Fyodor Dostoevsky: Rejection Of Enlightenment In Notes From Underground

Rejection of Enlightenment in Notes from Underground

Russia was going through a period of transformation in the 19th century. The country’s serfs were emancipated and the Russian citizen’s way of thinking began to change. European enlightenment ideas were having a huge impact on Russia. Philosophers began to preach that application of math and science could fix all of the country’s problems. The idea was that teaching citizens to act according to reason could end a country’s struggles and create a utopian society where all people could live happily. Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of Notes from Underground, had a different idea. He strongly believed that no amount of logic predict man’s actions. He thought that man’s free will would always prevent any kind of earthly utopian society from existing. Through Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky makes a statement that man always has a choice to act against the scientific laws of nature. Notes from Underground includes Dostoevsky’s response to new enlightenment ideas. Numerous times it mocks the ideas of one philosopher in particular: Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky published a novel called What is to be Done? In this novel Chernyshevsky claims that man is born with reason and has a natural inclination to cooperate with other people. He states
The concept of this novel was that man would act according to what is in his best self-interest, which would be what is beneficial to society. Dostoevsky believed that this theory would make human behavior pre-determinate, which was not possible. Dostoevsky was a religious man. It was important to him that Russia pertained its original form of Christianity, in which man has the option to choose what his own self-interest is, for better or for worse (Gale 2010, Terrace, Notes from