Nikolai Ivanov - State University of Sankt-Petersburg
ON LEO SHESTOV’S BALANCE: BEYOND TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD
“Oh that my grief were throughly
weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together!
For now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea:
therefore my words are swallowed up.” (Job
6:2-3). Leo Shestov took these bitter confessional words
as an epigraph to the most characteristic and shrill of
his works, In Job’s Balances. On the Sources of the
Eternal Truths, and added to it a few more, prophetical
and terrible, from Plotinus: “A great and last struggle
waits human souls” (En. 1, 6, 7).
Epigraphs, like ancient oracles, “do
not speak and conceal, but mark” (Heraclites 14 М), even
if they speak, as in this case, for themselves. In this
way, for example, speaks also another epigraph from
Apotheosis of Groundlessness: Nur für Schwindelfreie,
“Only for those who are not afraid of dizziness.”
It demands care, a special tact of
thinking, when its ground – common sense – slips away
from under the feet; when you find yourself on the way
beyond the standard norms, accessible themes and
obligatory truths of mind to the horizon of “divine
groundlessness” (Shestov), where all is possible and
nothing is initial and final; where the whim is higher
than the law; where the obvious is more mysterious than
the secret, and the wonderful penetrates the order of
things more deeply than their own nature.
To rely on “commonplaces” or
“self-evidences,” on any metaphysics, criticism or
dogmatics, which speaks on behalf of Truth in the face
of this horizon, means to step into an abyss. Beyond the
cults of common sense there is nothing to amuse the
judgment. The only idea which is allowable there is a
shocking, inadmissible one – especially for those who
try to get rid of the illusiveness of their own life by
the tree of knowledge of “outward things.”
Today the apotheosis of
groundlessness has a double sense. It is not only a
title of one of Shestov’s works in which it is evident
how he “wasted his talent on totally unserious things.”1
It is also the shortest formula of all his philosophy,
an image which was assigned to it in the history of
modern ideas and which apparently carries a completely
definite meaning.
The establishment of such an image
is quite natural. For all his life Shestov kept fidelity
to the free, adogmatic spirit of the above-mentioned
book and its desperate plan – “to plough up the killed
and trampled-down field of modern thought,”2
and “to get rid once and for all of any sort of the
beginnings and ends, which were thrusted upon us with
such unclear persistence by all founders of great and
not so great philosophical systems.”3
But there is another side of the
image that is no less natural and evident. I mean the
negative, pejorative sense which is implicated in “the
deification of groundlessness” as a general
characteristic of Shestov’s philosophical confession.
This sense is obstinate and direct, like a stake. It
does not demand substantiations and cannot be
challenged. For it is ridiculous and silly “to think” in
the face of the obvious: the idea beyond its reasonable
ground is also beyond its own valuable reality, i.e. on
the other side of possible truth and falsehood.
According to Shestov, there is, of
course, no reason to fight against reason, but there is
still less reason to defend reason against its own
shadows. Why would one paint the devil, if the painted
devil is so bad? And if the critical arguments of mind
are so “good” (i.e. great and terrible enough to have no
alternative), if they “do speak for themselves,” why are
they so frightening in our eyes? What, in general, do
they “speak” of? Under the guise of “everything,” and of
its “objective truth,” they speak of nothing but of
themselves and their own validity. They speak of how
should everybody think and how, in practice, thinks
nobody but our depersonalized “everybodyness,” i.e.
vsemstvo (F. M. Dostoevsky) or das Man (M.
Heidegger). But at the same time they keep absolute
silence about the real, responsible contents of
thinking, about how the concrete philosopher or the
concrete shoemaker thinks. To judge according to these
measures, true thinking means to play blindly. The stake
and the cross of common sense are nothing more than a
bluff of mind, a cowardice and a self-deception of
reason, which thinks it is better to see nothing than to
turn away from the evident, and which nevertheless
sacrifices nothing with such ease as obvious things if
they are beaten out from the chorus of obligatory truths
and cannot teach us anything “useful.”
