Lev Shestov

[pieter]

Adam started:

"Pieter, some time ago I wrote a longer post about my impressions on Levinas, Wittigenstein an a bit of the Schopenhauer's Parega and paralipomena, pressed a wrong combination a keys and it was all gone. I thought I will write in once again, but somehow cannot get the inspiration. So, now just a question - have you ever read something by Lev Shestov?

PS. I started a new, let's call it philosophical thread, since I didn't like the previous's one title"

[pieter]

A dam,

In fact I am not really a philosophy expert, because I read more historical, relgiogious and political books and material than philosophy
books. In fact I have some difficulties as an layman, to understand the
complicated terminology of Philosophers.
I read more books about the development and history of Philosophy,
Philosophers, and the philosophic movements and schools.
Ofcourse everybody heared about Socrates, Plato and Aristoteles.
About the theorists of the Catholic church Augustine and Thomas of Aquino. Maybe Maimonides. Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Thomas More, Edmund Burke, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Friedrich Nietsche ("Also Sprach Zarathustra"), Karl Marx (the economical philosopher), Henry Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege, Edmund Husserl (phenomenology), Martin Heidegger (existential phenomenology), Hanah Arendt (books "the banality of evil", about the Eichman process and "The Origins of Totalitarianism", a political philosopher - I am reading her biography now-), Jean Paul Sartre.
Besides that you have Adorno, Habermas, Isiah Berlin, Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Hayek (Chicago school of economics), Richard Rorty, Francis Fukuyama (the End of history), Samuel Huntington (Clash of civilizations) and Martha Nussbaum.

Unfortunately I have never read something by Lev Shestov,
this is what I found about him on the internet:

"Who is Shestov

Lev Shestov (1866-1938) is a Russian-Jewish philosopher of existentialism. In France he is well known as LÈon Chestov. Variously described as an irrationalist, an anarchist, a religious philosopher, Shestov's themes were initially inspired by Nietzsche until he found a kindred spirit in Kierkegaard. Among his contemporaries he entertained long-standing philosophical friendships with Martin Buber, Edmund Husserl and Nikolai Berdyaev.

Shestov's development as a thinker lead him to undertake a vast critique of the history of Western philosophy which he saw broadly as a monumental battle between Reason and Faith, Athens and Jerusalem, secular and religious outlook. He thus engaged on what he termed a "pilgrimage through the souls" of such greats as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Blaise Pascal, Descartes, Plotinus, Spinoza, Plato, Luther and others.

This site proposes a number of Shestov's works in extenso. The English translations published mainly by Bernard Martin (1928 - 2001) in the 1960's, have long been out of print. Were it not for the dedication of this academic, the most important of Shestov's writings would not be available to the English reader today."

Pieter

[pieter]

Quote:
<<Shestov's development as a thinker lead him to undertake a vast critique of the history of Western philosophy which he saw broadly as a monumental battle between Reason and Faith, Athens and Jerusalem, secular and religious outlook.>>



Hello Pieter,
the above citation from the site you've read about Shestov precisely explains why I have asked you whether you know his works. Since you've mentioned some of the 'superstars' of philiosphy (Levinas, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer) I wanted to draw our exchange to the feedbacks of philososphy 'European way' as well. Perhaps only Wittgenstein does not 'fit' under Szestow's critisims - especially W. work on the interplay between the way we talk and the way we think. It is very useful to read Shestov, he doesn't use that much philosophical terms at all. HIs 'Apotheosis of Groundlessness' (Apofeoz bezpochvennosty") is just unbelieveably 'valid' today!
All the best.

[pieter]

A dam,

I understand what you are saying and I get curious about Shestovs work. Again I have to say that I am not a great expert in philosophy,
but I can say you that the "Logos" and "Mathematic way of thinking"
of great Philosophers fascinate me.
The questions "why do I exsist", "where do I come from", "what is the reason of being", what is your position towards the world and the other,
why is there suffering, are questions you maybe already asked yourself
when you were a kid or teenager. I did, and did not stop asking myself and others questions. And there were not always answers to that questions. Then I did not know that these questions were philosophical,
so I searched in my environment, in education, and especially in history,
art (form and content) and politics.
The nice thing about philosophical rhetoric, is that the the subject can be anything. About everything you can imagine philosophers have written, are writing now and will write in the future.
In the past art and philosophy were seen as oponents, because a greek Philosopher (I don't remember if it was Plato or Aristoteles) accused artists of trying to reinvent nature, or to copy it.
Philosophers argued that it was impossible to remake nature, while artists said that they made their version of what they saw in reality.
Because of my art background I struggle with that historical fact that art was always critisized and rediculized by philosophers.
From the other hand philosophers read books which became pieces of art, and influenced artists deeply. You have many artists who read Nietsche, Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida and Postmodern Philosopher Michel Foucault. And some of them like Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre too. Artists like the way philosophers design thought patterns,
structures, systematic thinking, phenomenons, and ofcourse Methaphysics. There is competition in the conceptual way of thinking and expressing oneselves. Many artists are thinkers, watchers, analysers of life and reason to, only the shape it in another form.

I think that Schopenhauer is not such a superstar as the other Philosphers, because of his scorn for fellow philosophers.
Their revenge was to keep him quiet. Nietsche was a great admirer
of his work, and Schopenhauer introduced Hinduism (the Indian Veda's)
and Buddhism into 19th century Europe. He may be a pessimist -
the wisdom of the life of this christian ahteïst always stays human in the highest meaning of the word.

I am really interested about the work of Lev Shestov,
and I hope that I can find him in the library or in a bookshop.
Thanks for bringing him up in my mind by your post.

Pieter:

Under here about Jacques Derrida's a tekst I found on internet about his theory of deconstruction, which was very influential on artists (who first want to deconstruct before they can construct, see Cubism, Mixed media art, assemblage -Rauschenberg-, Dada, and surrealism);

Deconstruction: A school of philosophy that originated in France in the late 1960s, has had an enormous impact on Anglo-American criticism. Largely the creation of its chief proponent Jacques Derrida, deconstruction upends the Western metaphysical tradition. It represents a complex response to a variety of theoretical and philosophical movements of the 20th century, most notably Husserlian phenomenology, Saussurean and French structuralism, and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
[First paragraph of a seven-page explanation in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Deconstruction: The term denotes a particular kind of practice in reading and, thereby, a method of criticism and mode of analytical inquiry. In her book The Critical Difference (1981), Barbara Johnson clarifies the term:
"Deconstruction is not synonymous with "destruction", however. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word 'analysis' itself, which etymologically means "to undo" -- a virtual synonym for "to de-construct." ... If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text's critical difference from itself."
[First paragraph of a four-page definition of the term deconstruction in J.A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, third ed. (London: Blackwell, 1991)].

