A voz cética em Memórias do Subsolo de Dostoiévski

Abstract

This work aims to investigate within the Dostoievskian work - Underground memories (1864) modes of argument that resemble the characteristics adopted by Pyrrhonian skepticism. Our present study is inserted in the interior of Dostoevskian thought, in a historical time in which the deposit of confidence in theories that aimed to reach through reason and scientism the perfect state of man was seething. And, here is our goal: to show the skeptical voice's refusal of the dogmatism of these theories. Far from being a literary criticism, our proposal is to identify some attitudes adopted by the underground man, which somehow can refer to the characteristics or traits followed by the Pyrrhonian skeptics. The work will be divided into four chapters: the first will be responsible for presenting the topic to be discussed. In the second chapter, we will show the Genesis of the Underground, discussing the place and the historical time in which the writing process of the work takes place and some inseparable biographical traits between Dostoyevsky and the underground man. In the third chapter, The Underground, we will demonstrate that the protagonist uses the skeptical discourse found in Sextus Empiricus' Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes to confront the rationalist ideas of Chernyshevsky. In this way, the underground man, based on skeptical modes of argument such as: diaphonia, isosthenia, reduction to absurdity and infinite regress, exhibits the inconsistencies of these theories, leading them to a dead end (aporia). Although the underground man appropriates the skeptical discursive logos and performs part of the path that guides skeptics to the suspension of judgment, this man who lives underground does not reach the state of tranquility of mind. And what is tragic: the character is in a "state of mind" diametrically opposed to ataraxia. It is in this sense that we can say that the underground man uses the discursive logos of the skeptics; without, however, actually being one of them.