Transcription
This is the most important book I have ever read. It fundamentally changed me as a person and prevented me from going down some truly dark paths in my life. If there is one thing I wish everyone in the world could read, it is this.
This is Theodore Dosstoyvki's Notes from Underground. Walter Calfman called it the best overture for existential philosophy ever written. And it convinced nature that dstovski was the greatest psychologist of his age and the only one that nature had anything to learn from. It is the story of the most repulsive, the most wicked, and the most hatable man in literature. And it's also a story about us exposing the darkest aspects of our psyche that we often like to pretend simply aren't there.
So today we are going to dissect this work of utter genius piece by piece to illustrate why I truly think that it can change your life and is one of the best books ever written. At points this video may be deeply upsetting and it's totally fine if you want to watch it in chunks. But I do recommend that you finish the whole thing as I promise it will be worth it. My name is Joe Folly and this is unsolicited advice.
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But anyway, back to the video.
One, notes from underground. A brief recap.
"I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man." These are the first words we hear from the underground man. And to be honest, it doesn't get much happier from there. At its core, this book is a confession. It is the testament of a man who has lived a squalid, cruel and pointless existence. It outlines both his philosophy in the abstract and how he behaves in practice.
Notes from underground is divided into two parts. The first part is simply called underground and is a sort of twisted essay where our anti-heroic protagonist outlines his theories about mankind, education, egoism, and more. He tells us a few anecdotes about his time in the civil service. He talks about how he used to enjoy tormenting people and denying their requests. How he loved having power over others but found the work dull and dreary and beneath him. And how he quit at the first opportunity to live in his tiny flat somewhere in St. Petersburg. We'll be coming back to these pages a lot in this video as these are the unimpeded self-reflections of the underground man and perhaps the clearest outline of how he sees himself and the world. We also learn some general details about the man. He is 40 years old. He's not sure who he's writing any of this to or to what end. And he considers himself extremely intelligent, capable of contemplating everything that is beautiful and lofty. At the end of this section, he tells us he will relay some stories from his youth just to illustrate his character further.
We also learn that the ultimate aim of notes from underground is for the protagonist to talk about himself. This is where the next section app at propo of the wet snow begins. And here are two bizarre tales from when the underground man was in his 20s. The exact significance of these stories in particular is never quite made clear, apart from that their memory oppresses the underground man, and that if he relates them to us, he feels that he may rid himself of this nagging pain. I'll leave it to you to decide if this worked in the slightest.
The first story is an encounter the man had with an officer. He was in a tavern one day and was in the officer's way, but rather than ask him to move, the officer simply physically moved him aside without acknowledging him at all. The underground man proclaims that he could have withstood even a beating. But this action, which carried with it the implicit message that the man was not even worth talking to, not even worth considering, burned him up inside. The underground man is torn. Sometimes he wants to make the officer his friend. Sometimes he wants to do him the worst. And sometimes both at the same time. He tells us that this slight tormented him for two full years until he finally conjured up a plan for revenge. You might think that he wanted to kill the officer or hurt him or otherwise make him feel the same sort of pain the underground man professes to have had. But the truth is even stranger. The underground man notices that on a particular street the officer walks through almost every day, he will always give way to those of higher rank with him, but will not move for those lower than him. The underground man states that he must bump the officer and refuse to yield to his force or his status. He tries many, many times, but often bows out at the last minute and gives way to the soldier. But finally, having gone into debt to buy some fine clothes for the occasion, he steals his nerves and bumps the officer, imagining that this officer will always remember the insult of a social inferior refusing to give way to him. The underground man retires to his bed and describes the vivid excitement that he felt. Clearly, it was worth the 2 years of stewing. "He did not even look back and pretended not to notice, but he only pretended. I'm sure of that. To this day, I'm sure of it. Of course, I got the worst of it. He was stronger, but that was not the point. The point was that I had preserved my dignity and placed myself publicly on an equal footing with him. I was in ecstasy."
The second story is significantly darker and a little less comic. The underground man goes to visit an old friend, Simonov, only to discover that a group of people from his old school are going out to dinner together the next day to celebrate the departure of Zerkov, who himself is a military officer and also attended the underground man's school. We get a glimpse as to what the man's early life was like. He felt rejected by his fellows at school and his family who sent him there. Yet, he also considered himself infinitely superior to them. He thought that he was cleverer, more philosophical, more refined, more educated, and yet he still found that he would hanker after their approval. He said that he did have one friend at school, but that he tyrannized him until he was broken. And we never find out exactly what happened to that unfortunate friend. The underground man invites himself to dinner the next day and is told to arrive at 5:00. When he does arrive, it turns out that he was given the wrong time and that dinner was due to start at 6:00. This may seem like a total triviality to most, but to the underground man, it is evidence of everything he feared. These people set out to humiliate him after all. He insults them before ignoring them for the remainder of the dinner, but they take no notice and have a good time anyway. When they go to leave, the underground man suddenly begs their forgiveness in a fit of desperation, which they simply do not give him, and they head to a brothel. He also begs Simonov for six rubles to join them, which he gives him with disgust, calling the underground man shameless. The underground man then decides he must either make these people love him, or he must find Zurkov and slap him in the face to restore his honor.
When he arrives at the brothel, he meets Liza, a young woman of 20 who has become a lady of the night out of desperation. The underground man mocks her, telling her that although she is young and beautiful now, she will soon be washed up and die of some horrible disease with no one to mourn her. She will be considered lower than scum. and everyone who seems to care about her now, the madam, the fellow workers, even her clients, will be anxious to see her shuffle off this mortal coil. He fully expects her to hate him, but she strangely respects these brutal proclamations, and the underground man tells her to visit him at his house. There he waits in fear and trembling. The other night. He thinks he managed to be temporarily heroic, giving Liza his address and implying that he would help her. But when she visits him, that illusion would be destroyed as his poverty will be revealed. Who would love him, pathetic, spiteful, and ugly as he is.
When Liza does arrive, the underground man unexpectedly breaks down. He is finally honest to someone about how he feels about himself. And he says, "I'm a scoundrel because I'm the most vile, the most ridiculous, the most petty, the most stupid, the most envious of all the worms on Earth. They won't let me. I can't be good." He begs her to leave and attempt to drive her off, but Liza embraces him instead. This seems like it could be a turning point. In almost any other story, the underground man would at last find some precious connection with another human being. But this is not most stories. The underground man simply does not know how to react to this sort of kindness and delivers her an insult that could never be taken back. He gives her a crumpled five rubal note indicating that this was not an interaction between two human beings, but he was just paying her for her services. She throws the note down and runs out of his little dwelling. He goes after her, but soon thinks better of it and scurries back to his den. The underground man tells us that even all these years later, this is one of his most painful memories. He then lets us know that he will stop writing, but we are told that the notes go on and on.
