Episode 218 - Transcript

So if you’ve been listening to the podcast lately, and you wanted an example of characters that confront Nihilism at a deep level, or characters that try to be authentic on the other side of Nihilism at the level that Nishitani’s talking about when he talks about a religious quest, well let’s just say, you could do worse than reading some of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s most famous books.

From Crime and Punishment, to The Idiot, to Brothers Karamozov, to the one we’re talking about today written earlier in his career than any of those ones, the one we’re talking about today is called Notes from Underground written in the year 1864. Arguably his deepest exploration into Nihilism.

And there’s plenty of resources out there that could give you a summary of a book like this, so that’s not what I’m going to be doing today.

And I guess you could always read a summary if you didn’t want to read the actual book. But I will say this: if you were going to read a book in the near future, Notes from Underground is a pretty short one, you can do it, believe in yourself, and in keeping with what we’ve been talking about lately where there are some insights about life and reality that are really only things that can be directly experienced by immersing yourself in them, then I don’t know, might be fun to read some Russian literature at some point in your life if you haven’t yet, it might be something that speaks to you in a unique way.

Nonetheless I feel the need to say here, there will be some inevitable spoilers in this episode if that’s something that matters to you, but mostly what this will be is an innocent conversation among us friends about the Nihilism that goes on for the main character of this book–as well as Keiji Nishitani chiming in every once in a while with how he sees what’s going on.

Anyway: If you’ve never read Dostoevsky before, then one of the biggest pieces of context I could give you right here at the start, is that one of the main things he wants to put at center stage throughout all of his works, but it certainly applies to Notes from Underground, at center stage is the complexity, and the irrationality, of the internal human experience. That what it is to be a person is often times 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 during the time that he was alive.

So to give an example of this: this is gonna show up in a few different places in the real world over the course of his life. One of them is gonna be in the political realm in an area you might be familiar with.

There’s a belief among certain thinkers around this time like Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Charles Fourier, there’s a utopian socialist vision that’s popular around this time, that if only we rationally understand human beings at a deep enough level, and then if only we can come up with a rational system of ordering of 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 in this rationally ordered utopia we’ve created: disputes between people will have been mostly resolved, most imbalances that lead to personal problems for people will have been sorted out, the world would be a pretty wonderful place to live in they say, and we’d have rationality and the social sciences to thank for this brave new world that we’ve created.

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

Should be said: he’s coming from a similar place that we’ve talked about recently on this podcast. Remember the problem that Nietzsche had with Socrates–Nietzsche thought that western thinking has made a huge mistake since about the time of Socrates, that they’ve massively overindexed 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 the ideals they should be aiming for in their moral decision making.

That people are mostly just good, rational people. And that most people, when they’re faced with a moral problem in their lives, well here’s the process: they collect all the information they can about it, they consider all the possible options they can think of, and then they reason very carefully and act out the best decision they can. The assumption by these people 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, to make them aware of the arguments, to teach them how to reason 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 that’s facing their life head on, it is in reality enormously complex. The kind of complexity you’ll see all over the characters that are portrayed throughout his books.

Part of what Dostoevsky wants to say with his work is that to be a human being is not to 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.

And characters from Dostoevsky’s work are going to reflect this true complexity in a way that is just artwork. I mean 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.

Anyway 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 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 perfectly 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 to Dostoevsky.

Any thinking where we’re going to limit the freedom of individuals to try to rationally solve their problems for them, to him is always something that is going to end up failing because it denies what human beings really are. Suffering is a necessary part of a human life, and if you try to rationally coordinate things to put an end to one kind of suffering for good, Dostoevsky thinks you’re just opening people up to a different kind of suffering somewhere else. This point will make more sense once we get more in to 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. Like a real shining example of a miserable person, someone that has made a prison for himself in his own life and mind.

Now 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 Dostoevksy, 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.

