SOURCE: "Lev Shestov After Ten Years Silence," in Horizon, London, Vol. 20, No. 118, October 1949, pp. 213-29.

As far as it is possible to judge, there exists at present among the intelligent reading public in England only a dim and confused conception of the significance of Existential Philosophy and its situation in relation to the rest of contemporary thought. It is unlikely however that the confusion that reigns here in people's minds with regard to this philosophic movement is anything like the dense and inextricable confusion regarding it that must by this time have become general in France. Intellectual discursivity, having sensed the menace to itself that a proper understanding of the essential thought of the philosophers who may rightly be described as existential would represent, seems to have found the topic of Existentialisme more stimulating than any other to have cropped up in France for a long while and to have set about muddling the crucial issues involved with a dogmatizing polemical gusto such as is fortunately seldom equalled on this side of the Channel. Here, stifling our resentment at being as usual about a decade behind the intellectual development of the rest of Europe, we generally miss the real point, pass on garbled accounts of what it is all supposed to be about and are wearily deprecating in our comments on it.

When I refer here to Existential Philosophy, I should like it to be quite clear from the start that I do not mean this expression to be understood to designate the philosophy associated with the movement headed by the brilliant exprofessor, publicist and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre. If one would form a just estimate of the distance that separates Sartre's Existentialisme from the kind of thought that in what I am going to say I shall refer to as existential, one should try to imagine Pascal writing a poetic novel about the gulf that he felt to be yawning at his side all the time towards the end of his life. Existentialism is the post-experimental intellectual exploitation of the experience of existing. The kind of philosophy that I wish to discuss is actual spiritual activity. Not all that goes on within man is what the Marxists call 'mere reflection'.

Frequently heard and familiar enough though the names of the representatives of Cartesian Existentialism have become, it is extremely seldom that anyone refers to the one great modern thinker who can justly be described as a representative of authentically existential philosophy, Leon Chestov. For every mention of Chestov's name during the ten years that have passed since his death, there have been I should imagine at least five hundred references to Jean-Paul Sartre. While it would be untrue to say that Chestov remains quite unknown in this country, since three books of his have been translated and published here—Anton Chebov and Other Essays, with an introduction by Middleton Murry, in 1916, All Things are Possible, introduced by D. H. Lawrence, in 1920, and in 1932, introduced by Richard Rees, In Job's Balances, a book uniting in one volume several representative short works—it is still necessary to say that this great, profoundly disturbing Russian thinker, whose message for the present time is quite as significant as his friend Berdyaev's, is unjustly neglected and his importance altogether underestimated.

Leon Chestov, exiled after 1920 by the Soviet Politbureaucratic revolutionaries to whom his philosophy was insufficiently optimistic to be useful to their purposes, was a Voice Crying in the Wilderness his whole life long. Vox Clamantis in Deserto is the sub-title of one of his last works, Kierkegard and Existential Philosophy, published in French translation a year or two before the first appearance of Sartre, who has always resolutely ignored him, though the world described with such long-drawn-out repugnance in his own imaginative works is certainly a desert. It is not surprising, however, that Chestov's voice has remained inaudible to one who has declared, during a discussion of the epistemological foundations of Existentialism, that the Absolute is in Descartes. The Absolute that is to be found in Descartes's Cogito is absolute self-sufficiency, and if this produces a desert, Sartre's superb intelligence can still reign supreme in it and immediately reduce to silence all voices crying 'Prepare ye …'.

