Lev Shestov is a philosopher not in the traditional sense of the word, but in the same sense in which Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Goethe are philosophical. Almost all of his works are brilliant, deep, inimitable, original literary excursions into philosophy. Shestov devoted his entire life not to the substantiation of his own system, not to the creation of his own concept, but to a task that was perhaps just as difficult – a detached and unbiased study of other people's philosophical constructions, the struggle against rationalistic ideas of "rational understanding" – and, finally, a truly brilliant realization of the task of philosophy as a science "to teach us to live in the unknown"...

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The Apotheosis of Groundlessness AST Moscow 2000 5-17-000579-2

Lev Shestov

Kirgegaard and Existential Philosophy

(Voice of one crying in the wilderness)

Instead of a preface

Kirgegard and Dostoevsky[1] 

I

Of course, you do not expect me to exhaust the complex and difficult subject of the work of Kirgegard and Dostoevsky in the course of the one hour that is at my disposal. I will therefore limit my task: I will speak only about how Dostoevsky and Kiergegard understood original sin, or, for they are one and the same thing, about speculative and revealed truth. But it must be said in advance that in such a short time it is unlikely that it will be possible to find out with the desired completeness even what they thought and told us about the fall of man. At best, it will be possible to outline, and then schematically, why original sin riveted the attention of these two most remarkable thinkers of the nineteenth century. By the way, in Nietzsche, who, according to the usual ideas, was so far from biblical themes, the problem of the Fall is the axis or pivot of all his philosophical problems. His main, main theme is Socrates, in whom he sees a decadent, i.e. fallen man par excellence. Moreover, he sees the fall of Socrates in what history – and especially the history of philosophy – has always found and we have been taught to find his greatest merit; in his boundless trust in reason and knowledge obtained by reason. When you read Nietzsche's reflections on Socrates, you involuntarily recall the biblical story of the forbidden tree and the tempter's seductive words: "You will be knowledgeable." Even more than Nietzsche, and even more insistently, Kiergegaard tells us about Socrates. And this is all the more striking because, for Kiergegard, Socrates is the most remarkable phenomenon in the history of mankind before the appearance on the horizon of Europe of that mysterious book which is called the Book, i.e., the Bible.

The Fall has disturbed human thought from the most remote times. All people felt that all was not well in the world, and even very unhappy: "Something is unclean in the kingdom of Denmark," in the words of Shakespeare, and they made great and strenuous efforts to find out where this trouble came from. And it must be said at once that Greek philosophy, as well as the philosophy of other peoples, not excluding the peoples of the Far East, gave an answer to the question posed in this way directly opposite to that which we find in the narrative of the Book of Genesis. One of the first great Greek philosophers, Anaximander, says in a passage that has survived after him: "From whence came the birth of individual beings, from there, of necessity, comes destruction to them. At the appointed time they are punished and receive retribution from one another for their impiety." This idea of Anaximander runs through the whole of ancient philosophy: the appearance of individual things, mainly, of course, living beings, and chiefly men, is regarded as impious daring, the just retribution for which is death and their destruction. The idea of γένεσις and φθορά (birth and destruction) is the starting point of ancient philosophy (which, I repeat, stood inexorably before the founders of the religions and philosophies of the Far East). The natural thought of man, at all times and among all peoples, weak-willedly, as if bewitched, stopped before the fatal necessity that brought into the world the terrible law of death, inseparably linked with the birth of man, and of annihilation, which awaits everything that has appeared and appears. In the very existence of man, thought discovered something undue, vice, illness, sin, and, accordingly, wisdom demanded the overcoming at the root of that sin, i.e., the renunciation of being, which, as having a beginning, is condemned to an inevitable end. Greek catharsis, purification, has its source in the conviction that the immediate data of consciousness, which testify to the inevitable destruction of all that is born, reveal to us a pre-worldly, eternal, unchangeable, and forever insurmountable truth. Actual, present being (οντως ον) is not to be sought with us and not for us, but where the power of the law of birth and destruction ends, i.e., where there is no and is no birth, and therefore there is no and no annihilation. This is where speculative philosophy came from. The law of the inevitable destruction of all that arises and is created, which has been revealed to the intellect, seems to us to be eternally inherent in existence itself: Greek philosophy is as unshakably convinced of this as the wisdom of the Hindus, and we, who are separated from the Greeks and Hindus for thousands of years, are just as incapable of escaping from the grip of this self-evident truth as those who first discovered and showed it to us.

Only the Book of Books is a mysterious exception in this respect.