Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Shestov. Three Russian Apostles of Freedom
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“Well, can you expect a man who tries to find pleasure even in the feeling of his own humiliation to have an atom of respect for himself?” Humiliation humbles us. It makes us feel low and common. Someone just as low and common as ourselves suddenly inflicts an emotional wound on us that makes us feel painfully that we are even more low and common than everyone else. Our phony self is all at once sent flying out a window. Suddenly we no longer respect ourselves! What can be worse?
How can we live without respect for ourselves? Self-respect and self-esteem are the same thing and is there anything in the rationalized world we live in more necessary to be done with the power of love that exists in all of us than to love ourselves? The underground man not only has no self-respect but doesn’t want any. Respect for himself will make him not only respect himself but respect others. To respect himself and to respect others means to respect a world ruled by reason. “You see, gentlemen,” he tells us, “reason is an excellent thing. There is no doubt about it. But reason is only reason, and it can only satisfy the reasoning ability of man, whereas volition is a manifestation of the whole of life, I mean, of the whole of human life, including reason with all its concomitant head-scratchings…For my part, I quite naturally want to live in order to satisfy all my capacities for life and not my reasoning capacity alone, that is to say, only some twentieth part of my capacity for living. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in getting to know, whereas human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously, and unconsciously, and though it may commit all sorts of absurdities, it persists….man can deliberately and consciously desire something that is injurious, stupid, even outrageously stupid, just because he wants to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is sensible.” The underground man has no respect for his self unless it asserts itself on some occasions by acting willfully and he has come to enjoy willing what no one else dares to will. His humiliation has a “strange enjoyment” for him because when someone as common as himself puts him down, the pain to his wounded vanity also revives the life of his will that his reason tries to keep asleep.
He is now forty. Years before, when he was twenty-four, he was humiliated by an army officer. He goes by a small pub one night. He sees through a window some men having a fight with billiard cues and “one of them being thrown out a window”. He feels “envious of the fellow who had been thrown out the window”. Clearly it is not to his advantage to go into the pub and start a fight so that he can be himself thrown out a window. But that is what he wills, that is what he wants! He wants to teach his self the lesson that he does not respect it by acting willfully rather than rationally. But inside the pub he stands near the billiard tables and nothing happens. He does not start a fight. He does nothing to make someone throw him out a window. Without being aware of it, he is standing near a billiard table blocking the way. He is a “short, thin little fellow”. An army officer over six feet, without any warning or explanation, picks up the underground man bodily and carries him to another place out of the way “as if I were a piece of furniture”. He is “treated like a fly”. His wounded vanity makes his heart burn with resentment and he can not rest until he dares to walk on purpose into the path of the officer one day on a crowded street bumping directly against him. He gets the worst of the bumping but he is nonetheless strangely satisfied. He gets enjoyment by daring to act willfully and unreasonably in a way that upsets normal behavior.
Such strokes of the will against the world are impossible as long as the underground man hides alone in his corner brooding. He too, like Raskolnikov, gets up, goes out, and tests whether or not his thoughts and what he wills count for anything in a world where humans think very little and very rarely accomplish what they really and truly will. In fact, he is in no hurry to rush out and involve himself in the real world. Instead, he passes three months dreaming, dreaming of what he calls “salvation through the good and the beautiful”. “But how much love, good Lord, how much love I used to experience in those dreams of mine.” “…fantastic though that sort of love was and though in reality it had no relation whatsoever to anything human, there was so much of it, so much of this love, that one did not feel the need of applying it in practice afterwards…” However, after three months of dreaming, he feels “an irresistible urge to plunge into social life”. That the man from the underground will meet real love in the real world seems impossible but for Dostoevsky that is the only place real love can exist. The love that the underground man has been experiencing in his dreaming is an unreal result of poetic fantasy and for Dostoevsky there is no such thing as “salvation through the good and the beautiful”. However, he never rules out anything happening to anyone in the real world, even love for a “short, thin little fellow” like his underground man.
He decides to contact former schoolfellows whom he has not seen for years. He despises them all, Simonov, whom he suspects loathes him, Ferfichkin, “a little fellow with the face of a monkey” who was one of his worst enemies from their earliest days at school, Trudolyubov, an army officer, “ a great admirer of every kind of success and only capable of discussing promotions”. He visits Simonov and finds the three of them discussing a dinner party for a fourth, Zverkov. They make plans for the dinner party in his presence without inviting him. He is forced to invite himself and the three are forced to accept him unwillingly. The underground man describes the four of them hatefully and scorns them for their lack of intelligence and for their lack of respect for himself. But he is by no means a model of goodness and polite behavior! He uses the dinner party as a scene to display his willfulness with continuous critical words and strange acts that are clearly not to his advantage or anyone’s advantage. He insults them and even challenges one to a duel. The four end up not speaking to him at all. All of them eat and drink a great deal. After dinner the four leave the table and sit at a sofa drinking and talking and ignoring the underground man. He decides to pace up and down the room opposite the sofa. “They paid no attention to me. I had the patience to pace the room… right in front of them from eight till eleven o’clock, always in the same place, from the table to the stove, and back again.” Acting willfully in the real world requires a will willing to experience anything no matter how painful. In comparison, rational behavior is as gracious as it is boring.
