Vid Snoj, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts
GROUNDLESSNESS AND THE WISH FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE
The title of our symposium raises a
question and propels us to reflect on one of the basic
concepts of Shestov’s thought, which traverses the
realms of literature, philosophy and religion –
“groundlessness”. Allow me, for the moment, to answer
this question: bespochvennost, or
“groundlessness”, appears to be an existential
correlate of the suspension of rational truths. In
my contribution I will examine groundlessness and
attempt to unfold its definition within the context of
the dichotomy that Shestov himself put into the title of
his most important work, Athens and Jerusalem
(1938). This dichotomy metonymically epitomizes the
opposition that Shestov deals with in various forms in
his later opus, namely, the opposition between
philosophy and faith, between Greek wisdom and
Jewish-Christian revelation, between philosophy and the
Bible or philosophical speculation and biblical thought,
between Hegel and Job or between the tree of knowledge
and the tree of life. In pondering groundlessness within
the framework of the dichotomy between Athens and
Jerusalem, I want to get to the nerve of Shestov’s
thought, to the point which, as the the title of my
paper suggests, I have named “the wish for the
impossible”.
According to Shestov, Athens
triumphed in the history of European thinking; wisdom or
philosophy triumphed over revelation or biblical
thought. In the perspective of this judgement, Shestov’s
own philosophy appears to be a radical critique of the
history of philosophy, perhaps even a deepest
existentially enga-ged fight against reason and its
truths, which demand obedience.
Before proceeding to outline the
principle features of Shestov’s historiosophy, I would
like to draw attention to the peculiarity of his
philosophical hermeneutics. Shestov’s interpretation
never appears to be close reading, the slow and gradual
unfolding of a text which traces different meanings and
possibilities of reading. It rather concentrates on some
key statements which are simultaneously a key to the
story of European philosophy, and it quotes and
paraphrases them time and again. Shestov’s view is a
view from afar, yet a view with insight which, from the
aspect of the whole of the story, never loses sight of
what it is really all about – a view from above into the
depths. A catascopia: Shestov is always one step ahead,
i.e. a step ahead into the depths, and, while stubbornly
piercing a handful of statements he has chosen, always
tackles a root intertwinement of suppositions from which
grows the edifice of thought of a philosopher. For Kant,
a philosopher of reason par excellence, who in
his three critiques rejected traditional philosophical
metaphysics and outlined three realms of reason as areas
of its own power, if reason is properly used in them,
such a supposition is reason itself and justification of
its power. In Shestov’s eyes, Kant in his critique of
reason “turned to reason,”1
entrusting it to reason itself. That is why Kant’s
famous awakening from the “dogmatic slumber” described
in the introduction to his Critique of Pure Reason
is perceived by Shestov as the creation of a new dogma,
the “dogma of sovereignity of reason.”2
In Shestov’s historiosophy, which I
can only briefly outline here, the “discoverer” of
reason is Socrates. According to Shestov, it was
Socrates who decided that proven, rationally evident
truths were superior to unproven ones, i. e. those
coming to poets from the gods. In this way, Socrates
also became a discoverer of truth, with Shestov himself
describing its reign throughout the entire subsequent
history of philosophy using the attributes of
self-evidence, eternity and necessity. What is such
a truth like?
First and foremost, it is
“metaphysical”: invisible, yet visible to reason.
Through reason it is seen, i.e. brought to evidence and
recognised, as (self)-evidence, as the transparency of
that which exists. For this reason, the self-evidence of
truth is not, strictly speaking, the visibility of
something that is evident in itself, but the evidence
that discloses itself – that has always already been
disclosed – to reason. Truth therefore passes from
invisibility to self-evidence by means of reason.
Furthermore, truth is eternal, because it does
not originate in time, yet determines all that
originates and disintegrates in time. Having no temporal
origin itself, truth makes transparent the “being-so,”
or So-sein, of things. In light of this “it is
so,” it is a compelling truth, a truth that compels man
– that has always already compelled him – to accept it.
