Notes from Underground and a Few Ramblings

English translation of an archival essay. Originally published June 27, 2012; republished here on November 9, 2020. Türkçe oku.

Only human beings seek knowledge whose truth can be established with certainty. Only human beings have desires, wishes, hopes and dreams. How, then, can people discover the truth about their world? Is it possible to find out what things really are, or will our feelings about how we want them to be intervene?

In his Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau asks whether a person can be open: Can someone convey everything to the reader with complete honesty and from an objective standpoint? To my mind, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground can also be read in this context. How real is the Underground Man? Does that officer actually exist? Could Dostoevsky really have been so honest?

If we approach the situation from the very standpoint the author criticizes at the outset, will we, too, accept everything as unquestionably true?

On reflection, the process by which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers mastered knowledge was simpler and easier than it is today. Karl Marx, for example, could shut himself away in the British Museum for just a few months and gain command of economics, sociology, law and the basic natural sciences. Today, it is impossible to keep pace with the speed of knowledge. Which of us could shut ourselves in a library for a month and emerge qualified to speak on everything? Is that possible? Was this not what Foucault meant when he said that “the age of philosophers is over”?

Does the world operate according to deterministic laws, or is there also room for human creativity and imagination? Asking this question, we suddenly find ourselves feeling like the Underground Man. Did Dostoevsky not retreat “underground” because of an aboveground world populated by people who accept everything they are given as certain, without any foundation?

Someone who answers “two times two is four” almost without thinking, advancing through rote learning rather than reasoning or questioning, is, in Dostoevsky’s words, nothing other than “arrogant.”

We should not overlook the fact that the Underground Man is the product of a process: a constructed individual. He is also a product of a nineteenth-century society that modernized late. Spatial conflicts and oppositions are closely related to tradition and to a modernity that increasingly renders it ineffective. The existence of people and cities becoming capitalist and, in parallel, rapidly uglier provided the basis for “the underground” as a metaphor.

Come on, then! All humanity, UNDERGROUND!