Notes from Underground — Part I Underground — Chapter IX

The narrator, still addressing his imagined “gentlemen,” questions whether reforming human will to match reason and science is either possible or desirable. He concedes humanity’s creative drive to make roads but insists people often veer off course because the making, not the destination, is what they crave.

Extending this, he argues humans love destruction and chaos because they fear attaining their goals; the edifice is loved from afar, not inhabited. Unlike ants and their eternal ant-heap, humans are frivolous and prefer the process of becoming to the stasis of completion, which he equates with death.

He targets “twice two makes four” as an insolent, coercive certainty, suggesting that its opposite—“twice two makes five”—can be charming because it preserves freedom. He questions the assumption that only welfare is advantageous, asserting people sometimes passionately choose suffering, smashing, and negation to assert will.

Finally, he claims suffering is the origin of consciousness and more valuable than sterile certainties. Consciousness, though a misfortune, is prized over the finality of reason’s formulas; even self-flogging is preferable to inert contemplation. Thus he rejects the Crystal Palace ideal and defends caprice and the right to act against reason as fundamentally human.