[pieter]

N. A. BERDYAEV (BERDIAEV)


THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA OF THE PHILOSOPHY
OF LEV SHESTOV

(1938 - #439)

Several times already I have written in the pages of “Put’” about Lev Shestov. But here is a demand to speak otherwise about him, and to honour his memory. Lev Shestov was a philosopher, who philosophised with all his being, and for whom philosophy was not an academic specialisation, but rather a matter of life and death. He was consistent of mind. And it was striking, his independence from the surrounding tendencies of the times. He sought God, he sought the liberation of man from the forces of necessity. And this was his personal problem. His philosophy belonged to the existential type of philosophy, i.e. it did not objectify the process of knowledge, it did not tear it asunder from the subject of knowing, it tied it together with the integral judgement of man. Existential philosophy signifies the remembrance of the philosophising subject, who incorporates existential experience into his philosophy. This type of philosophy presupposes, that the mystery of being is comprehendible only within the human existential condition. For Lev Shestov the human tragedy, the terrors and suffering of human life, the surviving of hopelessness, were all at the basis of philosophy. It ought not to be exaggerated as something new, that which they term existential philosophy, or that it derives from certain currents of contemporary German philosophy. This element is something possessed by all genuine and noteworthy philosophers. Spinoza philosophised via a geometric method and his philosophy can produce the impression of being a cold objective philosophy. But philosophic knowledge was for him a matter of salvation, and his amor Dei intellectualis in no way belongs to objective scientific-form truths. By the way, the attitude of L. Shestov towards Spinoza was very interesting. Spinoza was his enemy, one with whom he struggled all his life, as though a temptation. Spinoza -- was representative of human reason, a destroyer of revelation. And at the same time, L. Shestov very much loved Spinoza, constantly he had him in mind, and often he quoted him. In his final years, L. Shestov had a very remarkable encounter with Kierkegaard. He earlier had never read him, he knew him only by hearsay, and did not even consider perchance the influence of Kierkegaard on his thought. But when he read him, he became then deeply agitated, he was struck by the closeness of Kierkegaard to the fundamental theme of his life. And he came to number Kierkegaard among his heroes. His heroes were Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Luther, Pascal and the Biblical heroes -- Abraham, Job, Isaiah. Just as it was with Kierkegaard, the philosophical theme of L. Shestov was religious, and just as with Kierkegaard, his chief enemy was Hegel. He went from Nietzsche to the Bible. And he all the more and more turned himself to Biblical revelation. The conflict of Biblical revelation and Greek philosophy became a fundamental theme of his pondering.

L. Shestov subordinated to the fundamental theme of his life everything, which he thought, and which also he spoke and wrote. He could look upon the world, he could produce evaluations of the thoughts of others exclusively within the context of his own theme, and entirely towards this he regarded and remade the world in relation to this theme. But how to formulate it? He was struck by the force of necessity over human life, which begets the terrors of life. The vulgar forms of necessity did not interest him, but rather the more subtle forms. The force of irreversible necessity has been idealised by philosophers, as reason and morals, as self-evident and generally-observed truths. Necessity is begotten by knowing. L. Shestov is completely caught up by this thought, that the Fall into sin is connected with knowledge, with the knowledge of good and evil. Man ceases to be nourished off the tree of life and begins to be nourished off the tree of knowledge. And L. Shestov struggles against the force of knowledge, which makes man subject under the law, in the name of the liberation of life. This is a terrible sundering for paradise, for the free paradaisical life. But paradise is attained through the tension of conflict, through disharmony and hopelessness. In essence, L. Shestov is not at all against scientific knowledge, he is not against reason in everyday life. Not in this is his problematic. He was against the pretensions of science and reason to decide questions about God, about the liberation of man from the tragic anguish of human judgement, wherein reason and rational knowledge want to circumscribe potentiality. God first of all is limitless potentialities, and this is a basic definition of God. God is not bound by any sort of truths of necessity. The human person is a victim of the truths of necessity, of the law of reason and morals, a victim of the universal and the conventional.

God stands opposite the kingdom of necessity, the kingdom of reason. God is in no way limited, to nothing can He be subordinated, and for God rather everything is possible. L. Shestov posits here the problem, which yet disquieted the Scholastic medieval philosophy. Is God to be subordinated to reason, to truth and the good, or is truth and the good only that, which God posits? The first point of view derives from Plato, and upon it stands St. Thomas Aquinas. The second point of view was that defended by Dun Scotus. The first point of view is bound up with intellectualism, while the second is with voluntarism. L. Shestov had kinship with Dun Scotus, but he posits the problem far more radically. If God is, then there lays disclosed all possibility, then the truths of reason cease to be incontrovertible and the terrors of life cease to be victorious. Here we touch upon a chief matter in the Shestov theme. And with this is connected that profound tremulation, which characterises all the thought of Shestov. Could God act thus, so that what formerly was, might not be? This is something most incomprehensible for reason. It would be very easy to misunderstand L. Shestov. The poisoned Socrates could be resuscitated, and in this Christians believe. His bride could be restored to Kierkegaard, while Nietzsche could be cured of his terrible illness. But this is not altogether what L. Shestov wants to say. God could have done it thus, so that Socrates would not have been poisoned, that Kierkegaard would not have deprived of bride, that Nietzsche would not have been strickened with terrible illness. Is there possible an absolute victory over that necessity, which rational knowledge invests upon the past? L. Shestov was tormented by the irreversibility of the past, fear of the formerly occurred tormented him.

Indeed, everything connected with this theme about a necessarily compelling truth is bound up with the setting in opposition of Jerusalem and Athens, the setting of Abraham and Job in opposition to Socrates and Aristotle. When they attempted to unite reason, as developed by Greek philosophy, together with revelation, there occurred then an apostacising and stepping-away from faith, and theology has always done this. The God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob, is replaced by the God of the theologians and the philosophers. Philo was the first betrayer. God was subordinated to reason, to necessity, to commonly-held truths. Therein perished Abraham, the hero of faith. L. Shestov was very close to Luther, to the Lutheran theme of salvation by faith alone. The deliverance of man cannot come from man himself, but only from God. God -- is the Deliverer. Deliverance occurs not by intellect, not by morals, not by human activity, but by faith. Faith signifies the miraculous for the necessary truths of reason. The heights bestir themselves from their places. Faith demands the irrational. The Apostle Paul also says this. Faith asserts a conflict, a paradox, as Kierkegaard loves to say. L. Shestov with great radicalism gave expression authentically to the existential and eternal problem. The paradoxicality of thought, the irony, to which L. Shestov constantly recoursed in his manner to write, prevented its comprehension. Sometimes they have understood it, but indeed backwards. This occurred, for example, with such a remarkable thinker as Unamuno, who much sympathised with L. Shestov.

