This is another response paper I turned in to my existentialism professor. Here I am responding to Dostoyevsky's The Underground Man and my comparison of the two types of men presented therein. I used this as a prototype to my upcoming essay, From Pilate to Nietzche: Postmodernism and the Prince of This World.
The Underground Man uses the dichotomy of the man of action vs. the man of acute self-consciousness to raise some very interesting arguments against the traditional western philosophical world and present an example of what would become existentialist thought. In this dichotomy, the man of action represents the “natural” man whom is the subject of traditional philosophy and science, and the man of acute consciousness is the “modern” man of contemporary civilization from whom the rebellion of existentialism arises. He clarifies the difference of these two through the use of a metaphorical wall. The wall, and how these two approach the wall are of infinite importance in defining what separates them, and thereby separating the difference in existentialism to traditional philosophy.
The wall is the invention of the gentleman the Underground Man is addressing. “What stone wall? Why, of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics… When they prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties… then you have to accept it,” (Dostoevsky 61). This wall, is the product of Western Philosophy. It is the laws which science and philosophy have made, stating objective truths about reality, in which the individual has no say. This wall is natural, universal, irrefutable law.
Of the man of action, the Underground man feels, “such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his tender mother nature wished to see him… He is stupid” (Dostoevsky 59). Notice the Underground Man says his mother nature. He also says that the man of acute self-consciousness is a retort-made man, implying a distance from the natural. In this sense, there is a distinct difference from what the Underground Man is implying about himself with what traditional western philosophy says makes a human being. The man of action runs to the wall, and accepts the wall. The man of acute consciousness runs to the wall and spends the rest of his life staring in anger and spite at the wall.
The man of action and of nature is identified by his own action and nature. So much so, in fact, that his identity is entirely contained within this perception. When he feels he is slighted, he runs and runs toward the object of his vengeance, “and nothing but a wall will stop him… but of the wall later,” (Dostoevsky 59). When he encounters the wall, he genuinely recedes with no remorse, for the wall is the laws of nature, and him, being a man of nature is satisfied. Towards the man of acute-consciousness, the man who is unable to chase the object of revenge, or to even feel revenge, he feels condescension and laughs. He is able to do this because as a man of nature he actually has a nature, unlike the man of acute-consciousness, who can’t even raise the will to defend himself. But the man of acute conciousness can be whatever he wants to be. In the case of the Underground Man, this is a spiteful creature. He wants to be against the wall of natural laws dictated by scholars, and he is thus defined by his own choice, and not those choices which are made for him that he cannot refute, and thereby setting up the subjectivism which stands in spite the traditional philosophical mode and is inherent in most existentialist thinkers to follow.
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