Dostoevsky - Notes From Underground - A Philosophical Guide

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

If you want examples of characters that take nihilism as seriously as we’ve been taking it in these posts lately then the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky is going to be of interest to you.

The following is not intended to be a replacement for reading his books. And especially as we start covering the longer of his five great novels, these posts will become increasingly incapable of giving any decent representation of the plot points of his books.

What this is intended to be is a guide to some of the philosophical themes that Dostoevsky wanted to communicate that often get missed in the brilliance of his stories.

Today we’re talking about the first major work of what people sometimes call the “mature” period of his writing— a book called Notes From Underground.

If you’ve never read Dostoevsky before, then the biggest piece of context I can give you starting out is that one of the main things he wants to put at center stage is the complexity and the irrationality of the internal human experience.

That what it is to be a person is oftentimes a chaotic mess.

In fact, Dostoevsky’s work can really only be understood fully if you consider it as something that’s opposing the positivism and overly rational ways of thinking that were dominating academia and governments during the time that he was alive.

If you wanted an example of this then there’s one in the political realm you might be familiar with.

There’s a belief among certain thinkers from around this time, like Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Charles Fourier— there’s a utopian socialist vision that if only we rationally understand human beings at a deep enough level, and if only we can come up with a rational system of ordering all these people politically, then what we’ll have on the other side of it is a kind of “crystal palace,” as it’s called by Fourier.

Where disputes between people will have been mostly resolved, most imbalances that lead to personal problems for people will have been sorted out; the world will essentially be a rationally ordered utopia, and we’d have the social sciences to thank for this brave new world that we’ve created.

And this is a way of thinking about people and society that Dostoevsky thinks is absolutely ridiculous.

Should be said he’s coming from a similar place that we’ve talked about in recent posts. Remember the problem that Nietzsche had with Socrates?

Nietzsche thought that Western thinking throughout its history had massively over-indexed on the idea that rationality can lead us to the good. That if only we reason correctly, then pretty much everybody can think their way to being a more moral person.

That people are mostly just good, rational people. And that most people, when they’re faced with a moral problem in their lives— here’s the process:

1. They collect all the information they can about it.

2. They consider all the possible options they can think of.

3. And then they reason very carefully and act out the best decision they can.

The assumption is that if people are making bad choices out there— well that’s because they just haven’t practiced reasoning about morality enough. Also, that it’s our job as a society to educate people. We should make people aware of the moral arguments that exist and then teach people how to reason about them better.

But Dostoevsky’s going to say this is nowhere near what it’s like to actually exist as a human being with an internal experience of the world.

Look, it would be amazing if this was how it worked. Where I know that something is best for me, and then I just do the thing that’s best for me all the time.

But if you actually look at the psychology of someone who's in the throes of truly living, it is in reality enormously complex. Difficult to describe. The kind of complexity and difficulty you’ll see written all over the characters in Dostoevsky’s novels.

Part of what he wants to say with his work is that to be a human being is to not do the rational thing all the time.

People often do things that they know are not the right thing to do. People will sabotage themselves and others for essentially zero gain in their actual life. People often want things that are obviously destructive to them. People often don’t even know what it is they really want.

Consider how much of life is taken up by getting the thing you want, and then after getting it, realizing that not only does it turn out you don’t actually want the thing you thought you did, but that you weren’t even the person you thought you were when you decided that you supposedly wanted the thing in the first place.

The actual internal experience of a person is something that is enormously chaotic, filled with tensions, where we hold opposite positions at the exact same time. And the idea that you are making these sterilized, rational calculations that are going on up in your head somewhere is really just for lack of affirming the actual set of challenges you face every day when trying to navigate your own experience.

Characters from Dostoevsky’s work are going to reflect this true complexity in a way that can only be described as artwork. Crime and Punishment, for example, is said by some to be the first psychological thriller that was ever written. Notes from Underground, the one we’re talking about today, goes on more or less entirely in the ruminating thoughts of the main character trapped up in his head.

So as we go throughout the themes of this book here today, just know that Dostoevsky is having none of this nonsense from the utopian side of things. Not only does he reject the idea that rationality is ever going to be able to fully explain the internal experience of an individual, but also that we will ever be able to use rationality to arrive at some perfect political system that organizes people like they’re the “keys on a piano,” as he puts it.

We’re not that. We’re something much more dynamic and chaotic than that. And that these utopian theories are not just political theories to him— they’re not just philosophical arguments detached from people. In the lived experience of the person in one of these societies, these theories are a matter of life and death for the soul.

