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In one of his early novels published in 1846, The Double, his hero Mr. Golyadkin, a minor government official, discovers the appearance of another Mr. Golyadkin, another being exactly like himself. At the beginning of the novel before his double appears, he consults a doctor because he feels mentally unbalanced. It is natural to think as his strange story develops that he loses his reason. In reality he never loses his reason and he becomes more and more unbalanced and delirious because he is horrified that he is losing not his reason but his self. His self appears to him in a form exactly like himself in every detail, as a living foreign himself exactly like himself. His double arrives on the scene and this other alien self that is also himself becomes more dominant in their relations with one another than himself. Reason is always able to guide us to some logical and practical end. We feel it is a necessary integral part of our normal behavior that helps us directly. But when our imagination runs wild for some unknown reason, when our emotions start going berserk and we appeal to our reason, we find that our reason is still present but is indifferent to our trouble and of no help. Mr. Golyadkin’s reason tells him with indifference that he is the real Mr. Golyadkin and that the other Mr. Golyadkin is also the real Mr. Golyadkin. Reason does not abandon the poor man at all and merely remains a useless presence in his mind indifferent to the delirious state of his feelings. As the other false Mr. Golyadkin becomes more and more dominant and as the reason of the real Mr. Golyadkin is without any power to distinguish between the two and establish who is real and who is unreal, the feelings of the original Mr. Golyadkin go more and more berserk as he begins doubting that he is in fact real. He is forced to enter a mental hospital. His double walks behind the carriage bringing the original Mr. Golyadkin to his new home and as he arrives there, disappears. Dostoevsky’s message is that Raskolnikov’s self, Mr. Golyadkin’s self, our selves may not be real. Our reason allows our imagination to create a self for ourselves and on our journey through life we must carefully keep presenting our invented self to others in a conventional package with few deviations. We feel comfortable with ourselves because other selves around us accept our invention of our self as real. Poor Mr. Golyadkin can not feel authentic facing his double’s invention of himself because it is in fact himself and only he should have the right to invent himself! By way of contrast, Sonya’s self is barely imaginable to herself. The self she constructed for herself naturally has been humiliated, crushed, destroyed. The world will no longer let her invent, it will only let her be. But normal being causes her suffering that is relieved only by the secret treasure she feels living in her heart. Unfortunately Raskolnikov and Mr. Golyadkin, who care nothing for the life of the heart, must rely only on themselves for strength and they discover that their inventions of themselves are not as reliable as they think.
The young Dostoevsky wrote The Double around the age of 25, two or three years before he received his second pair of eyes. As he stood before rifles pointed at him waiting for death, his reason at last allowed his imagination to abandon completely its duty to invent a self adapted to the selves of our world and let it go free to invent a self suitable to any world at all. A self for any world! But why not a self that did not fit in any world and that did not even need to make rational sense as a self? Bullets would fly at him in a few moments and when they arrived he would no longer have time or being or mind. The ground below his feet in seconds would no longer feel like ground. He would be timeless and groundless and his mind would no longer be able to pretend that rational forms of behavior were the only true basis of his true self.
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Eighteen years after The Double, after four years of imprisonment at hard labor in Siberia, he wrote the short novel, Notes From The Underground, in which he takes up for treatment the subject of groundlessness. A man from the underground, from a corner of a room where he lives, like Raskolnikov, in self-isolation from the outside world, addresses us in a way that is extremely egotistical, proclaiming his complete freedom and his right to be irrational. He declares himself against not only all the normal customs of social life but also against all the natural laws of science and of mathematics. Unlike Raskolnikov, he uses his reason against reason, his logic against logic. “Merciful heavens!,” he shouts at us, “But what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic when, for some reason, I dislike those laws and the fact that two times two makes four?” In other words, to hell with all laws! He lives in a corner of his room hidden away underground for forty years from the world outside. He has difficulty explaining to normal people the “strange enjoyment” that results from his lonely struggle. “But it is just in that cold, abominable half-despair, half-belief, in that conscious burying of oneself alive for grief in the underworld for forty years, in that acutely recognized and yet partly doubtful hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined for ever and repented of again a minute later – that the savor of that strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies. It is so subtle, so difficult of analysis, that persons who are a little limited, or even simply persons of strong nerves, will not understand a single atom of it.”
They will not understand that their selves hang floating in nothingness and that they can, like the man in the underground, strip themselves of every normal and decent and rational mental structure that creates for themselves and for others what they are. But the nothingness that the underground man opens up within himself when he kicks away both his normal invented self and the normal way people live does not fill up with some sort of blessed goodness. No, it fills with “half belief, half despair” and a “hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward”. If you throw away the structures that make you yourself, you become defenseless. You become morbid and the world outside you that you despise and reject starts kicking you in the face because it no longer recognizes you as a normal person like all the normal persons around you who all resemble one another. Keep working at making your self yourself intentionally! It is what your mind tells you you must do!
The man from the underground shouts at us from Dostoevsky’s pages daring, irrational, extremely egotistical thoughts. He hates the people around him and wants nothing to do with their normal, practical lives. “Advantage! What is advantage?” he asks us defiantly. “Can you possibly give an exact definition of the nature of human advantage? And what if sometimes a man’s ultimate advantage not only may, but even must, in certain cases consist in his desiring something that is immediately harmful and not advantageous to himself?” There are some things, some experiences that escape all possible rational classification and when modern life will be so rationalized that all experience will have been rationally determined in advance, even then the man from the underground will not do automatically what he is supposed to do. He will not only not do what is to his advantage but he will seek what is not to his advantage. Against the whole world, against all the laws of society and science, against the power that tells us all you must do this, he, in his corner, he in his self-imposed prison, he will hold out against the power of two-plus-two-makes-four. He, when everyone else in the universe is doing only what reason tells them they must do, he will act willfully. He will will what he wants even if it is not to his advantage. Especially when it is not to his advantage because only then does he find a “strange enjoyment”!
“Well, can you expect a man who tries to find pleasure even in the feeling of his own humiliation to have an atom of respect for himself?” Humiliation humbles us. It makes us feel low and common. Someone just as low and common as ourselves suddenly inflicts an emotional wound on us that makes us feel painfully that we are even more low and common than everyone else. Our phony self is all at once sent flying out a window. Suddenly we no longer respect ourselves! What can be worse?
How can we live without respect for ourselves? Self-respect and self-esteem are the same thing and is there anything in the rationalized world we live in more necessary to be done with the power of love that exists in all of us than to love ourselves? The underground man not only has no self-respect but doesn’t want any. Respect for himself will make him not only respect himself but respect others. To respect himself and to respect others means to respect a world ruled by reason. “You see, gentlemen,” he tells us, “reason is an excellent thing. There is no doubt about it. But reason
