Translation of Levinas's Review of Lev Shestov's Kierkegaard and The Existential Philosophy [PDF]

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Translation of Levinas’s Review of Lev Shestov’s Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy James McLachlan Levinas Studies, Volume 11, 2016, pp. 237-243 (Article) Published by Philosophy Documentation Center DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lev.2016.0023

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Translation of Levinas’s Review of Lev Shestov’s Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy James McLachlan

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n 1937, Emmanuel Levinas published a review of Lev Shestov’s Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy.1 In one of the first studies in English on Levinas, Edith Wyschogrod claims: “What Levinas writes of Shestov’s analysis of Kierkegaard might well be taken as a program for his own future work.”2 The review of Shestov’s Kierkegaard book shows Levinas sympathy with Shestov’s rebellion against rationalism and totalism, his complaint that the individual and all her concerns, desires, and suffering were crushed by the world and ignored by philosophy. But his review of Shestov’s book also shows Levinas’s concern the rebellion could end in “the vanity of personal protest” and substitute subjective imprisonment for the imprisonment of history.3 Such irrationalism could lead to its own forms of violence, which in 1937 were becoming apparent. Like Levinas, Shestov helped introduce Husserl in France, although in Shestov’s case as an adversary to Husserl with whom he developed a friendship.4 The exchange between Shestov and Levinas’s Strasbourg teacher Jean Hering helped publicize Husserl in France.5 As an 237

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exile in Europe, Shestov published his most powerful works Potestas Clavium, In Job’s Balances, Athens and Jerusalem, and Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy. Shestov sought, through a continued hammering, to escape the trap of Being toward radical freedom.6 The form of Shestov’s escape attempt can be situated between Levinas and Kierkegaard. He shares with Levinas the desire to escape ontology but, like Kierkegaard, Shestov’s version of the escape is into a radically individual relation with God through a violent repudiation of the universal; thus, both Levinas’s disagreement with and attraction to Shestov in his 1937 review of Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy prefigure his rejection of Kierkegaard. One must be wary of reading Shestov as a kind of introduction to any thinker he engages, and thus the inclusion for many years of Shestov’s book on short bibliographies on Kierkegaard was extremely misleading. The book was quite influential when it appeared in 1936 around the same time as Jean Wahl’s Études Kierkegaardiennes. Shestov’s work is filled with hyperbole, exaggeration, and polemic. All of his writings are more literary essays than works of scholarship. And it is this mesmerizing writing that Russian literary critic D. S. Mirsky called “the tidiest, the most elegant, the most concentrated. . . in short, the most classical prose in the whole of modern Russian Literature.”7 A more perceptive reader than many Kierkegaardians who have read Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, Levinas wrote in 1937 that “the philosophical project of M. Shestov often takes on the allure of brilliant literary essay. It is a ‘poem’ rather than a ‘work.’ The author is more present therein than his subject.”8 Here Levinas notes several important points about Shestov’s Kierkegaard book. Perhaps the most important is that it is not primarily about Kierkegaard that “the author is more present therein than his subject.” Levinas sees Shestov had indeed seized on one of the central aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought but “what affects us more deeply still, and this is not its smallest attraction, the ideas of M. Shestov.”9 This is true of all of Shestov’s work. It is a “vast symposium” around the problems that agitated Shestov.

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f Emmanuel Levinas, review of Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (Vox clamantis in deserto), by Leon Chestov, trans. T. Rageot and B. de Schloezer, Revue des Études Juives 101, nos. 1–2 (1937): 139–41. The thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher, dead in 1855, has known for some time a rare good fortune. Jaspers and Heidegger in German, Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, are some of the names that permit us to measure the quality of the influence, which, in a very solid manner, he has also exercised on the only modern philosopher of Judaism worthy of the name, Franz Rosenzweig. This good fortune is not just a mode. The moral crisis opened by the War of 1914 has given men a pointed feeling of the impotence of reason, of the profound discord between rationalist civilization and the exigencies of the individual soul lost in the anonymity of the general. It has reopened the question, despite the blinding expansion of the sciences and technology, of the value, until now uncontested, of the Greek heritage. From there, under different forms, the reemergence at the same time of irrationalism and doctrines of violence. The substance of Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy is much more subtle. It makes naked the richness of an individual soul thirsting for salvation and, through this, the existential categories of religious psychology. With all its nuances, it does not lend itself well to summary. It suffices to indicate the essential preoccupation to which it responds. In a world clarified and explained by reason, only the general counts: my destiny is nothing important, my pain is nothing exceptional, my despair is nothing unique; if I carry a sadness or a shame in the depth of my soul, which does not trouble the universal order. My speculation assigns to these things a place in the whole, and my only wisdom can only consist of my submitting to its laws. But before speculating, I exist. My existence goes on precisely in this pain, in this despair. Far from arranging themselves in a whole that would embrace them, they are all mine. They have their history, their truth, their weight, their own exigencies. I can drive them back, but I can never fully suppress

