Should Dostoevsky’s Underground Man Embarrass Atheists?

The genetic fallacy and the antisocial counterculture

As a Christian existential novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky was a master at steelmanning the secularist’s mindset, at delving into the traumas suffered by those who believe God is dead. But as a case against secular philosophy, Dostoevsky’s works are paradoxically also elaborate perpetrations of the genetic fallacy.

Dostoevsky’s Underground Man

Take, for example, Notes from the Underground. I first read that novella as an undergraduate student and I marvelled at how Dostoevsky captured the nuanced anxieties, resentments, and cynicism of the hypersensitive, introverted misanthropist, which is the type of character befitting a young philosophical atheist, which is what I was at the time.

That novella was highly influential in its depiction of the social outcast who’s plagued by his philosophical insights, crushed by his hyperawareness of everyone’s faults, and bereft of solutions. You can see Dostoevsky’s influence, for instance, in everything from Woody Allen’s perennial intellectual protagonist to the scene in David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) in which the police raid the serial killer’s lair and find his stacks of philosophical journals. The police read a portion in which the killer speaks of how he laughs at the foolishness of ordinary folks, to the point of vomiting on himself in public.

What’s now the stock character of the Underground Man can thus degenerate into a terrorist, a militant “incel,” or Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky’s Crimes and Punishment, taking existential agony into a violent rebellion against social norms.

But let’s return to the novella, which is divided into two parts. In the first, the unnamed antihero introduces himself with a defense of his philosophy of life. This is a character who lives in his head, who is, he says, “used to thinking and imagining everything like a book and seeing everything in the guise in which I had previously created it in my dreams.”

Consequently, the Underground Man spends some thirty pages expounding his existential philosophy, to bring society down to his level. History, he says, is irrational, despite the utopian boasts of “enlightened” modernists, because we’re free to disobey reason, and we protect that freedom as the core of our identity even if that entails self-destructing out of spite. Reason “satisfies only man’s intellectual faculties, while volition is a manifestation of the whole of life.”

You might expect, then, that this existential outsider would heroically seize the day, get out of his head, and pursue his whims like a carefree child. Instead, this antihero excels at cutting himself off from the outside world, retreating to his bunker, and torturing himself.

The reason, as he says, is that “the direct, immediate, legitimate fruit of heightened consciousness is inertia, that is, the deliberate refusal to do anything.” Thus, “all spontaneous people, men of action, are active because they are stupid and limited.” The smarter you are, the more you understand what can go wrong, so whence the basis of the smart person’s self-confidence?

Peter Wessel Zapffe would later make much of that ironic downside of a “damaging surplus of consciousness,” in “The Last Messiah.”

But following that philosophical monologue, the novella’s second part shows the Underground Man in action, although it’s still written in the first person by this unreliable narrator. In public, the antihero is often ignored or insulted, or he rubs others the wrong way because he uses people as pawns in his intellectual games (somewhat like the Larry David character, but not as funny).

This culminates in his unflinching description of his mental breakdown before a Mary Magdalene figure named Liza. The Underground Man brings home a prostitute and berates her maniacally for occupying so low a station in society. He uses her as a scapegoat because he couldn’t avenge himself against someone else who’d insulted him earlier. But this is also classic Freudian projection since what this antihero resents is how she reminds him of his pariah status. His tirade brings her to tears, but she holds out hope for himself, sheepishly showing him a note from her fiancé that proves someone thinks she’s lovable.

Later, she catches the Underground Man in all his squalor, when he’s warring with his disrespectful servant in his shabby abode. Unable to hide his poverty and hypocrisy with his intellect, as Notes from the Underground seems designed to try to hide the drama of the second part with the philosophical façade of the first, the antihero uses the occasion to confess the horrid truth about himself.

He confesses to her that he blew up at her for “power” and for “the fascination of the game; I wanted to get your tears, your humiliation, your hysterics.” (He was thus trolling her like a Trumpian.) “I’m a blackguard,” he says, “a scoundrel, an egotist, a sluggard.” He’s ashamed of his poverty and of the collapse of his intellectual façade, as he says, “because I am so vain that it’s as if my skin had been flayed off and the very air was painful to me.”

He’d tried to seem wise and to have her best interests in mind when he castigated her for her role as a sex worker. But she later caught him “in this disgraceful dressing-gown at a time when I was going for Apollon (his servant] like a bad-tempered little cur. The savior, the hero, flying at his servant like a mangy, neglected mongrel, while the servant laughs at him!”

