In 1864, Russia and the Western world was experiencing a philosophical reversal with reverberations that can still be felt almost two hundred years later. One by one “unquestionable” truths were being placed in the dust bin by a cold rationality. The attack on humanity’s placement of itself in the universe started over three hundred years earlier, when a polymath named Copernicus rediscovered the forgotten truth that we are not the center of the universe. Ever since then, the more scientific details that are catalogued about the world, the further man is pushed from that once prized and secure position. There are two main ideas that the underground man (UM) simultaneously seems to prove by his actions and disapprove of by his words. First is man as nature, the second is man as automata, and by extension nature as automata. It had only been five years since Charles Darwin had written ‘On the Origin of Species’ and already Dostoyevsky has incorporated his theory and worked out what he sees as its possible ramifications. Chiefly that of an alienated human that is horrified to look in the mirror and see no-thing looking back. In an opening note to the book Dostoevsky makes clear that the UM is an inevitable product of the spread of these two ideologies. The book opens with the memorable tripartition of the UM.
I’m a sick man…I’m a spiteful man, I’m an unattractive man.
This opening salvo is as confident a summation of himself as you will get from the UM, by the time we reach chapter six it becomes clear that part of his internal turmoil is that he can not manage to be anything completely. What is a man who hasn’t become anything? The contradictory self-description is another main theme and product of the age. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to describe others but when it comes to oneself, contradictions must be employed and even then, the description is never quite complete.
The next important concept the UM introduces is his distinction between the “man of action” and the UM (i.e. inert, spiteful, conscious, retort man). The man of action is the individual that has assimilated his education without letting it change his outlook. He has adjusted to society without seeing what he has given up. He looks at problems in the world with confidence in his ability to divine the answer, and if there is no answer this also does not cause him to lose sleep. The man of action is characterized as being able to act due to his “limited consciousness”. To the UM this is how nature intended man to be, the UM thinks that if someone has let their consciousness be expanded by the education available in the 19th century they would be none the better for it. Standing in contrast to the “man of action”, the UM and his ilk cannot help but be inert. They see through everything including themselves. This means that there is almost nothing that they can honestly do other than “sink into luxurious inertia…”. He works this out mainly through investigating revenge. His claim is that the man of action can take revenge because he confuses primary causes for secondary ones, whereas the UM is not confused. The two examples he uses, seem almost to be abstruse on purpose. The first example is that the UM claims that at certain moments he would have been “positively glad” to be slapped in the face. This theme shows up again several times later in his memoir, and its meaning is up for interpretation. Here the emphasis is on the laws of nature, later it seems to be more about recognition. The second example is a memorable psychoanalysis of an educated man suffering from a toothache. In both examples, the UM is making the case that there can be a type of pleasure found in the deepest of despair. This is part of a larger observation that he is making on the human condition, which is that man in some appreciable sense seeks out suffering. Both the slap in the face and the toothache also represent what he calls a stone wall, which is twice two makes four, from different angles. The slap in the face highlights the superficiality of revenge or anger because one does not get angry or take revenge on natural laws. The mistake is assigning the primary cause of the slap to the person instead of a long string of events that lead from the beginning of time to this very moment. Due to these events, it could not have occurred in any other way. The man who slapped you, is no more to blame than a tornado or a single domino in a line of toppling dominos. A similar thing occurs to the educated man suffering from a toothache. The toothache destroys any illusions of autonomy, in that moment it becomes clear that he is a slave to everything. In this instance his teeth. This results in groans that are no longer only due to pain, but also that illusive pleasure that is found in despair. What makes these events more poignant, is that the “truth” that the conscious man knows, does not spare him from the experience that he experiences.
by the way of the most inevitable, logical combinations to reach the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a bit of juggling, a card-sharper’s trick, that it is simply a mess, no knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these uncertainties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the more you do not know, the worse the ache.
This is the stone wall, the twice two makes four. The fact that can’t be disproved by logic but can’t be reconciled to experience. Nature does not care what our experience is, twice two goes on being four despite our willing it to be different. The result is inertia and the inability to become anything, what is a domino to do when it has found out that it is in fact a domino?
Here the UM transitions to attacking an idea that is still commonly held today, which is the idea that if man knew his own interests, he would not act against them. The UM thinks this is ultimately naïve because man does not always act rationally. For example, he says that every list of human “advantages” that is compiled (think wealth, health, stability, etc) always leaves out the most important advantage of all, which is the ability to act against every advantage. The argument goes like this, that the laws of nature dictate that every human action is caused by a previous action and therefore future actions can be calculated as soon as these laws are known. Once all the factors are tabulated the future will become dull and the human race will cease to exist. He says this because he believes that reason is good, but it doesn’t make up one tenth of what it means to be human. Yet even so it wants to have control over the whole show. To escape becoming an automaton the last resort is to throw off reason and embrace the rest of life. Caprices and desires that arise from parts unknown remain unexplained. The UM argues that humanity will spend most of its time trying to prove to themselves that they are more than a piano key. That this “desire” is the last stronghold for humanity. If we don’t know where desire comes from, but we know it doesn’t come from reason could it perhaps come from ourselves?
Modernity has largely been a time of dissection. No longer the handiwork of a benevolent benefactor, the totality of the soul has been cut into various systems, the limbic system, the digestive system, the nervous system, and so on. Yet when we attempt to put these systems back together, they fail to make a whole. They fail to justify the experience of what it is like to be human, and therefore we have gained a greater knowledge about our parts but have gotten further away from understanding their aggregation.
This leads to another key insight from the UM into the human condition, and that is our relationship to goals. Humans need goals, we can not live without them, but the goals themselves are illusory. Once achieved they are in immediate need of replacing. This is one reason why life goals need to be abstract. In some sense they need to be unreachable. Like that old saying “never meet your heroes” if one places too much importance on the goal itself, they will likely be disappointed upon reaching it. Have you ever noticed that fairy tales always end with “and they lived happily ever after” but they can never describe what that would look like. This isn’t because they are bad writers, it is because to live happily ever after you would need to cease to be human. This is one of the UM’s key critiques of utopias whether they are in this life or the next, part of being human is the ability to act against one’s own advantages and would therefore instantly destroy any utopia they occupy. This is a rebuke to any system that promises utopia if only its rules are followed. You can, in some sense gain the world but you will lose your soul.
This is when the UM recounts a couple stories of past events. It is essentially a sketch of what the UM looks like when interacting with the world. It is a concrete representation of the previous abstract concepts. I hadn’t realized it, but this book was written prior to “The Idiot”. My main critique of The Idiot was that in the book there is an assumption that where there is honesty, there is goodness. This was not being fair to Dostoyevsky, because the narrative part of this book lays out (as honestly as the UM can manage) a recounting of someone who is honestly bad. In some ways the story can be seen as a confession or an attempt to ease the suffering of particularly painful memories. I think the best ending to this review would be to let the UM end it himself.
Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but … hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don’t know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we … yes, I assure you … we should be begging to be under control again at once. I know that you will very likely be angry with me for that, and will begin shouting and stamping. Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your underground holes, and don’t dare to say all of us—excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that “all of us.” As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what’s more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don’t even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don’t want to write more from “Underground.”