This point will take on more shape once we get into his later work.

Anyway, as an example of this type of internal, emotional complexity we’re talking about, Dostoevsky creates the main character of his book Notes from Underground.

Now, we don’t know everything about this character. In fact, we don’t even know his real name— people usually just call him the Underground Man when they talk about the book.

What we do know about him, though, is that he is nothing short of completely miserable. Truly a shining example of a deeply miserable person— someone that has made a prison for himself inside his own life and mind.

The first thing to know about him is that he is clearly a very smart person. And that’s an important part of all this, because to Dostoevsky, it’s not like what got him trapped in this prison is the fact that he’s stupid.

No, he’s actually thought about things a lot throughout the course of his life.

In fact, almost everybody, if they didn’t know him, might see him as somebody who’s maybe thought too much about things, and now he’s made himself miserable.

But from his perspective, he hasn’t thought about things too much— he just sees through the illusions that most people live every day of their lives in.

He sees through all the social pleasantries and the customs people blindly follow. He sees through things like religion. He even sees through this rationalist utopian nonsense we talked about, where more generally, rationality becomes something people cling to in their lives.

To him these are systems that exist in large part just to control people’s behavior, and in his mind, at least he is someone who’s free from all that.

Much more on this point here in a second but first let’s talk about what sort of life it creates when you live every day of your life in the kind of attitude the Underground Man lives in.

He’s so critical of everything that provides meaning and connection in the world around him that he’s thought himself into a corner where he’s completely alone and can do nothing with his time but contemplate things— never able to act on anything.

He describes in the book the kind of stuff he does with his day.

He says he sits in a small, cramped apartment and he reads novels all day long. He takes in all these fictional stories, but he’s constantly disappointed when he has to look at the real world and the way it actually is.

And because he’s alone in this apartment of his, he will argue with people up in his head, creating elaborate scenarios that never even existed, just so he can feel a kind of spiteful connection to someone else for a moment.

He will spend hours remembering every problem anyone has ever caused for him— plotting his revenge against these people as though they cared a lot more about him than they really do.

He doubts constantly. He overthinks constantly. And what makes this an even worse situation for him to be in is that he is fully aware that he takes these things way too far.

He’s aware of the many flaws that he carries into his own existence, and yet he can’t bring himself to change them. Because to change something about yourself would require at least some form of action. And when you think and doubt as much as the Underground Man does, you never end up being able to take action on anything.

Think about how crippling doubt at this level can be. Take something simple like wanting to do the right thing when it comes to your vote on some local levy. Well, if you’re committed enough to doubt, you will never be able to figure out what the right way to vote is.

You’ll just sit around contemplating things for the rest of your life, unable to take action on anything. You’ll rip apart every attempt at an idea of what justice is, for example, the second that you try to formulate it.

But for Dostoevsky this is only the beginning of the problems the Underground Man has created for himself in his life. Because not only will he rip apart every rational argument that comes his way, but he is also in a place where he can’t fully deny the validity of there being at least some rational objective truth to things.

After all, as he mentions in the book: two times two just equals four, right?

Seems pretty clear that is an objective fact of the universe.

More than that, how about the laws of the natural world, or the facts of our own existence?

To deny these things seems to be ridiculous at some level. And this is what Dostoevsky calls the “stone wall” that we encounter in the universe— the stone wall being a metaphor that there are certain things that seem to be rationally, objectively true and deterministic.

See Dostoevsky knew that there are plenty of people out there who at this point in their thinking— after questioning things like God for a while— they’ll see this rational stone wall, how stable it seems, and then they will cling on to rationality as their new, ultimate way that they get to the truth. Determinism becomes a replacement as the thing that allows them to predict everything.

But not the Underground Man. He’s far more tortured than this.

Because while he can’t deny that two times two equals four he also can’t fully accept rationality either as something that can ever fully predict or coordinate his experience as a person, or the world in all of its complexity.

Rationality has limitations. To him, there is no objective, rational form of something like justice. There’s just the illusion of the endless ways people rationalize their own version of justice being objective.

He refuses to be someone that makes rationality into something more than what it is. And he refuses to use the stone wall as a tranquilizer for any inconvenient feelings that may come out of there being limitations to rationality.

So the Underground Man becomes someone who’s trapped in a kind of limbo up in his head.

He is stuck in a place that Dostoevsky calls contemplative inertia.

