“You think, gentlemen, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to
defend myself. I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined
to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering-that is,
incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead. But the
reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is
predestined to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the
“direct” practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the
road almost always lead somewhere, and that the destination it leads to is less
important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save
the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the
fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices. Man
likes to make roads and create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he
such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell me that! But on
that point I want to say a couple words myself. May it not be that he loves
chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does love it) because
he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice
from a distance, and by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps he
only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when
completed, for the use of les animaux domestiques- such as the ants, the sheep,
and so on. Now the ants have a different taste. They have marvelous edifice of
that pattern which endures forever-the ant heap.
With the ant-heap the respectable race of ants began and
with the ant-heap they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to
their perseverance and good sense. But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature,
and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of
it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty) perhaps the only goal on
earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining
in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must
always be expressed as a formula, as a positive as twice two makes four, and
such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but this is the beginning of death.
Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am
afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that mathematical
certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to
succeed, really to find it, he dreads I assure you. He feels that when he has
found it there will be nothing for him to look for. When workmen have finished
their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they
are taken to the police station- and there is no occupation for a week. But
where can man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when
he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not
like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a
comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all.
But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something
insufferable. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms
akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an
excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five
is sometimes a very charming thing too.”
-Dostoyevsky, Notes from the underground.
