Shestov's Reading and Misreading of Kierkegaard

Canadian Slavonic Papers

Shestov's Reading and Misreading of KierkegaardAuthor(s): JAMES M. McLACHLANSource: Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 28, No. 2 (June 1986),pp. 174-186Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40868583 .

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JAMES M. McLACHLAN

Shestov's Reading and Misreading of Kierkegaard Shestov's interpretations of a good many philosophers have been regarded as questionable. Robert Perkins, for example, has shown that he misinterpreted Kierkegaard's attitude towards reason.1 It has also been objected that Shestov was not rigorous enough in his definition of terms. Numerous other objections of this sort can be made but it would be a mistake to discard Shestov for these reasons. Shestov is an unusual and original thinker whose philosophical position does not easily fit into the mainstream of Western thought. Indeed he opposes it and seeks to replace it by a religious attitude that he thinks has been lost. His arguments and interpretations are not offered as evidences or proofs in support of a thesis; they are rhetorical devices to jolt us out of our complacency and point to a mystery that cannot be described in rational discourse and whose truth does not depend on it. The opposition between philosophical and religious discourse is symbolized for Shestov by the dichotomies "Athens and Jerusalem" (the title of one of his books) and "logic and thunders." Logic is man's effort to grasp and make sense of reality; it is manipulative and impersonal. Thunder is the form of the revelation with which God answered Job.

This study will focus on Shestov's interpretation of Kierkegaard. The two have often been compared and it is true that there is a great affinity between them; but the differences are profound and perhaps even more important than the similarities. For Shestov, Kierkegaard falls on both sides of the dichotomy between reason and revelation. Thus his interpretation of Kierkegaard reveals both the negative element that seeks to subvert what Shestov calls the "eternal truths" of reason and the positive element of the return to revelation and mythic thinking. This study will commence with a general outline of Shestov's philosophy. Next, it will consider the similarities between Shestov and Kierkegaard. The final section will deal with the differences, both those perceived and those unperceived by Shestov.

I Shestov sees Athens and Jerusalem as representing respectively a

coercive, impersonal view of ultimate reality (the proof) and a non-coercive

1. Robert Perkins, "Kierkegaard's Epistemological Preferences," in Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, IV, 4 (1973), p. 197.



Vol. xxvill, No. 2 Shestov and Kierkegaard | 175

personal one (faith). Reason, in its search for absolutes and universais, has ignored the incredible multiplicity and arbitrariness of the real world. The scientist who is concerned with uncovering general principles is not concerned with reality in Shestov's sense:

Who would wish to observe this drop of water suspended from a tele- graph wire, or this drop that glides over the window pane after the rain? There are millions of such drops and these, in and of themselves, have never concerned the scientists and never could concern them. The scientist wants to know what a drop of water in general is.2

It is not the universal, general, and eternal that stand at the centre of Shestov's philosophy but the particular, the finite, and the temporal. Any attempt to generalize about reality can only do violence to it and to human nature. Shestov therefore is absolutely consistent in holding multiple and sometimes contradictory positions. In Potestas Clavium he asks:

. . . how many profound and daring thoughts have perished for the reason only that they could not be reconciled with the idea of the sole truth and could not breathe in the atmosphere saturated with this idea?3

It is not that Shestov is opposed to reason but he insists that reason must not usurp the place of God and man.4

2. Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, transi. Bernard Martin (Athens, Ohio, 1966), p. 81.

3. Lev Shestov, Potestas Clavium, transi. Bernard Martin (Athens, Ohio, 1968), p. 118. Elsewhere Shestov wrote: "People seem shocked when I enunciate two contradictory propositions simultaneously . . . But the difference between them and me is that I speak frankly of my contradictions while they prefer to dissimulate theirs, even to themselves . . . They seem to think of contradictions as the pudenda of the human spirit." Cited in George L. Kline, "Lev Shestov," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7 (New York, 1967), pp. 432-33.