The four decide to leave the restaurant for an adventurous evening of vice. They do not invite the underground man who hesitates to follow them. When he finally decides to follow them and arrives at their destination, the four have gone. He falls asleep and wakes up seeing “two wide-open eyes observing me intently and curiously. The look in those eyes was coldly indifferent and sullen, as though it were utterly detached, and it made me feel terribly depressed.” “I suddenly saw clearly how absurd and hideous like a spider was the idea of vice which, without love, grossly and shamelessly begins where true love finds its consummation.” He remembers that for two hours he “had never said a word to this creature, and had not even thought it necessary to do so”.
Now however he does talk to her. He asks her name. “‘Lisa’, she replied, almost in a whisper, but somehow without attempting to be agreeable, and turned her eyes away.” He finds it “hideous” to talk to her and he goes on asking details about her life “almost angry with her”. She gives him information about her background speaking “more and more abruptly”. He tells her of a burial he observed of a girl her own age who had been living in a similar set of circumstances. This makes her curious but she asks him questions about the burial “speaking even more abruptly and harshly than before”. Something however eggs him on to carry on the conversation. Will he speak willfully with her? Will he speak egotistically and hostily to her as he has been speaking to his school fellows a few hours before at the dinner party? Will he test his highly individualistic antisocial amoral ideas on her to perhaps influence her to live as he does delighting in groundlessness and irrationality? What kind of talk will come from the underground man now that he has left his hiding place and must talk to a real woman in a real world? If he does not continue his wild and crazy antisocial talk, will he not prove to us that he has been nothing but all talk? But on the other hand, he can not be humiliated by her in the present situation where he is dominant and she is a young woman with a lowly status. Since he can not find a “strange enjoyment” from some humiliation caused him by a prostitute, he tries to influence her to rise above her lowly state.
In the presence of the young woman, the underground man turns into a run of the mill idealistic moralist! He turns himself into a new man, a regular honest middle-class man, as he begins describing for her the joys possible if she changes and lives a pure and honest life! “Come, get back your senses while there’s still time. You’re still young, you’re good-looking, you might fall in love, be married, be happy…” He is disgusted with the way he is talking. He regrets that he is “no longer reasoning coldly” and that he himself was feeling what he was saying and “warmed to the subject”. But he goes on and on painting for her verbal images in long moralizing speeches about the joys of a normal life with love, marriage and the love of children. He tells us that his “moralizing” is “ridiculous” and that she probably doesn’t understand any of it but he goes on anyway. “Though you are now young, attractive, pretty, sensitive, warm-hearted, I – well, you know, the moment I woke up a few moments ago, I couldn’t help feeling disgusted at being with you here!…But if you were anywhere else, if you lived as all good, decent people live, I should not only have taken a fancy to you, but fallen head over heels in love with you.”
“I knew I was speaking in a stiff, affected, even bookish manner, but as a matter of fact I could not speak except ‘as though I was reading from a book’. But that did not worry me, for I knew, I had a feeling that I would be understood, that this very bookishness would assist rather than hinder matters.” Eventually he sees that he has made an impression on her and it frightens him because her body “was writhing as though in convulsions”. She sobs and “broke out into loud moans and cries”. He can not go on with his “bookish” talk because he sees fearfully that it is having a real effect on a real human being. He is about to tell her that he is sorry, that he should not have talked to her so long in such a positive moralistic idealistic fashion but he stops realizing that he has had a real effect on her and that now it would be wrong to try to undo what he has done. He gives her his address and tells her to come and see him. She will not let him go until she relates a story about how she once was loved by a young man before she sank to her present condition. Her story proves that now because of the underground man’s positive sermon she has hope for a changed future. He is sorry for what he has done and is happy to leave.
Away from Lisa, he is “overcome with embarrassment” for what he has said to her. How could he have talked for so long so sentimentally with romantic nonsense about goodness and love and hope? He gave her his address and now is worried that she will come to visit him. Even as days pass and she still does not come, he remains worried. “If not today, then tomorrow, but come she will! She’ll seek me out! For such is the damned romanticism of all those pure hearts!…How could she fail to understand? Why, anyone would have seen through it!”
When Lisa visits him and they sit together with tea, he has a nervous attack and begins sobbing. “She was frightened. ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’ she kept asking, standing helplessly over me.” He resents her presence and there are long silences between them. Finally she speaks. “‘I–I want to get away from that place for good,’ she began in an effort to do something to break the silence, but, poor thing, that was just what she should not have spoken about at such a stupid moment and especially to a man who was as stupid as I.” Another five minutes of silence passes between them. He asks her suddenly what she has come for and she does not answer. “I’ll tell you, my dear girl, what you have come for. You’ve come because I made pathetic speeches to you the other night. So you were softened and now you want more of these pathetic speeches. Well, I may as well tell you at once I was laughing at you then. And I’m laughing at you now….I had been insulted before, at dinner, by the fellows who came before me that night….So to avenge my wounded pride on someone, to get my own back, I vented my spite on you and I laughed at you. I had been humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate someone…I wanted power. Power was what I wanted then. I wanted sport. I wanted to see you cry. I wanted to humiliate you. To make you hysterical….And do you realize that now that I’ve told you all this I shall hate you for having been here and listened to me?”