Action and Character in Dostoyevsky's

Action and Character in Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground

Julia Annas

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 1, Number 3, Fall 1977, pp. 257-275(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/phl.1977.0002

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Julia Annas

ACTION AND CHARACTER IN DOSTOYEVSKY'SNOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

Notes from Underground was written with a specific purpose inmind: to answer Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?1 And

many features of Dostoyevsky's work can only be understood whenwe bear in mind its specifically Russian setting. The narrator is a romanticidealist of the forties transformed into something rather different by1864, and no doubt we lose much if we do not bear in mind thatDostoyevsky is looking back across the gulf of imprisonment andsuffering at his own idealistic youth.2 But the intense and radicallypeculiar nature of Dostoyevsky's writing takes us to a level of the workwhich is accessible to those without knowledge of the local conditionsof the work's production. As Mochulsky says, "the author steadilyemerges beyond the confines of the Russian intellectual . . . theunderground man's paradoxes are not the whims of some half-madeccentric, but a new revelation of man about man." The book is "thephilosophical preface to the cycle of the great novels" (p. 245). Eventhough Dostoyevsky's passionate and extreme temperament made himquite incapable of constructing a piece of precise philosophical argument,there is much of genuine philosophical interest in part I. It is notjust a particular moral and political theory, like Chernyshevsky's, whichis to be discredited, but something deeper, the presuppositions of awhole type of moral theory.In this article I shall examine the implications of what Dostoyevsky

says for the philosophy of action and thence for ethics. I shall arguethat he challenges a very basic model of human action, which is bothintuitively plausible and basic to many moral theories. I shall also arguethat as the work stands, there is a lack of continuity between partsI and II on the philosophical as well as on the literary level. Inconcentrating on the consequences for moral theory, I shall be ignoringthe social and political aspects of the work. It may well be urged thatsuch a division of the moral from the political is unrealistic in treating

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a Russian writer. In defense I can only say that this narrowing offocus brings out in a sharper and more tractable way the philosophicalissue which is my main concern.

I

Tell me, who was it who first declared, proclaiming it to the whole world,that a man does evil only because he does not know his real interests,and if he is enlightened and has his eyes opened to his own best andnormal interests, man will cease to do evil and at once become virtuousand noble, because when he is enlightened and understands what willreally benefit him he will see his own best interest in virtue, and sinceit is well known that no man can knowingly act against his best interests,consequently he will inevitably, so to speak, begin to do good. Oh, whata baby! Oh, what a pure innocent child! (part I section 7; all quotationsare from the translation by Jessie Coulson [London: Penguin, 1972]).

What exactly is the target here of the Underground Man?3Every moral theory presupposes some theory of human action,

although this may not be explicit; since moral philosophy is concernedwith human actions, it must presuppose some account of what it isfor a human action to be performed. One very influential traditionthinks of the paradigm of action as essentially aimed at some good:"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit,is thought to aim at some good" is the opening sentence of Aristotle'sEthics.4 What is it for every action to aim at some good? We havethe assumption here that every action is purposive and rational;purposive in that there is some goal which the agent sees as a goodand rational in that performing the action is believed by the agentto be an appropriate means or way of bringing about the desired goal.This model of action is developed very fully in Aristotle, but it is notconceptually linked to Aristotelianism alone; it appears, for example,in recent very influential articles on action by Donald Davidson.5According to Davidson, to give a reason for an action is to explainit by a combination of belief and "pro-attitude," a term introducedto cover all sorts of long- and short-term wanting and desire. Davidsonnotes that it follows that we can always work out some reasoning whichgives the characteristic of the action that the agent found desirable:"from the agent's point of view there was, when he acted, somethingto be said for the action" ("Actions, Reasons and Causes," p. 691).Davidson sums up this line of thought neatly:

When a person acts with an intention, the following seems to be a true,

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if rough and incomplete, description of what goes on: he sets a positivevalue on some state of affairs (an end, or the performance by himselfof an action satisfying certain conditions); he believes (or knows orperceives) that an action, of a kind open to him to perform, will promoteor produce or realize the valued state of affairs; and so he acts (thatis, he acts because of his value or desire and his belief). Generalized andrefined, this description has seemed to many philosophers, from Aristotleon, to promise to give an analysis of what it is to act with an intention;to illuminate how we explain an action by giving the reasons the agenthad in acting; and to provide the beginning of an account of practicalreasoning, i.e. reasoning about what to do, reasoning that leads to action("How is Weakness of the Will Possible?," p. 102).

We should note that accepting this model of action does not onits own have any implications about the kind of motivation that isnecessary; it is quite possible to accept the model and reject any formof egoism. The fact that an agent seeks some good in any action doesnot imply that it is his own good that he seeks. This is why an attackon the rational model of action cuts much deeper than an attack onegoism (which is in turn why what is formally an attack on the egoistictheories of Chernyshevsky becomes something of much deeper interest).What is at stake is whether an agent must have in mind some good,his own or not, in order to act in the full sense.AU the same, the model will suggest an agent-centered picture of

practical reasoning. For the agent's goal must be a good for him, ifhis action is to be in fact rational. And it may well make egoism seema more plausible theory of motivation than any alternative, for initiallyat any rate it is hard to see how an agent could be motivated by somethinghe sees as a good without some appeal being made to a desire ofhis own. This line of thought is wrong,6 but it is not obvious whyit is wrong, and it is understandable that Dostoyevsky should run togetherthe two issues.The rational model of action is intuitively plausible, but it runs up