4. A. Lazareff, Vie et connaissance, transi. Boris de Schloezer (Paris, 1942), p. 13. For a recent discussion of Shestov's attitude towards reason see the exchange in Ultimate Reality and Meaning. Louis J. Shein, "The Philosophy of Infinite Possibility: An Examination of Lev Shestov's Weltanschauung," Ultimate Reality and Meaning, 2, no. 1 (1979), pp. 59-68. Stanley Grean, "A Comment on Louis Shein's Article 'The Philosophy of Infinite Possibility: An Examination of Lev Shestov's Weltanschauung'," ibid., 6, no. 2 (1983), pp. 152-57. Donald Wiebe, "Being Faithful and Being Reasonable as Mutually Exclusive: A Comment on Shein and Grean's Interpretation of Shestov," ibid., 1, no. 2 (1984), pp. 166-68.



176 I Revue Canadienne des Slavistes Juin 1986

Reason is indeed necessary, very necessary for us. Under the ordinary conditions of our existence it helps us cope with the difficulties that we run up against in our life path. But it also happens that reason brings man the greatest misfortune, that from benefactor and liberator it is transformed into jailer and hangman.5

Necessity, the categories of thought, the principle of contradiction, and universal ethical categories are useful ways of dealing with the world, but Man has forgotten that it was he who created the categories of reason, and imposed them on the world. He has subjugated the individual and concrete to the general and abstract and because of this he is forced to accept the horrors of the world and even the losses of his loved ones as eternally un- alterable truths; for with acceptance of the ultimacy of the categories of thought, the alteration of past events becomes unthinkable. Thus man has subjugated himself and even his gods to the impersonal. In Athens and Jerusalem Shestov writes:

How can anyone hand over to anyone or anything his right to God, to the soul, to immortality? For the fact is that in inquiring we renounce our right, we hand it over to someone. To whom? Who, then, is the someone or something that has stolen from us our soul and our God? And why has this something to which our existence is perfectly indifferent arrogated the right to pronounce final judgement on that which is more important to us than everything in the world?6

Against the "truths" of reason Shestov speaks of "truths that one can see but not show," they can only be experienced. The closest we can come to expressing them is through myth. Philosophical discourse aims at offering complete explanations that are opposed to the irreducible nature of reality. Shestov saw both sides of this dichotomy exemplified in Plato. Plato "knew that it is difficult to find the 'Father and Creator of all the universe' and that 'if one finds Him, one cannot show Him to everyone'."7 Hence he spoke in myth of what he had experienced. But there is also the danger that individual experiences may be taken not as evidence of the multiplicity of reality, but as immutable principles. Shestov believed that Plato had foreseen this danger, but still succumbed to it: "When he [Plato]

5. Lev Shestov, Speculation and Revelation, transi. Bernard Martin (Athens, Ohio, 1982), p. 215.

6. Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, p. 381. 7. Ibid., p. 96.




tried to show men what he had seen, the thing changed itself mysteriously under his eyes into its contrary."8

Religious myths do not reduce the chaos of multiplicity to general laws, but reflect it. Thus Shestov writes of the book of Job:

The whole book is one uninterrupted contest between the "cries" of the much-afflicted Job and the "reflections" of his rational friends. The friends, as true thinkers, look not at Job but at the "general." Job, how- ever, does not wish to hear about the "general;" he knows that the general is deaf and dumb and that it is impossible to speak with it. "But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God" (13:3). The friends are horrified at Job's words: they are convinced that it is not possible to speak with God and that the Almighty is concerned about the firmness of His power and the unchangeability of His laws but not about the fate of the people created by Him . . .

But the Biblical God, as is known, judged otherwise. At the end of the Book of Job we read, "The Lord spoke to Eliphaz of Teman: My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of Me what is right, as my servant Job has" (42:7). 9

For Shestov, Job is a supreme example of faith; through his faith he enters in the realm of the divine, where the loss of his flocks, children, and his health is not an eternal, unchangeable truth but a changeable, finite one, so that it is possible for God to restore his loss to him and even to make it never to have happened.10

II Shestov discovered Kierkegaard late in his life, in 1928, at the sug-

gestion of his philosophical adversary and friend Edmund Husserl.11 Shestov came to have an enormous, though critical, enthusiasm for Kierkegaard, but his interpretation of the Danish existentialist is contro- versial and it is certainly not the most faithful exposition of his thought.

