Many Things

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been told that you overthink things from time to time. The introspective pull inward is a tempting one, especially when we are feeling at a loss of who we are and why we are the way we are. Where did this come from?

The year 2020 wasn’t all bad. Carl Trueman’s book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, published that year, is a masterwork in intellectual history, tracing the development of Modern notions of self and identity—indeed, our seemingly intuitive senses of who we are and where we go to discover who we are. Trueman argues, quite persuasively in my view, that how we think about ourselves as Moderns is the product of a wider historical conversation of notions and ideas. As is often the case, we tend to assume that our views are organic or that we tend to think about things the same way that all people in all places have done so. Yet, even if you’ve never picked up a copy Rousseau or Freud, you have certainly been shaped by them.

In the literary works of the nineteenth century, there was a marked preoccupation with self-consciousness, identity, and alienation. The social and philosophical developments implicated in this shift are complex. In this essay, I want to explore how psychological self-awareness emerges in great works of nineteenth-century literature, using Dostoevsky’s Underground Man as a case study. Because the scope of this theme is too broad to tackle comprehensively in a short essay, I will limit myself to the character of Underground Man, whose extreme self-consciousness—though written in the 1860s—remains eerily familiar to readers in the twenty-first century.

If you’ve resonated with any of this thus far, I would pose to you that you will find quite a lot of yourself in Dostoevsky’s underground man. As is often the case with Dostoevsky’s characters, it’s usually the ones we aren’t meant to like that we relate to the most.

Listening to a Man Who Won’t Stop Talking

Of course, it takes very little effort to “draw out” the thoughts of the Underground Man. Offer him a listener, and he spills forth the convulsions of his innermost psyche. But the question remains: Should we take him seriously? Are his critiques of society worth hearing, or is he himself a living critique of the society that formed him—a kind of Frankenstein’s monster?

Before we delve into his psychology, it’s worth considering where he comes from. Dostoevsky, emphasizing the Underground Man’s embeddedness in his historical moment, notes in the novel’s preface: “The author of the diary and the diary itself are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless, it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed.”

Edward Wasiolek, commenting on the historical moment in which the Underground Man exists, writes:

Much of its creative and intellectual energy in the nineteenth century was devoted to finding that place and in certain respects to writing a new narrative. In this endeavor literature, for reasons peculiar to Russia, embodied the best of such creative energy and Dostoevsky was at the time the best of its literature. Dostoevsky more than anyone else caught the agony and complexities of man struggling in and with history and the attendant existential ambiguities of looking for coherences and systems that could not be wrested from history. The Underground Man, as always the quintessential character in Dostoevsky’s creative world, is an exploder of Western myths, especially those that posit rational designs as the shape of human destiny. He understands, as apparently the proponents of Western rationalism did not, that history destroyed design and identity, both for nations and for individuals, because being in history is never finished and if never finished, never definite.

If Wasiolek is right, then the Underground Man is something like an anti-hero for the modern age—a representative figure whose inner chaos reveals the deeper disorder of the world around him. He is a man formed by the historical conditions of nineteenth-century Russian society, where rapid modernization and the rise of rationalist utopianism have left their mark.

A Man at War with Himself

To understand what the Underground Man means, we need to attend to how Dostoevsky presents him. His inner turmoil is communicated not by long descriptions from an omniscient narrator but through the jagged immediacy of the first-person voice. It feels less like reading a novel and more like overhearing a man rant in a darkened room.

This choice—first-person narration—does more than establish mood. It immerses the reader in the speaker’s fractured psyche. His self-consciousness is on full display: he contradicts himself, questions his own motives, anticipates the judgments of his audience.

“You’re probably thinking, gentlemen, that I want to make you laugh,”

he adds,

“Well, there you’re mistaken too. I’m not in the least the jolly type you think I am, or perhaps may think I am.”

Yet, even as he speaks, he casts doubt on his own words. He opens with,

“I’m a sick man . . . I’m a spiteful man. I’m an unattractive man. I think there’s something wrong with my liver.”

But a moment later:

“Well, I lied about myself just now when I said I was a spiteful civil servant. I lied out of spite. I was simply having a little fun with these petitioners and the officer, as in fact I could never really be spiteful.”

He is self-aware enough to know he’s performing, but not self-possessed enough to know what the performance means.

“I was always conscious of the abundance of elements within me that were diametrically opposed to that [being spiteful]. I felt that they were literally swarming inside me, those warring elements . . . Not only did I not become spiteful, I never even managed to become anything: neither spiteful, nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.”

He is painfully aware of his failure to become someone. And yet, he is also aware of the standard by which he ought to have become someone. The nineteenth-century man, he tells us, “ought to be and is in fact morally obliged to be essentially without character.”

