Abstract
Shestov’s work can be summed up under six headings. Three are sharp contrasts, three are paradoxes. (1) First there is the contrast between Shestov the person, who was moderate, competent, and calm, and Shestov the thinker, who was extreme, incandescent, and impassioned. (2) Then there is the contrast between his critique of reason, his acceptance of irrationalism, and the means by which he attacks the former and defends the latter: namely, careful rational argument. Sometimes he argues like a lawyer (after all, he had a law degree from Moscow University). (3) Shestov speaks repeatedly of the “horrors and atrocities of human existence.” But his examples are always drawn from history or literature, never from his own life, although we know that he experienced much horror. (4) Nietzsche is the thinker whom he invokes most frequently, and most warmly. Yet, paradoxically, Shestov completely ignores most of Nietzsche’s central themes. (5) Shestov’s skeptical doubts are mostly directed at rationalism; he is not skeptical about the existence or benevolence of God. Yet he is explicitly skeptical about divine omniscience and implicitly skeptical about divine omnipotence in a metaphysical sense, though not in its ethical application. (6) Shestov has a deep faith that God can undo all the horrors of life, putting an end to all suffering. At the same time he knows that this will not, and cannot, happen, since the very idea of undoing the past, erasing its horrors, is conceptually incoherent.
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Notes
It is precisely the Nietzschean themes neglected by Shestov that I find the most interesting, not because I find them congenial but rather because they represent the “dark side” of Nietzsche’s thought, something that is dangerous and destructive in a moral, social, and political context. The heart of Nietzsche’s position is that what was most precious to him—the high culture of the remote world-historical future—was entirely incompatible with compassion, even common human decency, toward the weak and uncreative individuals of the historical present. See my article, “The Use and Abuse of Hegel by Nietzsche and Marx” in Hegel and His Critics: Philosophy in the Aftermath of Hegel (ed. William Desmond) Albany: SUNY Press, 1989, esp. Sec.VI, pp. 15–24.
He wrote only two brief political works. Both of them are as penetrating and impassioned as his philosophic writings, but they do not make use of aphorisms. The more important of them, Čto takoe bol’ševizm? (Berlin 1920) begins with the question “What is Russian Bolshevism?” and continues: “It is difficult, no, it is impossible to write calmly about this subject” (emphasis added).
One might say that Shestov, the non-poet, wrote much “poet’s prose” which had the power, depth, and eloquence of the prose of his contemporaries, Mandelstam and Cvetaeva, both major poets. This would perhaps also make room for Lo Gatto’s claim that Shestov was a “lyric poet,” since Lo Gatto characterizes Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Kierkegaard as “poets”.
It is even possible that one of the reasons Shestov favored the aphorism was that a chapter or section consisting of a dozen or more aphorisms has a formal resemblance to a poetic cycle consisting of a dozen or fewer poems.
An earlier commentator had made a similar point in slightly different terms: “Essentially, Shestov wages his Thirty Years War not against science and reason, but only against the obtuse dogmatism of their devotees, against the Egyptian darkness of vulgarized semi-enlightenment, and against the nothingness and falsehood of self-assured half-knowledge” (Gofštetter 1931, 99).
Although Shestov’s first publication on Husserl did not appear until 1917, he became acquainted with Husserl’s work in 1912. While living in Coppet, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he visited and corresponded with his friend Gustav Špet, who was then taking courses with Husserl at the University of Göttingen. For the correspondence see Tatjana Ščedrina, Gustav Špet. Žizn’ v pis’makh (Moscow: Rosspen, 2005), esp. pp. 323–325.
For a somewhat more detailed discussion of this point, see (Kline 1968 81–82).
Shestov is referring to Berdjaev’s “collection of essays on philosophy, sociology, and literature,” entitled Sub specie aeternitatis (Moscow 1907).
However, in the same passage Armetta misleadingly associates Shestov’s position with Feuerbach’s project of reducing theology to philosophical anthropology.
See his essay “Velikij molčal’nik,” Vestnik, No. 130 (1979).
See his doctoral dissertation (University of Washington, 1980): On the Threshold of Faith: An Intellectual Biography of Lev Shestov from 1901 to 1920, Focusing on His Concept of Man.
I agree with Andreoletti’s summary statement that “Shestov’s critique of reason is not exhausted in itself; but is only a pars destruens: its goal is not nothingness but faith” (Andreoletti 1954, 1098).
Here is another aspect of Nietzsche’s thought that Shestov chose to ignore: Nietzsche had dedicated his Human All-too-human to Voltaire and in a later introduction to that work stressed the closeness of his thought to that of Voltaire. See Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. K. Schlechta, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1960, 2:1118.
Saint Peter Damian (1007–1072), a skeptic about the recourse to reason in theological argument, claimed in his De Divina Omnipotentia that “the entire created order depends simply on the omnipotent will of God, which can even alter the course of past history.”(entry on Peter Damian by E. Fairweather, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York: Macmillan, 1967, 6:124; emphasis added).
In the Revised Standard Version this passage reads: “As it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’.”
For further discussion of this point, see Kline (1968, 83–85).
Friedrich Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. R.J. Hollingdale), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961, p. 215 (trans revised). [Also Sprach Zarathustra, Werke in drei Bänden, 2: 444].
One of the most important works of Shestov’s maturity was entitled precisely Afiny i Ierusalim (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1951), reprinted in Sočinenija v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), 1:313–664. French and German translations from Shestov’s manuscript had appeared in 1938.
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Acknowledgement
My thanks to Grazia Micciche for help with translations from the Italian and to Edward Swiderski for technical help with the whole paper.
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Kline, G.L. Skepticism and faith in Shestov’s early critique of rationalism. Stud East Eur Thought 63, 15–29 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-010-9135-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-010-9135-6