Theories of existence - Human Inertia and the Essence of Suffering

 

Human Inertia and the Essence of Suffering

 

At the beginning of the underground man’s despondent and bleak look at the murky depths of the human metaphysical spirit, he explains how his over-consciousness is in fact a sickness, and that it makes him wicked. Using the term ‘conscious’ is indeed capricious, as it can mean numerous things; however, in the underground man’s case, when he describes himself as ‘conscious’ or ‘highly conscious’, he means that he understands more the reality he lives in—this does not necessarily mean intelligence per se, but more a higher awareness of the world around him. This consciousness makes him over-think and over-analyze every manner of his existence, and it torments him to no end. “I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.”[1] He continues to explain how, while understanding more about the world, and realizing more and more that which is ‘beautiful and lofty’, the more he became subdued by this sickness, and the more wicked he became. In essence, he is saying that our very humanity, the true act of being, is a sickness we all suffer to some degree; only those who are overly­ conscious suffer the most.

Do not believe, however, that this suffering is something that tortures us. As wicked beings, we enjoy basking in our suffering; by accepting our quintessential evil, we are in bliss. We perform every action we do in order to indulge in our suffering, like a hedonistic masochist. Consider, as his own example, a man who suffers from a terrible toothache. This man will moan in agony, he will moan until the neighbours hear how much this man, afflicted with a toothache Lucifer could not bear, is in suffering. The stricken man will ensure that the whole house understands his pain—but why? There is no utilitarian value to moaning in pain, no relief or analgesia; instead, this man moans because it gives him pleasure. The more he afflicts others with his pain, the happier he is, because there is simply no other reason for a man to moan in pain—it is futile. As we are all hedonists; moaning would serve no other purpose except to derive pleasure, sometimes “of the highest sensuality”.[2] Yet where does this desire to moan in the first place derive? We may be hedonists by nature, but there is certainly an ulterior motive to this wanting for pleasure. Indeed, in the case of our forlorn man with the toothache, it is out of the vainness of his own consciousness, for he understands not where the pain comes from. He is a slave to his teeth and to a pain stemming from nowhere—he is vile. Out of pure vanity, we insist on indulging our suffering, which in the end luxuriates the egotism through a most wicked pleasure.

Of course, the man who has achieved a higher consciousness through his suffering is always at odds with les hommes de la nature et de la vérité. Once and a while, they will try to get back at the overly conscious man, and remind them of the banal world they are actually living in. The underground man calls this reveille a ‘slap’, and he explains how it makes us want to gain revenge against that who has slapped us. You must understand, that revenge is an emotion only humoured by the ‘ingenious people and active figures’ of our population, who believes that revenge is justice; the conscious man will deny revenge of all justice, for he is like a mouse, albeit the fact that he is more intelligent and far more superior.[3] Yet this slap will shortly bring him down to this forsaken, commonplace world, seeking revenge in turn. However, like the mouse that he really is, the man of heightened consciousness will pad himself with decisions and details until he can no longer incite the flame of vengeance from within, after which he will crawl back into his corner—this exact theme is exemplified in the first tale of the underground man, concerning the police officer whom the underground man wishes to avenge.

The result of this constant padding, this constant submersion into thought and nothing more, is conscious inertia, for after all our suffering and torment, this awful "sitting with folded arms"[4] leaves us exactly as where we began. The underground man calls this the ‘laws of nature’, so that every action and thought is like the “deliberate pouring from empty into void.”[5] First, we suffer from human inertia, as a cause of this constant padding of our minds to the point that empty becomes a void. Unfortunately, those ‘laws of nature’ creates in us a desperate boredom, in which we will go out of our way to create suffering—the underground man, to name an example, forces himself to fall in love, and to purposely disobey those of higher standing so he is to get in conflict; alas, when all is said and done, this suffering will lead back to conscious inertia, and the vicious cycle is once again completed. This is the destiny of the conscious man: suffering causing human inertia, which in turn causes us to suffer, which will again bring us back to the dastardly inertia that remains the gravity to pull our souls into the dark abyss of misery (this is an abyss, no doubt, that contends with the celestial Godliness of heaven, for only in our misery do we find true bliss).

For the man of consciousness, the world of reasons evaporates, and justifications can only be existent if they justify that there is no reasoning to anything—in effect, this would also make justifications non-existent, and therefore there is simply no true reality to humankind. To explain further, consider the example of revenge: les homme de la nature et vérité will only need to believe that in revenge there is justice, and there will lie his primary cause, or his objective in avenging; but the man of consciousness will be unable to determine what the primary cause of vengeance is, and therefore he is stuck in inertia. This proposition remains throughout life, as the conscious man will never be able to ascertain the primary cause for any action—this is the fundamental aspect of conscious inertia. So our very consciousness, then, forces all our reason to vanish; all these so-called ‘reasons’ are nothing more than the pain of a toothache, for they have no cause, no root, and ultimately no purpose.

There are those—the underground man would insist that they are the ‘ingenious people and active figures’ of our everyday lives—who believe that through a higher consciousness and a developed reason, all of our possible profits will be realized. This theory assumes that we are indeed reasonable creatures and that by examining a table of arithmetic, we will be able to determine the profits as opposed to our losses; in such a way, we will devise a method of surviving in perfect harmony with the rest of humanity. How, then begs the underground man, do we continue to survive against reason at all ends? The conscious man’s free will will always go against the grain of that harmonious little table, simply because it can! “What sort of will of one’s own can there be if it comes to tables and arithmetic, and the only thing going is two times two equals four?”[6] Contrary to these ‘rational’ men, it is through a higher consciousness that we initiate our free will, and only through our free will do we purposely and consciously avoid these profits. It is all, of course, through our vileness and tendency towards suffering that our free will does so: yet these reasons, although redundant to higher consciousness, remain there, looming, and the man of consciousness seems always to avoid it. This rationality, however, has an inane purpose as well, as the underground man later proves—there is a reason (for lack of a better word) why the men of consciousness avoid rationalism.

---

[1] p. 7

[2] p. 15

[3] One can find may links to Nietzsche’s ‘Ubersmensch’ in Dostoevsky’s work, specifically embodied in the man of heightened consciousness, who is ‘above’ the rest of the active population. 

[4] p. 18

[5] p. 18

[6] p. 31. Compare to the very same phrase (“two times two equals four”) in Fathers and Sons: in the former title, Barazov asserts that the aforementioned phrase is the only thing he will ever need to know, as all else will follow; yet here, the underground man remains his antithesis, proclaiming that relying on something as futile as “two times two equals four” is superfluous.