Gorazd Kocijančič, National and University Library,
Ljubljana
SHESTOV’S AND LEVINAS’ FEAR
The important Shestov’s word
“groundlessness”, which was so aptly chosen for the
title of this symposium, does not aim at its historical
self-understanding but reveals how close to some
important features of post-modernity Shestov’s thought
is: in particular to those articulations of discourses
(in philosophy, literature and religion) where clear and
distinguishable limits are getting blurred and lost and
where discourses can merge one into the other because
their own most profound identity becomes questionable,
or even unclear.
This closeness was clearly
recognised by Emanuel Levinas, one of the most important
post-modern thinkers. In 1937 this French philosopher
opened some of the crucial questions concerning this
issue in his short review of Shestov’s book on
Kierkegaard1 with the
title »Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle (Vox
clamantis in deserto)«. 2
Approaching those questions with his usual
insightfulness Levinas reveals some of the basic tenets
of his own philosophy – and contemporary thought in
general. I would have fulfilled my task already if I
succeed in drawing your attention to this short review
which would undoubtedly deserve a more thorough analysis
than the one I am trying to present here, in particular
if you bear in mind the fruitful parallels that could be
drawn between Levinas’ thought and the work of Karl
Barth (a thinker who especially in his commentary to the
Epistle to the Romans resembles closely to Shestov) and
between Karl Barth and Shestov’s ethnical and spiritual
kinsmen, Jacques Derrida. 3
Kairos of the meeting between
Shestov and Levinas is of the utmost significance. This
is the time just before the Second World War, the time
of “preparations” for holocaust. This is the time when
one Jewish thinker reads the book of another Jewish
thinker. The thinker who is criticising the pretensions
of philosophy accusing it of having claims to encompass
the totality reads the thinker who has in his intensive,
congenial, passionate reading of Kierkegaard also
striven to express his “existential” criticism of the
pretensions of philosophy.
At the beginning of his review
Levinas hints at the connections between the critique of
rationality and the war: “The moral crisis which was
caused by the war of 1914 gave to people a very clear
sense of inefficiency of reason [raison], of the
fundamental incongruity between rationalistic
civilisation and the demands of the soul lost in the
anonymity of the general” (p. 87). He then adds that he
is aware that the Danish thinker aims at something
essentially more subtle. Kierkegaard’s philosophy, which
is according to Levinas hard to summarise, evades the
naivety of rationalism as well as doctrines of violence
– this phrase already suggests Nazism which was the
subject of his intelligent critique in his work
Quelques reflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlerisme,
publ. in 1934 – the naivety and doctrines that are
simplistic reactions to that crisis. Levinas presents
Kierkegaard’s thought primarily as a necessity of
raising existential questions, regardless of our answers
to them (“Is my speculation legitimately separated from
condition humaine, from human destiny and its death?”).
In his answer he argues against this suppositon and adds
: “We should respect the internal significance of events
which constitute our existence, before we interpret them
according to (en fonction) the universal order
constructed by reason.” (88) Levinas then defines
Shestov’s reading of Kierkegaard as a “struggle fought
by soul, abandoned in despair in the world governed by
reason and ethics – i.e. governed by Necessity, this
consequence of the original sin, as a struggle for the
freedom of the soul which should not have been limited
by logic or morals”.
However, Levinas’ review is not an
univocal approbation, despite his numerous praises (“Mr.
Shestov is particularly good at defining the peripeteias
of that struggle, Kierkegaard’s oscillations between
Abraham and Socrates”, p. 89; “this explanations surely
understand one of the essential aspects of Kierkegaard’s
thought”, ibid., “I highly recommend this book to all
readers who would like to rethink and revive their
Judaism as a religion” (90); “in Shestov’s existential
thought the religious philosophy re-evaluates the
questions of salvation, i.e. of the very message of
Judaism”, 90). Levinas praises the book’s vivacity,
poeticism and the symphonic unity and writes politely
that “in it we feel – which is not its least attraction
– the ideas of M. Shestov”, although he is not
astonished by that because he is “one of those who do
know Shestov’s work and his fight for Jerusalem and
against Athens” (89).4
He critically adds, however: “between those thinkers –
namely Shestov and Kierkegaard there exists an
irrefutable similarity which often causes certain
confusions”.
