Lev Shestov - Potestas Clavium - Preface: a thousand and one nights 4

     And yet men cannot and do not wish to stop thinking of God. They believe in Him, they doubt, they lose their faith, they return to Him. The so-called "proofs" for the existence of God show themselves to be finally only a kind of philosophical ballast; they are certainly very interesting and instructive but completely useless for the purpose they set themselves. If one reads Anselm, Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel - whatever may be the glory of these names, whatever may be the depth and wisdom of their reflections - one has the very clear impression that these men did not believe in God. Or, more exactly, that what they called God is not God.

     The Greek philosophers already were firmly convinced, as I have said, that God does not exist, that God is in virtue, that is, in the capacity man possesses of renouncing the real world and confining himself within the world of ideas, the ideal world, the only world that is forever protected against all attacks. One can take away my father, my mother, my children, my wealth, my fatherland even - but who can take away from me the realm of ideas? In the Middle Ages realism triumphed among the Catholic philosophers mainly because the "general" (the ideal), not knowing genesis (birth, beginning), was not subject to phthora (death, end). And in modern times everyone rushed to idealism - this we must never forget - only because ideas, even the simplest ideas, are indestructible. It is easy to kill a living rabbit or a ladybird, but who can kill "the rabbit in general" or a geometrical truth? Idealism is the only refuge of those who have lost all hope of saving living beings.

     But is this a way out? Would it not be better, following Schopenhauer and the Hindu wisdom that Schopenhauer valued so highly, openly to renounce God and admit that human life is evil and continuous suffering and that, consequently, our final task consists in destroying in ourselves "the will to live"? Obviously not, from the practical point of view; practically, idealism is justified. But it would be better for those who thirst for the supreme truth, for those in whose eyes practical considerations retreat into the background because of certain (perhaps exceptional) circumstances of their existence.

     Schopenhauer's disciple Nietzsche was the first philosopher who was seized with terror at the idea of what men had done in killing God. It may be that if Nietzsche had been brought up on Hegel he would never have suspected that Hegel's God is only masked atheism. Only because Schopenhauer taught him to speak the truth about the God of the philosophers was it given him to feel the meaning of the crime that men had committed in creating the cult of general ideas (the ideal). Nietzsche himself says that men do not realize to this day what they have done. That is true. We are only beginning little by little to discover the abyss into which we have fallen. And in the measure that the reality becomes revealed, our horror at the crime that has been committed and is still being committed grows.

     Even external events have, as if they were doing it purposely, mysteriously developed in such a way that even the blind must see that cultivated mankind has entered a period of insanity. The war that has been unleashed over mankind has taken on such proportions and made so many victims that there is no one, it seems, in all of Europe who has not been affected in what is dearest to him. The representatives of the Allied Powers, assembled in congress to divide the spoils of crushed Germany, are hoping thus to heal their own wounds, but everyone realizes that this method of treatment must fail. The bleeding wounds will not close; on the contrary, they will spread still more. And the cries of men tortured to death will rise again, and again they will ask why men have killed, why men still kill God.

     Then finally, perhaps, men will turn away from the methods of the "natural" explanation of life. Perhaps ancient memories will suddenly reawaken, and from the secret depths of the human soul will escape the ancient but ever-living de profundis ad te, Domine, clamavi. And then men will discover as "self-evident truth" that history is not at all the self-unfolding of the "idea," that Judaea was not - as Hegel thought - one of the moments of this self-unfolding, that the Greeks did not possess all truth, and that contemporary Germany is not at all the completion and crown of the ancient civilization. The inhabitants of the most ignorant region of the ancient world knew much more than the cultured lands of the modern world. They knew, for example, that, even if God is not envious, He is still jealous and not at all disposed, at least for the present, to authorize anyone whomsoever - even if he be a scientist - to penetrate His secrets.

