“Has there ever been a single philosopher who recognized God?”
Perhaps this is one of the most important questions in Shestov’s attempts at critiquing the Western philosophical tradition, for it makes apparent the ground out of which the whole thinking-philosophizing of Lev Shestov arises, taking place as religious existentialism and hence placing itself over against, according to Shestov’s critique, the godless ground grounding the whole thinking-philosophizing of the Western metaphysics, that is, the arguing that rationality and reason can lead to the truth, or that reason can think toward and into the space only opened up by the truth. This question makes apparent that, for Shestov, the totality of the Western philosophy, since the pre-Socratics, has never allowed the possibility of a transcendent God to arise, or has never brought itself into a place where the existence of a transcendent God might be a possibility.
Reason, for Shestov, cannot reach, grasp, or think, God, for God exceeds, and dwells in what surpasses, rationality. That is, reason can only think a rational God, a God that is reasonable, but God, for Shestov, negates rationality and reason, and accordingly they cannot think God.
“Every time reason set about proving the existence of God, it required as a first condition that God be ready to submit Himself to the fundamental principles that reason prescribed to Him.”
This means that reason thinks away from God, instead of thinking toward and into the space of the dwelling of God, and that reason confines God to the known, the thought, and the calculable, but God is, and will remain forever, the unknown, the un-thought, and the incalculable. In this confining of God to what is near, graspable, or reachable, God is forever lost and never encountered; God is hidden from reason because God is that which is more than reason.
Reason, for Shestov, also fails to think and grasp the universe, for the universe is monstrous, unpredictable, and strange. The universe is an enigma and a surprise; and reason can only think and order the unfolding of the events that the universe has already decided to reveal. That is, coming face to face with what the universe has decided to send, or to give, is not a thinking toward and into the universe itself. Reason’s collecting, or bringing together, of the surprises into one place, and calling this place, this placing, a theory, is not a grasping of the universe, but rather a noticing of what was allowed to let itself be seen, for the universe will send other surprises and mysteries.