Wednesday Post

Today in class we discussed the difference between the active man and the incapacitated man and how Dostoevsky’s novel related to previous lectures about The Stranger. I spoke about this earlier in a pervious blog post about Notes from the Underground. I said that I thought that a man of character is a limited man because he character traits cause him to behave in a certain man, while the characterless man is able to be whatever he wants whenever. The active man is limited because once he chooses a “character” trait or “path” then he has cut himself off from all other “path”. For example, if you are an honest man then you have cut yourself off from the advantages of being a scoundrel, and vice versa. A man (the characterless man) that sees both advantages of these character traits clearly and finds logic to both of them, renders himself inactivity because he is incapable of choosing between them.  According to Dostoevsky’s, the man of two extremes is the man of brilliance, but to the man of action, the man of two extremes is a man of insanity and laziness.  Much like in The Stanger lecture high intelligence can cause a person to be unable to function in normal society, like Dostoevsky’s character.