Translator's Introduction
by Bernard Martin

Most of the essays and aphorisms collected in Lev Shestov's Potestas Clavium, which was not published in book form until 1923 when it appeared in Russian in Berlin, where written during the war years and originally printed in various journals in Moscow in 1916 and 1917.[1] The war itself was a deeply shattering experience for Shestov. In "A Thousand and One Nights," which he was to put at the head of Potestas Clavium, he ventures the suggestion that the tragedy of the world conflict, and indeed all of the horrors of the Twentieth Century, may be seen as God's answer to "Christian" Europe and its sacrilegious attempts to reach the heavens through rational, mechanical means, and he offers the hope that these horrors may destroy that presumptuous self-assurance which has led men to deify themselves and their own reason instead of the living God.

The concern to restore men's faith in the God of the Bible, which for some years had been growing in Shestov's mind, is here prominent but not yet as massively dominant as in his later books, especially in In Job's Balances and Athens and Jerusalem. In a sense, Potestas Clavium may be regarded as a transition between these works, in which his mature religious philosophy is expressed, and such earlier books as Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy, and The Apotheosis of Groundlessness,[2] in which he had begun clearing the way for his religious message by a bold assault on rationalism, philosophic idealism, scientism and autonomous morality. Here the polemic is continued and intensified, and Shestov brings to it the resources of the ironic and elegantly simple literary style that he had by now perfected, as well as his thorough familiarity with the whole range of European philosophy and literature.

In Potestas Clavium Shestov takes up once again the defense of the living individual whose uniqueness, spontaneity and freedom, he feels, have been denied by the rationalistic tradition that has dominated Western philosophy from the time of the pre-Socratics and by the scientism that has, especially in modern times, put forth such boundless pretensions. Philosophy and science have been concerned with abstractions, with generic concepts, seeing in them true, necessary and eternal being. The fact, however, Shestov wishes to insist, is that these are ghosts and that reality inheres only in the living individual. "The general and the necessary are non-being par excellence. And it is only when it will recognize this that philosophy will redeem the sin of Adam and arrive at the hridzômata pantôn, the roots of life, at that timiôtaton, that "most important" of which men have dreamt for so many thousands of years." [3]

By the time he wrote the essays contained in Potestas Clavium, Shestov had already become persuaded that reason and knowledge do not liberate but enslave men, and had arrived at that interpretation of the Biblical legend of Adam, the serpent and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that he was to expound so passionately and insistently in his later years. "God forbade plucking the fruits of this tree not out of fear that man would obtain more than what had been granted to him and not out of jealousy. The accursed serpent deceived Eve, deceived Adam, deceived Anaximander, and blinds all of us to this day. The tree of knowledge does not increase our powers but, on the contrary, diminishes them. We must choose between the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life." [4]

Years before, Shestov had already undertaken a vigorous attack on the fundamental presuppositions of positivistic science, especially the principle of regularity in the sequence of the phenomena of nature and the idea of causal necessity that is assumed to govern them. In a work published in 1905 he had argued that the causal relationships between natural phenomena which science is concerned to discover and describe are - despite the fact that they exude an air of regularity, permanence and necessity - in an ultimate sense completely arbitrary and ungrounded. The truth is that the universe may be so constituted as to permit at any moment the most fantastic metamorphoses: "...we are forced to admit that anything whatsoever may result from anything whatsoever... from our own minds and our own experience we can deduce nothing that would serve us as a ground for setting even the smallest limit to nature's own arbitrary behavior. If whatever happens now had chanced to happen quite differently, it would not, therefore, have seemed any the less natural to us." [5]

In the present work Shestov reiterates his conviction that what appears "natural" to the mind lulled into slumber by routine and habit is really profoundly enigmatic and mysterious. Such is the constancy of natural phenomena. "Why for millions of years," he demands, "has no light ray ever traced a curve, no stone floated on water, and no beet seed produced pineapples? Say what you will, I find this strange and monstrous, and only the inertia of our stupid and cocksure reason has found for this order of things the epithet 'natural.'"[6] Shestov here extends his challenge of "necessary" and "natural" explanations in the realm of physical phenomena to such explanations in the realm of history, concentrating his attack on the Marxist theory of history, to which he refers as "economic materialism." [7]

In his earlier work Shestov had already initiated his life-long polemic against what he regarded as the unjustified claims made on behalf of logic and logical principles. In the view of the rationalist tradition it is admitted that empirical facts may be arbitrary and contingent but the basic axioms of logic, e.g., the principle of identity and the principle of non-contradiction, are regarded as necessary, universal and eternal. This Shestov emphatically denied. That "A = A" is not a necessary, but an empirical truth. It is true only for our phenomenal world; other worlds are conceivable in which it is false.[8] Shestov did not wish completely to discard logic; what he did wish to insist upon is that it is not the only or primary road to truth. "Against this one must fight, even if he has against him all the authorities of thought beginning with Aristotle." [9]