In response to this outburst, Liza acts in the Christlike manner that recalls Jesus’s answer to the inquisitor in the Grand Inquisitor poem in The Brothers Karamazov. Liza realizes that the Underground Man is in great pain, and she embraces him and the two sob, just as Jesus deals with the inquisitor’s cynicism by kissing him (recalling Judas’s kissing of Jesus in his act of betrayal, as told in the gospels).

Rather than growing from this revelation, though, the antihero retreats yet again, disgracing Liza by handing her money for her troubles, which she discards before leaving him for good. That encounter happened years before the narrator is supposedly writing of it in the novella. At the end of this novella, the narrator seems to finish by saying, “that’s enough; I shall write no more from the underground.” But Dostoevsky interrupts and points out that although this “paradoxical” writer “could not help going on” after all, this place seems “a good place to stop.”

In other words, the Underground Man is lost in his intellectual rationalizations and ruminations, so there’s no point in multiplying examples of his failures.

Dostoevsky’s worldview

The translator Jessie Coulson quotes from Dostoevsky’s notebooks to show that he was proud of having been the first to depict the tragic Utopian socialism of “the real man of the Russian majority”:

The tragedy lies in his consciousness of his own deformity…I am the only one to have depicted the tragedy of the underground, made up of suffering, self-torture, the consciousness of what is best and the impossibility of attaining it, and above all the firm belief of these unhappy creatures that everybody else is the same and that consequently it is not worth while trying to reform.

Coulson adds that the Underground Man’s existential philosophy “is to a considerable extent a direct statement of Dostoevsky’s own beliefs.” The critic Leonid Grossman goes further, saying that those opening ones are Dostoevsky’s “most utterly naked pages…Never afterwards was he so fully and openly to reveal his inmost recesses, unmeant for display, of his heart…It is as if he was trying to pay back the spiritual leaders of his youth for the terrible ordeals of his years as a convict.”

Dostoevsky had reason to hold a grudge against the socialist critics of Tsarist Russia, because he was arrested when he was twenty-eight for belonging to a literary group that entertained such criticisms. He was sentenced to death but he ended up spending four years in a Siberian prison camp followed by six years of mandatory military service abroad.

Still, the Underground Man’s philosophy could only have been part of Dostoevsky’s worldview because the author was an Orthodox Christian from a young age. Infamously, he wrote in a letter to ND Fonvisin that although “I am a child of this age, a child of unfaith and scepticism, and probably (indeed I know it) shall remain so to the end of my life,” nevertheless “even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” This is because of his “simple creed” that “there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly, and more perfect than the Saviour.”

The status of the genetic fallacy

What this means is that all of Dostoevsky’s novels that delve into the wounded psyche of these secularists, from the Underground Man, to Raskolnikov, to Ivan Karamazov effectively present these portraits as warnings that Christianity represents the only salvation. Of course, there’s no explicit argument in these novels that we ought to be more like the Christian “idiot” Prince Mishkin than like Dostoevsky’s self-torturing antiheroes. As a great novelist, Dostoevsky depicts these characters’ strengths and faults and lets the reader decide on the story’s moral.

But if we should be tempted to think, for example, that atheists are likely to fall into something like the Underground Man’s trap of withdrawing from society and of lashing out due to resentment and self-loathing, we should recognize that this kind of personal attack carries no logical weight at all against either atheism, utilitarianism, or socialism (those being some ideologies of the Enlightenment, the period in which Dostoevsky wrote).

On the contrary, we can use this as a case study of what’s wrong with the genetic fallacy of reducing something’s status or meaning to that of its source or history. In this case, we have the Underground Man’s cynical philosophy, and Dostoevsky presents the author of that philosophy as admitting that he’s a scoundrel who uses that philosophy as a poor excuse to get back at the cruel world.

Even if all of that were true, or someone were to use cynical secular philosophy as such a defense mechanism, that wouldn’t imply that the philosophy is erroneous. As a Christian existentialist, Dostoevsky may have wanted to reduce philosophical questions to calls for an act of faith. His point would be that philosophy grows out of character and experience, not so much out of neutral rational inferences. He’d want to say that we can choose to torture ourselves with the secularists or to be saved and happy with Christian faith. The choice is the heart of it, for Dostoevsky, and many philosophical arguments are just rationalizations of our personality or our life’s circumstances.

Thus, Dostoevsky would likely deny there’s anything wrong with this “genetic fallacy.” But to see what would be wrong with that degree of irrationalism, we need merely stipulate the truth of atheism, for the sake of argument, and imagine the implications of a godless world in which the real choice is to commit ourselves to a strictly rational worldview or to retreat, not to the “underground” but to a childlike state of religious naivety. That is, we can see how godless nature would torture those who refuse comforting delusions, and how contentment in that scenario might depend on gross existential inauthenticity.

