Notes from underground

I have finished the first book on my classics list, Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I read the Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes translation in the OneWorld Classics series. The title of the book is slightly misleading to a modern reader. In the original translation it was titled Notes from the Underground, which suggests something of a revolutionary, perhaps subversive movement. Dostoevsky means nothing of the kind, it is perhaps better thought of as notes from under the floorboards, a psychological rather than political concept. (But more on that in a little while). The book is divided into two parts. In the first part of the book the Underground Man (UGM) lays out some philosophical reflections on life, but all of these are tied to his own life. In the second part the UGM moves around in some petty encounters in which he attempts to prove the thesis of the first half of the book. There are three such encounters in the second half, the first is the UGM's determination to revenge himself on an army officer; the second is his attendance of a party of old school friends; the third his encounter with the prostitute Liza.

This short book is by common acknowledgement regarded as the first existentialist novel and it isn't hard to see why. On the surface the protagonist, the Underground Man, a nameless minor official in the Russian civil service, potters about exposed to the mere folly and existence of his own soul. He commits petty acts of immorality and revels in his own degradation. There is no small about of boasting regarding his own enlightenment and his own vileness. The book is riddled with contradictions, assertions and tension. The opening line of the book reveals that the UGM is no ordinary protagonist, "I'm a sick man... a spiteful man... an unattractive man, that's what I am"(p.7). He is telling us this but nevertheless his character is not merely one of degradation it is a kind of nothingness. "I have failed not only to become spiteful - but to become anything else for that matter: vicious or kind, scoundrel or honest man, hero or insect"(p.8). He has failed to make of himself a good or evil man, he is literally nothing to no one.

"And I am now living out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the vicious and useless consolation that an intelligent man of the nineteenth century can't seriously make himself into anything and that only a fool and seriously make himself into something"(p.8). This line gives us a clue as to the plot of the book. Throughout the UGM assures that he is the only intelligent person of his acquaintance and that it his intelligence, his book learning, that makes him unable to follow good or evil. He simply gets along, revelling in depravity and in beauty, not really affected by these realities and yet totally immersed in them - he is a soul alone.

Dostoevsky is not to be identified with the Underground Man, who is decidedly an anti-hero. In some respects the UGM is the archetype of anti-hero. What is interesting though is that Dostoevsky allows his protagonist to express ideas that he (and potentially his readers) would agree with. Thus, while we are plainly not supposed to sympathise with UGM in his actions, yet his thoughts and ideas are ones that we can (perhaps should) agree with. For instance, Dostoevsky is clearly sceptical of the age of progress and in the perfectibility of man through reason alone. The UGM expresses this scepticism of Utopian visions of rational organisation of man, typified by the Crystal Palace. This is both the Crystal Palace of London, where all mans achievements were rationally collected and organised, and rationalist commune of Nikolai Chernishevsky's What is to be done?. While we may agree that communes and utopias are ridiculous (and we may wish to be reformers, even if not totalitarian reformers), nevertheless the arguments of the UGM are not always the ones we would want to use to repudiate utopia.

The concepts of freedom and determinism are vital to understanding this text. Dostoevsky, is once more challenging those who would take away the freedom of man in the name of science (or rather rationalism). A scientistic and rationalist concept of man is surely inadequate to understand what it is to be human. The UGM sneers at his reader "you're repeating to me that an educated and sophisticated man - a man of the future, that is - cannot knowingly desire something disadvantageous for himself, that this is mathematics." However, men "have a right to wish for himself even the silliest of things and not be bound by the obligation to wish for himself only something intelligent." This then, "at least preserves what is dearest and most important to us: our personality and our individuality". Though the UGM believes in the precepts of science (here expressed as mathematics) that men strive for their own good, still he holds out that men must have a right to wish for their own destruction and to do that which is totally foolish. In other words, he wishes to show that man is free to escape not only his nature but his reason. The UGM wants to be free to follow his reason, if he wants to, but also to follow his desires and to be free from his mind.

While we may agree that our freedom, our personality and individuality are more important to us than science allows for, nevertheless we might not wish to take the UGM to the logical conclusion that we are free from our natures. Rather we should be free to fulfill our natures, not merely conform to some scientific scheme which tells what to think. The strictures of a strictly logical concept of our nature is what we may oppose as it strips of our humanity and our liberty. If we are nothing but a sack of chemicals, radically determined by our genetics and social upbringing, then we have no freedom. No freedom to practice the virtues or to avoid vice. We need not indulge in vice just to prove our freedom, but avoid them precisely because we are free. The UGM is a contradiction because in spite of his call to freedom in depravity he is compelled by the force of the situation to act in a certain way. the repellent and vicious way. This shows that we may wish to be free, but his argument that he was free to choose folly is in fact itself a kind of slavery. What we are shown, but not told, is that we need to be free to choose the good and this will free us from from compulsion and rationalism.

