Bound by Numbers

So far, Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, has been an interesting, dare I say philosophical, read. I admit, I definitely had to stare at passages at about every other page to understand what the hell the underground man was talking about, but his views on mankind were captivating and...creative. His contradictory statements strewn about threw me off a bit, but I think I get where he's going. There's a lot of points the man covered, but I'll talk about one.

2 + 2 = 4, no it does not equal 5, and no it does not equal 3. It's a law of nature, in a sense, and it cannot be changed. All those dumb 'tricks' where people make 1 = 0 are wrong, because they're dividing by zero, and that's defying the laws. The underground man questions that; he asks himself: "...what sort of free will is left when we come to tables and arithmetic..." (Dostoevsky 29)?

He believes that "...laws of nature exist in this world, so that everything he does is not done by his will at all, but is done by itself, according to the laws of nature" (Dostoevsky 23).

Why can't 2 + 2 = 5, why does it have to be 4. That's why, according to him, we don't have absolute freedom. We're bound by laws that we cannot change. Yet, some of this is man-made; some of these laws are our own creation. We invented numbers, and time, and now our lives are basically controlled by those numbers. It seems the amount of money or time we have basically dictates our lives, so do we really have freedom? The underground man made me think of one of my favorite quotes.

           “Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. 
Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. 

Man alone measures time. 
Man alone chimes the hour. 
And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures.
A fear of time running out.” 
― Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper

It differs from the underground man's thoughts, but you get the point.

 But I disagree with the man, I think that, despite the laws of nature, we are free, and we have free will. We're free to simply ignore them if it comes to that. I mean, sure they'll still be true, but that doesn't mean we have to let them control us. There is a big difference in controlling and affecting.

 Freedom is relative, anyways.