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

(Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/phl.1977.0002

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/phl/summary/v001/1.3.annas.html

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Julia Annas

ACTION AND CHARACTER IN DOSTOYEVSKY'S

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

Notes from Underground was written with a specific purpose in

mind: to answer Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?1 And
many features of Dostoyevsky's work can only be understood when
we bear in mind its specifically Russian setting. The narrator is a romantic
idealist of the forties transformed into something rather different by
1864, and no doubt we lose much if we do not bear in mind that

Dostoyevsky is looking back across the gulf of imprisonment and

suffering at his own idealistic youth.2 But the intense and radically
peculiar nature of Dostoyevsky's writing takes us to a level of the work
which is accessible to those without knowledge of the local conditions
of the work's production. As Mochulsky says, "the author steadily
emerges beyond the confines of the Russian intellectual . . . the
underground man's paradoxes are not the whims of some half-mad
eccentric, but a new revelation of man about man." The book is "the

philosophical preface to the cycle of the great novels" (p. 245). Even
though Dostoyevsky's passionate and extreme temperament made him
quite incapable of constructing a piece of precise philosophical argument,
there is much of genuine philosophical interest in part I. It is not
just a particular moral and political theory, like Chernyshevsky's, which
is to be discredited, but something deeper, the presuppositions of a
whole 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 argue
that he challenges a very basic model of human action, which is both
intuitively plausible and basic to many moral theories. I shall also argue
that as the work stands, there is a lack of continuity between parts

I and II on the philosophical as well as on the literary level. In

concentrating on the consequences for moral theory, I shall be ignoring
the social and political aspects of the work. It may well be urged that
such a division of the moral from the political is unrealistic in treating
257

258Philosophy and Literature

a Russian writer. In defense I can only say that this narrowing of

focus brings out in a sharper and more tractable way the philosophical

issue which is my main concern.

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 and
normal interests, man will cease to do evil and at once become virtuous

and noble, because when he is enlightened and understands what will

really benefit him he will see his own best interest in virtue, and since
it 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, what

a baby! Oh, what a pure innocent child! (part I section 7; all quotations
are from the translation by Jessie Coulson [London: Penguin, 1972]).

What exactly is the target here of the Underground Man?3

Every moral theory presupposes some theory of human action,
although this may not be explicit; since moral philosophy is concerned
with human actions, it must presuppose some account of what it is
for a human action to be performed. One very influential tradition

thinks 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's

Ethics.4 What is it for every action to aim at some good? We have
the assumption here that every action is purposive and rational;
purposive in that there is some goal which the agent sees as a good
and rational in that performing the action is believed by the agent
to 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 not
conceptually linked to Aristotelianism alone; it appears, for example,
in recent very influential articles on action by Donald Davidson.5
According to Davidson, to give a reason for an action is to explain
it by a combination of belief and "pro-attitude," a term introduced
to cover all sorts of long- and short-term wanting and desire. Davidson

notes that it follows that we can always work out some reasoning which

gives the characteristic of the action that the agent found desirable:
"from the agent's point of view there was, when he acted, something
to 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,

Julia Annas259
if rough and incomplete, description of what goes on: he sets a positive
value on some state of affairs (an end, or the performance by himself
of an action satisfying certain conditions); he believes (or knows or
perceives) that an action, of a kind open to him to perform, will promote
or produce or realize the valued state of affairs; and so he acts (that
is, he acts because of his value or desire and his belief). Generalized and
refined, this description has seemed to many philosophers, from Aristotle
on, 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 agent
had in acting; and to provide the beginning of an account of practical
reasoning, 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 on

its own have any implications about the kind of motivation that is
necessary; it is quite possible to accept the model and reject any form
of egoism. The fact that an agent seeks some good in any action does
not imply that it is his own good that he seeks. This is why an attack

on the rational model of action cuts much deeper than an attack on

egoism (which is in turn why what is formally an attack on the egoistic
theories 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, if
his action is to be in fact rational. And it may well make egoism seem
a more plausible theory of motivation than any alternative, for initially
at any rate it is hard to see how an agent could be motivated by something
he sees as a good without some appeal being made to a desire of
his own. This line of thought is wrong,6 but it is not obvious why
it is wrong, and it is understandable that Dostoyevsky should run together
the two issues.