against another powerful intuition, namely that there are actions whichare the agent's actions, initiated by him, but which are nonethelesspointless and irrational. The problem is sometimes called "weaknessof will" or akrasia, following Aristotle's discussion of it. The difficultyis that an akratic or irrational act is one done by the agent even thoughhe recognizes that there is an alternative (perhaps merely not acting)which it would be better to perform. In acting as he does, he recognizesthe greater good, but is not moved to action by it. But is this notparadoxical? How can he be motivated to action when according tothe model he can have no motive for what he does? There is no goodwhich he seeks to obtain by doing what he does, or at any rate no


good which is not outweighed by the recognized bad consequencesof performing the action. But in that case, how can he be performingan action at all? He seems to be an agent in what he does, but ifhe acts he is going against his conception of the greater good, andhow can this be?The most obvious philosophical remedy is to say, as Plato does in

the Protagoras, that irrational actions simply do not occur, because theycannot. Since action must be understood as purposive and rational,it is simply incoherent to describe someone as acting in defiance ofthe good he recognizes. So cases where this seems to happen mustbe explained away as really being cases of a mistaken conception ofthe good to be attained. Irrationality is really intellectual error; knowl-edge is virtue. We have already seen the Underground Man's opinionof this thesis.Irrational actions present a paradox to any theory of action that

wants to take the plausible view that the paradigmatic action is purposiveand rational (in the sense explained). There are, of course, numerousways of dealing with the problem. Probably the most common is toproceed in the hope that the paradox will turn out to be harmlessor at least amenable to resolution in terms of the theory. This is Davidson'sapproach to the problem in "How is Weakness of the Will Possible?"But another reaction is clearly possible: to insist on the reality of irrationalaction and hold that if it creates problems for our theory of actionthen so much the worse for the latter.Much of what the Underground Man says in part I consists of an

attack (not a linear, cumulative attack, but a series of disconnectedjabs) on the idea that action in the proper sense must be understoodas rational and purposive. Section 7 in particular revolves aroundirrational action and holds that it not only exists but by its existencediscredits any theory that ignores it or has to explain it away. Thereis a long description of the man who expounds clearly and at lengthwhat he ought to do and must do, aware of all the circumstances,and then a quarter of an hour later goes and does the exact opposite.Now of course a description of a case of irrational action cannot provevery much on its own. It does make the point that there is nothingobviously incoherent in the idea of such an event. But the rationalistopponent will be unimpressed; he will say that the case is actuallyincoherent, that difficulties will surface when one extends the descriptionto the agent and his relation to the action, and that to claim thata description of irrational action shakes the analysis simply begs thequestion.So more is needed than a mere assertion that irrational action occurs.

And in section 7 the Underground Man does more; he turns to thewhole notion of advantage employed by the opponent in his claim that

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a man can only act with some good or advantage in view. "Can youundertake to define exactly where a man's advantage lies? What ifit sometimes happens that a man's advantage not only may but mustconsist in desiring in certain cases not what is good but what is badfor him? And if so, if such cases are even possible, the whole ruleis utterly destroyed." He claims, that is, that the mere possibility ofsuch a case proves his point. But is he still not begging the question?In fact he is not, because Dostoyevsky is quite subtle here. TheUnderground Man conducts the whole argument in his opponents'terms, so that they are forced to recognize a counterexample to theposition they hold. He allows them to insist that action can only occurwhen there is some good in view, and that otherwise described it isincoherent—still, he claims, they lose their case because they omit thegood or advantage that consists in acting against all one's other goodsand advantages. "Doesn't there, in fact, exist something that is dearerto almost every man than his own very best interests, or—not to violatelogic—some best good (the one that is always omitted from the lists. . .) which is more important and higher than any other good . . .?"Perhaps, that is, irrational action has to be described in terms of seekingsome good so as not to "violate logic," that is, produce an inconsistentdescription of what is going on. But even if the opponent claims thatwhen the action is properly described, i.e., as aiming at some good,it can be seen not to be irrational at all, this move gets him nowhere.For this "good" is no more than verbally similar to any recognizedgood. " 'Well, but then it is still a good,' you interrupt. By your leave,we will explain further, and the point is not in a play on words, butin the fact that this good is distinguished precisely by upsetting allclassifications. ... In short, it interferes with everything." The opponentought to worry about the case of a man acting knowingly but notso as to achieve any recognized good, for even if what happens hasto be described formally in terms of seeking good of some kind, theopponent still cannot account for it, because the "good" here is onehe has not considered and which conies into conflict with all the goodshe has considered. He can draw no comfort from the fact that theperverse insistence on flouting all one's conceptions of good can itselfbe called "good"; he can win only a verbal victory. So the UndergroundMan feels free to describe as good the aim of acting against all one'snotions of what is good and worthwhile. "One's own free and unfetteredvolition, one's own caprice, however wild, one's own fancy, inflamedsometimes to the point of madness—that is the one best and greatestgood, which is never taken into consideration because it will not fitinto any classification, and the omission of which always sends all systemsand theories to the devil."It is worth noticing that the emphasis on volition, khoten'ye, brings


