Of Mouse Men
What succeeds the pursuit of knowledge?
Key points I discuss below:
Dostoyevsky’s Underground Mouse Man as a mirror for modern consciousness
Structuralist thought and the paralysed mass consciousness.
The philosophers who shaped modern thought
Settling into the identity of a mouse man. Seeking the meaning in the pursuit itself.
The indecisive, hyperconscious mouse man
“Perhaps the normal man should be stupid, how do you know?” asks the unnamed narrator in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. He goes on to describe the antithesis of the normal man, “a man of acute consciousness, walking around in fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action.” Such a mouse man will “bury himself alive for grief in the underworld for forty years in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations.”
I felt personally attacked when I first read Dostoyevsky’s account of the Underground Man. Yet, I simultaneously felt a sense of relief at recognising a background state of being, which for my whole life has accompanied a sense of shame. Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man is no hero, but his polemic against the stifling industrial determinism of his time is nothing short of heroic.
Structuralism and the paralysed mass consciousness
Andy Grundberg, in his 1986 essay “The Crisis of the Real,” describes twentieth-century structuralism as “a historical process which gradually replaced our faith in the obvious with an equally compelling faith in what is not obvious - in what can be uncovered or discovered through analysis.”
We (and I must use the royal 'we') are so deeply conditioned in the Industrial Age to think in neat, structural terms that our default mode is to keep breaking down the world and putting it back together in our minds, in a quest to uncover the deeper meaning behind everything. Beware then the voracious mind, that in the absence of (real) problems and an abundance of information, desires to ingest as much as it can, force-feeding into its subconscious everything it chances upon and conflating its excretions with truth.
Post-war institutionalisation has seemingly transformed us into an unprecedented global civilisation, where each of us is now a cog in a larger machine so intricately linked that even the tiniest disturbance in a far corner of the world can threaten the delicate web of our local existence. It’s why we sentence our children to decades of education, instilling the belief that to ‘stay informed is to stay ahead’. And yet, by the time they attain the outward appearance of adulthood, they are trained in every aspect of their survival to become wholly dependent on the same parent institutions that administered everything for us in exchange for our compliance.
It’s the kind of education that curtails dissent. But the dissent lingers at the edges of our daily existence, lashing out at the car that cuts us off at the lights, at our spouse when the dishes aren’t stacked to our liking, or eventually at the migrant nurse wiping our bottoms because deep down we are angry at how quickly life has passed us by. How did we get here, we ask ourselves, and why didn’t we do something about it sooner? We didn’t, because we belonged to a slim majority of the suitably employed but deeply indebted, earning salaries that barely covered basic needs and a few luxuries per year. So, our minds compensated, tuning into fantasies of a rational, ordered reality, governed by agendas that could be understood by consuming more news, studying more trends, and analysing more data, all of which served to reaffirm our powerlessness, thus absolving us of the responsibility for the kind of self-realisation that shifts realities.
The Modellers of Reality
Philosophy has a lot to answer for. On one hand, it has given us frameworks of thought, with which we can challenge our life’s assumptions - and yet, these frameworks have overlaid themselves on our collective vision of reality, like an outdated Google Map. It doesn’t matter how many cars drive over a cliff; if the map says there’s no cliff there, our mechanised minds insist there must be no cliff, and those who see a cliff are clearly the problem.
The idea of the ‘Construct’ perhaps began with the Sophists (5th century BCE), who argued that one can only know their perceptions of the world, but not the world itself. Protagoras, the first professional philosopher, espoused the idea that there is no objective reality, and even if there were, the human mind would be unable to grasp it. Later, Plato, along with his teacher Socrates and his student Aristotle, challenged the Sophists by arguing that knowledge about the world was indeed possible. Although the senses were imperfect representations of reality, they could be enhanced through the application of philosophical ideas and mathematical language. Experience filtered through logic became the foundation by which abstract knowledge could be realised. Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) refined this approach by combining logic with (mostly Biblical) faith.
The Renaissance and the Reformation movements (14th to 17th centuries CE) challenged faith and the authority of the Catholic Church, reviving the scepticism of the early Greek Sophists. Against this background, Descartes (1598-1650) claimed his fame by demonstrating the clever and frankly audacious application of scepticism itself as a tool towards true knowledge. Everyone clapped - but only for a moment. While Descartes elevated deductive reasoning as the one true way to truth, his theories quickly found themselves in opposition to those of heavyweights John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-1776), in a battle between rationalism (reason) and empiricism (experience).
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) attempted a peaceful middle path, bringing to the fore the structuralism we know today, which accepts knowledge as phenomenological. Though we cannot know things-in-themselves (noumena), we can know of them through their underlying structure. Knowledge, therefore, became representational models of their environment, and questioning the ultimate reality behind the models was seen as meaningless.
And so, a long line of dudes gazing at their navels, poking, prodding, plucking out bits of fluff, and holding them up against the sunlight, asking ‘why dost thou thus?’, inspired the foundation of modern thought. This way of thinking has survived, despite genuine alternatives, most notably from feminist epistemology, which highlights knowledge driven by traditionally women’s roles - the holistic administration of the family, the creating, tending, caring, cleaning, cooking, and rearing - all the unpaid work in propping up society that often goes unnoticed by the men who build their toy models and then wonder why their models are incomplete.
I, Mouse Man
I’m a thirty-eight-year-old woman, and yet, admittedly, I relate to the pitiful mouse man. Mine’s a colonised mind, heavily conditioned by almost a decade of higher education and just as many years in the workforce as a chemical engineer, and yet, even in my comfortably structuralist discipline, I saw it all for what it was. That all the models in the world would not explain the kink in reality’s passage as it ceaselessly flows to, God knows, what end. And if God does exist, they might not care to know either. Mine’s no longer an existence for the thesis, but the antithesis. It’s not about acceptance, but a petulant denial of all that is.
Every endeavour in my existence was never about the endeavour itself or attaining its goal. Mine was to uncover the next kink in the road, and then the next, and then the one after that. As long as I live, it's this subsequent unknown that keeps me, like so many of the mouse men, scurrying onwards while gnawing on the scaffolding of existence.
And in this, I share the same sentiment as Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man:
“Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall is a wall…
But what do I care for the laws of nature, when I dislike those laws? Of course, I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it. But I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.”
References:
Notes from the Underground. Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Crisis of the Real, Writings on photography since 1974. Andy Grundberg
The Theory of Knowledge. Peter Cole.
Great writing, but walls aren't barriers if one can understand one's own existence correctly. I like it.