Love, attention and teaching: Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

ABSTRACT

Fyodor Dostoevsky's final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, is one of the most influential works of the nineteenth century. To date, however, the potential value of the book for educationists has been largely ignored. This article addresses a key pedagogical theme in The Brothers Karamazov, namely, the notion that ‘love is a teacher’. Love as Dostoevsky understands it is active and difficult; it focuses not on the abstract idea of loving humankind but on the messy particulars of everyday life. Active love, it will be argued, has much in common with Iris Murdoch's concept of attention. The first part of the article examines several passages in The Brothers Karamazov that address the theme of active love. The second section analyses these examples from the text in the light of Murdoch's ideas and explores some of their broader educational implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Dostoevsky
• love
• attention
• literature
• teaching

Acknowledgements

This article is a shortened and revised version of one chapter in Roberts, P. & Saeverot, H. (2018). Education and the limits of reason: Reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nabokov. New York: Routledge (pp. 28–46). Material from the book is reproduced here with the permission of the publisher. I also wish to acknowledge the helpful feedback provided by the Editor-in-Chief and two reviewers for the Open Review of Educational Research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Peter Roberts is Professor of Education and Director of the Educational Theory, Policy and Practice Research Hub at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. His primary areas of scholarship are philosophy of education and educational policy studies. His research interests include the ethics and politics of education, literature and education, the pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and tertiary education policy.

Notes

1. As one of the reviewers of this article observed, the notion of attention is also an important theme in the work of Nel Noddings. For a discussion of the connections between attention and care in Noddings’ writings, see Gendron (2016).

2. A situational account of love can be helpful in recognising that as we respond to others, we are doing so at a given moment in time, in a specific context. Thus, perceptions of repugnance may differ from one situation to another. Acquiring an understanding of possibilities for different modes of being in different contexts is part of the process of learning to pay attention. I owe this point to one of the reviewers.

3. See also Carr (2010) on the impact of the Internet on the human brain. I am grateful to one of the reviewers for drawing this work to my attention.

4. See further, Bakhtin (1984); Lensmire (1997); Roberts (2005).