Notes From the Underground (1864) by Fyodor Dostoevsky Part I and II of II
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (1821 -1881) 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8) Dostoyevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social, and economic context of 19 th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20 th-century existentialism, his Notes from the Underground (1864)has been characterized as both the first example the best overture for existentialism ever written. Dostoyevsky was the second of six children born to Mikhail and Maria Dostoyevsky's father Mikhail was a retired military surgeon and a violent alcoholic, who had practiced at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow. The hospital was located in one of the city's worst areas; local landmarks included a cemetery for criminals, a lunatic asylum, and an orphanage for abandoned infants. This urban landscape made a lasting impression on the young Dostoyevsky, whose interest in and compassion for the poor, oppressed and tormented was apparent. Shortly after his mother died of tuberculosis in 1837, Dostoyevsky and his brother were sent to the Military Engineering Academy at Saint Petersburg. Fyodor's father died in 1839. Though it has never been proven, it is believed by some that he was murdered by his own serfs. At the Saint Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering, Dostoyevsky was taught mathematics, a subject he despised. However, he also studied literature by Shakespeare, Pascal, and Hugo. In 1842, he wrote two romantic plays (both of which a re now “lost-texts”), influenced by the German poet/playwright Friedrich Schiller: Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov. Dostoyevsky described himself as a "dreamer" when he was a young man, and at that time revered Schiller. However, in the years during which he yielded his great masterpieces, his opinions changed and he sometimes poked fun at Schiller. . After his first novel, The Petersburg Collection, was fully published in book form in 1847, Dostoyevsky became a literary celebrity at the age of 24. Dostoevsky then became a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, which was a Russian literary discussion group of progressive-minded commoner-intellectuals in St. Petersburg. organized by Mikhail Ptrashevsky, a follower of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Nicholas I, worried that the revolutions of 1848 would spread to Russia, mistook the largely harmless group for a subversive revolutionary organization. He closed the circle in 1849 and arrested and incarcerated its members. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was even sentenced to death in 1849 for his involvement, but was reprieved to serve eight years in prison, later reduced to four years by Nicholas I.
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (1821 -1881) 9) Dostoyevsky's post-prison fiction abandoned the West-European-style domestic melodramas and quaint character studies of his youthful work in favor of dark, more complex story-lines and situations, played-out by brooding, tortured characters—often styled partly on Dostoyevsky himself—who agonized over existential themes of spiritual torment, religious awakening, and the psychological confusion caused by the conflict between traditional Russian culture and the influx of modern, Western philosophy. 10) Nonetheless, Dostoyevsky owed to earlier Western-influenced writers such as Gogol whose work grew from the irrational and anti-authoritarian spiritualist ideas contained within the Romantic Movement which had immediately preceded Dostoyevsky in West Europe. 11) Hovever, he soon joined the Pochvennichestvo (Return to the Soil) was a late 19 th century Russian Nativist movement tied in closely with its contemporary ideology, the Slavophile movement. Both were for the complete emancipation of serfdom, and both campaigns stressed a strong desire to return to the idealized past of Russia's history, and both were driven towards anti-Europeanization. In addition, they also chose a complete rejection of the Nihilist and radical movements of the time. The primary focus was instead to change Russian society through the humbling of the self, and social reform through the Russian Orthodox Church, rather than the radical implementations of the intelligentsia 12) Thus, Dostoyevsky's major works from this period focused on the idea that utopias and positivist ideas were unrealistic and unobtainable. 13) In December 1859, Dostoyevsky returned to Saint Peersburg where he ran a series of unsuccessful literary journals, Vremya (Time) and Epokha (Epoch), with his older brother Mikhail. The latter was shut down as a consequence of its coverage of the Polish Uprising of 1863. That year Dostoyevsky traveled to Europe and frequented the gambling casinos.
