New notes from underground∗

Like the Underground Notes of my forebear, Dostoevsky, ‘New Notes from Underground’ is written in two parts, of which only the first is published here. The second part, containing philosophic reflections, as well as a veridical account of the author's state of mind and life circumstances while dwelling underground in America, further establishes the fact that ‘New Notes’ departs significantly from Dostoevsky's subterranean memoir, the original published version of which carried a lengthy footnote informing readers that both the author of the Notes and the Notes themselves were fictitious.

An American underground man examines arguments to evidence his thesis that Huxley's ‘really revolutionary revolution in the souls and flesh of human beings’ is being fomented by respected scientific rationalists. Believing that Homo sapiens is an evolutionary error, these benevolent intellectuals wish to alter the human gene pool in order to circumvent genosuicide. Mindful of the veridical knowledge of man issuing from current research in the biological and neurosciences, the underground man contends that these precursors of mankind's second genesis are gradually undermining resistance to the transition from natural to artificial selection of the human genotype by disinheriting the collective mind of the superannuated mythologems controlling it: the practitioners of normal science being latter‐day governors or puppeteers exhibiting radically new empirical models of cosmos and man in the shadows of a contemporary Platonic cave. Seeking to awaken the educated public to ominous events of evolutionary enormity, the underground man prods humanist philosophers by impiously debunking the Socratic dream of reason, the Enlightenment mystique, and the millennial myth of freedom, provocatively supporting the revolution of the scientific rationalists, as if they had perceived aright.

Notes

Like the Underground Notes of my forebear, Dostoevsky, ‘New Notes from Underground’ is written in two parts, of which only the first is published here. The second part, containing philosophic reflections, as well as a veridical account of the author's state of mind and life circumstances while dwelling underground in America, further establishes the fact that ‘New Notes’ departs significantly from Dostoevsky's subterranean memoir, the original published version of which carried a lengthy footnote informing readers that both the author of the Notes and the Notes themselves were fictitious.