At the end of his text we sense the
philosopher’s fear of a religious man, the “helenised”
Jew’s fear of the uncivilised wildness of Shestov’s
paradoxes, and last but not least, one might also detect
the Jew’s fear of a Jewish thinker who in his openness
to the radical paradox remains open for Christianity.
(“Mr. Shestov, a Jewish philosopher, is certainly not a
philosopher of Judaism. In the heritage of Jerusalem he
does not distinguish the Old Testament from the New
one”, 90). This fear is even more crucial because
Levinas undoubtedly realises that Shestov’s work raises
“the questions which are fundamentally important for
every religious philosophy; these questions define the
level where the fact of religion itself (le fait
religieux lui-meme, 90) is posited.”.
The grounding of Levinas’ objection
to Shestov’s thought could perhaps be summarized by a
bit too daring extrapolation and it could be argued that
in his opinion philosophy could not be abandoned to the
wild unpredictability of God, of His absolute power,
without its abdication to the logos which is its
substance (One could see here the programme of Levinas’
proper synthesis of Hellenism and Judaism): “for
example, we are not utterly convinced that knowledge for
Kierkegaard is simply identified with evil and that it
is not rather indispensable and fortunate element of his
dialectics…” (86).
We can more or less agree with
Levinas’ fear and his objection to Shestov – an
objection which, of course, does not focus on the
interpretation of Kierkegaard only but also on the
fundamental structure of philosophy itself – but we can
also disagree. However the main problem lies elsewhere.
When we read Levinas’ critique of Shestov’s argument,
the critique of his path at the crossroad as defined by
Levinas, the question arises whether such an alternative
– logos on one side, and a super-logical, absolute God
of revelation on the other, Socrates on one, Abraham on
the other, Athens on one side, Jerusalem on the other –
whether such and alternative properly understands and
summarises Shestov’s thought at all.
* * *
In order to understand the real
character of Shestov’s fundamental alternative one could
knock on every door. With other words: the old master is
relentlessly repeating himself, and he is doing this
with all the passion and intensity characteristic of all
genuine thinkers. One of the proper entrances is surely
the text Parmenides in chains – one of the most
important Shestov’s thematisations of philosophy. It was
published as a separate book and it also represents the
first chapter of his important work Athens and
Jerusalem. The title of the work openly alludes to
Aechylus’ drama Prometeus desmotes, “Prometheus in
chains”, and with its conflation of metaphors hints at
the horizon in which Shestov reads philosophy. This
texture of literature and philosophy is not only alluded
in the title of Shestov’s essay but also in the fact
that the title emphasizes the poet-thinker who has
written his thoughts in hexameters – a poet-thinker who
has been proclaimed for a mere philosopher and a poete
manqué by a more recent generations which were
insensitive to the specific literariness of archaic
literature.
The summary of this essay is simple.
With words of Shestov himself taken from the
introduction to his “Athens and Jerusalem”:
Parmenides in chains endeavours to show that great
philosophers have lost in their race for knowledge the
Creator’s most precious gift – freedom.”
5 It appears that Levinas was
right. However, this is only an appearance. If the essay
is read more closely, Shestov’s treatment of
philosophical texts reveals itself in a kind of symbolic
condensation. In this text the Russian philosopher
almost does not speak about Parmenides. Using more or
less Aristotelian glasses (the work is also introduced
by a quotation from Aristotle “necessity does not obey
persuasions”), Shestov ignores mystical dimension of
pre-philosophical, sapiential insight and projects to
Parmenides the issues of modernity, but only to
paradoxically criticise the Aristotelian understanding
and to emphasize the possibility of utterly other
philosophical insight found in Plato: “Aristotle would
bless our knowledge and Plato would curse it” (op.
