Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Here, then, is the explanation for the so-called masochism of the underground man. Why does he refuse to see a doctor about his liver or insist that one may enjoy moaning needlessly and pointlessly about a toothache? It is because, in both instances, some mysterious, impersonal power—the laws of nature—has reduced the individual to complete helplessness, and his only method of expressing a human reaction to this power is to refuse to submit silently to its despotism, to protest against its pressure no matter in how ridiculous a fashion. The refusal to be treated is such a protest, self-defeating though it may be; and the moans over a toothache, says the underground man, express “all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; all the system of the laws of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while it does not” (5: 106).

  Both these situations are analogous to the shameful “pleasure” that the underground man confesses at keeping alive the sense of his own degradation after his debauches. He refuses to be consoled by the alibi that the laws of nature are to blame, and his dubious enjoyment translates the moral-emotive response of his human nature to the blank nullity of the laws of nature. Far from being a sign of psychic abnormality, this sensation is in reality—given the topsy-turvy world in which he lives—a proof of the underground man’s paradoxical spiritual health. For it indicates that, despite the convictions of his reason, he refuses to surrender his right to possess a conscience or an ability to feel outraged and insulted.

  2. The Man of Action

  Only by recognizing this ironic displacement of the normal moral-psychic horizon can we accurately grasp the underground man’s relation to his imaginary interlocutor. This interlocutor is obviously a follower of Chernyshevsky, a man of action, who believes himself to be nothing less than l’homme de la nature et de la vérité. The underground man agrees with this gentleman’s theory that all human conduct is nothing but a mechanical product of the laws of nature, but he also knows what the man of action does not—that this theory makes all human behavior impossible, or at least meaningless. “I envy such a man till my bile overflows,” says the underground man. “He is stupid, I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal man should be stupid—how do you know?” The normal man, the man of action, happily lacks hyperconsciousness, and when impelled by a desire to obtain revenge, for example, he “simply rushes straight toward his goal like an infuriated bull with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him” (5: 103–104). He is unaware that whatever he may consider to be the basis for his headlong charge—for example, the need for justice—is a ludicrously old-fashioned and unscientific prejudice that has been replaced by the laws of nature. Only his stupidity allows him to maintain his complacent normality, and to remain so completely free from the paralyzing dilemmas of the underground man.

  Confronted by the so-called tenets of natural science—such as, for example, “that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such ravings and prejudices”—the men of action stop all their questionings and reasonings. The hyperconscious underground man, who lacks this saving grace of stupidity, still cannot help behaving as if some sort of free human response were still possible and meaningful; “consequently there is only the same outlet left again—that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can” (5: 103–105). He knows that the idea of guilt, along with all other moral ideas, has been wiped off the slate by the laws of nature, yet he irrationally persists in having moral responses. And since there is nowhere else for him to assign moral responsibility, by the most irrefutable process of deduction he and he alone is to blame for everything. But at the same time, he knows very well that he is not to blame, and he wishes it were possible to forget about the laws of nature long enough to convince himself that he could freely choose to become anything—a loafer, a glutton, or a person who spends his life drinking toasts to the health of everything “sublime and beautiful.”

  Every self-contradictory response of the underground man in these chapters derives from this dialectic of determinism, driven by the contradiction between the underground man’s intellectual acceptance of Chernyshevsky’s determinism and his simultaneous rejection of it with the entire intuitive-emotional level of personality identified with moral conscience. As a result, his self-derision and self-abuse are not meant to be taken literally. The rhetoric of the underground man contains an inverted irony similar to that of Winter Notes, which turns back on itself as a means of ridiculing his scornful interlocutor, the man of action. For the life of the underground man is the reductio ad absurdum of that of the man of action, and the more repulsive and obnoxious he portrays himself as being, the more he reveals the true meaning of what his self-confident judge so blindly holds dear. It is only the impenetrable obtuseness of the radical men of action that prevents them from seeing the underground man as their mirror image, and from acknowledging the greeting he might have given them (in Baudelaire’s words): “hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!”

  3. The Most Advantageous Advantage

  After showing the inherent inability of the human psyche to accommodate itself to the “rational” world of Chernyshevsky’s philosophy, the underground man turns more directly to demolish the arguments that Chernyshevsky and the men of action use to defend their position. His acceptance of Chernyshevsky’s philosophy has always included a sardonic realization of the incongruity of its basic precepts with the norms of human experience, and this incongruity is now formulated more explicitly in the arguments developed throughout Chapters 7–9.