Notes from underground is a peak into the mind of perhaps the most unpleasant character in fiction. Sure, there are people who've done worse things, but none of them get under my skin quite like the underground man. Maybe because his evil, his malice is of the everyday variety. It is an extreme version of something most of us can quite sadly relate to. And that is why analyzing this book is perhaps one of the most painful yet valuable exercises a person can do. This is a man intent on his own self-destruction. and perhaps he is more like us than we would like to admit.
So, let's start upon one of the main themes of the book and one of the underground man's chief torments. If you want to help me make more videos like this, then please consider subscribing to the channel or if you're feeling extraordinarily generous supporting the channel on Patreon to gain access to occasional exclusive content.
Two, hyperconsciousness.
"I assure you, gentlemen, that to be excessively conscious is a disease. A real full-blown disease." If you've clicked on a dsttoyki video, then you are almost certainly the kind of person who quite likes to think and to reflect. This is not a bad thing in the slightest. To be able to examine your own life and your own experience is a necessary step to changing it, or at least realizing that you might have more to appreciate than you initially thought. But the underground man's attitude is different. He is not merely self-conscious but hyperconscious that is he is incapable of living without extended thought and specifically extended thought about himself.
We first find this in his distinction between the natural man that is the type of person not marred by this kind of hyperconsciousness and himself. The natural man or the man of action is like a bull. He says he charges at the world headon and does not spend too much time questioning whether he is in the right or whether his actions are just. He simply acts. The underground man holds this sort of person in contempt as being dull and brutish. But there is a little bit of envy behind his words. By contrast, he describes himself as a mouse, someone totally incapable of acting, but who retreats into the world of imagination or analysis instead.
If you'll let me indulge into some wider dsttovski commentary. This mouse is a development of the earlier dstovskian stock character of the dreamer. In white knights and the double, our protagonists spend much of their time viewing the world in narrative or dreamlike terms. In white knights, the narrator imagines that he is some sort of romantic and views his interactions with our heroine Nstinka as if it would play out the classic romance beats, ending up inevitably disappointed when they do not. Goladkin escapes into his imagination as a way to cope with his lowly position. So much so that it manifests in a whole another person in a magical realist sort of way. But the underground man uses his own mind as a kind of torture device, tormenting himself over and over again with overanalysis and twisted imaginings. This is evident in his dealings with the officer. As we said, he dwells on the insult given to him for two whole years and is still reflecting on the whole affair 14 years later. The very notes he is writing stand as witness to his bizarre hyperconsciousness. He is, to borrow an image from nature, like a man picking at a scab and complaining about the pain it brings him.
"Of course, nothing remains for it but to wave the whole thing aside with its little paw, and with a smile of faint contempt, in which it does not believe itself, slip back shamefacedly into its crack. There in its loathsome, stinking underground, our offended, beaten down, and derided mouse at once immerses itself in cold, venomous, and above all, everlasting spite. For 40 years on end, it will recall its offense to the last most shameful details. Each time adding even more shameful details of its own, spitefully taunting and chafing itself with its fantasies."
This can seem a little bit abstract, but I think that it is strangely relatable to many of us. Have you ever had someone offend you and been totally unable to do anything about it at the time? You wanted to come up with some clever retort, but you became tongue-tied and embarrassed. As a result, you struggled to let go of it and rehearsed it over and over again in your mind, each time reopening a wound mid-healing. Sometimes this can be relatively harmless, like realizing the clever thing that you could have said and perhaps should have said days later in the shower, but at points it can become obsessive. This is especially true with victims of psychological trauma. And the trauma specialist Judith Herman comments on this at length. She talks about how traumatized people often ruminate on events adnause imagining everything that they could have done differently. This maladaptive mechanism might have had a beneficent original purpose. It could have been intended to comb situations for lessons as to what we could have done differently. But it also leads to an enormous amount of suffering on the part of the patient. And while this pattern might be strongest in the case of trauma, it is by no means limited to it.
In the case of the underground man, his hyperconsciousness renders him totally unable to act in the world or to react to things. From one perspective, this non-reactiveness is not a bad thing. I'm not convinced that if he had lost his temper at the officer, this would have ended any better. But his extreme is just as destructive. It's just in a quieter, more inward-f facing way that doesn't get as much public attention simply because it's not obvious to other people. The underground man is totally unable to take his own will as a reason for acting. He must consider everything to the nth degree and in doing so reasons his way into non-reactivity but never deals with this initial feeling. As a result, the wouldbe reaction gnors at his insides, turning him spiteful and diminishing his self-respect bit by bit. He calls himself cowardly, though not necessarily because he's scared of physical violence, but because he can never muster up the passion for an action. He comments that even his hatred and spitefulness is of a mean and meager kind. It limits itself to insulting people and peppering Petersburg with his casual cruelties. The underground man is a tyrant, as we'll come back to later, but he is a petty kind of tyrant. His tyrannies are as small and unremarkable as everything else about him. They are, to again quote the man himself, cruelties that come from the head, not the heart.
I am fascinated by this aspect of the underground man. It forms part of DSTVKI's broader critique of an overly abstract way of viewing reality where we only ever consider the world in terms of grand philosophies and reasonings and never in terms of the particular concrete existence that we inhabit. Spoiler alert for Crime and Punishment and the idiots, but this comes out very strongly in those texts as well. In Crime and Punishment, Rasconikov has impeccable reasoning for murdering a horrible old porn broker who adds basically nothing to the world, but he's still torn apart by guilt and terror afterwards. While in The Idiots, the Yepansions preach Christian values in the abstract, but are brutal to others in their actual actions and decisions.
For the underground man, though, this hyperconsciousness mainly prevents him from seeing the world through his own eyes, as it were. He considers himself a highly educated man and to that extent desires objective airtight reasoning for every one of his actions. But as he himself points out, reasoning is only part of what fulfills a human life. We also require emotional and philosophical fulfillment for those sides of ourselves. The underground man lives his life totally in the third person. This is what ultimately separates him from the man of action. The man of action places at least some stock in his own perspective. He considers his will at least a defeasible reason for taking action. The underground man waits for his oh so educated, oh so refined soul to come up with a beautiful and lofty reason for acting. And when it refuses to cough up the goods, he retreats back into his grotto having failed to plug an emotional cut with a purely reasoned argument.
This is partly because DSTvki thinks no human is completely reasonable. He's responding to the rational egoist theories of the time which held that humans would behave according to strict reason if they were only educated enough to do so and were informed about what was in their best interests. The underground man is part of where dstoyvki thinks this attitude would end up in practice. And the man knows it as well. He himself points out the shortcomings in rational egoism. But this is just another step in his analytic self- torture. He still struggles to act and when he does it is only ever out of desperation or uncontrollable emotional outburst. In his attempts to be reasonable, to be refined, he ensures that his will will oscillate between two poles, rational analyst and erratic tortured madman.
I think that this theme is part of what keeps me coming back to Notes from Underground over and over again because at its core, I think that this critique applies to me in a number of ways. I'm so reluctant to ever shoot from the hip, as it were, that I often pay for it in the self-hating ruminations that inevitably follow. And considering you're the kind of person who watches a philosophy YouTube channel in their free time whose whole shtick is analyzing things to the nth degree, perhaps it might apply a little to you as well.
