Notes from Underground and Sartre's Philosophy: Existentialism Arisen from Conscious Inertia Cade Aguda College

On the surface, it appears that the Underground Man is no more than Dostoevsky’s attempt of a fascinating and contradictory refutation of Chernyshevsky’s proposal of rational egoism as a solution to an emerging hyperconscious culture. Fascinating in the sense that the Underground Man refuses to subscribe to the construction of the idealistic ‘crystal palace’ through his innate belief in free will, and contradictory in the sense that his own state of hyperconsciousness pushes him deeply into a place of what he describes as ‘conscious inertia,’ or a state of inaction- which is ironically what rational egoism exists to solve. The Underground Man, if without realizing it, exhibits many of the same traits as an existentialist, including a belief in some kind of inherent radical subjectivity that is bound to humanity, and refuting the notion that human reason can be reduced to pure mathematics, as he thinks that humans derive their essence through their actions. Yet his existentialist nature is stymied as he recognizes the futility of his position: he is trapped in ‘conscious inertia,’ which leads to what philosophers such as Sartre coin ‘despair.’ This status, which remains with him throughout both parts of the novel, emerged as a...