Shestov’s precept is simple:
If you have kept bright eyes
and sensitive hearing – throw away tools and
devices, forget methodology and scientific
quixotics and try to trust in yourself. So what,
if you will not extract obligatory judgments and
if you will see the rams in rams? It may be a
step forward. You will forget to look together
with everybody, but you will learn to see where
nobody could see, and not to speculate but to
conjure, to call out alien words for totally
unprecedented beauty and greatest forces.4
The horror, ancient horror of
reason, which is experienced in the face of the
fluctuations of the ground on which common sense relies,
is of a completely mythological kind. The real
thought can be only a thought of your own. And to
understand this it is not necessary to read Leo Shestov
or Johann Wolfgang Goethe. This idea also belongs to
“everybodyness.”5
Common sense prompts (to itself)
that its reasonable alternative simply cannot exist.
That is why there is no question. Only what is more
reasonable: to follow or to contradict requirements of
mind (judgment). Only a little fool – Ivan from Russian
fairy-tales – chooses for himself the road to death, and
not to marriage, health and richness. Cognition is not a
fairy-tale, but a vital (and always essential) reality.
As soon as you realize this, you will find yourself in
safety – in the center of arguments that open the
general way from Reason to Truth. The instantaneousness
of such a resettlement is provided by ideality, by the
meta-physical character of the common sense zone. Reason
is not late on its borders cut out from non-committal
banalities. It at once directs to the center, to the
recognition of senselessness of thinking in the face
of the evidence of being, from which all the
infinite prospects of knowledge take their beginnings.
Only now the real (instead of the far-fetched) problem
of choice comes up: at which prospect it is necessary to
stop and which argument it is reasonable to accept as
rational, i.e. the most weighty and reliable one. And
only now also appears a quite different opportunity: to
take breath, to refrain from immediate judgment, and not
to glance over the nearest, but the farthest prospects,
over ghostly horizons of cognition which may be open
from the zone’s center. At this moment it is not
necessary to strain the eyes and imagination. It is
simply enough to recollect that all these
attracting and seemingly inaccessible horizons have
already been overcome and rejected once. On behalf of
the banal truths they were just under our feet. We just
crossed them, after we have stepped within the limits of
the zone. And if it is so, does the infinity of our
commonsensical ways to Truth appears to be too bad?
It is clear which one of these
opportunities Leo Shestov realized in his work. His
questions – as well as answers from the zone of
self-evidences – speak for themselves:
Is it not a main task of our
time to learn the art of bypassing (and even
destroying) all those numerous outposts, which
were built in olden time by powerful feudal
lords of spirit under different pretexts and
which are still considered as insuperable, even
“natural” barrier to the movement of our thought
by virtue of eternal conservatism of cowardly
and short-sighted human nature? For what one has
to finish? What for the last word? What for the
world-outlook?6
In order to live, to survive, they
answer. We are forced to reckon with the
imperfection of our own nature, its limited
potentialities and, in particular, its “cowardice and
short-sightedness”, about which Shestov himself writes.
Precisely, we are “forced.” We necessarily have to
reckon with them, as well as, whenever possible, to
struggle with them. It is important to remember that
this struggle is nothing else than their own direct
manifestation.
I tried to speak to the
mountain, to move the sea. It didn’t move. I
tried to conjure all material world: ‘Be
scattered.’ It wasn’t scattered. What therefore?
Nothing therefore! I know also something else. I
tried to conjure an empty, obviously senseless
superstition based on nothing, since only God
knows about childhood where it is taken from –
and all in vain. It stands as strong as
mountains, rivers and seas! So go away with your
“therefore” and your human experience! However,
it’s useless to lay yourself out. Besides the
fact that we are not capable of it, we also do
not want to break off delusion and to be
released from charms of a seeming reality. Even
events of recent time which were tremendous
enough to wake a deadman had no effect on
anybody. People wait patiently that all things
fall into place again and that it is possible to
begin to live just as they used to, pleasantly
and carefree. How long will this beating of
people still go on?7
“Events of recent time” which are
spoken of here are the events of any time if one
ponders over them seriously. And the business of
Shestov’s philosophy is a business of any philosophy
(if one keeps in mind Plato’s “secret for people”)
There is only one problem: to
test the spirit for its presence on that side of
things-in-themselves means to behold the end of the
natural light of reason.