cit. , p. 340). Aristotle’s criticism of Parmenides
– as if Parmenides is forced to follow the phaenomena
and as if he was forced similarly to other pre-Socratic
thinkers into the direction of Aristotelian ontology by
the truth itself – this Aristotelian criticism is only a
disclosure of that which Aristotle himself, “this high
priest of visible and invisible church of all who think”
(29) should have been criticising. Shestov asks us: “Why
does the truth have power over Parmenides and Alexander
and why do not Parmenides and Alexander have power over
the truth?” (op. cit., p. 340). Aristotle was the
man “who knew the bitterness of the insult” and the
worst insult he experienced is described in Shestov’s
dramatic account of Academy’s disputes as Plato’s
invention of transcendence. With Shestov’s words: “How
to force Plato to stop talking? How to force him to
submit himself to necessity not only in the visible,
empirical world but also in thoughts where he should
give to necessity all the honours it is entitled to?
Necessity is not a necessity to those who sleep but to
those who are awake. And those who are awake, those who
see necessity understand what necessity really is
(istinnoe suščee), while Plato with his impudence and
effrontery leads us away from everything that really
exists to the realm of fantastic, chimerical,
illusionary and therefore fake” (op. cit., 342).
The story is then transported to
modern philosophy and is too long to be summarised here.
But the crucial thing has already been said. Shestov’s
critique of rationality stems from the radically
envisaged absoluteness of the transcendence which is in
the majority of Shestov’s texts stylized into the
otherness of the Biblical God. In Parmenides in
chains this is not the case. The work reveals the
radical deliverance of thought which transposes
Shestov’s usual self-portrait, i.e. thinking of God in
the tradition of Augustinianism and nominalism, to the
very root of Western thought, before every dichotomy of
though and revelation: “It is obvious that the most
unbearable and horrible thought for Aristotle was the
thought that our terrestrial life is not the ultimate,
final, real life and that it is possible, to a certain
extent, to wake up from it as we wake up from the sleep
into the state of awakening… Plato’s thought about
“dreamers” undermines the very basis of human thought.”
(op. cit., p. 346)
Shestov obviously relegates to Plato
some of the legacies of “the father Parmenides” –
without inauguration of the Being which devaluates the
world into appearance and transforms the state of being
awaken to the ecstasy of the only One otherwise
hisunderstanding of that dialectics of the sleep and
awakening would not be possible. And to be honest,
Shestov appears to be aware of some of those issues.
Parmenídes desmótes is - at least as the father of
Platonism - at the same time Parmenídes lyómenos ( =
Parmenides set free, Parmenides without chains) despite
the fact that Shestov claimed the opposite. And this
very trick makes Levinas’ critique of Shestov too short.
Thus the question of the relationship between thought
and revelation in the work of Shestov should not be left
to Levinas’ formulation of the question – which is, of
course, expressed in even more simple form by some other
historians of the Russian thought.
Without close reading of Shestov’s
texts thought should not be exploited against
revelations or the opposite; on the contrary, the
question should be asked to what extent, according to
Shestov, the thought, philosophical thought alone, is
able to undermine “the very basis” of the thought
itself.
Jerusalem and Athens could perhaps both be found in
Greece. And perhaps Levinas should have been even more
afraid.
Translated by the author and Nike K.
Pokorn
[1] The book was
translated by T. Rageot and B. Schloezer, Paris: Vrin
1936.
[2] Levinas’ review, which was first
published in Revue des études juives, II, July–December
1937, n. 3, p. 139–141, is quoted from the anthology of
Levinas’ texts, published under the title L’intrigue de
l’infini by Marie-Anne Lescourret, Paris: Flammarion
1994, p. 87–90.
[3] I’ m referring to J. F. Gould,
Levinas en Barth. Een godsdienstwijsgerige en etische
vergelijking, 1984, German translation: Emmanuel Levinas
und Karl Barth, Bonn: Bouvier Verlag 1992, and G. Ward,
Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, Cambridge
1995.
[4] Cf. similar judgment by S. N.
Bulgakov, in Nekotorie čerti religioznago mirovozrenija
L. I. Šestova, published in S. N. Bulgakov, Sočinenija v
dvuh tomah, Moskva 1993, I, p. 521.
[5] Afini i Ierusalim, Predslovie, v: L.
Šestov, Sočinenija v dvuh tomah, t. 1, Moskva 1993, p.
332.