The philosophic thought of L. Shestov encountered tremendous perplexity in its expression, and this engendered much misunderstanding. The difficulty was in the inability to express by words that which L. Shestov pondered concerning the fundamental theme of his life, the inexpressibility of the chief points. He often recoursed to a negative form of expression, and this was more successful for him. It was the clear, against which he led the struggle. Positive forms of expression were more difficult. Human language is so very rationalised, so very predisposed to thought-forms engendered by the Fall-into-Sin -- to the knowledge of good and evil. The thought of L. Shestov, directed against the commonly-held, itself took on the form of the commonly-held. And this provided easy ammunition into the hands of the critics. We stand here before a profound and little investigated problem of communication of creative thought to an other. Is that which is communicated something very primary and very consequential, or is it only secondary and transitory? This at present is a problem posited by existential philosophy. For it, this is a problem of the transference from the “I” to the “thou” in an authentic communality. For philosophy, which imputes itself to be rational, this problem does not present disquieting consequences as regards an universal reason. One way or another universal reason makes possible an adequate transfer of thought and knowledge from the one to the other. But in actuality reason is in steps, of varied qualities and dependent on the character of human existence, of existential experience. Will determines the character of reason. Whereupon then there is posited the question about the transfer of philosophic thought through the non-rational concept. And indeed at present rational concepts do not make for a communication from one to an other. L. Shestov frankly was not interested by this problem and he did not write about it, since he was completely absorbed by the relationship of man and God, and not by the relationship of man and man. But his philosophy very acutely posits this problem, and he himself is beset by the problem of philosophy. His contradiction was in this, that he was a philosopher, i.e. a man of thought and knowledge, and he comprehended the tragedy of human existence, the negative apperception. He struggled against the tyranny of reason, against the force of knowledge which banished man out of paradise, yet he struggled upon the territory of that same knowledge, and recoursed to the weaponry of that selfsame reason. In this is the difficulty of philosophy, which wants to be existential. And in the thick of this difficulty I see the merit of L. Shestov.

L. Shestov struggled for the person, for the individually unrepeatable, against the force of the general. His chief opponent was Hegel and the Hegelian universal spirit. In this he was akin to Kierkegaard, he was akin to the theme of Belinsky in his letters to Botkin, and especially to Dostoevsky. In this struggle is the right-truth of L. Shestov. In this struggle against the force of the commonly-held he was so radicalised, that what was veritable and saving for one he regarded as not veritable and not obligatory for another. In essence, he thought that each man has his own personal truth. But by this were posited all those problems of communication. A matter whether there be communication between people on the soil of true revelation, or is this communication only upon the ground of the truths of reason, as conformed to the conventional, on the soil of that which L. Shestov following upon Dostoevsky called the “allness”?

In the last days of his life Lev Shestov was embued of heated thoughts, agitated and intense. And he shew the victory of spirit over the infirmity of body. His perhaps finest books, “Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy”, and “Athens and Jerusalem, an Essay of Religious Philosophy”, were written by him in the final period of his life. Here is not the time to criticise the philosophy of my old friend Lev Shestov. One thing only I shall say. I am very sympathetic to the problematics of Lev Shestov and I find close to me his motif of the struggle against the force of the “common” over human life. But I always parted with him over the value of knowledge, and I do not see in it the source of oppressive necessity over our lives. Yet only in an existential philosophy can there be explained, what the matter of concern is here. The books of L. Shestov help to give an answer to the basic question of human existence, and within them there is existential significance.


NIKOLAI BERDYAEV.

1938

[pieter]

Adams reply:

Hello Pieter. And thank you. It was a real pleasure and a double one. One - the reading. Second - I need to explain. I am not an acadamic philosopher, just a hobbist, exactly as you are. The only difference between us is that I practice the hobby (Pinkola would probably say 'finding the essence') probably some ten years longer than you. Which is not equal to and is not supposed to mean that I am ten years ahaed of, not at all, you know it. Nonetheless I said so on purpose. Some ten years ago, when I was your age, another hobbist drew my attention to Shestov. Since that time L.S. has become one of the most favourite thinkers for me, if not the most important one. So now you can imagine how joyful I am to see that apparently you've become interested with Shestov!
Now to Berdayev and Shestov. To my mind they didn't differ that much. Pehaps they even - at the baseline- agreed but, as is often with very good friends, tried to outline the differences as sharp as they can - for the sake of good discussion You cannot discuss with someone with whom you totally agree, isn't it? And surely they were very close when they critised Ratio (Berdayev in his 'Sub specie aeternitatis'book with the title of Spinoza). As to Dostoyevski - besides what says Berdayev in Put', Shestov critisized Dostoyevski's, doubtful indeed, input into philosophy. He was especially critical re Dosoyevski's 'slavophilia', which Shestov insightfully exposes as the Russian version of Bismarckan verse - 'Russland, Russland ueber alles' (If you want more on that pleae check 'Nachala i koncy' - ("Beginnings and ends)).
Shestov and Hegel. Berdayev says: "L. Shestov struggled for the person, for the individually unrepeatable, against the force of the general. His chief opponent was Hegel and the Hegelian universal spirit." - no wonder Shestov was not the philosopher the Soviet Union liked most
And, finally, since that's a Polish Culture Forum, a Polish accent. You've had your Dutch one with Spinoza already Shestov thought and wrote a lot about the nessesity and it's opponent, the blind chance. For everyone always wanting to know everything about the role of accident in human life but afraid to ask:


there's a really very good film by Kieslowski 'Przypadek' (Blind chance)
www.imdb.com/title/tt0084549/

That film is a real must. ANd I personally assure - noone will regret watching it

All the best and thank you once again.

[pieter]

