Abstract
The Russian thinker Lev Shestov (1886-1938) was once regarded as one of the great Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, though in the twenty-first century he is largely forgotten. He was admired not only by his contemporaries, among them Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber, but by numerous influential French or Francophone intellectuals of younger generations, including Georges Bataille, Rachel Bespaloff, Emil Cioran and Gilles Deleuze.
Emmanuel Levinas, writing in 1937, summarised Shestov as a ‘philosopher of religion’ who had returned religious philosophy, ‘under its existential form,’ ‘to important problems of salvation.’ In so doing, Levinas continued, Shestov had ‘explode[d] the synthesis of the Greek spirit and the Judeo-Christian one, which the Middle Ages believed to have accomplished’. In their different ways, the rather more fashionable philosophers of these later generations valued his writings, among other things, for their inspired, self-consciously prophetic critique of the arrogance and ignorance of the entire rationalist project. From the late 1890s to the late 1930s, in readings of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, of Luther and Pascal, of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, Shestov relentlessly pitted Faith against Reason, Revelation against Speculation, Paul against Plato, Kierkegaard against Kant. Or, to echo his favourite opposition, Jerusalem against Athens.
Recently, there has been something of a resurgence of interest in Shestov’s idiosyncratic thought, which scholars such as Ramona Fotiade have sought to return to prominence. But there remain few monographs on his thinking, especially in English. The artist and scholar Marina Ogden’s book, which makes excellent use of her intimate knowledge of Shestov’s writings in Russian, is in this respect an important intervention. It offers a useful and frequently insightful introduction to Shestov’s thinking, not least in organising the book on roughly chronological, biographical lines. Its attempts to initiate a conversation between Shestov’s thought and that of both William James and Sigmund Freud are especially interesting. But, more boldly, and perhaps more riskily, the book also tries to provide a ‘key to understanding his philosophy’. As its title indicates, it finds this in Shestov’s metaphor or ‘parable’ of the Angel of Death. This figure appears in Shestov’s ground-breaking article on Dostoevsky, ‘The Conquest of the Self-Evident,’ written for the centenary of the novelist’s birth.
There, Shestov writes that ‘the Angel of Death who descends towards man to separate his soul from his body is all covered with eyes’. Sometimes, though, this angel arrives prematurely, and so decides not to remove the relevant individual’s soul but, instead, to leave them ‘one of the innumerable pairs of eyes with which his [own] body is covered’. This individual – Dostoevsky is his case study – is then blessed or cursed with a terrible new vision, one that reveals that ‘things do not exist “necessarily”, but “freely”, that they are and at the same time are not’. This liberates them from the impoverished assumptions of a rationalist metaphysic, opening them up to a sense of the miraculous contingency of being. Ogden misses an opportunity to pursue Shestov’s intriguing claim that Gogol too was the recipient ‘the accursed gift of second sight’ granted by the Angel of Death, and, surprisingly, fails to cite Geneviève Piron’s discussion of the Angel of Death in Léon Chestov: Philosophe du déracinement (2010); but her approach nonetheless proves highly suggestive. This is an important revival of Shestov’s reputation.