Pain as Epistemology: A Phenomenology of Suffering in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62843/jssr.v6i2.730Keywords:
Pain, Phenomenology of Suffering, Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, Human ConditionAbstract
Fyodor Dostoevsky Notes from Underground (1864) has long been read in existential, psychoanalytic, and political terms, and critics have viewed the Underground Man as suffering, whether pathologically, masochistically, or as an expression of alienation. This paper suggests an alternative solution: that suffering in Notes from Underground, as an epistemic category, a knowing that does not subscribe to the rationalist and utilitarian paradigms of 19 th -century modernity. Using close reading of some of the most important episodes including the toothache and the humiliation experiences; this paper analyzes the way in which pain generates a kind of lived certitude that is antithetical to abstract rational truths such as 2 + 2=4. The analysis will refer to phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Levinas), affect theory (Ahmed), as well as pain studies (Scarry), and put Dostoevsky in the position of a thinker of embodied epistemology, where suffering is, in some ways, the truth telling more than rational computation. Reframing pain as a constitutive and not a pathological force, the article locates Notes from Underground in the larger discussions of embodiment, affect, and truth. Finally, it states that Dostoevsky presupposes phenomenological and modern theories of pain and initiates a debate between literature, philosophy, and affect studies that transforms the understanding of suffering into not weakness but knowledge.
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