We have even become so unaccustomed to living that we sometimes feel a kind of loathing for ‘real life’ and that’s why we cannot bear to be reminded of it. ¹
— Dostoevsky —
The poet Iqbal once beautifully said, “While the head is still pondering on the edge; the heart plunges into Nimrod’s fire.” 2 This opposition between the head and the heart—between thought and action—that Iqbal is highlighting here has come to increasingly characterise modernity ever since Descartes. As dwellers of modernity, we have all fallen into this ‘Cartesian-chasm’ to a greater or lesser degree. Many of us, with our ears plugged into phones and eyes fixed on screens, seem to trudge through cities like zombies. Others, trapped in their dark rooms, remain entangled in the sticky web of the internet like helpless insects. We all seem to be afflicted by a kind of solipsism—an urge to retreat into ourselves, to be left alone and keep ourselves distracted from life.
Being a ‘modern man’, I have often struggled with this kind of solipsism. I have a tendency to overthink and seek reasons for everything. And this often has a paralysing effect on me which is difficult for me to snap out of. Were it not for my friends forcing me out of such paralysis, I am sure I would have been perpetually trapped in my own thoughts. However, I have often wondered, what is so wrong about being trapped in one’s thoughts? What is so wrong about trying to tease out reasons for everything? Surely, to act correctly, do we not need a complete understanding of the state of affairs? Reading ‘Notes from the Underground’ made me realise why I was mistaken.
Dostoevsky’s underground man spends his days confined to his little room. He is a creature filled with intense rage, spite, and resentment. Unlike the ‘common people’, who take life as a given, he is hyper-conscious of everything and he endlessly searches for reasons behind his thoughts and actions. He is paralysed by his mind and trapped by the ‘inertia’ of his thoughts. He envies, and deeply longs for, the friendship and love that common people experience in their lives. Yet, every time these things are extended to him, he rejects them in the vilest of ways. He is a man trapped within his own consciousness and tormented by his own conscience. But why is he this way? How did he come to be like this?
For Dostoevsky, the answer lies in the zeitgeist of the world in which he lives. The modern spirit seeks to understand things by taking them apart, reducing every whole to its constituent parts. It is a method that has served us well with clocks and comets; but turned upon man, it becomes the cause of the underground man’s torments. Taken apart, man is merely a part of nature, with absolutely nothing metaphysical about him. The underground man understands the grave implications of this.
He knows that when he puts himself ‘under the microscope’, his volition and individuality, which make him who he is, are nowhere to be seen. He is made from the same matter as everything else, and like everything else, he is bound by the iron chains of natural law. All his actions and emotions are caused by his surroundings; his volition seems to be an illusion. Humiliated by the world’s encroachment upon him, the underground man chooses to retreat into the realm of his thoughts. There, in his own fantasies, he dreams up new ways of tormenting himself, for it is only while suffering that he feels he exists.
Reading this book was a terrifying experience for me. It left me alone, in an underground of my own, trapped in perpetual thought which allows no respite and offers no certitude. In the dark underground, I endlessly wondered how I had descended so deep, and whether any stair led back up. For a long time I was alone with my tormenting thoughts, but eventually, my silent solitude was interrupted by words which echoed in my heart like a sudden thunder on a quiet night:
To me, on the first morn, Gabriel did remind;
Accept not the heart which is enslaved by the mind! ³
— Iqbāl —
The tragedy of the underground man lies not in an inability to see the limits of reason. In fact, he sees these limits more clearly than most. “Reason is nothing but reason,” he says. The trouble is that all he can do is think. Or rather, he can’t not think. But some beliefs, like that of human volition, arise purely out of intuition, and no amount of thinking will deliver them. What the underground man could not see was that his intense self-obsession was the cause of his misery, and that only a genuine concern for others could cure him. He could not see that the way out of the underground was not through his head, but through his heart. His heart was enslaved by his mind and this doomed him to slow and painful decay.
In an age such as ours, when underground men not only exist, but are mass-produced, ‘Notes from the Underground’ offers us a much-needed critique of modernity. Personally, this book taught me that the head has its limits, and that in some matters, the heart takes precedence. It gave me, as Roger Scruton once said, “the real reasons, for not having reasons.” 4
Bibliography:
F.M. Dostoevsky; Notes From the Underground, Part 2, Section 10.
Iqbāl; Bang-e-Dara, 166, verses 5 & 6.
Iqbāl; Zarb-e-Kaleem 78, verses 7 & 8. (Translation is my own.)
What Conservatism Really Means- Roger Scruton & Hamza Yusuf. YouTube Link