Dostoevsky and Socrates: The
Underground Man and “The
Allegory of the Cave”
Thomas S. Berry, University of Maryland http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/DS/06/157.shtml In the Notes from the Underground, the
Underground Man can be interpreted as an allegory
of Socrates' famous "Allegory of the Cave;" and the
Russian work can be seen as a refutation of basic
Socratic premises. Dostoevsky's polemic with
Chernyshevsky and Schiller in the Notes has been
studied; (1) the Russian author's dispute with
Socrates in the same work also deserves
consideration.
Two elements support the thesis that
Dostoevsky was attacking Socratic thought in the
Notes: 1. A direct reference to a Socratic principle
by the Underground Man, a matter that will be
discussed later in this study; and 2. the basic theme
of the Notes, as declared by the author, which
contradicts Socratic philosophy. Dostoevsky
explained the major idea of the Underground Man in
a letter to his brother on March 26, 1864. (2)
Complaining about the censors' prepublication
distortion of the Notes, Dostoevsky mentioned that
the main theme of the work was in the next to the
last chapter of Part I. In that section, he maintains
that life cannot be based on the rational alone. This
contest of the rational versus the irrational is evident
in Dostoevsky's philosophical development from his
youth onward; for instance, on October 31, 1839(3),
as a young engineering student, he wrote his brother
that a knowledge of "nature, the soul, God and
love...is known by the heart, not the mind." This
theme is presented in Pechorin's diary in
Lermontov's Hero of Our Time and by the repentant
Karl Moor in Schiller's "Die Räuber;" both of these
works were highly praised by Dostoevsky in his
youth. (4) He also wrote in glowing terms to his
brother about the famous French religious writer
Pascal, who upheld the spiritual over the rational. (5)
In his early manhood, Dostoevsky was associated
with Belinsky, who defended philosophic idealism
against empirical truth. (6) Consequently,
considering the influences on Dostoevsky and his
numerous references to the irrational versus the
rational, it is evident that he had contemplated the
idea for some time.
A later development of Dostoevsky's attack
on rationalism as the best philosophy for mankind is
evident in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,
which he wrote In 1863 just before undertaking the
Notes from the Underground. Returning from
Europe, Dostoevsky deplored the West he had
discovered in his travels. In the Russian writer's
mind, Western civilization was decadent and
materialistic. In his attack on the West, he again
repeated the theme referred to so often in the past:
the pointlessness of a life based only on the rational.
(7) This is the idea carried over to the Underground
Man. Whether Dostoevsky deliberately or
subconsciously wanted the Underground Man to
serve as a rebuttal to Socratic philosophy is a matter
of conjecture, but a dispute between the
philosophical ideas of the two writers is evident.
The beginning of the Notes from the
Underground can be interpreted as an attack on the
famous Socratic dictum "Know thyself." The
Underground Man gives the impression that he
knows himself very well. His health and
psychological state are discussed in considerable
detail. A Socratic argument develops between the
Underground Man and himself. A question is asked
and an answer is given; but the Underground Man's
inquiry leads to the blind wall of the laws of nature
and the inquirer realizes that he cannot know himself
if nature does not even ask one's permission whether
you like or dislike it's laws. In knowing oneself, one
simply has to accept the world presented by nature.
This the Underground Man cannot do. He refuses to
resign himself to the blind laws of an impartial
nature. Lev Shestov, in his book Athens and
Jerusalem, said that Dostoevsky was attacking
"eternal truths" with his theory about the laws of
nature, or the stone wall, as Dostoevsky refers to
them:
And he attacks them from the side which
seemed "naturally" defended and
consequently inaccessible. Before the wall,
he says, men who are philosophically
cultivated, that is, schooled by the Greeks,
“bow down in all sincerity...A wall for them
has something calming, final, perhaps even
mystical about it.” (8)
But the Underground Man will have nothing to do
with such finality and comfort. He will not bow to
constraint. Dostoevsky had discovered what Etienne
Gilson had realized while writing L'esprit de la
Philosophie Medievale, that:
the divine law exercises no constraint on the
will of man...It is established that freedom is
an absolute absence of constraint, even in
relation to the divine law. (9)
God does not constrain, but two times two make
four and the stone walls do constrain.
