Lev Shestov

Philosopher of the Sleepless Night

Matthew Beaumont

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350151178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The Jewish philosopher Lev Shestov (1866-1938) is perhaps the great forgotten thinker of the twentieth century, but one whose revival seems timely and urgent in the twenty-first century. An important influence on Georges Bataille, Albert Camus, Gilles Deleuze and many others, Shestov developed a fascinating anti-Enlightenment philosophy that critiqued the limits of reason and triumphantly affirmed an ethics of hope in the face of hopelessness. In a wide-ranging reappraisal of his life and thought, which explores his ideas in relation to the history of literature and painting as well as philosophy, Matthew Beaumont restores Shestov to prominence as a thinker for turbulent times. In reconstructing Shestov's thought and asserting its continued relevance, the book's central theme is wakefulness. It argues that for Shestov, escape from the limits of rationalist Enlightenment thought comes from maintaining an insomniac vigilance in the face of the spiritual night to which his century appeared condemned. Shestov's engagement with the image of Christ remaining awake in the Garden of Gethsemane then, is at the core of his inspiring understanding of our ethical responsibilities after the horrors of the twentieth century.

1

Athens and Jerusalem
Lev Shestov in Gethsemane

I

In 1936, the seventy-year-old Russian Jewish philosopher Lev Shestov, accompanied by his sister Elisabeth and her husband, German Lovtsky, travelled from his home in France to Palestine. There, at the invitation of the Cultural Department of the Histadrut, the Jewish trades-union organization, he delivered a series of lectures in the Zionist settlements – Haifa, Tel Aviv and, foremost among these cities, Jerusalem.

Although Shestov’s ‘inner biography remains unknown’, as V. V. Zenkovsky observed in his monumental History of Russian Philosophy (1953), it can be surmised that his journey to Palestine entailed an implicit, perhaps semi-conscious attempt to come to terms with his Jewish origins.¹ His relationship to his familial and cultural heritage had been complicated, and had required some kind of reckoning, at least since the time when, as a young man engaged in a more or less Oedipal rejection of his merchant father’s patronym, he first changed his name from Lev Isaakovich Schwarzmann to Lev Shestov.² But his attempt to escape his past, as this assumed name probably indicates, was incomplete. He remained profoundly shaped by his Jewish background. This might have included a debt, identified by the historian Sidney Monas, to the Hassidic movement ‘which had an enormous influence in the Jews of the diaspora during the time of Shestov’s childhood and early youth’.³ Encouraging him to make the journey to Palestine in the mid-1930s, his friend Aaron Steinberg urged him ‘to show the world once again the Jew beneath the Russian persona’.⁴ And this does indeed seem to have been one of the consequences, intentional or unintentional, of Shestov’s two-month trip. For according to one of his intellectual biographers, his appearances there ‘evoked an enthusiastic response from audiences who recognized the aged Shestov as one of the great Jewish philosophers of the century’.⁵

Emmanuel Levinas, writing in the Revue des Études Juives in 1937, the year after Shestov’s trip to Palestine, summarized him in these terms:

M. Shestov, Jewish philosopher, but certainly not a philosopher of Judaism, in the heritage of Jerusalem he does not separate the Old Testament from the New. But he is a philosopher of religion. And under its existential form, religious philosophy returns to important problems of salvation, which is to say the essential message of Judaism. And he does this in a more radical fashion than ever, since existential philosophy – M. Shestov shows admirably and obstinately – explodes the synthesis of the Greek spirit and the Judeo-Christian, which the Middle Ages believed to have accomplished.⁶

As a thinker, Shestov identified equally, and equally idiosyncratically, with the Judaic and Christian theological traditions; and, at least after moving to Paris in the early 1920s, he demonstrated a consistent, if not relentless, commitment to excavating the relevant, revelatory truths, as he perceived them, buried in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. In both, he celebrated what he called ‘the “madness” of Scripture’ – their scandalous refusal to conform to the protocols of reason.⁷ Take, for example, the idea found in Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels that faith might move a mountain. This notion, almost literally outlandish, is simply not susceptible, so Shestov claims, to some rationalist interpretation that, offering a ‘uniform explanation’ that ‘exclude[s] contradictions’, makes it conform ‘to the common conceptions of the work and problems of life’. For Shestov, contradictions are the very condition of truth; and the idea that faith might move a mountain should be celebrated, like the Old and New Testaments themselves, for commending what he called ‘the maddest and most perilous experiments’, experiments that threaten to capsize reason in spite of its authority and apparent stability.⁸ Shestov, in short, proclaimed the possibility of impossibility. And he came to the Bible, as he said of his hero Fyodor Dostoevsky, ‘to be rid of the power of reason’.⁹

