History from the Underground: Dostoevsky on Freedom and Necessity

To what extent are humans free in a world that is historically given to them? Heidegger made famous the idea that we are “thrown” into the world, and a whole branch of philosophy, namely hermeneutics, has started from the proposition that we are embedded creatures forever interpreting the world. Heidegger’s student Hans-Georg Gadamer suggested that we come “too late” to this act of interpretation. The world that we interpret is already there before us before we have had a chance to make meaning of it. Those who have witnessed the birth of a child should appreciate the notion of the givenness of the world. Wrenched from our mother’s womb, we have no say as to the conditions we inherit and start out our lives in.

Anthropologists tend to weigh this tension through the concepts of agency and structure. In my field, the philosophy of history, the concepts of freedom and necessity have provided a balance sheet for registering the degree to which humans have both made history and been made by history. In particular, in the years following the Second World War, a dispute erupted over the applicability of “covering laws” in historical explanation. The philosopher of science Carl Hempel made of history what natural scientists make of the natural world: something regulated by laws, the knowledge of which enables predictions to be made. A wave of humanistically inclined philosophers of history intervened to insist that the human behaviour studied by historians is not subsumable to covering laws and is, rather, fundamentally context-specific, that is, rooted in time and place. In issuing this appeal, these philosophers of history defended a tradition of humanistic inquiry stretching back to the early eighteenth century and the idea espoused by Giambattista Vico that history involves reconstructing purposive human action from the “inside,” when natural scientists, in Vico’s view, explain natural occurrences from the “outside.” Ever since, a principle of “methodological individuality” has by and large ensured that history remains the study of self-governing individuals cutting paths through morasses of necessity.

Dostoevsky’s novels are considered “existentialist” because of the genius they display in situating individuals in the midst of the tension between freedom and necessity. Whereas Tolstoy is known for the authorial authority that he commands over his characters, taking his readers through a story whose outcomes the reader senses are already complete, Dostoevsky thrusts his characters within the open-ended “crisis time” of having to think and act in the here and now. They confront at every moment the responsibility of having to decide on this course of action rather than that course of action. Time for them is the compression of the past, present and future in the present moments that Dostoevsky penetrates with such psychological mastery. The effect on the reader is an intensity of feeling for the urgency of action. With the compression of time comes a sense that history is at hand in every present moment of seeming open-endedness.

Dostoevsky’s 1848 novella White Nights was a TikTok or rather “BookTok” sensation in 2024, Penguin’s fourth best-selling classic, its short length and telling of a failed romance played out mostly in the protagonist’s own head apparently resonating with young readers. The theme of isolation runs through the novella as it does existentialist literature en bloc, from Kafka’s Samsa the salesman turned giant insect alienated from society to Camus’ Meursault the detached knifeman attributing murder to the sun in his eyes. On the question with which I opened—to what extent are humans free in a world that is historically given to them—these fictional texts of the existentialist canon tend to imply that we are mostly helpless in the face of the impersonal forces of history. The art of living existentially thus consists in adopting a kind of wry irony as to the absurdity of what is in fact enacted in the world in spite of our intentions.

Determinism is the philosophical doctrine that all events, including human actions, are causally inevitable. What happens “had to happen,” and so the sensible course of action, according to the determinist, is to set about discovering the natural laws that govern the workings of the universe. When Hempel in the mid-twentieth century argued that explanations of human action in the past conform to covering or general laws, he caused offence among humanists chiefly because he impugned the liberal political philosophy behind their historical methodology. For, if human actions conform to laws that can be determined in advance, then humans cannot truly be said to be free, their futures not constructible by purposive action in the present. In light of the totalitarianisms of the previous decades, defending a view of human action as a fundamentally open-ended activity was paramount to liberal-minded and humanistically inclined historians and philosophers of history.

More highly esteemed than last year’s social media sensation, Dostoevsky’s 1864 Notes from Underground is commonly characterized as an assault on the kind of determinism that liberals have fought against. Man, says the Underground Man, is nothing but “a sort of piano key or sprig of an organ” who cannot but obey the laws of nature. “These laws of nature need only be discovered,” he gibes, “and then man will no longer be answerable for his actions, and his life will become extremely easy.”1placeholder It is no coincidence that with the growth of scientific knowledge in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came the highpoint in deterministic thinking. Those ironclad “Laws of Nature,” if only they be fully discovered, will bestow to human affairs the level of mastery that humans had come to exercise over the natural world. Insofar as the Underground Man derides this assumption, he also repudiates the dominant ideologies of nineteenth-century Europe: utilitarianism, scientism, liberal progressivism, communistic utopianism, and above all the prestige of rationality.

The Underground Man is particularly affronted by the idea that man is rational and that history, in the Hegelian manner, is the story of man’s ever-increasing rationality. The human sciences that were on the rise in the nineteenth century, professionalizing and codifying their norms and methodological procedures, were unable to account for our rationality because they were unable to account for our desires. “Only answer me,” the Underground Man implores the “gentlemen” who are presumably the followers of Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s utilitarian form of “rational egoism” or “enlightened self-interest”: “has man’s profit been calculated quite correctly? Isn’t there something that not only has not been but cannot be fitted into any classification?”2placeholder The problem is, we have too many “various little itches,” as Dostoevsky describes them, that are in conflict with our apparent interests. We routinely set out to annihilate ourselves, go to war, martyr ourselves, climb dangerous mountains, engage in ruinous affairs. For Dostoevsky, freedom is mischievous and fraught, partly because it involves the freedom to abuse it.