  “Oh, tell me,” the underground man asks incredulously, “who first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his real interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real, normal interests . . . he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and since we all know that not a single man can knowingly act to his own disadvantage, consequently, so to say, he would begin doing good through necessity” (5: 110). This was indeed the essence of Chernyshevsky’s position—that “rational egoism,” once accepted, would so enlighten man that the very possibility of his behaving irrationally, that is, contrary to his interests, would disappear. But this argument, as the underground man points out caustically, has one flaw: it overlooks that man has, and always will have, a supreme interest, which he will never surrender, in being able to exercise his free will.

  The underground man’s discourse in these chapters is composed of several strands. One is the repeated presentation of the way in which “statisticians, sages, and lovers of humanity” frequently end up by acting contrary to all their oft-proclaimed and solemnly high-minded principles of rationality. Another is to look at human history and to ask whether man ever was, or wished to be, totally rational. “In short, one may say anything about the history of the world—anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one cannot say is that it is rational. The very word sticks in one’s throat.” A third comes much closer to the present and, in passing, takes a sideswipe at the British historian Henry Thomas Buckle, then popular with the Russian radicals, who believed that the laws of history could be worked out according to those of the natural sciences. The underground man simply cannot control his merriment over Buckle’s assertion that “through civilization mankind becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty, and less fitted for warfare,” and he appeals to the reader: “Take the whole of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon—both the Great and the present one. Take North America—the eternal union [then racked by the Civil War]” (5: 111, 116, 112).

  These examples show to what extent rationalists and logicians are apt to shut their eyes to the most obvious facts for the sake of their systems, and all these systems, for some reason, always define “human advantages” exclusively “from the average of statis
tical figures and scientific-economic formulas. Now then, your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace—etc., etc. So that a man who, for instance, would openly and knowingly oppose the whole list would be, according to you, and of course to me as well, an obscurantist or an absolute madman, no?” (5: 110). But while the underground man does not reject prosperity, wealth, freedom, and peace in themselves, he rejects the view that the only way to attain them is by the sacrifice of man’s freedom and personality.

  “There it is, gentlemen,” he says commiseratingly, “does it not seem that something really exists that is dearer to almost every man than his greatest advantage (the very one omitted, about which we spoke of just now) for which, if necessary, a man is ready to go against all laws, that is, against reason, honor, peace, prosperity—in short, against all those wonderful and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage dearer to him than everything else?” (5: 111). The answer to this question, whose parentheses parody some of the more laborious passages in The Anthropological Principle, has been given in the first six chapters. The one “most advantageous advantage” for man is the preservation of his free will, which may or may not be exercised in harmony with reason but which always wishes to preserve the right to choose, and this primary “advantage” cannot be included in the systems of the lovers of humanity because it makes forever impossible their dream of transforming human nature to desire only the rational.

  4. The Crystal Palace

  Chernyshevsky embodied this dream of transformation, as we know, in his vision of the Crystal Palace, and Dostoevsky picks up this symbol to present it from the underground man’s point of view. In this future Utopia of plentitude, man will have been completely reeducated, “science itself will have taught man . . . that he does not really have either will or caprice and that he never has had them, and that he himself is nothing more than some sort of piano key or organ stop; . . . so that everything he does is not at all done by his will but by itself, according to the laws of nature” (5: 112).

  The musical imagery here derives directly from Fourier, who believed he had discovered a “law of social harmony” and whose disciples liked to depict the organization of the passions in the phalanstery by analogy with the organization of keys on a clavier. Also, when the underground man comments that in the Crystal Palace “all human action will . . . be tabulated according to these laws [of nature], mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000 and entered in a table” (5: 113), he is not exaggerating. Fourier had worked out an exhaustive table of the passions that constituted, in his view, the immutable laws of (human) nature, and whose needs would have to be satisfied in any model social order. Dostoevsky thus combines Fourier’s table of passions with Chernyshevsky’s material determinism in his attack on the ideal of the Crystal Palace as involving the total elimination of the personality. For the empirical manifestation of personality consists in the right to choose a course of action whatever it may be, and no choice is involved when one is good, reasonable, satisfied, and happy by conformity with laws of nature that exclude the very possibility of their negation.

  Luckily, though, the underground man assures us, the Crystal Palace is not possible because “man is so phenomenally ungrateful . . . shower upon him every earthly blessing, . . . give him such economic prosperity that he has nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with ensuring the continuation of world history—even then man, out of sheer ingratitude” will “even risk his cakes and deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply in order to prove to himself (as if this were so necessary) that men are still men and not piano keys” (5: 116–117). For if the world of the Crystal Palace really existed, “even if man really were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics—he will devise destruction and chaos, will devise sufferings of all sorts, and will insist on getting his way!” And if all this suffering and chaos can also be calculated and tabulated in advance, “then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and to insist on getting his way!” In both cases, the cause of this chaos is the same: the revolt of the personality against a world in which free will (and hence moral categories of any kind) has no further reason for being. The clear sense of the text is that the self-destructive revolt of freedom is not a value in itself; it is envisaged only as a last-ditch defense against the hypothetical accomplishment of the Crystal Palace ideal. As the underground man writes in relief, “And after this how is one not to sin by rejoicing that this is not yet, and that for the time being desire still depends on the devil alone knows what!” (5: 117).