In Potestas Clavium the challenge to the absolute claims of logic is renewed.[10] Shestov here further affirms that men have come to look upon logical contradictions as "the pudenda of the human mind," just as they regard certain physical organs as the pudenda of the body, and concludes, "thus, the demands of logic finally have for their source simply a deep-rooted human prejudice."[11] Indeed, rationalism as such is similarly rooted, Shestov urges, in an arbitrary preference for order, fixity, limitation: "the pretensions of reason to all-inclusiveness take their rise in our taste for the limited, which encloses itself in artificial bounds and feels such extreme fear before all that is unknown."[12] The acceptance of the kind of rationalism exemplified par excellence by the philosophy of Edmund Husserl is explicable, Shestov suggests, only by "the desire not to escape outside the limits of positivism, a desire dependent not on metaphysical considerations but on the profoundly inculcated habit of living and thinking in certain conditions of existence already well-known and comfortable."[13] We wish to sleep, and it is when we "know" and "understand," when our judgments are "clear and distinct," that we sleep most soundly.[14]

Shestov offers no theory of knowledge and explicates no theory of truth. His concern, he insists, is not with "the problem of knowledge" but with "knowledge as a problem." However, one might not improperly characterize the theory of metaphysical truth implicit in Potestas Clavium as negating the descriptions of truth commonly given in the rationalist philosophic tradition. Truth is not what is logically necessary. It is not what is recognized and acknowledged everywhere, always, and by everyone. It denies self-evidence and affirms contradiction. It is manifold, not one; private and individual, not public and common; essentially incommunicable, not transmissible to all.

Shestov regards Husserl, who sought to make philosophy a rigorous science and, against relativist doctrines, to develop a theory of truth as something that all beings - men and monsters, angels and gods - must recognize as truth,[15] as the greatest and most brilliant modern representative of the rationalist tradition. A large part of Potestas Clavium is devoted to a trenchant critique of Husserl's philosophy.[16] Shestov sees Husserl's opposition of "scientific philosophy" to "wisdom" or "profundity of thought" and his charge of the philosophers who were interested in the latter with faithlessness to their true mission as evidence that Husserl was carrying on the work of Kant. Just as Kant concluded that metaphysics is impossible, so Husserl, who identifies metaphysics with wisdom, also concluded that it is impossible.[17] But metaphysics or wisdom is, in Husserl's view, unnecessary; all that is required is science and, in philosophy, the application of the phenomenological method to every problem. These will yield truths that are universal and eternally unshakeable. Shestov's critique, in "Memento Mori" and "What is Truth?: On Ethics and Ontology," of Husserl's rationalism, a critique which also serves as an occasion for the presentation of his own views and those of others in the history of philosophy - notably, Plodnus - who dared "to soar beyond reason and knowledge," is an incisive one and constitutes one of the most valuable parts of Potestas Clavium.

No less intense than Shestov's attack on rationalism in Potestas Clavium is his attack on autonomous ethics. Here also the polemic had been inaugurated long before. As early as 1900, in the second book that he wrote, Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching, Shestov had exposed the hollowness of the ancient tendency to identify "the good" with God, a tendency represented most prominently in the late Nineteenth Century in Tolstoy's moralistic preaching, and had recounted Nietzsche's shattering discovery, after serving the good with all his heart and soul for years, that it could not save him or any other man. If God is the good, then, indeed, as Nietzsche proclaimed, "God is dead." The closing sentences of the book had summed up its message as well as the thought that was to obsess Shestov for the rest of his life: "Good - we now know it from the experience of Nietzsche - is not God. 'Woe to those who live and know no love better than pity.' Nietzsche has shown us the way. We must seek that which is above pity, above good. We must seek God." In Potestas Clavium Shestov returns to the fray. Socrates, who first propounded the idea of the good, he here suggests, "wished to become like God, indeed to transcend God. God created the universe, Socrates created the good which is more valuable than the whole universe. And ever since Socrates all reasonable beings, mortal or immortal, have been seeking the sources of the real in the good. The universe is transitory, the good is eternal."[18] Not only for Socrates but also for the Cynics, the Stoics, Spinoza, Kant, and even many Christian and Jewish philosophers and theologians up to our own day, the good has replaced God. If a sense of the reality of God and of human freedom is to be recovered, it can only be through a refutation of the claims of autonomous reason and autonomous morality.

In Potestas Clavium Shestov seeks to show that the logical and moral universe in which modern man lives and which, as he believes, bars his way to God, is the product of a long historical development whose beginnings he traces to the very dawn of Greek thought, to Anaximander. It was the Greek philosophers - particularly Socrates and his disciples, and then the Stoics - who identified God with, or subordinated him, to the rule, moral and logical. It was they who elevated the idea of law to the status of the supreme principle of the universe, promising men, through knowledge and obedience, possession of the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

The idea of the potestas clavium was first proclaimed "by the great prophet of a small people, Socrates." [19] Christianity only tore the power away from the hands of the pagan philosophers in order to claim it for itself, and for long centuries the pretension of Catholicism to the capacity for opening and closing the gates of heaven was not challenged. But now science, in its turn, is claiming the potestas clavium. "'Scratch' any European, even if he be a positivist or a materialist, and you will quickly discover a medieval Catholic who holds frantically to his exclusive and inalienable right to open for himself and his neighbor the gates of the kingdom of heaven." [20]

The history of Christianity is understood by Shestov as the history of the progressive Hellenization and consequently, distortion, of the biblical message. The God of the Bible was gradually transformed from the Omnipotent One who stands beyond and above all rules and principles into the guardian of the law. The result was not man's promised liberation, but his enslavement.

It was Shestov's proclaimed mission and his life-long endeavor to reverse this trend, to restore to man his right to the God revealed in the Bible and to the primordial freedom bestowed upon man by this God. In this endeavor Potestas Clavium, which is here presented for the first time in English translation, played a major role.


Bernard Martin

Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio
July, 1968