Rage Against the Machine: the Curious Case of Lev Shestov

The Wednesday After Advent 4

Lev Shestov

Or as the French would have it:  
Leon Chestov

Another philosophe
greatly admired by the French

"I'd like to thank the Academy."

Some 35 years ago I encountered the works of Lev Shestov. I remember the feeling only too well. It was the same feeling I had when I was 5 years old and my mother dragged me off to the Ralph Flanagan Swim School. Flanagan was a world class swimmer about a decade after the Weismsuller era [Ralph won a silver medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics] and I have often wondered if Weismuller [later known as Tarzan] taught his chimp buddy Cheeta to swim the same way Ralph taught me. I remember the look on my mother's face when on the first day of class Mr. Silver Medalist unceremoniously chucked me into the deep end, turned his back, and walked away. I got the message. This is the Herbert Spencer School of Aquatics. And you're a scholarship student. Sink or swim, dude.  These were the days before big-time liability suits. Anyhow,  I learned to swim just fine. I even got a certificate certifying I was a Little Minnow.

 Tarzan, Jane, and Cheeta

kinda like Eden

(but without the bush meat)

Family Values

I think he favors his mother

Shestov has a way of unnerving everyone who reads him.  The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once commented: "His voice when he enters an argument is that of a priest angry at the sight of holy vessels being desecrated."  Shestov was an irrationalist. Now if you need a precis,  I'll share this with you from the Routledge Encyclopedia of  Philosophy [I have edited for concision and to frame my own peculiar biases]: 

"...Shestov taught that reason and science can neither explain tragedy and suffering, nor answer the questions that matter most. ...Shestov regarded philosophical idealism as an attempt to gloss over the 'horrors of life' and attacked morality and ethics as inherently coercive. ...Philosophy and revelation are incompatible because God is not bound by reason, nature or autonomous ethics. To God, 'all things are possible', even undoing what has already happened. God even restored Job's dead children to him--the same children, not new ones, Shestov insisted."

Shestov denied the Blessed Trinity of philosophy: the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle. In other words, he threw 2500 years of Western thought out the window of his Paris apartment. To which I say [crossing myself quickly]: "good riddance". 

It was not that Shestov hated philosophy. He simply believed that God's actions were not restricted by anything we mortals might consider logical or reasonable. Now this argument actually resonates with me. And for Catholics who have been spoon fed so much Aquinas they feel like geese with exploding livers; spread this on your cracker. There is a patron Saint of Irrationality: St Peter Damian. Here's a hagiography your Jesuit high school teacher never shared with you. Like Shestov, Damian also believed that God could change the past if he so desired. He believed that the Devil was the first grammarian because he taught Adam to decline deus in the plural [Genesis 3:5, Evidently the devil doesn't speak Hebrew] and argued that since Jesus did not choose philosophers as disciples, monks [and presumably Catholic seminarians] should not be required to study philosophy. Of course, by this same logic [if logic applies in Damian or Shestov's world] only commercial fishermen should teach theology. QED. I think.

This is not as wacko as it sounds. At least to other wackos such as myself. If you want really wacko, then you should read St. Peter Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus Of course, if you do read it, you may be forced to conclude that not much has changed in the last 1000 years and that St. Peter Damian is not wacko at all--merely prescient. Oh dear, I almost forgot. St. Peter Damian also introduced the practice of self-flagellation into Western monastic life; which makes him not only the Patron Saint of Irrationalists but of Self-Disciplinarians. After all, who needs a teaching brother with a paddle when you can cut out the middleman? That's not crazy at all. In my book that just makes him, ummm, "well-rounded".

St. Petey D

First I'll write a letter to the Pope, 
then I'll whip those naughty monks into shape

Shestov's magnum opus--at least in my hallowed opinion--was his book Athens and Jerusalem.  Shestov saw very clearly that people were trapped in a mode of thinking, a way of seeing and encountering the world, that limited them necessarily; and that this kind of  "inside the box" rationality was, well--here it comes again--a consequence of the Fall. For Shestov, so-called rational thinking is something we do only when we're caught in the gears of The Machine. It's the downside of wanting to know Good and Evil. You get the knowledge alright. But you also get the misery that comes with it.

 "Big wheel keep on turning..."

And the off switch is where????

In some branches of apologetics, this is what is called the noetic effect of sin. Simply put, once Adam and Eve got the boot, no one could think straight anymore. Certainly not straight enough to think themselves out of their misery and back into the Garden [You want back? Here's a hint: "garden" and "grace" both begin with "G"]. It's an argument you're more likely to encounter hanging out with Calvinists than Russian-Jewish emigre philosophers. And it's certainly on the "no-no" side of the nature/grace divide [at least for some Catholics]. But it does show a high regard for sin and seems to be a truer measure of the depths of human depravity. But hey, who needs a Savior anyway? You're smart enough; you figure it out.

So how far out is this argument? It's so far out there that even a Jansenist would throw holy water on it [though not this Jansenist]. But it also has a sly logic.

It leaves room for miracles like bringing the dead back to life and and wiping the slate clean. Hey if God can change the past, why not my past?

Back from the dead

Like it never even happened

Shestov missed a couple of things though. Which is why he only gets a consolation prize--i.e. the Noble Pagan award. High marks indeed for a Jewish thinker who liked to quote Martin Luther and St. Paul. He never got a handle on grace. And he never got a handle on grace because he could never wrap his mind around the notion that sin was something more than just an epistemic glitch. And this is where Lev missed the boat. Sin isn't just a problem of the way we see the world [though it is that too], it's a condition of the heart, of the entire person. But that's OK, because for a philosopher--and this is still Advent, right?--he still makes a pretty good John the Baptist.

Shestov's works are now out of print and his legacy is far from secure. Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, was a close personal friend and great admirer of Shestov's [as were D.H. Lawrence, Martin Buber, Albert Camus, and Nikolai Berdyaev]. This is particularly curious given that Husserl and Shestov's philosophies were diametrically opposed. No matter. An accurate assessment of Shestov remains to be written. Perhaps an even more curious [and perhaps frightening] fact is the special attention shown by Serbian scholars to Shestov's works. Not that anyone would ever consider irrationalism a feature of Serbian character.

Now, about Cheeta. He left the jungle, changed his name to Jiggs, and retired to an assisted living facility in Palm Beach where you can catch him on Saturday nights tickling the ivories in the rec room.

Mr. Saturday Night
 Why is this chimp smiling? 

"It's OK--I still get my residuals."