Part 1, Chapter 8 — the piano key
He pushes the polemic further. Once science has reduced human will to a formula, man will go mad just to demonstrate he is not a piano key.
Summary
Ha, ha, ha! says the imagined reader, but in reality there is no choice — science has analysed man so far that we already know freedom of will is nothing but — . The Underground Man cuts in. He confesses, almost admiringly, that he had been about to make the same point himself. Yes: if there really is one day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices, then the man whose desires were predicted by it would have no more freedom than a piano key whose notes are decided by a hand outside it. Scientific demonstration of this kind is, the Underground Man concedes, a real possibility.
What he refuses is the conclusion the rationalist draws from it. The conclusion was supposed to be that man, once shown the formula, would settle gratefully inside it. The Underground Man predicts the opposite. The moment the formula is announced, he says, man will go mad on purpose. He will commit acts of pure perversity not despite the formula but because of it. He will choose, deliberately, the most disadvantageous course of action, simply to demonstrate that the formula is incomplete. He would rather be ill, ruined, in pain — anything — than be a being whose every motion has been already predicted.
The piano-key image is the chapter's gift to the rest of philosophy. It will recur in arguments about freedom for the next century and a half. The point is not that the Underground Man is right about the metaphysics; the point is that he is right about the psychology. There exists, in the human being, a refusal that cannot be calculated, because every attempt to calculate it triggers a fresh refusal. He has located the place where determinism breaks against the human will. He will live in it, because he has nowhere else to go.
- Part 1, Ch. 1The novel opens with the voice. A forty-year-old retired collegiate assessor, alone in a basement flat in Petersburg, addressing...
- Part 1, Ch. 2He could not even become an insect, he says. The reason is that consciousness past a certain degree is itself an illness — a real...
- Part 1, Ch. 3Two types of human being. The "direct" man — the bull — charges at the wrong done to him until a wall stops him. The man of acute...
- Part 1, Ch. 4An imagined reader laughs at him. Next he will be finding enjoyment in toothache! He answers seriously: yes, even in toothache...
- Part 1, Ch. 5A single long paragraph. Yes, he says, a man can take pleasure in his own degradation; he has done it for years, and is not, here...
- Part 1, Ch. 6If only he had done nothing simply out of laziness! "Sluggard" would have been a calling, a quality, a positive trait — something...
- Part 1, Ch. 7Who first announced, the Underground Man asks, that man does nasty things only because he doesn't know his own interests? The...
- Part 1, Ch. 8Science, his reader says, will eventually prove that free will is an illusion — that desire follows from antecedent causes the way...
- Part 1, Ch. 9The ant has finished his anthill, and that is why he is still an ant. Man — mercifully — prefers the process of building to the...
- Part 1, Ch. 10You believe in a Crystal Palace, he tells the reader — a palace at which one cannot put out one's tongue or make a long nose on...
- Part 1, Ch. 11Better to do nothing! Long live underground! He cries the conclusion — and, in the same chapter, takes it back. He does not...
- Part 2, Ch. 1Sixteen years earlier. The Underground Man is twenty-four, gloomy, ill-regulated, already as solitary as a savage. He hates the...
- Part 2, Ch. 2One night in a billiard room a tall officer in uniform brushes the Underground Man aside without noticing him. The Underground Man...
- Part 2, Ch. 3He drops in on Simonov to find two more schoolmates — Ferfichkin and Trudolyubov — planning a farewell dinner for Zverkov, a...
- Part 2, Ch. 4He arrives at the Hôtel de Paris an hour early; he has misread the time. The others appear at six, friendly to Zverkov and...
- Part 2, Ch. 5He runs out of the tavern. "So this is it, this is it at last — contact with real life," he mutters at himself, half-mocking, half...
- Part 2, Ch. 6Upstairs with Liza. He sleeps, wakes in the dark to a wheezing clock striking two, begins to talk. A long speech — half borrowed...
- Part 2, Ch. 7He walks home with her address in his pocket. By morning the sincere speech of the night before has become a trap. He has invited...
- Part 2, Ch. 8The long war with Apollon over a few rubles in unpaid wages reaches its loudest point. The Underground Man, in his dressing gown...
- Part 2, Ch. 9She comes in. He turns on her. The speech in the brothel was a lie, he tells her; he was amusing himself with her tears; she was a...
- Part 2, Ch. 10As she leaves he presses a crumpled five-rouble note into her hand, "from spite," to convert what she has just done into a...