It is not necessary to lose one’s
mind to solve its childish cunning: coming from the
outside, its light is the only thing that kindles the
soul inside the zone of self-evidences. “Zone’s” own
light is nothing but a gloom, in which masters of
metaphysical time, who has learnt when thinking is silly
and ridiculous and when it is permissible, are immersed
without taking notice that their reason, mastering the
new fear and the new rhythmic discipline, has been
switched inadmissibly off. “Fear is a faint of freedom,”
Shestov liked to repeat after Kierkegaard. And if such a
faint does not frighten (and, on the contrary, even
inspires) us, if the lesson of school freedom is
perceived by us as a lesson of the necessity of life,
this changes practically nothing: insensibility to
the insult does not rescue one from being insulted.
Light, which is gloom’s disguise, only blinds its
priests.
In the zone covered and consecrated
by mind we learn to see only what we think
(anything else here is simply not present) and to
think only what we do (anything else here does not
occur). Such science of “vision” forces us to develop
our thinking for the sake of the best arrangement in the
sensual world and results in the full transformation
of a person, if this science is imposed (there is no
other opportunity to keep identity) on nothing less than
a fundamental religion of the zone – on initial belief
in available spiritual practices in senselessness of
thought in the face of the obvious and its conventional
transcriptions. The person begotten by science and
religion of common sense is begotten for a new life –
for a feat of maturity. These science and religion
promise to give us all for the loss of innocence, namely
a sound body and spirit, peace of mind, riches of house,
greatness of name, good fortune, etc. And you can get
all these on one condition – if you strictly follow the
precept of judiciousness. This is not a condition, but a
fairy-tale. Only that this tale’s end is not too fairy:
the main hero – a knight of Truth – faces his death.
And the true story is that he kills
himself: those who do not think while looking at
something, will never see what they are looking at,
in our special case – the philosophy of Leo Shestov.
The boldness of thinking was always
considered by Shestov as more essential and more
primordial than its adequacy. For him it was a sign of
thought’s authenticity, “not a casual sin of man,
but his great privacy.”8
“Why not? The only point is that
this sign is too private and not too evident,”
the common sense authorities reply. And in any case the
obvious point is that to be anxious about the whole
world which is avoided for the same reasons and on the
same paths as your own philosophy, means to fall into an
empty self-flattery. This is exactly what really must be
feared, instead of alleged “suppression” of the
lifeworld by speculative senses and by the “authority of
keys” – a vicarial, sacred mission of philosophical
truths.9 It is
ridiculous to be frightened by pure ideas taken from the
ore of life. They are pure in so far as they are
faultless and safe. Pureness is a source of salutariness
of any idea, a pledge of its sobriety and depth. It is
not dangerous to be pure; it is dangerous to be false.
The separation of thinking from irrational
stratifications of life gives an essence to cognition –
to a process the value of which for the world culture
cannot be exaggerated. The search for truth is a sacred
precept of human history, its major spiritual mover.
This is an indisputable and even banal fact. Yet for
this reason, according to Shestov, this very fact
does not deserve the human reason’s trust. The
philosopher answers:
As far as that goes, I again
admit that the ideas an sich, which are
absolutely bad to my taste, do not exist: I’m
still capable now to watch with pleasure the
development of the idea of progress, with
factories, railways, balloons, etc. But
nevertheless it seems to me a naivety to hope
that all these knick-knacks (I speak about
ideas) can become a subject of serious human
searches. If that desperate struggle of man
against the world and gods, which the legend and
history narrates, is possible, it is enough to
recollect, for instance, Prometheus. This is so
certainly not because of truth and because of
idea. A man wants to be strong, rich and free, a
man wants to be a tsar in the world – just this
miserable, worthless man created from ashes,
which is right before your eyes as ruined as a
worm by the first casual push – and if he speaks
about ideas, this is only because he is
disappointed about the success of his true task.
He feels like a worm, he is afraid that he will
once again turn into dust from which he was
created, and he lies, pretending that his
poverty is not frightful to him, if only the
truth would be found out. Let us forgive him his
lie…10
The lie, which common sense forgave,
the philosopher did not forgive himself. He knew exactly
what he did when he made up his mind to undertake a
risky and the most unpromising and inexcusable
enterprise according to sensible measures, namely to
come out of a general game around judgment’s “validity,”
to give up the image of the teacher of life, to stop
hiding an inescapable fear of his own poverty behind the
pious admiration of truth’s dignity and to expose his
fear and sin. What is demanded immediately by mind is to
look in the face of “groundlessness” and not to go
blind, not to be horrified. What is demanded from a man
is to begin to see clearly, after having understood how
groundless is this requirement, how ridiculous the
important look and how cynical the awe, with which we
invariably perform our own compositions if we have
received the assent of the common sense authorities. A
man who makes up his mind to take this way (and this
alone) should “be ready never to leave the labyrinth.”11
This is precisely what convinced Shestov that another,
special “exit,” another, “spare” freedom does not exist.
