![]() ![]() But there’s a prophetic passage in Notes from Underground that proves it’s truly the book that best captures our era. Yes, The Plague and the Decameron describe epidemics that strikingly parallel the experience of our own. In an opinion essay about The Plague for The New York Times, Alain de Botton wrote, “Camus speaks to us in our own times not because he was a magical seer who intimate what the best epidemiologists could not, but because he correctly sized up human nature.” But did he? Camus may well have sized up the human condition, in the sense that “each of us has the plague within him.” Yet in Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky wrote that the best definition of mankind is “a creature that has two legs and no sense of gratitude.” And the Underground Man’s rant explains why. Why would someone refuse to wear a mask when this minor inconvenience is in their own and society’s best interest? Why would a down and out rural voter support a party bent on gutting the medical care that allows their survival? Why would urban protestors indulge in rowdiness and violence and thereby give their opposition a law-and-order platform? On all sides, we’re seeing behavior that’s counter-productive to one’s own goals. When told what to do, we’ll do just the opposite, simply out of spite.īy now it should be obvious that Notes from Underground answers today’s most perplexing questions. “People don’t suffer that in silence, of course,” notes the Underground Man, “they groan but the groans aren’t straightforward and honest, they are spiteful, and the spite is the whole point of them.” In other words, we not only take pleasure in pain, we take pleasure in being spiteful. In fact, he argues we want to have some minor pain such as a toothache. Or as he phrases it, “Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, smashing things is also sometimes very pleasant.”Īt one point in the book, the Underground Man claims there’s pleasure in toothache. And that out of resentment for the laws of nature, we’ll throw reason to the wind. He knew something his peers did not: obstinacy and self-will mean more to us than anything else. ![]() But Dostoyevsky didn’t think a human being’s behavior can be tabulated like an almanac. That we could “deduce the whole range of human satisfactions as averages from statistical figures and scientifico-economic formulas.” It was simply a question of logic, of numbers and applied technology. Like today’s technologists and futurists, mid-nineteenth century intellectuals believed that society could be improved rationally, even mathematically. To him, “two and two make five is also a very fine thing.” “Nature doesn’t ask you about it,” he explains, “she’s not concerned with your wishes or with whether you like her laws or not.” And so he wants to rail against it. There’s nothing we can do against twice two equals four. Why? Because facts and mathematical formulas leave no room for volition. To illustrate his point, the Underground Man uses the metaphor twice two equals four. And this dearest thing is “one’s own free and unfettered volition, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness.” The Underground Man argues no, there’s something dearer to man than his own best interest, and for it he’ll throw away reason, honor, peace, and prosperity. And the thrust of his rant is a philosophical refutation to the idea-promoted the year before in Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done?-that human beings will act virtuously and reasonably because doing so serves one’s own enlightened self-interest. The second part is a dramatic narrative, but the first part is a diatribe-the rant of a bitter, forty-year-old, ex-civil servant known as the Underground Man. Published in 1864, Notes from Underground is considered to be the first work of existential fiction. And why’s that? Because we value freedom over reason. Why? Because it argues that people are irrational, and that when given the choice, we’ll act against our best interests. But the novel that best speaks to our moment is actually Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. ![]() During the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, readers turned to literature of pestilence: Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and, most of all, Albert Camus’s The Plague. ![]()
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