/lit/ - Literature

Yes, Shestov is brilliant. The one Gnostic with a love for matter

>>13496581
what text would you recommend I read next?

>>13496621
I forget what it's called, Letters to Job or something? On the main Shestov website online all of his major texts are there.

>>13496442
I fucking loved athens and jerusalem

Next read apotheosis of groundlessness then dostevsky and nietzsche.

Then read cioran

>>13497136
After Cioran, read Michelstaedter, then Weil, then Mainlander (if you can)

then ascend or kill yourself. there is nothing left. you've swallowed all the pills

>>13497138
give book reccs for those authors and I will

>>13497128
I will try to find that one thanks m8.
>>13497136
AoG appears to be translated as All things are possible. I can read Russian though mine isn't the best so I might go for the original or the translation, I did the Russian for AaJ, and I think I understood it, because he is very clear about his ideas, he doesn't fuck about like a lot of philosophers, you really can feel that he's trying to commit his ideas rather than be impressive or complex.

I've read boatloads of Dosto, Nietzche, and cioran, but I don't exactly see the relation to Shestov. I could just be very dumb but Shestov gave to me something I was craving since I first encountered philosophy and religion, finally someone seemed to agree with me when I read Jerusalem and Athens, it was honestly so relieving. It is especially that question of how reason cannot justify itself that has always haunted me, but those pure experiences of revelation, whether felt yourself or handed down, they have a quality of absolute sureness to them. Those 3 always seemed to me still mired in the conceptions of philosophy, which I have been trying to escape, that endless fucking labyrinthe and quagmire that has haunted me for over a decade. I could be very wrong, I always feel like an amateur in this subject I have never studied it in school.

>>13497152
I'll let the other anon recommend Cioran, but if Shestov and his thought resonates with you, read Kazantzakis' Saviors of God, Michelstaedter's Rhetoric and Persuasion and Weil's Gravity & Grace because they're all in the same stream (the eternal struggle for God/a final Good in the Void)

>>13497161
I remember feeling the same way, I was halfway Athens and Jerusalem and realized I could stop reading philosophy forever and I think my studies would have felt complete. Naturally, I didn't, but like Cioran has it, everything since has just been a "long process of verification".

>>13497161
Dosto and Niet is a book by Shestov

http://www.angelfire.com/nb/shestov/dtn/dn_1.html

Thats the relation.

I then connect cioran as being like shestov - disillusioned with the 'certain' logics, but instead of proclaiming faith, finding it lacking

>>13497166
I saved your recs on my doc, thank you anon.
>>13497171
i should maybe revisit Cioran then, I didn't like his lack of religion, I am very innately religious person, I grew up atheist because of my parents and society, but I found God very young, first at 17 and then again fully at 22. Cioran doesn't seem to get that, though i could have just not understood him, im really not that smart, it bothers me sometimes, but I think that even being not that smart, if I work at it hard enough I can understand these things just by effort and caring.

Athens and Jerusalem has just been amazing though, like an actual beach to finally reach after that immeasurably long time at sea in confusion. It is combined with a lot of particular ideas I have myself, but the core of them is just a religious revelation I had, I have discarded basicallly all the metaphysics I worked on, just to go toward that one truth of God, though I use a different word than God for it, instead of all these concepts.

I believe it because the experience itself was just absolutely sure, and also because the effects it had on me and the people around me were testament to its truth. But you become lost and lose your connection to it, through various ways. Then you have to find your way back I think.

We are very imperfect things I believe, but we are connected to that perfect whatever it is innately, we have only to see it.

>>13497174
>http://www.angelfire.com/nb/shestov/dtn/dn_1.html
thank you anon, I again betray my ignorance, my ideas really do not align with what is, i apologize for criticizing the connection, I just did not know.

He talks about Nietszche a lot in JaA too, but he seemed very critical of him, like he was just on the brink of understanding. Dostoevesky I have a very conflicted understanding of, I think his Karamazov book is one of the great human expressions of all history, but his religion is to me strange, there is a relation to Dostoevsky that I do love, it is a Russian tradition about Christ, but I think it's not good to talk about it here. I think Dostoevsky had hate in him that hurt him, because he was cluttered by psychological things that harmed him, that made him mad and not there all the time.

I really love his books but they seem also like they contain this kernel of deep harm that he couldn't fix, nothing could help him, or would help him, he was lost, despite his genius. The way Alyosha falters in TBK doesn't seem to me like a character expressing doubt, but the actual religious instinct of D being confused, because the brothers were just aspects of a person as I see it, Dimitri being the unseeing will and desire for love, Ivan being the intellectual capacity broken by human instincts, and Alyosha being the religious impulse confused by the facts of the world. I do think the book has salvtion in that the brothers go to save Dimitri despite his crime, or his lack of crime, it doesn't matter, he deserves their love and forgiveness, I think that solved it for Dosto, but his ideas of the individual people they were seem broken by exactly the ideas and experiences that Shestov suggests confuses our relation to God.

>>13497190
Shestov has this quality that all my favorite thinkers and writers share: he's a fire that's learned to burn in a vacuum. His idea of God exists in spite of Necessity, suffering, death, etc. and not because of it (as a coping mechanism). Every author I recommended to you is the same way.

I don't remember if it was even in Athens and Jerusalem, but that line about "what are all the mathematical formulas of the world to one cry of torment" or whatever it was, him and all these writers are their own species of Occam's Razor, they shear the fat and get down to what matters: pain, darkness, silence, but also a faith that recognizes that silence as its own constitutive condition and not something to be kept at bay at all costs (until one very dark night you get a sort of flash of intuition about how that faith, too, is a lie, as you approach the absolute terror of the void like an asymptote, beyond which not even Nietzsche himself could endure, beyond which only the "forsaken solitude" of death can take you. Enjoy!)

>>13497228
>in spite of
The in spite of is I think the all to everything, that thing that exists beyond, totally outside and not depending on our concepts of reason, the world, or anything, not even us, except that part of us that shares in it. It's not oneness or totality, it''s not anything we could draw to mind. I associate it with creation but even that is human folly.
>what are all the mathematical formulas of the world to one cry of torment"
This I don't know about because already ideas about the world come streaming in, the non-understanding that connects us to God seems already lost when you have these systems of things, of the dream of this world made into ideas.

The terror of the void is also an infinite love I think, that void contains every aspect of beauty and desire that we ever wanted, but they are not the void themselves. As Hegel said it is not x=x it is a subtle difference, a nonknowing that even Buddhist or Traditional concepts don't reach, because they think they can take one human idea and make it king.

But the true decider is not given to us to be known, not any ideas humans have ever had, but only something that reaches us rarely in times of revelation, or revelation given to others.

>>13497258
You're smarter than you give yourself credit for.

>>13497267
That is kind of you to say anon, I don't think I am, I understand nothing, I think if you knew me youd see that, but it is still nice.