Demons and the Heart in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground

Demons and the Heart in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground Emily Lehman (bio) narrative, selfhood, Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky, Christos Yannnaras, relationality Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is a common—almost clichéd—text for engaging with the problem of theodicy. Perhaps this is because, rather than being a theoretical philosophical exercise, the concerns that Dostoevsky raises in The Brothers Karamazov are concerns with which he himself has deep sympathy—and most readers cannot help but have deep sympathy as well. The author who would reportedly say "My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt" exorcised his demons in The Brothers Karamazov, as he did in the remainder of the quintet of his most well-known novels.1 But Notes from Underground, written in 1864 after the death of Dostoevsky's wife and brother, is Dostoevsky's rawest account of doubt, and his most sympathetic portrayal of the materialists, determinists, and nihilists upon whom he would cast aspersions in The Idiot. Notes, which would be the gateway to Dostoevsky's five most serious novels, takes the form of a series of disjointed rambles from an unnamed protagonist. In its seemingly chaotic portrayal of the human experience, the novella presents an argument for Christianity that is strong by being counterintuitive. In the philosophical ramblings that constitute the first part of the work, the Underground Man flails against the dictates of late modern [End Page 46] materialism and determinism even while attempting to claim their most important effect for himself—an abdication of responsibility. In the second part of the novella, the story of his encounter with the prostitute Liza, the Underground Man discovers that responsibility never really can be abdicated, only denied. By portraying a man up against the fundamental structure of reality, Dostoevsky makes a powerful, and perhaps his most subtle, presentation of the evidence for divine mercy and human freedom. This honesty would endear Dostoevsky to Friedrich Nietzsche, who called the earlier writer "the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn."2 Nietzsche was profoundly impressed by Notes from Underground. In a letter to Peter Gast dated March 7, 1887, he calls the work "a real stroke of genius in psychology—a terrible and cruel piece of mockery levelled at γνῶθι σεαυτόν ["know thyself"], but done with such a light and daring hand, and with so much of the rapture of superior strength, that I was almost intoxicated with joy."3 Dostoevsky shows that "superior strength" by making the best case for nihilism that he can—a case that Nietzche would make even more aggressively later on, continuing the takedown of the philosophical and religious framework that had been taken for granted for hundreds of years. Dostoevsky's demons are the demons of Nietzsche, which are the demons of late modernity. Though Dostoevsky did not himself embrace nihilism in the end—and attempted to include in Notes even more of a religious rebuke to nihilism than the censors permitted—in Notes from Underground he allows the reader to see, as Nietzsche would have put it, his own abyss staring back at him.4 This honesty also makes Notes from Underground an appropriate work to put in conversation with that twentieth-century inheritance of Aristotelian ethics, After Virtue. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre identifies Nietzsche as simply following through on the philosophical tenets of emotivism, making Nietzscheanism one of the two alternatives available to the intellectually consistent late-modern man, "one of the two genuine theoretical alternatives confronting anyone trying to analyze the moral condition of our culture."5 MacIntyre, like [End Page 47] Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, sees the logical conclusions that post-Enlightenment determinism was sometimes unwilling to make. MacIntyre describes Nietzsche's position thus: In five swift, witty and cogent paragraphs he disposes of both what I have called the Enlightenment project to discover rational foundations for an objective morality and of the confidence of the everyday moral agent in post-Enlightenment culture that his moral practice and utterance are in good order. But Nietzsche then goes on to confront the problem that this act of destruction has caused. … if there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my...