Stig Jang's List: Notes from the underground

• hree and four deal with suffering and the enjoyment of suffering;
• War is described as people's rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines human history.
• narrator's desire for pain and paranoia is exemplified by his liver pain and toothache.
• human beings only moan about pain in order to spread their suffering to others.
• The main issue for the Underground Man is that he has reached a point of ennui^[1] and inactivity^[2
• The Underground man as conscious of his problems, feels the desire for revenge, but he does not find it virtuous; this incongruity leads to spite and spite towards the act itself with its concomitant circumstances
• The first part also gives a harsh criticism of determinism and intellectual attempts at dictating human action and behavior by logic.
• one cannot avoid the simple fact that anyone at any time can decide to act in a way which might not be considered good, and some will do so simply to validate their existence and to protest and confirm that they exist as individuals
• the good here he's ridiculing is enlightened self interest (egoism, selfishness).
• Rebellion in the face of the disfunction, disorder of adult experience, that one inherits under the understanding of tradition and society.
• As this type of rebellion is used by adolescents to validate their own existence, uniqueness and independence
• Near the end of his painful rage he wells up in tears after saying that he was only seeking to have power over her and a desire to humiliate her.
• He recalls this moment as making him unhappy whenever he thinks of it, yet again proving the fact from the first section that his spite for society and his inability to act like it, makes him unable to act better than it.
• His claim that human needs can never be satisfied even through technological progress, also goes against Marxist belief
• The novel has also been cited by Paul Schrader as an influence when he wrote the screenplay for the film Taxi Driver, which has existential themes.

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• Determinism is the view that every event, including human cognition, behavior, decision, and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.^[
• Determinism necessarily entails that humanity or individual humans may not change the course of the future and its events (a position known as fatalism
• mechanistic determinism would assume that every event has an unbroken chain of prior occurrences, but a selectionistic or probabilistic model does not
• In its central part, determinism is the theory that our choices and decisions and what gives rise to them are effects
• Logical determinism is the notion that all propositions, whether about the past, present or future, are either true or false. The problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of how choices can be free, given that what one does in the future is already determined as true or false in the present. This is referred to as the problem of future contingents.
• Additionally, there is environmental determinism, also known as climatic or geographical determinism which holds the view that the physical environment, rather than social conditions, determines culture. Those who believe this view say that humans are strictly defined by stimulus-response (environment-behavior) and cannot deviate. Key proponents of this notion have included Ellen Churchill Semple, Ellsworth Huntington, Thomas Griffith Taylor and possibly Jared Diamond, although his status as an environmental determinist is debated.^[9]

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• The originally French word Ennui, means general lack of interest, boredom or depression. It may also refer to oppressive boredom. It refers to a state of being rather than a passing mood as is generally the case with "boredom".