Dear Adam,

I like your serious response very much.
I am greatful of being able to know that Lev Shevtov exsist, although
it is hard to find any material about him in this provincial city in the East of the Netherlands (me comming from the South-West of Holland, and after that living and studying for two years in Amsterdam often mock with Arnhem and Arnhem people, like Schopenhauer and Heine with their fellow German compatriots). I love the environment here and the fact that I live near Germany, the city of Nijmegen and Arnhem and Utrecht. What I miss however sometimes is the Cosmopolitan, international, cultural and intellectual climate of Amsterdam (a city with two huge universaties, and lots of people of other Western countries, Russians and Poles). When I lived in Amsterdam I knew the Russian community over there. Wonderful but strange people, blessed with a nobel soul and a profound love and knowledge of culture, cursed with their notorious hypochondric deep melancholy (longing for Mother Russia), nostalgia and alcoholism (Vodka) which goes with that.
They share that subtle, sensitive, Slavian soul which shapes the spirituality, sense of tradition and culture which seems to flow through their blood. We Germanistic peoples (Duch, Flemish, Germans, British)
miss that. We have to learn that ourselves, individualy, because it is not in your uprbringing, in your family or social environment.
Duch or other Germanistic friends will be offended by my words here,
I often quarelled about that with them, when I said that I am not fond of Duch music, cinema, theater and even literature.
I think Poles and Russians have a kind of selfawareness, a positive Patriotism which can not exsist overhere in the West.
Here it would emediatly become a reactionary form of Nationalism,
a dangerous, sentimental wallow in our own culture, music and history.
In Poland and Russia it is more ecclectic, a struggle for life in which elements of differant cultures were incorperated, and then Polonised or Russificated in a natural manner. Polish culture is very Polish, but in the same time has Pan-European roots, because it was a huge empire in the Middle ages (the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom), and because of the influence of German, Jewish, Ukranian, Russian, Duch immigrants,
and Italian, French and German artists, architects and stiles.
In Polish cities you see next to the Polish Gothical stile, also the influence of Italian Renaissance and German jugendstil.
Back to the Russians of Amsterdam and the Poles in my past.
From the Russians and their Russian parties, I learned to know the music and the sound of their language, by listening to their conversations and songs (with I could not understand).
I laso learned in Amsterdam and from my mother that Poles often hate
Russians, but Russians do not necasseriy hate Poles.
In Amsterdam I got Polish lessons from a Russian who looked like Boris Becker. Later other Russians said that he was a KGB guy, and he disappeared (that was in 1991). I got the lessons in the appartment of an older Spanish girlfriend, which friend was a Russian.
From the other side I as a Duch guy who spoke English with them, never really became part of them. Russians have a strong group culture with eachother. I started watching Russian movies in cultural cinema's and rented video's of Tarkowski, Sergei Bodrov (Prisoner of the Mountains) and others.

But my first real encounter with Russia was when I red Dostoyevski's
Crime and Punishment, Gogols Petersburg stories, Isaac Babel's Red Cavelry, and I did a lecture on the Russian Revolution in the first class of my highschool (the subject was to difficult for my fellow pupils).
Dostoyevski is nearly my favorite writer, next to Kafka, Gunter Grass,
Tadeusz Konwicky and Bashevis Singer.
So I can understand Shemtov's fascination with Dostoyevski very well.
In my opinion Dostoyevski's novels are especially psychologically interesting. When you read about Rashkalnikov and his interrogators,
the description of the various persona.
I really would wish I had more time to find and read more philosophical novels of great philosophers. I really loved Levinas "Humanism of men",
and Bergson. I can imagine Shemtovs fascination for the Christian existentialist Kierkegaard, whom I read a long time ago, in my early twenties. I read often in the new literary bible translation, which is written in Modern (present-day) Duch. Especially old testamony stories, because with my christian background I know ofcourse the New testamony better. I can understand Shemtovs identification with the bible as a jew (the bible tells the story of his hebrew ancestors) and philosopher. What is amazing is his interest in Luther and christian
stories. Most jewish thinkers I know were not interested in christianity
or christian subjects, because both faiths have fundamental differances.
It is interesting that Shemtovs main subjects of study Nietsche, Dostoyevski and Kierkegaard, are extremely differant in their stile of writing and philosophy. Nietsche is nearly manical or agitating when you read his "Also sprach Zarathustra". People in my circle of friends or like him or hate him. Nietsche himself wanted that reaction. He said, I want to be rejected or to be read very carfully. Wehn you read him you have to chew on his sentances and words and digest it piece by piece.
For me it was not easy to read then man with the Hammer, who later on went crazy on a mountain. Kierkegaard was more sympathetic to me,
although he did inherit his father's melancholy, his sense of guilt and anxiety, and his pietistic emphasis on the dour aspects of Christian faith. He is considered the father of the Existentialist philosophy,
although most people connect that kind of philosophy with Sartre.
The sources Lev Shemtov was interested in made my interest in him grow the last days. Thursday I will go to the library again to see if I can find anything about him in the encyclopedea Judaïca, which is kept in the archives of that library.

Pieter

[pieter]

Pinkola's response:

Dear Adam,

I can see that you're smiling a lot , anyway what I was going to say?

Someone once said that the life of every man, was a diary,in which he meant to write one story, but wrote another!

[pieter]

Hi Pieter,
in case you have difficulty in obtaining Shestov's books and books about Shestov, here are two links:

shestov.by.ru/

shestov.narod.ru/home.html

In the second of the links there are Shestov's books ready to be downloaded. I wish a good reading!

Pieter, to be quite frank, I think - and I may be wrong - that the way you see Russians (and Poles too, for that matter) is a bit stereotypic. You know, in time when I did not speak Italian I ascribied the traits of the language - uncomprehended, just the beutiful melody - to the people using it. WHen I learned some Italian I had to realize that even very unnice sentences, or even the mundane ones, sound romantic and longingly. If I would extrapolate such a hypothesis onto the sound of Dutch or German to my Polish ear, I would have to assume that all Dutch and Germans are harsh and unnice. Including Erasm of Rotterdam, Baruch Spinoza, Vincent van Gogh, Simon de Vlieger, Jan Vermeer, Ferdinand Bordewijk and Anna Frank!
The same phenomenon happens while judging the alleged 'hatred' of Poles to Russians. Of course there are some Poles who are not fond of Russian culture, people, everyday life habits etc. But, believe me, I have never talked to or met anyone who'd actually 'hate' Russians, and met a lot who like them, appreciate their culture. I think that if one would have been been asked to name a Polish 'deed of hatred' towards Russians, naming such a deed would come out problematic. However it is the fact-of-life that Poles don’t accept any form of Russian state’s imperialism. One of the friends of my grandparents was the officer of Polish Army that fought with the Russians in 1920 when they tried to invade Poland. He told them that he had two favourite poem books even in the front, and read them. One was Norwid, the other... Lermontov (perhaps because he was officer in the army, too . So now, just imagine, a Polish cavallery officer reads Lermontov in the morning, then mounts o horse and leads his men against the invading Russian troops...
Jewish thinkers and Christianity. I think that we need to differentiate it a bit, there are philosophers Jews and Judaistic philosphers, just like there are philosophers,say, Catholics and Catholic philosophers. There's a myriad of philosophers of Jewish roots or Jewish who have greately contributed to the philosophy, both secular and spiritual (including Christianity). I have an impression that it is not that important what is the thinkers background (although it is instrucive and interesting) as long as the outcome of his thinking is not parochial. Ie. Thomas Merton gave the world so much, and not just to the Christians or Catholic, but to all who cared to read his works. So did ie. Paul Tilish and not just to Protestants.
I have to go now, I hope to hear from you. BTW: did you think of coming to the Polish Culture Site at jagahost.proboards79.com/index.cgi . It is a bit more lively then here?

