A POINT OF VIEW

In a previous entry I wrote that “a free thinker does not have a point of view.” This line of thinking, albeit admittedly not original, ought to be further pursued, due to its delightful intellectual promise. Having said that, I seriously encourage my reader to do the same. Here below, the reader will be treated to a perfectly Nietzschean discussion, delivered in a similar aphoristic manner, courtesy of the Russian-Jewish original thinker Lev Shestov. The passage below is taken from his extraordinary work All Things Are Possible (Part II, #9). A very pleasant contemplation!---

“A point of view. Every writer, thinker,--- even every educated person, thinks it necessary to have a permanent point of view. He climbs up some elevation, and never climbs down again in all his days. Whatever he sees from this point of view, he believes to be reality, truth, justice, good; and what he does not see, he excludes from existence. Man is not much to blame for this. Surely there is no very great joy in moving from a point of view to another point of view, shifting one’s camp from peak to peak. We have no wings, and a “winged thought” is only a nice metaphor, unless, of course, it refers to logical thinking. There, to be sure, a very great volatility is usual, a lightness, which comes from perfect naïveté, if not from ignorance. He who really wishes to know something, and not merely to have a philosophy, does not rely on logic, and he is not allured by reason. He must clamber from summit to summit, and, if necessary, hibernate in the dales. For, a wide horizon leads to illusions, and in order to familiarize oneself with any object, it is essential to go close up to it, to touch it, feel it, examine it from top to bottom, and on every side. One must be ready, should this be impossible otherwise, to sacrifice the customary position of the body: to wriggle, to lie flat, to stand on one’s head, in a word, to assume the most unnatural of attitudes. Can there be any question of a permanent point of view? The more mobility and elasticity our man has, the less he values the ordinary equilibrium of his body: the more often he changes his outlook, the more he will take in. If, on the other hand, he imagines that from this or the other pinnacle he has the most comfortable survey of the world and life, then leave him alone: he will never know anything. Nay, he does not want to know, he cares more about his personal convenience than about the quality of his work. No doubt he will attain to fame and success and thus brilliantly justify his “point of view.”

Do I have “a point of view”? Well, I do have my pet leitmotifs, which I push down the reader’s throat using every opportunity. But I definitely lack what Shestov means by a point of view, and I am exceedingly proud of it. A point of view presupposes a closed mind, but happily, I have kept mine open all my life. Even today, at the age when preconceived ideas calcify, I am keeping my mind open; and if someone now offers me an incontrovertible proof that capitalism-as-such exists and can be properly defined, and that this capitalism is better than socialism-as-such, I will accept it gracefully, and this is a solemn promise!

Appendix to this entry. A biographical note on Lev Shestov:

Lev Isaakovich Shestov (pseudonym of Yehuda Leib Schwartzmann) was born in 1866 in Kiev, Russia, but ended up living in France from 1921 until his death in 1938. He is known as an original existential philosopher, greatly admired by Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov (which in itself is a compliment) and by a few other notables, including our old friend Albert Camus, D. H. Lawrence, Isaiah Berlin, and others. His lack of universal recognition is probably due to an inadequate availability of his works to the general reader. This unfortunate situation may, however, be changing towards a broader availability, but, I am afraid, in this day and age of glaring cultural illiteracy, he is destined to remain known only to a very small circle of professionals and the dying-out breed of erudite connoisseurs. Among his better known books are:

Shakespeare and his Critic Brandes, 1898, The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche (Philosophy and Preaching), 1899; The Philosophy of Tragedy: Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, 1903; An Apotheosis of Groundlessness (All Things are Possible), 1905; Potestas Clavium, 1919; In Job’s Balances, 1923-1929; Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, 1933-1934; and finally his monumental magnum opus Athens and Jerusalem, 1930-1938.

My reader may well understand my particular interest in Lev Shestov, arising from the latter’s own interest in my all-time favorites Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as well as in such giants of Russian philosophizing and literature as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Moreover, in his works, Shestov rather unconventionally discusses several other great Russian geniuses, such as Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol and Turgenev, among others… To put it in a nutshell, Shestov is an awfully interesting philosophizer, deserving some serious consideration, in spite of the regrettable fact that the Encyclopaedia Britannica has found no place for him, even in its shorter Micropaedic section. Fortunately for me, his works in Russian are somehow available on the Internet, and it will be a great pleasure for me to review them (all perhaps?), when my work assumes a more leisurely pace.