Rousseau vs. Schopenhauer

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Guy de Maupassant's "Une Partie de Campagne" (A Day in the Country) and Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" represent a confrontation between two prominent philosophers, Jean-Jacque Rousseau and Arthur Schopenhauer, whose ideas about the negative influence of society upon man and the power of desire are visible in both works. The author points out that, in "Notes from Underground", the protagonist Underground Man leans heavily on Schopenhauer to refute the idealistic and romantic notions of the innate goodness of Western enlightenment philosophy that had been imported to the tsarist Russia of his day. The paper relates that, compared to de Maupassant's Rousseauian allegory, the first part of "Notes from Underground" is a pessimistic treatise on the potential of reason to construct a Utopia.

From the Paper:

"The Underground Man criticizes the idealists who claim that human beings only do bad things because they don't realize that it is always in their best interests to do the Good. According to them, if human beings were enlightened as to their best interests and they used their reason, they would always do well. On the other hand, the Underground Man claims that throughout history, human beings have consistently done things that were obviously not in their best interests. There must be some other interest that is even more advantageous than peace and prosperity."

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