[pieter]

Adam,

Thanks for your clear and direct reaction.
I just read your discussion with Jerzy on the thread "Russians celebrate 4 november". Actually I was raised by my mother not to hate Russians or Germans, the two big threats to Poland in the past.
In the same time my father was less "political correct", because he openly disliked Germans and Japanese, people from the South-East of Holland (Limburg people, a sort of lasy Southern-dialect speaking miners, some of them have a weird sort of German dialect) and Irish
(because he is very Anglophile).
I grew up with German and Russian culture, next to French and British culture. My father was fond of Russian folk and choir music, and my mother loved Prokofieff, Tsaikovski and Rachmaninov.
I myself liked Dmitri Sjostakovitsch very much.
It was easier to obtain Russian culture, because it is a bigger country with more people, than Poland, a country about which there was not so many information in my youth, because the Iron curtain was between my country and Eastern Europe.
About stereotypes, generalisations and cliché's about peoples, countries and cultures. Europe was a battleground for thousands of years, and for people outside Europe it is hard to understand why there is so less unity, and why there was such hostilities between neigbours.
History shows us that like Kane and Abel in the bible, people from the same family often argue and quarrel with eachother.
What is close to you can irritate you the most. A Duch person for example can be very offended when someone in France, Spain or Yugoslavia sees him as a German, because he sees himself as someone with a completely differant national identity, culture, history and language as his neigbour. On a language course in France in 1990 I got very angry at an Austrian guy who said that Duch was a German dialect. As punishment I started to talk Duch to him, and he could'nt understand me anymore. And that proved that there is a differance.
We ofcourse share language roots and are part of the same language tree, but Duch, Danish and English are from just another branch.
For instance the Duch word for sea means lake in German, and the Duch word for lake means sea in german.
Unlike you, my parents and some of my francophone friends I like German as a literary (Heine, Kafka, Mann, Rilke) and musical (Mathew and johns passion of Bach) language. Hoch-Deutsch I even find more beautiful than my native Duch language and English.
Most people are fond of the language they were teached by their parents, grandparents and teachers. For me Duch is pragmatic, and I like the fact that I can understand Flemish and Afrikaander (South-Afrcican people of farmer origin) people. And because German is close to Duch it is also nice to be able to communicate with Germans, Austrians and Swiss people.
I aggree with you on your standpoints on the Philosophers background too. I think that my grandfather who hated communism, Stalinism, and the fact that Poland was occupied by renegade Poles and their Sovjet brothers, did not stop him from liking Russian literature (Tolstoi, Tsjechov and etc.). I can not check that, but because I know that he was a cultivated gentleman who read a lot, I do believe he did that.
Disliking a regime and a mentality of a ruling class or group in a country,
does not mean that you have to dislike the whole population.
The mistake of the twentieth and 21 century is that people could'nt differientiate between Nazi and German, Communist (Sovjet) and Russian, Pole and anti-semite, Jew and Zionist, American and Capitalist. Sometimes anti-poles were united in one person who could or can not identify himself with the label the "other(s)" put on him.
I know a secular leftwing jew who is anti-zionist, and he is sick of being connected to that country every time someone hears his name.
I know philosemite Poles, anti-communist Russians, anti-semite jews,
and anti-capitalist Americans, and yes even christian jews.
Spinoza was kicked out of the Jewish community of Amsterdam, because of his views, and he choose a latin name in staid of his Hebrew
name Baruch, that became Benedictus.
A Catholic monk became his fellow traveller.
Can you tell me something about philosophy and literature in Polish language and culture. What place has philosphy under the Polish intelligentsia, students, readers, the people who are interested in it.
Do you have a philosophy tradition in Poland?
I ask you that because I have no other information than the Polish history and literature I read, and that is moslty narative.

Pieter

[pieter]

Dear Adam,

This afternoon I had the time to go to the library, went to the desk and asked for a part of the encyclopedea Judaïca, to search for Lev Shestov. While I was waiting I searched in the philosophy department for interesting books I could lent. I found an interesting book by the Duch guy Dr. R. van Woudenberg about "Philosophical thoughts about
faith in God", and I lent it together with a book about present-day journalism, TV news and the new technology. I also lent the DVD
"New York stories", three stories about New York by Woody Allen,
Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
After that I went back to the counter, where to parts of the the encyclopedea Judaïca lay, and yes I found our dear Lev Shestov.

This is de encylopedea's story of Shestov:

Lev Shestov (pseud. of Lev Issakovich Schwarzman; 1866 - 1938),
religious philosopher and man of letters, born in Kiev. (the city where my grandfather studied before the first world war)
Shestovs father was a wealthy textile manifacturer, and Shestov absorbed an interest in Yiddish and Hebrew literature.
Much of his later work is at least congruent with his hasidic roots.
He is known for his elegant and witty, aphoristic style, the range of his erudition and interests, and the trenchancy of his critique of rational speculation, and systematic philosophy as modes of truth.
His most outstanding gift as a writer was his ability to characterise
thought and style by conveying a sense of human experiance that produced it, and he called his essays "Pilkgrimages throughsouls".
Although he left no direct disciples, Albert Camus, Nicholas Berdayev, and D.H. Lawrence, among others, have testified to his impact.
He was close to,and appreciative of, even the philosophers whose effects at system he set himself most strongly to oppose -Edmund Husserl and Karl Jaspers-.
His essays on Chekhov, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are famous.
Like the hasidim, Shestov cultivated a respect for mystery and paradox that survived the most intensive rationalist training.
He cared too much for inwardness, for inner experiance as an acces to salvation, to rest within what was orthodox in Judaism.
At the same time he was to dismayed with the Logos of the Fourth Gospel, too smitten with love for the Old Testament God, with all his
arbitrary caprice, to have other thanshort shrift for conventional or Churchly Christianity.
Yet Shestov was both a Jew and Christian; and for him the fundamental
antinomies were not between the Old and New Testament, or even between religion and atheism, but rather, as the titles of his last two books clearly state, between, "Speculation and Revolution", and "Athens and Jerusalem" (1938).
Well trained in Logic and philosophy, Shestov was against rational speculation only insofar as he felt it attempted to limit human possibilities. He was agianst what he felt was Husserl's project of turning philosophy into a science, and believed that philosophy should concern itself primarily with questions that could not be answered by reason, but only by the "cries of Job"-i.e., by direct human experiance.
He believed that rational speculation ("Athens") had infected religion
as well as philosophy. Against Philo and St. Thomas, Shestov cited
Tertullian, who believed it was absurd; Luther, who grasped that the essence of action and therefor of "good works" was limitation, hence
mediocrity, and that salvation could come by faith alone;
and by those biblical heroes of faith, Abraham and Job.
Trained as a lawyer at Kiev university, Shevtov never practiced.
Although early committed to radical politics, he never entertained illusions about the Bolshevik Revolution, and emigrated shortly after it occurred. In 1922 he became professor of Russian philosophy at the university of Paris.