The Disease of Over Thinking

The Underground Man considers his overactive self-consciousness a disease—a full-blown affliction. He envies the “men of action” who can operate in the world without being paralyzed by endless analysis. For them, the world presents clear causes, motives, and goals. For him, every supposed cause trails a dozen others in its wake.

“You see, . . . in order to begin to act you must be completely sure in advance that there are no residual doubts whatsoever. But how can I, for example, reassure myself? Where are my primary causes on which I can take a stand, where are my foundations? Where shall I take them from? I practise thinking and consequently every primary cause immediately draws another in its wake . . . ad infinitum.”

He cannot act—not because he has no will, but because he cannot believe in the legitimacy of any cause for action. Even when he turns to spite as a motivator, he finds that it too can be reduced to chemical processes: “destiny, something in the nature of a toothache.” And so he is left in a state of perpetual suspension.

What If Modernity Is the Real Villain?

The Underground Man is not an anomaly. He is a product of a rationalist, utopian modernity in which old certainties have been stripped away and replaced with the promise of scientific progress. But progress, he realizes, cannot account for the irreducibility of human desire.

He satirizes the Enlightenment fantasy of a fully predictable, scientifically calculable human future:

“All human actions . . . will then be calculated according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms . . . and entered in a directory . . . Then the Crystal Palace will be erected . . . Then . . . well, the Golden Age will dawn.”

But even this gleaming vision cannot tell him why he exists or why he wants what he wants. “Do away with my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better and I will follow you . . . why was I created with such desires? Could I possibly have been created solely and simply to reach the conclusion that my whole make-up is nothing but a swindle?”

The End of All Desiring

Desires arise from the whole of a person. Even Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, in the final analysis, falls short of adequately explaining the human desire in these terms.

Ultimately, the progressive utopia of a perfectly rational world fails in its efforts to adequately supply concrete identity, meaning, and even a rationale for the desire of those things. Dostoyevsky was aware of this fact and, speaking through the mouth of the underground man, declares, “Do away with my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better and I will follow you… why was I created with such desires? Could I possibly have been created solely and simply to reach the conclusion that my whole make-up is nothing but a swindle? Can that be the whole purpose? I don’t believe it.”

For the underground man, the struggle for identity comes from an existence within a society that is screaming that everything that makes him him may be reduced and rationally explainable. Yet, for all his education, he cannot rationally explain himself. In fact, when he tries, he finds himself utterly incomprehensible: there are aspects of his being that defy rationality.

The underground man understands that entirety of one’s being cannot be accounted for with mathematical precision and the very existence of desire proves this. Desire for identity, moreover, inexorably haunts the modern man. Perhaps it is an oversimplification, but the quest of self-consciousness begins with an awareness that things are not as they ought to be. If things were as they should be, then the thought would never enter our minds.

For all of the advances of modernity in tracing the “what” and substance of human constitution, for all its premeditated abstractions, those who devote themselves to this conception of the world find themselves so turned inward upon themselves in search of the “why” that, reaching the bottom, they find nothing but seemingly endless systems of rationally observable, categorical, chemical parts. As a result, many have abandoned the search for a “why” and, like the underground man, wonder if everything is just a swindle: a meaningless void with delusions of purpose. Modernity inevitably brings us to our knees and we’re forced to wonder with Albert Camus whether the only real philosophical question left is that of suicide.

Yet, the very undeniable existence of desire, of ideology, and even the sense of moral “oughtness” that Lewis speaks of in Mere Christianity, supplies for the underground man a placeholder of identity external to himself. As Lewis observes quite poignantly, if we experience a desire that finds no satisfaction in this world—or, we might also consider a desire for which there is no rational explanation in this world—“then it is most probably that we are made for another world.” We do not exist in a world that is materially composed of the modern Utopian ideal. Rather, we live in a created world whereby all extant things, even human rationality and desire, find their telos in the contemplative and satisfactory “chief end” of knowing the distinct Creator God through glorifying and enjoying him forever.

If we remain turned inward upon ourselves in examination of the created order – the “what” and composition of creaturely existence – we will fail to see the primary cause of all things and the ultimate origin of rational existence. The purpose, or “why,” of existence cannot be satisfactorily found through mere rational contemplation of the predictably observable world, but only if the self-evident faculties of desire and human rationality are utilized toward their telic end: that is to know God the Creator. Therefore, the quest for self identity and the contorted angst that self-awareness brings ultimately finds rest in the God that has formed our most inward parts (Ps. 139) and who dictates the beginning and end of days (Is. 46:10). In the final analysis, God doesn’t call us to perfect introspection. He calls us to faith in Him as the ultimate fulfillment of our being.