This week the Deakin Philosophical Society, continuing with the great books, will discuss two brief chapters from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (VII and VIII of Part I – Underground, for those with the full text). A copy of the text is available here. A Libriox audiobook version is also available.

There are two main questions with which the chapters deal. First the underground man asks if we only do wrong because we are unaware of our true interests. Then: If through the application of reason we become aware of our true interests, won’t we simply act contrary to those interests out of boredom or to assert that reason is not all that we are? Like Cleopatra, won’t we stick gold pins into our slave-girl’s breast just to hear her scream?

It is interesting to note that Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground partly as a review of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done? Last week Beckett told us that there is nothing to be done. This week Dostevsky tells us that maybe there is something to be done after all, but not the something that rational egoists (Chernyshevsky) and utilitarians would have us do.

Dylan Nickelson,
President, Deakin Philosophical Society.