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky Bibliography • • • • • (Translator) Honore de Balzac, Eugenie Grandet, [Russia], 1844. Bednye lyudi (title means Poor Folk), [Russia], 1846. Dvoinik (translation published as The Double), [Russia], 1846. Roman v devyati pis'makh (title means A Novel in Nine Letters), [Russia], 1847. Chuzhaya zhena i muzh pod krovat'yu (title means Another Man's Wife and a Husband under the Bed), [Russia], 1848. Elka i svad'ba (title means A Christmas Party and a Wedding), [Russia], 1848. Netochka Nezvanova, [Russia], 1849; translated as Netochka Nezvanova by Jane Kentish, Viking, 1986. Dyadyushkin son (novella; title means Uncle's Dream), [Russia], 1859. Selo Stepanchikovo (novella; title means The Friend of the Family), [Russia], 1859. Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (title means The House of the Dead), [Russia], 1860 -62. Unizhennye i oskorblennye (translations published as The Insulted and Injured. Insulted and Injury and Insult), [Russia], 1861. Prestuplenie i nakazanie, [Russia], 1866, translation by Jessie Coulson published as Crime and Punishment, edited by George Gibian, [New York], 1964. Igrok (novella; title means The Gambler), [Russia], 1867. Idiot, [Russia], 1868. Vechnyi muzh (novella; title means The Eternal Husband), [Russia], 1870. Besy (title means The Possessed), [Russia], 1872. Dnevnik pisatelya (title means The Diary of a Writer) (essays and short stories), [Russia], 187377; translated as A Writer's Diary, by Kenneth Lantz, Northwestern University Press, 1993. Podrostok (title means A Raw Youth or The Adolescent), [Russia], 1875; translated as An Accidental Family, by Richard Freeborn, with introduction and notes, Oxford University Press, 1994. Brat'ya Karamazovy, [Russia], 1880, translation by Constance Garnett published as The Brothers Karamazov, edited by Ralph Matlaw, [New York], 1976.
Longing to escape underground. Utilitarianism, existentialism/suffering is the sole of consciousness
Rational Egoism , Enlightened Egoism, Altruistic Egoism, and Utilitarianism 1) In ethical philosophy rational egoism or egotism is the principle that an action is rational if and only if it maximizes one's self-interest. The view is a normative form of egoism. However, it is different from other forms of egoism, such as ethical and psychological egoism While psychological egoism is about motivation and ethical egoism is about morality, rational egoism is a view about rationality (where rationality may or may not be tied to morality). 2) Rational egoism is discussed by the nineteenth-century English philosopher Henry Sidgwick in The Methods of Ethics. A method of ethics is ‘any rational procedure by which we determine what individual human beings “ought” – or what it is “right” for them – to do, or seek to realize by voluntary action. Sidgwick considers three such procedures, namely, rational egoism, dogmatic institutionalism and utilitarianism. Rational egoism is the view that, if rational, an agent regards quantity of consequent pleasure and pain to himself alone important in choosing between alternatives of action; and seeks always the greatest attainable surplus of pleasure over pain. 3) Sidgwick found it difficult to find any persuasive reason for preferring rational egoism over utilitarianism. Although utilitarianism can be provided with a rational basis and reconciled with the morality of common sense, rational egoism appears to be an equally plausible doctrine regarding what we have most reason to do. Thus we must ‘admit an ultimate and fundamental contradiction in our apparent intuitions of what is Reasonable in conduct; and from this admission it would seem to follow that the apparently intuitive operation of Practical Reason, manifested in these contradictory judgments, is after all illusory. 4) Ethical egoism or egoism is the normative ethical position that moral agents ought to do what is in their own self-interst. 5) It differs from psychological egoism, which claims that people do only act in their selfinterest 6) Ethical egoism contrasts with ethical altruism, which holds that moral agents have an obligation to help and serve others. 7) Egoism and altruism both contrast with ethical utilitarianism, which holds that a moral agent should treat one's self with no higher regard than one has for others (as egoism does, by elevating self-interests and "the self" to a status not granted to others).
Notes from the Underground (1864) Major Themes, Motifs, and Polemics 1) Shame, Guilt, and Confession 2) Self-Consciousness 3) Nihilism 4) Rational, Moral, Utilitarian and Enlightened Egoism 5) Free Will 6) Individualism, Fragmentation, and Invisibility 7) Isolation vs. Society 8) Action vs. Contemplation and or Passivity 9) German Idealism- Kant and Hegel 10) Positivism 11) Confession 12) (Fragmented) Identity 13) Romanticism 14) The Limitations of Logic and Abstract Thought 15) The ejection of Socialist Utopianism 16) The inability of theory and/or ideology to account for the complexities of human behavior 16) The underground as the acute infection of Contemporary of Western thought undermining the Russian National character or Orthodox Church.
