Lev Shestov - Potestas Clavium - Part III

But I shall perhaps be asked: what have the angel and the fiery sword to do here? Both exist, only they are found not outside of man but in him, just like that apple which Adam ate. They are manifest in our desire to intelligere, in our art of creating general ideas. It suffices for a man (as Spinoza, following the suggestions of his predecessors, did) to employ the language of concepts for Paradise immediately to transform itself into Hell. Where beautiful gardens were, where birds sang, where young lion cubs played perpetually, where people rejoiced, loved, where a free life ruled triumphantly, there suddenly arose divitiae, honores, et libidines - as concepts which, whether one translates them into Latin or into another language, mean only one thing: death, death, and death! And the philosophy of Spinoza, which bears at its proud summit Amor Dei intellectualis, is also death. Man carries in himself an angel armed with a burning sword which forbids him access to Paradise.

The ancient curse continues to weigh upon us. We also are guilty and we are our own willing executioners. Res nullo alio modo vel ordine a Deo produci potuerunt quam productae sunt (Eth. I, prop. XXXIII), or, as Hegel put it, vernünftiges Unglück! How is it that man could come to find supreme satisfaction in the knowledge that misfortune is rational and that God could not create things otherwise than He did create them? And yet, it is at this that we are asked to stop; it is in this that one sees the supreme wisdom, the highest good that life can give us. Even the sweet singer Horace assures us that the most enviable fate on earth is that of the wise man:

Sapiens uno minor est Jove, dives,
Liber, honoratus, pulcher, rex denique regum.
[The wise man is only a little less than Jove, rich,
free, honored, handsome, and, lastly, king of kings.]

Who speaks thus? The ancient serpent who took on the form of a poet and began anew to lead men astray by praising to them the beauty of the fruits of the tree of knowledge. If it were a question of Horace only, one could refuse to listen to him: polla pseudontai hoi aoidoi (the poets lie a great deal). But Horace only repeated what the philosophers constantly proclaim, the philosophers who know perfectly well that there is not a grain of truth in these statements. The wise man is not at all beautiful or free and he is not the king of kings. He is enchained, ugly the least of slaves, and stands in all things not only behind Jupiter but behind the most miserable of mortals.

     The "exoteric" philosophy must obviously be silent about this. I think that even the initiates do not speak of these things among themselves. It is only among the saints that you will find confessions of this kind, but the saints expressed themselves in such a way that no one ever believed them. And, in general, this is one of those great mysteries of life that remain hidden, even when one speaks of them loudly in all public places. The philosophers, like the saints, need sancta superbia. And Spinoza finally, lived only thanks to sancta superbia, of which he tells us nothing in his writings, for it is impossible to treat of it as one treats of perpendiculars and triangles. One must sing of it as the food of the gods, as nectar and ambrosia. Spinoza's Ethics in its entirety is precisely a triumphal, but not a triumphant, hymn to the glory of sancta superbia.

     It is said that intuition is the only means of grasping the supreme truth. Intuition comes from the word intueri, "to see." Men have very great trust in their vision, and for this they certainly have sufficient reason. Yet it is necessary to know not only how to see but also how to hear. The philosophers should have found a substantive from the word audire and granted to it all the rights of intuition. And even more rights still. For the most important, the most necessary thing cannot be seen; it can only be heard. The mysteries of being are whispered silently only to him who knows how, at the right time, to be all ears. At these moments one discovers that everything in life is not "rational" and particularly so "misfortune"; that God is not a general idea and that not only does He not act "according to the laws" of His nature but that He is Himself the source of all laws and of all natures; that things are such as they were created by God but could have been created quite otherwise; that the philosopher, who is obliged to know the universe by means of general ideas, is not rex regum but servus servorum, the least of all men, as the famous saints, St. Theresa or her disciple St. John of the Cross, and still others, were. But it is impossible to see all these things: we can only hear them.