Now, Dostoevsky would say that the atheist doesn’t have greater intellectual integrity because secular philosophy permits all the degradations and hypocrisies that he depicts in his novels. And that’s correct: atheists needn’t be saints. But my point is that that pettiness, self-loathing, and wretched hypocrisy could easily be caused not by a failure to appreciate the power of Christianity, but by God’s nonexistence.

If we assume there’s no God, how else would we expect sensitive, introverted, secular intellectuals to act? They’re among the ones who best understand why theistic religion is dishonourable. There would be secular stand-ins for God, such as idols and convenient pastimes as well as social contracts and laws to keep the peace. But all of this would be an experiment of fallible clever animals that have evolved some natural impulses which would have to be suppressed for the greater, social good — including perhaps the impulse to worship something. We’d be internally conflicted, with the capacity to understand the cold, hard facts, and a longing for the world to be a meaningful, hospitable place.

To be sure, Notes from the Underground should still be read as a tragedy, but the tragedy needn’t be that the antihero is so preoccupied with books that he fails to appreciate the possibility of salvation through love, empathy, and ultimately Christian faith. Instead, the tragedy could be that those forms of salvation depend on unbecoming, primitive impulses, lies, and fallacies. The Underground Man’s antiheroism might be the best that philosophers could hope for in the modern world that’s devastated the old religious dogmas.

Of course, intellectualism can be used as a façade to conceal grievous faults, perhaps even crimes. The Nazis and the Soviets could boast about the efficiency or the breadth of their bureaucracies even as they committed mass murder. And even a psychopath could excel in appearing charismatic and rational. But the religious existentialist’s irrationalism can also be a façade, a fantasy that wards off nature’s inhumanity and godlessness.

Jesus, the underground man

Ironically, Dostoevsky ought to be sensitive to this defense of the Underground Man, because his vaunted saviour, the character of Jesus that’s depicted in the canonical gospels is himself plainly an “underground man.”

If we assume that Jesus was an historical figure, he would evidently have had two major influences:

• radical Judaism, as in the Dead Sea Scroll community, the Essenes, the Zealots, John the Baptist, and so on
• Hellenistic culture, as in the mystery religions and Greco-Roman philosophies like Stoicism.

According to a standard historical-critical reconstruction of what led to the material from the New Testament, what Jesus preached was a synthesis of those two perspectives. He taught a spiritualized form of Judaism that nevertheless led him into conflict with the Roman Empire. He was hardly alone in that Jewish radicalism since only several decades after Jesus would have died, there were the Jewish-Roman Wars which led to the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Jewish Temple.

Some of that spiritualizing of the messiah could have been a later Christian response to those wars, to tame Christianity and make this form of Judaism palatable to Rome. But to the extent that Jesus saw himself as a self-sacrificing savior whose death would usher in the world’s end and God’s judgment of humanity, the Jewish source of that thinking would have been supplemented, at least, by the mystery religions or personal salvationist cults from Greco-Roman culture.

In any case, like the Underground Man, the Jesus of the gospels was bitterly opposed to all aspects of the ruling society of his day. He had an uncompromising, idealistic expectation of righteousness. He said God judges not just our actions but our thoughts, so we had to be pure. He said our earthly conditions are nothing compared to what we can expect from our afterlife, so we should be happy even to rid ourselves of all our worldly possessions to show God that we’re “poor in spirit.” And Jesus said, in effect, that he came to divide biological family members from each other because uniting the ideal family of God’s adopted children is more important than any secular endeavour.

Jesus was, in short, part of a marginalized counterculture, which means he lived on the outskirts, in the “underground,” in opposition to social conventions.

And far from being a live-and-let-live spiritualist, Jesus threatened everlasting hellfire against all who fell short of the transcendent moral standard. The vehemence of that threat, then, was akin to the Underground Man’s spitefulness, as Friedrich Nietzsche effectively pointed out. The otherworldly bias of Christian morality was for the slave mentality, said Nietzsche, since this moral standard was based on resentment against the natural winners in society, such as the Romans.

The point, then, is that there are religious as well as secular “underground” or antisocial individuals. What Notes from Underground picks up on isn’t just a set of secular foibles, but an aspect of the perennial counterculture. The only question is whether the religious and secular forms of that counterculture are equally arbitrary, sad, or reprehensible.