Recap: Critiquing Rational Egoism The Inhertiance of Western Thought is Conflict
Russian Romanticism: A Western Hybrid Romanticism, Idealism, Utilitarianism, and Roguery
German Idealism and Hegel: Rejecting “the thing in itself, ” the Limitations of Abstract Thought, the Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage and Self-Consciousness 1) 2) 3) German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780 s and 1790 s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment The bestknown thinkers in the movement were Johanne Fichte, Friedrich Schiller, Hegel, Freidrich Jacobi, Gottlob Shulze, and Friedrich Scheilermacher. The word "idealism" has more than one meaning. The philosophical meaning of idealism here is that the properties we discover in objects depend on the way that those objects appear to us as perceiving subjects, and not something they possess "in themselves, " apart from our experience of them. The very notion of a “thing in itself” should be understood as an option of a set of functions for an operating mind, such that we consider something that appears without respect to the specific manner in which it appears. The question of what properties a thing might have "independently of the mind" is thus incoherent for Idealism. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831 responded to Kant's philosophy by suggesting that the unsolvable contradictions given by Kant in his Antimonies of Pure Reason applied not only to the four areas Kant gave (world as infinite vs. finite, material as composite vs. atomic, etc. ) but in all objects and conceptions, notions and ideas. To know this he suggested makes a "vital part in a philosophical theory. Given that abstract thought is thus limited, he went on to consider how historical formations give rise to different philosophies and ways of thinking. For Hegel, thought fails when it is only given as an abstraction and is not united with considerations of historical reality. In his major work The Phenomenology of Spirit he went on to trace the formation of selfconsciousness through history and the importance of other people in the awakening of self-consciousness via the master-slave dialectic. Thus Hegel introduces two important ideas to metaphysics and philosophy: the integral importance of history and of the Other person.
Underground Man as Romantic Idealist Interweaving Western Discourse to Undermine Rational And Moral Egoism
Layering Paradox: Unreliable Confession, Absence of the Economy of Contrition, Positivism and the Law of Humanity
Rousseau’s Confessions, Heine, and Dostoevsky 1) The Confessions was one of the first autobiographies in which an individual wrote of his own life mainly in terms of his worldly experiences and personal feelings. Rousseau recognized the unique nature of his work; it opens with the famous words: I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself. 2) The Confessions is also noted for its detailed account of Rousseau's more humiliating and shameful moments. 3) In addition, Rousseau explains the manner in which he disposes of his five illegitimate children, whom he had with his world-wide known companion, Therese Levasseur. 4) I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous and sublime; even as thou hast read my inmost soul: Powereternal! assemble round thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellowmortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and, if he dare, aver, I was better than that man. 5) Heinrich Heine's strongly critiqued Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions: the French philosophor, Heine asserts, made himself out to be a monster who consigned his natural children to an orphanage to suppress an even nastier truth, namely that the children were not his in the first place. Better a monster than a cuckold, thought Rousseau.
Isolation, Native Exile, Free Wil, Peter the Great, and the Powerless The Rational and Irrational: Enlightened and Romantic
The Underground as Russian National Character Polluted by Western Thought: Action, Passivity, Rousseau, and Hegel ( Marx) The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men. Karl Marx 1848
The No Exit of Acute Consciousness: German Idealism, French Romanticism, Peter the Great, Rational Egoism and Sin
German Idealism and Hegel’s Master Slave Dialectic The Inability to Conceive of and yet Yearn for Equal Footing and The Desire to Be Recognized (to be an Individual) in the Face of Invisibility
Ethical Egoism, Ethical Utilitarianism, Invisibility, and Romanticism
An Impossible Choice: Slave or Romantic Hero Dreams, Romanticism, Romantic Idealism, Retrospective Shame
The Incompatibility of Western Ideology and Russian Life: Romantic Idealism in the Social Sphere
Outdoing the Master Invisibility, Romanticism, German Idealism, Ethical Utilitarianism, and Class Ideology
Romantic Idealism Action, Passivity, Invisibility, Men of Action, the Drive Towards Isolation and Depravity
Sounding Booking The Enslavement of Romanticism, The Incompatibility of Philosophy and Lived Life
The Self-Recognition of Artificiality: Confession, the Religious Master Slave Dialectic, The Unbearable Weight of Romantic Idealism
Theme: The Entrance of the Literary Into Lived Life and the Confusion of Literary and Real Worlds the incompatibility of books with life
Lost Love and Lost to Love: The Cost of Operating Outside the Laws of Humanity
Unexpurgated Sin, Existentialism, A Generation Born from Ideas The Impossibility of Connecting with Real Life (idealism), the Run Towards the Yoke of Ideology, and Existentialism
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