Boris Šinigoj, Ljubljana
THE GREAT AND FINAL STRUGGLE OF LEV
SHESTOV:
FROM DARING UNCOVERINGS OF THE GROUNDLESSNESS OF THOUGHT
TO TREMENDOUS REVELATIONS OF DEATH
What
is philosophy? And what is its task?
Jésus
sera en agonie jusqu’à la fin du monde:
il ne faut pas dormir pendant ce temps-là.
Blaise Pascal1
In his paper entitled “In Memory of
a Great Philosopher,”2
Lev Shestov provides some valuable information about his
encounters with the founder of modern phenomenology,
Edmund Husserl. Although Husserl strived to present
philosophy as a strict science based on cognitive
principles and the self-evidences of reason, which
Shestov always strongly opposed, the two immediately
became friends after meeting for the first time at a
philosophical symposium in Amsterdam in 1928. Shestov
was pleasantly surprised to learn that Husserl himself
had given the initiative to meet in spite of being aware
of the enormous differences in their thinking.3
He was even more attracted by Husserl’s radical
philosophical passion and preoccupation with which he
attempted, using Cartesian principles of thought, to
reestablish philosophy as a science of absolute truths.
At the same time, he recognized in Husserl’s rationality
his own alter ego, which again challenged him to
struggle with every self-evident or obvious matter of
thought in order to free the human mind of its own bonds
and awaken it for true revelations.
The emphatic and passionate
philosophical attitude of this strict philosopher
reminded Shestov of the fatal experience of “to be or
not to be” and the “time out of joint” in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, which had drawn Shestov himself to philosophy.
Later on, after becoming better acquainted with
Kierkegaardian thought, Shestov was no longer surprised
at Husserl’s suggestion to study more intensively the
works of Kierkegaard, as he soon recognized in the
radical attitude of this strict philosopher the true
embodiment of the famous Dane’s fundamental statement
entweder-oder (i.e. “either-or”). Shestov’s account
of the radical philosophical attitude of his great
intellectual antagonist is today confirmed not only by
the notes of Sister Adelgundis Jaegerschmid, preserving
Husserl’s contemplations from the last years of his
life,4 but also by
the philosopher’s early notes dating from 1906. These
reveal a true existential crisis and a search, both
uncovering his struggle with himself as the first and
only possible means of a philosopher’s being at the
beginning of his path:5
First of all I shall name a
general task which I must solve for myself, if I
am to call myself a philosopher at all. I am
thinking about a certain criticism of the mind,
a criticism of the logical and practical, even
an evaluating mind. Without generally clarifying
the significance, essence, methods and principal
aspects of criticism of the mind; without
creating, conceiving, strengthening and
establishing a general concept for it, I truly
cannot live (kann ich wahr und wahrhaftig nicht
leben). I have indulged sufficiently in the
torments of obscurity, of rambling doubt. I must
attain inner certainty. I know this involves
something great and the greatest, I know great
geniuses have failed in this; and if I were to
compare myself with them, I would have to fall
into despair in advance ...6
In contrast with Husserl’s fear of
falling into despair too early, Shestov takes
Kierkegaard’s view and sees despair as the place where
philosophy originates.7
Yet this philosophy is no longer based on the
self-evidences of thought in order to attain the
absolute validity of its findings, but rather unveils
the real face of truth in the groundlessness and
uncertainty of the mind, in the existential paradoxes
and absurdities of the world, in man’s caprices and the
coincidental length of Cleopatra’s nose, in madness and
insanity, which liberate the space of man’s
understanding of unreasonable and irrational seeing, for
reasons of the heart and faith. In brief, this
philosophy teaches us how to love the abyss beneath our
feet so that we may learn to fly.8
And yet Shestov as the herald of the contemporary
hermeneutics of suspicion, which always seeks the
meaning of philosophical questionings far beneath their
established forms, had to exclaim to himself upon his
first meeting with Husserl: how close we are in our
basic philosophical attitudes and how unrelenting is the
struggle between our differing philosophical positions.
How incomprehensible is the philosophical fate that one
finds a fellow fighter and friend in an intellectual
antagonist.