8. Ibid., p. 116. Shestov sees this same transformation of a primordial religious experience into an abstract idea in the work of Nietzsche and Meister Eckhart. For Nietzsche the experience of the radical plurality of chaos was transformed into amor fati and the doctrine of "eternal return;" for Eckhart, into the abstract idea of the godhead that fathered German idealism. Ibid., pp. 216, 396.

9. Shestov, Speculation and Revelation, pp. 71-72. 10. Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, p. 309. 1 1 . Husserl had suggested that Shestov read Kierkegaard because his thought

had been so important to Heidegger's Being and Time. Shestov, Athens and Jeru- salem, p. 25.



178 I Canadian Slavonic Papers June 1986

By this time Shestov's thought had matured and his discussion of Kierke- gaard reflects much of his own philosophy.12 Shestov considered his method of philosophizing a "pilgrimage through souls," by which he meant a kind of dialogue with thinkers who, he felt, either shared his views or were his antagonists. He uses these thinkers to help define his own philosophical position. So his writings on Kierkegaard should not be read as an exposition of that philosopher's views, but rather as a debate with him and a critique of his thought from Shestov's point of view.13

Shestov's enthusiasm for Kierkegaard does not extend to all the Kierkegaardian corpus; this is obvious from a reading of Kierkegaard

12. The major influences on Shestov's thought were Dostoevskii and Nietzsche. Shestov was particularly interested in Dostoevskii's Notes from the Underground', indeed Berdiaev once remarked "Shestov wants to philosophize like the man underground." One of Shestov's earliest works, The Philosophy of Tragedy, is a comparison of Dostoevskii and Nietzsche and the two figure prominently in his later works. Leon Chestov, La Philosophie de la tragédie et Sur les confins de la vie, transi. Boris de Schloezer (Paris, 1966).

Nietzsche's aphorisms on the origin of reason and will to power come close to Shestov's position. For example, in The Will to Power Nietzsche writes: "Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases. In fact, to make possible logical thinking and inferences, this condition must be treated fictitiously as fulfilled. That is: the will to logical truth can be carried through only after a fundamental falsification of all events is assumed. From which it follows that a drive rules here that is capable of employing both means, firstly falsification, then the implementation of a point of view: logic does not spring from the will to truth [. . .]

A morality, a mode of living tried and proved by long experience and testing, at length enters consciousness as a law, as dominating - And therewith the entire group of related values and states enters into it: it becomes venerable, unassailable, holy, true; it is a part of its development that its origin should be forgotten- That is a sign it has become master -

Exactly the same thing could have happened with the categories of reason: they could have prevailed, after much groping and fumbling, through their relative utility- There came a point when one collected them together, raised them to consciousness as a whole - and when one commanded them, i.e., when they had the effect of a command- From then on, they counted as a priori, as beyond experience, as irrefutable. And yet perhaps they represent nothing more than the expediency of a certain race and species- their utility alone is their 'truth'." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, transi, and eds. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, 1967), pp. 277-78.

13. Shestov's writings on Kierkegaard are found, largely, in three works: Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, first published in Paris in 1936, "Kierke- gaard as a Religious Philosopher," first published in Russkie zapiski in Paris in 1938, an English translation of which is found in Speculation and Revelation, and finally, large sections of Athens and Jerusalem.




and the Existential Philosophy. His preferences and antipathies seem to follow Gregor Malantschuck's breakdown of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works into "concrete" and "abstract." The "concrete" works include Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, and culminate in Stages on Life's Way; the "abstract" works include the books written under the pseudonyms Johannes Climacus (A Philosophical Fragment and Concluding Unscientific Postscript) and Vigilius Haufniensis {The Concept of Anxiety).14 Shestov does not make this distinction himself but he does favour the "concrete" works. Shestov is highly critical of almost all the works published under Kierkegaard's name.15

