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3. Underground Metaphysics
- Michigan State University Press
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29 C H A P T E R 3 Underground Metaphysics After Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky composed Crime and Punishment, the work that was for a long time, and perhaps remains yet, his most celebrated. Raskolnikov is a solitary dreamer, subject to alternations of exaltation and depression. He is obsessed with the fear of being ridiculed. He is thus an underground person, but he is more tragic than grotesque because he tries fiercely to test and surpass the invisible limits of his prison. The need for action, which for his underground predecessor was realized only in feeble and sorry gestures, leads this time to an atrocious crime. Raskolnikov kills, and he kills deliberately in order to place his pride on an unshakable foundation. The underground hero reigns over his individual universe, but his royalty is threatened each instant by the invasion of others. Raskolnikov imagines that his crime, in excluding him from the morality of the human community, will avoid this danger. It is true that his crime isolates Raskolnikov more radically than his dreaming did. But the meaning of this isolation, which the hero had hitherto believed to be determined by his own will, is always in question. Raskolnikov does not know whether his solitude makes him superior or inferior to other humans, an individual god or an individual earthworm. And the Other remains the arbiter of this debate. Raskolnikov, after all, is not less fascinated by the judges than Trusotsky by his Don Juan model or the underground character by his officer bullies. Raskolnikov depends, in and for his being, on the verdict of the Other. 30 Chapter 3 The detective mystery transforms the underground hero into an actual suspect, under surveillance by real police agents, and brought before real judges who will judge him in an actual tribunal. In making his hero commit an actual crime, Dostoevsky magisterially throws into relief this most extreme self-division. Even the name of the main character suggests this duality. Raskol means schism, separation. The writers of the twentieth century will unceasingly take up this mythic incarnation of underground psychology, but they will sometimes correct it in an individualistic direction: they will give it the conclusion that Raskolnikov tries in vain to make come true. One cannot read these works without wondering why the motif of the trial exercises such fascination on their authors. The conclusion would perhaps be less simple and less reassuring if this very fascination, rather than the “innocence” of the hero and the “injustice” of the society, had become a subject for reflection. The reverie of Raskolnikov is just as literary as that of the underground man, but it is differently oriented. For the romantic “beautiful and sublime” is substituted the figure of Napoleon, the quasi-legendary model of all the great ambitious figures of the nineteenth century. The Napoleon of Raskolnikov is more “Promethean” than romantic. The superior humanity that he embodies is the fruit of a more extreme pride, but the fundamental project has not changed. And Raskolnikov cannot escape from the underground oscillations; he succeeds only in giving them a terrible intensity. In other words, this more of pride does not succeed in enabling Raskolnikov to emerge from the underground. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche would certainly ascribe the failure of Raskolnikov to the cowardice of the “last man,” that is, to underground cowardice. Like Dostoevsky, Nietzsche believes he recognizes in what takes place around him a passion of modern pride. We can understand his emotion when the accident of browsing in a bookstore front brought into his hands a copy of Notes from the Underground. He recognized there a masterful depiction of what he himself called ressentiment. It is the same problem, and Dostoevsky poses it almost in the same way. The response of Dostoevsky is different, no doubt, but Crime and Punishment, in spite of Sonya and the Christian conclusion , still remains quite distant from final certainty. For yet some time Dostoevsky would ask himself whether a pride even more extreme than that of Raskolnikov could not succeed where this hero had failed. After Crime and Punishment came The Gambler (1867). The hero is a utchitel—a tutor—in the home of a Russian general who is stationed, with his family, at a German post. He experiences an underground passion for the general’s daughter, Pauline, who treats him with a contemptuous indifference. It is Underground Metaphysics 31 his awareness of being regarded as nothing that renders her as...