When, in their discussions, the two
men touched on the key question: “What is philosophy?”,
they initially crashed like two mighty mountains whose
weight cannot be measured or otherwise weighed. Only one
of them recognized gravity according to the principles
of reason, while the other preferred to believe in Job’s
scales, where sadness and suffering weigh heavier than
all the sands of the sea.9
Yet the very next moment they managed to come together
as if guided by the old Hasidic statement: not like
mountains, which are incapable of this, but like humans
who come together to embrace in greeting.10
It was then that Shestov, heartened by the great
examples of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, stepped
forward and passionately asserted: “Philosophy is the
great and final struggle”. But Husserl immediately
rejected this and, despite their shared enthusiasm,
sharply replied: “Nein, Philosophie ist Besinnung!”
11 Yet his radical
philosophical position nevertheless confirmed Shestov’s
reply.
If the true meaning of philosophy is
therefore a struggle, then this certainly can’t be just
any struggle, let alone a testing of strength. And least
of all a bare verbal quarrelling, which to Shestov, as
well as to the contemporary Russian writer, Rozanov12,
is reminiscent of a fight on the verbal level and is
also quite common among philosophers. That Shestov was
well aware of this is easily confirmed in one of his
witty jokes, which is not lacking in self-irony:
The struggle is father to
all, king to all, Heraclites once taught; the
important thing is to struggle, but why one
struggles is another story altogether ... The
entire history of human thought – both
philosophical and theological – is the history
of a struggle, not a struggle for life, but for
death. This leads to the idea that our
conception of truth as something that cannot
stand contradiction originates precisely in the
passionate need for a struggle. Because elderly
persons – philosophers and theologians are
normally old men – can no longer fight with
their fists, they came up with the idea that
there is only one truth so that they could fight
at least on the verbal level. The truth, on the
other hand, is far from being ‘a one and only’,
and is certainly not something that people would
have to fight over. 13
When, in his discussion with
Husserl, Shestov defended philosophy as the great and
final struggle, he was not engaging in an ordinary
polemic, but rather in a decisive spiritual struggle
that is always first a struggle with oneself as a
philosopher. This is a struggle in which Shestov
endeavoured again and again not to conquer other
philosophers, but his own self, inasmuch as he was still
rooted in the world of intellectual self-evidences based
on the principle of noncontradiction as a defender of
the consistency of thought. He named it the great and
final struggle, because through this struggle he
attempted to find the way to contemplation of the only
thing that is needed: not by speculatively accepting the
impersonal logic of pure reason, but by heartedly
questioning one’s own being; not by systematically
referring to the self-evident principles of thought, but
by unscrupulously uncovering the groundlessness of one’s
own mind.
If the meaning of philosophy as a
struggle is therefore to aim for the great and final
things beyond ordinary polemics on truth and mutual
challenges with words, then what is its task? Shestov
finds the answer in Kierkegaard:
The task of philosophy is to
liberate itself from the power of rationalism
and to find in itself the courage (and such
courage gives man only despair) to search for
the truth in what most people usually consider
to be paradox or absurd. It is where, according
to our experience and understanding, all
possibilities end; where, in our opinion, we
lean against the wall of the absolutely
impossible; where it is very obvious that there
is no way out, that all has ended forever, that
man no longer has anything to do or contemplate,
that he can only watch and cool down; where
people are abandoning and have to abandon any
attempts at searching and struggling whatsoever;
it is only there that ... the real and true
struggle begins – and this struggle is the task
of philosophy. 14
In other words, the task of
philosophy is to teach us to live in groundlessness and
uncertainty of mind, to keep us awake by relentlessly
contemplating unanswerable questions, to make us
sensitive to the truth that is not self-evident, to the
truth concealed in the paradox and the absurd, to
prepare us for the impossible and the unexpected, the
unheard of and the unthinkable. For this is the only way
that philosophy can prepare us to heartedly persist in
expecting the unexpected, whether by encouraging us with
the fiery example of Ephesian’s “hope in that which is
unhoped,” 15 or with
the redemptiveness of the Apostles’ bold preachings of
“hope against hope,” 16
which awakens desperate souls for “a new heaven and a
new earth.” 17 And
all of this for the sole purpose of preventing us from
falling asleep as did the first disciples of Jesus. If
we are to believe Pascal (and Shestov did), an
eschatological drama is still taking place in the
Gethsemane Garden as a mortal struggle of Jesus, and
will continue until the end of the world. And here we
can contribute our struggle with our own somnolence,
i.e. our own philosophy, so that we may prepare
ourselves, with “a hope that does not humiliate,”18
for the very end, which at the same time holds the
promise of a new beginning.