Coming as the most recent successor of two or three of the most original and significant thinkers of the nineteenth century—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoievsky—Chestov may be considered to have made it possible at present to think of Existential Philosophy as such, that is to say to see it as a distinct current of thought with special distinguishing characteristics and central preoccupations, with a task and destiny to fulfil in the history of the spiritual crisis of Western man in the present age. The Existentialisme of Sartre does not belong to this current of thought. It is a perversion of the thought that inspired Kierkegaard and Dostoievsky (the Knight of Faith and the Underground Man) based on a typically French Cartesian misunderstanding of the essence of the special contribution of these solitary individualists to European philosophical speculation. Heidegger's position in relation to this situation is a quite special one, which I cannot begin to discuss here, but it should not be confused with Sartre's, simply on the supposition that they are both 'atheists', as innumerable facile vulgarizers and subtle casuists have attempted to do during the last five or ten years. What critics really mean when they state, as for instance Mr. J. V. Langmead-Casserley does in The Christian in Philosophy, that 'in writers like Heidegger and Sartre we are confronted by an existentialism which is specifically atheist', is simply that the assumption of these philosophers is that contemporary man is not a conscious believer in God. To assume this does not make one an atheist; and when Sartre does also announce himself as being specifically an atheist, this is a professional naivete on his part. The now universal state of human existence cannot be said to be one of continual, profound, everyday faith in the living God. To have real faith in God is not at present natural to man in the world. To be a wholehearted and practically consistent believer is to be an exception to the normal condition of man in the twentieth century. It is the universal, a priori condition of human existence that is the subject existentialism undertakes to describe, to begin with, and the exceptions can only have significance in relation to a 'normal' or 'ordinary' state that has been first properly defined and analysed. It becomes clear after the initial examination of the ordinary state of man's existence has been made that there exists in it a tendency towards something else, which is ordinarily resisted in ways which Heidegger in particular subjects to detailed analysis. This something else is the state which results from a change of the 'ordinary' state of existence into a more highly developed state. The state of the conscious and deliberate atheist and the state of the authentic Christian both represent a higher development of existence than that of the ordinary. The only thing that any existentialist philosopher could be said to set out to convert anyone to is responsible choice. The important point that Sartre misses is that neither belief nor disbelief can be taught to anyone, and atheism, as soon as it becomes specific, is a belief: a belief in the non-existence of the spiritual dimension of reality, resting on a refusal to recognize that there is a Ground of Being.

'Socrates spent the month following his verdict in incessant conversations with his pupils and friends. That is what it is to be a beloved master and to have disciples. You can't even die quietly,' wrote Leon Chestov in 1905, thirty-four years before his own death. 'The best death is really the one which is considered the worst,' he wrote: 'to die alone, in a foreign land, in a poor-house, or, as they say, like a dog under a hedge.'

Chestov did not die in a poor-house, but otherwise he may be said to have achieved this ambition. His only disciple in 1939 was the Roumanian-born Jewish poet and philosopher Benjamin Fondane, who was destined to a death in the gas-chambers at Birkenau six years later. At the end of his life, Chestov was resigned to being neglected or mischievously misinterpreted by his contemporaries, who if ever they referred to him, did so to pour scorn on his crazy 'anti-rationalism', being unable to observe that few thinkers in the history of philosophy have had so realistic a respect for the power of human reason, even though this was a respect tempered by a realization of its limitations and of its hypnotic influence over those whom it enslaves. He did not want disciples—he did not even want to have pupils or a class of students, which for a philosopher in these days is rare. He believed philosophical activity to consist in absolutely undivided truth-seeking, and this he could not reconcile with telling people they need seek no more, should they happen also to be seeking Truth, but simply attend his classes and pay attention while he told it [to] them, the proper fee at the end of the term, and the maximum amount of lip-service to the importance of his ideas. To adopt the role of a teacher of this kind, would have been altogether in contradiction with the inner position, the adoption of which is a necessary prerequisite of Existential Philosophy, properly so-called. It is perfectly extraordinary how this simple fundamental distinction which makes Existential Philosophy existential is still so universally and completely ignored, particularly by professors.

It was not unintentionally that in introducing Leon Chestov I began by referring to his death. In Chestov's philosophical writings the thought of death is like a constant ground-note; death was to him a starting point as well as the ultimate goal for speculative thought. The first and most indispensable prerequisite for whoever would undertake the task of philosophy was for Chestov not the rational faculty or cogitative power, but courage. All advances in the realm of human thought are the result of a victory over fear. The justification of Socratic doubt, which questions the foundedness of all commonly accepted truths as a matter of discipline, is in the realization that we are ever apt to use our faculty of rational thinking less for the purpose of arriving at the truth than for that of protecting ourselves from fear of the unknown.

Chestov addressed his philosophy not to a class of passive students, but to an individual reader, his interlocutor. With regard to the fruitfulness of the normal master-pupil relationship, or what has become in the modern world the normal relationship between teacher and taught, he was from the very beginning completely sceptical; but if he had not had some faith in the possibility and efficacy of communicating real philosophic thought he would hardly have continued to the end of his life to publish books in which an interlocutor is continually stimulated to reconsider the views of other great philosophers as well as his own views of them.

