Lev Shestov Quotes
Lev Isaakovich Shestov was a Russian Jewish religious-existentialist philosopher who emigrated after the Bolshevik revolution and spent the rest of his life in Paris. Through readings of Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and the Hebrew Bible, he attacked the rationalist tradition from Plato to his own day, arguing that necessity is a tyrant and that the truths of faith are inaccessible to reason but liberate the person to whom they are given. The quotes below are attributed to Lev Shestov, organized by topic.
Browse Lev Shestov by topic
Lev Shestov on Death
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“One of the outstanding examples of the unfree character of modern philosophical thought is perhaps the famous dispute between Hume and Kant. Kant often declared that Hume had awakened him out of “dogmatic slumber.” And in fact, when we read Hume and those passages of Kant in which he appeals to Hume, we might think that this could not be otherwise, and that what Hume saw and what was visible to Kant also, after Hume, must have awakened not only a sleeper, but even a dead man. Foreword p. xlv”
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“Suppose Euripides is right, and that indeed no one can be sure whether life is not death and death life; can this truth ever become certain? If all men daily repeated Euripides’ words when they got up and when they went to bed, they would remain as strange and as problematic as on the day when the poet first heard them in the depths of his soul. P. 6”
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Lev Shestov on Freedom
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Attributed to Lev Shestov:
“Necessity is a tyrant which the philosopher must not obey.”
Lev Shestov on God
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Attributed to Lev Shestov:
“Athens and Jerusalem cannot be reconciled.”
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Attributed to Lev Shestov:
“Reason has its limits; faith begins where reason ends.”
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Attributed to Lev Shestov:
“All things are possible to him who believes.”
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“Spinoza’s formula, “Deus=natura=substantia”, like all conclusions drawn from it in his Ethics and his earlier works, simply means that there is no God. This discovery of Spinoza’s became the starting point for modern philosophical thought. Foreword p. xxxix”
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“There are no ideals exalting the soul, but only chains, invisible indeed, but binding man more securely than iron. And no act of heroism, no “good work” can open the doors to man’s “perpetual confinement”. Dostoievsky’s barrack vows of “improvement” now appeared to him as a sacrilege. He experience which he underwent was much the same as Luther’s when he remembered with such unfeigned horror and disgust the vows which he had pronounced on entering the convent. P. 10”
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Lev Shestov on Justice
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“Thales was the father of ancient philosophy. His consternation, and the firm beliefs to which this gave rise, were transmitted to his pupils and to their pupils again. The law of heredity exercises as despotic and unlimited a sway in philosophy as in all other fields of organic existence. Let any one who doubts this cast a glance at any text-book. Since Hegel no one has dared imagine that the philosopher is able to think and inquire “freely”. The philosopher grows out of the past, like a plant out of the earth. Foreword xxxi”
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“Directly Kant hears the word “law” pronounced he takes his hat off; he neither wishes nor dares to dispute. He who says “law” says “power”; he who says “power” says “submission” – for man’s supreme virtue is to submit himself. P. 23”
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Lev Shestov on Knowledge
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“What can be more terrible than not to know whether one is alive or dead? “Justice” should insist that this knowledge or this ignorance should be the prerogative of every human being. p. 3”
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“Plato, too, knew the “underground”, but her called it a “cave” and created his splendid world-famous myth in which men were likened to prisoners in a cave. But he did it in such a way that no one thought of calling Plato’s cave “underground” nor calling Plato himself a sickly, abnormal being, one of those for whom normal men have to invent theories, treatments, etc. p. 13”
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Lev Shestov on Life
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“Dostoievsky was not the first to live though this unimaginably terrible passage from one world to another and to find himself obliged to abandon the stability which “principles’ give. Fifteen hundred years earlier Plotinus, who had also tried to transcend our experience, tells that at the first moment one has an impression that everything is disappearing, and has an overwhelming fear that only pure nothingness is left. P. 28”
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Lev Shestov on Politics
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“When he was in the settlement Dostoievsky was already especially attracted by these resolute men whom no obstacle could turn from their purpose. He tried by every means in his power to understand their psychology, but he did not succeed. P. 19”
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Lev Shestov on Truth
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Attributed to Lev Shestov:
“Philosophy is the daring of those who refuse foundations.”