For the disciples sleeping in the
Gethsemane Garden later awoke in the flames of the
Spirit in time to speak of this, and were able to taste
in this world the novelty of life awaiting us – at least
as far as we still sincerely believe and hope – beyond
the present-day Athens and Jerusalem, behind the unknown
and undiscovered walls of the city of Heaven.
Two eyesights? If only the second is
real,
what should we do with the first?
There are more things in
heaven and earth,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
William Shakespeare19
So that we may embark on the path of
awakening from the long sleep of preconceived
philosophical convictions about the necessity of the
general applicability and self-evidence of human
understandings that are obscuring our view on “more
things in heaven and earth”, let us contemplate the
question of true understanding according to Shestov. It
seems that Shestov comes closest to this question in his
story of the angel of death,20
who comes to man in order to separate the soul from his
body. Yet it happens that the angel of death comes too
early. In this case the angel does not touch the visited
soul, but imperceptibly leaves him a pair of its
innumerable eyes, which now allow him to see something
completely new, something he had not dreamed of in his
most daring dreams. Being thus endowed with new eyes, he
can no longer see like people, but like angels, like
beings who are not from our world, but from other,
nonterrestrial worlds.
According to Shestov, Plato and
Dostoyevsky were among the rare few endowed with this
second eyesight, though it was not always at their
disposal. This is because endowed eyesight, in contrast
to natural eyesight, is not born of natural necessity,
but of supranatural freedom, which can never be fully
acquired. For it is with and by this eyesight that
unheard of and unthinkable realities are revealed to us,
realities which remain completely invisible and
inaccessible to natural eyesight. This is a turning
point for the observer with second eyesight, something
that marks him forever. Something similar happened to
Dostoyevsky’s hero from the underfloor, who was willing
to sacrifice the entire world for a cup of tea if he
would only be saved from it afterwards. Or to the rare
lovers of wisdom in Plato’s cave, who returned to the
cave after a mystic ascent to the Good: where people
with natural eyesight see reality, a man with second
eyesight henceforth sees only shadows and
hallucinations. And in that which does not exist for the
multitude of prisoners in Plato’s cave or, in the words
of Dostoyevsky’s underfloor hero, for “vsemstvo”21
(all of us), because it appears impossible and absurd,
he with second eyesight observes the true and only
reality.
Yet even those with the greatest
gift of second eyesight cannot avoid “the struggle
between the two eyesights – natural and unnatural – the
struggle whose outcome seems as difficult and mysterious
as its beginning ...”22
And this not only applies for Plato, whose dialogues are
dramatically packed with the opposing views of various
speakers, or Dostoyevsky, who repeatedly attempts to
reach a reconciliation between various protagonists with
first and second eyesight in their great novels.
According to Shestov, this is even more pronounced in
Gogol, at least in those works in which he untiringly
expressed the morbid feeling that we and the world are
governed by rational thinking with its grotesquely
abstract principles, which is completely alienated from
true reality.
Much like Plato did not have in mind
a certain underground cave, but used it to allude to the
entire cosmos as a lacking world of plurality, and just
as Dostoyevsky came to realize after returning from
katorga that life on the outside is basically not
different at all, so Gogol in his Dead Souls did
not speak only of a certain district in Russia, but with
his second eyesight looked on the entire world as a sad
and enchanted kingdom. Even more. As he himself
confessed, the heroes of his works were not used to
expose and ridicule those who should have been raised to
the level of his better eyesight, but to continuously
ironize and question his own self for as long as he
still remained rooted in the fallen human world despite
his endowed eyesight. Or as he revealed, during his stay
in Nice in the winter of 1843/44, in The Rule of Life
in the World: “The beginning, root and foundation of
everything is love of God. But in our case this
beginning is at the end and we love everything that
exists in this world more than God ...”23
We can, therefore, agree with
Shestov that, in a similar way as Dostoyevsky later on,
Gogol had considerable difficulty and no real solution
in attempting to reconcile his two eyesights: “His
works, filled with wittiness and incomparable humour,
are the most moving world tragedy, and the same could be
said of his personal life.”24
Is, then, the gift of eyesight that uncovers true
reality a curse or a blessing? Does a curse or blessing
mean anything at all in the area accessible with second
eyesight? Does observation with the eyes of the angel of
death not extend far beyond good and evil? Is it then
sensible to ask such questions? Or does the solution to
the riddle of second eyesight and its attitude towards
first eyesight lie precisely in the unanswerableness of
these and similar questions? For according to Shestov,
the entire purpose of second eyesight is “to ask
questions that have no answers simply because they so
obstinately demand answers.”25
Is there not, beneath the ashes of the apparent
absurdity of such activity, a glittering flame of man’s
original longing to return to lost Eden, where
unanswerable questions will no longer require answers
because they will simply be needless?