For the meaning relayed by “it is so” is “it must be
so.” In view of this “must,” however, truth is the law.
The law of contradiction says: A is A, which means that
A cannot simultaneously be B; A is necessarily A.
It was Aristotle who established the
law of contradiction as the fundamental law of logic, as
the basis of all other truths and laws, and consequently
became, in Shestov’s eyes, the insurer of Socrates’
discovery. Hence, the word of God also had to obtain a
“blessing from the law of contradiction or some other
law”3 in mediaeval
philosophy, which attempted to rationally prove the
truth of the revelation. Even God himself was placed
under the reign of rational truths or laws. In mediaeval
philosophy, for example, the law of contradiction does
not belong to the sphere of God’s almighty power – and
neither does the law quod factum est infectum esse
nequit: even God cannot undo what has happened. Such
laws do not depend on the will of God, but are
themselves without a will: “It is not possible to talk
with them, we cannot beg or convince them – therefore,
we must submit to them.”4
According to Shestov, in modern
philosophy the God of philosophers gradually became
increasingly more bound by rational truths. Spinoza’s
rationalisation of the divine, for example, led Shestov
to the conclusion that “ the real name of God is a
necessity,”5 and it
was Hegel who, in his judgment, brought this
rationalisation to an end and finally transformed the
God of philosophers into an idol of reason by including
the otherness of the divine in the movement of the
absolute spirit, which is gradually becoming aware of
this otherness through Be-greifen, the work of a
concept, and appropriating it. Yet Husserl allegedly
went even further when he separated truth in its
absolute self-certainty from both the divine as well as
from human existence.6
Moreover, Shestov also sees in
Socrates’ identification of knowledge with virtue a
point of contact between the real – under the aspect of
the necessary – and the good, i.e. between ontology and
ethics. Epictetus, a member of one of the philosophical
schools that emerged out of Socrates’ thought, says:
“The beginning of philosophy is an acknowledgement of
one’s own inability and impossibility/powerlessness [synaísthesis
tês autoû astheneías kaì adynamías] in face of
necessity.”7 The
truth which reason recognises as self-evidence and
acknowledges to be a necessity, thus limits the
horizon of human thought and deed and, by simultaneously
delimiting the possible from the impossible in
this horizon, demands the adjustment of a human wish.
Acknowledgement or acceptance is, at the same time, a
submission to necessity, a translation of ontology into
ethics, by which necessity on the ontological level
emerges as a duty on the ethical level. That is why the
task of philosophy was, Shestov stresses, to lead man to
the point where he comes to love necessity and willingly
assumes acting in accordance with necessity as his duty.
Even more: this task was to educate the human wish,
so that it would strive for the principle of truth,
sub specie necessitates, as the supreme good.
Shestov points to the universal
ontological-ethical value of rational truths with an
preinterpretative allusion to “ the starry sky above
myself and the moral law inside myself” from the
beginning of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, by
saying: “The eternal truths shined before Kant and also
after him, and it is after them that weak mortals
orientate themselves...”8
But the truths in the sky that existed before man and
also before God, the truths that exist above man and
also above God – these truths are also below in a way;
when below, they make ground: they offer ground to man,
Grund in the sense of the “foundation” or
rational “reason” on which man stands on earth. They are
ground for his existence with regard to that which
exists or must exist and, therefore, that which man
should wish for. Yet ground – and here Shestov has gone
one step further than the philosophy he is fighting
against – is in reality being given and the path of
desire paved by reason. Although it is presented in the
history of philosophy only as a medium in which truth
discloses itself, reason does not actually enable truth
to pass from invisibility to self-evidence by seeing and
bringing it to evidence, but sets it up. Rational
truths, i.e. those brought to evidence through reason,
are truths of reason itself.