Chestov in many of his works leads his interlocutor through a careful and penetrating analysis of certain of the writings of Tolstoy, Dostoievsky and Chekhov to the possible recognition of the startling and difficult fact that there exist certain situations and states, such as have to be passed through at least once by all who are mortal, wherein a man may suddenly have to admit that the ordinary, reassuring truths and assumptions upon which we all base our everyday life and which it might well seem outrageous even to question publicly, are no longer able to satisfy him, but seem to the contrary to have been simply the easily available, conventionally legitimized means whereby men commonly stupefy themselves so as to continue to be able to remain fast asleep even when wide awake and busily occupied in carrying on very competently their no doubt highly important and altogether worth-while daily affairs.

For most of us, this moment of dislocation, of panic, of abrupt unfamiliarity and questionableness of everything hitherto regarded as certain, is throughout our whole lives postponed, evaded, and its possibility and implications absolutely denied and ignored. But as Chestov took pains to make vivid to his interlocutor, with the approach of death, this moment may become increasingly difficult to postpone. For it is in part the moment of fully recognizing the truth of the fact of Death itself, and of its immense enigmatic significance for the whole of the human life that leads to it.

It would be a great mistake to regard Chestov's preoccupation with Death as a gloomy aberration or morbidity; it is in fact a throughly normal and healthy preoccupation for a philosopher, and it is the ordinary current attitude to the darker aspect of reality that is morbid. It is generally far too easily forgotten today, in discussions of modern philosophy, that there have been in the history of thought few definitions of philosophy's purpose which more deserve serious attention, the attention of our second thoughts, than the Platonic-Socratic 'preparation in view of death'. Most modern philosophers, restlessly haunted by the ambition of succeeding in the enterprise of making philosophy an important department of the imposing edifice of Materialist Science, or rather the indispensable epistemological handmaid of an authoritative world-hegemony of laboratory and classroom workers and mathematicians, do not care, it would seem, to be reminded of this supposedly nonsensical formulation of the purpose of speculative thought; indeed, they seem unanimously to take it for granted that we should all be inarticulately resigned to being dead already.

In this respect, Heidegger's philosophy is an exception; in it the way all men regard Death most of the time they are alive, or rather the quasi-universal Western educated habit of evading real seriousness—and an appearance of seriousness is more than almost anything else made to serve to facilitate this evasion—has been treated as the subject of a rigorous, detailed analysis. For Heidegger, resolution-in-view-of-death is an experienced reality that is to be regarded as the necessary foundation of all human life having personal authenticity. Until we have undergone the realization that comes with a moment of the kind I tried to describe just now, we shall be all the time as it were running away from our true self, unable to accept life in its complete seriousness, continually anxious to keep always to the most superficial level of experience where everything is a matter of course and nothing new or difficult ever disturbs the unexceptional monotonously humdrum normality of a mediocre existence.

Martin Heidegger, in making the analysis to be found in Sein und Zeit of everyday banality and the inauthentic conception of death that is based on hearsay and clichés and not on a profound personal realization, was partly inspired originally by a story of Tolstoy's, The Death of Ivan Ilyitch. It happens that this story was among the later writings of Tolstoy that Chestov examines at some length in his book The Revelations of Death, in an essay entitled 'The Last Judgement'. The moral to which Chestov's reflections on Tolstoy's greatest short story led him, he has expressed in what seems to me a rather more cogent form than that given it in that essay, in another of his writings, 'Revolt and Submission', where he says:

Despite his reason man is a being subject to the power of the moment. And even when he seeks to consider all things sub specie aeternitatis, his philosophy is usually sub specie temporis—indeed, of the present hour. This is why men reckon so little with death, as though death did not exist. When a man thinks on his dying hour—how do his values and standards change! But death lies in the future, which will not be—so every one feels. And there are many similar things of which one has to remind not only the common herd but also the philosophers who know so much that is superfluous and have forgotten, or have never known, what is most important.

After I had been reflecting quite recently on these words of Chestov and was beginning to plan the present dissertation, I happened idly to pick up an anthology of old English poetry, and on the page at which I opened it, this is the poem I found:

A good that never satisfies the mind,
A beauty fading like the April showers,
A sweet with floods of gall that runs combined,
A pleasure passing ere the thought made ours,
An honour that more fickle is than wind,
A glory at opinion's frown that lowers,
A treasury that bankrupt time devours,
A knowledge than grave ignorance more blind,
A vain delight our equals to command,
A style of greatness, in effect a dream,
A swelling thought of holding sea and land,
A servile lot, decked with a pompous name
Are the strange ends we toil for here below
Till wisest death makes us our errors know.

