dov's Notes From The Underground. In 10 minutes, the Russian novelist and philosopher Fodor Dovi, who lived from 1821 to 1881, was probably most famous for his novels such as The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. However, it was his short work, Notes From The Underground, originally published in 1864, that was to have a particularly significant impact on later existentialist philosophy and is usually considered to be an outstanding existential work in its own right. Basically, Notes From The Underground is divided into two sections. The first section, entitled simply Underground, constitutes about a third of the book's overall length and contains most of its philosophical import. The second, longer section, entitled Appropo of the Wet Snow, is a fictional autobiographical narrative that exemplifies and elaborates upon some of the principal themes introduced in the first section. But what are the principal themes that run through Notes From The Underground? In the very first paragraph, we encounter the theme of spite, which is basically a form of existential defiance.

the work infamously begins. I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. And then, a few lines later, If I don't consult a doctor, it is from spite. My liver is bad, well, let it get worse. This morose passage reflects a larger motif that runs through Notes From The Underground: the attempt to call into question some of the fundamental beliefs and habits that shape and condition our lives, not only in the mid-19th century, but even today. This attempt to question our world's prevailing logic is also reflected in the work's second principal theme, which has to do with examining the value of reflective consciousness, and especially the kind of reflective consciousness that centers around quasi-moralistic evaluation of ourselves and others. This is where the motif of being underground or buried emerges. Dostoevsky's protagonist, known simply as the underground man, tells us that he feels like a mouse buried in the refuse of his

own internal reflective consciousness, his myriad thoughts and judgments, and his wild flights of imagination. In contradistinction to all of this, the underground man describes what he calls real, normal men or men of action, whose energies and consciousness are directed outward, but who possess a comparatively shallow perceptual and intellectual capacity. The underground man further tells us that he feels a deep ambivalence about his subterranean world of hyperreflective consciousness. On one hand, he feels an acute envy of men of action, mostly because they are free of all of the doubts, questions, and resentments that have intimated him, but on the other hand, he finds a kind of solace in his sense of perceptual and intellectual superiority. In this regard, Dov's treatment is roughly parallel to, but certainly not identical with, Fredick Nietzsche's later distinction between master and slave moralities. As we learn in the second half of Dostoevsky's novel, practically all of the underground man's reflective consciousness circulates around the theme of his

superiority and inferiority with respect to the people around him, and he expends extraordinary energy concocting elaborate fantasies about what they're thinking, why they're laughing, and what he ought to be doing about it. Eventually, it becomes apparent that the underground man is living in a kind of Hell constructed of his own internal ruminations, especially about how he stands hierarchically with respect to other people. Is Dostoevsky saying that all, or at least most, of our internal consciousness is ultimately structured this way? It's difficult to tell from the text alone, but in any case, he's definitely providing a vivid illustration of the paranoia, resentment, and suffering that arises in an overly reflective life structured according to the paradigm of hierarchical quasi-moralistic judgmentalism. A third principal theme that emerges in Notes From The Underground has to do with the nature of human freedom, and especially with respect to the idea that the human world is reducible to our quest to find happiness in more or less rational

ways question are we genuinely free if all we ever choose is what optimizes our advantage in life. In other words, what seems like the most sensible thing that offers us the greatest likelihood of our experiencing pleasure and happiness. For Dostoevsky's Underground Man, the answer is no. But because for our freedom to be genuine, it must necessarily involve the broad spectrum of human possibilities as real choices. Otherwise, what we call our freedom would, in actuality, be nothing more than a pre-ordained and mechanical will to pleasure, which would work something like a piano key or Organ Stop, as he says, or like a quasi-mathematical calculus of Felicity, as the British utilitarian philosophers put it. In other words, what we call free choice would simply boil down to an ongoing process of perceiving possibilities, estimating the prospective benefits of each, and then automatically picking the one that seems to offer the most benefits with the fewest problems. Notice how Choice here is really pre-ordained by the process of estimation, something we might expect from a modern AI.

program consequently Doo's underground man places a special priority on the choices we make that defy any such calculus of ficity. When we choose the negative, what is disadvantageous for ourselves and or others. Here dovi is not talking about difficult choices we make in order to acrew some other Advantage, such as joining the Army to get funding for college, but about negative choices that we make out of pure Caprice for no good reason at all. These kinds of choices are important for dooi CU they allow our freedom to pass beyond the confines of any possible calculus of Felicity, and hence allow our freedom to become real, a matter of independent Choice, rather than anything that's automatically pre-ordained. As he writes, man may desire what is injurious for himself, what is stupid, very stupid, simply in order to have the right to desire for himself what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is sensible, because these sorts of choices make our freedom real rather than a kind.

of mechanical illusion. Dooi calls them our most advantageous advantage. In other words, these disadvantageous choices confer on us the most advantageous advantage of all: that of being genuinely free human beings. Spite, then, is a kind of mood or attitude wherein we defiantly assert our most advantageous advantage against all of the myriad enticements and seductions to do otherwise. Spite is about defiantly laying claim to our full freedom and hence our full humanity against all odds. This sort of analysis obviously finds ready confluence with the more modern concepts of psychopathology, the Jungian shadow, or the Freudian Thanatos drive, for instance. However, Doo's analysis produces the additional effect of depathologizing these more modern concepts and attenuating their hidden quasi-moralistic underpinnings. In fact, although it can be hard to admit, hasn't pretty much everyone felt the unreasonable urge to smash up things for no good reason? For DVI, these moments may be our most deeply human moments. And isn't the opposite

vision of life. Always having to be nice and inoffensive, always being good, always saying the politically correct thing at the right time, ultimately an incredibly dull and constrictive way of being alive. In the final analysis, aren't our negative, painful, unreasonable, and destructive moments part of what makes life ultimately so interesting, so strange, and so beautiful, in short, so worth living in the first place? All in all, Dostoevsky's Notes From The Underground represents a kind of critique of the Enlightenment's predominant vision of life, and especially a critique of the idea that human reason automatically eventuates in human happiness, which is the whole point of life. The Enlightenment's view, it turns out, is only a partial, fractional view of the deeper reality of our lives, which inescapably includes all that the Enlightenment's vision neglects or even tries to erase. In this regard, Dostoevsky's Notes From The Underground also represents an attempt to invite us to lay claim to the wider and more unsettling horizon of our

full humanity as he writes does not man perhaps love something besides well-being perhaps he is just as fond of suffering perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being man is sometimes extraordinarily passionately in love with suffering and that is a fact there's no special need to appeal to Universal history to prove that just ask yourself if you're a man and have lived at all whether it is good or bad it is sometimes very pleasant to to smash things I hold no brief for suffering or for well-being either I am standing for my Caprice and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary and that's dostoevsky's Notes From The Underground in 10 minutes

Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground -- In Ten Minutes

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