In such cases, it would be better
not to respond to unanswerable questions, but rather
allow them to speak inside us in silence and awaken a
premonition of the unutterable. Yet this can only be
attained in a personal and existential way. Because,
according to Shestov, knowledge ends where the first
eyesight ends, and the second eyesight marks the
beginning of belief in the fact that “something is just
beginning here, but ending elsewhere”.26
And so we slowly begin to sense what we are to do with
the first eyesight if the second opens up to us, and
what to do when we are divided between the ignorant
knowledge of first eyesight and the knowing ignorance of
second eyesight. If we follow Shestov’s apophatic turn
of philosophy from Husserl’s endeavours for strictly
scientific thinking to the bold acceptance of the
inconstancy of caprice and all that is groundless and
unusual in life, we are following what Plato saw from
his cave and Dostoyevsky from the underfloor, but only
in the first premonition of hope and faith on the path
towards true life. Yet precisely at the meeting point of
knowledge, hope and faith there may be a possibility of
mediating between the two eyesights, inasmuch as they
cannot be reconciled, for we are always tempted to
subordinate one to the other?
To hear this question more clearly
in our minds, let us take a look at a living example of
mediation between the first and second eyesight. It
seems that the unique attempt of such mediation was
demonstrated by the late Wittgenstein. After becoming
aware of the limits of the logically structured world in
his youth, he took on a new eyesight and suddenly saw
the unutterable and fell silent.27
Yet he not only made use of the written language, but
for several years remained truly faithful to the bold
testimonies of his youth, until finally returning among
cave men following the example of Plato’s philosophers.
Here he not only devoted himself to daily language as
Socrates once did, but also to completely unarticulated
human voices.28 And
so in his later philosophical studies of language games
he risked a genuine attempt at connecting the two
eyesights – the natural and mystical – using the
symbolism of unarticulated voices to awaken in us, like
Dostoyevsky’s underfloor man with a caprice, the
premonition of bottomless depth and liberating
unanswerability of the last philosophical questions.
On a symbolic level, the role of
unarticulated speech in Wittgenstein’s search for an
appropriate attitude towards the unutterable is
surprisingly close to Tolstoy’s story The Three
Hermits, which was his favourite. The story speaks
of hermits on a solitary island who were once visited by
a bishop who happened to be passing by on a ship. As a
servant of God, he first asked them what they were doing
for their redemption and how they were serving God and
praying. They replied that they did not know how to
serve God, that they were only serving one another and
praying: “Three are ye, three are we, have mercy on us!”
Moved by such holy simplicity, the bishop smiled and
spent the rest of the day trying to teach them the
prayer “Our Father”. After the three hermits had finally
learned the prayer with considerable difficulty, the
bishop returned to his ship and, thankful to God for
letting him do a good deed, sailed away pacified. Night
soon fell, but the bishop continued to stare out to sea,
absorbed in thought, in the direction of the island. In
the distance he suddenly noticed a light that was
rapidly approaching, and then saw the three hermits
running on the water, illuminated by light. When they
reached the ship, the three of them called out in one
voice that they had forgotten the prayer and asked him
to teach it to them again. Struck by fear, the bishop
crossed himself and uttered: “Your own prayer will reach
the Lord, men of God. I am not worthy of teaching you.
Pray also for us sinners.”29
Revelation of death: a revelation of
true life?
Только смерть и безумие
смерти
может разбудить людей от кошмара жизни.