In a word, “to hell with underground!” (Dostoevsky)
As I said before, freedom of
thinking was always appreciated by Shestov above its
formal validity and consistency. This does not mean,
however, that he simply turned the zone of
self-evidences upside down or that he transformed truth
from an object of logic cult into an object of mystical
sacrifice. This zone is bottomless: the stream of
transcriptions of the self-evident has no end and edge.
In order to present it in the upturned mode it is
necessary to take the plunge headfirst into it. The fall
into an abyss will really seem then as an ascension to
heavens. The truth contained in this general illusion is
that in flight we shall not break our head: the
temptation by cognition – the gravitation to truth – is
strong as much as it is eternal. However, what is the
truth here? Is it not too one-sided, if it is equalized
with the “object” of cognition? And is it not necessary
to be in order to see in it only a transcendent and
anonymous Gnostic reality? To whom and to what its
lesson’s possibility speaks of?
The opportunity of any lessons, any
extractions from the past and the present speaks only of
the existence of our thinking and life in the world, but
says nothing about their contents – either about the
truthfulness of our thoughts, or about the
meaningfulness of our being. In other words, this
opportunity keeps absolute silence about the reality
of the world in which we live and reflect, a reality
by which we are temporary and fully supported as casual,
uninvited visitors who speak a foreign language, though
we feel and behave completely as if we were at home, as
if we were masters here. Yet the world paid us an
unexpected visit, and so we are compelled “to stop
everything” and to teach the stupid “object” our own and
unique language – eternal laws of the good, the true
and the beautiful, i.e. the Word of God, the Prose
of things and the Poetry of cosmos. This deformation of
our sensuality together with illusiveness of our
practice is inevitable if we take lessons from the
lifeworld time and again, but then we suddenly find out
for ourselves, and try to prove to all, that the world
“truly” is, as it seems, in accordance with our
“foundations” and that, in its own essence, it can be
reduced to the rational sum, to logic of “ideas” taken
from it. We just cannot “find out” anything else, for
the world seen in the zone of self-evidences is nothing
but a zone turned upside down, where what is necessary
is replaced by what is true, what is casual by what is
false, and what is possible by what is conceivable – and
the impossible by the unthinkable, the real by the
rational, the unreal by fiction, the natural by the
logical, the supernatural by the mystical, etc. – up to
the final point in view of reason according to which
the self-evident is nothing but the existing itself.
When reason quarrels with mind, they only amuse one
another: they will always find a common
language. But what, in terms of “true knowledge,” we
are talking about? Not only that we rationally attribute
our own values to being, but we also still believe to
have “a reasonable basis” to assert that anything else
simply does not exist! It is not Shestov with his
adogmatics that is “on that side of truth and
falsehood,”12 but
our trustful truthfulness, as well as European rhetoric.
However, even this is not the point. The problem is not
that the tree of knowledge is a myth (eventually,
everyone should know this). The problem is that this
myth corrupts life.