Several of the fourteen lines of this sonnet of Drummond of Hawthornden, seem to me to refer specifically to illusions which today as much as ever are particularly influential, illusions of the kind which without our being in the least aware of it may colour and modify the whole of our outlook, fundamental ideas and behaviour, with the result that we become unreal human beings, maladapted to the real world we live in, absurdly confident of our sanity, common sense and grip on things, all the while being objectively no more than inefficient bunglers, wasters, and self-deceivers.

Those who are familiar with Kierkegaard's life and thought will recall that his real career as a serious philosopher with a great vocation did not begin until he had gone through the experience of what he called 'the great earthquake'. Now there is no doubt that this terrible and profoundly effective experience which forced upon him certain essential realizations about himself which it may be he could not have reached by any less drastic way, was a crisis precipitated by the death of his father. Thus, it may be said, then, that Existential Philosophy as we know it today had its origin in the death of the philosopher's father. There is a deep connexion between this fact and the truth expressed by Chestov in another passage from the work I quoted from just now in which he says:

As soon as man feels that God is not, he suddenly comprehends the frightful horror and the wild folly of human temporal existence, and when he has comprehended this he awakes, perhaps not to the ultimate knowledge, but to the penultimate. Was it not so with Nietzsche, Spinoza, Pascal, Luther, Augustine, even with St. Paul?

There cannot be for the Christian any reality in Christ's resurrection unless he really believes in it. Not very long after Kierkegaard's campaign against the high-toned insincerity of the Churches representing the social acknowledgement of God's reality in the clever, busy, highly respectable bourgeois world of the mid-nineteenth century, Nietzsche proclaimed to European thinking men, who had succeeded in banishing all real religious consciousness from everyday life completely, 'God is dead!'

When he has comprehended this, man awakes, perhaps not to the penultimate knowledge, but to the prepenultimate. I believe that the ultimate, or penultimate knowledge will be found to be the beginning of all really transparent apprehension of the world which scientific knowledge decomposes. This is because I have the faith of a Christian and really believe in the truth and presently imminent reality of the Resurrection, so far as I understand it.

The ancients, to awaken from life, turned to death. The moderns flee from death in order not to awake and take pains not even to think of it. Which are the more 'practical'? Those who compare earthly life to sleep and wait for the miracle of the awakening, or those who see in death a sleep without dreamfaces, the perfect sleep, and while away their time with 'reasonable' and 'natural' explanations? This is the basic question of philosophy, and he who evades it evades philosophy itself.

It might be said that philosophy as Chestov envisaged it was, instead of being as it is supposed to be, a part of one's education, a subject studied in a course having its place in the curriculum of a university, a necessary antidote to one's education. Philosophy in this sense—truly Existential Philosophy, which aims, not at making as complete and rational a discursive exposition as possible of the purely conceptional problems of existence, but at launching individuals into a more fully conscious and authentic real existence of their own, is really the beginning and foundation of a second education, one that continues throughout the lives of all of whom it might ultimately be said that they attained anything like wisdom. To begin with, it brings one to the realization that the knowledge of the world, of man, of history, of reality, with which one has been equipped by one's education, the picture one has of the reality which is the contingent context of one's life, is only a structure of more or less ready-made and on the whole passively accepted ideas, corresponding to the objective real world with a degree of accuracy that no one could ever hope to calculate.

The most outstanding characteristics of Chestov's philosophy are its anti-idealism and its anti-rationalism. Now both these expressions require immediate modificatory definition. Chestov was not a disbeliever in the invisible, nor anti-metaphysical in the sense in which the Logical Positivists are anti-metaphysical. Philosophy can never dispense with ideas or with the use of the rational faculty. But a self-critical philosophy can become conscious that the individual thinker's ideas are necessarily only approximate and partial reflections not to be confused with what they reflect, and that the Reason with the deificatory capital R is only a collective reflection of the individual's faculty of thinking rationally re-reflected in the minds of individuals.

