Notes from Underground Essay -- Book Review, Dostoyevsky

One word that has come to represent the mid-18th coulomb Enlightenment movement is Reason. The French philosophes believed that understanding could provide critical, informed, scientific solutions to social issues and problems, and essentially improve the military personnel condition. Russian author Fyodor Dostoevskys Notes from Underground is one of the most famous anti-Enlightenment apologues for its rejection of these very notions. Through this novel he showed what he believed were gaps in the idea that the mind could be unloadd from ignorance through the application of reason, and the rejection of the idea that hu military man could achieve a utopian macrocosm as a result.The story revolves around the thoughts and rants of an unnamed character that we shall refer to as The Underground Man. In Dostoevskys time, the term man or men referred to all humankind, and the Underground Man seems symbolic of what could happen to mankind should the endless application of reason take o ver. Dostoevsky seems to be making the bidding that rationality is indeed useful for analyzing situations but is ultimately damaging to the self if focused on constantly. Reason does not, as m any(prenominal) Enlightenment thinkers believed, free man but instead takes something away from the essential human existence. It reduces us to something that potful be scientifically explained, forcing us to lose a central piece of what makes us human in the process All human actions will then, of course, be classified according to these laws mathematically, like a logarithm table, up to 108,000 and entered in a special almanacwith such clearcutness that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world (24). The Underground Man suggests that the one most plus advant... .... This complexity causes him to doubt every single decision and make any type of action impossible, which is why he believes only narrow-minded community who are not able to question their actions are the only ones who can act with confidence. Taking all this into consideration, it seems impossible that excessive reason and awareness will eventually lead to progress it will do in force(p) the opposite, when using the Underground Man as an example. One can kick downstairs much anecdotal support in Notes from Underground that this is an anti-Enlightenment novel out-of-the-way(prenominal) too much to be included in this short take hold review. Even from the few examples listed here and through the Underground Mans discourse throughout, it is easy to see the explicit rejection of the Enlightenment notion that reason would free mans mind of ignorance and set humankind on a path to a utopian existence.