लेव शेस्तोव

कृतियाँ

• 1903दोस्तोयेव्स्की और नीत्शे: त्रासदी का दर्शन

  भूमिगत मनुष्य और नीत्शे को ऐसी त्रासदी के साक्षी के रूप में पढ़ता है जिसे कोई नीतिशास्त्र या तर्क सांत्वना नहीं दे सकता।

• 1938एथेंस और येरुशलम

  शेस्तोव का सार-ग्रंथ, पहली बार 1938 में फ़्रांसीसी में प्रकाशित: यूनानी दर्शन से कांट और हेगल तक की उस परंपरा के विरुद्ध जो ईश्वर को भी तर्क और अनिवार्यता के अधीन करती है, वह बाइबिलीय आस्था रखता है जिसके लिए सब कुछ संभव है।

मत

Shestov is on the map as a philosopher who turned against the authority of reason itself. His early books read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche as witnesses of experiences – suffering, ugliness, despair – that no ethics or system can explain away. Later he formulated his opposition as “Athens and Jerusalem”: Greek philosophy and its heirs from Aristotle to Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and Husserl submit even God to necessity and self-evident truths, while biblical faith, as in Job, Abraham or Luther, demands the impossible and refuses to accept that what has happened cannot be undone. In his friendship and argument with Husserl he treated phenomenology as the purest form of the rationalism he opposed; it was Husserl who directed him to Kierkegaard, whom he then read as an ally. Albert Camus, in “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), counted him among the existential thinkers who escape the absurd by a leap into faith and so commit “philosophical suicide”. Fondane and Cioran took up his line of thought. Critics have asked whether a philosophy against reason can still argue; Shestov did not claim to offer a system and accepted the paradox. His work draws on the Hebrew Bible and on Christian authors alike and fits no single confession.

जीवन और संदर्भ

Lev Shestov, born Yehuda Leib Schwarzmann, was born in Kyiv on 12 February 1866 (31 January Old Style), the son of a Jewish textile merchant. He studied mathematics and then law in Moscow and Kyiv and graduated in law in 1889; his dissertation on labour legislation was not accepted. For years he helped run his father’s business in Kyiv, while spending long periods abroad; in Rome he married Anna Berezovskaya, a marriage he long kept from his father. His first book, on Shakespeare and his critic Georg Brandes, appeared in 1898 under the pen name Shestov, followed by studies of Tolstoy and Nietzsche (1900), Dostoevsky and Nietzsche (1903) and “The Apotheosis of Groundlessness” (1905). He lived in Switzerland from 1908 to 1914, then in Moscow, and in 1918–19 lectured in Kyiv. In 1919–20 he left via Crimea and Constantinople, and from 1921 lived in Paris, where he lectured on Russian and Greek philosophy at the Russian courses attached to the Sorbonne and met Edmund Husserl in 1928. His friends included the poet Benjamin Fondane, Georges Bataille, who co-translated one of his books, and Nikolai Berdyaev. He died in Paris in November 1938.

अन्य प्रमुख कृतियाँ

• Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes (Shekspir i ego kritik Brandes, 1898)
• The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche (Dobro v uchenii gr. Tolstogo i F. Nitshe, 1900)
• Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy (Dostoevskii i Nitshe. Filosofiia tragedii, 1903)
• The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (Apofeoz bespochvennosti, 1905)
• Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy (Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle, 1936)
• Athens and Jerusalem (Afiny i Ierusalim, 1938)