blows, we should take heed.” Dostoevsky warned, and we failed to listen.
VG: I assure you I’m not trolling—at least not explicitly. To philosophize is to troll, to one degree or another, as I argue in The Stone Wall. I think there is a relationship between knowing something and conquering it, as you describe in your response to me. In a way, maybe all knowing is is conquering. This seems to me to be the message of Michel Foucault.
The reason I asked you about romance is because to love is to not know, at least some of the time. It reminds me of what Otto Weininger states, “One can only love what they understand.” He’s fundamentally wrong about this. Love resides in mystery.
In my responses to you in The Stone Wall, I reference gnosis (a Greek word for knowledge, meaning that knowledge you experience; another being episteme which means basically ‘knowing facts’) and gnosticism, a practice that emerges out of the pursuit of experiential understanding that some people have categorized as a religion or mystical activity. The act of understanding something certainly grants one power over it (whether or not this power is illusory, as you note), and it may reduce love, if you buy my equation that love is predicated on mystery. Interestingly, the Christian Church persecuted gnostics because 1) the doctrines they put forth were heretical, and 2) to give credit where it’s due, I think the Church rightly understood that allowing people to ‘understand everything’ will drive them mad (and it did in many cases of these gnostic mystics).
Speaking epistemologically, I am a pragmatist because I believe what knowledge we retain is what has use to us. A lot of knowledge is not practical; it is therapeutic. Gnostic beliefs may be this. Perhaps Dostoevsky’s message didn’t resonate with the public because it’s not comforting. However, if it’s any consolation (and it’s not really meant this way) if life becomes uncomfortable enough we may start to find a little more therapy and use in the words that Dostoevsky offers to us.
AT: In this sense, it is often that like pursues like. However, in the chaos of amplifying the “like,” in the case of Dostoevsky—or Nietzsche, who we spoke about last week—sometimes, by properly inoculating ourselves through submerging ourselves in the painful words and observations of others, we are able to free ourselves of the shackles that our own pain has entrapped us. Like, amplified by like, becomes opposite, and we emerge strong, or on the path to strength. Of course, if like pursues unwavering like, a point I make in The Stone Wall in regards to Schopenhauer, the like can become amplified rather than inverted, and the outcomes are often catastrophic. All one has to do is count the bodies of Schopenhauer’s disciples who took their own lives.
I recorded a podcast earlier today and the host asked me how I became a good writer, and speaker. I responded that I became good at them, precisely because I was naturally bad at them, and that I believe we often cannot truly excel at a task unless we first struggled with it. This is true for philosophical strength, also. It is likely, from my observation, that for true strength to emerge we must first have experienced weakness and vulnerability. Critically, we must have experienced it in a manner that didn’t break us, and allowed reprieve at precisely the right moment. In this sense, the acquisition of strength is luck, and since it is forged in chaos and despair, it is perhaps unethical to subject others to the necessary path—lest we risk breaking them. But we must, for the alternative is a reality in which all are weak, where none are afforded the opportunity to seize strength.
So we must contemplate how to create this measured stress, tempered chaos. I discuss this concept in my third book, which is likely to be released late 2026, on the subject of education, Manufacturing Minds: The Education System’s War on Free Thought.