  Such is the terrible prospect of the proposed completion of the Crystal Palace ideal, and the underground man continues to question the buoyant assurance of Chernyshevsky and his followers that such an ideal is man’s true desire. He denies that humanity is longing to achieve the static, secular apocalypse of the Crystal Palace, which would signify the end of history and the cessation of all further striving, aspiration and hope. “May it not be that . . . he only likes that edifice from a distance, not from close up; perhaps he only likes to build it and not to live in it, leaving it aux animaux domestiques such as ants, sheep, etc., etc. Now the ants have an entirely different taste. They have an astonishing edifice of this kind eternally indestructible—the ant-hill” (5: 118).

  Although this comparison of the Socialist ideal to an ant-hill was a commonplace in the Russian journalism of the period, Dostoevsky may have used this image in connection with the end of history as an allusion to Herzen. “If humanity went straight to some goal,” Herzen had written in From the Other Shore,” there would be no history, only logic; humanity would stop in some finished form, in a spontaneous status quo like the animals. . . . Besides, if the libretto existed, history would lose all interest, it would become futile, boring, ridiculous.”5 The obvious similarity of these texts shows how much Dostoevsky had absorbed from the work he admired so greatly; it also reveals how accurately he was thematizing a profound ideological contrast between his own generation and that of the 1860s. For the intellectual and ideological physiognomy of the generation of the 1840s, nourished on Romantic literature and German Idealist philosophy, formed a sharp contrast to that of the 1860s. Herzen, like Dostoevsky, always staunchly refused to accept Chernyshevsky’s material determinism and denial of free will.6 It is thus appropriate that the underground man later attributes his opposition to the ideal of the Crystal Palace at least partly to having come of age when he did.

  All these arguments are then focused in a final rejection of the Crystal Palace as leaving no room for “suffering.” “After all,” the underground man says, “I do not really insist on suffering or on any prosperity either, I insist . . . on my caprice, and that it be guaranteed to me when it’s necessary.” Suffering is no more an end in itself than madness or chaos, and remains subordinate to the supreme value of the assertion of moral autonomy, but it serves as a prod to keep alive this sense of moral autonomy in a world deprived of human significance by determinism: “In the Crystal Palace it [suffering] is even unthinkable: suffering is doubt, negation, and what kind of a Crystal Palace would that be in which doubts can be harbored?” The ability to doubt means that man is not yet transformed into a rational-ethical machine that can behave only in conformity with reason. This is why the underground man declares that “suffering is the sole origin of consciousness” (5: 119); suffering and consciousness are inseparable because the latter is not only a psychological but primarily a moral attribute of the human personality.

  5. The Palatial Chicken Coop

  Chapter 10 of Notes from Underground poses a special problem because it was so badly mutilated by the censorship. In this chapter, as we know, Dostoevsky claimed to have expressed “the essential ideal” of his work, which he defined as “the necessity of faith and Christ,” but the passages in which he did so were suppressed and never restored in later reprintings. At no peri
od of his life, it should be noted, would Dostoevsky have relished the dangerous and time-consuming prospect of attempting to persuade the censors to reverse an earlier ruling. To have tried to do so would only have imperiled and delayed the publication of the reprints and collected editions of his work on which he counted for badly needed income.

  Despite its mutilation, let us examine this “garbled” chapter to see what can still be found that may help us to come closer to Dostoevsky’s “essential idea.” We learn that the underground man rejects the Crystal Palace because it is impossible to be irreverent about it, but, he says, “I did not at all say [this] because I am so fond of putting out my tongue. . . . On the contrary, I would let my tongue be cut off out of sheer gratitude if things could be so arranged that I myself would lose all desire to put it out” (5: 120–121). Dostoevsky thus intimates that the underground man, far from rejecting all moral ideals in favor of an illimitable egoism, is desperately searching for one that, rather than spurring the personality to revolt in rabid frenzy, would instead lead to a willing surrender in its favor. Such an alternative ideal would thus be required to recognize the autonomy of the will and the freedom of the personality, and would appeal to the moral nature of man rather than to his reason and self-interest conceived as working in harmony with the laws of nature. For Dostoevsky, this alternative ideal could be found in the teachings of Christ, and from a confusion that still exists in the text, we can catch a glimpse of how he may have tried to integrate this alternative into the framework of his imagery.