Shestov particularly admired Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling for the theme of the importance of the individual over the universal ethical law and, in particular, for the way Kierkegaard illustrates it through the story of Abraham and Isaac.16 Abraham rises above the "ethical" to the level of faith because he is able to believe in a paradox: according to God's promise, his posterity through his son Isaac will become as numerous as the sand on the sea, and yet that same God has commanded him to sacrifice his only son. He is able to accept these contradictions and believe that God has the power to suspend the laws of logic in his case. He is thus able to regain everything "by virtue of the Absurd."17 Faith, for Kierke- gaard, is the struggle for possibility.18

Shestov himself had arrived at this position in the early 1920s long before his encounter with Kierkegaard. Only faith, which survives because of paradox and contradiction, can embody the individual religious experience. Accordingly, Shestov approves of Kierkegaard's assertion that proofs for the existence of God do not demonstrate the existence of God, but of something else that is not God. 19 For both Kierkegaard and Shestov God's independent reality can in no way be stated in a proof, it is ineffable. Shestov had already said this in 1923: "The God proved by reason, what- ever predicates granted to Him - omnipotence, omniscience, goodness - was God only by the grace of reason."20 And hence not the God of

14. Gregor Malantschuck, Kierkegaard's Thought, transi. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, N.J., 1971), pp. 214-15.

15. Lev Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, transi. Elinor Hewitt (Athens, Ohio, 1969), pp. 163-66.

16. Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, pp. 52-65. 17. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death,

transi. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J., 1941), p. 124. 18. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, p. 173. 19. Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, transi. David Swensen

(Princeton, N.J., 1936), p. 54. 20. Shestov, Potestas Clavium, p. 10.




Abraham. Logic and reason can deal only with general categories and not with individuals or what is unique to them. In desperation the individual turns from reason to God. For both philosophers despair is the turning- point; Shestov is right to emphasize the importance of despair in Kierke- gaard's thought, citing this passage from Kierkegaard's journals: "Only horror that has turned to despair can develop man's higher powers."21

On all these points Kierkegaard and Shestov seem to be very close and the similarities are important. But when these similarities are examined in detail the differences between them prove to be even more substantial. Even in the elements that appear the most similar (the importance of the individual as indefinable by reason, and the importance of the move from despair to faith and God) Shestov and Kierkegaard diverge significantly.22

Ill Shestov's interpretation of Kierkegaard is based on his own notion of

faith as a struggle against any final understanding. This is one of Shestov's most significant insights but it is also the cause of his misinterpretations of Kierkegaard and his rejection of the Edifying Discourses and the later works. Shestov does this because he identifies Kierkegaard's philosophical project too closely with his own. For example, he said that "Kierkegaard went from Hegel to Job and from Socrates to Abraham solely because Hegel and Socrates demanded that he love reason, and he hated reason more than anything else in the world."23 One of the themes of Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy is that between Athens and Jerusalem there is no peace, nor should there be.24 But this is Shestov's position, not Kierkegaard's. In each of his works Kierkegaard sees the spirit of Athens (which he calls the pagan or the socratic) as not totally antithetical to that of Christianity, even though the latter is different from anything that has gone before. Shestov's misreading leads him inevitably to the conclusion

21. Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, p. 67. 22. Shestov, as noted earlier, believes that, as with Job, it is only through

despair that man can shed his dependence on reason and come to faith. Kierke- gaard in The Sickness unto Death reveals a dialectical movement from despair to faith. For Kierkegaard all human beings are in despair, despair is the lack of

integration of the finite and the infinite desires of the self. After the fall man becomes conscious of his inability to integrate the finite and the infinite and falls into despair which is sin. It is only through faith in the God for whom all things are possible that the possibility of repairing the rift within the self can be realized. But it is only by moving from the unconscious despair of innocence to the consciousness of our

despair, that the possibility of coming to faith emerges. 23. Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, p. 34. 24. Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, p. 372.