out the point that the agent is still to be considered the author ofhis acts, however irrational. They are caused by his desire or wanting,and so brought about in the normal way, even if he does not aimat any good in doing them. The English word "volition" is an artificialphilosopher's term, and indeed suggests if anything an act of will thatis opposed to the agent's desires, whereas khoten'ye at once brings tomind the very common verb khotet', to want or like. The UndergroundMan is not suggesting that an irrational action can be motivated byan act of pure will, a volition unconnected to desire. On the contrary,he is insisting that it can be produced by some kind of desire, andbe an expression of agency, in the face of the recognition that it isno good. In section 8 he insists that reason is only a part of humanlife, whereas khoten'ye is a "manifestation of the whole of life (proyavlenievsei zhizni), I mean of the whole of human life including both reasonand speculation." It is hardly natural to say this of "volition" in English,although this is the translation Coulson uses.This vindication of acting in the full sense against what one recognizes

as good is developed in two main directions. First, the UndergroundMan is clear that such actions are nevertheless not motivated, and hencenot explained, in any ordinary sense. In section 5 he contemplatesthe straightforward man who acts from a motive without questioningit. By contrast, the Underground Man is always questioning his motivesuntil they lose their force for him. So if he acts it is purely out ofzlost'. No one word can translate z/ost'adequately; translators vary between"anger," "spite," "resentment," "malevolence," thus disguising Dos-toyevsky's obsessive concentration on the one word. (It occurs 13 timesin section 1 alone.) But while there is no adequate translation, it canprobably be safely seen as whatever it is that actually gets a man toact against his conception of the good. The point here is that zlost',while it may bring about an action, is not a motive for it, and doesnothing to explain it. This is recognized quite explicitly: it might "servequite successfully instead of a primary cause, precisely because it isn'ta cause (prichina)" This is a paradoxical way of putting the pointthat an action produced by wanting of some kind but still against allthe agent's conceptions of good is not motivated in any recognizableway. So we might want to say, "He had no motive; he just did itout of spite." This is not to deny that spite was what actually broughtabout the action, only that the action is not motivated in the usualway and not accessible to the usual kind of comprehension.Second, the Underground Man feels it necessary to argue that the

existence of the volition that brings about an irrational action is notthreatened by determinism. He worries about determinism spasmodicallythroughout part I, but it is hard to find a clear point of view in what

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he says. He talks a lot about the laws of nature, but without any clearidea of what they actually are. In section 3, he throws together asexamples of necessity the theory of evolution, psychological egoismand twice two equalling four; and this shows great ignorance, andperhaps lack of interest, in what a determinist might actually be tryingto say. But this confusion does not matter after all, since in section8, the most sustained discussion, neither the Underground Man norhis opponents are arguing about the truth of determinism; what theyare disputing is whether or not it matters if determinism is true. Theopponent is presented as thinking that it does not, even though herecognizes that if all our desires are predictable, they become controllable.He accepts this, holding that if our desires run on the rational lineslaid down, this will remove freedom only in the sense that there willno longer be desires which are opposed to reason. But, he maintains,freedom to act against reason is not what we really mean by "freedom";freedom is just the ability to do what it is rational to do, and so weare not deprived of anything by losing a will which goes against reason.It is obvious that this is a kind of compatibilism, though in Dostoyevsky'shostile presentation it is not clear or well-thought out, and much morework would have to be done to make it sound plausible. What theUnderground Man insists on, by contrast, is quite clear: the possibilitydoes make a difference, for if a man's desires can be predicted thenthey can be manipulated, and if they can be manipulated then hereally is no more than a piano key, part of a mechanism constructedindependently of him.Occasionally he does maintain that determinism is actually false; it

cannot be true because man does possess desires of such a type asto frustrate any attempt to manipulate them. (This is a thesis whichis not necessarily tied to irrational actions, except insofar as he sometimessuggests that the desires in question are those which bring about irrationalactions.) Sometimes, however, he seems to be less sure of this, recognizingthat the desires on which he lays so much weight are, after all, merelydesires which could in principle be just as predictable and manipulableas any others. But the main point is sustained: it does matter whetheror not determinism is true, for, if so, it is no longer a man's owndesires that bring about his actions, and he loses responsibility forthem.7A great deal of the discussion of part I, then, and not just the most

obvious section 7, maintains that there do exist actions in the full senseof the word, which are freely produced by the agent's desires andthus genuinely originate from him, but which are nevertheless donein the knowledge that the agent believes them to produce no good,or less good then an alternative. The effect of this claim is of course


to discredit the rational purposive paradigm of action, and with it theagent-centered picture of practical reasoning. It is incidentally interest-ing, in view of the fact that Dostoyevsky conflates this notion withthat of motivation as egoistic, that the Underground Man never triesto discredit this picture of action by claiming that purely non-egoisticactions are possible. Moral philosophers have sometimes claimed thatthe agent-centered model of practical reasoning is wrong because anaction can be performed purely out of duty, for example. But it neveroccurs to Dostoyevsky to appeal either to deontological notions or toaltruism.We would expect the rejection of the rational paradigm to have

important consequences for the way we can regard character and action.And we find this, not only in what the Underground Man says, butin how he says it.