History occupies a dual status in Notes from Underground fairly typical of the nineteenth century. First, there is the historicism deployed by the Underground Man to rebuke the idea that conflict between nations decreases the more civilization increases. “Why, look around you, blood is flowing in the rivers.”3placeholder The universalism of the Enlightenment had been hijacked by Napoleon’s rampaging French nationalism; the “everlasting union” in North America was at war with itself; Schleswig- Holstein was again the scene of Prussian hostility. A conventional historicism born of the ambition to recount the past “as it actually was” (when philosophy to historicists had wrongly come to impose an artificial or outside goal on history), served the Underground Man to exemplify the stupidities of man and his view that we generally do not pursue courses of actions that are in our best interests.

A sense of history’s movement or directionality is the second concept of history at play in the book. Notes from Underground belongs to a great current of nineteenth-century thought that rejected the a priori imposition of the meaning of history and the newly created social sciences concerned with classifying the law-like structures within which humans operate. The first concept of history allows the Underground Man to expose the reality of human irrationality, but it is the second concept of history, or rather speculative philosophy of history, that is at the center of his fulminations.

We have reason to believe that Dostoevsky had the necessary intellectual resources to formulate these two conceptions of history. His American biographer Joseph Frank tells us that in 1854 he wrote to his brother in Saint Petersburg entreating him to send Kant, Vico, Ranke and the Church Fathers, and “to slip Hegel in without fail, especially Hegel’s History of Philosophy. My entire future is tied up with that.”4placeholder In terms of a reading list on the philosophy of history, Dostoevsky could not have requested names more important than Vico, Ranke and Herder. Vico, together with his German interpreter Herder, placed history on a philosophical footing that later, in Dostoevsky’s time, allowed Ranke and the German historicists to establish history as a “scientific” academic discipline, one whose practitioners relied on an empathy-dependent hermeneutics of recovery, where the aim is to reconstruct the thinking behind actions and events.

Important to note is that this hugely influential historicism (it went on to provide the basis of academic historical practice worldwide) was a direct response to Hegel and his armchair variety of speculative philosophy of history—the conception of history so reviled by the Underground Man. When Ranke famously appealed for historians to enter the archive to reconstruct the past “as it actually was,” he was doing so precisely because Hegel had come to exercise far too powerful an influence in promoting the idea that the “cunning of reason” moves history in ways rendering human action and initiative ineffectual. Hegel recognized that, down at the level of “particulars,” history is an awful mess, even what he calls a slaughterhouse. However, viewed with a suitably philosophical attitude, he believed that world history reveals itself as moving with purpose toward the realization and fulfilment of a universal idea of freedom. “Reason cannot stop to consider the injuries sustained by single individuals,” Hegel wrote, “for particular ends are submerged in the universal end.”5placeholder In this sense, history is not only rational but providential. It is programmed to move toward its goal.

Without doubt, the Underground Man is a hopelessly paradoxical figure. No sooner do we characterize his outbursts as an assault against a broadly Hegelian conception of history than we are forced to acknowledge his positive statements regarding the limitations imposed on individuals by what is historically pregiven. “I believe this,” he asserts: “the whole human enterprise seems indeed to consist in man’s proving to himself at every moment that he is a man and not a sprig!”6placeholder When the prostitute Liza responds to his monologue by observing that he sounds like a book, she is implying that he lacks authenticity, that he fails to cultivate an end not already foreshadowed by his words. He is, in other words, an utterly determined character, as completed a product as the material entity that is a book with words proceeding from beginning to end. The Underground Man senses this narrative closure, hence the excitement he experiences momentarily when, at some point in his monologue, he observes himself depart from “cold reasoning” and sees a “goal” of his own making open up before him. He is consistent throughout that human actions are goal-directed; the question is whether these goals are the result of personal improvisation or impersonal, historical necessity.

The tragedy of the Underground Man, the reason why he embodies the existential hopelessness of asserting freedom over necessity, consists in the fact that every personally construed goal is swiftly reappropriated by the impersonal forces of history. His is no repudiation of determinism and liberal-minded defence of the humanistically oriented historical, political and human agent, exercising his free will among a range of possible alternatives. The Underground Man’s, and possibly Dostoevsky’s, scorn for rationalism would not allow him that. The future is not open to the range of possibilities that liberals might liked to have imagined. No, Notes from Underground is less an attack on determinism than an avowal that we are ultimately unable to refuse history. “Go on,” the Underground Man urges at the end, “try giving us more independence…unbind the hands of any one of us, broaden our range of activity, relax the tutelage, and we…but I assure you: we will immediately beg to be taken back under tutelage.”7placeholder Humans have to live by something, and the nature of this something to live by is a topic that Dostoevsky’s later works would explore.