Vol. xxviii, No. 2 Shestov and Kierkegaard | 181

that Kierkegaard failed to follow through in the battle against the eternal truths of reason. He cites one of Kierkegaard's journal entries on the immutability of what Shestov calls the "Eternity" of God as an illustra- tion of this:

When Christ cried out: My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? - this was terrible for Christ, and so it has usually been described. It seems to me that it was more terrible still for God to hear that. It is terrible to be so inflexible! But no - this is still not the most terrible thing: that is to be so inflexible and, at the same time, to be love; this is profound, endless, unfathomable sorrow.25

The idea that God should hear the cries of His Son and be unable to do anything Shestov finds unacceptable. It is to return to the impersonal realm of the absolute general laws under another guise. But the results for living beings, Gods, or humans are the same.

It is impossible to prevail upon Eternity, to beseech it, to appeal to its conscience; Like the ethical, it has no ears with which to hear. And in this case God has no advantage over mortals: He has no common language with the ethical or Eternity. God himself suffers, suffers unbelievably, when He sees how Eternity and the ethical deal with human beings. God is indeed love and yet he dares not, He cannot, put them to flight, just as the god of the pagans could not oppose the order of existence which he did not establish.26

For "philosophizing theologians" the immutability of God has become an inflexible axiom. But, says Shestov, this kind of enslavement of God to his own eternal nature or "immutability" has nothing to do with the God of revelation. God is alive. He can change if he wills it. He returned to Job his flocks and children. He was prepared to reverse his intention to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for Abraham.27

Shestov insists not only on God's omnipotence, but also on man's total freedom: if God loves men then he has no need to subordinate them to his divine will and thus deprive them of the most precious of all the gifts he has given them.28 "Where God is there is no law, there is freedom and where freedom is not, God is not."29 Against Kierkegaard's assertion that man belongs to God more surely than any slave ever belonged to his earthly master Shestov cites the psalms: "Ye are Gods, Children of the

25. Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, p. 233. 26. Ibid., p. 231. 27. Ibid., p. 237. 28. Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, p. 431. 29. Ibid., p. 358.




most High."30 Man is, for Shestov, a free being who is capable of partici- pating in the divine omnipotence. God may be omnipotent but he does not force man to do anything.31 For Shestov it is unthinkable to subjugate the individual to any eternal principle even if it be regarded as God.

In their explanations of despair and faith Kierkegaard and Shestov again diverge. This is illustrated by the way Shestov misinterprets Kierke- gaard's concept of repetition. In Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus Dubitandum est Kierkegaard defines the meaning of "repetition" as the unifying of the past life with the present and the projection ofthat way of being into the future. To explain this he argues that there is a difference between consciousness and reflection. Reflection is disinterested in that it is not directly involved with its object, the past, which appears to it as a solidified thing, an ideal.32 Consciousness, on the other hand, is absorbed in the world in which it is involved. The world cannot simply be a "thing" for consciousness because the world is constantly changing and demands continuous involvement. Within consciousness there is thus a collision between the ideal, our memory of the past, and the actual, the flux of time and the multiplicity of beings which cannot be forced into an unchanging ideal; so what we experience is always a twofoldness and a disunity. Reflection tries to distance itself from this collision but the fully conscious individual cannot accept this and must attempt to unify the ideal and the actual. Johannes calls this collision between ideality and actuality "repetition." In the present, consciousness holds together the relation of the actual and the ideal that existed in the past and makes it continue to exist in the present; thus to achieve repetition is to be fully conscious of the paradoxical relation of the ideal and the real, the general and the individual.33 In his Journals Kierkegaard speaks of a pastor who is able every day to conduct ten funerals, baptize numerous babies, perform twenty marriages. But the significance of these actions lies not in the external fact of their repetition, but in the repeated renewal of the self in relation to God. It is in this sense of repetition that the pastor unites the past and the present.34

30. Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, p. 164. 3 1 . Shestov holds that this is the meaning of Nietzsche's "morality of masters

and slaves:" God and men of faith participate in the entirely personal morality of masters of the creation. We fallen men with our reliance on impersonal necessities participate in the morality of slaves. Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, p. 346.

