Anomaly

In response to Mikhail Epstein's claim that at the heart of all Russian philosophy are “pure negativity” and “dangerous intellectual poisons,” this essay offers the counterexample of Lev Shestov (1866 – 1938), known by his contemporaries as a Russian thinker of “radical optimism.” At the center of his work is the belief in miracles. The function of the miracle, in Shestov's conception, is to liberate humanity from the perception of necessity and compulsion in history. The existence of miracles guarantees that things could always have been (and can always still be) otherwise. Even in distant retrospect, the “facts” of history can be changed, if God so wills it. In a world that includes the miraculous, counterfactuality is an available, even if rarely taken, path to freedom, which is the goal of human existence. Building on the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, Shestov's optimism had a strong impact on both existentialists and Surrealists.