     To be sure, Aristotle said that all this is only foolishness and falsehood: polla pseudontai aoidoi (the poets lie a great deal). And Hegel, Aristotle's disciple, was angry at the very possibility of such a thought: Denn warum sollte en (das heisst Gott) uns nicht offenbaren, wenn wir einigen Ernst mit ihm machen wollen [For why should not He (i.e., God) reveal Himself to us, if we are willing to be serious with Him?]. Exactly: "wenn win einigen Ernst mit ihm machen wollen"... O holy simplicity! How they must have laughed on Olympus when Hegel wrote these lines! And do you not hear with your human ears that there is in these words of Hegel and in all his writings not the least, even distant, hint of that seriousness which would be necessary to bring nearer the moment of revelation? Do you recall what happened when men set themselves to build the Tower of Babel? And yet, when they undertook this colossal work, they certainly wished einigen Ernst mit ihm machen! If we wish to obtain the word of God, it is not the serious people, the practical people of affairs, who can help us. On the contrary God answers these "serious" people with confusion of tongues. Men who had agreed so completely on all the points of their undertaking suddenly, without visible cause, stopped understanding each other.

     Now what is presently happening is just that of which the Bible tells. Not more than five years ago [i.e., 1913] men appeared to understand each other so well and were building in such complete agreement that majestic tower, called modern culture, which was to unite all men and establish paradise on earth. And the paradise would certainly have been realized if an incomprehensible madness had not suddenly darkened men's minds and pushed them to destroy, with a rage of which history does not know any other examples, the product of centuries-old efforts and labors. The proud tower of European culture is now in ruins. We must begin again the painful work of Sisyphus. And there is no longer any Hegel whose philosophy of history could console men by explaining to them that was wirklich ist, sei vernünftig [what is real is rational], that Germany had to be crushed because its historic role had ended, or even that it is time for all of Europe to return to the shadow, that is, cease to live historically in order to give its place to the Land of the Rising Sun, to the United States, to the young Australian republics, or to still others.

     You think that Hegel would have preferred to renounce his philosophy of history rather than thus console Germany and Europe? But he would, in that case, have had to renounce his whole philosophy, for his philosophy of history forms the essential part of his system. You think that he would have agreed, that he would have been prepared to admit that God is neither the Absolute Idea nor the Spirit, that God is - as the Bible teaches - a personal God, and that the present war is God's answer to all of "Christian" Europe and its sacrilegious attempt to reach the heavens by mechanical, "rational" means?

     It may be. Yes, it may very well be. For Hegel was not only a scholar but also a man and consequently capable, at the sight of the misfortunes of his fatherland, of repeating after the Psalmist, "Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem!" But if it be so, if even Hegel would have been capable of renouncing his grandiose constructions and admitting that the moving element in history is not the "inner dialectic" of the Spirit, but certain mysterious, inconceivable, and terrible forces - what, then, must we do and say in face of the events that unroll before our eyes? For the moment it would perhaps suffice to recall the Biblical story and declare ourselves ready not einigen Ernst mit ihm zu machen but to accept it with all that seriousness and extraordinary tension of the soul with which man awaits the fateful events of his existence, events such as the approach of death.

     If the horrors of these last years bring about the fall of our presumptuous self-assurance, then the misfortunes and sufferings that have broken over our heads will perhaps have served some useful purpose. But it is hardly likely that this will happen. We must believe that men - those eternal Sisyphuses - will begin again in five, ten, or twenty years patiently to roll the immense rock of history and try, just as before, to push it in torment to the top of the mountain, in order that the catastrophe and all the misfortunes of which we have been the witnesses may repeat themselves once more.

     The philosophy of history does not at all resemble the description which Hegel has given us with such enviable assurance and such weighty carelessness. Mankind does not live in the light but in the bosom of darkness; it is plunged into a perpetual night. No! Not in one or two or ten but in a thousand and one nights! And "history" will never lead "man" to the light. Furthermore, the light is not accessible to "man." "Man" may build an immense tower but he will not reach God. The only one who can reach God is "this man" (all Hegelian terminology), this single, particular, accidental, but living man, whom up until now philosophy, as well as the entire "empirical" universe, has so carefully and methodically pushed outside the limits of "consciousness in general." This is perhaps the moment to recall Pascal's words, too much forgotten by the creators of the great philosophical systems:

L'homme n'est qu'un roseau le plus faible de la nature, mais c'est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l'univers entier s'arme pour l'écraser. Une vapeur, une goutte d'eau suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand l'univers l'écraserait, l'homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce qu'il sait qu'il meurt et l'avantage que l'univers a sur lui, l'univers n'en sait rien.
[Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. It is not necessary that the whole universe arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But when the universe will have crushed him, man will still be more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.]