And this leads us nicely onto our next point because the underground man's hyperconsciousness has another cataclysmic result. He is totally unable to decide who he is.
Three, authenticity and the ego.
"I never even managed to become anything. Neither spiteful nor good. Neither a scoundrel nor an honest man. Neither a hero nor an insect." In my video on authenticity, I argued that someone's authentic self was a mixture of inner properties they didn't control and the decisions that they made and endorsed out in the world. If you're strongly predisposed to valuing a given thing or just had that inculcated in you from a young age, you might not be able to just choose not to hold those values. But at the same time, we're not totally fixed. We change and develop over the course of our lives. And our choices and our endorsements are part of that. I don't have to acquies to my inner urge to shout no matter what anger issues I was brought up with. I can choose to distance myself from that behavior and calm myself down instead. Through this, so the story goes, we gradually converge on a notion of who we are that we do endorse. We have balanced the plates of cultural context, innate propensity, and individual expression to arrive at a coherent identity. This is something the underground man simply cannot do.
One of the most influential analyses of notes from underground comes from Renee Gerard, who points out that the underground man's identity is totally fractured. He has very little idea of what he wants as an individual, but his desires are all totally mediated through stories and through the people around him. In line with Gerard's mimemetic theory, he calls these the underground man's mediators, meaning external models that shape what the underground man wants. In effect, the underground man wants to escape himself and become one of his mediators.
The first mediator is pretty abstract and is introduced very early on. This is the mere idea of the educated man or the refined man. The underground man is very clear that he wants to be such a refined man. When he refers to his desires or attitudes, he often merely calls them the desires of an educated man or an intelligent man or a literary man. When he is demeaning himself as a mouse, he is at the same time praising that for its intelligence. He thinks that action and a pleasant lack of self-consciousness could only be accomplished if he were far far stupider. And that seems to give him at least a small measure of comfort.
Next, in the second part of the novella, we see that he has mediators almost everywhere. For example, he desires to be like this officer that he has the 2-year one-sided feud with. In one particularly poignant passage, he imagines winning the officer over to his side. He pictures himself writing the officer a letter and the officer being so swung by his beautiful and gentlemanly pros that he at once seeks the underground man's friendship. This is quite difficult to make sense of when we remember just how much the underground man hates the officer, but it fits in very well with Gerard's theories. For Gerard, when we catch a desire to become another person, this can arouse both deep admiration and a strange kind of spite or hatred. Admiration because we do actually want to be this person in some sense and spite because we are not and also we feel slightly humiliated that we are placing someone else so far above ourselves. For Gerard, this can create the sort of lovehate dynamic that absolutely defines the underground man's relations with others.
We see a similar pattern with Zerkov. As I said in the first section, the underground man resolves to either make his friend or slap him. And it's only when he realizes that his friendship would almost certainly be rejected that he definitively decides on the slap. Arguably, the only other major character in the novel that is not a straightforward mediator for the underground man is Liza. But even here, he fails to remain in sincerity. Although he does not want to be Liza, he still desires her admiration and consciously calculates every last action to get what he wants. Perhaps the only truly honest moment he has in the entire book is the breakdown in front of Liza, but he also finds this so distressing and unfamiliar that he immediately drives her off.
But all of this only tells part of the story. I think that the primary source of the underground man's inauthenticity is irony and specifically irony used as a defense mechanism. I plan to do a full video on this at some point, so I will keep things relatively brief here. But one of the uses for irony that tends to go relatively unnoticed is as a method of protection. To be ironic is to not run the risk of exposing any vulnerable part of yourself that you value to the world. If I give you my honest opinion, say that the brothers Karamazov is my favorite novel. Well, this opens me up to all kinds of critique or mockery. You could point out that it's a pretty unoriginal choice. You could say it exposes a blind spot in my understanding of literature that I don't take into account its obvious flaws. You could accuse me of not recognizing the superiority of Nabacov. Yes, I have read his review of Dosski's works and no, I don't agree with it. My point is to express an honest opinion on any subject, however trivial, is to invite the world to critique you. The same goes for a sincerely held feeling or an earnest friendship or a firm conviction. In each case you are saying here is something about me that I take seriously. Take your best shot. This is not so for the ironic mode. To draw from Sperber and Wilson's analysis of irony to talk in an ironic voice is to speak as if you are someone else. It is to subtly disavow the very thing you are saying and to never be quite clear on whether it is your belief or merely something you are holding up for examination. It denies sincere feeling and can have a detached almost superior air to it. I know this is a very trivial example, but it's a bit like when someone will critique something on Twitter, but rather than give an honest opinion will say something like, "Ooh, this isn't a good look, sis." This sort of mock apathy always allows you to at a later date withdraw your statement or claim that it didn't express any real belief. It is to hold your own speech at one place remove from yourself. This is part of what makes irony such an effective defense mechanism in the public realm. You can in effect use it to hide who you are from others. The danger comes when it is the primary or even worse the only way that you talk to other people or even to yourself. By never committing to anything, you effectively never decide who you want to be. Nature might deplore this as never becoming who you are. And Kaggard would say it is skimming the aesthetic surface of life by never truly committing to any version of yourself for any length of time. The underground man jumps between saying he is joking and then that he's not. He says he's spiteful, then he claims there is no spite in him. He denies being cowardly, yet calls himself a coward at multiple points in the book. He claims to hate Liza, yet fantasizes about marrying her. He claims to not admire any of his mediators, but then imagines being firm friends with them. It doesn't even seem quite right to call the underground man a liar. This would imply that he is concerned with the truth, and there is scant evidence for that. Indeed, it is more like he is Harry Frankfurt's bullshitter. That is, someone who talks without any regard for what is true or false, but only with some other factor. In the underground man's case, he may be concerned with being witty or temporarily salvaging his dignity or with making an impression on the people around him, be it as a scoundrel or a hero. But truth basically never enters the equation. And he talks this way even to himself, as he puts it. "In every man's memories, there are certain things that he will not reveal to everyone, but only to his friends. And there are things that he will not even disclose to his friends, only to himself. and even then under a veil of secrecy. But finally, there are things that he's afraid of divulging even to himself. And every decent man has quite an accumulation of these. But how many of us can really say that we never do the same? Which among us are truly and totally honest with ourselves about who we are? Can we own up to our darkest desires or our noblest, loftiest ambitions? And when do we turn to an ironic mode of thought to run from the terrifying question of what we want to do with this tiny sliver of time we get before retiring into either oblivion or eternity." And to end this section, I would like to give one final quote. This time not from notes from underground but from the brothers Karamazov. Here the elder of a monastery, the elders Osma is giving some advice and he says the following. "The main thing is that you stop telling lies to yourself. The one who lies to himself and believes his own lies comes to a point where he can distinguish no truth either within himself or around him and thus enters into a state of disrespect towards himself and others." The scariest thing about the underground man is that he may not know that he is almost never sincere and that even when he grasps at sincerity, he simply finds a way to play act it instead. For all his analysis, who he is is almost totally opaque to him. And to think this probably stemmed initially from a wish to protect himself. Perhaps we should all be a little bit more frightened of being ironic.