“For a living human being the ‘tree
of knowledge’ is a threat to the dearest,”13
wrote Shestov. What is the basis of this deepest
Shestov’s belief? In fact, freedom so praised by him
turns to be a pure arbitrariness if it breaks with its
substance – the intelligible necessity. The deformation
of sensuality during cognition of the objective world
should not confuse anybody. It is natural, it is a
blessing, if this cognition promotes growth of
rationality of our conceptions. Feelings only miss the
true, necessary state of affairs, consideration of which
is peculiar to human reason, as Spinoza taught. Reason
is the highest instance of thought, a source of its
pureness and salutariness. Under the influence of
affects we all do foolish and nasty things. On the other
hand, reason is innocent by its very nature: when we
think, we “do not do” anything bad and dangerous. We
just gently behold world around us, bearing the
responsibility for the course of our subjective ideas,
and not for the objective course of things. This feeling
is quite ordinary and sensible. It did not even occur to
us that, from the very beginning, it harbors in itself a
sincere danger, that it is also a sort of thought
for which it is necessary to be responsible, that “pure
thoughts” are all, without exception, internal
feelings rejected by us as causing trouble in the
world (they are different modes of our belief, hope and
love), and that cognition is a process of their
realization in life and thus a creation of the
lifeworld in no less degree than its restrained
contemplation. To decline the responsibility for the
lifeworld “objects” in our cognition means to lose human
dignity. It makes a man nobody in the strict
sense. It deprives him of any individuality, originality
and uniqueness, and transforms him into something
that perceives the world, into an one-dimensional
abstract “I” not capable to rouse either love, or
hatred. Simultaneously, this transcendental subject is
by himself indifferent to another’s dignity: it does not
matter to him at all which face, name and fate do we
have and what is going on in our hearts. As if
bewitched, he constantly turns his back on them and
looks afar, to the horizon of Truth where there is no
living soul, but only reasons and conclusions of
nobody’s, autonomous, mythical Reason which promises
good fortune of a general order to our life. Looking
from his back, this subject still seems to be a human
being – a conductor who knows the exit from the empire
of lie and illusion. But if what has happened to heroes
of terrible folk legends would happen also to us, if we
manage, by some desperate cry from the heart, to force
our conductor to respond and turn back, then we would
shudder at a man, who determined the way for us and whom
we so persistently and obediently followed. Instead of a
face – disgrace: an egg, an emptiness, a chasm. It would
be no wonder, if we take to our heels, cursing the
“subject” and all his “truths” by the worst names. But
what if he was waiting for it? What if he presented us
with his terrible look and transformed us into
himself thanks to our best intentions to offend his
non-existent dignity with names of our non-being? There
is nowhere (and from nobody) to run away here: the chasm
itself is not dangerous, and the “ground” turns out to
be a danger.
The deformation of sensuality that
reaches the level at which we do not recognize ourselves
anymore speaks not of the nature of reason, but of the
nature of its cult. Nobody does sacrifice truth as
easily as the one who “piously” serves it. And it does
not matter whether this service is celebrated by the
priest of mind or by the priest of reason. They are both
– ourselves. And they both blindly trust their own eyes.
But if the priest of mind is blind from his birth and
just miserable in his attempts to pass off in
contemplation, the priest of reason is blinded by
himself and frightens those who do not “do” anything
when they think they will never know what they do.
There is nothing more dangerous for
the lifeworld than “to feel” in it like spectators,
whereas, in practice, we are its creators: everything
depends on us, including its “objective” creations and,
in particular, the expansion of transcendental
subjectivity. Deceiving feeling, reason deceives itself.
Deceiving itself, it corrupts life: it makes legal in
life all that is made by the soulless
order-of-perceived-from-the- outside-necessity and for
what nobody should and cannot bear the moral
responsibility. It is too well-known what “Freedom” and
what “Orders” have grown in 20th century on this
lifeground poisoned by fertilizers of all ideas of
Enlightenment rationalism that have lost their
dissenting spirit and become “testimonies.” Only when
such a ground is cultivated and proliferate, when truth
that resists to the human subject becomes not only an
abstract “fantasy” of philosophers, but also a quite
concrete and aggressive reality of life which
transforms people into real “phantasmagorias” (Shestov),
it is not self-destructive, because it continues to
build of itself the divine principle and, indulging its
ambitions and fears, obstinately clings to itself and to
such life as if it were a saving “ground.”
Does it not appear, then, that the
point of reason’s honor is to cultivate its own
“groundlessness” and, in self-evident threat to the
truthfulness of our knowledge, to open “a basic, the
most enviable privilege of divinity that is most
incomprehensible to us”14
once and forever in it?