32. Soren Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus or De omnibus dubitandum est, transi. T. H. Croxall (Stanford, Calif., 1958), pp. 151-52.

33. lbid.t p. 154. 34. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, transi. Howard

and Edna Hong (Princeton, N.J., 1983), p. 329.




This is why repetition is never possible on the level of mere sensory experience because all that is experienced is individual moments in the flux of time. In Repetition Constantine Constantious attempts to repeat a trip he once took to Berlin; he returns to the hotel, the comedy, all of the places he had been to in his earlier successful trip, only to be disappointed at the outcome. Indeed this disappointment was inevitable because in the world of the aesthetic there is only a stream of endless sensory experience.35 This is the sensualist's despair: aesthetic satisfaction at any moment is difficult enough but sustaining it over time is impossible.36 The young man who achieves a repetition in Kierkegaard's view does not receive back the physical reality of the girl that he had lost, but rather, receives back his (own) self as he was before the affair.37 This is also the case with Kierke- gaard's interpretation of the story of Job. Kierkegaard does not emphasize that Job receives back his children, health, and flocks but that after his despair the split in his being is healed.

Repetition is in Kierkegaard thus tied to an act of will unifying past experience and projecting it into the future. It is more concerned with the subjective side of the individual knower and not to those physical objects, including human beings, that are outside him. Shestov's idea of repetition is much closer in form to that of Kierkegaard's sensualist Constantine Constantious, who believes that repetition has to do with the sensuous world of things and not only with the will. Like Nietzsche he believes life is not reducible to anything beyond the world of sensory experience. Man stands before the mystery of the incredible multiplicity of creation, "a world of sudden, wonderful and mysterious transformations,"38 which God, after he created them, called "very good." Job, in Shestov's interpretation, is the best example of this dogged attachment to the finite because he will not let go of the finite beings that God has taken from him, and feels that if all things are possible for God he can return them to him and, even more than that, make the unjust events of his past not to have occurred. This is, in Shestov's understanding, what Job wins from God.

The fundamental divergences between the two become even more apparent in their interpretation of the myth of the Fall and their definition of sin. For Kierkegaard pre-lapsarian innocence is a state of peace and non-differentation, but it also contains the subconscious desire to become differentiated, a self, an individual. This possibility of becoming creates

35. Ibid., pp. 173-77. 36. Ibid., pp. 173-74. 37. Ibid., pp. 220-22. 38. Shestov, In Job's Balances, transi. Camilla Coventry (Athens, Ohio, 1975),

p. 160.




an anxiety, like that which can be seen in children, because the individual is not conscious of what it has to do. The prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil awakens the spirit to the awareness of good and evil, and also to the possibility of freedom, of "being able" to choose, although to choose what is not yet clear. Adam is still innocent but he is fascinated with the terrible possibility of action: "he both loves and flees it."39

The Fall is brought about when the individual moves from the possibility of action to action itself. In sin Man becomes aware of his inability to posit the relation between the finite and the infinite and falls into despair. The synthesis of the finite and the infinite can only be accomplished by God because God, the Christian God for Kierkegaard, is the eternal who entered time, the infinite who became finite, the ideal who becomes actual. God is the ultimate paradox who holds the eternal and the finite together. Sin is introduced with the desire of the self to create itself outside the relation with God, and the despair at its own failure. The unifying of the finite and infinite is only possible for the infinite God; this is the ultimate meaning of the Kierkegaardian dictum that purity of heart is to will one thing; to will the relation with God who unifies the temporal and the eternal, the ideal and the actual, and the finite and the infinite.

