Developments: the underground men
An essay on what can exist from numbing intellectuality to aggressive action as closed in on itself as possible
“No, because I have no fear to feed you with. No fear to give you and I will prove it. Sing for me like you once did as the river caught your tongue. […] You’re not here. You are not here. I have no fear for you and I have no guilt for you. I did as others did and as others had me do, and we are all owned, and we have all owned others… so don’t you dare stand there and judge me. Today, I have work to do.”
Taboo, James Keziah Delaney — Season 1, Episode 1
The reflection I bring comes from Dostoévski’s Notes from underground. I start with a central character, the underground man, and move on to James Keziah Delaney, a fictional character and central to the television series Taboo.
The underground man gives us his nauseating logic in which, in the end, men of action are separated from intellectual men. Mikhailovitch describes, with absurd effectiveness, the details of the mind of a man who is too intellectual and with analytical reasoning too well developed and practiced; However, along with these few qualities, and through them, we are presented with a man of vile character, and his sincerity about what he thinks about himself as an individual gives us the impression of being bigger and opened just because he is logically arranged, once that the most latent truth is denied by him in most of history and that is the scope of his bestial ego disguised by his intellectual tenor and exacerbated false modesty.
He is a man who admits being sick and with great anger, but he never gets treatment and he doesn’t even want to find ways to channel his anger. I’m not interested in dealing, here, with the sexual aspects of both, but aggression, violence and their channels are part of a great interest to me. I will talk about some ways they treat women, but I will not focus on their sexual lives, but on the affective aspects of the established contacts.
The underground man is constantly ecstatic in his intellectual enjoyment and believes that all intellectual men must suffer from this evil, for the man of action, in order to act, must abandon the torrent of questions, answers and conclusions engendered in each other and pulled by the existence of one reasoning after another when one ignores the existence of self-evident truths and axiomatic structures — the latter, in a more Aristotelian character. This man feels little, small and is aware of his social nullity, both positively and negatively.
He is unable to arouse happiness in anyone and he is also unable to provide the taste of hatred in any individual. However, his analysis in this regard is focused on a universe with a very specific social and gender profile; when he speaks of his null impact in relation to other individuals, these other individuals are all men and of a social class similar to his or higher than his. In fact, these men do not see him, and his failed attempts to exert action on them do not affect them at all.
This man, affected by not affecting, instinctively guided by his cowardice and comfort, turns to the most primitive way out to channel his hurt and anger: to reach a more fragile being and reaffirm illusions of authority and accomplishment. The closest and most fragile entities are configured as his servant, with whom there is a more pulverized, diluted channeling, and Liza, the central female character, with whom the channeling is direct and gains more evident materiality through speech, words about the derogatory nature of the female figure and about how she is exercising her sexuality, which is configured as one of the oldest aggressions in human history, derived from the primary physical traumas of our interaction and with individual and collective psychological consequences that can generate locks throughout the psychosocial development of a nation, murder and rape.
His intellectual and analytical capacities do nothing but the exercise of nihilism and the metaphysical unfolding of part of this nihilistic process, or the aura generated from unleashed elements gives rise to the distribution of feelings of a sadness, melancholic and derogatory nature, including for himself. The only clarity that exists in him is in the process of developing his logical method of deductions, even if it leads him to the conclusion of convenient and overly relativized truths, which, in turn, lead him to more synthesized and collectively recognized attitudes, as clichés of a man of undeveloped reasoning, less noble ideals and a character woven with pillars of cowardice.
Between paralysis and acting, the underground man does not develop, in his conclusions or pseudo-projects, the roles of the variable time and of the topics fluidity and plurality in relation to the concepts of action and aggressiveness. When reflecting on this cyclical mode of poisoning, paralysis and deception of the underground man, a male figure came to my mind, who are also very interesting in his intellectual processes along with the psychosocial developments inherent to the materialization of his intentions in actions. His name is James Delaney.
James condenses, in itself, a fusion — with wide poetic license — of Charles Marlow and Mr. Kurtz — Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — and it sounds like an intrinsically contradictory protest against its own image and origin, the English society of the 18th-19th century, a society with many underground men, which, in addition to the mental dispositions of our allegorical underground, held great economic and political power, which makes the potential for devastation even greater.
He returns from the African Continent to London in 1814. To the African Continent he went, about a decade earlier, as an agent of oppression, degradation and colonization, as a profound connoisseur and applicator of action of an evil, nefarious character, like he himself admits several times, “- The Leviathan of the seas, is it? The terrible shadow. The beast with a million eyes and a million ears. Conquest. Rape. Plunder. I studied your methods in your school. And I do know the evil that you do because I was once part of it”.
James merged the man of action with the man of intellect. He understood that it is necessary to establish a cycle of continuous fluidity between intellectual activity and action and also that they are activities that, when ordered in a feedback system and allowed to function in this way for as long as possible, the variable experience arises in the process and it becomes the element that, when analyzed, allows the improvement of the process while it repeats itself and generates more plural inputs of experience to be analyzed and transformed into more diversified bases for taking action.