Because when you both can’t deny rationality, but can’t accept it either— well, for one thing, as you can imagine, this is a pretty good recipe for becoming miserable. But as the philosopher Keiji Nishitani says when assessing the situation of the Underground Man, he says this is a person who has effectively negated the self and then withdrawn into a totally reactionary place of inactivity.

He’s reduced the self into a state of contemplative nihilism and nothing else.

For Keiji Nishitani, that’s the existential move that’s gone on here for the Underground Man. To put it in the language of his religious quest that we talked about last time, the way he’d describe what’s going on with the Underground Man is that he’s someone that is overly stuck in the field of awareness he calls nihility.

Because if nihility is the thing that gets us to question the stable forms we usually use to give meaning to our reality, then the Underground Man’s entire life of sitting at home critiquing and contemplating things, never taking action— he is basically the human embodiment of nihility.

To Nishitani, he’s someone who lives in a state of what most resembles a type of madness. Where he’s at the same time constantly in a state of paralysis, but constantly in a state of rebellion against the world of meaning.

He says the self inside him is not dead; it’s still moving around in some sense. It cycles through different forms of despair every day in this contemplative inertia it’s stuck in.

But even if you wouldn’t call this someone who’s dead, you certainly wouldn’t call this someone that is alive, because he’s also not capable of affirming anything and having the chance to escape this inertia.

Again, to Nishitani, this is a negated self that is trapped in a place of reacting to and contemplating the things that happen to it. Trapped in a cycle he can’t get out of.

Does that description of his life resonate with anybody out there reading this and a place that you’ve been in before? Another relevant question is would you say this is a better description of your psychology than other attempts that just try to connect it to some pre-existing rational framework?

The beauty of what Dostoevsky’s doing here is on full display. And despite the fact that the Underground Man has been framed up until this point as someone who is completely miserable, for someone like Nishitani, he actually has quite a bit of respect for someone like the Underground Man.

Because for Nishitani, the Underground Man is not some basic level of nihilism that pretty much everybody gets to at some point in their life. This isn’t nihilism in the form of being an atheist and a fan of science. This is a deeper engagement with nihilism that Nishitani says you really don’t see in Russian literature before the work of Dostoevsky.

One where he’s obviously gone deep enough to start questioning the foundations of rationality and forms. Obviously something Nishitani is quite familiar with, but something quite distinct from most of the western tradition.

And this isn’t something you just stumble upon either. The only way that Dostoevsky could have possibly written so vividly, from this perspective, is if he himself had been trapped in this contemplative inertia at some point in his life, and then navigated his way through it.

Dostoevsky once wrote that if you want an example of what Hell is: Hell is a place where a person is unable to love.

And the Underground Man, building his world the way that he does, treating people the way that he does, essentially guarantees that he’s always going to be living in this kind of Hell.

The title Notes from Underground is a metaphor for the kind of isolated madness that he lives in every day. He actually compares himself to a mouse at one point in the book. He’s a rodent whose life is to listen to people through the floorboards and then to judge their conversations, finding out all the things that are wrong with the way they’re looking at things.

You can see another tension start to emerge here in the way he’s living.

On one hand, he’s super aware of many of the flaws that he has. He’s very aware that basically no one has any reason they would ever want to hang out with him. The way he sees it— he’s not going to participate in any of their delusions, so what use could they possibly have for him?

But on the other hand, he definitely thinks of himself, at some other level, as superior to these people because he’s smarter than them. Because he’s thought about things more than them. Because he sees the flaws in their thinking that they aren’t able to see. He finds a lot of comfort in this feeling of superiority.

As an extension of this form of torture he’s set up for himself, he admits he actually envies a lot of the people out there that can live in a more normal way than he does. At some level he’d love to be someone that can take action on things they believe in, and not get caught up in the type of paralysis that he does everyday.

But, if he’s being honest, one of the only ways they can ever do that is probably because they’re way stupider than him. He thinks his superior intelligence comes with the cost of paralysis.

Better to be a mouse, thinking of yourself as sub-human but smartly critiquing everything alone in a crawlspace, than to be dumb and oblivious, acting out a set of delusions like all these other people do. This is his thinking.

There’s a story in the book he tells of a time he took this attitude of his to a party that was going on.

He wasn’t invited to the party. No. He just shows up. He’s told about it when he runs into someone that’s going to it the day before.

He shows up and everybody’s looking at him.

“Oh, so nice to see you…”

These are his former classmates at the party. And he hates all these people. But still, he just had to go.

And he shows up bringing all this famous energy he’s known for and when people start trying to talk to him at the party, what does he inevitably do?