Addressing the man who thinks he knows
himself, the Underground Man would ask, "How can
you know yourself if you are constrained by the laws
of mathematics or of impartial nature?" He would
continue, "You can't!" Besides, where is all this
"know yourself" when it comes to a toothache? That
is the great humbler! All your pride in knowing
yourself disappears. You are no longer what you
thought you were; you are nothing but a moaning
glob of protoplasm. So, see, you didn't know
yourself at all! You're "no longer the hero" you tried
being before and you've no reason to respect
yourself.
The Underground Man insists on the
impossibility of knowing oneself because to know
thyself you must "have your mind at ease without a
trace of doubt in it." But, he asks, "How does one set
one's mind at rest?”
Where are my primary causes on which I am
to build? Where are my bases? Where am I
to get them from? I exercise myself in the
process of thinking, and consequently with
me every primary cause at once draws after
itself another still more primary cause, and
so on to infinity...” So you give it up as
hopeless because you have not found a
fundamental course. (Part I, Sec. V)
The Underground Man concludes that you end up
deceiving yourself. You talk yourself into believing
you know yourself, but you don't because that is
impossible. Continuing his argument, the
Underground Man states that he wishes he could
have at least been capable of being lazy:
there would at least have been in me one
positive quality, as it were, in which I could
have believed myself. Question: who is he?
Answer: a loafer. After all, it would have
been pleasant to hear that about oneself. It
would mean that I was positively defined.
(Part I, Sec. VI)
The Underground Man could have "known himself"
if he had at least been lazy. Realizing the man's
ambivalence, one can understand why he chose
gluttony as his preferred vice: he wanted a large
stomach. That would be an asset because he could
have embraced it and thereby know that one thing on
this earth was positive, for he would be holding it.
Still he would only be deceiving himself because a
stomach is only temporal. The Underground Man
concludes that you cannot ever know yourself.
A second Socratic premise that the
Underground Man disputes is that "no one would
deliberately choose what will harm him or
knowingly reject what will benefit him most." (10)
The Underground Man says:
We all know that not a single man can
knowingly act to his own disadvantage, but
what if it so happens that a man's advantage
sometimes not only may, but even must,
consist exactly in his desiring under certain
conditions what is harmful to himself and
not what is advantageous. And if so, if there
can be such a condition, then the whole
principle becomes worthless. (Part I, Sec.
VII)
Through the rest of the literary work, Dostoevsky
tries to prove that the principle is indeed worthless.
Man, according to Dostoevsky, has the right
to desire for himself even what is very stupid and
not to be bound by an obligation to desire what is
rational. It is the irrational that preserves our
individuality, not the rational; otherwise the
Underground Man could not ask the question, "Why
then am I made with such desires?" This is not a
question for the so-called "normal man" who accepts
the rational world per se; no, it is the Underground
Man's question and he cannot answer it. Instead he
realizes that life is a series of contradictions that
come about by man's free will or choice. Part II of
the Notes presents many examples of the
Underground Man in situations where he acts to his
own disadvantage.
In the beginning of Part II of the Notes,
when the Underground Man went into the tavern in
hopes of being thrown out the window, he certainly
was acting to his disadvantage. It was a matter of
free choice, but his craving for contradictions
certainly caused him to act to his own disadvantage.
What could show more antipathy than the hero's
ridiculous efforts to bump into his adversary on the
street? The futility of the endeavor and the
unsuitability of his conduct indicate the
contradictions prevalent in his mind. The irrational
directs his thinking and his actions appear absurd in
the empirical, rational world.