At the end of the book, when Liza comes to see him, he manages to destroy not only her hope but his own. After their first sexual encounter at the brothel, the UGM goes on a moralising sermon regarding her chosen life. It evidently touches her (and we believe the UGM in his (one) act of sincerity). Afterwards, he gives her his address which he immediately regrets. He hopes she will visit him (and regrets that she might). He has a genuine pity and compassion for her, but when she arrives he nevertheless gives over to his passions (knowing full well the terrible consequences for himself and for her). As he says, "I was angry at myself but of course it was she who had to suffer the consequences". Ashamed of his poverty, his servant and everything else he would rather destroy her and wipe away the hope he had kindled in her. After breaking down into despair in front of her, he takes sexual advantage of her pity for him and seals his anguish at himself by handing her money for the service. In all this, the UGM acknowledges the pure folly of the choice, he knows full well that his pride and lust are clouding everything and destroying all hope. It is not hard to see that the UGM is a slave to his passions, that while he exalts in the freedom to choose folly, he is actually enslaved by his passions. A genuine freedom would have been afforded him if, swallowing his all encompassing pride, he could have helped Liza free herself from her disreputable profession. His own, and her, happiness would have been secured if he followed his reason, subdued his passions, and done what his intellect knew to be the good.

Thus, we come to the conclusion. The UGM is the archetype of the anti-hero, but he is also, strangely the archetype of the modern man. Bored with the 'sublime and beautiful' (concepts expounded by 18th idealists such as Kant and Burke), and wrapped up in his own intellect, he self creates a little hell of his own, his 'corner', underground. Here Dostoevsky, happily writing before Freudian psycho-analysis, uses the rather traditional image of the house to represent the psychology of the person. Thus, we creep underground, with the UGM, as a mouse and discover all his demons, his pride and foremost his Acadia. He is bored with world, it is nothing but that which science describes, there is no transcendent principle (apart from the escape into 'sublime and beautiful' books). The UGM is stuck with the reality of his own soul and his demons. He revels in his sloth and inflicts his presence on the world. He is a slave to his passion, even while extolling this slavery as freedom. Genuine freedom would come not from exploiting the demon within but in the pursuit of the good, of the virtues and in forming a good character. Instead, he lazily justifies himself with his notes having nothing else, literally no-thing else to turn to.

Inaugural ramblings

Conversion to Catholicism has brought many things into my life. One thing was the realisation that I was gravely ill-educated. Another, was the vast spaces that Catholicism opens up intellectually and spiritually. Quite simply no amount of life times is enough to explore its rich depths (we have eternity for that).

Chesterton was the first 'great' that I really read and fell in love with. Chesterton's own story of conversion, along with the multitudes of literary figures who found their way into Rome (see J. Pearce for more), was a great influence on my own journey into the Church. Chesterton was certainly proved right when he said that Catholicism does not restrict your thinking, it rather lets you think. No matter where you travel, if you travel with the Church, or specifically with Our Lord, you'll find the vast richness of the Cosmos and become a whole person.

What these rambles are trying to get at is the real possibility of education which is opened up with the Faith. Not that education is the exclusive preserve of the Faith but that Western culture simply is the Faith in one way or another. Every book you pick up that deals with ultimate questions is in dialogue (however imperfectly) with western culture and with Catholicism in some manner or other (although the Greek and Roman classics have a slightly different place).

Now the point of this blog is really to clear my own mind about the Great Tradition. This is the educational tradition of the West going back to Socrates and Plato, through the medieval liberal arts and into the Great Books programmes of today. It is the Great Conversation. The world is divided into two camps (I'm excluding for the moment the great far Eastern traditions), those who follow the Great Tradition, whose master is Truth, Beauty and Goodness, and those who follow their own inclinations and live in the present (presentism). Loosely speaking most modern philosophies, ideologies, programmes for reform, theologies and so on are stuck in the present. In England, the National Curriculum is constantly being modified (and watered down) to meet short term objectives and to get  meaningless results. It does not open up a dialogue with the Great Tradition, but perpetuates an atomised, individualism, "meaninglessness" and radical subjectivism.

So with the help of Chesterton and friends I hope to formulate at least in my own mind the dialogue with the Great Tradition and to get to grips with schooling. Perhaps my ramblings will be of use to others and certainly laying out my thoughts in essay form helps to bring together all the loose ends that float around endlessly in my mind.