Athens and Jerusalem
Описание книги
For more than two thousand years, philosophers and theologians have wrestled with the irreconcilable opposition between Greek rationality (Athens) and biblical revelation (Jerusalem). In Athens and Jersusalem, Lev Shestov—an inspiration for the French existentialists and the foremost interlocutor of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber during the interwar years—makes the gripping confrontation between these symbolic poles of ancient wisdom his philosophical testament, an argumentative and stylistic tour de force. Although the Russian-born Shestov is little known in the Anglophone world today, his writings influenced many twentieth-century European thinkers, such as Albert Camus, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Czesław Miłosz, and Joseph Brodsky. Athens and Jerusalem is Shestov’s final, groundbreaking work on the philosophy of religion from an existential perspective. This new, annotated edition of Bernard Martin’s classic translation adds references to the cited works as well as glosses of passages from the original Greek, Latin, German, and French. Athens and Jerusalem is Shestov at his most profound and most eloquent and is the clearest expression of his thought that shaped the evolution of continental philosophy and European literature in the twentieth century.
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Athens & Jerusalem
LEV SHESTOV
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Shestov and Husserl met for the first time at a conference in Amsterdam, in 1928, and then at regular intervals over the following decade. In the obituary31 that Shestov completed in 1938, only a couple of months before he himself died, the author of Athens and Jerusalem remembers that, despite their radically opposed views on the sources of truth and the aims of philosophy, Husserl recommended “Parmenides in Chains” for publication in the prestigious German periodical Logos.32 Echoes of their initial debate and of their ensuing discussion during Husserl’s visit to the Sorbonne in 1929 (which Shestov helped organize) resonate through the inaugural lecture that Heidegger gave the same year at the University of Freiburg, entitled “Was ist Metaphysik?” [What is metaphysics?]. The meetings and correspondence between Shestov, Husserl, and Heidegger at this time are particularly important for the elaboration of Shestov’s book on Kierkegaard and existential philosophy (first published in 1936), whose problematics is equally evoked in the second part of Athens and Jerusalem. According to Shestov’s recollection of his first meeting with Heidegger in Freiburg, in 1928, their discussion turned around aspects of the existential critique of speculative thought, which the author of Being and Time had borrowed from Kierkegaard (something which Shestov ignored as he had not yet read the Danish philosopher):
When I met Heidegger at Husserl’s, I quoted a few of his texts which, as I thought, ought to have shattered his system. I was absolutely certain. I had no idea then that these texts reflected Kierkegaard’s influence and that Heidegger’s input consisted in his determination to fit these ideas into the Husserlian framework. After Heidegger left, Husserl approached me and made me promise that I would read Kierkegaard. I couldn’t understand why he was so adamant about it—Kierkegaard’s thought has nothing to do with Husserl’s, and I don’t think Husserl even liked him. Today I think that he probably wanted me to read Kierkegaard so I may better understand Heidegger.33
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