Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, and the Irrational Human Experience

As we've discussed in class, both Fyodor Dostoevsky and Charles Baudelaire were nineteenth-century authors who fought back against the rigid, scientific view of the world presented by Enlightenment thinkers. Dostoevsky (through the voice of the Underground Man in Part I of Notes from Underground) says that rationalism doesn't get you everywhere in life. There will always be a nagging feeling of unsatisfaction with a perfect life and a perfect world, a desire to overcome realism and do irrational things. I also found it interesting that Dostoevsky himself was an avid gambler, a truly irrational human invention (Ian Johnston mentions this in "Notes on Notes from Underground"). What other animals would willingly give up something they have, knowing they will almost certainly lose it? Dostoevsky would probably say, "Because we can."

As we head into the poems of Baudelaire, I've noticed that he also emphasizes the irrational aspects of human life, if not in the same way as Dostoevsky. Baudelaire focuses on the darkness and mystery of the human psyche--corruption and sin. These aspects of humanity are not rational; they are the evil that fights the good in humans. Baudelaire emphasizes that humans aren't like the machines of the industrial revolution that work to perform a single, monotonous function; they are complex beings with irrational motivations.