But this disorientation is closely connected to another aspect of the underground man's character and his situation. His total loss of power both over himself and the world at large.
Four. Helplessness, power, and dominance.
"I wanted to show my power. That's how it was. But you were thinking that I'd come specially to rescue you, weren't you? Isn't that what you were thinking? Isn't it?"
One of nature's most controversial thesis is the will to power. This idea takes many, many forms over the course of his writing, ranging from quite modest proposals to grand metaphysical pictures. In his earlier work, it was the idea that overcoming resistance was a key part of what brings humans fulfillment. Then it was the claim that a will to power is behind all or almost all human action. And then finally it was proposed as an organizing principle of the universe similar to how the will in general functions in Shopenhau's philosophy. And what most people don't know is that ne's ideas about power were partly influenced by reading dstoyvki and notes from underground in particular which he read in French. Specifically, it helps inform what nature thought happened when someone felt completely powerless. Though, it's also worth noting that nature read this quite late in life. So, it is at most a continuation and influence on his pre-existing patterns of thought rather than an outright inspiration. But whatever your interpretation, nature did think that a feeling of power was a key need for the human psyche. He thought that without this ability and sensation of overcoming resistance, we would decay into decadence, which is another concept from nature that is immensely complicated and covers a lot more than just the effects of powerlessness. And we can't get too much into it now. But perhaps even more interesting is how nature thinks the powerless react to the powerful. When someone who lacks a sense of power sees someone who does have power and perhaps worse has power over them, they feel Rosantimon. For nature, roantimon both reflects an inner sensation and a kind of unconscious drive. At one level, it's a sort of nursed envy of the helpless towards those who are not. And at another, it is the drive to devalue what you cannot achieve and win a philosophical victory over those powerful people. Nze argued that this had occurred in Pauline Christianity where he thought the more pagan virtues of strength, power, and extreme self-discipline were replaced by the Christian ideas of meekness, humility, and grace. Again, like everything in nature, this is more complicated and more controversial than I'm presenting it here. But the general gist for our purposes is this. Nature thinks the powerless come to resent the powerful and in doing so devalue that power in favor of whatever properties they do have access to, including things like weakness and weakness. Importantly, nature thinks this is a dishonest maneuver. It's dishonest because he thinks the powerless do not truly desire to be powerless. They wish to be the powerful. And they're hoping that in this act of deception, they will convince the powerful to take pity on them and perhaps even gift them a measure of their own power. Hence the emergence of the priestly class that nature finds oh so detestable.
But how does this relate to the underground man? Well, in some ways he is a microcosm of this process of active roantimon or resentment to use a less pretentious term. This connects quite closely with something we talked about in the last section. The underground man demeans his mediators because in some ways he wants to be them. He knows that to be less hyperconscious would make him happy. He is aware that for all their unrefinement and coarseness, Simonov, Sarov, and his friends have what he wants. We see these little shafts of honesty peak through the cracks at points. For example, the underground man repeatedly calls himself ugly, but also proclaims that he doesn't mind and would rather have an intelligent face than an attractive one. But later he says of Zveov, "I hated his handsome but stupid face, for which however I would willingly have exchanged my intelligent one." Likewise, he proclaims that he is not a material man and that he holds material wealth in contempt. But at the same time, he is ashamed of his poverty before Liza and is humiliated when Zerov and Co talk about his income as poultry. He attempts to devalue everything that he truly wants, but never quite succeeds. So he's just left stewing in his own resentment, hating and admiring others in equal measure and pretending to have these higher concerns when in reality he just wants what all the other people in his life want, but is too scared to admit that he's failed to get it.
However, we should not conclude from this that DSTVKI himself admires Verov for his material successes. Far from it. DSTvski does not think that the underground man is an isolated phenomenon. He thinks that the environment encourages the development of such underground men and that people like Zveov are a part of it. For his part, DSTVski hates that the measure of a man in Petersburg society was the size of his income and his social status. He was an Orthodox Christian and wished to see people value things like love, human agency, and self-sacrifice. But he recognizes the predicament that materialism as a value system puts people in. By treating someone's outward success as their worth, we implicitly motivate resentment amongst people who have not achieved such outer success. By undermining the worth of the underground man, we make it even more likely that he will become lost in his resentful hole. Put a pin in this as we'll definitely be coming back to it in the next section. This particular theme of dststevkis has been developed in recent years by many philosophers including gyongchoan who argue that valuing people simply for what they produce or achieve is a crime against humankind and encourages depression, anxiety, burnout and deep self-hatred.
One of the more tragic consequences of the underground man's total powerlessness is that when he does have power, he becomes a tyrant. He freely admits this, saying that he is convinced he could never associate with someone except as an exchange of power. He does not understand the notion of loving someone for their own sake or of sacrificing himself for others. For him, there is only power. And the primary question that he asks in almost every situation is who is more powerful, him or the other person. But he is not the only person that holds this position. He just happens to be on the bottom rung of a power and status obsessed community that Dosski condemns. Through his example, the underground man does not just indict himself, but this entire way of viewing our relations with other people in this myopically powerobsessed fashion. It's true that he would probably be happier if he had a modicum, more personal power, and his sense of helplessness and lack of agency certainly does no favors for his state of mind. DSTVski famously thought that a notion of control over your own actions was a key part of our philosophical needs as humans. And perhaps he would have had some sympathy with nature's later idea of power as self-overcoming. But at the same time, the obsession that the underground man and those around him have with power and with influence is deeply unpleasant and almost certainly hurts them all in the long term. After all, we all have moments where we are at one another's mercy. And a society of tiny tyrants is one where it's never safe to let your guard down for even a second.
In some ways, this Nietian Rosantimonbased picture only gives half of the underground man's story. It is true that the underground man would probably be more fulfilled if he could admit to himself that what he does value is power and worldly success. If he dropped this act of only caring about intelligence or education or refinement, then he might eventually be able to achieve these highly coveted material benefits. But at the same time, Dstoyki would view this as only a partial solution. It would be better for the underground man and the society in which he lives to recognize that it is in none of their interest to be constantly engaged in this pecking order contest. This endless competition over simply social status and power is drawing them all away from other pursuits that DSTK thinks could truly make them happy. After all, the person at the top of this petty pyramid we see in the novella is and it's not even clear whether his friends like him or if they're simply being sickopantic to him because of their relative powerlessness compared to him. The world of notes from underground is a world without friendship. The only person who doesn't view things this way is Liza. When we first meet her, she has a modicum of faith in human goodness. She has a certain innocent naivity about her and she truly believes that the madam of her brothel and the other girls working there mean her well. The underground man quickly robs her of this innocence, but even then she finds some faith in him. The final blow for her comes with the underground man's ultimate insult of paying her for her companionship, demonstrating that he cannot see their relationship in anything but instrumental terms of power, control, and renumeration. The saddest part is in the context that they exist, the underground man may have done her a good deed. If you're surrounded by predators, it is better to know it. But it's better still to have a community that runs not on mutual predation, but on mutual care. Though DSVKI makes it clear that the underground man bears responsibility for his actions, he also admits that he is a product of the values in his environment. So, it's worth us asking to what extent do our own communities, societies, and nations mimic this dark portrait of St. Petersburg and whether it's driving us all gradually underground.
