Embodied Judgment: Kant, Gallagher, and Merleau-Ponty on Guilt in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Associate Professor of English Language and Literature Department, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

This article argues that Raskolnikov’s guilt is not primarily a conclusion of moral reasoning but first a disturbance in bodily attunement, including fever, nausea, spatial disorientation, and dream imagery, that gradually reorients judgment toward confession. Bringing Kant’s Achtung (respect for the moral law) into conversation with phenomenologies of embodiment, Merleau-Ponty’s motor intentionality and “corporeal schema,” and Gallagher’s body schema and posture and attention coupling, I propose embodied judgment as a continuum from pre-reflective grip to rational acknowledgment. On this view, normativity shows up first as a felt interruption of self-love and habitual ease, then crystallizes as the recognition of duty. Close readings of Crime and Punishment show how sensory atmospheres and affordances, stifling rooms, crowd pressure, overheard talk, thresholds, objects like the axe and the New Testament, format what appears morally salient and doable. The horse-dream, febrile wanderings, Porfiry’s interrogations (as “objectified conscience”), and the Lazarus scene all stage shifts in Raskolnikov’s intentional arc: postural collapse and proprioceptive instability narrow his field of action; Sonia’s room and scripture function as moral affordances that reorganize that field toward confession. Kant’s account of respect as a self-effected feeling clarifies how these bodily disruptions become practical acknowledgment rather than mere affect. The payoff is conceptual and methodological: the article bridges Kantian normativity and Merleau-Pontian habit, showing how literary scenes supply ecologically rich cases of moral psychology. Crime and Punishment thus models how guilt is enactively realized in and through bodies, spaces, and second-person grips, where judgment emerges before, and then alongside, explicit moral reasoning.

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References

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Journal of Philosophical Investigations
Volume 20, Issue 56 - Serial Number 56
Articles
October 2026
Pages 563-584

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