Encyclopedia Judaica

P.S. - If there are mistakes or errors in the text it is my fault, because
I copyied the text with handwriting in the libary and later typed this text over from my handwritten text of my writingpad.

Pieter

[pieter]

[quote
Do you have a philosophy tradition in Poland? [/quote]

I'll try to write moreabout that, only I don't know WHEN

We have an oustanding tradition of philosophy, especially in the logic/philosophy interface, but not just that. Alfred Tarski is one of the three major logicians:

Aristotle-Godel-Tarski - the great triada

He was a Polish Jew [(primo voto Alfred Teitelbaum) conversed into Roman Catholic, if that matters for someone]. Among many other acheivements he was the fist to define the TRUE SENTENCE in a way impossible to refute. And, just iamgine, it happened in the first half of 20 th century only!

[pieter]

Adam,

Thank you for your reaction and I am curious if you can tell me something more about
19th and 20th century Polish philosophy. Logic philosophy (especially Logic positivist)
is my favorite branch of philosophy next to language analythical philosophy
(Wiener Kreis/Wittgenstein, as I mentioned before).
But I stand open to any kind of philosophy, only it will take a lifetime and a lot of
dicsussions, debates, correspondences and most important of all reading books
to get more deep into it. This converstion between us is for me important,
because it opened a new road to me in Philosophy (a branch -Shestov/Berdyaev-
of Russian/European philosophy I did not knew before I met you on this Forum).
I am anxious to find more information on Alfred Tarski and Polish philosophy.
I only knew Leszek Kolakowski before I read your last post, and I liked
Kolakowski very much. I read essays of his.

Have a nice weekend, and I am looking forward to your reply.

Pieter

[pieter]

Adam,

Because Lev Shestov chief enemy was Hegel, I post information about Hegel,
because I am interested in the Anti-thesis, how will Adam react on Hegel
as a Shestov admirer and follower. What do you think about this
important German philosopher, which influence reached to Francis Fukuyama.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. He received his education at the Tübinger Stift (seminary of the Protestant Church in Württemberg), where he was friends with the future philosophers Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin. He became fascinated by the works of Spinoza, Kant, and Rousseau, and by the French Revolution. Modern philosophy, culture, and society seemed to Hegel fraught with contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object of knowledge, mind and nature, self and other, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Hegel's main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called "the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge". According to Hegel, the main characteristic of this unity was that it evolved through and manifested itself in contradiction and negation. Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in each domain of reality -- consciousness, history, philosophy, art, nature, society -- leads to further development until a rational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts of a larger, evolutionary whole. This whole is mental because it is mind that can comprehend all of these phases and sub-parts as steps in its own process of comprehension. It is rational because the same, underlying, logical, developmental order underlies every domain of reality and is the order of rational thought. It is not a thing or being that lies outside of other existing things or minds. Rather, it comes to completion only in the philosophical comprehension of individual existing human minds who, through their own understanding, bring this developmental process to an understanding of itself.
Many consider Hegel's thought to represent the summit of early 19th-Century Germany's movement of philosophical idealism. It would come to have a profound impact on many future philosophical schools, including schools that opposed Hegel's specific dialectical idealism, such as Existentialism, the historical materialism of Karl Marx, historicism, and British Idealism. At the same time, modern analytic and positivistic philosophers have considered Hegel a principal target because of what they consider the obscurantism of his philosophy. Hegel was aware of his 'obscurantism' and saw it as part of philosophical thinking that grasps the limitations of everyday thought and concepts and tries to go beyond them. Hegel wrote in his essay "Who Thinks Abstractly?" that it is not the philosopher who thinks abstractly but the person on the street, who uses concepts as fixed, unchangeable givens, without any context. It is the philosopher who thinks concretely, because he or she goes beyond the limits of everday concepts and understands their larger context. This can make philosophical thought and language seem mysterious or obscure to the person on the street.
Although it is often said that Hegel influenced Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx and Engels, actually all of those later writers opposed the most central themes of Hegel's philosophy. Nor did Hegel have any influence on the nationalist movement in Germany. After less than a generation, Hegel's philosophy was suppressed and even banned by the Prussian right-wing, and was firmly rejected by the left-wing in multiple official writings. After the period of Bruno Bauer, only contemporary writers have found inspiration in Hegel's actual writings.
Contents
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1 Life and work
2 Hegel's legacy
3 Famous Hegel quotations
4 Major works
5 Secondary literature
6 External links
7 Hegel texts online
[edit]
Life and work

Hegel was born in Stuttgart on 27 August 1770. As a child he was a voracious reader of literature, newspapers, philosophical essays, and writings on various other topics. In part, Hegel's literate childhood can be attributed to his uncharacteristically progressive mother who actively nurtured her children's intellectual development. The Hegels were a well-established middle class family in Stuttgart - his father was a civil servant in the administrative government of Württemberg. Hegel was a sickly child and almost died of illness before he was six.
Hegel attended the seminary at Tübingen with the epic poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the objective idealist Friedrich Schelling. In their shared dislike for what was regarded as the restrictive environment of the Tübingen seminary, the three became close friends and mutually influenced each other's ideas. The three watched the unfolding of the French Revolution and immersed themselves in the emerging criticism of the idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
Hegel published only four books in his life: the Phenomenology of Spirit (or Phenomenology of Mind), his account of the evolution of consciousness from sense-perception to absolute knowledge, published in 1807; the Science of Logic, the logical and metaphysical core of his philosophy, in three volumes, published in 1811, 1812, and 1816; Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a summary of his entire philosophical system, which was originally published in 1816 and revised in 1827 and 1830; and the (Elements of the) Philosophy of Right, his political philosophy, published in 1822. He also published some articles early in his career and during his Berlin period. A number of other works on the philosophy of history, religion, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy were compiled from the lecture notes of his students and published posthumously.
Hegel's works have a reputation for their difficulty, and for the breadth of the topics they attempt to cover. Hegel introduced a system for understanding the history of philosophy and the world itself, often described as a progression in which each successive movement emerges as a solution to the contradictions inherent in the preceding movement. For example, the French Revolution for Hegel constitutes the introduction of real freedom into western societies for the first time in recorded history. But precisely because of its absolute novelty, it is also absolutely radical: on the one hand the upsurge of violence required to carry out the revolution cannot cease to be itself, while on the other, it has already consumed its opponent. The revolution therefore has nowhere to turn but onto its own result: the hard-won freedom is consumed by a brutal Reign of Terror. History, however, progresses by learning from its mistakes: only after and precisely because of this experience can one posit the existence of a constitutional state of free citizens, embodying both the benevolent organizing power of rational government and the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality.
Aside from Hegel's dense and difficult style which, for English readers, is additionally challenging because his terminology and idiom do not translate easily into English, his work can be perplexing for modern audiences because he had a teleological and rationalistic view of human society and history that are at odds with current post-modernist intellectual trends. Specifically, Hegel developed a new form of logic which he called, 'speculative logic,' and which is today popularly called, 'dialectics,' which remains largely undeveloped in the direction that Hegel intended. A new form of logic will tend to be complex and this makes Hegel's writings famously difficult to read.
[edit]
Hegel's legacy