But none of this quite answers why the underground man is so relentlessly cruel. Whatever the other characters in the story are, they're not as coldly brutal as our unlikable protagonist. And Dosstoyvki gives us a characteristically sympathetic yet uncompromising explanation.
Five. Dignity, shame, and cruelty.
"My deborttery was solitary, nocturnal, fertive, timmerous, and sorted, and it was accompanied by a feeling of shame that did not desert me at the most depraved moments."
A key theme, the underground man comes back to again and again is his shame. In my translation, the word shame or ashamed or shameless appear 43 times altogether. This is about once every three pages. If you add synonyms like humiliation, that number jumps to 60. So once every two pages. This is really quite remarkable. It appears far more than the properties more commonly associated with the underground man. Words like hate or spite or cruel. The dominant frame of mind felt by this creature is not quite hostility, but embarrassment. And not the merely social embarrassment of saying the wrong thing in public, but a deeper kind which borders on outright self-hatred.
Self-hatred is a strange sort of vice. Today, we almost view a certain kind of self-hatred as a virtue. We sometimes mistake it for something more straightforwardly admirable, like humility or modesty. I can only speak for myself, but when I was at university, I would quite often find people almost leaping over one another to condemn themselves, as if to be the most self-hating person in the room was a twisted badge of honor. And it's very easy to forget just how strange this sort of prizing of self-hatred is. In Buddhist scripture, for example, it is often just taken as read that someone loves themselves in some way and that the best place to start wishing others well is to build on the goodwill that you already feel for yourself.
For his part, Dstoyki thinks that self-hatred and shame are among the most destructive psychological phenomena known to man. To again quote the elders Osma, "I earnestly beg you also not to be anxious and not to be intimidated. Be just as you are at home and above all do not be so ashamed of yourself. For it is from this that all the rest proceeds." Dosstoyki is positive that much human cruelty emerges from personal shame that then gets externalized onto others. This forms part of his argument for Christian forgiveness. He thinks that unless people have a route back to the common human fold, they will never repent of any wrongs they've committed and potentially change their ways. For him, to merely punish is not enough. We must also forgive and through that forgiveness potentially transform someone. This is part of what Liza could have done for the underground man. When the underground man confesses all of his spitefulness, all of his malice even towards her, Liza forgives him of it nonetheless. This makes it all the more tragic when he throws it back in her face. Such is his inner shame that even if Liza can forgive him, he can never forgive himself.
There are three aspects to the underground man's shame. The first is that he views humanity as a whole in quite contemptable terms and he himself along with it. The underground man is an intellectual determinist in the modern day. This refers to the idea that our choices are predetermined by the causal chain of the universe. But importantly, it doesn't entail the non-existence of the will, nor does it imply that choices cannot hold value. It merely states that any choices we do have are predetermined before they happen. This was not quite the case in 1860s Russia, at least in Dostky's view. Along with determinism came the idea that people's wills were just not all that important. There was an overemphasis on merely physical needs and a condescending view that people could not tell what was good for them, but had to be instructed by a scholarly elite. Dosstoyvki just could not stand this more simplistic view of humanity. He thought it wasn't true and that it didn't cohhere with all the people he had met in his long stretch in prison and as a conscript. And he also thought that it robbed people of their dignity. The underground man views the whole of humanity almost like a set of gears. He's not just a descriptive determinist, but he is this latter kind of thinker. He believes both that our choices are determined, but also that they do not matter. As I said, one does not actually imply the other, but at least for dstovski, they seem to go together as more of a package in this time period. Thus, the underground man is already starting out on the back foot. He implicitly views being a human being as a kind of undignified, petty existence. But this is of course only his reasoning. And as we have
Already discussed, it takes more than reason alone to plunge someone into despair. The second leg of the underground man's indignity is his total rejection and humiliation by those around him. To hear him tell it, he was hated by his family, hated by his school fellows, and hated by his colleagues. And in some ways, hatred is his preference. Most of the world simply pretends he is not there, denies him recognition entirely. This is why the officer moving him out of the way stung him so painfully. It was a testament to his insignificance.
He falls into a pattern well known by researchers on social rejection. The recipient of repeated ostracism comes not only to hate themselves but to eventually behave antisocially and to despise others. This pattern was demonstrated to Dostoyevsky on a journey into St. Petersburg. So the story goes, he saw a man of higher rank sitting in a carriage, beating the peasant driver to make the carriage go faster. In response, the peasant beat his horse and passed on the brutality.
This then creates the final component to the underground man's shame and self-hatred. Since he feels certain he will be rejected by others and views himself as of no worth at all, he becomes cruel and spiteful, ensuring that no one will come to accept him. To revisit what we said in the last section, this continues to explain his view of relationships as struggles for tyranny. He doesn't believe that anyone could choose to love him because in his own view, he is deeply contemptible. Thus, the only way he could ever feel confident that someone would remain in his life would be if he had outright ownership over them. Of course, this kind of dominance can also never assure him of his own worth since by definition it doesn't reflect the genuine desires of the person he is friends with. He is caught in this contradictory bind where he can't let others be free around him since he is terrified they will confirm his worthlessness. But without giving others the freedom to reject him, he can never have his worth affirmed either.
This is part of why he is so antagonistic towards almost everyone around him. At the very least, if he rejects them first, he has nipped the agonizing dilemma in the bud. For Dostoyevsky, this is a nightmare because it deprives the underground man of life's vital aspect, love. To again draw from the elders Osamer, he defines hell as the inability to love. That last bit is important. It is not just a lack of love given to you, but the total inability to give it to others.
When the underground man decides it is pure rationality that one ounce of your own fat should be essentially dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow men or preemptively rejects the whole of humanity saying they could all go to hell so long as he has his tea, he is cutting himself off from love. He condemns himself to a life underground by himself thinking about himself. This sort of self-focus easily becomes rumination, excessive self-analysis, and self-hatred. It is a form of negative narcissism where rather than thinking that you are uniquely brilliant, you think you are so truly awful that no one could see any good in you. It may sound like extreme humility, but it is self-obsession in a mask.
The saddest part about all of this is that the underground man is in so deep that even when he is shown love or respect, he is so suspicious of it that he rejects it outright. I think most of us have met someone like this or maybe we've even been someone like this at various points. We become so used to rejection or unkindness that it turns us totally cynical. And in response, we start to think that goodwill or friendship or love are just myths. Fairy tales told to children to make them believe the world is better than it is to hide the unbearable reality beneath. For Dostoyevsky, this seems like wisdom, but is anything but. He views it as running from the hard work of actively learning to love people again.
