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Marina Kostalevsky Sensual Mind: The Pain and Pleasure of Thinking There’s nothing more debauched than thinking. —Wislawa Szymborska, “An Opinion on the Question of Pornography” IN A WELL-KNOWN 1870 letter to Nikolai Strakhov, Dostoevsky wrote, “I’m weak in philosophy (but not in the love of it; in the love of it I’m strong).”1 In speaking of his weakness in philosophy, Dostoevsky meant his insufficient background in the scholarly discipline called philosophy. In confessing the strength of his love for philosophy, however, he meant his love of thinking. It is generally agreed that all main characters in Dostoevsky’s great novels, from Raskolnikov to Ivan Karamazov, are thinkers. Examining those fictional thinkers of the “Dostoevsky school,” the critics analyze, as a rule, their ideas, that very set of “ultimate questions” that is linked inseparably with Dostoevsky’s name. But what makes Dostoevsky’s work philosophical in the literal sense of the word is his fascination with the human ability to think. If one asks what constitutes the most typical activity for a Dostoevskian character, the answer will be thinking. Raskolnikov, for example, defines his mental exercise as his daily work: “What are you doing?” asks the housemaid. “Work.” “What kind of work?” “I think” (Ps, 6:26). But Dostoevskian characters are not simply absorbed in thought; they are engaged in a relentless thought process that reinvents meaning as it progresses. The contemporary philosopher Merab Mamardashvili, who meditated all his life on the phenomenon of consciousness, believed that people’s cognitive potentialities reveal themselves each time anew in the process of intellectual pursuit. Mamardashvili considered Dostoevsky the first example of what may be called a “modern intellectual laborer.”2 In other words, Dostoevsky’s thought is not preordained; it is born in the very process of thinking. Thereby the dynamics of thought become a determining epistemological factor to Dostoevsky’s mode of operation. One of the first records of these dynamics appeared as early as 1864 in the Notes from Underground. This remarkable example of “mind at 200 work” may certainly be viewed as a case study for different types of cognitive analysis. What makes it particularly fitting for our purposes is Dostoevsky ’s sensualization of the mind: “A sullen thought was born in my brain and passed through my whole body like some vile sensation, similar to what one feels on entering an underground cellar, damp and musty.”3 One may observe that this passage looks, retrospectively, like a step toward mapping the type of connection between feeling and thinking that became a focus of proliferating studies in neuroscience in the last decade of the twentieth century. This “organic” link between body and mind, which in Dostoevsky forms a parallel to a corresponding approach to the relationship between body and spirit and between spirit and mind, is further emphasized through the introduction of such notions as “pain” (and “pleasure”) into the epistemological discourse. “I am strongly convinced,” declares the underground man, “that not only too much consciousness, but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.” He contends, “Suffering—why, this is the sole cause of consciousness.”4 The contemporary scholar of the neuroscience of the mind, Antonio Damasio, echoes this reasoning almost verbatim: “The drama of the human condition comes solely from consciousness.”5 In the course of his research, Damasio has refuted the long-standing notion that presented the mind as linked to the brain “in a somewhat equivocal relationship” and the brain as “consistently separated from the body rather than being seen as part of a complex living organism.” (One may observe that this “separatist” point of view was often mocked by Dostoevsky, who, of course, criticized not only a separation of mind from body but also from soul. See, for example, Dmitri’s outburst as regards “all these nerves in the brain . . . magnificent science . . . soul and God” [BK, 589])6 “Through most of the twentieth century,” continues Damasio, “emotions were not trusted in the laboratory. Emotions were too subjective, it was said. Emotions were too elusive and vague. Emotions were at the opposite end from reason, easily the finest human ability; and reason was presumed to be entirely independent from emotion.”7 I suggest that in Dostoevsky, one may perceive a revolutionary break from the romantic opposition that affixed reason to the brain and emotions to the body; a break which, on the one hand, links his approach with the Platonic and Christian tradition of the threefold unity of human nature and...

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