Lev Shestov 30
Tolstoy not only inspired
Wittgenstein, but also Shestov himself, particularly his
later works, such as the unfinished Notes of a Madman
or Death of Ivan Ilych and Master and Man,
in which the aged writer was deeply involved with the
question of passing away and death. Like Gogol, from
whom he borrowed the title of Notes, also Tolstoy began
to question his own self, to examine his own being and
nonbeing through the literary treatment of the last
questions. Yet his later works not only reveal an
extreme existential engagement, but also a deep loss of
trust and faith in the sense and self-evidence of the
moral and community order which his heroes always
experienced in a unique way when confronting death.
For example, in the Notes of a
Madman, the rich landowner, faced with a favourable
opportunity for a profitable land sale, is suddenly
overcome by a dreadful and unbearable anguish without
any apparent external reason. An anguish accompanied by
an uncontrollable fear and indescribable horror. An
anguish which, in Tolstoy’s words, is by its feeling
comparable to the tormenting nausea felt before vomiting
and which, despite its spiritual nature, man also feels
physically.31 This
is the anguish arising from the horror felt after
looking back on one’s own life, which suddenly and
dramatically revealed itself to the hero in all its
questionability and absurdity one peaceful evening in a
drowsy inn:
Death seems dreadful, but if
you remember, if you think about life, then
dying life is dreadful. Life and death
seemed to be blending into one. Something was
tearing the spirit into pieces, but was unable
to do so. Once again I went to see those who
were sleeping, once again I tried to fall
asleep, again all the same horror – red, white,
square. Something is tearing away, but has not
torn off. 32
What is this “red, white,
square-shaped horror” that has, in the midst of a drowsy
world, penetrated so ruthlessly into the hero’s soul and
driven it to the verge of madness? Beforehand it had
been free of any doubts or uncertainties, life had
followed its ordinary course, there were no open and
unanswered questions, just more or less reliable
answers. Now, by some sort of witchcraft, everything has
suddenly changed, all answers, all certainty and
stability have vanished, time has jumped out of its
hinges, solid ground has disappeared in groundlessness,
the steel wagon of life has derailed and become
distorted along the way to the point of
unrecognizability: “All that has remained are the giant
and completely new questions with their eternal,
intrusive companions – restlessness, doubt, and a
senseless, unnecessary, gnawing and even uncontrollable
fear.”33
Has not the anguished soul with this
“red, white, square-shaped horror” only now truly
awakened? And has not this horror drawn from the bottom
of its deep sleep in a stable and self-sufficient world
an unknown longing for true life? Or has it in reality
drowned even deeper into a false sleep, where in
contrast to the common world of those who are awake,
each sleepy individual dreams his own imagined reality?
So when is awakening real and when is it not? Where does
common sense end and where does madness begin? Is it all
merely a strange hallucination of an unbalanced mind? If
we preserve the criterion of general self-evidence, the
question is determined in advance and Tolstoy’s hero is
condemned to madness. Even if others do not notice this,
he himself is well aware of it: “Madness is in the fact
that everything which seemed real and actually existent
has now become hallucinatory and vice-versa, what
previously seemed hallucinatory now appears to be the
only reality.”34
In Tolstoy’s later period, however,
it is precisely this madness that drives man beyond the
daily experience and liberates the soul for the
premonition of a different life, for completely unknown
questions and undreamt-of visions. Ultimately even for
the “last bold jump into uncertainty”, which is done for
us by another force and not by ourselves alone.35
At least that is how the confrontation with one’s own
passing away and death is experienced by Ivan Ilych, a
simple public servant and the second of Shestov’s heroes
from Tolstoy’s later works, whose spiritual suffering in
the face of an insidious disease remains concealed and
inaccessible to all around him, even his close family,
despite his efforts to reveal it. Finally, utterly
exhausted and dejected, he finds himself in complete and
hopeless solitude, a “solitude in the midst of a densely
populated city and numerous acquaintances and family
members, a solitude that cannot be more complete
anywhere, neither in the depths of the sea nor in the
earth”36.
At that very moment he is
irrepressibly engulfed with questions to which he can
find no answer, and an unheard inner voice begins to
speak inside him, unrestrainedly casting doubt on his
entire life:
Maybe I did not live as I
should have? How is that, if I did everything
that had to be done? ... What, then, do you want
now? To live? Live how? Live as you live in
court, when the executor announces: ‘The court
is coming’? The court is coming, judgment is
coming. Here is your judgment. But I’m not
guilty ... What for, why all this terror? There
is no explanation. Suffering, death ... Why?
