Without Lifting A Finger

 On the contrary: to us the most alluring questions are those to which there is no actual, no universally valid, answer. I hope that sooner or later, philosophy will be thus defined, in contrast to science:—philosophy is the teaching of truths which are binding on none.

 All that he had to tell, Dostoevsky told us in his novels, which even now, twenty-five years after his death, attract all those who would wrest from life her secrets. And the title of prophet, which he sought so diligently, considering that it was his by right, did not suit him at all. Prophets are Bismarcks, but they are Chancellors too. The first in the village is the first in Rome. … Is a Dostoevsky doomed eternally to be 'on the eve'? Let us once more try to reject logic, this time perhaps not logic alone, and say: 'So let it be.'

A quarter of a century has passed. So far nothing has happened in Europe. But we are drowning ourselves, literally drowning ourselves, with blood. Not only is our alien population oppressed, Slav and non-Slav alike, but our own brother is tortured, the miserable starving Russian peasant who understands nothing at all. In Moscow, in the heart of Russia, women, children, and old men have been shot down. Where now is the Russian universal soul of which Dostoevsky prophesied in his speech on Pushkin? Where is love, where are the Christian precepts? We see only 'Governmentalism,' over which the Western nations also fought; but they fought with means less cruel and less hostile to civilisation. Russia will again have to learn from the West as she had to learn more than once before. And Dostoevsky would have done far better had he never attempted to prophesy. But there is no great harm done even if he did prophesy. I am glad with all my heart even now that he rested a little while ...

Left Zagajewski and have settled on some Shestov essays I found on Amazon. The first is on Chekhov. It's Shestov working on Chekhov. A sample: To define his tendency in a word, I would say that Tchekhov was the poet of hopelessness. Stubbornly, sadly, monotonously, during all the years of his literary activity, nearly a quarter of a century long, Tchekhov was doing one thing alone: by one means or another he was killing human hopes. * There is no detailed biography of Tchekhov, and probably will never be, because there is no such thing as a full biography—I, at all events, cannot name one. Generally biographies tell us everything except what it is important to know. Perhaps in the future it will be revealed to us with the fullest details who was Tchekhov's tailor; but we shall never know what happened to Tchekhov in the time which elapsed between the completion of his story The Steppe and the appearance of his first drama. If we would know, we must rely upon his works a...

The chain of being/reading goes: Milosz was told (commanded) to read Shestov by Sorana Gurian; Shestov was told (forced) to read Kierkegaard by Husserl (according to Shestov, Kierkegaard was not yet a big deal in the the France of the 1930's); R L Swihart was told (armtwisted) to read Shestov by Milosz. Anyway, certainly Shestov found a kindred reflection in Kierkegaard. To close the week, and the week of the Absurd, I leave a few words from Shestov on Kierkegaard (in "Kierkegaard as a Religious Philosopher," see http://www.angelfire.com/nb/shestov/sar/kierkegaard1.html ):   I concluded the previous section with those words of Kierkegaard's that are never to be forgotten if you wish to penetrate into the essence of his philosophy: "Only terror reaching despair develops a person to his highest." That is why Kierkegaard was so irresistibly drawn by the Book of Job which, in his view, is the most human book of the whole Bible. That is why he a...

I thought I'd shortlist Shestov.  It's been a while since I've read Shestov (thus far I own none of his hard-to-come-by books: give me time , and the little I have read I downloaded from the online Shestov library: http://www.angelfire.com/nb/shestov/index.html ), and much of my understanding of him (meager as it is) is through the filter of Czeslaw Milosz and his essay in To Begin Where I Am . I'll start with a quote from the end of Milosz's essay "Shestov, or the Purity of Despair": To Sorana [she had demanded that Milosz read Shestov] the God of the Scriptures defended by the stern priest Shestov would probably not have meant an afterlife and a palm tree in Heaven. He must have appeared to her as He did to the Russian author, as pure anti-Necessity. The question was not the existence of Heaven and Hell, not even the "existence" of God Himself. Above any notions, but revealed by His voice in the Scriptures, He is able to create...