II

Philosophers who take action to be in the last analysis purposiveand rational have trouble describing an agent's relation to an irrationalaction, even if they accept the latter as a coherent possibility. Aristotleis reduced to saying that the agent does not "choose" to do his akraticact, because for Aristotle (more so than for us) choice is linked toone's character and expresses it, and the akratic act is out of character.An irrational act does not reflect the agent's valuations, and so it cannotbe seen as a product of his dispositions—his generosity or meanness,greed or thrift, courage or cowardice. It lacks understandable connectionwith his character. Most of our character-describing words applied toagents (not just the traditional virtues and vices) have implications aboutwhat the agent values and what choices he has made and will make.8The Underground Man is like Aristotle's weak-willed man in whom

weakness of will has become a chronic condition. And one result atany rate is inevitable: most character-describing words fail to get agrip on him, and his moral character collapses in fragments—or perhapswe should rather say that no attempt to apply to him notions involvedin morally judging someone's character can begin to succeed. Thisis not because he is morally revolutionary; indeed, morally he is extremelyconservative, holding without question, for example, the most conven-tional views about duels, slaps in the face, and so on. Rather, his moralcharacter fails to form a whole because his actions frequently, indeedusually, cannot be described in terms of the rational paradigm; andbecause we thus cannot ascertain his values at the time of action, wecannot go on to characterize him in ways which carry implicationsabout his past and future actions and choices. His single most striking

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feature is his inconsistency, which he describes (in the person of hisinterlocutor) in section 1 1 . But this inconsistency does more than makehim difficult to pin down by a third party. The book is written inthe first person, and what is striking is the way that the writer displayshis lack of grip on his own character. Because he does not regardhis actions as reflecting and confirming considered value judgments,he cannot see them in the light of any lasting disposition or trait ofcharacter, and so he is left without any way of making connectionsbetween his own actions. If two of his actions or utterances do notcohere, he can regard one as tending to undermine the attitude expressedby the other; but he can also think of himself as just having changedhis mind, and as being committed to both at different times. Anda great deal of the time either this is what he does, or both possibilitiesare left open.Part I is full of ways in which we are shown the Underground Man's

disconnected state. He is always backtracking; each remark he makestends at once to provoke a contradiction. "Who can be vain of hisdisease, still less swagger with it? Why do I say that, though? Everybodydoes it—we all show off with our diseases." He develops argumentsand then breaks them off with dissatisfaction or a change of direction.He is incapable of keeping up a sustained argument or discussion—therelatively short part I is made up of eleven short sections, none verylong and some not very homogeneous internally. Most important ofall, he can sustain no confidence in what he says. He is always turningaside to ask questions or to invent objections from himself or fromimaginary interlocutors. He knows that the interlocutors' parts arewritten by himself too, and that there is no genuinely distinct pointof view, but he needs the fiction of an opponent of some kind, todramatize his own lack of internal continuity. As well as providingconstant questions and interpolated objections, the imaginary interlocu-tor enables the Underground Man to distance himself even from whathe puts down in an apparently straightforward way. He frequentlyand obsessively insists that when we think he is serious he is in factjoking, or that when we think he is joking he is serious. He constantlyoffers advice, invites sympathy, wheedles and bullies. AU this has theeffect of reducing his commitment to any particular utterance. Severaltimes he takes back something he has just said, on the grounds thathe was lying, but the admission that he lied does not produce remorse;he has just changed his mind, and he does not regard what he saidas a lapse from a generally truthful policy.The constant to and fro between the Underground Man and his

imaginary opponents has been labeled "dialectical." Peace, for example,talks of the "counterpoint" of Notes from Underground and says, "In


it can be seen the beginnings of that dialectical method of presentingideas which is the hallmark of Dostoyevsky the mature artist" (p. 17).This is most misleading if it is thought to imply a conscious, anti-dogmaticmethodology in argument, or some progression by means of confrontingand transcending oppositions. There is no development in the argument;positions are confronted with other positions and then sometimes change,but there is no coming to grips with rival views or any attempt touse the interlocutor to clarify the narrator's own position. Rather, theinterlocutor serves as a defense against maintaining and clarifying whatthe narrator has to say. The various dramatic devices serve to dissociatethe Underground Man from what he says, and make it impossibleto predict from the present passage what will be said next, or to judgewhat has been said in terms of what is being said now. We are neverallowed to feel that we know where we are in the argument. Thisis both a philosophically interesting point and a dramatically effectivedevice on Dostoyevsky's part. Since the Underground Man lacks acharacter that could group his actions in intelligible ways, it wouldbe dramatically inept to have him deliver a consistent and well-construct-ed argument about his own lack of continuous character. It is preciselycharacteristic of him that we can understand what he says only inshort momentary bursts, and that these do not add up to anythingcoherent.Section 6 reveals the Underground Man's lack of character most

strikingly. "Oh, if only it was only out of laziness that I do nothing!Lord, how much I should respect myself then! I should respect myselfbecause I had something inside me, even if it was only laziness; Ishould have at any rate one positive quality of which I could be sure.Question: what is he? Answer: a lazy man; and it really would bevery pleasant to hear that said of me. It would mean being positivelydefined, it would mean that there was something that could be saidof me. ? lazy man!'—that is a name, a calling, it's positively a career!"The point here is underlined by using for "quality" not the more neutralword kachestvo, but svoistvo, which literally means "something of one'sown." The Underground Man does not regret lacking certain charac-teristics as opposed to certain others; he regrets lacking the abilityto categorize himself in any way that makes long-term sense. Whenhe describes himself, it is usually in terms of abuse, but he cannoteven accuse himself of having a bad character. (The one good qualityhe thinks of himself as having is cleverness, but this is not a qualityof character.) Hence, perhaps, the shrill tone of his abuse of himselfand others, and the reason why Notes from Underground contains suchan amazing number of variants on "disgusting," "revolting," "filth,""muck," and so on: his adverse comments are all based on disgust,