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them. Their voice tears my being in spite of my submission to universal necessity. My speculation, itself, is it wholly independent of them? Can it be legitimately abstracted from the human condition, for its destiny, for its death? Whatever the response that one gives to these questions, it is important to pose them, it is important to respect the internal meaning of the events that constitute our existence, before interpreting them through the universal order constructed by reason. This is the task of existential philosophy. For Kierkegaard, this is not a “theory” but a wager that, like Pascal, the individual supports despite the absurdity and the paradox of its pretensions. An enterprise that is identified with faith, but with a faith that is an enterprise full of risks, an unsettled faith, a religion where certainties, menaced at each instant, must be reconquered anew, where each instant, virgin, pathetically counts for itself, where all is always starting anew. M. Shestov interprets Kierkegaard’s philosophy as a combat delivered by a soul abandoned to despair in a world commanded by reason and the ethical — which is to say by Necessity, consequence of original sin — for his salvation, which means his liberty that neither logic nor the ethical will be able to limit, daily struggle for a reign where the eternal, uncreated, truths will not impose their rule on a God who is absolutely free, for whom all is possible, even contradictions, and for whom freedom pluralizes in the arbitrary, the fight of the “prince of faith,” Abraham — who does not hesitate to place himself over the ethical and knowledge because of his confidence in the unlimited power of God against the “prince of resignation,” who has above all a sense of the impossible, who sees the gods themselves enchained by reason and submitted to the laws of necessity. M. Shestov knows very well the vicissitudes of this struggle, Kierkegaard’s oscillations between Abraham and Socrates, that fascinating “sinner par excellence,” from whom Kierkegaard does not succeed in fully turning away. Through this, Kierkegaard’s cause is separated from that of vulgar irrationalism and appears as the tragic expression

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of the European consciousness that no longer has the strength to forget Socrates. This interpretation certainly seizes on one of the essential aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought. But what affects us more deeply still — and this is not its smallest attraction — the ideas of M. Shestov. Those who know Shestov’s work, and his struggle for Jerusalem against Athens, will not be surprised. There is between the two thinkers an incontestable relation that is the cause of certain confusions. We are not, for example, absolutely persuaded that knowledge is identical for Kierkegaard with pure and simple evil. It would not be more likely a happy and indispensable moment in his dialectic, a principle of enrichment and not abdication and as the goad of faith. The philosophical project of M. Shestov often takes on the allure of brilliant literary essay. It is a “poem” rather than a “work.” The author is more present therein than his subject. The unity of his book on Kierkegaard, for example, is more symphonic than logical. M. Shestov runs to and fro through history in defiance of perspectives. Such proceedings disorient a reader who is habituated to the order of a French dissertation, to the patient reading of the texts, nourished by the note at the bottom of the page. But, on the other hand, this style presents great advantages. The doctrines and the men of the history of philosophy appear with extraordinary life, posing questions, lancing replies, reunited in a vast symposium, despite space and time, around the problems that agitate M. Shestov. And those that lift his latest book are of a fundamental character for all of religious philosophy: they define the plan where is situated the religious fact itself. Also, one could not recommend his book too strongly to those who wish to rethink their Judaism as a religion, who cannot be content with philological research on the past of Israel, and who are tired of the sterile ecstasies before the “beauty of the Decalogue and the Morality of the Prophets.” M. Shestov, Jewish philosopher, but certainly not a philosopher of Judaism, in the heritage of Jerusalem he does not separate the Old Testament from the New. But he is a philosopher of religion. And

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under its existential form, religious philosophy returns to important problems of salvation, which is to say the essential message of Judaism. And he does this in a more radical fashion than ever, since existential philosophy — M. Shestov shows admirably and obstinately — explodes the synthesis of the Greek spirit and the Judeo-Christian, which the Middle Ages believed to have accomplished. Emmanuel Levinas

Notes 1. Emmanuel Levinas, review of Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentiale (Vox clamantis in deserto),” by Leon Chestov, trans. T. Rageot and B. de Schloezer, Revue des Etudes Juives 101, no 1–2 (1937): 139–41 (my translation). 2. Wyschogrod writes: In one of his earliest writings, a review of Leon Chestov’s Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle in Revue des Etudes Juives 1, nos. 1–2 (1937, 139–141), Levinas concludes: “Shestov interprets the philosophy of Kierkegaard as a combat undergone by a soul abandoned to despair in a world ruled by reason and the ethical.” (Leon Chestov is also known as Lev Shestov.) He sees in Shestov’s interpretation a Kierkegaard who proclaims the supremacy of Jerusalem over Athens. This interpretation, he writes is made explicit in Shestov’s book Athens and Jerusalem. What Levinas writes of Shestov’s analysis of Kierkegaard might well be taken as a program for his own future work. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 26n4. 3. Emmanuel Levinas, “Colloque Kierkegaard: Groupe de discussion,” in Kierkegaard Vivant: Colloque organizé par L’Unesco a Paris du 21 au 23 avril 1964, ed. René Maheu (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 232–34. 4. Shestov was never a student of Husserl. He became friends with Husserl, who once introduced him as his most violent critic. Shestov’s early article on Husserl, “Memento Mori: On Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Knowledge,” appeared in 1926 and created one of the first exchanges on phenomenology in France with Levinas’s teacher Jean Hering. 5. Eugene H. Frickey, “The Origins of Phenomenology in France, 1920– 1940” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1979). 6. In his review of Shestov’s book on Kierkegaard, Nikolai Berdyaev wrote, “In it his fundamental thought is expressed with the greatest concentration, but also with the greatest of clarity, if perchance it be possible to demand clarity of

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a thinker, who negates thought and struggles against knowledge. The formal deficiency of the book is in the fatiguingly frequent repetition time and again of certain of those phrases, expressing evidently great importance for the author.” N. A. Berdyaev, “Lev Shestov and Kierkegaard” (1936, #419), trans. Fr. S. Janos; Lev Shestov I Kierkegaard in Sovremennye Zapiski, no. 62 (1936): 376–82. 7. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature: Comprising a History of Russian Literature and Contemporary Russian Literature, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1958), 426. 8. Levinas, “Revue.” 141. 9. Ibid. Berdyaev makes the same point in his 1936 review of Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy. Shestov had arrived at his position long before he read Kierkegaard. “And as might be expected, as regards the book of L. Shestov it is impossible to learn of Kierkegaard himself, and one learns only of the author of the book” (Berdyaev, “Lev Shestov and Kierkegaard,” 376).