There are, nevertheless, exceptions
in the history of philosophy. As .. Shestov often says,
some thinkers “lost the ground under their feet” and are
familiar with the groundlessness that emerges when
rational truths lose the value of a grounding instance
and are left hanging in the air: Pascal, who began to
sense an abyss, though not on his left, as Shestov
remarks in connection with groundlessness, but under his
feet,9 Kierkegaard,
who also had the experience of abyss and dizziness,10
and before them perhaps Luther, who did not name it this
way. And after them, of course, Dostoyevsky, who created
the first real critique of reason in the figure of the
“underground” man, which is not his apology as is
Kant’s.11
Groundlessness is a “circumstance”
which, in Dostoyevsky’s literature, accompanies and
surrounds the underground man. This man acts within the
frames of accustomed ways of thinking, undermining the
ground on which normal man stands by saying, for
example, “two times two is five.” Yet the underground
has no ground: the underground man himself stands
without support, in a groundlessness spreading all
around and surrounding him on all sides offering no
ground, centre or support.
On the other side, following
Kierkegaard’s lead, Shestov conceives also his own
existential philosophy by means of suspense, abolishing
eternal truths above and opening Ab-grund, abyss below,
that is, in groundlessness.12
This is a philosophy that no longer turns to eternal
truths and, if anything, teaches “man to live in
uncertainty.”13 It
does not seek truth in reason and its possibilities.
Inasmuch as they are within reach of rational judgment
of the realisable out of the real, these possibilities
are limited and, therefore, on this side of the line,
which delimits what is possible or what in all rational
probability could happen, from the impossible. They are
limited precisely by delimitation, by separation of the
impossible, whose other side is nothing other than the
enclosure of the possible in the rational possibility
that must be accepted as the only possible possibility.
Shestov’s existential philosophy thus begins at the
point where it is shown to reason that an individual
without ground under his feet stands before the
impossible – at a place where reason sees no possibility
at all. For the eye of reason, there is no way out of
this place, and the impossible is absurd to the
individual who sees with the eye of reason.
Absurdum, as Lewis and
Short’s Latin-English dictionary tells us, is what is
“out of tune.” Absurd is thus that which is not in tune
and does not sound together with reason, with its truths
or laws. Yet it is for this reason by all means not
senseless. In spite of finding ground in reason and its
truths, thinking hits against the absurd and then
reverses and adjusts itself differently. Absurd is harsh
in relation to reason and is impossible for it. Absurd
is a certain possibile that is impossible for
reason. Absurd is a possibility that is impossible
for reason. But for possibility to emerge in the
impossible at all, one requires the eye of faith. In any
case, thinking does not end with faith, for faith
appears to be a “dimension of thinking.”14
In other words: when thinking hits against the absurd,
it adjusts itself in the di-mension of faith according
to the measure of the absurd. Absurdum mensura.
Before that which is impossible for
man, it is faith in God that gives thinking another
dimension. When in groundlessness, the all-possibility
opens for man in the impossible, but only through faith
in the almightiness of God. Only divine almightiness
freed from rational truths presents the
all-possibility to a man of faith. For “with God all
things are possible,” says evangelist Mark (10:27), or
“with God nothing will be impossible,” says evangelist
Luke (1:37); and, as Kierkegaard already established, it
was Abraham sacrificing Isaac who also believed “by the
power of the Absurd,”15
assuming that everything is possible with God. What is
impossible for man is possible for God – and from the
point of view of reason, it is absurd. Yet in terms of
the possibility, the absurd is not limited as reason is.
The absurd possibility is impossible for reason,
yet nevertheless a possible possibility for faith.
The absurd possibility is an impossible possibility,
a possibility of faith. It is neither a potentiality, an
unused possibility of what exists, nor its capability as
an entirety of such possibilities, but a pure,
absolute possibility.
Before this possibility, thinking is
different. Without looking towards eternal truths in the
sky that are forcing it to the ground, in a
groundlessness in which the dimension of faith has
opened for it, thinking flies – and flies with ease
in the wish for the impossible. And because
“impossibility is a stone wall,”16
it rises from straits over the walls of the impossible
towards all-possibility.
In such thinking, the use of reason
is different as well. There is no need to sacrifice
reason: to renounce reason does not mean to sacrifice
it, but to shake off its “hostile yoke.”17
Therefore, when thinking reverses itself alongside the
absurd in the dimension of faith, it is not a sacrifice
that is at stake – or at least not, as in the case of
Abraham’s sacrifice, a sacrifice with a final victim, a
performed sacrificium intellectus –, but a
renouncement of the hidden pretension of reason, of the
pretension to autonomy, to be a self-legislative
instance. To be an instance which in reality issues its
own laws.
Still more: this thinking renounces
the law of contradiction, but again only as a commanding
and not also as an executing instance, too. It does not
want to rely on rational proof, nor release itself from
it completely. Fondane explains: “But why should we
renounce rational proof? To be logical? If we
have the freedom to reject it, we have the same freedom
to use it.”18
Thinking measured in the dimension
of faith does not, when renouncing the pretensions of
reason, sacrifice lógos. It does not sacrifice
the basic logicalness or the grammatical regularity of
the language matrix that enables its own discursive
structuring. On the other hand, it runs in incessant
paradoxical turns. By paradox, by thinking contrary to
rational thinking and bypassing it, his thinking rises
above its limited condition. Yet it is still a
discourse, and its dis-coursing is an incessant
re-coursing to the elements of logical thinking in
grammar. For the paradox is what preserves the “logic”
of a language and reverses the logic of thinking
within it.
Let me go back a step or two. I
would like to point out that Shestov interprets the
inaugural event of both traditional and his own
philosophy in the biblical key. On the one hand, he
represents the inauguration of reason at the beginning
of the history of philosophy through the biblical story
of the Fall of Man. In this story the threads of the
story common to both Athens and Jerusalem are
intertwined: rational knowledge becomes the fruit of the
tree of knowledge, Socrates becomes Adam, his ethics a
doctrine of the fallen man, etc. On the other hand,
Shestov draws on the birthplace of his own philosophy
the figure of human existence before the impossible. And
he draws it with the help of the biblical story about
Job.
In his interpretation of this story,
Shestov follows Kierkegaard, who, facing the problem of
the limits of divine almightiness, turned away from
Hegel and philosophical speculation, and sided with Job.
As Kierkegaard says: at the end of The Book of Job,
when Job gets back everything he has lost – his
property, children and health, his property and years of
his life even in doubly – the almightiness of God is
presented by “repetition.” Namely, Kierkegaard
understands the return of all that Job has lost as
repetition that occurs when it is “in all human wisdom
and probability impossible.”19
Repetition brings restoratio in
integrum to Job, and thus for him represents the
complete return of what he has lost. Because it is not
within the power of man, but of God, it may be called an
event of the impossible. But considering the fact that
God undoes what has happened, as Shestov understands the
essence of repetition, it is ultimately the return of
the same. God makes the impossible possible: he
undoes the loss of property, children and health – and
what was before that, at the beginning, returns, because
God has turned the time in-between into something that
“was not,” just the same in the end. Repetition,
therefore, does not simply involve the restoration of
the primary state of things; the point is that the end –
after the things that happened in-between have returned
into nothingness, into “was not” – is the same as the
beginning. Repetition is the return of the same from
non-being to being by annihilation of the in-between.
In his interpretation of The Book
of Job, Shestov links God’s cancellation of the law
quod factum est infectum esse nequit with the
Kierkegaardian repetition by repeating the move made by
Kierkegaard in his explanation of Abraham sacrificing
Isaac, when he put into Abraham’s mouth the following
words: “This [a sacrifice, my note] will not happen, but
if it nevertheless happens, God would give me a new
Isaac through the power of the absurd.”20
In this way, Kierkegaard verbalizes what is happening
inside Abraham and, by the use of direct speech, makes
Abraham say what he does not say in the biblical
narrative. In interpreting the biblical figure of
Abraham, Kierkegaard fills it up with faith – not with
the faith that everything, i.e. anything, is
possible with God, but with an utterly specific and
distinctive faith. A faith determined by the wish for a
new – repeated, i.e. the same, – Isaac.
