Author:: [[Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky]] DateFinished:: Rating:: Tags:: #📩 # Notes From Underground  ## Highlights I am a sick man…I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts. However, I don’t know a fig about my sickness, and am not sure what it is that hurts me. I am not being treated and never have been, though I respect medicine and doctors. What’s more, I am also superstitious in the extreme; well, at least enough to respect medicine. (I’m sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I am.) ([Location 308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=308)) - Note: Everything about this sounds conflicted. No, sir, I refuse to be treated out of spite. Now, you will certainly not be so good as to understand this. Well, sir, but I understand it. I will not, of course, be able to explain to you precisely who is going to suffer in this case from my spite; I know perfectly well that I will in no way “muck things up” for the doctors by not taking their treatment; I know better than anyone that by all this I am harming only myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t get treated, it is out of spite. My liver hurts; well, then let it hurt even worse! ([Location 311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=311)) - Note: It’s conventional to go to the doctor but the underground man wants to prove he can exercise free will so he suffers in his pain. Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure—primarily a limited being. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=333)) - Note: It is impossible for an intelligent man to become something. What does this mean? But anyhow: what can a decent man speak about with the most pleasure? Answer: about himself. So then I, too, will speak about myself. ([Location 352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=352)) - Note: Am I to take everything this man says as a sarcastic statement? That the exact opposite is where the true wisdom lies? I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, full-blown sickness. ([Location 356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=356)) - Note: Sometimes I feel an annoyance at waking up. I was in a blissful state of ignorance while playing video games as a child. Why did it have to be taken away? Children are the most innocent of beings. Over intellectualizing things can be a detriment. When you are overly conscious you can fall into a thinking rabbit hole. You play back memories that alter every time you retrieve them agonizing over things you could have done differently. But all the same I am firmly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness. ([Location 363](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=363)) I’ll explain to you: the pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one’s own humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall; that, bad as it is, it cannot be otherwise; that there is no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person; that even if you had enough time and faith left to change yourself into something different, you probably would not wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you would still not do anything, because in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into. ([Location 378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=378)) - Note: People seem not what is good but what is normal. We don’t like change. There is solace in the idea that you have reached rock bottom. That there is no where worse to go. perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it’s even very beautiful. ([Location 409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=409)) - Note: The underground man seems to suffer and feel incredible pleasure from his heightened consciousness. But a stupid or emotional man is like an animal. They don’t feel highs or lows. They just are. They can just be. the man of heightened consciousness, who came, of course, not from the bosom of nature but from a retort (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect that, too), this retort man sometimes folds before his antithesis so far that he honestly regards himself, with all his heightened consciousness, as a mouse and not a man. ([Location 411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=411)) - Note: I believe the underground man uses a mouse as the embodied animal because a mouse being angry, emotional, and spiteful goes against its nature. Not only is a mouse not conscious like this but also a mouse is typically seen as the animal that’s hunted by cats and other things. How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself? ([Location 490](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=490)) - Note: With high consciousness you’re aware of all the bullshit you do. Of all the shortcomings you have. Of how your virtues are really self interest in disguise. Reminds me of my note on there is no true altruism. And you ask why I twisted and tormented myself so? Answer: because it was just too boring to sit there with folded arms, that’s why I’d get into such flourishes. ([Location 500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=500)) - Note: Solitude is dangerous. Especially for religious societies. In solitude there is room in consciousness to think. And with thinking comes questioning. Boredom is the strongest emotion. I repeat, I emphatically repeat: ingenuous people and active figures are all active simply because they are dull and narrow-minded. How to explain it? Here’s how: as a consequence of their narrow-mindedness, they take the most immediate and secondary causes for the primary ones, and thus become convinced more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for their doings, and so they feel at ease; and that, after all, is the main thing. For in order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain. ([Location 509](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=509)) - Note: Narrow minded individuals can act because they can come to convictions with less thinking. But