Idealism in the sense in which Chestov's philosophy understands the word is thinking which treats ideas as though they were the completed final end-product of thinking, whereas they can for the existing individual never be more than the means by which he thinks, convenient approximate reflections from which the thinker should continually re-detach himself and what they reflect.

To some extent, everyone is an idealist, in the sense of the word which I have been attempting to define. Undoubtedly everyone has an idea of the world we live in which is only a very approximate, and to a large extent second-hand, hearsay idea of it, and just as undoubtedly we rely on this idea that we have cultivated and allowed to grow up in our minds and come to accept it just as though it really corresponded to the actual world in its unknowable objectivity. And unless we are continually conscious of the difference between knowing a thing and thinking one knows it before having had an opportunity to do so, we are thus in danger of becoming secured against reality, which in reality is inevitably mysterious, being only very incompletely knowable through any one individual's experience, unaccountable in fact and perhaps still full of astonishing surprises and things of which we had never dreamed. It is only too easy to become comfortably secured against reality in this way, secured against it by an ideal reality which a kind of universal tacit agreement among us allows us to regard as identical with the only true reality, though the reason we tolerate it as a substitute is that it is what we call normal, average, safe, readily accountable, domesticated in fact to fit in with our own ordinarily egotistical purposes.

Only with a full realization of the extent to which we are all idealists of this kind, only, that is to say, with a proper realization of our actual state of Socratic ignorance, for which there can be no a priori truths until we have found out what they are for ourselves, can the autocritical habit of mind indispensable to a genuine philosopher begin to develop.

Anti-idealism is the result of a realization of how fatally easy it can always be to confuse an idea of a thing that one has in one's mind that came to be there as the result of our having read or been told something about someone or something, with an idea that we might have developed of the same thing if we had actually experienced knowledge of it ourselves. We remain very largely ignorant of the extent to which our knowledge is in reality knowledge of the knowledge of others. Education fosters this sort of confusion and ignorance, unless a conscious anti-idealism enables us to be continually on our guard against it. We cannot possibly do without the knowledge of others, but it is most useful to us when we are fully conscious that it is not the result of our own experience when we remember it. As soon as we become aware of the extent to which we are conditioned by and dependent on ideas, we become perceptibly more realistic and objective; at the same time we become more open-minded, tolerant, pacific and cooperative. We cease to think of ourselves as the elect, to whom the last word on our special subjects has been specially divulged by grace of the goddess of Reason; for an orderly but after a while dusty permanent model scheme of basic assumptions for referring to about Everything, we exchange a new habit, that of having a thorough spring-clean and stocktaking of all our ideas regularly at not-too-long intervals.

It may be that Chestov himself nowhere expresses what I have called his anti-idealism in quite the bald form in which I have presented it; it may be, too, that what I have said either reveals the quintessence of Chestov, or is, to the contrary, a misrepresentation of him resulting from my having used Chestov's name merely as a cover under which to pass off some idea or attitude of my own. If the latter were actually the case, I might still argue with a grain of truth that in this I had at least given an illustration of Chestov's method. At any rate, Chestov did himself express quite clearly enough the anti-idealism I have spoken of, in the following words:

Even the blind, one would think, must arrive at the conviction that matter and materialism are not the crucial issue. The most deadly enemy of the spirit everywhere is not inert matter, which in fact, as the ancients taught, and as men teach today, exists either not at all, or only potentially as something illusory, pitiable, powerless, suppliant to all—the most deadly and pitiless enemies are ideas. Ideas, and ideas alone, are that with which every man must do battle who would overcome the falsehood of the world.

I think I may add here, that he who would overcome the false materialist philosophy which has so often been denounced as the real reason for the present situation in our relations with Leon Chestov's native land, the philosophy of the Communist intellectuals leading the great Party which claims to represent the toiling Russian masses, the philosophy which drove Chestov into exile after 1920, will be unable to get very far until he sees that Materialist Idealism, which does not yet realize that it ought truly to be thus so-called, confuses reflection and reflector. Certainly, there cannot be a reflection without a reflector for it to be seen in, but it is a nalve and fatal error to confuse the two on account of their being inseparable in living experience, although easily separable in reflected or theoretical experience by the (immaterial) experimenter.

It might also be added that Christian philosophy properly so-called is anti-idealist in just the sense I have been discussing, or otherwise can be only a quasi-Christian philosophy, as most philosophies since Christ, with the possible exception of such philosophy as might in a certain sense be called Socratic, have inevitably been. 'The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath' is the classic maxim which might serve as the type for an authentically Christian anti-idealism.

