The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  Beauty in itself as plenitude, being, perfection, whatever one may like to associate with finality, is riven by a startling ambiguity: it is at once beautiful and terrible or, indeed, sublime. It is so because in its perfection or completion it represents a radical abstraction from anything we experience in the world. To make this beauty the highest “object” of human striving is to identify the only striving that truly counts with overcoming the world of everyday experience. The imperative is clear: one must seek union with beauty, with being, with the eternal and unchanging. As the mystical tradition well understood, this imperative leads to annihilation of the self, to silence, to fanā.16 The imperative is in this sense a directive to leave one’s life behind, and what a mystic may perform as a metaphoric instantiation of this annihilation comes down to a simple act of suicide in its literal and most violent incarnation. Beauty is indeed at once beautiful and ugly, beguiling in its perfection and terrifying in its distance from, or negation of, lived life.

  The Platonic challenge is clear: to pursue beauty in itself is madness, but it is also the only sense-giving pursuit for the one who seeks to engage in philosophy, for beauty is one way of describing that wisdom, or Sophia, after which the philosopher seeks as a lover of wisdom, as one in search of the perfection that is wisdom. This perfection liberates one from the imperfection of the world of appearances—the pursuit of beauty in this respect is the pursuit of the most radical emancipation from imperfection, the difficult life lived down here below. From this perspective, the life lived down here below is itself ugly because imperfection is ugliness, first and foremost, the horrid ugliness imposed on each one of us by disease and death, the collapse of our corporeal existence. Here we have a reversal that turns on a negative evaluation of the life down here below based on its limitation, its finitude. And, indeed, the notion that the highest goal of human striving should be the acquisition (in whatever form) of perfection presumes that the imperfect life—the life of the finite, embodied individual—must be overcome. We must become free, just as gods or madmen are free.

  The challenge is quite literally breathtaking. It is a call to revolution that bids us to leave behind our lives in the muddle of the imperfection that is our world down here below. It is a call to throw away what we have in pursuit of an existence that cannot be even tolerably clear to any of us, since what is clearest to us in our everyday world must be quite unclear to the one having seen the sun, having possessed the absolute vision that seems to condemn us to silence or chatter in the cave, the underground. This call echoes through two millennia. Perhaps all of Western culture has been colonized by Plato, and so it is in the Eastern Christian lands as well. If Heidegger makes the former point with succinct force in his celebrated essay “On Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” Kojève seems to insist on it as well in his writings on Vladimir Soloviev and, indeed, in his commentary on Hegel.17 Yet, in doing so, Kojève opposes Hegel to Plato in the sense that, for Hegel, final wisdom is attainable in discourse.

  THE UNDERGROUND MAN

  The radical desire for freedom from the muddle of indefinite existence seems to be one of the core concerns of Dostoevsky’s fiction, demonstrated most memorably by his persistent interest in crime. Dostoevsky is not only a virtuoso of suicide; his fiction also presents a series of absorbing portraits of what extreme emancipation might look like, a gallery of myths of ascent to perfection, of dreams and obsessions, that rival their most imposing literary models, including those of Plato himself. Before proceeding to a discussion of two of those myths—that of the theoretical murderer Raskolnikov and the theoretical suicide Kirillov—I turn to the work that opens up the questions animating these mythic responses, Notes from Underground, a text exploring the life down here below, “liberated” from any ideal or ostensibly palliative myth of emancipation.

  Indeed, Notes from Underground sets out a countervailing, perhaps “antimythic” portrait of emancipation as emancipation from the very striving for emancipation—freedom is to be sought not in the self-immolation that is the final end of self-perfection but precisely in avoiding the temptation to attain perfection as final freedom from the muddle of life down here below. Dostoevsky challenges the venerable tradition that views divine perfection as the highest of all values by presenting, in the extraordinary figure of the underground man, a view that celebrates, however ironically or morosely, finitude, the freedom that comes from being unable to finish, to achieve perfection. To the grand myths whereby man seeks to become a god or God, Dostoevsky opposes a humbler, uglier, less tragic tale—that of the imperfect being, the being in need of other beings, the being whose freedom is experienced as insecurity and suffering, a being that can be underground or, in its more positive form, very much in the world.