The rational model of action is intuitively plausible, but it runs up

against another powerful intuition, namely that there are actions which
are the agent's actions, initiated by him, but which are nonetheless
pointless and irrational. The problem is sometimes called "weakness
of will" or akrasia, following Aristotle's discussion of it. The difficulty
is that an akratic or irrational act is one done by the agent even though
he recognizes that there is an alternative (perhaps merely not acting)
which it would be better to perform. In acting as he does, he recognizes
the greater good, but is not moved to action by it. But is this not

paradoxical? How can he be motivated to action when according to

the model he can have no motive for what he does? There is no good
which he seeks to obtain by doing what he does, or at any rate no

260Philosophy and Literature

good which is not outweighed by the recognized bad consequences

of performing the action. But in that case, how can he be performing
an action at all? He seems to be an agent in what he does, but if
he acts he is going against his conception of the greater good, and
how 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 they
cannot. Since action must be understood as purposive and rational,
it is simply incoherent to describe someone as acting in defiance of
the good he recognizes. So cases where this seems to happen must
be explained away as really being cases of a mistaken conception of
the good to be attained. Irrationality is really intellectual error; knowledge is virtue. We have already seen the Underground Man's opinion
of this thesis.

Irrational actions present a paradox to any theory of action that

wants to take the plausible view that the paradigmatic action is purposive
and rational (in the sense explained). There are, of course, numerous
ways of dealing with the problem. Probably the most common is to
proceed in the hope that the paradox will turn out to be harmless
or at least amenable to resolution in terms of the theory. This is Davidson's
approach to the problem in "How is Weakness of the Will Possible?"
But another reaction is clearly possible: to insist on the reality of irrational
action and hold that if it creates problems for our theory of action
then 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 disconnected
jabs) on the idea that action in the proper sense must be understood
as rational and purposive. Section 7 in particular revolves around
irrational action and holds that it not only exists but by its existence
discredits any theory that ignores it or has to explain it away. There
is a long description of the man who expounds clearly and at length
what 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 prove
very much on its own. It does make the point that there is nothing
obviously incoherent in the idea of such an event. But the rationalist
opponent will be unimpressed; he will say that the case is actually
incoherent, that difficulties will surface when one extends the description
to the agent and his relation to the action, and that to claim that
a description of irrational action shakes the analysis simply begs the
question.
So more is needed than a mere assertion that irrational action occurs.

And in section 7 the Underground Man does more; he turns to the

whole notion of advantage employed by the opponent in his claim that

Julia Annas261
a man can only act with some good or advantage in view. "Can you
undertake to define exactly where a man's advantage lies? What if
it sometimes happens that a man's advantage not only may but must
consist in desiring in certain cases not what is good but what is bad
for him? And if so, if such cases are even possible, the whole rule
is utterly destroyed." He claims, that is, that the mere possibility of
such a case proves his point. But is he still not begging the question?
In fact he is not, because Dostoyevsky is quite subtle here. The
Underground Man conducts the whole argument in his opponents'
terms, so that they are forced to recognize a counterexample to the
position they hold. He allows them to insist that action can only occur
when there is some good in view, and that otherwise described it is
incoherentstill, he claims, they lose their case because they omit the
good or advantage that consists in acting against all one's other goods
and advantages. "Doesn't there, in fact, exist something that is dearer
to almost every man than his own very best interests, ornot to violate
logicsome 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 seeking
some good so as not to "violate logic," that is, produce an inconsistent
description of what is going on. But even if the opponent claims that
when 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 recognized
good. " '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, but
in the fact that this good is distinguished precisely by upsetting all
classifications. ... In short, it interferes with everything." The opponent
ought to worry about the case of a man acting knowingly but not
so as to achieve any recognized good, for even if what happens has
to be described formally in terms of seeking good of some kind, the
opponent still cannot account for it, because the "good" here is one
he has not considered and which conies into conflict with all the goods
he has considered. He can draw no comfort from the fact that the

perverse insistence on flouting all one's conceptions of good can itself

be called "good"; he can win only a verbal victory. So the Underground
Man feels free to describe as good the aim of acting against all one's
notions of what is good and worthwhile. "One's own free and unfettered

volition, one's own caprice, however wild, one's own fancy, inflamed
sometimes to the point of madnessthat is the one best and greatest
good, which is never taken into consideration because it will not fit
into any classification, and the omission of which always sends all systems
and theories to the devil."