     In recent times, Husserl has defined philosophy as the science of the roots of things, rhidzômata pantôn. This definition, in which one cannot fail to notice a remembrance of Empedocles' verse, tessara gar pantôn rhidzômata prôton akoue (before all else, learn the four roots of all things), is extremely seductive and, in its way, expresses exactly the object which philosophy, in the person of its most remarkable representatives, always set itself. Nevertheless, one cannot characterize it as exhaustive. Man obviously tries to know the roots and sources of everything that exists. But Plotinus was also right when, to the question "What is philosophy?" he replied, to timiôtaton, "the most important, the most valuable." Man seeks the roots not because he is pushed by an unsatisfied curiosity. Rightly or wrongly he believes that where the roots and origins are is also what is most important, most valuable, most necessary for him.

     If it turned out, for example, that vulgar materialism contained the "final truth," philosophy would obviously no longer be entitled to call itself the science of sciences. If everything arose from dust and will return to dust, is it worth the trouble to be interested in roots and origins? So then, in seeking the rhidzômata pantôn philosophy aspires to to timiôtaton, that is, it wishes to find the sources of life-bringing and death-bringing elixirs. Even the monk Spinoza, who had made a vow of renunciation, tells us (Eth. I, prop. XI): Posse non existere impotentia est, et contra posse existere potentia est... Ergo, ens absolute infinitum, hoc est Deus, necessario existit [the potentiality of non-existence is a negation of power and, contrarywise, the potentiality of existence is a power... Therefore, a being absolutely infinite - in other words, God - necessarily exists]. Complete monk that he is, he nevertheless aspires to potentia. And yet potentia is the same as divitiae, honores, and if you wish, libidines, but freed to a certain extent from those contingencies and conditions that are the property of earthly existence.

     A rich and honored man is above all a powerful man and consequently a free and proud man. But Spinoza himself rejected wealth and honors only because man is incapable of preserving by his own powers the divitiae et honores that he has conquered or inherited. But when he called them potentia it seemed to him that things had changed completely, for potentia, at least the potentia of which he dreamt, had been defined by him in terms and predicates that did not admit the idea of destruction. But the whole argumentation here is obviously false. To begin with, posse non existere can be considered a power as well as a weakness. It may be that the choice between existence and non-existence must be left to the supreme being. But then, even if one admits with Spinoza that posse non existere, impotentia est, who can then oblige us to accord the preference to power over weakness? Or, more exactly, is the desire for power not libido, one of those passions which Spinoza vowed to renounce? Is there any place in geometry for potentia, and especially the desire for potentia? If one reasons mathematically, potentia is a certain curve, that is, the geometric locus of points having a certain determinate character; impotentia is another curve, that is, likewise the geometric locus of points having a certain determinate character. Let us say that the first is a circle and the second an ellipse. It is completely evident that there is no reason to accord preference to the circle over the ellipse. God can have as a predicate posse existere as well as posse non existere, if the question of his existence is treated more geometrico. I mean that the "proof" contains a petitio principii, and that it cannot be otherwise. It is clear that, before establishing his argumentation, Spinoza, in a certain process which does not express itself in his works (probably deliberately) decides the question not only of God's existence but also of all His predicates, and he remembered geometry only when he had to address men. He remembered it because he was afraid that his thoughts, deprived of their proofs, would be received with scorn and with shrugging of the shoulders.

     But, his philosophy was for him to timiôtaton, the most valuable. And he had to protect it by all the means, whatever they might be, that were in his power. If Spinoza had been a king or a pope he would have had recourse to pyres and tortures. But he was poor, weak, unknown. He possessed only his reason. So he wrote his Ethica more geometrico demonstrata. And it turned out that by this method it was possible to preserve many things for a long time and even better than by means of pyres and tortures. But not forever. If the philosophy of Spinoza should not find other means of defending itself, his God will not have the power, any more than the God of the inquisitors, to withstand time. And then it is obvious also that the question must be posed differently, as the men who were still free of our self-sufficiency and of our prejudices posed it: it is not man who "defends" God but God who defends man. To put it another way: it is not necessary to defend God but to seek Him and, consequently, if philosophy wishes, following the thought of Plotinus, to be to timiôtaton, reason must renounce its pretensions to sovereignty. It is not given to it "to draw everything out of itself"; it is not reason that was "in the beginning." The sources and roots of life lie beyond the boundaries of reason.