  In this respect, it has become a commonplace of Dostoevsky criticism to maintain that Notes from Underground first opens up the various veins of ore later mined by the immense novels that constitute Dostoevsky’s primary achievement.18 I think that this commonplace, like many, is justified. Notes from Underground first posits the questions about this life down here below, its value and justification, that occupy the heroes of the subsequent novels. In short, Notes from Underground sets for the later novels a framework of response that is remarkably dialectical.19

  FREEDOM AND NATURE

  What could be more humiliating, boring, and ridiculous than our abject servitude to nature? We all have a “toothache,” as the underground man puts it, using a simple example to make a crucial point: that pain reminds us uncomfortably of the natural necessity we cannot easily overcome, if we can overcome it at all. It hurts, and we moan, and “in these moans is expressed, first, all the futility of our pain, so humiliating for our consciousness, and all the lawfulness of nature, on which, to be sure, you spit, but from which you suffer all the same, while it does not.”20

  The lawfulness of nature and futility are closely related for the underground man. If nature is lawful, then there is no deviation from its laws; there is no act that can contravene nature. Put simply, we are entirely at the mercy of nature’s laws, which prescribe, first and foremost, that we must die. A toothache is but a symptom of a far more comprehensive illness. One is reminded here of the celebrated final line of Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates’s “cheerfulness” about his death comes out awkwardly as a withering judgment about life as an illness from which one is cured only at the end. Or, at least, this is how Friedrich Nietzsche interprets Socrates’s final words to Crito, and Nietzsche’s interpretation seems quite persuasive.21

  Yet the underground man says more. Not only do we suffer and moan about our suffering. We also derive pleasure from our moaning. We turn our moaning into sweet music that consoles us. While the transformation of pain into sweet music is a commonplace, arguably a romantic one,22 it also points to another dimension of lawfulness that is very important for the underground man: repetition. While the “iron law” of nature may well prescribe our death, it also enforces a strict conformity on our life, a routine, that is likely the most powerful reminder of its sovereign authority in our everyday experience (precisely as everyday). Where there is only repetition, there is no novelty, no possibility of the new. Where there is no possibility of the new, there is only repetition (for a being subject to time). What sweet music can one possibly make out of repetition? What is sweet about repetition? If one rolls the boulder up the hill only to have it come down each time, why not simply fall under the boulder and be done with it?

  The curious fact is that this tale of futility is in fact a tale. Why tell such a tale? Is it sweet music? It may not be sweet, but it is a kind of music, and it is sweet insofar as it is a consolation—surely, the underground man is percipient in this claim.23 Otherwise, it would be very hard to understand why anyone would seek to record his or her pain, as the underground man does. Why create a record of one’s moans if there is nothing consoling in it? Why write if writing changes nothing?

  We look to look away.24 Is this not the cardinal injunction? Is
“sweet music” little more than a diversion from what we “always already know”? The underground man is, however, quite unable to listen to the “sweet music,” to enjoy the pleasure his pain seems to inflict on him. One has only to recall the opening lines of the novella: “I am a sick man … I am a wretched man. An unattractive man.”25 The underground man is unable to look away. He is insufficiently mad. And yet he wears a conventional face of madness, as the one who cannot become anything, “not even an insect,” as the one who hesitates, mired in indecision and apparent impossibility.

  As the indecisive one, the underground man contrasts himself with those who have no difficulty making decisions, the “ingenuous people and active figures” who are able to act precisely because they do not think, precisely because they have rejected endless discourse in favor of action. The underground man is blunt about these active people: “As a consequence of their narrow-mindedness, they take the most immediate and secondary causes for the primary ones, and thus become convinced more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for their doings, and so they feel at ease.”26 These are the truly mad ones, the “charging mad bulls” possessed by an idea, possessed by the truth, those that have achieved or are on their way to achieving a final, decisive point in their lives.

  The underground man, on the contrary, cannot stop thinking,

  Well, and how am I, for example, to set myself at ease? Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought. So once again it’s the laws of nature. And, what finally, is the result? The same old thing.27

  Stuck in interminable, impotent discourse, the underground man cannot help but speak, and, in doing so, he seems to do little more than repeat his moan, his lament, even in different forms, as if to alleviate his boredom. Though he seems unsatisfied with his complaints, he seems equally unsatisfied with the prospect of liberation from them. He cannot decide; indeed, he turns the notion of decision upside down by emptying it of any positive criteria by which to make a final decision or even to make sense of decision as such.

  Viewed from this perspective, the basic opposition developed by the underground man is at first blush a venerable one: the theoretical man is to be distinguished from the practical one. Theory and practice are, indeed, not unified but desperately, even comically, incommensurable.28 When one thinks, one cannot act, and when one acts one cannot think. The examples may be multiplied, but one has only to recall a celebrated moment in the Symposium when Socrates, prior to entering Agathon’s house to begin the festivities, mysteriously halts. Socrates halts, it seems, so as to consider his action. One cannot act and consider action at the same time, a point made twenty-five hundred years later by Martin Heidegger, who noted that philosophy as such is a vexatious activity because it halts activity; one cannot reflect on the basis of a particular way of being without somehow stepping out of it while one considers it.29 Reflection and action are thus incommensurable. The meditation that aims at synoptic understanding is at odds with action that is always within a context, in a given place and time—in a word, involved or partial.30

  Perhaps the most sardonic play on this old distinction in Notes from Underground comes in the second part, where the underground man and the prostitute Lisa engage in no discourse at all while they are otherwise engaged in that most basic of actions, intercourse. The discourse “blooms” only after the act that first brings them together has in fact been completed. This play is indeed all the more sardonic because the underground man’s discourse seems to be a cynical and impromptu performance, a feigning of sympathy for the prostitute’s plight, which appears to have a transformative effect on her. Of course, in the end, the speech leads to no direct change in the underground man, who, in a grotesque repetition of their original encounter, is happy to have sex with Lisa again when she comes to him, having taken up his offer to leave her previous life. But he ends up dismissing her rudely and returning to the world of endless discourse that is his underground, the world of fiction, of literature, of the intellectual and the man of letters. The underground man cannot relinquish his freedom, and, in this respect, he is a perhaps grotesque example of negative freedom, of negation transformed into a “positive” criterion for action.