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which is a strong feeling but a momentary one. It is called forth bythe appearances of things, the way they happen to strike one, as muchas by the way they really are. Correspondingly, the feeling of disgustrequires no reference to a trait or disposition of character; it is morelike a reaction which does not characterize the person in any lastingway.The very first section presents us with the dilemma of the Under-

ground Man. AU the salient features are already there in its first fiveparagraphs. The strangeness of the narrator strikes us from his veryfirst words, and it lies as much in the way he tells us about himselfas in what he tells us about what he does.The first paragraph introduces the writer as sick and nasty ("Ya

chelovek bolnoi . . . ya zloi chelovek."). Again, there is no adequateEnglish translation of the crucial word zloi, the adjective correspondingto zlost'. "Angry," Coulson's word here, is too feeble in not suggestingthe note of nastiness and perversity. The nearest equivalent is perhaps"mean" in the American sense, suggesting both force and malevolence.We begin to see the perverse nature of the writer's beliefs. He thinksthat his liver is bad, though he knows he has no ground for this belief.He is not having treatment although he thinks that he ought to. Heis superstitiously respectful of doctors, although he is well-educatedenough not to be. He refuses treatment out of spite (zlost'). So farwe find a man who acts even aggressively against his own interestsout of pure perversity. We may find it hard to see the point of actinglike this, but there is no indication yet that this is not a coherent policy.The second paragraph partly continues in this way. He makes a

joke, decides that it is no good and leaves it in for that reason. Buta new element is also introduced. Although his behavior was consistentlythat of someone utterly zloi, we are told, it did not really answer tothe way he felt. He did not in fact care at all about the petitionershe got so angry with. Then why behave so badly to them? That turnsout to have been the heart of his perversity ("glavniy punkt moei zlosti").Zlost', which has been introduced as the mainspring of his behavior,makes a man act in ways in which he has no desire to act. It turnsout that there is something permanently self-frustrating about zlost'.But there is still no indication that it is not something which couldbe a permanent state. Indeed, in describing the way in which he wouldturn on himself for occasionally letting good will determine his behavior,and act the way he felt instead of fighting it, he says that that wasalways his way—obychai, what is usual or customary, suggesting thatthere was some degree of dispositional reliability.In the third paragraph, however, the picture splits apart. "I was

lying when I said just now that I was a zloi civil servant. I was lying


out of zlost'." Translators who use, as Coulson does, unrelated wordsfor these two occurrences surely destroy the sense of the sentence,which brings out precisely the problem of characterizing oneself aszloi. To be zloi, to act only or predominandy from zlost', is preciselyto lack character, so to characterize oneself as zloi will at once leadto paradox. The zloi man is the man who acts out of perversity andbreaks all links between action and character. Thus he is unable evento judge his own state coherently. Since he has no moral dispositions,he cannot consistently judge himself or even his own lack of moraldispositions. He has no ground on which to stand, as it were, eitherto approve or disapprove of his own zloi actions. When he denies,out of zlost', that he acted out of zlost', the denial has as much validityas the affirmation. The actions of the zloi man do not support—theyeven undermine—what he values; his actions are inconsistent with hisvalued objectives, and so cannot stand in coherent relations with anytraits of character.9This may seem to be overworking one particular sentence. But it

is hard to ignore Dostoyevsky's words here, for now the fragmentationof the Underground Man's character is shown for the first time. Hebecomes obsessive and loses control, bursting out to the imaginaryinterlocutor, "You think that now I'm making some sort of confessionto you, asking your forgiveness, don't you? . . . I'm sure you do . . .But I assure you it's all the same to me if you do think so."In the fourth paragraph we find explicit recognition of the way

the writer cannot characterize himself, and the paradoxes which result.Precisely because zlost' is the predominant force that moves him toaction, he cannot make himself into a zloi character, any more thaninto any other sort of character—the nature of zlost' precludes this.One result is that no possible reflection on his own character can befound satisfying. He consoles himself with the thought that to actotherwise than as he does would be foolish, but this is merely a spiteful(zlobniy) thought, and only irritates him. There is no point in his eventrying to have a consistent character. He is condemned to the stateof permanent dissatisfaction and irritation that we find him displayingall the time. The paradoxes developed in the rest of this paragraphbring this out by their pointlessness: he thinks it desirable to lackcharacter, and has thought so for forty years ... he has the rightto say that old age is disgusting because he is going to be old him-self. . . .Pointless paradox occurs in the final paragraph too. St. Petersburg

is too expensive and unhealthy for him, but he won't leave. He startsto give a reason, but then breaks off—"It's all the same"; for thecharacterless man considerations like expense and climate cannot be