Because of its historic and symboli c importance for both the Jewish and Christian faiths, Shestov regarded Jerusalem, the first city he visited during the trip to Palestine, as a sacred city. ‘Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget thee, O Jerusalem!’, he repeated after the Psalmist (137: 5) in ‘A Thousand and One Nights’ (1917), an essay whose title was intended to transmit millenarian associations as well as merely literary ones.¹⁰ For Shestov, as Michael Finkenthal has commented, ‘Jerusalem was not the city of David only but also that of the crucifixion, of Christ’.¹¹ Far more than that, though, its name delineated an entire matrix of philosophical ideas and spiritual commitments that stood out against the Enlightenment tradition he so doggedly attacked in his writings. Indeed, his final book, which he completed in 1937, after stubbornly working on it for more than seven years, was entitled Athens and Jerusalem (1938). This was his chef d’oeuvre, and its title clearly signalled that here he was going to gather strength from what the intellectual historian Adam Sutcliffe has categorized as ‘the mythic resilience of Judaism’, which ‘holds within it a unique power to call attention to the limits of the Enlightenment’.¹² Shestov summarized his intellectual enterprise in these terms in the Foreword: ‘The task which I have set for myself in this book, Athens and Jerusalem, consists in putting to proof the pretensions to the possession of truth which human reason or speculative philosophy make’. In a Kierkegaardian formulation, he added: ‘Man wishes to think in the categories in which he lives, and not to live in the categories in which he has become accustomed to think: the tree of knowledge no longer chokes the tree of life’.¹³

Pointedly, Shestov gave the title ‘Athens and Jerusalem’ to one of the lectures he delivered in the Holy City in 1936. On this occasion, the German-Jewish philosopher and theologian Gershom Scholem, who had admired Shestov’s work for a long time, introduced him to the audience (though he remained slightly bemused by the elderly Russian’s performance, complaining that he ‘read from the manuscript so badly that it was quite impossible to understand anything of consequence, even for wholly favourably predisposed listeners such as myself’). Concluding his brief account of the event in the course of a letter to his old friend Walter Benjamin, Scholem exclaimed: ‘The event was a terrible fiasco!’ Scholem nonetheless underlined his profound respect for Shestov, whose style he characterized as ‘magnificent’.¹⁴ And, certainly, when Shestov died in Paris in November 1938, this ‘fiasco’ didn’t prevent a memorial service from taking place in Jerusalem, where the eminent Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber, who had only recently settled in the city, delivered a speech for the occasion.

II

So, what precisely did Jerusalem signify for Shestov? It represented, as one commentator has noted, ‘a kind of sensibility, a way of living based not on logic but on trusting in God, believing in miracles, paradox, contingency, and irrationality’.¹⁵ In Athens and Jerusalem, and throughout his intellectual career, to put the case at its plainest and most Manichaean, Shestov pitted Judaeo-Christian thought against Graeco-Roman thought, Faith against Reason, Revelation against Speculation, Paul against Plato, the Particular against the Universal, Kierkegaard against Kant, Being against Thinking, the Tree of Life against the Tree of Knowledge – in short, Jerusalem against Athens. These are the terms of Shestov’s Either/Or. In the tradition of the Church Father Tertullian, whom he profoundly admired, he effectively asked, Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis? ‘What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ Tertullian’s point, as Shestov insisted, was that ‘what for Athens is wisdom is for Jerusalem foolishness’.¹⁶

