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Good OP (except no mention of Dostoyevsky) that reminded me that I've got to read more Sartre. I've noticed going off on a philosophy tangent isn't a very good panty dropping technique unless it's the right woman, then it's magic.
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Jan 14, 2017 20:25
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=royTfXaUb2A
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Jan 14, 2017 21:39
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The Underground Man is like a proto-goon and makes me think that horrible nerd shitheads have always existed and will always exist. I model my life after the underground man tbh
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Jan 14, 2017 21:56
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Let’s talk about one of the last of the major league guys. We’re going out of order this time, because who gives a poo poo about sequence now that we have a rough idea of the development of the thought? The big guy I left out of the last post is this depressing and uplifting Russian right here:  Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский (Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky) Unlike all the other folks we’ve discussed so far, Dostoievski was primarily a novelist, and was famous for editing the Crime and Punishment comic book series for Lev Gleason Publishers. He didn’t write long, systematic treatises or exhaustive essays all about how he saw life and the world. He suffered from epilepsy, and had a very severe gambling addiction, which resulted in some of the greatest works of existentialist literature ever written. He spent 5 years in exile in Siberia for murdering a pawnbroker (to whom he was in hock to due to his gambling debts) and her step-sister with an axe, but got off with a lighter sentence when he confessed to the crime, and during which he was cared for by one of his wives, Sonya, a former prostitute whose drunken father he had been friends with. He may or may not have moonlighted as Russian vigilante "Raskol" (lit. "The Axe-Haver", or, better translated, "Axe-Man" ), but there is also convincing evidence to suggest that this was Anton Chekov, so the mystery to his identity remains open.  While in Siberia, he recorded in his journal a very long dialogue with one of the inquisitors there about whether or not Jesus was a good guy. According to the grand inquisitor, Jesus is no longer necessary to the church’s mission -- in direct opposition to the message stated in the Bible. The inquisitor was angry with Jesus for not doing more back in the Gospel days. He should have turned the stones into bread, because men follows those who feed them, “Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!”. He should have thrown himself off the cliff and been caught by the angels, because then the people would know without a doubt that he was god. And he should have ruled over them on Earth, and insured that everyone go to heaven, because with such a wise ruler, how could he but insure the goodness of all mankind? If Jesus had directly refuted Satan’s challenge, the would would have been much better off; he would have provided direct, miraculous proof of God’s existence, and robbed humanity of a freedom which they are not capable of using or understanding, and thereby damned to hell as a result of their choices. And so it is the inquisitor and men like him who will shoulder the burden that Jesus should have taken up, leading the people and making their moral choices: "Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him".  Portrait of Doztoeveskee and his brothers, after he let himself go a little Post-Siberia, he wrote mainly to cover his gambling debts, was widely recognized as one of the greatest authors in Russia, and died age 59 from a pulmonary haemorrhage caused either by the police raiding his neighbor's apartment looking for anti-Tsarist terrorists or himself looking for a dropped pen holder.  Today we will be looking at one of his most important novels: Notes from Underground Notes from Underground is widely considered the first existentialist novel, and is all about a goon. Seriously. Our narrator, the Underground Man is a middle aged former civil servant who lives on an inheritance and pension. He lives in a crappy basement apartment, and suffers from liver pain and a bad toothache. He hates everyone and everything around him, because the world is suffering and any attempt to better the world is doomed to failure. The book is divided in half, with the first taken up by the Underground Man’s personal thoughts and feeling about utopianism and the world in general, and the second about his encounter with a police officer and visiting a prostitute. The main thesis of the first half, which is as close as Dostoyevski ever gets to writing a direct statement of intent, is that utopianism is doomed to fail, because people can always chose to act against their own self interest. Even if the great progressives and liberals are working their asses off to make the world a better place, there will always be bitter and vengeful people like him who will hurt themselves simply to prove that they can, that their lives are not predetermined, that they have free will. This is a direct refutation to Socrates’ claim that no man ever does evil, he simply does what he thinks is good. In the second half, the Underground Man is convinced that there is a police officer who is always around, but never seems to notice him. This infuriates him, because despite his self-loathing, he cannot stand the idea of someone being able to pass him over like that. He sees this man everywhere he goes, and decides that he will take revenge by dressing up like a rich person, then bumping into him without saying “Excuse me”. Like I said, he is a goon. He does so after weeks of planning, coordinating his shoulder bump like a general planning a coup, and the officer Doesn’t. Even. Notice. Needless to say, the Underground Man is angered by this. Next, he attends a going away party for an old friend from school, but the group fails to tell him that the time of the dinner has been changed from five to six, so he arrives early to find no one there. He hated them back then, but felt obligated to go. When they do finally come, he quickly gets into a fight with them, believing that they stand for everything he hates about the world. They abandon him and head off to a whorehouse, and he follows them, wanting to continue the argument, but by the time he gets in, they’ve already gotten rooms and are busy loving. So, like any good goon, the Underground Man hires himself a hooker and proceeds to tell her all about how horrible her life will be once she’s old and no longer pretty and no one will want to sleep with her and how she’ll die alone and unloved in the gutter. Unlike a goon, however, she is eventually won over by this vision of horror, and sees him as her savior. He gives her his address, and tells her to come over sometime. But he quickly descends back into goonhood, as he realizes that having a GIRL in his apartment would be scary, because look at this dump! He’s busy trying to make the place look respectable when she arrives and sees the sort of life he leads, and, rather than seeing him as the cool and detached Camus-like existentialist he presented himself as at the brothel, she instead sees the basement dwelling goon for what he is. Trying to save face, he yells at her, saying that he was just trying to humiliate her, trying to neg her, just like the guys in The Game said to, but she’s having none of it. He starts crying, embarrassed by his poverty and his lovely apartment and his lovely life. She gives him a hug. "They—they won't let me—I—I can't be good!" he chokes out. He then immediately goes back to treating her like poo poo, and then tries to pay her (it is implied that she has pity sex with him), but she throws the money back in his face and stalks off. He never sees her again. He ruminates on this, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to fantasize about what’s happening to her now, and how his treatment of her will change her life forever, and how this whole incident just proves that he was right all along, that the world is poo poo and that he’s right for treating people badly. It makes him unhappy whenever he thinks about it. So, as we can see, this novel contains many existentialist themes: the narrator wishes for perfect freedom in spite of social pressure, but unlike in, say, Sartre, it is contrasted with the actual difficulty of doing so. The Underground Man wants the freedom to say that 2+2=5, but is constrained by the laws of nature. He will never be perfectly free. There will always be obstacles in his way, both societal (the police officer will never notice or care about him) and personal (he will never be the sort of dashing hero that can help Liza the prostitute). He knows and acknowledges these things, despite how painful they are. Freedom and self-awareness are scary and awful things, and perhaps it would be better to live in a fantasy world, but to do so would be to delude one’s self and not face reality. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 17:24
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Notes is one of my favorite books. I made my book club of non-crazy people read it and they all hated it. The disgrace was palpable. I don't have a whole lot to add but if this kinda thing interests people and you're not into reading books about it just yet UofT professor Jordan Peterson has his Personality and Maps of Meaning courses on YouTube and cover lots of these guys.
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Jan 20, 2017 05:24
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