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Hegel's philosophy is largely for experts and professionals. It is not intended to be easy reading because it is technical writing. Hegel presumed his readers would be well-versed in Western philosophy, up to and including Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Fichte and Schelling. Without this background, Hegel will be practically impossible to read.
One common joke about Hegel's legacy for subsequent thought is that ironically Hegel has managed to be both one of the most influential thinkers in modern philosophy while simultaneously being one of the most inaccessible. Because of this, Hegel's ultimate legacy will be debated for a very long time. He has been such a formative influence on such a wide range of thinkers that one can give him credit or assign him blame for almost any position.
One famous philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer for a very short time a fellow colleague of Hegel's at the University of Berlin said this about his philosophy: "The height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had been only previously known in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced, general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, as a monument to German stupidity."
One possible reason for the difficulty in reading Hegel's works rests with his innovations in the science of logic. In response to Immanuel Kant's challenge to the limits of Pure Reason, Hegel developed a radically new form of logic, which he called, speculation, and which is today popularly called, dialectics. The difficulty in reading Hegel was perceived in Hegel's own day, and persists into the 21st century. In order to read Hegel, one must become familiar with all preceding philosophers first, and then one must also learn a completely new version of logic.
Many who tried to do this, even great and famous writers, quit without mastering Hegel's specific, new logic. It has been argued that this includes Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred Ayer, Benedetto Croce, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Alexandre Kojève, Karl Barth, Jean-Paul Sartre and the great bulk of postmodern theoreticians.
Historians have spoken of Hegel's influence as represented by two opposing camps. The Right Hegelians, the direct disciples of Hegel at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now known as the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), advocated protestant orthodoxy and the political conservatism of the post-Napoleon Restoration period.
The Left Hegelians, also known as the Young Hegelians, interpreted Hegel in a revolutionary sense, leading to an advocation of atheism in religion and liberal democracy in politics. Thinkers and writers traditionally associated with the Young Hegelians include Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, David Friedrich Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, and most famously, the younger Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - all of whom knew and were familiar with the writings of each other. A group of the Young Hegelians known as Die Freien ("The Free") gathered frequently for debate in Hippel's Weinstube (a winebar) in Friedrichsstrasse, in Berlin in the 1830's and 1840's. In this environment, some of the most influential thinking of the last 160 years was nurtured - the radical critique and fierce debates of the Young Hegelians inspired and shaped influential ideas of atheism, humanism, communism, anarchism and egoism.
Except for Marx and Marxists, almost none of the so-called "Left Hegelians" actually described themselves as followers of Hegel, and several of them openly repudiated or insulted the legacy of Hegel's philosophy. Even Marx stated that to make Hegel's philosophy useful for his purposes, he had to "turn Hegel upside down." Nevertheless, this historical category is often deemed useful in modern academic philosophy. The critiques of Hegel offered from the "Left Hegelians" led the line of Hegel's thinking into radically new directions - and form an important part of the literature on and about Hegel.
Because of this we may suppose that the traditional division of Hegel's thought into Left-Hegelian and Right-Hegelian schools was inadequate. The moderate, the authentic Hegelian, was lost until after the fall of the USSR (around 1990) when Western scholars approached Hegel's writings with a fresh attitude.
Marxist readings of Hegel can yield many myths. Postmodern readings of Hegel (influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger) can also yield many myths. Today's student is fortunate to have a new wave of Hegel scholars who read Hegel directly, without preconceptions. Scholars like Walter Jaeschke and Otto Poeggler in Germany, as well as Peter Hodgson and Howard Kainz in America, are notable in this regard.
In previous modern accounts of Hegelianism — to undergraduate classes, for example — Hegel's dialectic often appears broken up for convenience into three moments called "thesis" (in the French historical example, the revolution), "antithesis" (the terror which followed), and "synthesis" (the constitutional state of free citizens). Hegel used this classification only once, when discussing Kant: it was developed earlier by Fichte in his loosely analogous account of the relation between the individual subject and the world.
Knowing that the traditional description of Hegel's philosophy in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis was mistaken, a few scholars, like Raya Dunayevskaya have attempted to discard the triadic approach altogether. According to their argument, although Hegel refers to "the two elemental considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute and final aim; secondly, the means for realising it, i.e. the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its life, movement, and activity" (thesis and antithesis) he doesn't use "synthesis" but instead speaks of the "Whole": "We then recognised the State as the moral Whole and the Reality of Freedom, and consequently as the objective unity of these two elements."
Furthermore, in Hegel's language, the "dialectical" aspect or "moment" of thought and reality, by which things or thoughts turn into their opposites or have their inner contradictions brought to the surface, is only preliminary to the "speculative" (and not "synthesizing") aspect or "moment", which grasps the unity of these opposites or contradiction. Thus for Hegel, reason is ultimately "speculative", not "dialectical".
Actually, according to Dr. Howard Kainz, Hegel's philosophy contains thousands of triads. However, instead of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, Hegel used different terms to speak about triads, including immediate-mediate-concrete as well as abstract-negative-concrete. Hegel's works do speak frequently about a synthetic logic, although it is true that the old-fashioned description of his philosophy in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis was always inaccurate.
Hegel used his system of dialectics to explain the whole of the history of philosophy, science, art, politics and religion, but many modern critics point out that Hegel often seems to gloss over the realities of history in order to fit it into his dialectical mold. Karl Popper, a critic of Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies, suggests that the Hegel's system forms a thinly veiled justification for the rule of Frederick William III, and that Hegel's idea of the ultimate goal of history is to reach a state approximating that of 1830s Prussia. This view of Hegel as an apologist of state power and precursor of 20th century totalitarianism was criticized thoroughly by Herbert Marcuse in his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, on the grounds that Hegel was not an apologist for any state or form of authority simply because it existed: for Hegel the state must always be rational. Other scholars, e.g. Walter Kaufmann, have amply criticized Popper's theories about Hegel.
Arthur Schopenhauer despised Hegel on account of the latter's alleged historicism (among other reasons), and decried Hegel's work as obscurantist "pseudo-philosophy". Many other newer philosophers who prefer to follow the tradition of British Philosophy have made similar statements. But even in Britain, Hegel exercised a major influence on the philosophical school called "British Idealism," which included Francis Herbert Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, in England, and Josiah Royce at Harvard.
In the latter half of the 20th century, Hegel's philosophy underwent a major renaissance. This was due partly to the rediscovery and reevaluation of him as a possible philosophical progenitor of Marxism by philosophically oriented Marxists, partly through a resurgence of the historical perspective that Hegel brought to everything, and partly through increasing recognition of the importance of his dialectical method. The book that did the most to reintroduce Hegel into the Marxist canon was perhaps Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness. This sparked a renewed interest in Hegel reflected in the work of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Raya Dunayevskaya, Alexandre Kojève and Gotthard Günther among others. The Hegel renaissance also highlighted the significance of Hegel's early works, i.e. those published prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit. More recently two prominent American philosophers, John McDowell and Robert Brandom (sometimes, half-seriously, referred to as the Pittsburgh Hegelians), have exhibited a marked Hegelian influence.
Beginning in the 1960's, Anglo-American Hegel scholarship has attempted to challenge the traditional interpretation of Hegel as offering a metaphysical system. This view, often referred to as the 'non-metaphysical option', has had a decided influence on most major English language studies of Hegel in the past 40 years. The works of U.S. neoconservative Francis Fukuyama's controversial book The End of History and the Last Man was heavily influenced by a famous Hegel interpreter from the Marxist school, Alexandre Kojève. Among modern scientists, the physicist David Bohm, the mathematician William Lawvere, the logician Kurt Godel and the biologist Ernst Mayr have been deeply interested in or influenced by Hegel's philosophical work. The contemporary theologian Hans Küng has advanced contemporary scholarship in Hegel studies.
The very latest scholarship in Hegel studies reveals many sides of Hegel that were not typically seen in the West before 1990. For example, the essence of Hegel's philosophy is the idea of Freedom. With the idea of Freedom Hegel attempts to explain world history, fine art, political science, the free thinking that is science, the attainments of spirituality and the resolution to problems of metaphysics.
[edit]
Famous Hegel quotations

