Lev Shestov

Works

• 1903Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy

  Reads the underground man and Nietzsche as witnesses of a tragedy that no ethics or reason can console.

• 1938Athens and Jerusalem

  Shestov’s summa, first published in French in 1938: against the tradition from Greek philosophy to Kant and Hegel, which submits even God to reason and necessity, it sets biblical faith, for which all things are possible.

Position

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.

Life & context

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.

Further main works

• 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)
• The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (Apofeoz bespochvennosti, 1905)
• Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy (Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle, 1936)