Dostoevsky and Socrates: The Underground Man and “The Allegory of the Cave”

Thomas S. Berry, University of Maryland

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 repentent 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.

158

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:

159

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 I 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)

160

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 my 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

161

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.

162

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 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)

163

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 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

164

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.