This is the simple insight, that Being is *within* the Concept. -Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
"Logic is to be understood as the System of Pure Reason, as the realm of Pure Thought. This realm is Truth as it is without veil, and in its own Absolute nature. It can therefore be said that this Content is the exposition of God as God is in God's eternal essence before the creation of Nature and a finite mind." The Science of Logic
"The science of logic which constitutes Metaphysics proper or purely speculative philosophy, has hitherto still been much neglected." The Science of Logic
"It is remarkable when a nation loses its Metaphysics, when the Spirit which contemplates its own Pure Essence is no longer a present reality in the life of a nation." The Science of Logic
"What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational." (Was vernünftig ist, das ist Wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig.) The Philosophy of Right
On first seeing Napoleon: "I saw the World Spirit seated on a horse." Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
"We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in this world has been accomplished without passion." Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
"To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality."(Abstraktionen in der Wirklichkeit geltend machen, heißt Wirklichkeit zerstören.)
"As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus, philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts." (Was das Individuum betrifft, so ist ohnehin jedes ein Sohn seiner Zeit; so ist auch Philosophie ihre Zeit in Gedanken erfaßt.) The Philosophy of Right
"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk." The Philosophy of Right
"The true is the whole." (Das Wahre ist das Ganze.) The Phenomenology of Spirit section 20.

[pieter]

Hegel's work Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) is called The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind in English; the German word Geist has connotations of both spirit and mind in English. It is one of Hegel's most important philosophical works; he himself regarded it as the foundation of his later works. It explores the nature and development of mind/spirit, showing how it evolves through a process of internal contradiction and development from the most primitive aspect of sense-perception through all of the forms of subjective and objective mind, including art, religion, and philosophy, to absolute knowledge that comprehends this entire developmental process as part of itself. Thus it also lays out an entire system of metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy.
The Preface to the Phenomenology, all by itself, is considered one of Hegel's major works and a major text in the history of philosophy, because in it he sets out the core of his philosophical method and what distinguishes it from that of any previous philosophy, especially that of his German Idealist predecessors (Kant, Fichte, and Schelling). This Hegelian method consists of actually examining consciousness's experience of both itself and of its objects and eliciting the contradictions and dynamic movement that come to light in looking at this experience. Hegel uses the phrase "pure looking at" (reines Zusehen) to describe this method. If consciousness just pays attention to what is actually present in itself and its relation to its objects, it will see that what look like stable and fixed forms dissolve into a dialectical movement. Thus philosophy, according to Hegel, cannot just set out arguments based on a flow of deductive reasoning. Rather, it must look at actual consciousness, as it really exists. Hegel also argues strongly against the epistemological emphasis of modern philosophy from Descartes through Kant, which he describes as having to first establish the nature and criteria of knowledge prior to actually knowing anything, because this would imply an infinite regress, a foundationalism that Hegel maintains is self-contradictory and impossible. Rather, he maintains, we must examine actual knowing as it occurs in real knowledge processes. This is why Hegel uses the term "phenomenology". "Phenomenology" comes from the Greek word for "to appear", and the phenomenology of mind is thus the study of how consciousness or mind appears to itself. In Hegel's dynamic system, it is the study of the successive appearances of the mind to itself, because on examination each one dissolves into a later, more comprehensive and integrated form or structure of mind.
An influential section is the discussion of the dialectic of the lord and the bondsman. To become free every man must engage in a life-death struggle. Those that shirk from this struggle, those that live in fear of losing their life, become the bondsman under the domination of the lord. However, by working and laboring on the world the bondsman begins to understand its temporal nature and sees his own role in changing it, while the lord essentially loses the world by failing to engage it except through his servantile bondmen. This, for example, is at the root of the lord's faculty of desire -- the only way in which he relates to the world is not by working on it and altering it, but by desiring something that he may have enough power to acquire. The bondsman, according to Hegel, will one day rise up and realize that this life is nothing to him, thus risking his life and usurping power from the lord. Only by risking one's life is one able to achieve freedom in the full Hegelian sense.
The master and slave relationship was much discussed in the 20th century, especially because of its connection to Karl Marx's conception of class struggle as the motive force of social development. This idea also provided the inspiration for Søren Kierkegaard's conception of the God – sinful bondsman relationship and for Friedrich Nietzsche's master-slave morality. One of Hegel's most influential interpreters, Alexandre Kojève, argued that Hegel's intentions were to illustrate that overcoming the fear of death was the only way to achieve true freedom. This was not actually stated by Hegel (in truth at points in this work he makes a direct argument against the use of force as the manner in which history develops). The most recent work that uses this argument is Francis Fukuyama's, "The End of History and the Last Man". Fukuyama admits in the work that his understanding of Hegel is mostly Kojèvian.