Fyodor Dostoevsky on Heightened Consciousness
From ancient Greek philosopher Plato to English statesman Francis Bacon, many of our greatest thinkers had taken on the enormous challenge of designing the ultimate blueprint — a utopia that houses the entire human race. No more wars, no more poverty and certainly, no more suffering. A society focused on advancing the frontiers of human knowledge, on perpetuating goodness and peace, and on unbolting every individual’s fullest potential.
In 1863, Russian literary critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky chimed in, offering his quixotic vision of a utopia based on natural laws of self-interest. In it, he propounded the doctrine of “rational egoism”, suggesting that people are selfish and do everything in their own self-interest for their long term happiness.
To fiercely rebuke Chernyshevsky’s ideas, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky published Notes from Underground (1864), which has been translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Using the title “gentlemen”, Dostoevsky addresses the typical intellectuals of the 1860s, as he proceeds to fervently criticise the scientism and rationalism underpinning Chernyshevsky’s novel.
Notes from Underground consists of two sections. The first section is narrated in a monologue form, by an unnamed character, who was a former official, now referred to as the “underground man”. It is a bitter yet passionate rambling about man’s immanent irrationality, and consequently the infeasibility of a social utopia driven by self-interest. The second section of the novella describes certain events that took place in the life of our anti-hero when he was twenty-four. Through his interactions with his former school mates and a prostitute named Liza, we learn more about his paradoxical character: one that is wicked yet pitiful, crazed yet relatable. Much of his relatability stems from his firm conviction that to harbour any consciousness at all is in itself a sickness, one that he, alongside all of mankind, is inflicted by. Aware of our voyeuristic presence, our conflicted protagonist is careful with how he presents himself, as succinctly demonstrated in the first line in his diary:
“I am a sick man…I am a wicked man.”
Our protagonist’s heightened consciousness, and by extension ours, comes at a hefty cost: interminable self-loathing. We recognize our intrinsic limitations, arrive before this ultimate wall, but discover no way around it. Even with enough time and faith, we could never change ourselves, due to the enormous inertia following the laws of heightened consciousness. Not only is there nothing we can do to change ourselves, but more fundamentally, there is nothing to do at all. We want to direct our frustrations toward an object or person for this dire situation we find ourselves in. But it becomes strikingly evident that we are somehow to be blamed, though it is obvious we are in no way at fault. This grey cloud of uncertainty looms over us, envelops us and sweeps us into a frenzied state of pain — that is, the more uncertain we become, the more we feel this stabbing pain.
Unlike non-sentient creatures, we often ruminate in depth about the primary cause for all our doings, before implicating another primary cause, and another, and so on ad infinitum. Our constant wrestling with our intellectual thoughts, as a means to identify an irrefutable basis for our actions, becomes the source of our utter misery and restlessness. Because to begin to act with complete certainty, we must be at complete ease, with our minds free of any worry. Yet as long as we possess a heightened consciousness, never will this inner state of serenity be within our grasp.
To tackle this problem, the underground man is left with no choice, but to throw himself against this ultimate wall, over and over again, to benumb himself, so he can no longer feel any pain. This process of self-deception, as the underground man later notes, is futile and counter-productive:
“[Man] is a frivolous and unseemly being, and perhaps, similar to a chess player, likes only the process of achieving the goal, but not the goal itself [...]”
Man enjoys the process of working towards a goal more than reaching the goal itself. He loves his well-being, but not as much as his suffering. His suffering is more profitable, albeit irrational, to him than his well-being, or more generally, any conventional type of profit society conditions us into pursuing: prosperity, freedom, peace, and so on. Suffering is what makes us conscious, so while it is our greatest misfortune, it is ironically our most prized possession too.
This is why Dostoevsky was so vehemently against Chernyshevsky’s utopia, one underpinned by laws of science and mathematics. These laws lay down absolute and incontrovertible facts, shower us with the warmth of epistemological certainty; in the process, they compel us to renounce our suffering, our contemplation and our consciousness. But this isn’t what we truly want. Unchanging conclusions extrapolated through reason disinterest us to the verge of intellectual suicide. What we want, subconsciously, is to be catapulted into the tempest of the human experience, in all of its chaos and desolation. That unexpected thrill that accompanies suffering is what we ultimately crave.
Our own free and voluntary wanting, however wild and unreasonable, is what satiates our needs. Whatever it may cost and wherever it may lead us to, we need this fickle wanting in our lives to thrive. While human caprice seemingly contradicts our reason, and in fact it does, it is still more profitable than every other self-interest, because it preserves the dearest thing to our hearts — our unique personality and individuality. We will do anything to not be a mere piano key played by the hand of fate; we will cling onto our most absurd aspirations to escape the iron cage we find ourselves entrapped within. Our resolution to be independent and free individuals is so powerful that:
“[Even] if it should indeed turn out that he is a piano key, if it were even proved to him mathematically and by natural science, he would still not come to reason, but would do something contrary on purpose, solely out of ingratitude alone; essentially to have his own way. And if he finds himself without means — he will invent destruction and chaos, he will invent all kinds of suffering, and still have his own way! He will launch a curse upon the world, and since man alone is able to curse (that being his privilege, which chiefly distinguishes him from other animals), he may achieve his end by the curse alone — that is, indeed satisfy himself that he is a man and not a piano key! If you say that all this, the chaos and darkness and cursing, can also be calculated according to a little table, so that the mere possibility of a prior calculation will put a stop to it all and reason will claim its own — then he will deliberately go mad for the occasion, so as to do without reason and still have his own way! I believe in this, I will answer for this, because the whole human enterprise seems indeed to consist in man’s proving to himself every moment that he is a man and not a sprig [...]”
Reason only satisfies our reasoning capacity, whereas caprice manifests human life in its totality, encompassing reason and other quasi-inferior self-interests. In other words, our sense of reason only knows what it has learnt, but human nature — our fickleness and our independent wanting — acts as an entire whole, both consciously and unconsciously. The latter may defy the very principles governing our reason. But none of that matters, because as the underground man had previously alluded to: we live to satisfy our whole capacity of living, not just our reasoning capacity.
Caprice, animated by our consciousness and suffering, is an infinitely superior human quality than reason — this is precisely the crux of Dostoevsky’s entire rebuttal against Chernyshevsky’s utopian fantasies, that we as human beings are much more than our mere faculty of reason. Human caprice, in the end, shall always prevail over reason.