Theories of existence - A Final Comment on the Underground

 

A Final Comment on the Underground

 

Our narrator—faceless, abject, and fully conscious unto his misery and suffering—mentions many times that he has been living in the ‘underground’ for forty years; this is important, considering his apparent age of forty-some odd years. At first, we consider the underground to be literal, an actual exodus from those who “are sure to tell a pack of lies about [themselves].”[1] Instead, by the end of his dialectic, we discover that the underground is much more. It is not, contrary to popular belief, an actual underground, but instead the ultimate state of conscious inertia, a complete and utter idleness of the mind. Earlier, the underground man condemned those who strive to reach for their goal and attain it, because it simply places them without a purpose in arbitrary contemplation; however, he himself has reached the very same goal of conscious inertia, and suffers eternally for his success. The underground is the fundamental essence of being—one could consider it the essential heaven, as opposed to the allegorical paradise of Christian lore. The underground is the very idea of existence that precedes essence, but also the very highest and core essence attainable by man. In this way, the underground man is both naïve and fully conscious: he has developed so far that he has reached conscious inertia, but at the same time that inertia keeps him forever in the underground, idle and superfluous.

We have seen, through the tragic tales and digressions of the forlorn narrator, that, first of all, a very core element of human reality is that we all wish to be the hero—yet it is the one who seems the most heroic who is often blinded to his muddiness, which makes him vile. In his despair, he will reach a conscious inertia that leaves him in a suffering so great that he is bound to enjoy it, and to relish in it; this will bring about anguish, a slap into the insensible realm of rationality. However, his foray into reason will be fruitless, for our free will does not permit it. Ultimately, he will suffer, fully conscious, in inertia, desiring, willing, but in idleness, because he has reached the perilous stage of the underground. Many will pity this man, the underground man, the hundreds and thousands of underground men, who pervade the kingdom of conscious inertia, forever suffering, because we do not understand them; alas, because we do not understand, we try to, and we suffer and suffer until we do understand him, but then it is too late—for we, too, will be part of the underground.

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[1] p. 39. This is derived from the narrator’s (Dostoevsky?) interpretation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, as Rousseau is often condemned for his obvious vanity.