It is worth noticing that the emphasis on volition, khoten'ye, brings

262Philosophy and Literature

out the point that the agent is still to be considered the author of
his acts, however irrational. They are caused by his desire or wanting,
and so brought about in the normal way, even if he does not aim
at any good in doing them. The English word "volition" is an artificial
philosopher's term, and indeed suggests if anything an act of will that
is opposed to the agent's desires, whereas khoten'ye at once brings to
mind the very common verb khotet', to want or like. The Underground
Man is not suggesting that an irrational action can be motivated by
an 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, and
be an expression of agency, in the face of the recognition that it is
no good. In section 8 he insists that reason is only a part of human
life, whereas khoten'ye is a "manifestation of the whole of life (proyavlenie
vsei zhizni), I mean of the whole of human life including both reason
and 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 Underground
Man is clear that such actions are nevertheless not motivated, and hence

not explained, in any ordinary sense. In section 5 he contemplates

the straightforward man who acts from a motive without questioning
it. By contrast, the Underground Man is always questioning his motives
until they lose their force for him. So if he acts it is purely out of
zlost'. No one word can translate z/ost'adequately; translators vary between
"anger," "spite," "resentment," "malevolence," thus disguising Dostoyevsky's obsessive concentration on the one word. (It occurs 13 times
in section 1 alone.) But while there is no adequate translation, it can
probably be safely seen as whatever it is that actually gets a man to
act 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 does
nothing to explain it. This is recognized quite explicitly: it might "serve
quite successfully instead of a primary cause, precisely because it isn't
a cause (prichina)" This is a paradoxical way of putting the point
that an action produced by wanting of some kind but still against all
the agent's conceptions of good is not motivated in any recognizable

way. So we might want to say, "He had no motive; he just did it

out of spite." This is not to deny that spite was what actually brought
about the action, only that the action is not motivated in the usual
way 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 not
threatened by determinism. He worries about determinism spasmodically
throughout part I, but it is hard to find a clear point of view in what

Julia Annas263
he says. He talks a lot about the laws of nature, but without any clear
idea of what they actually are. In section 3, he throws together as

examples of necessity the theory of evolution, psychological egoism

and twice two equalling four; and this shows great ignorance, and
perhaps lack of interest, in what a determinist might actually be trying
to say. But this confusion does not matter after all, since in section
8, the most sustained discussion, neither the Underground Man nor
his opponents are arguing about the truth of determinism; what they
are disputing is whether or not it matters if determinism is true. The
opponent is presented as thinking that it does not, even though he
recognizes that if all our desires are predictable, they become controllable.
He accepts this, holding that if our desires run on the rational lines
laid down, this will remove freedom only in the sense that there will
no 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 we
are 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's
hostile presentation it is not clear or well-thought out, and much more
work would have to be done to make it sound plausible. What the
Underground Man insists on, by contrast, is quite clear: the possibility
does make a difference, for if a man's desires can be predicted then
they can be manipulated, and if they can be manipulated then he
really is no more than a piano key, part of a mechanism constructed
independently of him.
Occasionally he does maintain that determinism is actually false; it
cannot be true because man does possess desires of such a type as
to frustrate any attempt to manipulate them. (This is a thesis which
is not necessarily tied to irrational actions, except insofar as he sometimes
suggests that the desires in question are those which bring about irrational
actions.) Sometimes, however, he seems to be less sure of this, recognizing
that the desires on which he lays so much weight are, after all, merely
desires which could in principle be just as predictable and manipulable
as any others. But the main point is sustained: it does matter whether
or not determinism is true, for, if so, it is no longer a man's own
desires that bring about his actions, and he loses responsibility for
them.7

A 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 sense

of the word, which are freely produced by the agent's desires and
thus genuinely originate from him, but which are nevertheless done
in 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

264Philosophy and Literature

to discredit the rational purposive paradigm of action, and with it the

agent-centered picture of practical reasoning. It is incidentally interesting, in view of the fact that Dostoyevsky conflates this notion with
that of motivation as egoistic, that the Underground Man never tries
to discredit this picture of action by claiming that purely non-egoistic
actions are possible. Moral philosophers have sometimes claimed that
the agent-centered model of practical reasoning is wrong because an
action can be performed purely out of duty, for example. But it never
occurs to Dostoyevsky to appeal either to deontological notions or to

altruism.