However, Dostoyevsky does not think this is a merely individual effort. One of his strangest and perhaps most difficult ideas is that we are all responsible for the sins of all humanity. This seems incredibly bizarre. How is it that I could be responsible for the cruelty of someone else? But the underground man helps us to understand what he's driving at. The underground man was not born cruel. He is merely passing on the cruelty given to him by others. We see his story completed in other Dostoevskian characters. People like Raskolnikov or Grushenka who view themselves with just as much contempt as the underground man, but through the persistent kindness of Sonia or Alyosha begin to slowly rediscover their humanity.
And this persistence is important. Too often we view helping people or helping ourselves as a one-and-done affair. There is a suffering person. They are shown kindness and all of their problems evaporate in a puff of smoke. It is like those shorts or TikToks of people doing one grand act of generosity for someone in need with the implication that everything is now well. But this is just not how things tend to work in the real world. Hurt and rejected people shown the first touches of kindness often do react more like the underground man. They are suspicious, shifty, and maybe even openly hostile. It is why Dostoyevsky thinks that active love is a grueling and demanding task. Those in need of love are not always grateful but can be extraordinarily difficult.
Does this mean we should give up on them? Well, Dostoyevsky doesn't think so. And yet, who among us would be up to the task of loving the underground man back into humanity without becoming his prey instead? I suspect it may require a much wider shift and a little bit of a group effort. But if nothing else, this can encourage us to be a little bit more wary around shame. It may seem trivial, but it's a volatile and destructive force that can rob someone of their human dignity and their sense of self-worth. And without self-worth, there is little telling what someone might become.
But to move from the personal or the psychological to the grander and philosophical, there is an ideological undercurrent to the underground man's tortuous worldview. And it may be familiar to many of us. Six, nihilism and disenchantment. It's in despair that you discover the most intense pleasure, especially when you're acutely conscious of the hopelessness of your predicament. The word nihilism has been used in a wide variety of ways. In Dostoyevsky's own time, it largely referred to a political movement which aimed to reform Russia and included everyone from mild social reformers to anarchists and socialists to violent aspiring revolutionaries. And yet the underground man is only partially related to this kind of nihilist. He shares some views with Chernyshevsky, sure, but his picture of reality is so much wider than this.
The underground man has become totally disenchanted with the world. And this is a problem that even Dostoyevsky struggled to solve. One of the great literary motifs of the first few chapters of Notes from Underground is the allusion to sameness. The underground man repeatedly describes things as all the same to him or goes on large tangents only to immediately dismiss them as having no consequence using the phrase "all the same" and then carrying on. You really get the sense that this is the way he views the world, as undifferentiated. Everything is as good or meaningful as everything else. The very idea of better or worse or meaning is an illusion. There is only stuff, and the underground man refuses to even impose his own will on that stuff with any confidence. The result is stagnation and dissatisfaction.
The underground man is suffering from a confrontation with the absurd, to use Camus' phrase. He has no meaning. Yet he has also not learned to live without appeal or impose meaning either. He simply sits in his dilemma, unable to budge one inch from his initial position. I say dilemma, I really mean contradiction. There is a contradiction between the underground man's stated position and what he seems to actually desire. Because while he will say that everything is the same to him and act as if nothing really matters, he also admits that he hungers after the beautiful and the lofty, and at points he gets carried away into temporary idealism. There is significant internal conflict between what he believes is true and his felt existential needs as a human being.
This is part of why he views hyperconsciousness as such a curse. If he were not so conscious, he would never discover that life is pointless and that it is all at a base level the same. He could live in blissful ignorance, but now he has gazed upon the Gorgon and must deal with the consequences. A lot of this again comes back to Dostoyevsky's critique of what we might call the worship of reason. That is the idea that reason might not just provide us with a way of understanding the world and of making mathematical and scientific advances, but that it would positively teach us how to live in a far thicker, normative sense. This was always potentially a little bit optimistic. And it's telling that this is something that Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Camus all happen to agree was not going to work. And trust me, you don't find them agreeing about very much.
Dostoyevsky counted a sense of meaning as among humanity's core philosophical needs. In The House of the Dead, which is his semi-autobiographical prison memoir, he gives his firm belief that almost any task could become torture as long as you assure the person doing it that it is totally and utterly pointless. His example is emptying a glass of water into another one and then back again, and doing this for hours and hours on end without reprieve. Such a task, he is certain, would drive a man mad. But this is how the underground man views his entire life.
And in some ways, the underground man mirrors the dilemma that Dostoyevsky thought the whole of mankind was in in the 19th century. The Enlightenment had brought with it numerous technological advances. But at the same time, it had begun to erode some of the key ideas that helped people see their own lives as meaningful things like God, or immortality, or a sense of justice that was not merely a human construct, but was out there in the world. Above all, there was the idea that when we act or think or feel, we are doing this for something beyond just ourselves. That our existence has some kind of point to it. Dostoyevsky thought that this feeling was under threat.
This is part of why Notes from Underground has been so influential in the development of existential philosophy. It was one of the first books to articulate what being a nihilist might feel like rather than simply stating it as an abstract philosophy. Sure, David Hume could say things like "reason is a slave to the passions" and argue that meaning and morality were human emotional concepts with no genuine significance to them. But that is different from truly feeling as if life were insignificant. It's a bit like mortality. We all know that we're going to die. But there's a difference between just saying that and truly recognizing it in your bones. Genuinely acknowledging at an emotional level that your time here is finite and that you and everyone you love will one day pass away.
The closest thing the underground man actually has to an ideal is his idea of being literary. It is something he emotionally associates with dignity and meaning even despite his rational self. Part of the reason he hates the way he acts is because he does not resemble the romantic heroes in the books he has read. For Dostoyevsky, this is almost certainly him satirizing the outgrowth of the romantic movement in 1840s Russia and how he thinks these narratives are paltry and pointless next to Christ and are also detached from everyday living. But I think that we can take a slightly different approach. This little scrap of meaning, however insignificant, comes not from the underground man's rationality, but from his instincts and his emotions. He finds these narratives compelling. He doesn't sit down and reason out that these protagonists are people that he wants to emulate. He just feels that they are.
And this gets to a wider aspect of Dostoyevsky's philosophy that is highly interesting. Whether or not you personally are religious, Dostoyevsky is a fascinating kind of Christian in that he basically admits that his faith is not on any rational foundation. Whereas say, St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine did think they had justified true beliefs in God. Dostoyevsky almost seems to think that the world of religion is not really about facts. He even writes that if the truth were against Christ, he would still throw his lot in with Christ. The full letter this is taken from is even more illuminating. He begins by stating just how skeptical he is about God and how he can find very little reason to believe, but that he glimpses God through feelings of great otherworldly, enchanting love and peace. Obviously, this is not an argument for God, and Dostoyevsky doesn't think it is either, but it helps us to understand the kind of existential structure that Dostoyevsky is driving at. For him, to look at existential issues as purely rational or philosophical problems is to approach them with blinkers on. He would heavily disagree with Camus that we need to move past meaning because we cannot use non-reason-based ways of finding it. Dostoyevsky doesn't think that meaning is a reasonable thing, and the underground man stands as witness to this.