He’s awkward. He doesn’t really know how to have a conversation without being defensive.

They’ll ask him something about himself, he’ll say something back that’s a little off. People will pull back a bit.

So they try again— they’re like, “maybe I’ll make a joke with him.” He insults their joke, attacks them personally. The group pulls back even more.

The guy is utterly incapable of connecting with anyone at the party.

So the whole situation is turning out to be pretty uncomfortable, and to make all the awkwardness a little easier for him to deal with, he starts drinking.

And ohhh, does that help his situation.

Eventually, he drinks to the point that he gives this horrible speech that makes everyone mad at him.

Then he decides, “You know what, screw these guys. I’m just gonna sit over here and drink alone, and if they want to talk to me, then they have to talk to me first!”

But no one talks to him. He just sits there, getting more and more drunk.

He actually hears a guy say at one point: “I will never forgive myself for letting him join us tonight.”

Then, at one point, the whole group of guys he was talking to moves from the table they were sitting at over to the sofa to have a more comfortable conversation. Nobody invites him over.

So what does he do?

The Underground Man, for three hours straight, walks over near them— adjacent to them— and drunkenly paces around, thinking to himself silently, laughing occasionally to himself, looking over at them, listening in on their conversation.

He’s like this lost puppy, wishing that they’d just call him over to talk to them so he can show them how smart he really is— but at the same time, he’s also hating all of them with a passion. All the while, telling himself that the only reason he’s pacing around like this is because it’s exactly what he wants to be doing right now— it has nothing to do with them.

For three hours he does this.

Eventually, the night ends. Everyone is going home. And now you may think this is where you’d call it a night if you’re the Underground Man.

But no. Drunk. Just got done humiliating yourself at a party. What does a man do when he’s on a roll making good life choices like this? Well, he goes to a brothel.

He actually was going to the brothel to confront the people that were at the party that he thought had gone there. But upon arriving, he realizes they’re not there and starts talking to what may be the most spiritually enlightened person of anyone that Dostoevsky includes in the book: a prostitute by the name of Liza.

Liza is going to teach us something very important about the Underground Man and the whole collection of games that he is playing in his life.

It’s worth mentioning how they met— imagine this scene: he’s drunk, he’s upset, and in his insecurity starts lambasting this woman for all the poor life choices she’s making as a prostitute. How she’s ruining her ability for any chance at a better life in her line of work.

Classic Underground Man kind of stuff to open with.

But Liza, hearing all the criticisms— it’s clear in the book she’s a smart person and has a pretty complicated reaction to him.

On one hand, she’s obviously hurt by the criticism. But on the other hand, she feels like he’s someone that has shown a kind of care towards her.

He’s trying to help, albeit in a twisted sort of way. He clearly doesn’t like himself very much, but he’s at least there, and maybe she feels for him a bit as a fellow human being. Maybe this is just some kind of misguided affection.

So when he leaves the brothel and gives her his address and says to stop by sometime— she shows up at his house a few days later.

And the day she shows up at his house, he’s in a particularly underground state, even for Underground Man standards. On this particular day this is a guy that’s spiraling.

And when she sees him like this and she still lovingly opens up to him, he just rejects her and lays into her even more. Like pure cruelty at this point, trying to hurt her with his words even though it’s not how he actually feels.

(Keep in mind this is a guy who had just spent the last three days hoping she would show up, and now he’s telling her that he was laughing at her behind her back the whole time.)

Still, even after all of this, Liza just gives him a hug. She holds him, she lets him cry on the couch. She still offers herself to him unconditionally, even when he’s in this almost completely broken state.

This reaction from her makes him both furious and completely confused.

After all, from his perspective— she can’t be serious, right? What could he, as a person, possibly have to offer her?

For someone to want to love somebody like him, she must be either out of her mind, or stupid, or completely misreading the situation.

So he does the ultimate disrespect. He tells her to go, he puts a five ruble note in her hand, kind of like giving her twenty bucks, and sends her on her way. Basically pointing out she’s a prostitute and that it’s time for her to go.

At which point she refuses the money, drops it, and leaves the apartment, slamming the door behind her. He chases after her, calling to her, but she doesn’t stop this time.

Now what did Dostoevsky want these scenes to reveal about the Underground Man?

One critical thing he wanted to show is how this attitude of his has turned his life into a constant, painful tension between love and freedom. A tension many people in the modern world find themselves living in.

Living today it’s always really tempting to see freedom in terms of how much independence you have.

How much can I do my own thing without someone else stepping in and telling me I can’t? That’s what freedom is.