The rationalist philosophical tradition, as Shestov conceptualized it, did not have a monopoly on truth. Shestov did not reject rationalism tout court. He was emphatic, as he put it in an article on Kierkegaard in 1938, that ‘reason is indeed necessary, very necessary for us’ and that ‘under the ordinary conditions of our existence it helps us to cope with the difficulties, even the very great difficulties, we run up against on our life-path’.¹⁷ Furthermore, in spite of his Pascalian campaign against Cartesian philosophy, he praised Descartes’ works for ‘the extraordinary vigour, the uncommon passion and emotion which fills them’.¹⁸ Notwithstanding his characteristically emphatic rhetoric, then, Shestov’s objection was less to reason or science tout court than to the rationalist ideology of the Enlightenment and to scientism.¹⁹ But he contended nonetheless that, in part so as to be able to help people cope with the irruption of extraordinary experience into their everyday existence, including death itself, revelation should not simply rival but should supers ede both reason and scientific knowledge as the source of truth. The spiritual teaches us far more than the rational. As Shestov framed it in the stirring final paragraph of ‘Memento Mori’ (1916), the essay on Edmund Husserl that did so much to publicize the phenomenologist’s thinking in France when it first appeared in translation in 1925, an ‘obscure feeling’ persists; namely, the conviction that ‘the truth which our ancestors sought unsuccessfully in Paradise’ can only be found ‘beyond reason’ and that ‘it is impossible to discover it in the immobile and dead universe which is the only one over which rationalism can rule as sovereign’.²⁰

Reason, Shestov declared in ‘A Thousand and One Nights’, at his most polemical, ‘is completely incapable of creating anything whatsoever that is alive’. ‘By its very nature’, he added, ‘reason hates life more than anything in the world, feeling it instinctively to be its irreconcilable enemy’.²¹ Reason subordinates life to thought’, he continued to argue more than twenty years later in Athens and Jerusalem; ‘and the more we try to subordinate our life to our thought, the heavier our slumber becomes’.²² Shestov took a certain pride in the fact that his repetitious pronouncements, which elicited Albert Camus’s exasperated but admiring judgement – in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) – that the Russian’s writings were ‘wonderfully monotonous’, infuriated his critics.²³ His more or less apocalyptic enterprise demanded an insistent, iterative, even obsessive mode of speech that, like other prophetic forms, at times proved slightly deaf to other voices. He compared the irritation of his critics, in distinctly grandiose tones, with ‘the Athenians’ dissatisfaction with Socrates’.²⁴ In this spirit, in spite of his suspicion of the rationalist legacy of Socrates, he saw his role as that of someone who must help prevent people, in their ordinary lives, from remaining in the grip of the spiritual and intellectual stupor against which he fulminated.

The English surrealist poet David Gascoyne, a great admirer of Shestov, was correct to characterize him, with calculated literalness, as a ‘profoundly disturbing’ thinker. And to value Shestov’s impassioned commitment to disrupting what, in a sentence that accelerates almost uncontrolledly in its intellectual excitement, Gascoyne described as ‘the easily available, conventionally legitimized means whereby men commonly stupefy themselves so as to continue to be able to remain fast asleep even when wide awake and busily occupied in carrying on very competently their no doubt highly important and altogether worthwhile daily affairs’.²⁵ Shestov’s calling was – calling. Or crying, groaning and lamenting – in short, all those activities that Spinoza prohibited, to Shestov’s perpetual contempt, when he offered his influential advice to philosophers: Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere. Shestov, to the contrary, advocated laughing, weeping and screaming; everything except contemplative understanding.²⁶ All that profoundly matters, according to Shestov, exceeds the limits of language; instead, it must be voiced or emitted from some place deep within the diaphragm. Whereof one cannot speak, to frame it in Wittgenstein’s terms, thereof one must make … inarticulate noises. In essence, Shestov’s thinking was informed by the belief that humanity’s predicament was most profoundly articulated in the anguished cry of Christ on the cross: ‘My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ This expression of despair, the ultimate instance of seeking in lamentation, is both the opening of Psalm 22 (22: 1) and, in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew (15: 34; 27: 46), the culmination of Christ’s misery, the moment at which he drinks the dregs of the cup of trembling and wrings them out: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.

Shestov’s journey to Jerusalem, then, was something of an intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage. It was also of personal, genealogical importance, as I have implied; in the course of this trip, he ascended the Mount of Olives, whose peak is part of the ridge on the eastern ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Staying woke and staying awake
• 1 Athens and Jerusalem: Lev Shestov in Gethsemane
• 2 Philosophy and anti-philosophy: Shestov’s interventions
• 3 Angels of history and death: Shestov’s constellations
• 4 Garden and wasteland: The art of Gethsemane
• 5 Sleep and the sleepless: The night of Gethsemane
• Conclusion: Auschwitz and the end of the world
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright