Lev Shestov

• 1. Introduction

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  Lev Shestov died in a Paris clinic on the 19th of November 1938, still writing. He was seventy-one years old and in the final weeks of his life had been studying Indian philosophy and the recent work of his friend Edmund Husserl. A Russian-born philosopher who had lived through revolution, exile, and the death of a son in combat, Shestov had spent decades arguing something that most of his contemporaries found either scandalous or liberating: that reason cannot tell us the truth about the things that matter most. Not about God. Not about existence. Not about what is ultimately possible.

  He was born Yeguda Lev Shvartsman in Kiev, into a Jewish family, and would spend a lifetime slipping out of every intellectual category that tried to hold him. He rejected rationalism and positivism. He resisted nihilism. He wrote with the aphoristic electricity of Nietzsche while pursuing questions that were, at root, religious. Contemporary scholars have settled on the term "anti-philosophy" to describe what he was doing, which may be the most accurate label available and also the one he would have enjoyed most.

  How does a thinker arrive at the conviction that reason is a form of tyranny? What happens when philosophy begins not with a theory but with despair? And why did figures as different as Albert Camus, Paul Celan, Gilles Deleuze, and Emil Cioran all find in this relatively obscure Russian philosopher something they could not find anywhere else?

• 2. A Philosopher Formed by Refusal

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  Shestov's education was shaped, from the beginning, by collisions with authority. He studied law and mathematics at Moscow State University, but a clash with the Inspector of Students sent him back to Kiev to finish his degree. His doctoral dissertation was then rejected by the St. Vladimir's Imperial University of Kiev because of what the examiners called its revolutionary tendencies. That rejection prevented him from becoming a doctor of law, and it tells you something important about the man: his ideas were disqualifying before he had even published a book.

  By 1898, he had found his people. He entered a circle of prominent Russian intellectuals and artists that included Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Diaghilev, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, and Vasily Rozanov. He contributed articles to the circle's journal and completed his first major philosophical work there, a study of Tolstoy and Nietzsche titled Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching. The pairing of those two names is revealing. Both writers placed moral life and human suffering at the center of their thinking. Both resisted the comfort of pure system.

  A second book, on Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, followed, and it established Shestov's reputation as an original and incisive thinker. His cousin, incidentally, was Nicholas Pritzker, a lawyer who emigrated to Chicago and became the patriarch of the family that now bears that name in American business and politics. The two men could hardly have taken more different paths.

• 3. Everything Is Possible

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  In 1905, Shestov published All Things Are Possible, a work he wrote in the aphoristic style he borrowed from Nietzsche. On the surface it examined the difference between Russian and European literature. Underneath, it was a work of existentialist philosophy that criticized and satirized humanity's fundamental attitudes toward life.

  D. H. Lawrence, who wrote the foreword to S. S. Koteliansky's English translation, captured the book's spirit directly. Lawrence wrote that Shestov's central cry was "'Everything is possible'" and was careful to add: "It is not nihilism. It is only a shaking free of the human psyche from old bonds. The positive central idea is that the human psyche, or soul, really believes in itself, and in nothing else."

  Shestov himself put his key argument this way in the book: "...we need to think that only one assertion has or can have any objective reality: that nothing on earth is impossible. Every time someone wants to force us to admit that there are other, more limited and limiting truths, we must resist with every means we can lay hands on."

  Many of his closest Russian friends were unpersuaded. They read his work as a renunciation of reason, even an endorsement of nihilism. Shestov spent years defending the distinction. Rejecting reason's claim to final authority was not, he insisted, the same as saying nothing matters. It was, rather, the precondition for taking the most important things seriously at all.

• 4. Exile and Influence

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  Between 1908 and 1910, Shestov lived in Freiburg, Germany, then moved to a small Swiss village called Coppet. He wrote prolifically in both places, producing Great Vigils and Penultimate Words. He returned to Moscow in 1915, the year his son Sergei died fighting against the Germans.

  The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 made his position untenable. The Marxists demanded that he write a defence of Marxist doctrine as an introduction to his new work, Potestas Clavium, or the book would not be published. Shestov refused. He did, with the authorities' permission, lecture at the University of Kiev on Greek philosophy, but the direction of his life after 1917 was outward.

  He left Russia and eventually arrived in France. Paris recognized him quickly. He was invited to contribute to a prestigious French philosophy journal, befriended the young Georges Bataille, and was helped by Eugene and Olga Petit to integrate into French political and literary circles. In 1925 he lectured at the Sorbonne. The following year he met Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology, and they maintained a cordial relationship despite radical differences in their views. Later, according to Michael Richardson's research on Bataille, it was Shestov who first exposed Bataille to Nietzsche. Shestov's radical theology and interest in extreme human experience almost certainly shaped Bataille's own thinking.

• 5. The Kierkegaard Encounter

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  In 1929, on a return visit to Freiburg, Husserl urged Shestov to study the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. The effect was immediate and profound. Shestov discovered that Kierkegaard had already traversed much of the same terrain: rejection of idealism, suspicion of objective reason, a conviction that ultimate knowledge comes through ungrounded subjective thought rather than verifiable argument.

  But Shestov concluded that Kierkegaard had not gone far enough. Kierkegaard had identified the problem and flinched. Shestov continued where he believed the Dane had stopped. The result was Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy: Vox Clamantis in Deserto, published in 1936 and regarded as a foundational text of Christian existentialism.

  What Shestov found in Kierkegaard confirmed his own core conviction: that God, by definition, is not bound by the laws of logic. The notion that God entails the possibility that "there is nothing that is impossible" meant that no rational system could capture the absolute. Shestov explained his position in conversation with his student Benjamin Fondane: "I know full well that Necessity reigns now... But who can prove to me that it has always been? That it was not something else before? Or that there will not be something else afterwards? It's up to men to side with Necessity, perhaps... But a philosopher must search for Sources - beyond Necessity, beyond Good and Evil."

  Fondane, for his part, drew out the implication: genuine reality "begins beyond the limit of the logically impossible" and only once "every humanly thinkable certainty and probability has proven its impossibility."

• 6. Athens Against Jerusalem

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  Shestov's magnum opus, Athens and Jerusalem, occupied him from 1930 to 1937. He finished it despite deteriorating health. The title names the central antagonism of his philosophy: Athens stands for reason, system, and the Greek philosophical tradition; Jerusalem stands for faith, scripture, and the God who is not constrained by logic.

  The book's argument runs directly at the tradition from Aristotle through Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. All of them, Shestov maintained, reflected a belief in eternal knowledge discoverable through reason, in mechanistic rational laws that would constrain even God. He found this tendency rooted in fear: fear of an arbitrary, unpredictable God led philosophers to worship instead what is unchanging, what he called "dead" reality opposed to life and the absolute.

  In Athens and Jerusalem he asked why God should be assumed to love order as humans do: "Why attribute to God, the God whom neither time nor space limits, the same respect and love for order? Why forever speak of 'total unity'? ...There is no need at all. Consequently, the idea of total unity is an absolutely false idea."

  The book's final sentence is uncompromising: "Philosophy is not Besinnen think over but struggle. And this struggle has no end and will have no end. The kingdom of God, as it is written, is attained through violence." He was citing Matthew 11:12. The philosopher Leo Strauss later wrote "Jerusalem and Athens" partly as a direct response to Shestov's book.

• 7. Despair, Faith, and the Legacy

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  Shestov's philosophy does not begin with a concept. It begins with an experience he called despair: the loss of certainties, the loss of freedom, the loss of life's meaning. What he called Necessity, also Reason or Fate, was not merely an intellectual position but a real force in the world that subordinates living experience to abstraction and kills it.

  Yet despair, for Shestov, was only what he called "the penultimate word." Beyond it lay faith, which he defined not as belief or certainty but as a way of thinking that arises in the midst of the deepest doubt. He wrote: "Within the 'limits of reason' one can create a science, a sublime ethic, and even a religion; but to find G-d one must tear oneself away from the seductions of reason with all its physical and moral constraints, and go to another source of truth."

  Albert Camus discussed Shestov in Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Gilles Deleuze referred to him in both Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition. The poet Paul Celan counted him among his influences. Emil Cioran, writing in his collected works published by Gallimard in Paris in 1995, called Shestov "the philosopher of my generation" and added: "He thought rightly that the true problems escaped the philosophers. What else do they do but obscure the real torments of life?"

  Shestov remains relatively little known in the English-speaking world, in part because his works have been limited in availability and in part because his themes are genuinely unconventional. The English second edition of Athens and Jerusalem, translated by Bernard Martin and edited by Ramona Fotiade, was published by Ohio University Press in 2016, nearly eighty years after his death.