Although this explanatory move is in-ventio, the
invention that comes into Abraham’s interior as a
congenial fulfillment is nevertheless an eisegesis.
Shestov repeats it in his
explanation of Job. In his words, Job did nothing less
than “demand [my emphasis] that what happened
should be as if it had not happened, that the burnt
property should be as if it had not been burnt, that the
children who were killed should be, as if they had not
been killed, that his health should be as before.”21
Supposedly, Job himself demanded the annihilation of the
past, that is, of the time in-between, a time of
“inhuman” suffering, in which he was left without his
property, children and health. He himself allegedly
believed that God would return what he had taken from
him.
Here we are dealing with an
interpretation of the unsaid in The Book of Job.
Yet in reality Job does not demand all of that at all.
In wanting to accuse God in front of God, he demands
only to have a lawsuit with God, a case implying his
request for God’s acknowledgement that he is right and
is not guilty of the evil that struck him. Nowhere does
he voice the wish for the impossible, the wish for the
return of his property, children and health. The
question is, of course, whether Job’s accusation
actually does imply a request for return; but if it
does, it by all means does not imply a request for
precisely such a return, for the return of those
very things which he had lost. Furthermore, if Job had
voiced a request for that, wouldn’t God have fulfilled
his request by returning all that he has lost, and
wouldn’t this return be a recompensation, i.e. an
act of compensation, redemption or settlement belonging
to the sphere of exchange economy and not a gift
of God outside of such economics. And the event of the
impossible in The Book of Job, the Kierkegaardian
repetition, is a gift, a repeated divine gift of all
that has been lost. For Job does not get everything back
on a request which God recognizes as justified. He gets
it all back only after two divine speeches from a
whirlwind which do not proclaim he is right, but,
avoiding Job’s request, permit a double, divine and
human right, more specifically, only after he himself
withdraws his request (cf. Job 42:6.10). The
gift of God is the return of the same without
recompensation.
Using Shestov’s words, Job
“demands,” yet this is not his voice, but the voice of
the wish for the impossible. This wish certainly does
not in any way count on man’s own power, or on human
power in general. In the fiftieth aphorism from the last
part of his magnum opus, Athens and Jerusalem,
Shestov says: “A man remembers God when he wants the
impossible. For the possible, he turns to men.”22
But nevertheless: although the wish for the impossible
cannot exist without faith, which is “an immense power,”23
and its fulfillment cannot occur without the
transcendent power, without the almightiness of God,
which makes the impossible possible, it has priority in
Shestov’s thought precisely as its own wish. It
is perhaps no coincidence that Shestov discusses only
those biblical cases that can be explained, as though
God fulfills such wishes, and ignores those in which
wishes are not fulfilled. In this way, the question of
God’s call which precedes man’s wish and configures
differently the relation between man’s wish and God’s
wish remains undisscussed. For example, the question of
the call that sets Abraham on his way to the Promised
Land and to the sacrifice of Isaac.
Hence, does all of this mean that
God must fulfill the wish for the impossible?
That the human wish is necessarily a “wish of the Other”
and that God has no choice but to meet it? That it is
also the will of God to fulfill it? Does, on the other
hand, even God submit to this wish which does not
acknowledge the necessity? And finally, is God here not
to fulfill the wish of the possible, but of the
impossible?
In the middle of the fifth aphorism,
Shestov says: “Man’s ultimate wish in the world is to
live according to his own will...”24
Although this sentence had been taken out of its
context, in my judgment it nevertheless uniquely speaks
about the priority of the human wish before the divine
wish: about the wish of one’s own will, about everything
happening in accordance with one’s will.
