BellaOnline Forums Travel and Culture Polish Culture Pieter and philosophy

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

[url=BellaOnline ALERT: For anti-spam reasons, we restrict the number of URLs allowed in a given post. You have exceeded our maximum number of URLs.

Pinkola, the chain letter you've sent does not take into account that if yoy put your left hand into the fire and the right hand into the liquid nirogen, then statistically you are in the thermal comfort envoironment <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> All the best!

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 clich�'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

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 Juda�ca, 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 Juda�ca 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