Perhaps one of the most remarkable examples of the coherence of modern philosophical thought is the famous Humeau-Kantian dispute. As you know. Kant repeatedly stated that Hume woke him up from his sleep. And indeed, reading Hume and those passages in Kant in which references to Hume are found, it seems that it could not be otherwise, that what Hume saw and what Kant could already see after Hume, could not only awaken the sleeping, but also the dead. Hume wrote: "Is there a principle in nature more mysterious than the connection of soul and body, a principle by which the supposed spiritual substance acquires such power over material that the most refined thought can act on the grossest matter? If we were to possess power by a secret desire to move mountains, or to direct the planets in their orbits, this vast power would not be more extraordinary or more beyond our comprehension than that aforesaid." Thus wrote Hume. Kant, repeating Hume's words, spoke in almost the same words: "dass mein Wille meinen Arm bewegt, ist mir nicht verständlicher, als wenn jemand sagte, dass derselbe auch den Mond zurückhalten könne." [8] It seemed, what else? It would seem that for people who have seen this, further sleep, further faith in understanding, in intelligere, will become impossible and unnecessary. That they, like Tertullian, would break free from the power of the devil's delusion and, awakening to the final reality, would smash to pieces all the pudet, ineptum, impossibile that bound them...

But it wasn't like that. Both Hume and Kant woke up in a dream. Their awakening was illusory. Even the fact that they had discovered in themselves the miraculous power to move mountains and guide the planets in their orbits did not teach them that they had a different purpose than perpendiculars and triangles. Hume began to talk about "habit" and forgot about the miracles he had seen. Kant, in order not to look at miracles, transferred them to the realm of Ding an sich, and left to people synthetic judgments a priori, transcendental philosophy, and three miserable "postulates." That is, he fulfilled Spinoza's program in its entirety: he defended piety and morality, and betrayed God, putting in its place a concept that he created in the image and likeness of the highest criteria of mathematical truths. And such a philosophy seemed to everyone "sublime" par excellence. Morality, like its parent, reason, or what was called reason, became autonomous, self-legitimate. And the "purer", the more self-legitimate, the more independent morality was, the more it was worshipped. Fichte followed Kant and again recreated Spinoza in his "ethical idealism". Man must first of all obey, and obey a principle as far removed from it as the perpendiculars and triangles sung by Spinoza, and they are, in their humble obedience to the supreme principle, eternal and unattainable models for restless and irrationally restless mortals. Hegel went in the same direction: no matter how much he struggled with Spinoza, no matter how stubbornly he strove in his dynamism to overcome the statics of his teacher, he still more strengthened people's faith in the "autonomy" of reason. For him, philosophy was the "self-development" of the spirit, i.e., the automatic unfolding of the Absolute, which, in its "ideality" of nature and its inanimateness, surpasses even mathematical concepts. I am not even talking about modern philosophers. Their fear of "reason" is so great, the belief in the inviolability of synthetic judgments a priori is so irresistibly strong, that it does not occur to anyone that a struggle is still possible here. The "miracles" that were revealed for a moment to Hume and Kant are forgotten. Those who are not with science will face the fate of Thales. Sooner or later, he will be "swept off the face of the earth" or, like Thales, will fall into a well, to the merry laughter of young beauties.

I said that the truthful Spinoza had told people a deliberate lie. It may be asked: why did people believe him? How did he manage to bewitch them - to take away their sight and hearing? An attentive reader may have already guessed how to answer these questions. It is not for nothing that I have had to think of Thales so many times in these pages. After all, he definitely fell into a well - this is not a lie or an invention. And with anyone who does not look at his feet, sooner or later trouble will happen. In other words: common sense and science cannot be neglected with impunity. That is why Hume and Kant were in such a hurry to forget the miracles they had seen, and clung so tightly, the one to habit, the other to synthetic judgments a priori. Their students and admirers felt this, and this ensured the success of their philosophies. Whoever is afraid of failure must believe in the "truthfulness" of Spinoza, listen to Hume and Kant, and hide himself with whatever God sends from everything extraordinary and "miraculous"...