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, but
in how he says it.
II

Philosophers who take action to be in the last analysis purposive

and rational have trouble describing an agent's relation to an irrational
action, even if they accept the latter as a coherent possibility. Aristotle
is reduced to saying that the agent does not "choose" to do his akratic
act, because for Aristotle (more so than for us) choice is linked to

one'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 cannot
be seen as a product of his dispositionshis generosity or meanness,
greed or thrift, courage or cowardice. It lacks understandable connection
with his character. Most of our character-describing words applied to

agents (not just the traditional virtues and vices) have implications about
what the agent values and what choices he has made and will make.8
The Underground Man is like Aristotle's weak-willed man in whom
weakness of will has become a chronic condition. And one result at

any rate is inevitable: most character-describing words fail to get a

grip on him, and his moral character collapses in fragmentsor perhaps
we should rather say that no attempt to apply to him notions involved
in morally judging someone's character can begin to succeed. This
is not because he is morally revolutionary; indeed, morally he is extremely
conservative, holding without question, for example, the most conventional views about duels, slaps in the face, and so on. Rather, his moral
character fails to form a whole because his actions frequently, indeed
usually, cannot be described in terms of the rational paradigm; and
because we thus cannot ascertain his values at the time of action, we

cannot go on to characterize him in ways which carry implications

about his past and future actions and choices. His single most striking

Julia Annas265
feature is his inconsistency, which he describes (in the person of his
interlocutor) in section 1 1 . But this inconsistency does more than make
him difficult to pin down by a third party. The book is written in
the first person, and what is striking is the way that the writer displays
his lack of grip on his own character. Because he does not regard
his actions as reflecting and confirming considered value judgments,
he cannot see them in the light of any lasting disposition or trait of
character, and so he is left without any way of making connections
between his own actions. If two of his actions or utterances do not

cohere, he can regard one as tending to undermine the attitude expressed

by the other; but he can also think of himself as just having changed
his mind, and as being committed to both at different times. And
a great deal of the time either this is what he does, or both possibilities
are 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 makes
tends at once to provoke a contradiction. "Who can be vain of his

disease, still less swagger with it? Why do I say that, though? Everybody
does itwe all show off with our diseases." He develops arguments

and then breaks them off with dissatisfaction or a change of direction.

He is incapable of keeping up a sustained argument or discussionthe
relatively short part I is made up of eleven short sections, none very
long and some not very homogeneous internally. Most important of
all, he can sustain no confidence in what he says. He is always turning
aside to ask questions or to invent objections from himself or from
imaginary interlocutors. He knows that the interlocutors' parts are
written by himself too, and that there is no genuinely distinct point
of view, but he needs the fiction of an opponent of some kind, to
dramatize his own lack of internal continuity. As well as providing
constant questions and interpolated objections, the imaginary interlocutor enables the Underground Man to distance himself even from what
he puts down in an apparently straightforward way. He frequently
and obsessively insists that when we think he is serious he is in fact
joking, or that when we think he is joking he is serious. He constantly
offers advice, invites sympathy, wheedles and bullies. AU this has the
effect of reducing his commitment to any particular utterance. Several
times he takes back something he has just said, on the grounds that
he 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 said
as 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

266Philosophy and Literature

it can be seen the beginnings of that dialectical method of presenting

ideas which is the hallmark of Dostoyevsky the mature artist" (p. 17).
This is most misleading if it is thought to imply a conscious, anti-dogmatic
methodology in argument, or some progression by means of confronting
and 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 to
use the interlocutor to clarify the narrator's own position. Rather, the
interlocutor serves as a defense against maintaining and clarifying what
the narrator has to say. The various dramatic devices serve to dissociate
the Underground Man from what he says, and make it impossible
to predict from the present passage what will be said next, or to judge
what has been said in terms of what is being said now. We are never
allowed to feel that we know where we are in the argument. This
is both a philosophically interesting point and a dramatically effective
device on Dostoyevsky's part. Since the Underground Man lacks a
character that could group his actions in intelligible ways, it would
be dramatically inept to have him deliver a consistent and well-constructed argument about his own lack of continuous character. It is precisely
characteristic of him that we can understand what he says only in
short momentary bursts, and that these do not add up to anything
coherent.

