Shestov and Hegel: The Experience of Truth

Abstract

L. Shestov and G.W.F. Hegel were concerned with the problem of truth and knowledge. The genuine dialectical relationship between necessity and freedom, according to Hegel, is expressed in the return of the absolute to itself as a realized unity of itself and its own other. As a result, the hidden power of absolute truth erodes the limitations of particular definitions, forcing one to pass over into another and return to itself in a new, truer form. While Hegel thought of the history of philosophy as a series of necessary stages in the advancement of truth and knowledge, Shestov was sceptical of the claims about the necessity and possibility of absolute knowledge. The purpose of our research is to demonstrate the specific features of the philosophical interpretation of Hegel’s ideas in the works of religious existentialist Shestov, as well as to generalize Shestov’s understanding of the principles of correlating the categories of faith and reason when dealing with the problem of truth through the interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy. This approach seems acceptable, since the two thinkers differ significantly in their understanding of the process of searching for truth, which found expression in their views on the very course of the historical-philosophical process. Shestov believed that a study of the history of philosophy allows us to grow and develop through a free and committed attitude towards truth and knowledge. For him, such a commitment is a criterion by which we can judge whether we have a genuine experience of knowing the truth. For Hegel, our experience in pursuing the truth is not a product of the history of philosophy, but a process underlying the history of philosophy. Therefore, the experience of truth, a self-reflection on the contradictions, is an experience of a continuous process of moving away from the familiar towards something new, where knowledge appears as an endless process of liberating thought from the burden of non-existence, a revival of the miracle of thinking as the creation of the impossible.