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weighed up objectively, for to do so would involve comparing his pastand future states. These considerations have force only according tohow he feels at the time. The section concludes with a final poindessparadox: the respectable man wants most to talk about himself, sohe will too. The respectable (poryadochniy) man is the man whose lifedisplays poryadok, order and organization; exactly the opposite of theUnderground Man. The writer cannot even talk about himself withoutdoing it because it is the exact opposite of what would be expected.In this brief, peculiar and apparently unattractive section, Dostoyevsky

has achieved something remarkable. He has shown us what happensto a man's character when his actions cease to be understandable interms of reason and purpose and he becomes an irrational agent. Wesee the narrator's perversity, his zlost', and while we understand howhe can commit irrational actions we also see how action becomesdissociated from character, and the way in which character dissolvesand disappears. To lack character is not, of course, the same as tolack a sense of one's identity as a person; this characterless man hasa very strong sense of himself as an individual, but he cannot judgehimself by more than momentary reactions, and so his opinions andbeliefs become fragmentary and unintegrated. Further, he is incapableof a whole range of attitudes and opinions that can only be developedin someone with character dispositions; he is incapable, for example,of love, trust and hate (as opposed to resentment). His moral worldis composed of momentary attractions and repulsions, with the repulsionspredominating, since his insistence on acting against his conceptionof the good weakens for him the practical and attractive force of good.In so presenting breakdown of character as a "consequence" of a

rejection of purposive, rational action as the norm, I may have madeit sound as though it is or could be a distinct causal product. In factthe relation between character and action is complex, and it wouldbe ill-advised to claim priority for either; they stand or fall together.The paradigm of rational action has its problems, but one reason whyit remains entrenched at the basis of so much in philosophy is itstight, though not altogether obvious, links with the notion of moralcharacter. If we cease to interpret what someone does in the lightof the rational paradigm, we lose all comprehension of his character.Part I of Notes from Underground shows the horror of knowing thatthis has happened when the person is oneself.

Ill

In part I we have had displayed to us the fragmentation of thepersistently irrational agent; we have seen his inability to continue in


any line of thought, his insecurity, his inability to comprehend himselfas a continuous whole, his tendency to judge and act by the momentrather than in terms of policy and character. All this has been shownin and by the fragmentation of the form, the broken paragraphs,inconsistencies, the need to question, argue, distance himself from whathe says. This effect has of course been noticed before, for exampleby Mochulsky: "We perceive almost physiologically [sic] the under-ground man's division through the unsightliness of his style, thedisharmony of syntax, the irritating brokenness of his speech. AllDostoyevsky's heroes are characterized by their language, but the verbalportrait of the man from underground is the most expressive" (p.246). But what has not been sufficiently noticed is that there is a contrasthere with part II.10In part II we are given a narrative, which proceeds chronologically

and with no peculiarities of form (except perhaps the excessivelydiscursive and rambling opening section in which the writer's situationis established). It is true that the protagonist of the narrative, the "I"that the writer is writing about, persistendy acts in an irrational wayand has a fragmentary and elusive character. But the "I" who is writingshows none of this. He is the normal narrator, distanced from hisprotagonist but maintaining a single view of him throughout. Thereis no feeling of a man whose sense of continuity is precarious. Thereis the feeling rather of a man of forty looking back on past eventsand regarding himself with a morally established character. There isthe sentimental touch of his having recalled Liza's face for fifteen years;there are even passages where he judges his earlier self in a morallyrather stringent manner: "What I can say for myself with certaintyis that although I committed this cruelty deliberately, it came frommy wicked head, not from my heart."There are a few points in the second part where the narrator turns

to an interlocutor or breaks off with, "Gentlemen . . .," in a waysuperficially like the outbursts of part I. But the function of theseis rather different. In part II, section 1, for example, the narratorfirst says that he is not trying to justify his "debauched" behavior,then—"But no! that was a lie! To justify myself was exactly what Iwanted to do. That observation is made for my own benefit, gentlemen.I won't lie. I have given my word. . . ." He is catching himself outin a lapse of from a general policy of truthfulness—precisely whatdoes not happen in part I, where his self-accusations of lying are morelike a mere swing between two opinions. Compare this passage frompart I, section 11: "It would be better if I believed even a small partof everything I have written here. I swear, gentlemen, I don't believea word, not one single little word, of all I have scribbled down! Thatis, I do perhaps believe it, but at the same time, I don't know why,

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I feel, or suspect, that I'm lying like a trooper." This is someone whoreally does have difficulty in distinguishing between telling a lie andbeing uncertain between two opinions because he is uncertain of hiscommitment to either. By contrast, the narrator of part II is in nosuch muddle, and is even fanatically truthful. When he comes to relatehis ugliest action, in section 11, he says, "I wish I could lie now andwrite that I had done it without premeditation." But he does not infact lie; it matters to him to face the truth. His asides do not expressreal shifts and are more like rhetorical flourishes. (The only exceptionis perhaps the long excursus on Russian romantics in section 1, butthis is clearly signalled as a digression, separate from the narration.)Part I, then, is written by a man who embodies the condition he

is talking about; part II is not. At the literary level one may concludethat Dostoyevsky has made his point, and there would be nothing moreto be gained by upsetting the narrative conventions in order to goon and on, showing that the narrator is a fragmented personality.If part II had continued in the style of part I, we would never beable to identify the relevant events very firmly; they would be seenin flashes and impressionistically, from different and perhaps contra-dictory points of view. Doing this could make a point, of course, butnot one that Dostoyevsky wants to make.From the philosophical point of view, however, the transition is