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 myself
because I had something inside me, even if it was only laziness; I
should 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 be
very pleasant to hear that said of me. It would mean being positively
defined, it would mean that there was something that could be said

of 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 neutral
word kachestvo, but svoistvo, which literally means "something of one's
own." The Underground Man does not regret lacking certain characteristics as opposed to certain others; he regrets lacking the ability
to categorize himself in any way that makes long-term sense. When
he describes himself, it is usually in terms of abuse, but he cannot
even accuse himself of having a bad character. (The one good quality
he thinks of himself as having is cleverness, but this is not a quality
of character.) Hence, perhaps, the shrill tone of his abuse of himself
and others, and the reason why Notes from Underground contains such

an amazing number of variants on "disgusting," "revolting," "filth,"

"muck," and so on: his adverse comments are all based on disgust,

Julia Annas267
which is a strong feeling but a momentary one. It is called forth by
the appearances of things, the way they happen to strike one, as much
as by the way they really are. Correspondingly, the feeling of disgust
requires no reference to a trait or disposition of character; it is more
like a reaction which does not characterize the person in any lasting
way.

The very first section presents us with the dilemma of the Underground Man. AU the salient features are already there in its first five
paragraphs. The strangeness of the narrator strikes us from his very
first words, and it lies as much in the way he tells us about himself
as 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 adequate
English translation of the crucial word zloi, the adjective corresponding
to zlost'. "Angry," Coulson's word here, is too feeble in not suggesting
the 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 thinks
that 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. He
is superstitiously respectful of doctors, although he is well-educated
enough not to be. He refuses treatment out of spite (zlost'). So far
we find a man who acts even aggressively against his own interests
out of pure perversity. We may find it hard to see the point of acting
like 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. But
a new element is also introduced. Although his behavior was consistently
that of someone utterly zloi, we are told, it did not really answer to
the way he felt. He did not in fact care at all about the petitioners

he got so angry with. Then why behave so badly to them? That turns
out 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 turns

out that there is something permanently self-frustrating about zlost'.

But there is still no indication that it is not something which could
be a permanent state. Indeed, in describing the way in which he would
turn on himself for occasionally letting good will determine his behavior,
and act the way he felt instead of fighting it, he says that that was
always his wayobychai, what is usual or customary, suggesting that
there 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

268Philosophy and Literature

out of zlost'." Translators who use, as Coulson does, unrelated words

for these two occurrences surely destroy the sense of the sentence,

which brings out precisely the problem of characterizing oneself as

zloi. To be zloi, to act only or predominandy from zlost', is precisely
to lack character, so to characterize oneself as zloi will at once lead

to paradox. The zloi man is the man who acts out of perversity and
breaks all links between action and character. Thus he is unable even

to judge his own state coherently. Since he has no moral dispositions,

he cannot consistently judge himself or even his own lack of moral
dispositions. He has no ground on which to stand, as it were, either
to 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 validity
as the affirmation. The actions of the zloi man do not supportthey
even underminewhat he values; his actions are inconsistent with his

valued objectives, and so cannot stand in coherent relations with any

traits of character.9

This may seem to be overworking one particular sentence. But it

is hard to ignore Dostoyevsky's words here, for now the fragmentation
of the Underground Man's character is shown for the first time. He
becomes obsessive and loses control, bursting out to the imaginary
interlocutor, "You think that now I'm making some sort of confession
to 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 to
action, he cannot make himself into a zloi character, any more than

into any other sort of characterthe nature of zlost' precludes this.

One result is that no possible reflection on his own character can be

found satisfying. He consoles himself with the thought that to act

otherwise 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 even
trying to have a consistent character. He is condemned to the state

of permanent dissatisfaction and irritation that we find him displaying

all the time. The paradoxes developed in the rest of this paragraph
bring this out by their pointlessness: he thinks it desirable to lack
character, and has thought so for forty years ... he has the right
to say that old age is disgusting because he is going to be old himself. . . .

