Three Views of the Human Being and Modernity — Part 1: Dostoevsky, Baudelaire and Chernyshevsky

Drawing on Marshall Berman, the seminar uses a three-way comparison to clarify different forms of modernity. First comes Baudelaire’s Paris: a city transformed by Haussmann’s boulevards, crowds, and new public spaces into a scene of accelerated and contradictory experience. The Baudelairian flâneur moves through the crowd, drawing energy from anonymity and diversity while encountering modern life as beautiful, violent, and unstable. Bourgeois order seeks to make the city governable, yet the same open streets can enable gathering, political passion, and transformation.

Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg has another atmosphere. Raskolnikov and the Underground Man also move through the modern city, but the street produces less poetic liberation than isolation, suspicion, guilt, and estrangement. Berman uses the contrast to differentiate a more open, revolutionary Western modernity from a more constrained Russian one. The seminar finds this comparison illuminating but resists reducing the difference to geography. The writers also differ in what they think the new world does to human beings.

Chernyshevsky occupies a third position. In What Is to Be Done?, the future can be improved through reason, organization, and material progress. The Crystal Palace becomes a symbol of a world in which needs are understood and conflict can be managed through rational planning. The seminar suggests that this confidence appears in both collectivist projects and certain extreme accounts of individual rationalism: each assumes that if people and society are understood correctly enough, a coherent programme for happiness can be constructed.

Notes from Underground is Dostoevsky’s fierce response to this dream. The Underground Man will act against his own interest simply to prove that a human being is not a piano key or component of a machine. If a Crystal Palace could satisfy every need and calculate correct behaviour in advance, someone might smash its windows merely to preserve the right to choose. Pain and disorder are not thereby declared good. The point is that the possibility of choosing badly is inseparable from freedom, and eliminating the danger of freedom may eliminate individuality itself.

The comparison therefore presents modernity as a field of competing projects rather than a single programme. Baudelaire finds poetic creation within its movement and contradiction; Chernyshevsky wants to turn it into rational design for a better life; Dostoevsky asks what happens to soul and freedom when reason imagines it can calculate everything. The seminar is not a rejection of rationality. It warns against converting reason into a total system that treats the unpredictable dimensions of human life as errors to be engineered away.