those with higher conscious are constantly questioning. I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. ([Location 514](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=514)) Wickedness could, of course, overcome everything, all my doubts, and thus could serve quite successfully in place of a primary cause, precisely in that it is not a cause. ([Location 519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=519)) try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms. The day after tomorrow, at the very latest, you’ll begin to despise yourself for having knowingly hoodwinked yourself. ([Location 525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=525)) - Note: Even if you manage to escape the self for a bit by letting yourself enter flow or be consumed with emotion the intelligent persons conscious will come back and know that you hoodwinked yourself because you knew what you were getting into beforehand. There’s no escape. Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I’m a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what’s to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble—that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void. ([Location 527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=527)) if one day they really find the formula for all our wantings and caprices—that is, what they depend on, by precisely what laws they occur, precisely how they spread, what they strive for in such-and-such a case, and so on and so forth; a real, mathematical formula, that is—then perhaps man will immediately stop wanting; what’s more, perhaps he will certainly stop. Who wants to want according to a little table? ([Location 643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=643)) - Note: The underground man hates the school of philosophy Utilitarianism that tried to predict man’s behavior in math. He despises it because he believes man’s primary desire is to exercise it’s free will. Mankind will do unproductive or even maladaptive things just to prove his free will is in fact free. This explains partially why the underground man takes pleasure in his own toothaches and liver pain. It’s conventional to go to the doctor but the underground man wants to prove he can exercise free will. I even think the best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful. ([Location 682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=682)) You, for example, want to make man unlearn his old habits, and to correct his will in conformity with the demands of science and common sense. But how do you know that man not only can be but must be remade in this way? What makes you conclude that man’s wanting so necessarily needs to be corrected? ([Location 722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=722)) - Note: What’s to say it’s inherently better for man to overcome his nature for wanting? man is predominantly a creating animal, compelled to strive consciously towards a goal and to occupy himself with the art of engineering—that is, to eternally and ceaselessly make a road for himself that at least goes somewhere or other. But sometimes he may wish to swerve aside, precisely because he is doomed to open this road, and also perhaps because, stupid though the ingenuous figure generally is, it still sometimes occurs to him that this road almost always turns out to go somewhere or other, and the main thing is not where it goes, but that it should simply be going, ([Location 728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=728)) - Note: The man from the underground argues the biggest attribute of mankind is their ungrateful mess. They are always wanting. In this pursuit of wanting they need to strive for something. Even if that something they strive for is meaningless. This is why the analogy of a road that goes no where works so well. But 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. And who knows (one cannot vouch for it), perhaps the whole goal mankind strives for on earth consists just in this ceaselessness of the process of achievement alone, that is to say, in life itself, and not at all in the goal, which, of course, is bound to be nothing other than two times two is four—that is, a formula; and two times two is four is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death. At least man has always somehow feared this two times two is four, and I fear it even now. Suppose all man ever does is search for this two times two is four; he crosses oceans, he sacrifices his life in the search; but to search it out, actually to find it—by God, he’s somehow afraid. For he senses that once he finds it, there will be nothing to search for. ([Location 741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=741)) - Note: The pursuit of a goal is much more engaging than the goal itself. One of the greatest fears of mankind is that there is nothing truly worth striving for. That there is no meaning to life. The man underground is questioning, what if you spend your whole life pursuing only to find out what you pursued isn’t as meaningful as you thought it was. And why are you so firmly, so solemnly convinced that only the normal and the positive, in short, that only well-being, is profitable for man? Is reason not perhaps mistaken as to profits? Maybe man does not love well-being only? Maybe he loves suffering just as much? Maybe suffering is just as profitable for him as well-being? For man sometimes loves suffering terribly much, to the point of passion, and that is a fact. ([Location 754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=754)) In every man’s memories there are such things as he will reveal not to everyone, but perhaps only to friends. There are also such as he will reveal not even to friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. Then, finally, there are such as a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and every decent man will have accumulated quite a few things of this sort. ([Location 823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004IK8PRS&location=823)) ### II   Apropos of the Wet Snow