Notes from Underground

Dostoevsky writes from the point of view of an “Underground Man”, an isolated but literary man whose life and worldview are often incoherent and paradoxical. In the first part entitled “Underground”, the “Underground Man” explains his worldview and explores some philosophical topics, and in the second, “Apropos of the Wet Snow”, he recounts a story of his youth which sheds more light on not just the philosophy of the “Underground Man”, but also his actions in society. The work touches on interesting topics such as the reason’s intrusion onto free will and obsolete humans in the face of industrialism. The “Underground Man” is an interesting psychological case study that is often relatable, and through him Dostoevsky highlights human weaknesses of vanity, frailty of ego, and an inferiority complex that leads to an obsession over dominance. Dark and incisive, and yet so naturally confused, I loved the perspective of the “Underground Man” perhaps even more than Raskolnikov’s in Crime and Punishment.

In a discussion on profit and its relation to rational utility, the “Underground Man” has the interesting opinion that demonstration of free will is the “most profitable profit” for people, while other rational utilities like money or power are secondary. We aren’t simply motivated like cogs in a machine toward quantitative utility like money or office, but rather by the capricious whims of what we want. For many of our wants, we’re hard pressed to name strictly rational reasons for them, and as such it seems more apt to conclude that there doesn’t exist legitimate, rational reasons and hence the what motivates us is irrational. Taking the argument a step further, if life were to be fundamentally irrational as we’ve seen, then the enforcement of rationality onto life would be death, in the literary sense that nothing would be dynamic or interesting anymore when we have rationally figured out the deterministic mechanism behind how our capricious wants arise. It’s a provocative idea, and applicable to modern neuroscience; the book seems to warn that the rational dissection of the human mind and brain will nullify everything interesting that we attribute to life, and as of now I’m inclined to agree.