  FREEDOM AS HESITATION

  The underground man insists on the distinction between the man of action and the man of discourse. But rather than deciding which is to be preferred, the underground man treats the distinction from the standpoint of hesitation and in fact transforms hesitation into a principle of action itself. Is this a sort of trick, the play of a sophistical imagination? One might argue that the latter is indeed the case, and a number of studies decry the futility and sadness of the underground man’s dilemma.31

  There is nevertheless one nagging problem here: the underground man does not really fit this kind of characterization. Indeed, he seems to mock the interpreter who might make the very clichéd claim that the underground man’s hesitation, his inability to make clear decisions, are reflections of profound or existential despair, a kind of paralyzing nihilism. The underground man seems far too cheerfully nihilistic in this sense. He is very much the forerunner of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Bardamu and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, and perhaps others in the twentieth-century pantheon, for although he bemoans his situation in the world, his misery, he also mocks it.32

  Put simply, the underground man tries to subvert the very opposition he otherwise affirms. Does he succeed or fail? And what might success or failure mean? The answers to these questions will turn us back to the guiding thread of my account, madness, which I described as the radical quest for freedom, the most complete emancipation. Is not madness as a radical desire for emancipation a desire for freedom from narrative that need not make sense of itself, that is, in this sense, the most beguiling nonsense? Is not the radical desire for emancipation a kind of madness precisely because it values nonsense above sense?

  To escape restraint, we charge headlong into nonsense. This is the heritage of the underground man that works itself through Russian thought and up to the one who perhaps most perfectly realized its consequences, Kojève. And Kojève is, in this respect, both an exemplary and apostate disciple of Dostoevsky. This is so because Dostoevsky recognizes at once the madness of the man of action who stops thinking, who decides to act without grounding that action in reason, that is, by acting in accordance with a proper reason; likewise, Dostoevsky recognizes the madness of the one unable to find or depend on any reason whatsoever. We have here two kinds of freedom, one positive, pursuing a more or less mad ideal, the other negative, resisting any ideal. As Dostoevsky puts it memorably in chapter 9 of the first part of Notes from Underground:

  Perhaps you think, gentlemen, that I am mad? Allow me an observation. I agree: man is predominantly a creating animal, doomed to strive continuously towards a goal and to occupy himself with the art of engineering—that is, to eternally and ceaselessly make a road for himself that at least goes somewhere or other. But sometimes he may wish to swerve aside, precisely because he is doomed to open this road, and also perhaps because, stupid though the ingenuous figure generally is, it still sometimes occurs to him that this road almost always turns out to go somewhere or other, and the main thing is not where it goes, but that it should simply be going, and that the well-behaved child, by neglecting the art of engineering, not give himself up to pernicious idleness. Which, as is known, is the mother of all vice. Man loves creating and the making of roads, that is indisputable. But why does he so passionately love destruction and chaos as well? Tell me that! But of this I wish specially to say a couple of words myself. Can it be that he has such a love of destruction and chaos (it’s indisputable that he sometimes loves them very much; that is a fact) because he is instinctively afraid of achi
eving the goal and completing the edifice he is creating?

  The underground man then makes his famous claim that while “two times two is four is an excellent thing,” one might also say that “two times two is five is sometimes also a most charming little thing.”33 Here is the most radical claim of the underground man, that perfection is a deadly thing, perhaps beautiful in its purity but ugly insofar as it can bring only stasis or a living death to which the nonsense, the sheer absurdity of a sentence whose sense is to be empty of sense, is a life-giving antidote.

  FREEDOM AS NONSENSE

  The underground man frames this famous praise of nonsense, his stultitiae laus,34 most respectably by reference to another venerable opposition: that between freedom and necessity. He starts out with the conventional and oft-noted critique of rational self-interest. The argument runs roughly as follows. The pursuit of rational self-perfection leads to the essentially algorithmic governance of human behavior and action; indeed, it is in this sense the perfection and thus elimination of the divide between theory and practice that we have already discussed. That is, the reconciliation between theory and practice, the impossibility of which seems to be crucial to the mytheme created by Plato and affirmed through many avatars in our tradition, becomes first possible as a dream or end in the guise of rational self-perfection.