For a Christian existential philosopher, all we highly rational, educated men are in reality all we still to a very large extent ignorant and unconscious men, just as all we respectable citizens are in reality all we miserable sinners.

'For we must disrobe ourselves of all false colours, and unclothe our Souls of evil Habits,' says Thomas Traherne, in the Centuries of Meditations; 'All our Thoughts must be Infantlike and clear; the Powers of our Soul free from the Leaven of this World, and disentangled from men's conceits and customs. Grit in the eye or yellow jaundice will not let a Man see those Objects truly that are before it. And therefore it is requisite that we should be as very Strangers to the Thoughts, Customs and Opinions of men in this World, as if we were but little children.'

And Kierkegaard tells us very much the same thing, in an entry in his Journals:

Truth is naked. In order to swim one takes off one's clothes—in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness, etc., before one is sufficiently naked.

This attitude of continual auto-criticism, which I have characterized as Anti-Idealism, is recognizably the same as that which Chestov expresses in the following passage from his All Things Are Possible:

There is no mistake about it, nobody wants to think. I do not speak here of logical thinking. That, like any other natural function, gives man great pleasure. For this reason philosophical systems however complicated, arouse real and permanent interest in the public provided they only require from man the logical exercise of the mind, and nothing else. But to think—really to think—surely this means a relinquishing of logic. It means living a new life. It means a permanent sacrifice of the dearest habits, tastes, attachments, without even the assurance that the sacrifice will bring any compensation.

What superficial commentators have unanimously described as 'anti-rationalism' and even 'irrationalism' in Chestov, is really nothing of the sort, but a necessary implication of his anti-idealism and a result of his unusual objectivity of mind, or what amounts to the same thing, of his highly auto-critical habit of thought (prior to the actual approximate formulation of his thought in writing, that is to say). A thinker who is above all aware of his own ignorance and uncertainty, who is not deceived by his ability to discover and repeat impressively sounding formulae into supposing that he has solved a problem and said the last word on a subject, who is constantly asking questions, and questioning where it is the rule to see nothing questionable, will not be satisfied for long with the criteria which simple-minded rationalists regard as the sole supreme arbiters of their thought. This does not mean that he must therefore despise Reason or logic; it simply indicates that he is not limited by the common confusion between what man has discovered, and what he has invented for purposes of convenience, in his mind.

No. 267 of Pascal's Pensees may relevantly be quoted here:

'The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. It is but feeble if it does not see so far as to know this. But if natural things are beyond it, what will be said of supernatural?'

Also No. 272:

'There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.'

The individual human reason becomes more rational as a result of losing its idealist awe of the Cartesian Goddess of Reason, who is never satisfied until everything has been reduced to clarity and distinctness, even if by artificial means; in recognizing its inevitable limitations and in liberating itself from the delusory self-sufficiency of the Cartesian cogitator, reason transcends itself and can become reintegrated with the creative imagination.

In a previous quotation, Chestov asks whether real thinking does not mean a relinquishing of logic. That he means by this an emancipation from complete dependence on logic is obvious from the following passage from the same book (All Things Are Possible):

To discard logic as an instrument, a means or aid for acquiring knowledge, would be extravagant. Why should we? For the sake of consequentialism? i. e. for logic's very self? But logic, as an aim in itself, or even as the only means to knowledge, is a different matter. Against this one must fight even if he has against him all the authorities of thought—beginning with Aristotle.

Existential Philosophy cannot be understood unless it is seen to be a protest and a struggle, fighting against not only Aristotle, but also against, for instance, Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Spencer, Husserl and Carnap. Its objectively critical attitude to the notion of Pure Reason and its refusal to make itself dependent on any predetermined method or criteria is related to its preoccupation with the problem of Original Sin and the hypothesis that the present condition of man is a fallen and not a supernatural one. Since man began to become civilized, his condition has been necessarily an unnatural one. Reason, the use of which has led to the progressive development of human civilization, is nevertheless not an entirely unmixed blessing. It is the blessing promised to Eve by the serpent and comes from the tree of which the fruit is death and limitation, not life and freedom. Existential Philosophy is a struggle for liberation. With it, an essentially Christian philosophy, as distinct from a nominally and superficially Christian philosophy, enters the history of Western thought. This is true even of Nietzsche, if not of the whole of Nietzsche (in whom the 'will to stupidity' and the 'will to power' not infrequently come into stultifying conflict), at least of that part of his thought which still remains creatively valuable; for Christianity had become by Nietzsche's time so profoundly self-contradictory on account of the predominance of pagan ethical principles in European thought surviving even Luther and the Reformation (the Renaissance and the secularization of classical learning putting back with one hand what the Lutheran Reformation had taken away with the other) that the genuinely Christian liberation in thought had to assume the guise of Anti-Christ. It is Nietzsche's greatest fault and weakness that he failed to understand this situation and his relation to it anything like as fully as he might have done.

