Theories of existence - An Attack Against Rationalism

 

An Attack against Rationalism

 

The underground man takes the benefit of an entire twelve pages simply to discuss the faults of rationalism, and the true reason for humanity’s existence. Rationalism, the narrator claims, is an attempt to put all of human nature into a formula—like the pitiable tables and charts of the previous chapter—so as to completely understand all of our actions, as well as to be able to predict all future outcomes. This type of rationality—the underground man sarcastically calls it ‘pure reason’—results in determinism, and no free will. It would allow us to erase all future wrongs from history, simply because we will be able too. A man will be able to look at a chart, compare numbers and quantitative qualities—just like two times two equals four—and determine, sine mens rea, how to direct said man’s future decisions unto infinity. Would not life be so sweet in this manner! Alas, the underground man breaks the utopian bubble we have created for ourselves through all these tables and arithmetic: to begin with, man is not, quite obviously, a wholly rational creature—this itself is human nature. Reason only knows what life teaches it, and common sense only goes as far as experience will take it. Human beings are naturally insensible creatures: the narrator uses the example of the history of civilization again. If we were wholly rational beings, he exclaims, then would we not take our mistakes from history and avoid them for the future? He continues to explain to us how rationalism asserts that, as stated before, through this theory we will be able to map out all insensibilities and eradicate them from existence—however, by stopping these ‘insensibilities’ before they ever occur, then they were never present in the first place, yet they are because we acknowledge them with our rationality. Such mind-bending dialectic is enough to force a man to “deliberately go mad for the occasion, so as to do so without reason and still have his own way!”[1]

Although we have determined, here, that rationalism is most certainly false—as human beings are irrational creatures—then what else is it that devours our reality, that oblivious subconscious tendency towards nastiness that plays alongside that part of us that is sensible? This insensible, but perhaps most profitable, problem is our want. Because we want, we go against rationality—this is the sole profit that goes beyond the measures of reason. We do not want to be reasonable, so we are not; our incessant want that goes against logic is the stone wall between humanity and all that is ‘beautiful and lofty’—and expression of our free will. Imagine the aforementioned man, with the ability to determine his future up to the millisecond with perfect precision; this man will become wealthy, and happy, and more logical than anyone else who he knows, because he is attuned to pure reason. Soon, this man will become bored with his seeming perfection and bountiful philanthropy—he will want chaos, he will create nastiness. He will want to confirm to himself that he is not a piano sprig, but a human being, and as such, he will activate his free will by creating unpleasantness; this is why wanting is most profitable, and indeed, it will allow the cursed man to have ‘his own way’.

It is in this way that we continually suffer: through unconditional wanting autonomous from reason, we will create destruction, and we will place a curse upon the world, just because we want to prove to ourselves that we are not piano sprigs but men! Oh, do we enjoy this suffering; it is the essential human condition, the only means of being human at all—for not only is well-being profitable, as reason would suggest, but instead so is suffering (more so, in fact, than well being, as the underground man explains in previous entries). Yet nonetheless, men attempt to make our free will congruent with that the advents of mathematics and science, so that we will still have our free will, but only use it to what is most ‘profitable’. This, the underground man sarcastically calls ‘the crystal palace’, a euphemism for what he believed was the ludicrous utopian world in Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? It is this commentary on the socialist myth that the underground man’s next major digression leads us.

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[1] p. 31