And yet Spinoza and all those who came from Spinoza and were spiritually nourished by him, told people lies. Needless to say, common sense and science cannot be neglected with impunity – this is what people discover in their "everyday experience". But there is another experience — it reveals something else. It reveals that it is also impossible to trust common sense and science "with impunity". That those who have been entrusted as well as those who have neglected will be equally punished. The Thracian woman who mocked Thales — has she passed the abyss? Where is she? Where is her merry laughter? History is silent about this! History, a mysterious science that tells about the affairs of bygone days, never remembers what awaited the "winners", what abysses were prepared for them. You can memorize many volumes of history books and not know such a "simple" truth. The more you read historical writings, the more thoroughly you forget the old truth that man is mortal. It is as if history sets itself the task of recreating life as if people had never died. Yes, it is. History has its own philosophy, and this philosophy requires of it precisely such a reconstruction of the human past. Otherwise, how could people have the ridiculous myth that the willingness to follow science and common sense ensures impunity? However, one must think that historians would not have coped with such a task by their own means. Behind the historians there is and they are moved by some other and incomprehensible force – or rather, although I will not be forgiven for it, the will. It is this enchantement et assoupissement surnaturel (194) and the apparently supernatural delusion of which Pascal speaks, and of which neither Kant nor the epistemologists who followed Kant's path ever suspected. Neither mathematics nor the sciences that are equal to mathematics can disenchant human consciousness and free it from supernatural spells. And does science strive for "free" research? Is it looking for a way to reality? I have already cited the patterns of thinking of such courageous men as Kant and Hume. As soon as something out of the ordinary stood in their way, they immediately hid in their shell, decided that this was something that should not be seen, even something that did not exist, that it was a "miracle". For greater clarity, I will cite another example from the book of a modern, very famous and influential historian of philosophy. In order to explain to his reader the meaning and significance of the "philosophy of identity" inherited by Hegel from Schelling, who in turn received his "epiphany" from Spinoza's books, the learned historian writes: "Solange man die Erkenntnis sich nach dem Gegenstand "richten lässt" in dem Sinne, dass dieser ein Ziel bezeichnet, dass für sich bei aller noch so grossen Annäherung doch immer ein äusserliches ist und bleibt; — solange bleibt die Zusammenstimmug des «Subjektiven» und des «Objektiven» ein unbegreifliches Wunder. Dieses Wunder schwindet nur erst…" etc.[10]

I could collect as many examples of such judgments as I like. From them it is clear what is the basic "faith" of science and philosophy, which constantly looks back on science in the conviction that if it does not get along with science, it will inevitably be "swept off the face of the earth" (the words in quotation marks also do not belong to me, but to a very famous contemporary philosopher). A miracle is "incomprehensible" because it cannot be caught in the net of "universal and necessary judgments." Ergo: If it were before our eyes, our science would teach us not to see it. She cannot rest until all the "miraculous" is out of her sight (das Wunder schwindet). And with such a voluntary self-limitation, the equal of which human thought has apparently not known in any historical epoch, science, in all sincerity, identifies itself with free investigation. What is this, I ask again, if not the "supernatural delusion" with which Pascal was so painfully tormented? With the methods of searching for truth developed by science, we are fatally doomed to make the most important, the most significant for us seem non-existent par excellence. When it appears before us, we are seized with insane terror, the soul fears that the great Nothing will swallow it up forever, and runs back without looking back, to where the cheerful and careless Thracian women triumph.

What is the way out of here? How to overcome a nightmarish delusion when it is sent by a supernatural force? And "how can a man quarrel with God"? The supernatural delusion is dispelled only by the supernatural force. Spinoza's judge, who was not satisfied with power over triangles and perpendiculars and subjugated living people, will never, of course, bless the arbitrariness hidden in the supernatural, and will continue to frighten us with the perunas of his "necessity." But neither his blessing nor his threats, now that the glamour has disappeared, have the same effect. All the pudendum, ineptum, impossibile, plucked by our forefather from the tree of Eden, are forgotten. Forgotten are both the "universally binding judgments" and the self-imposed piety that so seduced us. And then, only then, free research will begin. Perhaps the reader who will not be repelled by the long soul-to-heart wanderings that have provided the material for this book will be convinced that in the Holy Scriptures. Scripture is the Truth, and that Spinoza, in fulfillment of the will of the one who sent him, was doomed to take this truth away from our contemporaries.

L. Sh.

Part One. REVELATIONS OF DEATH

This is a mystery to people: but all those who really devoted themselves to philosophy did nothing else but prepare for dying and death.

Plato. Phaedo (64a)

OVERCOMING SELF-EVIDENCE (To the centenary of the birth of F. M. Dostoevsky)