Let me conclude with a suspicious
hint. Perhaps Berdyaev is right in observing that
Shestov is closer to Nietzsche than to the Bible.25
Shestov rebukes Nietzsche only when Nietzsche submits to
necessity confessing his love of fate;26
otherwise, he judges this German thinker to be first of
all a challenger of rational truths and a fighter for
the possibilities beyond such truths. In Shestov’s eyes,
Nietzsche discovered something that is more important
than the eternal return of the same: what makes “it was”
become “it was not” is will. So, concealed behind
Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same is the will to
power, and this very will reveals itself to Shestov as a
“force of endless power,” a force of absolute freedom
and infinite creativity, a creator of all-possibility
or, finally, as “Luther’s creator omnipotens ex
nihilo faciens omnia.”27
In short, the wish for the
impossible is perhaps the wish for the almightiness of
will made possible by the will of God. Of my own will.
Translated by Suzana Stančič
[1] Lav Šestov,
Atina i Jerusalim. Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolimis?,
Serbian translation, Budva: Mediteran, 1990, p. 76.
[2] O.c., p. 11.
[3] O.c., p. 185.
[4] O.c., p. 205.
[5] Léon Chestov, Les favoris et les
déshérites de l’historie: Descartes et Spinoza, Mercure
de France, June 1923, p. 666.
[6] Cf. Ramona Fotiade, Conceptions of
the Absurd: From Surrealism to the Existential Thought
of Chestov and Fondane, Oxford: European Humanities
Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2001, p. 205.
[7] Šestov, Atina i Jerusalim, p. 67 et
al.
[8] O.c., p. 11.
[9] Lev Šestov, Getsemanska noč.
Pascalova filozofija, in: Lev Šestov, Med razodetjem in
resnico. Izbor iz filozofskih del, Slovene translation
by Borut Kraševec, Celje: Mohorjeva družba 2001, p. 42.
[10] Lev Šestov, Kierkegaard –
religiozni filozof, in: o.c., p. 99.
[11] Cf. Lev Šestov, Nietzsche in
Dostojevski. Premagovanje samorazvidnosti, Slovene
translation by Borut Kraševec, Ljubljana: LUD
Literatura, 2002, p. 155; cf. also footnote on page 18
in Atina i Jerusalim.
[12] In the mid thirties of the past
century, Shestov and his pupil, Benjamin Fondane, who
contributed the most to the dissemination of Shestov’s
thought in France, used the term philosophie
existentielle to separate this thought from the first
outbursts of German and French “Existentialism”. Cf.
Ramona Fotiade, Conceptions of the Absurd: From
Surrealism to the Existential Thought of Chestov and
Fondane, Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre,
University of Oxford, 2001, p. 6.
[13] Lev Shestov, All Things are
Possible. Penultimate Words and Other Essays, Athens:
Ohio University Press, 1977, p. 12.
[14] Šestov, Atina i Jerusalim, p. 21.
[15] O.c., p. 148.
[16] O.c., p. 229.
[17] Šestov, Kierkegaard – religiozni
filozof, p. 87.
[18] Benjamin Fondane, Léon Chestov et
la lutte contre les évidences, Revue de la France et de
l’étranger, July-August 1938, p. 34.
[19] Sören A. Kierkegaard, Ponovitev.
Filozofske drobtinice ali drobec filozofije, Slovene
translation by Franc Burgar, Ljubljana: Slovenska
matica, 1987, p. 213.
[20] Seren Kjerkegor, Strah i drhtanje,
Serbian translation, Belgrade: Beogradski
izdavačko-grafički zavod, 1975, p. 180.
[21] Šestov, Atina i Jerusalim, p. 207.
[22] O.c., p. 305.
[23] Lev Šestov, Kierkegaard –
religiozni filozof, p. 93.
[24] Šestov, Atina i Jerusalim, p. 262.
[25] Berdyaev’s observation cites Pavel
Kuznecov in the afterword of Shestov’s anthology in
Slovene Med razumom in razodetjem, p. 230.
[26] Cf. Šestov, Atina i Jerusalim, p.
138.
[27] O.c., p. 134.