37
The dying man finally realizes in
horror that he is standing in front of a dreadful court
which has eliminated the difference between good and
evil, before an invisible judge who sentences everyone.
Not only he, Ivan Ilych, but all people are guilty
because it is not possible to resist death, and the fact
that we are condemned in advance is impossible to
understand. “Death cuts all invisible threads tying us
together on earth with beings similar to ourselves”.38
Yet for both Tolstoy and Shestov it is precisely the
complete solitude of a dying man in the face of death
that is an unavoidable condition for and beginning of
the true conversion of a soul.
As in Tolstoy’s first two stories,
Master and Man first presents man in ordinary,
generally accepted conditions of existence, only to
suddenly place him into a complete existential solitude.
This time it happens one winter night to the hero of the
story, Brehunov, a country merchant whose arrogant greed
to conclude a favourable business deal forces him to
spend the night outdoors in his coach together with his
servant. Despite the danger of being caught in a
snowstorm in the midst of an unsettled countryside,
until the very end Brehunov staunchly believes in
himself and in the power of his mind and will, which had
saved him so many times in his life. Remembering the
pleasant moments spent a few hours ago in the warm home
of a rich native in Griškino, he nevertheless have some
regrets about setting out on that night in spite of the
snowstorm. But he finds comfort in the thought that the
true reality of his life is in that warm room where he
was received as a distinguished guest and served hot tea
and snacks, and not here in a snowy field in the middle
of nowhere, where he and his servant are freezing
mercilessly, lost and forgotten by all.
But together with the cold, a
certain doubt as to the accuracy of his convictions
slowly began to penetrate Brehunov’s mind. Was it not
time for him to accept the uncertainty of the boundary
position in which he had found himself because of his
own self-will as the only true reality, and courageously
confront the danger of death? No, he will rather abandon
his helpless servant and coach, and ride away on his
horse to seek salvation alone. And so he attempts, one
last time, to defeat the invisible enemy with his own
strength and ingenuity, yet this enemy is becoming more
frightful by the minute. Soon after his initial
floundering in the search for the right path to his
rescue and the piercing shriek released from his horse’s
lungs in fearful agony before death, Brehunov is
suddenly overcome by a frantic fear and jumps from the
horse. Lying in the deep snow on the verge of
desperation, he remembers his reputation in the world,
clutching onto it as if it were the last straw of his
salvation:
Grove, rocks, lease, pubs,
house with iron roof and granary, heir... How
will all this subsist? What is this? It can’t
be... Is this not a dream?
39
Yet despite his enormous desire to
awaken from a bad winter dream, this awakening cannot
occur. At least not an awakening in this world. That is
because the real awakening will happen to Brehunov when,
with the last ounce of his strength, he drags himself to
the sleigh and, in a state of completely
incomprehensible enrapturement, begins to fervently
revive his servant, whom he had previously abandoned
with such indifference. After his rubbing proves
unsuccessful, he wants to warm the body with his own and
lies on his servant. Suddenly he himself becomes numb in
his final weakness. It is then that he begins to feel “a
special happiness that he had never experienced before”,
until, in his last dying moments, he is overcome by an
unusual feeling which, faced with the worthlessness of
his previous way of life, reveals true life in the
liberating embrace of death:
I am
going, I am going, his entire being exclaimed joyfully,
deeply moved. He felt that he was free and that nothing
was holding him back any more. 40
All these literary heroes have their
own actual starting point and origin in the deep life
experience of Tolstoy himself. Not only in the frequent
autobiographic similarities regarding external
circumstances, but also in the deepest psychological
sense and in spiritual distress, which reached their
peak with the old man’s escape from home and his fatal
cold, which chained the lonely writer in the midst of
his flight to an alien bed at a remote railway station,
where he was visited by death.
Despite his criticism of Bergson’s
philosophy which, due to its generalizing, abstract
nature, inevitably fails in face of the utterly
unpredictable, chaotic and capricious inner life of man,
Shestov is at least right when he ultimately confirms
the French philosopher’s thought that only great artists
are a source for the true inner experiences of man.41
However, this does not necessarily
exclude philosophers, at least not as regards the
existential contemplation of the last questions.