The cult of reason is a central one
in a mythological cognitive practice, which amuses
itself by illusion of a theoretical struggle against all
myths. This struggle is illusory not because of its
unsuccessfulness, but because of its senselessness: we
do not serve to the truth at all by measuring the myth
with its measures and thereby replacing it in our
consciousness by our own fiction. The myth is
replaceable only with another myth, i.e. with
another wonderful legend that fascinates the
imagination. Children very well know this. You will
never swindle them with lessons and notations, and
precisely here we should study them. It is to block the
mouths of babes and sucklings to no purpose, when we
describe in a pious way the “real” state of affairs
which does not give opportunity to miracles – feats of
Heracles or tricks of the charming Aphrodite. If our
imagination is captured only by the most tedious and
down-to-earth myths, myths about the myth itself, which
we judge as a sin against the truth, this does not
reveal the victory of Reason over the passion for
creating myths, but only the scarcity of our
quasi-scientific fantasy and the weakness of our
everyday memory. Imagination can be captured only by
the miraculous. The one who does not want to be
charmed by the real world in considering the truth as a
personal, animated and spiritualized reality, has no
other choice but to be fooled by his own “world view”,
i.e. by self-evidences, because the experience and the
arguments of mind and reason prove as two and two that
the truth is in opposition to the human subject and
remains impersonal, inert and dead, even if we daub it
the name of God.
One needs not to be Shestov, a man
of “pitch-dark mind” (V. V. Rosanov), in order to make
the same choice:
Jerusalem sees the last in
God – that is why all the “immediate data of
consciousness” do not seem to it as final
truths. The Book of Revelation promises that the
man will eat of the tree of life (Rev
2:7). It repeats Isaiah’s prophecy: “And God
shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” (Rev
21:4). – “He will swallow up death in victory” (Isa
25:8). All this does coincide neither with our
understanding, nor with the data of experience…
Yet it is just here where the question of
Truth’s sources takes its origin: are not reason
and experience the real origins of Truth? Or
else the fall of the first man in pursuit of
knowledge blocked for us the source of Truth,
and only redemption understood as destruction of
knowledge (Luther’s version of redemption) will
free us from sin and horrors of life and bring
us to Truth?15
The only reason why a lie that
opposes this living truth of revelation is not
mythical is that it does not belong to the myth. And
moreover – it is its curse. Of course, it is science
that pronounces an anathema against the myth because of
its “irrationality”, thereby ascertaining (not without
self-satisfaction) its half-natural and half-forced
“death.” Yet what is value of such a rational diagnosis,
if it is presupposed by the detriment of our
disciplined, sterilized sensuality and if we relate it
only to the myth about Truth’s spirituality and freedom,
while professing, on the same “obvious” basis, the myth
about its objectivity and necessity in a selfless way
and calling it “knowledge” without doubt?
It may be that there is nobody in
modern philosophy, who would attach such a great
importance to the opposition of these myths, with
exception of Shestov. But he was also fully aware that
they oppose each other exactly as myths. In his view,
they do not try to win over the blanket of
“truthfulness.” They do not need it either as a blanket,
or as a fig-leaf: they are clean in the face of the
real, although they paint it in opposite colors. There
is absolutely no need to mix them in order to see that
they are essentially inseparable and complementary, i.e.
in accord with each other as plot lines of one and
the same miraculous story, which narrates to spite
the obvious not about general “truth” and truth in
general, but about man – both the true creator and the
true creation. Truth is by itself beyond the realm of
the myth. It is unconnected not only with the spirit and
soul, but also with the body. When we add two apples to
another two and thus get four, we do not deal with
“truth” at all. We deal only with apples.
