Dostoevsky - Notes From Underground - A Philosophical Guide

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

If you want examples of characters that take nihilism as seriously as we’ve been taking it in these posts lately then the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky is going to be of interest to you.

The following is not intended to be a replacement for reading his books. And especially as we start covering the longer of his five great novels, these posts will become increasingly incapable of giving any decent representation of the plot points of his books.

What this is intended to be is a guide to some of the philosophical themes that Dostoevsky wanted to communicate that often get missed in the brilliance of his stories.

Today we’re talking about the first major work of what people sometimes call the “mature” period of his writing— a book called Notes From Underground.

If you’ve never read Dostoevsky before, then the biggest piece of context I can give you starting out is that one of the main things he wants to put at center stage is the complexity and the irrationality of the internal human experience.

That what it is to be a person is oftentimes 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 and governments during the time that he was alive.

If you wanted an example of this then there’s one in the political realm you might be familiar with.

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

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

Should be said he’s coming from a