According to Shestov, the fervor and fearless candour
with which Tolstoy devoted himself to the question of
passing away and death in the last years of his life can
only be compared to the reflections of the greatest
philosophers from ancient Greece onwards: “If Plato is
right in saying that philosophers aspire for nothing
other than passing away and death, ἀποθνήσκειν καὶ
τεθνάναι, then we must confess that very few of our
contemporaries devoted themselves so entirely to
philosophy as did Tolstoy.”42
And although the late Tolstoy tackles the question of
death in the form of tales and stories, his intention is
not so much to write high-class literature as to
fearlessly describe the “dreadful judgment”, where
life’s ideals are no more binding than an occasional
caprice, and where the invisible judge cannot be moved
by even the greatest achievements of man in the world.
And so in the background of reading Tolstoy’s later
works, Shestov’s daring apology for the insanity of the
mind reveals itself as an aspiration for its
liberalization for the final truth, as already expressed
in the medieval Russian tradition of the “jurodivs” or
fools in the name of Christ.
And so to conclude our encounter
with Shestov, instead of looking at Husserl’s disciple
Heidegger and his phenomenal definitions of man’s
being-here as “being-towards-death”43,
let us turn one last time to Pascal in order to reawaken
in ourselves a susceptibility for not only the
originally existential, but also for the spiritual and
religious dimension of this most disquieting of the last
questions. If we are to believe Shestov’s interpretation
of Pascal’s mystical vision of Jesus’ death struggle in
the Gethsemane Garden, that God himself had added his
endless suffering to Job’s scale, and that at the end of
the world the suffering of God and mankind would weigh
heavier than all the sand in the world ,44
then from this eschatological point of view Shestov’s
“revelations of death” not only appear as “revelations
of true life”, 45
but even allow us to see death itself as a mysterious
gift. Not only in the tradition of medieval mystical
poetry by St. Francis, who boldly glorifies sister
death, but also in the contemporary philosophical
thoughts of the late Jacques Derrida, who shares with
Shestov an eschatological leaning as well as the
heritage of the Jewish spiritual tradition:
The gift
that God bestows upon me by taking me under his view and
into his hands while remaining unreachable, the
horrifyingly asymmetrical gift of this mysterium
tremendum gives me responsibility, awakens me to the
responsibility that he grants to me only by inflicting
me with death, the mystery of death, the new experience
of death. 46
Translated by Suzana Stančič
[1] “Jesus will be
in agony until the end of the world: during this time we
must not sleep.” Misli (Thoughts) (553), translated into
Slovene by Janez Zupet, Celje 1986.
[2] Cf. L. Shestov, Med razumom in
razodetjem (Between Reason and Revelation), translated
by Borut Kraševec, Celje 2001 (=MRR), p. 170-196.
[3] Ibid., p. 171.
[4] Cf. S. Adelgundis Jaegerschmid OSB,
“Pogovori z Edmundom Husserlom (Conversations with
Edmund Husserl) (1931-1936)”, in: Bogoslovni vestnik
4/1988, particularly p. 446: “Philosophy is a passionate
will to know the being ... All philosophy is a
philosophy of the beginning, a philosophy of life and
death. We are always starting from the beginning ...”
[5] Cf. B. Šinigoj, “Prvi in edini možni
način filozofove biti” (The first and only possible
means of a philosopher’s being”, in: Anthropos 1-2/1992,
p. 21-25.
[6] Husserliana Vol. II, Introduction,
p. vii-viii; Taken from the introductory study by Ivo
Urbančič, in: E. Husserl, Kartezijanske meditacije
(Cartesian Meditations), translated by Mirko Hribar and
I. Urbančič, Ljubljana 1975, p. 14
[7] Cf. L. Shestov, “Kierkegaard – the
Religious Philosopher” (five lectures for Radio-Paris,
autumn 1937), in: MRR, p. 81.
[8] Cf., ibid., “Getsemanska noč –
Pascalova filozofija” (Gethsemane night – Pascal’s
philosophy), in: MRR, p. 62.
[9] Cf. Job 6, 2-3.
[10] Cf. Martin Buber, Pripovedi
hasidov (Tales of the Hasidim), translated by Tomo Virk,
Ljubljana 1991, p. 103.
[11] “No, philosophy is consideration.”
Quoted from: MRR, p. 175.
[12] Cf. Vasilij V. Rozanov, Uedinennoe
(1916), Moscow 1990, p. 231, translated by Drago Bajt,
Nova revija 158/1995, p. 77, and B. Šinigoj, “Dve
filozofiji? In slovanska duša?” (Two philosophies? And
the Slavonic soul?), in: electronic journal Logos
1–2/2005, www.kud-logos.si.