This is sometimes why Dostoyevsky is given the sort of pejorative label "irrationalist." But it's important to realize that he is not advocating for irrational inquiries into material truth. He is just suggesting that certain domains like ethics, existential meaning, and understanding human emotional landscapes cannot be fully treated simply by using reason. Just like the underground man can use his determinism to reason that he should not be spiteful at someone for doing him wrong, yet the hurt still remains. Dostoyevsky thinks that to approach meaning purely through the lens of reason is to somewhat misunderstand the problem at hand. All that will happen is that we will find nothing, and yet the yearning for some kind of ideal will still remain. For him, to give humanity an ideal that they truly and freely wish to orient their lives around is not a matter of mere rational justification, but emotional resonance. It requires nonrational means because it's a nonrational aspect of the human psyche. You can't sate your hunger with logic. No matter how hard you try, you need physical, actual food. And for Dostoyevsky, you can't sate your desire for meaning with logic either. You need to get down into the irrational components of the human mind and find out what resonates with them. He thinks that this is crucial, and we may think that he's wrong, but the general structure of his thinking is still highly interesting.
For his part, the underground man feels like he's just carrying the torch of rationalism further than anyone has done before him, saying, "As far as I'm concerned, I've merely carried to extremes in my life things you've never had the courage even to take halfway." For Dostoyevsky, the underground man is a nihilist, partly because he's using the wrong tools to conquer nihilism. He's treating himself like a machine and not taking into account his instincts or his emotions. It's another blow to that rational egoism that Dostoyevsky thinks is so misguided. To riff on one of my favorite logicians, the early Wittgenstein: Meaning, or beauty, or existential comfort, a subject about which logic probably cannot fully speak. This no more demeans logic than it demeans a space shuttle to point out that it's unable to bake a soufflé. This is not what it was made for. And so it's not a critique of space shuttles, nor is it one of soufflés, to argue that they might at best interact in only small doses. I say this because the kind of things that might genuinely fulfill the underground man, things like love, or forgiveness, or generosity, or patience, are not really things we can simply reason ourselves into. Can you truly reason your way into being more loving? Well, it might be part of the story. You might try to rationalize why people behave the way they do. And this might make you more patient and forgiving with them. But it also requires an emotional movement, a slightly irrational commitment to love that relies on the simple assertion that "love is beautiful" or "I want to love." This first step cannot be achieved by simply logic alone because logic is an inferential process that only works if you supply it with initial premises. And as Bertrand Russell once pointed out, initial premises are not a matter of logic but of stipulation.
The term disenchantment is most closely associated with Max Weber, who used it to describe the decreasing mystery and wonder in the world as we begin to understand natural processes in more rational, scientific detail. This presents people like me who hold scientific inquiry and rational processes in incredibly high regard, yet also desire some sense of wonder, in a little bit of a bind. How do we reinject the world with awe and meaning without that meaning immediately being dispelled as superstition? How do we fill the world with wonder without contradicting the truths of the Enlightenment? This is arguably the whole project of existential philosophy since Dostoyevsky, and no story better illustrates its importance than Notes from Underground. Plus, it also hints at an answer and suggests that it might be found closer to the experiences of beauty, love, and emotion than simply to cold rationality.
But there is one aspect of the underground man that closes the door behind him on the road to hell. And it's a worryingly common propensity and one that I certainly fall prey to from time to time. Seven. Superiority and pride. "I couldn't bear those snears. I conceived an immediate loathing for them and sought refuge in my timorous, wounded, but excessive pride." For someone who hates himself so very much, the underground man has an awful lot of pride. While he demeans himself as a mouse and openly envies the people around him, he also considers himself infinitely superior to them, at least intellectually. A fair amount of this is probably due to the Rason d'être that we talked about in section 4, where he values the properties he has and hates the ones he cannot achieve, even when this involves lying to himself. However, it quickly becomes its own issue because it prevents the underground man from ever seeing where he may be incorrect.
Just on the face of it, we can see how pride might be holding the man back. If he were less prideful, he could take all of his misery and the seeming happiness of some of the people around him as at least partial evidence that there might be some flaw in his approach. And he does know that the people around him are happier than he is. For instance, speaking about two of his work colleagues, he says the following: "Neither one of them imagined for one moment that he was being looked upon with loathing." This is in contrast to the underground man's own fixation with how hated he is by others. Now, he may not be correct in his assessment. Maybe the others do think that they are sometimes looked upon with loathing. They would have to be extraordinarily confident to not think this, at least from time to time. But at the very least, you would expect that the underground man would take their relative happiness as a sign that he might want to change something about his own attitude or approach to the world. He even says that he sometimes saw them as temporarily superior to him, but would quickly redress this, saying, "A cultured, self-respected person cannot be vain without making unlimited demands on himself and at other times despising himself to the point of hatred."
The underground man has made quite a subtle maneuver here. Rather than consider that his self-hatred is telling him something negative, he instead says that it's the sign that he is cultured and self-respecting, if a little bit vain. Strangely, even his suffering and his suffering at his own hands become evidence that he is right and that he is better than everyone else. The underground man oscillates between extreme self-condemnation and extreme superiority, but in the end takes his self-condemnation as direct evidence of his ultimate superiority. This is summed up in his question, "Which is better, cheap happiness or exalted suffering?" The underground man says that this question is idle, but we only need to look at his actions to get his answer. When it is his cheap happiness, then cheap happiness is better. And when it is his exalted suffering, then exalted suffering is better. For example, the happiness he gets merely by bumping into an officer is treasured for years. And the suffering he undergoes at the hands of Zverkov is also seen as far better than being one of them. Likewise, when he is the butt of some joke, this is an unforgivable sin and evidence of his opponent's baseness. But when he is vicious to Liza, well, that is gifting her some of this exalted suffering. The only real principle at work is the underground man's desire to maintain his pride. In effect, the idea that he is more intelligent or educated or refined than other people becomes an unfalsifiable premise. Anything and everything, be it his cruelty or his inaction or his fantasies or even his occasional magnanimity, is seen as evidence of his supreme intellectual superiority. He may be pathetic. He may be a mouse. But at the very least, he is a clever mouse.