somewhat problematic. The difficulties in fact begin at the very endof part I, where the transition to part II is made. The UndergroundMan begins to talk about the need to be honest with oneself and theterrible difficulty of facing one's own discreditable or ludicrous actionsand owning up to them. It is his proposal to be completely honestwith himself that formally leads him to write down the story "À Proposof the Sleet." Further, he puts great energy and effort into this attemptto be honest. And he also sees it as helpful to himself, in that it may"write out" and so release him from, a painful memory that troubleshim. But where does this mysterious determination to complete a projectcome from, still more the energy to carry it through? The UndergroundMan as we have seen him lacks the motivation to complete any project.He veers, as he himself recognizes, between zlost' and inertia. To carryout such a project one needs to believe that it is worth carrying out;but precisely this kind of belief cannot motivate him to action in anysustained way. Further, why should he be troubled by the painfulmemory? This presupposes a self with enough solidity to be troubledby owning one particular action. Even before getting on to part II,the reader is worried by the strange definiteness with which the writerbegins to shape up and tell the story. It is not that we are surprisedthat he is interested in himself; but we are surprised that he proposesto be interested in a sustained, purposive and even creative way.


If part II is to follow part I coherently, there has to be some indicationof a change in the transitional passage. And there is, though a crypticand brief one. In part I, section 11, the Underground Man, afterextolling his own point of view, becomes ambivalent; he would notchoose to be the normal man, but he envies him. Then in a dramaticturn-around, he accuses himself of lying: "I'm lying, because I know,as sure as two and two make four, that it isn't the underground whichI am eager for, but which I shall never find. Devil take the underground! "He at once undermines this forceful statement by disclaiming whathe has just written; but on the other hand it has been supported bythe curious section 10, in which some ambivalence appears about theidealizing systems of thought about human nature which have beenso belabored up to now. The Palace of Crystal now appears not asa distorted monstrosity, but as a possibly attractive ideal, disconcertingonly by its unattainability. And the Underground Man unexpectedlynot only turns on himself for hating it, but expresses regret for beingso constituted as to want to stick out his tongue at it. "I would letmy tongue be cut right out in mere gratitude if only things were soarranged that I never wanted to put it out again . . . Why was Imade with such desires? Can I have been made for only one thing,to come at last to the conclusion that my whole make-up is nothingbut a cheat? Is that the whole aim? I don't believe it."These passages presuppose that the writer recognizes some standard

of ideal human behavior. Clearly, it must be very different from thetheories derided so far, but all the same some ideal is in question.He has spent most of part I discrediting the rational model of actionon the grounds that it falsifies human nature; in this sense he is arealist. Yet now we find cryptic intimations of some kind of idealism,and then we move on to the narrator of part II, who has the honesty,consistency and strength of character to face unflinchingly the darkestparts of himself.The difficulty here is increased by the fact that we know from a

letter of Dostoyevsky's that the censor excised a passage in section10 in which the alternative to the underground was specified in religiousterms. "It would have been better not to print the next to last chapterat all, than to print it as it is, i.e., with sentences torn out and fullof self-contradictions. But what can be done? Those swines of censors—where I mocked at everything and sometimes blasphemed for form'ssake—that's let pass, but where from all this I deduced the need offaith and Christ—that is suppressed." (Quoted by Mochulsky, p. 256.)The passages have been lost, and critics differ as to the importance

they might have had. Peace, although he talks of "positive religiousideas," (p. 12) says that "the Underground Man's cult of his own willis as yet chaotic and lacking in direction" (p. 5). Boyce Gibson on

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the other hand says that Dostoyevsky "prepares the way for thereinstatement of religion on anti-rationalist terms."11 Mochulsky goesmuch further: "The dream of a genuine earthly paradise is the centralidea of the Notes," and, ". . . the fundamental lie of humanism is refut-ed: that it is possible to reeducate man through reason and advantage.Dostoyevsky objects: 'No, evil is not overcome by education, but bya miracle. What is impossible to man, is possible to God. Not reeducation,but resurrection. Here is the reason for the "need of faith and Christ.'"" 12Clearly, these are very different interpretations of the work, and

it remains an open question how positive an ideal the UndergroundMan was to have recognized at the end of part I. The present problemis affected by it insofar as it emphasizes the difference in coherencebetween the narrator of part I and that of part II. The narrator ofpart II is of course far from being a Christian, although he doessometimes take on a rather pious tone in commenting on his earlierself's "debaucheries" and "crimes." But he has at least developed toa point from which he can and does moralize about his earlier self.The story presents the way in which his present self faces and comesto terms with his past action. He accepts that he is capable of themeanest and most unforgivable actions. For Dostoyevsky this putshim in a state where he might possibly turn to Christ. Any moralityor religion based on any appeal to the agent's self-interest, howeverrefined, has been ruled out; a religious appeal of an a-rational kindwhich operates through abnegation of the self is the only appeal possiblefor him. Such an appeal, moreover, would make sense for him.But turning to Christ could make little sense for the writer of part

I; there is no self to turn, or rather no moral self; he can recognizejustice and right on an intellectual level, but they leave him cold.The writer of part I is not in a state to recognize and be motivatedby any kind of ideal, however remote from an agent-centered ideal.The writer of part II is, although he may not yet do so. The confusionand raggedness left by the censor's pencil in part I, section 10 pointup the problematic way in which the writer of part I becomes thewriter of part II.The extent of the censor's damage here can of course be exaggerated.