Innocence is not a state of perfection to which one would want to return.40 Innocence cannot be relation with God; relation requires differentiation. Indeed, because of the fall man is potentially closer though actually further from God than he was before the fall. The fall brings about the drama of the reconciliation of man with God which proceeds by the path of the dialectic. Despair is the motive force that drives the Kierke- gaardian dialectic through the various stages of man's inability to posit the relation between the finite and the infinite. The awareness of possibility is hope and the antithesis to this despair. The belief that for God all things are possible, including the synthesis of the finite and the infinite, keeps the individual open to this possibility and this is what Kierkegaard means by faith as the struggle for possibility.41 Unlike Hegel Kierkegaard's dialectic moves through contradictions by leaps and not by mediation; by freedom not necessity.42 The final leap is the leap of faith that returns the individual to God.

39. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, transi. Riedar Thomte (Princeton, N.J., 1980), pp. 42-45.

40. Ibid., p. 37. In The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard also writes that it is infinitely better to be in despair than to remain in innocence; in other words, the fall is a positive step. Sickness unto Death, p. 148.

41. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, p. 173. 42. Kierkegaard. Philosophical Fragments, pp. 93, 101.




Shestov's interpretation of the myth of the fall is radically different, and he criticizes Kierkegaard for placing imperfection and anxiety in pre- lapsarian innocence. For Shestov innocence was perfection: it was freedom, participation in the divine creativity. The fall did not bring about consciousness or differentiation of the self from the rest of creation, or freedom or even knowledge. All of these existed already. But because knowledge has taken possession of man's soul, he does not dare return to innocence. He does not even understand what it is: it appears to him as a state of slumber. Where for Kierkegaard despair is brought about by the necessary disrelation between the finite and the infinite elements in man, for Shestov despair is brought on by man's slavery to the "eternal truths" he has created, which have robbed him of hope.43

In Shestov's version of the fall man sought to be as God and have power over Him. The serpent says to Adam "you shall be like God knowing good and evil." But, says Shestov, the serpent lied: "God doesn't know anything, God creates everything and Adam . . . participated in this omnipotence." After the Fall man fell under the power of knowledge and lost his freedom; he allowed evil to enter the world by seeking knowledge of good and evil. He lost his freedom which was the power not to admit evil into the world. By his desire to become like God, man became unlike Him.44

The fundamental differences between Shestov and Kierkegaard grow out of their very different conceptions of man. For Shestov man is a created eternal being; thus the problem of the disrelation of the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the temporal, that is critical to Kierkegaard's notion of man is not an issue for Shestov. In Shestov's thought man comes to faith through despair because of his attachment to the finite that he has lost to the impersonal "truths" that were his own creation. There is no dialectical path whatsoever, only a continued assault on the "eternal truths" that threaten to destroy the hope that for God "All things are possible."

Shestov thinks that, difficult though it may be, we must imagine truths that are not coercive. When Moses stood face to face with God on Mt. Sinai the laws fell away; the light of reason grew dim, the bonds of law were loosed, and in this primeval "darkness," this limitless freedom, man once again found himself in contact with the fundamental "very good" which had once filled the world.45 It is only then that man's original

43. Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, p. 263. 44. Ibid., p. 255. 45. Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, p. 263.




freedom returns to him; not the freedom that is only a choice between good and evil, but the freedom that, to use Kierkegaard's words, is possibility.

For Shestov "God signifies that all things are possible." There is no good and evil but only the primal "very good" of creation. There is no reality apart from the multitude of individuals and events that God created and continues to create. Man can participate in this creation but only after he ceases to call "the good" that which is eternal and unchanging and sees God's "very good," the world in its finitude. This attitude requires constant struggle. Necessity, the ethical, the eternal have no real existence; they take their power from man who fears chaos, the capricious, the fantastic, and so will gladly sacrifice everything, even those he loves, to them. This openness to possibility and freedom is the heart of what Shestov wants for philosophy. It is also the point where he and Kierke- gaard are closest but also where they diverge most widely in their ways of attaining the goal.



Documents

Shestov's Reading and Misreading of Kierkegaard