[13] L. Šestov, Atene in Jeruzalem
(Athens and Jerusalem), Paris 1951, fr. 39: “Prerekanje
o resnici” (Quarrelling over Truth), translated by B.
Kraševec, in: Literatura 101-102/1999, p. 125.
[14] MRR, p. 81-82.
[15] Cf. Heraclytus, fr. 18; Clement of
Alexandria, Preproge (Stromateis) II, 17, 4.
[16] Cf. Rome 4,18.
[17] Cf. Rev 21,1.
[18] Cf. Rome 5,5.
[19] Hamlet, 1.5.180
[20] This is mostlikely Shestov’s free
association with the old Talmud tradition. Cf. L.
Šestov, Dostojevski in Nietzsche/Premagovanje
samorazvidnosti (=PS) (Dostoyevski and
Nietzsche/Overcoming Self-evidence), translated by B.
Kraševec, Ljubljana 2002, p. 142, and Talmud, Hagiga 2,2
and Kethuboth.
[21] A word coined from the Russian
expression “vse my” (all of us) introduced by
Dostoyevsky in his Notes from the Underfloor; in
contrast to “vsemstvo”, i.e. all of us with only natural
eyesight, who in our daily lives are subordinating
ourselves to the law of noncontradiction and the
self-evident truths of reason (Shestov occasionally
replaces the expression with Kant’s Bewußtsein
überhaupt, “general consciousness”), Dostoyevsky’s
underfloor hero is tirelessly struggling for the unique
freedom of the mind – with self-will and caprice. Cf.
PS, p. 149, translator’s note.
[22] PS, 143.
[23] Nikolai V. Gogol, Pravilo
življenja v svetu (The Rule of Life in the World), in:
same, Ispovest, translated by Dejan Lučić, Vrnjačka
Banja 2004, p. 70.
[24] PS, 162.
[25] Ibid.
[26] PS, 178.
[27] Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logično
filozofski traktat (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus),
translated by Frane Jerman, Ljubljana 1976, thesis 7:
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
[28] Cf. L. Wittgenstein,
Philosophische Untersuchungen, I, 528 in 529, in:
Werkausgabe, Vol. I, Frankfurt on Main 1997, p. 440.
[29] Cf. Lev N. Tolstoy, Polikuška in
druge povesti (Polikushka and Other Stories), translated
by Janko Moder et al., Ljubljana 1979, p. 235-241.
[30] “Only death and the madness of
death can awaken people from life’s nightmare.” L.
Shestov, “Na strašnom sude. Poslednie proizvedenija L.
N. Tolstogo”, in: Na vesah Jova, Vol. II, Moscow 1993
(=NVJ), p. 107.
[31] L. N. Tolstoj, Polnoe sobranie
sočinenija, Moscow 1928–1959 (= LNT), Vol. 26, p. 470.
[32] Ibid. (stressed by L. Shestov).
[33] NVJ, p. 99.
[34] NVJ, p. 107.
[35] Cf. NVJ, p. 138.
[36] The quotations from Tolstoy’s
works are cited according to the existing Slovene
translation, which has been partly adapted according to
the original version, in: L. N. Tolstoy, Gospodar in
hlapec in druge zgodbe (Master and Man and Other
Stories) (=GIH), translated by Vera Brnčič et al.,
Ljubljana 1978, p. 199.
[37] Ibid., p. 198, 200.
[38] NVJ, p 136.
[39] GIH, p. 293.
[40] GIH, p. 298
[41] Cf. NVJ, p. 127.
[42] NVJ, p. 138.
[43] Cf. Martin Heidegger, Bit in čas
(Being and Time), translated by Tine Hribar et al.,
1997, §§ 46-53 and p. 346, note 6, which in the style of
characteristic phenomenological reduction, quotes
Tolstoy’s tale “The Death of Ivan Ilych” merely as a
presentation of the phenomenon of “the shock and
breakdown of this ‘passing away’”.
[44] Cf. MRR, p. 75.
[45] Cf. NVJ, p. 518-519.
[46] J. Derrida, Dar smrti (The Gift of
Death), translated by Saša Jerele, Ljubljana 2004, p.
44-45.