Notes from Underground is meant to be a strange and disturbing book.AU the same, if one interprets part I as illustrating, in the way it iswritten, a philosophical point basic to Dostoyevsky's design, then itis hard to see the whole book as a unity.

IV

Insofar as Dostoyevsky's work, and Notes from Underground in particu-lar, has been considered philosophically interesting, it has generally


been in connection with existentialism. This is certainly true of thearticle on Dostoyevsky by Edward Wasiolek in The Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy, for example. Dostoyevsky is "considered a forerunner ofexistentialist thought." "The underground man is Dostoyevsky's totallyfree man. He carries revolt against limitation to its extreme and raisesit to a philosophical principle. Like the existentialists who were to followthree-quarters of a century later, he is en marge; he is in revolt notonly against society, but also against himself, not once, not only todayor tomorrow, but eternally." It may seem unusual to look to Dostoyevskyfor illumination of philosophical problems of "practical reason" and"action" that have occupied philosophers in a more analytic tradition.But the richness of a work can sometimes be best appreciated by seeinghow it allows fruitful readings within quite different traditions. I amnot suggesting that my interpretation of Notes from Underground is morejustified or privileged than the more customary ones. Arguably, it ismuch further from any explicit thoughts that Dostoyevsky himself mayhave had about the book as he wrote it by his wife's deathbed. ButI do think that it is legitimate to see the work as in fact illustratinga deep and troubling problem at the heart of what is at present themost prominent and plausible philosophical theory of action.

St. Hugh's CollegeOxford University

1 . For the relations of the books, see: Leonid Grossman, Dostoyevsky: a biography, translatedby Mary Mackley (London: Allen Lane, 1971), pp. 310-311; Richard Peace, Dostoyevsky:An Examination of the Major NoveL· (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p.7, 10-11, n. 3; Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoyevsky: his life and work, translated by MichaelA. Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 251.

2.Cf. Mochulsky: "The dreamer-romantic of the forties has in the sixties been trans-formed into a cynic-paradoxalist. . . . The underground man's social and historicalcondition is defined by the same marks which earlier characterized the dreamer's state.This is 'one of the representatives of a generation still living,' i.e., an intellectual ofthe 'Petersburg period' of Russian history, poisoned by European culture, divorced fromthe soil and the people, an historical type who 'not only can, but also must exist inour society'" (pp. 244-5). Grossman: "It is as if he was trying to pay back the spiritualleaders of his youth for the terrible ordeals of his years as a convict" (p. 310). Someof the characteristics of the ineffectual dreamer-idealist foreshadow the hostile portraitof Stepan Verkhovensky in The Devils.3.More accurately we should call him the Underfloor Man. Podpol'ye means "underthe floor," and iz podpol'ya has suggestions of something nasty creeping out from underthe floorboards, rather then the more heroic overtones acquired by the English "under-ground."4.To simplify rather crudely: I am thinking of moral theories of a roughly "Aristotelian"

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kind, which, while not egoistic, nonetheless assume that morality is an agent-centeredaffair, that it is part and parcel of the practical reasoning the agent carries on in hissituation in the world. Nothing said here touches moral theories of a radically differenttype, e.g. Kantian theories.5.The most important here are: "Actions, Reasons and Causes," Journal of Philosophy1963, pp. 685-700; "How is Weakness of the Will Possible?", in Joel Feinberg, ed.,Moral Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 93-113; "Freedom to Act"in Ted Honderich, ed., Essays on Freedom of Action (London: Roudedge and KeganPaul, 1973), pp. 139-156; "Agency" in Robert Binkley, Richard Bronaugh, and AntonioMarras, eds., Agent, Action and Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971), pp. 3-25.6.The matter is complex; for a sharp discussion of the issues involved see ThomasNagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).7.In what Dostoyevsky says about will we do find incoherent exaggeration, as thatthe individual's will is opposed not merely to philosophical and scientific theories butto mathematical necessity; it is an exercise of the individual's will to want two andtwo to equal five. This confusion is a consequence of Dostoyevsky's hasty and uncriticallumping-together of very different things under the heading "laws of nature."8.This is a very sketchy and vague gesture towards the problems of character andaction. See Myles Burnyeat, "Virtues in Action," in Gregory Vlastos, ed., The Philosophyof Socrates (New York: Doubleday, 1971), pp. 209-234; N. Dent, "Virtues and Actions,"Philosophical Quarterly 1975, pp. 318-335.9.There is a problem here of "self-ascription" analogous to that of ascribing evil traitsof character to oneself; see Margaret Gilbert, "Vices and Self-Knowledge," Journal ofPhilosophy 1971, pp. 443^153. But the problem is more salient in the case of zlost'.10.Mochulsky says that the second part "is joined to the first stylistically" (p. 257).But his grounds for this refer in fact not to style at all but to continuity of themes:"the inner dialogue becomes external, the fight is transferred from the sphere of ideasinto the plane of life, the imaginary enemies are embodied in real ones."11.Alexander Boyce Gibson, The Religion of Dostoyevsky (London, 1973), p. 81.12.Mochulsky, pp. 256 and 257. Mochulsky significantly finds it hard to explain whyDostoyevsky "never reestablished the original text in subsequent editions. Dostoyevsky's'philosophy of tragedy' has remained without its mystical consummation" (p. 257). Thisfact remains "strange"—surely an inadequate account if the censored ideas were infact the whole point of the work.

Documents

Action and Character in Dostoyevsky's