The irony is that intellectual humility is the very thing the underground man might need. Part of the reason he is so stuck in his ways is because his pride will not let him admit that his approach might be wrong. And to be fair, this is an incredibly difficult thing to do. The underground man has sunk an enormous cost into this approach. He describes himself as having lived 40 years underground, at least philosophically, meaning that this has been his way of life for as long as he can remember. He does not know another way to be, and so he prefers the comfort of a destructive habit to the unbearable uncertainty of discovering another way to live. Strange as it may seem, he clings to his hatred like a comfort blanket, using intellectual pride as the justification for his self-destructive philosophy. He has made himself into a martyr for the underground, and his very pain has become his badge of honor. To quote him directly: "Who could possibly pride himself on his infirmities, let alone brag about them? But what am I saying? Everyone does it. Everyone vaunts his illnesses. And perhaps myself, more than anyone." Here he is speaking of his hyperconsciousness, one of the key pillars of his misery. The underground man has turned this internal, pointless suffering into his only virtue, ensuring that he cannot change his ways without dispensing with the only thing that he actually respects about himself.
Of course, Dostoyevsky does not think there is nothing worth suffering for. In his other works, he praises self-sacrifice done out of love, but he's also rather critical of meaningless suffering. There is a difference between undertaking a huge sacrifice in the name of kindness for others and just looking at your wounds and insisting they must be noble simply because they're bleeding. This danger of pride and superiority mirrors Dostoyevsky's own idea that forgiveness and change is made possible if someone can find it within themselves to actually repent, and that this is extraordinarily difficult. We see this in Raskolnikov, who has to purge his pre-existing worldview bit by bit and undergo a great sacrifice, confessing to his crimes in order to alter his philosophy. Almost as difficult as the physical idea is the intellectual journey of admitting that his entire perspective, where there are superior men who have the right to treat their inferiors any way they wish, was wrong and self-destructive.
Dostoyevsky was, of course, a religious man, and the Book of Proverbs states that pride goeth before a fall. But for him, this is probably the best-case scenario. What you want is a dramatic fall so that your pride can be shattered and you can begin to build yourself up again on more loving foundations. Far worse than this is to never quite fall and instead cling to your pride as it burns ever hotter in your hands, watching yourself drift into ever-increasing misery while things never change so quickly that you're forced to re-evaluate your worldview. And let's be honest here, who is not prone to this sort of pride? Not necessarily in as dramatic terms as the underground man, but who does not struggle to admit that they are wrong, and not just incorrect, but badly, fatally wrong? I can only speak for me, but if I'm brutal with myself, I certainly do sometimes use the books that I've read or the studies I've undertaken as excuses to not properly interrogate the mistakes in my own philosophies. I do find it quite difficult to own up to my faults, and I do scramble to grab whatever intellectual material is at hand to salvage my wounded pride when I'm confronted with an objection that might just pose me a genuine challenge. It hurts to own up to this sort of thing, especially in public. But I have a sneaking suspicion that this might apply to far more people than me, and that perhaps St. Augustine was on to something when he said, "You will find no sin that is not labeled pride." After all, if we are so much better than everyone else and have absolutely nothing to learn from them, why are we still unhappy?
And I want to end by broadening our scope because Notes from Underground is not just a work of philosophy or literature. It is an intensely personal experience. And that is why I want you to read it for yourself. Eight. What's the point of Notes from Underground? "What I really wish to put to the test is, can one be perfectly honest with oneself and not be afraid of the whole truth?" We've said a lot about what Dostoyevsky may have wanted to show with the notes. We've used different philosophers, theologians, and psychologists to pick apart its particular points and lessons. And yet, this video will never be complete because I think the most valuable part of reading Notes from Underground is seeing which aspects of its anti-heroic protagonist you can find in yourself.
Take me for example. There's a reason I focus so heavily on hyperconsciousness, pride, shame, and arrogance in this video. It's because these are the parts of this repulsive character that I am forced to admit dwell within my heart. It is difficult to describe this experience you have when reading the notes. I can't say it's enjoyable. I've reread this book multiple times to write this video, and I make a point of rereading it each year, sometimes more than once, and each time I come away totally exhausted, and if I'm honest, a little bit miserable. This is not a very pleasant character to spend an afternoon with, and it's even less pleasant to realize the various ways in which you resemble him. But this is also what makes it such a thoroughly valuable read.
I often get comments asking me what the point of reading literature like this is. And this is a totally fair question. Obviously, novels can't make arguments. They're not made of premises and conclusions, and by themselves, they can't prove anything wrong or right. What they can do is teach you about yourself and present a particular philosophy in emotional terms rather than logical ones. This can't prove it correct, but it can make a point salient to you. For example, we all sort of know that pride can work against you and that hating humanity would be self-destructive. But simply knowing this cognitively is often not enough to prevent us from falling into these patterns. For a start, we don't tend to view our resentful reactions as resentment, but normally as something else, like righteous anger or noble indignation. We don't perceive ourselves as prideful or arrogant, but as self-assured and merely dismissing those who deserve dismissal. It's often only when we see these properties at a distance, as in the case of the underground man, that we can recognize them for what they are.
Whatever the literary intent, Dostoyevsky managed to create a perfect mirror to some of our worst aspects at a large enough scale that almost anyone can recognize them. I can almost guarantee that if you read this book, you will have some points where you think, "Oh god, this underground man guy seems an awful lot like me sometimes." Just realizing this is a fantastic exercise in humility and is also incredibly helpful information if you don't want to ruin your life in quite the same way that he did. The reason I think Notes from Underground has endured so persistently since its publication is because it speaks to us at multiple levels. At the philosophical level, it encourages us to consider the embarrassing or irrational or self-destructive parts of a human being. At the psychological level, it provides some fantastic and detailed insights into cruelty, the effects of shame, and these psychologically self-destructive spirals. And at the personal level, it is almost an anti-guide on how to live. It's no coincidence that the first video that got popular on this channel was on Notes from Underground and was called "Dostoyevsky's Guide to Destroying Your Life." This book melds the philosophical, the psychological, and the everyday perfectly because Dostoyevsky thought that these were all intimately connected.
Now, I have not even begun to exhaust the contents of this book in however long this video has ended up being. We could have talked about ugliness, how the underground man's spite is partly due to his perception of himself as supremely unattractive and how this ties into his overall idea that he's unlovable. We could have discussed hypocrisy and how he loses respect for himself by never sticking by his word or his stated commitments. We could look at it far more theologically and consider whether Christianity would be a solution to the underground man's problems, comparing this with other existential philosophies. But I want to leave you with this. Attached to the manuscript of Notes from Underground is a preface from Dostoyevsky which reads as follows: "The author of these notes and the notes themselves are of course fictitious. Nevertheless, such people as the writer of these notes not only can but even must exist in our society, taking into consideration those circumstances in which our society was formed."
This leaves us with three key questions which I would rank as among the most important we will ever ask. One, to what extent are we one of these underground men? Two, what causes the formation of underground men? And three, what can we do, both individually and society, to stop this? And if we don't do this, then what will stop the proliferation of the underground? What will prevent the formation of millions of such underground men, and indeed underground women, all stewing in their resentment and hate? And what will stop us from joining their ranks? Dostoyevsky firmly believed that it is never too late to be redeemed and to re-enter the world of love. But to do this, we first need to recognize where we have drifted badly off course and where we resemble the underground man far more than we would like to admit. Thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful day.