Essence and Existence

At the heart of every human being lie desires for freedom, for free love, for forgiveness, for meaning, and above all, for God; and at the very same heart are harbored a dread (an 'insupportable burden') of free-choice, appeal for justice (in terms of punishment or revenge), animalistic drive (passion), and desire for evil. Man is a contradiction, a contradiction between the heart and the mind, or between passion and reason, or between body and soul, and between good and evil or between God and Devil. And it is this contradiction that one finds in The Brothers Karamazov-a novel by the Russian author, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. The novel is about God, virtue/morality, human nature, etc. and this book (entitled, Essence and Existence: Human Predicament in the Search of Meaning Within and Beyond Oneself in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov) is a study of these human issues. The general objectives of the study are to explore human predicament in the search of God and meaning of life, to show the relationship between human virtue and God/immortality and to illustrate how the question of the existence and essence of God are addressed and how human nature is manifested.