Regarding experience itself, when analyzed coldly and unrelated to anything ethically or morally, James had the privilege of moving from the vilest act to the planning of actions of the noblest ideals and, thus, life made it possible by beating the hammer of injustice in the echo of the chaos that rules the world; he is an unpunished man, there is no doubt about that and therein lies his concrete connection with the so-called underground men: as said, being an agent of the imposed degradation of the proper exercise of nihilism and the metaphysical unfolding that this process can entail. James has much of the Übermensch developed in Raskolnikov and he also believes he deserves a judgment reserved for the extraordinary.
While still at the African Continent, James learned to communicate through the Twi language and also dedicated himself to the studies of occultism and magic of african origins. The exercise of this occultism and its gnostic character of access to the unconscious allowed James an absurdly plural transit of intellectual and emotional ways of conceiving information and its uses.
The most evident development of James’ disassociation with the underground man intrinsic to his formation as an individual is the channeling of his aggressiveness. James’ aggressiveness no longer serves barbarism closed in on itself, but the direct elimination of those who measure forces with him on the way to achieving his objective. And as for his purpose, Delaney separated everything that was inside him, what was rotten from what could bear fruit: he would return to London, he had backlogs of underground men to settle, and then he would leave for Nootka Sound to live the extension of her mother’s existence. With him, he would take the men and women of action who would help him circumvent the demands of the East India Company and also of the Americans.
James defends the memory of his mother and always denounces the oppression and commodification of her by his father, although we do not know the exact character of the oppression he exerted over other women and if he actually exercised it. This ode to the dead mother seems like a mean of aspiration to be and exercise better and this content of evolution and spiritual salvation is materialized in the female figure both in Liza, in Mikhailovitch’s novel, and in Salish, James’ mother.
James’ exert also involves being in an uncivilized mental place of existence, in animalistic places, where the Freudian social discontents do not affect him and his thoughts can have instinctive conclusions and, his aggressiveness, an uncontained manifestation. His aggressiveness materializes from this mental place of pure bestiality and stands in contrast to the form of illusory civic politeness that circumvents the same aggressiveness conceived by the so-called civilized man.
This bestiality confers an immanence, a latency of the first characteristic of the violent act, which is to close in on itself, independent of the cadences of reasoning that generate it or that may arise from it. James, unlike the underground man, admits the plurality of man, the transit of the intellect to bestiality, the always uncomfortable antinomy related to the possibilities of capacity of the human race.
“A noite não é menos maravilhosa que o dia […] ela tem revelações que o dia ignora. A noite tem mais familiaridade com o mistério das origens do que o dia.” (BERDIAEFF, 1936, p. 91).
I could not find this phrase in english language but, in free translation, it would mean “The night is no less wonderful than the day […] it has revelations that the day ignores. The night is more familiar with the mystery of origins than the day”.
Although written in a different context, when discussing human aggressiveness, Berdiaeff’s statement regarding the spiritual sources of modern times is very valid and applicable. This configuration that creates discomfort when the relationship with bestiality is necessary is harmful and, specifically, Western and European, put in vogue since the complex legacy, already corrupted, that Catholicism postulated to Christianity and, later, since the rupture with nature instinctive from the overvaluation of the cartesian postulated by Descartes, with its edge established in the flourishing of North American Protestantism.
The purposeful ignorance of the tragic sphere is necessary for the fluidity of the aggressive act. On the other hand, this modern tragic sphere can be transmuted into many configurations. The Waitaká, coming from the Macro-Jê linguistic branch, consumed human flesh and this was included in their daily cultural diet. The other was not an equal; if it were, it would not be food. The depersonalization of those outside the band also interacts in a very interesting way with the ornamental aesthetics of the group, which contributed to the recognition as an individual being attributed only to their peers.
Takuan Soho, a Zen Buddhist monk of the Rinzai school, who practiced the consecration of his acts and cycles to the Zen path, included, in this path, from the cultivation of flowers to the sword technique and the mental preparation to use it, formulating — if not the first — one of the most consecrated associations of martiality with the spiritual path in Japan. He called it the Mushin doctrine.
In orthodox based nominologies, which assumes well-defined parameters of good and evil, there is still Fiódor Dostoiévski himself, who admits the plurality of the spirit by showing that the intrinsic truth of the human personality, the splendor of divine grace, can only be lived through the rapture and this is only possible if evil is recognized as inherent to the human being, who chooses to exercise it or not through the divine gift conceived by God, freedom.
I confess that it is still complex for me to send a text of this nature — essayistic and, in a certain extent, a philosophical exercise — to its final considerations. A summary proposal for this open-ended writing is that the variables time, fluidity and plurality, discussed above through their relationship with aggressiveness, can be inserted into the concepts of cycle and instinct of the micro and macro systems of human functioning. Even more intrinsic to humanity is instinctive intelligence. Apart from these aspects, there is only automation. And we know that automation is destined for servitude. From Thebes, the “Decipher me or I will devour you”, this statement so severe and, in an allegorical way, a question asked by the universe to the human being, is underestimated by the underground man when he believes that the “know thyself” is only a matter for the intellect.