Do you hear in this the echo of the same psalm: De profundis ad te, Domine, clamavi? How strange: Pascal remained outside the highroad of philosophy. Or is there perhaps nothing strange in this? This setting of a reed, so weak and small, over against all the immense mass of the universe, of a particle of the All over against the whole of it - is this not too absurd for reasonable men to pay any attention to it? Yes, we must believe that is so. The classical philosophy has accustomed our minds to mathematical methods of reasoning and to proofs. Two is always more than one. One and one always make two. If we give up these propositions, we shall go astray in a forest of contradictions and forever lose the highroad.

     But it is only in mathematics that one and one always make two; in reality it also happens that the sum is three or even zero. When nature united the stonecutter Sophroniscus and the midwife Phaenarete, the result was three and not two and the third, namely Socrates, proved himself greater than the sum of the two. Or was Socrates, according to you, not a "greatness"? Was he only a thinking reed?

     Here is where the entire difficulty of the problem appears. Must a thinking reed really be for philosophy a quantité négligeable? I am prepared, like Pascal, to consider the reed as small and weak as anyone might wish, just as I am prepared to admit that the voice of the psalmist who cried from the depths of the abyss was lost in the infinite spaces of the universe. But the enigma remains no less an enigma; the mystery remains a mystery. Even the most positive of the scientists will not deny that for one ray of light to stray from its rectilinear route would be enough to overthrow the whole scientific theory of light. But when living beings are united, one and one constantly make three, four, five, and even more.

     Arithmetic has power only in the "ideal" world subject to man, chiefly and perhaps even exclusively because this world was created by man himself and consequently obeys its author. But in the real world a different hierarchy prevails: there that which in the ideal world is smaller is "greater." The laws in general are different there; it may even be that there cannot be any question of laws there, that one wishes to know nothing about our laws there. St. Paul teaches:

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing... Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away" (I Cor. 13).

You feel offended that I set over against scientific theories the words of an ignorant Jew? Very well, if you absolutely must have a scientific authority, listen to what was said by Plato who, five hundred years before St. Paul, expressed the same thought in almost the same terms:

"Who then among us would wish to live if he possessed all wisdom, all reason, all science, but on condition of never feeling any joy, great or small, as well as any pain, great or small, or in general any sentiment of this kind?" (Phil. 21d).

Like St. Paul, Plato renounces wisdom, reason, knowledge, if these must be acquired at the cost of renouncing joy and sorrow, that is, the "accidents" of his particular, individual, "accidental" being. It will perhaps be objected that this was, on Plato's part, only an accidental lapse, that one can oppose to it many quotations from his other writings. Yes, certainly, one can. But the goal of these reflections consists precisely in seizing and saving from oblivion the "accidental". It will be further objected that all this is very obscure and that I have not observed Descartes' rule which demands that our judgments be clear and distinct. I shall not reply to this at all. I shall content myself with recalling the point of departure of Descartes' conceptions: apud me omnia fiunt mathematice in Natura [with me all things in Nature become a question of mathematics]. This explains his entire methodology. But Pascal, who was also a mathematician of genius, thought differently: je n'aime que ceux qui cherchent en gémissant [I love only those who seek with lamentation]. In accordance with this, he sees the universe and knowledge under a different aspect. L'homme cherche partout avec inquiétude et sans succès dans les ténèbres impénétrables [man searches everywhere with anxiety and without success in impenetrable darkness]. This is our fate, this is our destiny. Therefore, qu'on ne nous reproche donc plus le manque de clarté, puisque nous en faisons profession [do not reproach us with lack of clarity, for me make it our profession].

Kiev, January 1919

Lev Shestov