Pointless paradox occurs in the final paragraph too. St. Petersburg

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

Julia Annas269
weighed up objectively, for to do so would involve comparing his past
and future states. These considerations have force only according to
how he feels at the time. The section concludes with a final poindess
paradox: the respectable man wants most to talk about himself, so
he will too. The respectable (poryadochniy) man is the man whose life
displays poryadok, order and organization; exactly the opposite of the
Underground Man. The writer cannot even talk about himself without

doing 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 happens
to a man's character when his actions cease to be understandable in

terms of reason and purpose and he becomes an irrational agent. We

see the narrator's perversity, his zlost', and while we understand how
he can commit irrational actions we also see how action becomes

dissociated from character, and the way in which character dissolves

and disappears. To lack character is not, of course, the same as to

lack a sense of one's identity as a person; this characterless man has

a very strong sense of himself as an individual, but he cannot judge
himself by more than momentary reactions, and so his opinions and
beliefs become fragmentary and unintegrated. Further, he is incapable

of a whole range of attitudes and opinions that can only be developed

in someone with character dispositions; he is incapable, for example,

of love, trust and hate (as opposed to resentment). His moral world
is composed of momentary attractions and repulsions, with the repulsions
predominating, since his insistence on acting against his conception
of 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 made
it sound as though it is or could be a distinct causal product. In fact
the relation between character and action is complex, and it would
be ill-advised to claim priority for either; they stand or fall together.
The paradigm of rational action has its problems, but one reason why

it remains entrenched at the basis of so much in philosophy is its

tight, though not altogether obvious, links with the notion of moral
character. If we cease to interpret what someone does in the light
of the rational paradigm, we lose all comprehension of his character.
Part I of Notes from Underground shows the horror of knowing that
this has happened when the person is oneself.
Ill

In part I we have had displayed to us the fragmentation of the

persistently irrational agent; we have seen his inability to continue in

270Philosophy and Literature

any line of thought, his insecurity, his inability to comprehend himself

as a continuous whole, his tendency to judge and act by the moment
rather than in terms of policy and character. All this has been shown
in and by the fragmentation of the form, the broken paragraphs,
inconsistencies, the need to question, argue, distance himself from what
he says. This effect has of course been noticed before, for example
by Mochulsky: "We perceive almost physiologically [sic] the under-

ground man's division through the unsightliness of his style, the

disharmony of syntax, the irritating brokenness of his speech. All
Dostoyevsky's heroes are characterized by their language, but the verbal
portrait of the man from underground is the most expressive" (p.
246). But what has not been sufficiently noticed is that there is a contrast

here with part II.10

In part II we are given a narrative, which proceeds chronologically

and with no peculiarities of form (except perhaps the excessively
discursive and rambling opening section in which the writer's situation
is established). It is true that the protagonist of the narrative, the "I"
that the writer is writing about, persistendy acts in an irrational way
and has a fragmentary and elusive character. But the "I" who is writing
shows none of this. He is the normal narrator, distanced from his

protagonist but maintaining a single view of him throughout. There

is no feeling of a man whose sense of continuity is precarious. There
is the feeling rather of a man of forty looking back on past events
and regarding himself with a morally established character. There is
the sentimental touch of his having recalled Liza's face for fifteen years;
there are even passages where he judges his earlier self in a morally
rather stringent manner: "What I can say for myself with certainty
is that although I committed this cruelty deliberately, it came from
my 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 way
superficially like the outbursts of part I. But the function of these
is rather different. In part II, section 1, for example, the narrator

first says that he is not trying to justify his "debauched" behavior,

then"But no! that was a lie! To justify myself was exactly what I
wanted to do. That observation is made for my own benefit, gentlemen.
I won't lie. I have given my word. . . ." He is catching himself out
in a lapse of from a general policy of truthfulnessprecisely what
does not happen in part I, where his self-accusations of lying are more
like a mere swing between two opinions. Compare this passage from
part I, section 11: "It would be better if I believed even a small part
of everything I have written here. I swear, gentlemen, I don't believe
a word, not one single little word, of all I have scribbled down! That