Chestov is of all the great existential philosophers—the others are Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche—the one who is nearest to us; and he is of all recent philosophers the one who is most necessary to a true understanding of the significance of existential philosophy in general and of its role in the crisis of modern thought. He is the philosopher of Tragedy and of Paradox; a seeker after the 'one thing needful', a solitary thinker whose despair does not counsel us to come to terms with defeatist resignation, but can inspire in those capable of it the violence with which alone is the Kingdom of Heaven to be taken. His message is just that which is needed as a corrective to the dispassionately impotent, science-seduced teaching of present-day British Academic philosophy. 'The don is the eunuch,' as Kierkegaard wrote in his Journals, 'but he has not emasculated himself for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, but on the contrary, in order to fit better into this characterless world.' Chestov never made the slightest attempt to fit in with the characterless modern world; perhaps that is why he has been so largely ignored by the intellectual representatives of this world till now; but it is also the reason why one can be confident that he will eventually be heard, nevertheless, for such thinking as his is for modern philosophy increasingly 'the one thing needful'.

'Power without wisdom is dangerous,' Bertrand Russell went so far as to admit in a broadcast talk not long ago, 'and what our age needs is wisdom, even more than knowledge. Given wisdom, the power conferred by science can bring a new degree of well-being to all mankind; without wisdom, it can only bring destruction.' This would appear to indicate a belated readiness on the part of an authoritative representative of scientifically aspiring materialist Thought to turn at last to the consideration of what [Miguel de] Unamuno has called 'the most tragic problem of philosophy', or at least to concede that scientific thought and wisdom are two quite different things, since they became separated by the University dictatorship of the professoriat, which exiles human subjectivity and silences the private feelings of the individual's heart. The utterances of Bertrand Russell in view of the crisis of contemporary society should be compared with the answer of the old professor to the young student whose personal crisis drives her to seek his wise advice in Chekhov's A Dreary Story.

Supposing the philosophers who speak in the name of scientific materialism do gradually become aware of their lack of wisdom, and begin to try to become philosophers in the true sense of the word (the etymological definition is 'one who loves wisdom'), where are they to turn? Existential Philosophy does not give itself out to be wisdom; though it looks rather as though Sartre, for instance, would have no objection to the public making use of his philosophy as though it were. Existential philosophers may be said to be in general agreement, however, with Pascal's saying: 'I can only approve of those who seek with lamentation'. Should anyone turn to Chestov for wisdom, this is what he has to say to him:

Although there have been on earth many wise men who knew much that is infinitely more valuable than all the treasures for which men are ready even to sacrifice their lives, still wisdom is to us a book with seven seals, a hidden hoard upon which we cannot lay our hands. Many—the vast majority—are even seriously convinced that philosophy is a most tedious and painful occupation to which are doomed some miserable wretches who enjoy the odious privilege of being called philosophers. I believe that even professors of philosophy, the more clever of them, not seldom share this opinion and suppose that therein lies the secret of their science, revealed to the initiate alone. Fortunately, the position is otherwise. It may be that mankind is destined never to change in this respect, and a thousand years hence men will care much more about "deductions" theoretical and practical, from the truth than about truth itself, but real philosophers, men who know what they want and at what they aim, will hardly be embarrassed by this. They will utter their truths as before, without in the least considering what conclusions will be drawn from them by the lovers of logic.

In case the end of this passage should seem to lend itself to any ambiguity, I think I may add that it is unlikely that Chestov, in speaking of 'real philosophers', was thinking of the representatives of bourgeois materialism, thinkers who also certainly 'know what they want and at what they aim', i. e., knowledge, i. e., power.