This is a guy that supposedly sees through the illusion of all of this kind of stuff, and so the result of that is that he doesn’t really believe in much of anything in terms of these theoretical systems that, from his perspective, exist in large part to just control people’s behavior. In his mind, at least he is someone who’s free from all that.

Now much more on this point here in a second, but first let’s think of what kind of life this attitude creates for the Underground Man that he ends up living every day. 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 is completely alone and can do nothing with his time but contemplate things, but never is 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 a whole bunch of novels, he takes in all the fictional stories, but he’s constantly disappointed when he has to look at the real world and the way it actually is.

Because he’s alone in this apartment, 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 these people 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.

What I mean is: even with something as simple as just wanting to do the right thing in some small circumstance. Say you want to think about how to vote on some local levy, what’s the right thing to do here. Well if you’re committed enough to doubt, then what does that look like if you play out the tape? You will just sit around contemplating things for the rest of your life, unable to take action on anything. You will just rip apart every attempt at an idea of what justice is for example, the second that you try to formulate it.

But his situation gets even worse than this if you’re Dostoevsky. Because not only will the Underground Man rip apart every rational argument that comes his way, but he also is in a place where he can’t fully deny the validity of there being at least some rational objective truth to things.

I mean after all, as he mentions, 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, 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, a stone wall that there are things that seem to be rationally, objectively true and deterministic.

And it should be said: there are many people that at this point in their thinking, you know, after questioning things like God for a while, they’ll see this rational stone wall and then they will cling on to rationality as the new, ultimate way that we get to the truth, and our new, ultimate way of predicting everything.

But not the Underground Man, because while he can’t deny these things outright, 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, to reify it. 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. But yet again at the same time, he also cannot deny that rationality does seem to at least point to some kind of truth out there.

So the Underground Man is a man that’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. In other words he’s reduced the self into a state of just contemplative nihilism and nothing else. For Keiji Nishitani, that’s the existential move that’s gone on here for the Underground Man.

Here’s where he’s coming from: remember the criticism Nietzsche had of passive, reactive approaches to life, that you’re never creating, you’re never differentiating, you’re never part of the unfolding of reality into the future, you’re always just reacting to reality as it unfolds and then trying to understand it by filtering it through some set of protocols that someone else has already come up with.

Well the Underground Man is in a situation that is even more severe than this. Because he’s in a place where he doubts even the reactive rational stances people try to simplify reality down with. He’s calling into question everything, whether it’s astrology, religion, or particle physics.

And for Keiji Nishitani and 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 if it’s not dead, you certainly wouldn’t call this a self that is alive, because it’s also not ever something that’s fully capable of affirming anything and possibly escaping 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.

Now does that description of his life resonate with anybody out there listening and a place that you’ve been in before? Another question: is this 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 I mean 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–which, the subtext there is that he actually has a ton of respect for Dostoevsky.

Because for Nishitani, the character Dostoevsky writes about and presents to the reader in the form of 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 where we’re questioning the foundations of rationality and forms that Nishitani says you don’t really see in Russian literature before the work of Dostoevsky.

And this isn’t something you just stumble upon either. The only way that he 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, navigated his way through it.

Which as we know Nishitani’s all about steering in to deeper and deeper forms of Nihilism as a means of undergoing a personal, religious transformation.

So if the Underground Man actually represents someone that’s currently going through a pretty deep engagement with Nihilism, then let’s talk about a few more of the events in his life that are given as examples in the book, that Dostoevsky uses to show what might be missing from only viewing the world in this way.

Dostoevsky once wrote that if you want an example of what Hell is, well 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, 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 here start to emerge here in the way he’s living.

The tension is that on the 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. I mean the way he sees it, he’s not going to participate in their delusions, so what use could they possibly have for him? He really is in his own mind a sub-human creature, like a mouse that lives in a crawlspace.

But on the other hand, he definitely thinks of himself at some other level as superior to these other 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. So he finds comfort in this feeling of superiority.

Anyway: as an extension of this 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, to take action on things they believe in, and to not get caught up in the type of paralysis that he does.