Seeking escape from the antagonisms of the
world, the Underground Man lost himself in
daydreams (Part II, Sec. III). However, while
reflecting on Schiller's "sublime and beautiful," he
realized that his lifted spirit was only a deception
which he described as a "sauce made up of
contradictions and sufferings, of agonizing inward
analysis." Even in moments of Schillerean "spiritual
heights" he was not sure of himself. Such uplifting
moments came even when he was practicing that
which he called his most loathsome vice.
Dostoevsky shows by this the contradictions that
prevailed in the hero's mind. Vice and the sublime
were in his thoughts at the same time. His thoughts
were riddled with contrariety. There was no chance
of ever knowing himself.
The antagonisms in the Underground Man's
thoughts cause him to conduct himself in ways that
are not to his advantage. In Part II, Sec. II, when he
joined in the party of his friends, he asked himself,
"What possessed me to force myself on them?" He
himself could not explain his repugnant behavior.
He was a victim of contradictory compulsions which
led him into situations ever to his disadvantage. The
yellow stain on his trousers at the party deprived him
of his dignity. How could a person know himself
with a yellow stain shouting impropriety and
neglect? He should have left the party, but for
reasons he could not explain, he stayed, later
concluding that "No one could have gone out of his
way to degrade himself more shamelessly and
voluntarily, and I fully realized it and yet I went on
pacing up and down." (Part II, Sec. IV) The
revolting scene ends with the Underground Man
begging for money to accompany his friends to the
house of ill repute. "Take it, if you have no sense of
shame!" Simonov finally exclaimed, underlining the
degradation of the Underground Man. His lack of
direction and his contradictory nature had caused an
impasse which had obliterated social decencies and
human values. Shame meant little in his situation.
With no understanding and rife with contradictions,
the Underground Man was adrift in the human sea
with no anchor of hope for moderation of thought or
adjustment in society.
The prostitute Liza exposes more of the
Underground Man's war with himself. Liza has gone
into her profession, certainly to her disadvantage, as
an escape. Without doubt, the meetings with the
Underground Man cause her grief, but her life is one
of sorrow. Her predicament is not the most
important element in this part of the work. Her
relationship with the Underground Man accentuates
his intellectual apostasy. He has gone beyond the
"stone wall" of rationalism and has been destroyed
by the irrationality on the other side of the wall. The
confusion in the world of the irrational only defeated
his determination to do anything or his desires for
anything. His vacillation is proof of his
contradictory nature: his sentimentality causes him
disgust; his love turns to hatred; and his hatred gives
him anguish. His neurotic state promotes his strange
behavior. In the scene where the Underground Man
orders his servant, Apollon, to call the police, the
menial's remark, "Who ever heard of anyone calling
the police on themselves?" can be seen as a
reference to Socrates' "No man would work to his
own disadvantage." The irrational Underground Man
most certainly would and did. He has refused the
rational world of the Greeks; and in his refusal, he
has forfeited the right to know himself. For
"knowing oneself" is just a matter of accepting the
world as the rationalists would have us believe it is.
The world is not really that way. It is more than the
confines of geometry and Chernyshevsky's
socialism. Man is free only in the irrational. Normal
man accepts Euclidian laws and is lost without them.
Take them away, the Underground Man says, and
normal man will crawl back to them, eagerly
demanding the old deceits, begging to be enslaved
(Part II, Sec. 10). But the Underground Man knows
that he has gone beyond the wall of rationalism. And
beyond that wall, there is chaos; but chaos allows
freedom from restrictions, awareness beyond the
normal, and refuge for genius.
The Underground Man did not cope with the
irrational world he found. He failed; he states that he
ruined his life in his great quest. Still he maintains
that even though he might have failed, he still had
more life than normal man. In his own words,
I have in my life carried to an extreme what
you have not dared to carry halfway; and
what's more you have taken your cowardice
for good sense and have found comfort in
deceiving yourself. (Part II, Sec. X)
The Underground Man has exposed mankind for
what it is: cowards, cringing to the security of a
rational world based on deceit. Dostoevsky has
shown that the Socratic principles which are basic to
Western civilization are a grand sham. These
principles have made a "generalized man" who is
"still-born" and in essence is a shell of his potential.
