Overcoming the bias of artifact …

… “The Idiot” savant by Gary Saul Morson | The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

At some point it occurred to Dostoevsky that, apart from testing the Christian ideal, his work had acquired another theme: the nature of time as people experience it. In its psychological, political, and philosophical passages, the novel develops the idea that time is truly open. There are more possibilities than actualities, and whatever does happen, something else might have. Dostoevsky also realized that writing without an advance plan was in fact the best way to depict the openness of time. Determinism tells us that the future is already given, and for conventional novels it is. If freedom is an illusion, then we resemble characters whose efforts can only bring about the future the author has contrived. In The Idiot, that is not the case. The author found out what would happen only when the characters did. He was no less surprised than they were.