Part 1, Chapter 2 — consciousness as illness

Now I want to tell you, gentlemen, why I couldn't even become an insect. The chapter opens with this and gives the philosophical claim that the rest of Part 1 will elaborate. Being too conscious, the Underground Man argues, is an illness — a real, full-blown illness. For ordinary daily life, ordinary consciousness would be enough. Half of what falls to a cultivated man of the nineteenth century would be enough. He has more than that, and the surplus has destroyed him.

He is, he admits, perversely proud of his disease. People do pride themselves on their diseases, he says, and he does, perhaps more than anyone — and immediately concedes the move is absurd and stands by the diagnosis anyway. At the moments when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of the sublime and the beautiful, he writes, I am also doing things at the same time that are not sublime or beautiful at all — petty, vile, contemptible things — and I am doing them precisely because I can feel the sublime so clearly. A man who can perceive the moral order with that much clarity cannot live inside it; he can only stand in shame outside it, watching himself fall short.

The chapter is short and dense. The Underground Man does not yet supply examples; the examples will come in Part 2. What he supplies here is the diagnosis the examples will demonstrate. Consciousness past a certain pitch produces a paralysis in which every motive splits, every action is preceded by its critique, and the man is left in a position from which only spite — the choice against his own interest, on principle — feels like a real act. The next eight chapters are the engine running.