True understanding is not limited by laws. Broader
horizons exist; man must have the courage to
discover them or else he will be blinded by the
limitations of rationalism and face stagnation.
Dostoevsky can be interpreted as staging an
argument against Socrates' famous "Allegory of the
Cave;" and perhaps the Underground Man is the
Russian writer's rebuttal to the Greek's famous
presentation.
Plato reported Socrates' "Allegory of the
Cave" in The Republic (Part VII). The Greek
allegory is in support of knowledge as a means for
overcoming the illusionary quality of existence,
which Socrates has shown in his arguments. The
Russian allegory upholds the irrational as the only
means of preserving individuality in a world where
the rationalism of the empiricists has explained
existence in terms which Dostoevsky found limited
and just as illusionary as that underground world
described by Socrates. The Greek hero left the
underground and found that the world he knew
below was an illusion; the Russian Underground
Man went beneath the earth to escape the illusion of
this world. The knowledge that the Greek hero was
heralded in this world was the very thing that drove
the Underground Man away. Socrates' hero rejoiced
that he had come to another world; Dostoevsky's
hero knew too well the world found by the Greek
and wanted to leave it. The Russian author created,
in a sense, a reverse allegory which contradicts
Socrates' famous presentation. The conclusion is
provocative: the knowledge that chained the Greeks
to their illusions below the earth will also chain them
to a piano-key existence on earth. Dostoevsky
wanted to preserve all that is good in man, his
irrationality, by taking him away from the illusions
that will eventually bind the Greek hero to his
newfound world.
There is no doubt that Dostoevsky had
planned for the irrational to be the answer for the
Underground Man's intellectual predicament. Faith,
or the irrational, was Dostoevsky's solution. The
irrational, or faith in Christ, would save the
Underground Man from chaos on the other side of
the Stone Wall; it would also deliver him from the
imprisonment of Greek thought in the empirical
world. It is well known that the censors deleted
Dostoevsky's references to Christ as the savior of the
disillusioned Underground Man. Whether the
censors helped make the Notes from the
Underground one of the most original Russian
contributions to world literature is a matter of
conjecture; as they are, the Notes pose philosophical
testaments that cast doubt on the great Socratic
premises so traditionally accepted in Western
civilization. (11)
NOTES
1. E.K. Kostka, Schiller In Russian Literature.
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965).
Wasiolek, E., Dostoevsky: The Major
Fiction. (M.I.T. Press, 1964). (For
Chernyshevsky, see section on Notes from
the Underground.)
2. Dostoevsky, F.M., Pis'ma, v. I. (1832-1867).
Ed. A.S. Dolinin. (Leningrad:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1928.) P. 353.
3. Ibid., pp. 50-51.
4. Frank, J., Dostoevsky: The seeds of Revolt
(1821-1849). (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1979.) P. 93.
5. Magarshak, D., Dostoevsky. (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975.) P. 75.
6. Terras, Victor, Belinsky and Russian
Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic
Aesthetics. (Madison, Wis.: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1974.) P. 37.
7. F.M. Dostoevsky. v. 5: Povesti i rasskazy,
1965-1966. (Leningrad: Izatel'stvo "Nauka,"
1973.) P. 374.
8. Shestov, L., Athens and Jerusalem. (Athens,
Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966.) P. 329.
9. Gilson, E., L'esprit de la Philosophie
Medievale. (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J.
Vrin, 1948.) P. 284.
10. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, v. 7. Ed. P.
Edwards. (New York: The Macmillan
Publishing Co., 1967.)
P. 484.
11. Dostoevsky's polemic with Socrates in the
Russian writer's major novels is under study
by the author, as well as the analogy
between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche in the
Notes. These studies will be submitted in the
future. The author wishes to express his
gratitude to Dr. Victor Terras, Brown
University, Providence, R.I., for his reading,
comments, and encouragement.