Or, framed in a slightly different way: can I do things in my life without other people projecting their expectations onto me? If there’s expectations I’m answering to from other people it must mean that I’m not very free.

So when the Underground Man doesn’t follow social expectations and critiques everyone who does, when he critiques systems to the point he doesn’t believe in anything, when he pushes people away to the point he can’t form a connection with anybody— when he does these things, he thinks this is him exercising his freedom.

But to Dostoevsky, being independent is not a synonym for being free. Being independent is a synonym for being alone.

Dostoevsky would be highly skeptical of anyone out there that’s under the impression that they’re totally independent anyway.

We are, at bottom, interdependent creatures. We are born into the care of others, and as we’ve been talking about lately, we are always, already embedded in relationships with people, ideas, systems, the universe. To see yourself as independent is really a modern luxury that says a whole lot more about how little you’re paying attention to your own existence than it does about the state of the world.

Not only does he think freedom like this is an illusion, but even if you could have total independence, it wouldn’t be the highest form of freedom humans are capable of anyway.

Consider the behavior of The Underground Man at the party.

At some level he craves social connection from his former classmates.

Recall the three hours he spent pacing around the party alone and consider the metaphor Dostoevsky’s using.

If you’re alone in your life, and in theory, you would like more people around you to make a connection with— well, in one sense, the people are right in front of you. But if you’re unwilling to even try to meet them on their own terms even a little, if you sabotage your ability to connect with anyone by getting drunk, pacing around alone coming up with everything that’s stupid about what they’re saying— what do you expect is going to happen? They’re gonna throw you a parade?

And then imagine coming up with some rationalization after the fact. For the Underground Man it was that his drunken pacing was exactly what he wanted to be doing with his night anyway. Think of how possible it is to endlessly rationalize your own behavior.

To Dostoevsky, you can’t have love and connection and have total independence simultaneously. The two are incompatible.

Love is the opposite of the utilitarian framing that we usually give to everything in the modern world.

And this is why Liza in the book is such a confusing person to the Underground Man.

When she opens herself up to him, she’s not doing it because he provides some emotional service to her, or because she has some project that he makes sense in the scope of.

As much as it’s possible for a human being to give the gift of unconditional love to another person— she is trying to. And he is rejecting her because to accept someone who’s trying to give this to him would be a direct attack on his entire existence.

See, sometimes self-loathing is actually a carefully constructed worldview. Something that can keep you safe from being hurt by other people and having to rethink the way you’re seeing things.

From the perspective of the Underground Man, if the only reason anybody would ever choose to love anyone is if they’re providing some service to them that benefits them, then it makes sense why nobody would ever want to be with him. He’s fine being seen as worthless.

But if someone like Liza wants to give her love to him unconditionally, then what does that mean about his entire rationalization for how the world works?

It means he might be wrong. That there might be another way of relating to people that’s possible and that his whole story about the world is incomplete.

Liza’s very existence and approach towards love becomes a direct attack to his worldview and everything that keeps him feeling safe.

And think of the brilliance of this from Dostoevsky— and how this extends to worldviews that don’t even involve love. Consider the elaborate rationalizations some will create for why their perspective is the only one that’s seeing the full truth of things.

But all this is an example of, to Dostoevsky, is retreating into rationality and reifying it into something more than what it actually is. This is mistaking a rationalization for the truth, and then getting stuck— possibly for years of your life— missing out on who knows what.

At least for the Underground Man, what he’s missing out on is a possible connection with another person. The kind of love and connection that might transform him out of this place of contemplative inertia.

What would it take to let this kind of love in for the Underground Man?

Some people say the Underground Man is the prototype version of the main character of one of his most famous books Crime and Punishment— a guy named Raskolnikov that we’ll talk about next time.

The only reason I bring this up is because if we wanted to find a way that the Underground Man might find some relief from the prison he’s set up in his own life, then what’s missing in the way he’s framing the world are things that Dostoevsky most explores in later books. Namely, the transformative potential of confession, suffering, and active love.

And notice, in light of many recent posts here we’ve done, how love, suffering, and confession are all activities that are rooted in a type of self-emptying.

Could confession, love, and suffering be gateways into this deeper connection with being that we’ve been talking about so much lately?

Dostoevsky seems to think so. Again, to him: Hell is a place where a person is unable to love.

Recommended Reading

1. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Classics, 1994.

2. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Classics, 1993.

3. Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. Translated by Jan Van Bragt, University of California Press, 1982.