Surely, it can happen that we get
not even this in the myth – and most certainly it proves
true. This is exactly what troubles our enlightened
consciousness, namely that the myth does not want to
“know” anything and would reduce all the apples of the
world to the one and only apple, turning it into the
greatest devilish temptation, rather than to agree to
count these apples “piece by piece” and “according to
the rules.” The myth seems to be naïve to us, and a man
who “thinks” in the face of its obligatory truths is
considered an ignorant. The program of science, on the
other hand, is to minimize thinking, to turn a
situation, in which one has not to think but only to
know what to say and to do, into a general situation
of human existence. This situation bans not only
childish whim, but also the very themes of mythological
thinking. Even immortality of the soul – the only thing
that can truly inspire man according to Dostoevsky and
Shestov – does not seem to us worthy of a serious
philosophical consideration in comparison with the
objects of knowledge. The extent to which we have lost
the art of thinking is demonstrated by the fact that
even what is the most fragile, the most free and
problematic in the world – the order of our own thinking
– seems to be the order of inanimate things that is
anonymous, natural and necessary. Meanwhile, it would be
enough to think over the only mythological topic which
is still not prohibited by science, the topic of the
caducity of any flash, in order to admit, in total
accord with the evolutionary theory, that “anything can
originate from anything whatsoever, that A can be
unequal to A,”16
just as I can be unequal to I. And if Logos, as it was
taught by philosophers from time immemorial, rules the
world, it does it by looking circumspectly at
Mythos which begot it, i.e. – in the eyes of common
sense – exactly at “anything whatsoever.” This begetting
did not take place “once upon a time,” not some time in
general – this is the way how the begetting takes place
in fairy-tales. It also did not take place “once and
forever,” sub specie aeternitatis – this is the
way only the stupidities which nobody can correct or
“gods of philosophers” (B. Pascal) with whom nobody
argues are begotten. This begetting takes place each
time and each time in the shortest instant of that
spontaneous spiritual initiation, emotional revelation
or existential shock, in which narratives cease to put
us to sleep. It turns out that the preservation of the
self and the feeling of reality, in putting
upside-down-turned mythological horizons endlessly into
the everyday world, are vitally problematic. In other
words, it happens against our will, but at our own
risk, that the myth begins to speak of our being and
that we have to stop keeping silence, if nobody
around us (and especially those who imagine themselves
to be half-gods) wants to see this. In this way even
reason with its victorious apocalyptic “from Myth to
Logos” is out of business. This is the only human
exception from divine rule: Logos cannot originate from
“anything whatsoever.”
We are troubled by the reality of
the impossible which is versified by the myth. Yet is it
not so that, in the sober forgetfulness of it, we forget
ourselves? Are we gods, for whom everything is possible
and who have no need either for common sense, or for
counting? Are we stones in which freedom of being
coincides with freedom of rest and fall? What is the use
of the total soberness of our knowledge if it totally
intoxicates our thought? The guaranteed truthfulness of
impersonal knowledge demonstrates not the mortality of
myth, but the mortal danger of thoughtless treatment of
it. It is exactly truth as a universal attribute of
knowledge which is, according to Shestov, a lie
that blocks the way to truth as a living substance of
revelation, as a reality of free, personal, solely
existent thinking.
This way has the only sense: to free
the thought from the burden of non-being in the face of
knowledge by reviving the gift of God, the miracle of
thinking as creation of impossible. This does not
require the “revival” of myth. Our consciousness is
mythologized enough even without that. We made the
school truth of equality of the impossible and the
unthinkable into the law of thinking, which turned out
to be more fundamental than Aristotle’s “dialectical law
of equality” long ago. And it was long ago that we
turned Aristotle himself, as well as Spinoza, into a
fool (at Hegel’s court) who held the equality of the
necessary and the sensible (and the knowable) to be a
theoretical maxim. In other words, considering things as
necessary, Aristotle did not see the natural inclination
of mind, with the inevitability of which we simply have
to deal, but the creative principle, which has to guide
us in cognition and which supposedly was followed by the
philosopher himself, who “found” in the world exactly
the same as any sane fool. Teaching of this absurd maxim
is in the compulsory program of all schools that deal
with quasi-scientific “purification” of living thinking:
in the program of primary “school of common sense” in
which our soul is sterilized and depreciated under the
guise of fighting against imprudence, and in the program
of “high school of knowledge” in which our spirit is
sterilized and depreciated under the pretence of
fighting with mythmaking.
Shestov himself gave a full account
of the inevitability of this two-sided sterilization
which is provided by the equality of universal school
maxima and the natural inclination of mind to present
the world in the light of necessity. Nevertheless, he
was also aware that to give in to the inevitable means
is not to show “wisdom,” but stubborn idolatry. You need
not think too much in order to give in to the mechanical
gravitation of the school order of thinking and to
demonstrate once again that its grip is deadly in the
straight sense of the word – it robs our sinful souls
and exhales the blessed spirit from us. Yet can we do
without thinking on our own? Is not thinking “necessary”
for the only reason that it is capable to lift us over
the routine of being and to make the most improbable
things possible? After all it is a miracle – to overcome
the impossible, our own nature, not by understanding
what is “peculiar” to all of us in it and in ourselves
and everywhere, but what goes contrary to our natural
self-satisfied capacity to see in everything what is due
to see, and in every existence the emanation of
impersonal entity that only hides itself behind the
school mask of the “object of cognition” and remains a
free, stirring and incomprehensible being, even if we
know all necessity that resides in it. If the impossible
is required in order to approach the living origin of
revelation, the mystery of Creator in the self and in
the world, then this requirement must be met
without making helpless gestures, referring to the
authority of the childish horror stories – to the
godless and unthinkable nature of the impossible crammed
in school myths about unreality. If paradise is lost
forever and if our God is dead, it is only because we do
not stop to dig the grave for our miraculous gift – the
grave of our truths which are irreproachably absurd in
their “total necessity.”