But, if he’s being honest, one of the only ways they can ever do that is probably because they’re stupider than him. I mean, 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 and acting out a set of delusions like these people do. This is his thinking.

So the Underground Man–and you may also know him by his work as Mr. Congeniality in the various pageants that he attends–there’s a story in the book he tells of a time he took this attitude to a party that was going on. He wasn’t invited to the party. No, no. He’s just told about it when he runs into someone that’s going the day before.

Anyway 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 for some reason.

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

Well 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’s like hmm, what do I do this time, well how bout I say something mean and antagonistic, the group pulls back even more.

The guy is utterly incapable of connecting with anyone at the party, because he has no ability to meet people in the conversation on their own home ground.

So the whole situation is turning out to be pretty uncomfortable at the party, and to make all the awkwardness a little easier for him to deal with, he starts drinking. And oh 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 here and drink alone, and if they wanna 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 confront the people that were at the party that he thought had went to the brothel, but upon arriving he realizes they’re not in fact there and starts talking to what may be the most spiritually enlightened person of anyone in the book: a prostitute by the name of Liza.

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

It’s worth repeating how they met— I mean he’s drunk, he’s upset, and in his insecurity just 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.

But it’s funny, you know: Liza, hearing all the criticisms from this man, it’s clear in the book she’s a smart person and has a pretty complicated reaction to him. On the one hand, she’s obviously hurt by the criticism of all the stuff that he’s saying, but on the other hand she feels like he’s someone that has shown some 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, well 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–like this is a day where this guy’s spiraling.

And when she sees him like this and she opens herself 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 what he actually feels.

I mean keep in mind this is someone 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. But 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.

Now this reaction from her makes him furious, and also 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, like giving her twenty bucks, and sends her on her way. Basically just 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.

Now what does all of this reveal about the Underground Man if you’re Dostoevsky? Why include these scenes from his life in the book?

Well one thing Dostoevsky wants to show is how much his life has turned into a constant painful tension between love and freedom. A tension many people in the modern world find themselves living in with our technological enframing of everything including other people.

Let me explain: you know coming from the modern western world, it’s always really tempting to see freedom in terms of how much independence you have. Like 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? Well expectations from other people must mean that I’m not very free.

So when the Underground Man doesn’t follow social expectations and critiques everyone who does, or when he critiques systems to the point he doesn’t believe in anything, or 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.

I mean it should be said: 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, animals, 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.

So 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.

The Underground Man when he’s at that party, at some level craves the social connection to his former classmates. He wants them all to like him, but at the same time he wants to hate them. And he can’t figure out how to get past this.

Think of the three hours he spent pacing around the party alone… think of the metaphor Dostoevsky’s using. If you’re alone just in your life, and in theory you would like people to be able to connect with, well in one sense, the people are right there, there’s people all around you. But if you’re unwilling to even try to meet them on their own home ground even a little, if you then sabotage your ability to connect with anyone by getting drunk, if you just pace around alone coming up with everything that’s stupid about what they’re saying, well what do you expect is going to happen? They’re gonna throw you a parade?

And then to come up with the rationalization after the fact that don’t worry, this is exactly what I wanted to be doing with my night anyway, that is an absolute masterclass by the Underground Man.

You can’t have love and connection and have total independence simultaneously. The two are incompatible. And what you’ll notice are the similarities here to the religious quest we talked about last time through the work of Keiji Nishitani. Why is it that so many religious traditions talk about love as the natural insight of being committed to a religious quest?

Is it just a coincidence? Is it that they know stupid people won’t question it when they hear it? Oh yeah, love, I agree with that! Here’s ten percent of my income!

No, love is the opposite of the utilitarian framing that we usually give to everything in the modern world. Again we view everything in terms of what use it serves to ourselves or to society, and not in terms of what it is on its own home ground.