is, I do perhaps believe it, but at the same time, I don't know why,

Julia Annas271
I feel, or suspect, that I'm lying like a trooper." This is someone who
really does have difficulty in distinguishing between telling a lie and
being uncertain between two opinions because he is uncertain of his
commitment to either. By contrast, the narrator of part II is in no
such muddle, and is even fanatically truthful. When he comes to relate
his ugliest action, in section 11, he says, "I wish I could lie now and
write that I had done it without premeditation." But he does not in
fact lie; it matters to him to face the truth. His asides do not express
real shifts and are more like rhetorical flourishes. (The only exception
is perhaps the long excursus on Russian romantics in section 1, but
this 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 conclude

that Dostoyevsky has made his point, and there would be nothing more
to be gained by upsetting the narrative conventions in order to go
on and on, showing that the narrator is a fragmented personality.
If part II had continued in the style of part I, we would never be

able to identify the relevant events very firmly; they would be seen
in flashes and impressionistically, from different and perhaps contradictory points of view. Doing this could make a point, of course, but
not 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 end
of part I, where the transition to part II is made. The Underground
Man begins to talk about the need to be honest with oneself and the
terrible difficulty of facing one's own discreditable or ludicrous actions
and owning up to them. It is his proposal to be completely honest

with himself that formally leads him to write down the story " Propos

of the Sleet." Further, he puts great energy and effort into this attempt
to 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 troubles

him. But where does this mysterious determination to complete a project

come from, still more the energy to carry it through? The Underground
Man as we have seen him lacks the motivation to complete any project.
He veers, as he himself recognizes, between zlost' and inertia. To carry
out 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 any
sustained way. Further, why should he be troubled by the painful
memory? This presupposes a self with enough solidity to be troubled

by owning one particular action. Even before getting on to part II,

the reader is worried by the strange definiteness with which the writer
begins to shape up and tell the story. It is not that we are surprised
that he is interested in himself; but we are surprised that he proposes

to be interested in a sustained, purposive and even creative way.

272Philosophy and Literature

If part II is to follow part I coherently, there has to be some indication

of a change in the transitional passage. And there is, though a cryptic
and brief one. In part I, section 11, the Underground Man, after
extolling his own point of view, becomes ambivalent; he would not
choose to be the normal man, but he envies him. Then in a dramatic

turn-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 which
I am eager for, but which I shall never find. Devil take the underground! "
He at once undermines this forceful statement by disclaiming what
he has just written; but on the other hand it has been supported by
the curious section 10, in which some ambivalence appears about the
idealizing systems of thought about human nature which have been
so belabored up to now. The Palace of Crystal now appears not as
a distorted monstrosity, but as a possibly attractive ideal, disconcerting
only by its unattainability. And the Underground Man unexpectedly
not only turns on himself for hating it, but expresses regret for being
so constituted as to want to stick out his tongue at it. "I would let

my tongue be cut right out in mere gratitude if only things were so

arranged that I never wanted to put it out again . . . Why was I
made 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 nothing
but 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 the
theories derided so far, but all the same some ideal is in question.
He has spent most of part I discrediting the rational model of action
on the grounds that it falsifies human nature; in this sense he is a
realist. 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 darkest

parts 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 section
10 in which the alternative to the underground was specified in religious
terms. "It would have been better not to print the next to last chapter
at all, than to print it as it is, i.e., with sentences torn out and full
of self-contradictions. But what can be done? Those swines of censors

where I mocked at everything and sometimes blasphemed for form's

sakethat's let pass, but where from all this I deduced the need of
faith and Christthat 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 religious
ideas," (p. 12) says that "the Underground Man's cult of his own will
is as yet chaotic and lacking in direction" (p. 5). Boyce Gibson on

Julia Annas273
the other hand says that Dostoyevsky "prepares the way for the

reinstatement of religion on anti-rationalist terms."11 Mochulsky goes

much further: "The dream of a genuine earthly paradise is the central

idea 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 by
a 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.'"" 12

Clearly, these are very different interpretations of the work, and

it remains an open question how positive an ideal the Underground
Man was to have recognized at the end of part I. The present problem
is affected by it insofar as it emphasizes the difference in coherence
between the narrator of part I and that of part II. The narrator of
part II is of course far from being a Christian, although he does
sometimes take on a rather pious tone in commenting on his earlier
self's "debaucheries" and "crimes." But he has at least developed to
a point from which he can and does moralize about his earlier self.