Only in overcoming the magical
forces of gravitation of ground, only in cognition of
the freedom of flight there is a real life and a
real dignity of thinking. If we want to understand this
divine vocation of man, we have no need to refer to the
word of God. The main thing is not that “the apotheosis
of groundlessness hides in itself the absolute ground of
Old Testament revelation.”17
“The main thing is to learn to think that if people […]
were sure that there is no God, this would mean nothing.
And if it were possible to prove as two and two that
there is no God, it would still mean nothing. Some would
say that you cannot demand this from man. Of course not!
Yet it is God that always demands the impossible from
us.”18
Did Shestov himself meet this
requirement? Was he capable to follow his philosophical
way up to the very end, “to open God’s world, in which
one could really live and die, for himself and for
everybody?”19
However, these questions themselves are more foolish
than the answers “yes” and “no” if we relate them to the
general consideration of his work. Only God knows the
answer (which depends on our belief or disbelief in His
existence), for nobody else can know our souls.
Only the souls, and not Shestov’s “texts,” will answer
whether his hopeless and immortal work succeeded.
Whether or not we were capable to reply to his
philosophical apotheosis in the same way as he himself
replied to the violent speeches of Jove and Plotinus.
Die glühende russische Erde –
with this he remained in the memory of his followers (L.
Zimni). It is an idle question whether the fire of the
earth would outweigh the “sand of the sea.” We must
finally take a stand with regard to a different thing:
“how long still” – how long still it will burn? Or
smoulder, namely as weighted, casual and, so to say,
well-tempered bitterness in the mouth? Do we have
anything what we could clearly say as an answer to
the call of this name – “burning Russian land?”
[1] For this
estimation of Apotheosis of Groundlesness by J.
Ajhenvald see B. Fondane, Rencontres avec Leon Chestov,
Paris 1982, p. 66.
[2] L. Shestov, Apofeoz bespočvennosti,
Sankt-Peterburg 1990, p. 54.
[3] Op. cit., p. 35.
[4] Op.cit., p. 172-173. – Cf. L.
Shestov, Načala i konci, Sobr. soč. 5, Sankt-Peterburg
1911, p. 193-197.
[5] About the metaphysical sense of
vsemstvo see L. Shestov, Na vesah Iova, Paris 1975, p.
25-93.
[6] L. Shestov, Apofeoz bespočvennosti,
p. 35-36.
[7] L. Shestov, Na vesah Iova, p. 154.
[8] L. Shestov, In Job’s Balances. On
the Sources of the Eternal Truths, Paris 1975, p. 235.
[9] See L. Shestov, Vlast ključej
(Potestas Clavium), Berlin 1923.
[10] L. Shestov, Načala i konci, p.
192.
[11] L. Shestov, Apofeoz
bespočvennosti, p. 59.
[12] Ibid., p. 178.
[13] N. Baranova-Shestova, Žizn Leva
Shestova, t. 2, Paris 1982, p. 193.
[14] L. Shestov, Na vesah Iova, p. 213.
[15] A note of Shestov from the archive
of A. Lazarev; see N. Baranova-Shestova, Žizn Leva
Shestova, t. 2, p. 212.
[16] L. Shestov, Apofeoz
bespočvennosti, p. 109.
[17] The letter of the father S.
Bulgakov to Shestov of the 22th of October 1938, N.
Baranova-Shestova, Žizn Leva Shestova, t. 2, p. 192.
[18] L. Shestov, Afini i Ierusalim, p.
269.
[19] The letter of E. Husserl to
Shestov of the 3rd of July 1929; see N.
Baranova-Shestova, Žizn Leva Shestova, t. 2., p. 331.