How many people out there in the modern world structure the relationships in their lives, the people they supposedly love, simply in terms of some role or function those people serve to them? They’ll be asked: why do you love this other person? And they’ll say back, well I love them because we share similar values, or because they make me feel emotionally comfy, or because they have a good job or we’re both passionate about fitness together, whatever it is, and these are all well and good as ways to categorize people, but in many religious settings this is not a kind of love that is enduring.

This is a kind of love that is conditional. Because the person loses the good job or all of a sudden doesn’t make you feel emotionally comfy, and the love goes away with it.

But this is why some people say that love is not a noun, it’s not a set of conditions that’s met, love is a verb. Love is a commitment and a process you’re engaged in with another person… it’s an acknowledgment of their whole being, flaws and strengths, good and bad, the truly bad about someone… it’s like adopting a tragic perspective for a single person where you never idealize them, but accept them in all their complexity.

Now none of that means you stay with someone if they’re abusive… sometimes to love someone is to know when to not be around them.

What it does mean though is that you know where you’re coming from if you’re treating people in your life by framing them solely in a utilitarian way–where your relationship with them is reduced to a transaction. And love, true connection to another person, requires the kind of self-emptying that we talked about last episode in the work of Nishitani, in the work of Simone Weil, well in the Russian Orthodox Church of Fyodor Dostoevsky as well.

It’s a process of removing the ways you project yourself onto someone, to make room for receiving this person as they are.

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 that because he provides some emotional service to her, or because she has some project he makes sense in the scope of. No, 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, when someone’s doing it real seriously, sometimes self-loathing is actually a carefully constructed worldview, something that keeps you safe from being hurt by other people, safe from having to rethink the way you’re seeing things.

See from the perspective of the Underground Man: if the only reason anybody would ever choose to love anyone is if they’re serving some utilitarian function in their life, then it makes sense why nobody would ever want to be with me. But if there’s this person, Liza, that wants to give her love to me unconditionally, then what does that mean about my entire rationalization for how the world works? Oh, it means there might be another way of relating to people that’s possible. It means this whole story I’ve come up with might not be the entire story of what’s going on.

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.

I mean in the world we live in, it is so common for people to have a limited perspective of how the world works, and then to come up with elaborate rationalizations for why what they’re seeing is 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, but 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. He rejects his one and only lifeboat because he can’t admit the ship is sinking. He just rationalizes it away.

And what would it take to let this kind of love in for the Underground Man? Well it should be said: many people describe the Underground Man as a sort of prototype for what Dostoevsky would develop in more realistic terms in later novels.

The Underground Man people say is the sort of skeleton of the main character of one of his most famous books, Crime and Punishment, the main character being Roskolnakov. The only reason I bring this up is that the things the Underground Man may be missing in the way he’s framing the world are things that Dostoevsky most explores in later books: the transformative potential of confession, the transformative potential of suffering.

See, love, suffering, and confession, if you take a step back and just look at them, they’re all activities that are rooted in a type of self-emptying. And we’ll explore this more on next episode if you all want to hear more from Dostoevsky, I await your guidance over email or messages.

But the short version of this is that to Dostoevsky, so often what prevents people from the experiences that would teach them something about their own existential quest are the very things that we avoid, so that we can avoid a type of temporary suffering.

Think of how this applies to the Underground Man. He would rather rationalize this transactional way of seeing other people for the rest of his life than face the very uncomfortable fact that there is a type of love that is unconditional. If he were to accept that, it might change his entire life, but it would also be very uncomfortable. So he sets up all sorts of rational barriers to prevent him from ever truly considering it.

We do this in smaller ways all the time. We live in rationalized illusions that prevent us from facing the discomfort that might transform us. And for Dostoevsky, confession forces you to meet the limitations of your own ego, to accept that there is something you are accountable for and thus can learn and grow into. Love forces you to fully affirm the existence of someone else, and thus to see and know your own limits. And suffering, a particular kind of suffering, reflected on and acted upon, this often shows us the limitations we live in, where the ego and the theoretical abstractions we make sense of reality with limit its true complexity.