The story presents the way in which his present self faces and comes
to terms with his past action. He accepts that he is capable of the

meanest and most unforgivable actions. For Dostoyevsky this puts

him in a state where he might possibly turn to Christ. Any morality

or religion based on any appeal to the agent's self-interest, however
refined, has been ruled out; a religious appeal of an a-rational kind
which operates through abnegation of the self is the only appeal possible
for 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 recognize
justice 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 motivated

by 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 confusion
and raggedness left by the censor's pencil in part I, section 10 point
up the problematic way in which the writer of part I becomes the
writer 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 is
written, a philosophical point basic to Dostoyevsky's design, then it
is 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

274Philosophy and Literature

been in connection with existentialism. This is certainly true of the

article on Dostoyevsky by Edward Wasiolek in The Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, for example. Dostoyevsky is "considered a forerunner of
existentialist thought." "The underground man is Dostoyevsky's totally
free man. He carries revolt against limitation to its extreme and raises
it to a philosophical principle. Like the existentialists who were to follow

three-quarters of a century later, he is en marge; he is in revolt not

only against society, but also against himself, not once, not only today
or tomorrow, but eternally." It may seem unusual to look to Dostoyevsky
for 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 seeing
how it allows fruitful readings within quite different traditions. I am
not suggesting that my interpretation of Notes from Underground is more
justified or privileged than the more customary ones. Arguably, it is
much further from any explicit thoughts that Dostoyevsky himself may
have had about the book as he wrote it by his wife's deathbed. But

I do think that it is legitimate to see the work as in fact illustrating

a deep and troubling problem at the heart of what is at present the
most prominent and plausible philosophical theory of action.
St. Hugh's College
Oxford University

1 . For the relations of the books, see: Leonid Grossman, Dostoyevsky: a biography, translated
by 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 Michael
A. Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 251.

2.Cf. Mochulsky: "The dreamer-romantic of the forties has in the sixties been transformed into a cynic-paradoxalist. . . . The underground man's social and historical
condition 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 of
the 'Petersburg period' of Russian history, poisoned by European culture, divorced from
the soil and the people, an historical type who 'not only can, but also must exist in
our society'" (pp. 244-5). Grossman: "It is as if he was trying to pay back the spiritual
leaders of his youth for the terrible ordeals of his years as a convict" (p. 310). Some
of the characteristics of the ineffectual dreamer-idealist foreshadow the hostile portrait
of Stepan Verkhovensky in The Devils.
3.More accurately we should call him the Underfloor Man. Podpol'ye means "under
the floor," and iz podpol'ya has suggestions of something nasty creeping out from under
the floorboards, rather then the more heroic overtones acquired by the English "underground."
4.To simplify rather crudely: I am thinking of moral theories of a roughly "Aristotelian"

Julia Annas275
kind, which, while not egoistic, nonetheless assume that morality is an agent-centered

affair, that it is part and parcel of the practical reasoning the agent carries on in his
situation in the world. Nothing said here touches moral theories of a radically different
type, e.g. Kantian theories.
5.The most important here are: "Actions, Reasons and Causes," Journal of Philosophy
1963, 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 Kegan
Paul, 1973), pp. 139-156; "Agency" in Robert Binkley, Richard Bronaugh, and Antonio
Marras, 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 Thomas
Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).
7.In what Dostoyevsky says about will we do find incoherent exaggeration, as that

the individual's will is opposed not merely to philosophical and scientific theories but
to mathematical necessity; it is an exercise of the individual's will to want two and
two to equal five. This confusion is a consequence of Dostoyevsky's hasty and uncritical
lumping-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 and
action. See Myles Burnyeat, "Virtues in Action," in Gregory Vlastos, ed., The Philosophy
of 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 traits
of character to oneself; see Margaret Gilbert, "Vices and Self-Knowledge," Journal of
Philosophy 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 ideas
into 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 why
Dostoyevsky "never reestablished the original text in subsequent editions. Dostoyevsky's
'philosophy of tragedy' has remained without its mystical consummation" (p. 257). This
fact remains "strange"surely an inadequate account if the censored ideas were in
fact the whole point of the work.