Ethics of Responsibility Without Certainty

The tradition of philosophy, from its earliest voices, sought to tether responsibility to knowledge. To act rightly, it was said, one must first understand the good; ignorance was the source of error, and truth the guarantor of virtue. Yet such a conception binds responsibility to certainty, as if one could only answer for one’s actions once armed with clear laws, rationally demonstrable norms, or divine decrees articulated beyond ambiguity. Shestov refuses this inheritance. For him, responsibility begins precisely where certainty ends, in the space where no law protects and no principle dictates. It is born not from knowledge, but from the terrifying experience of freedom.

Responsibility without certainty does not resemble the universal ethics of Kant, which prescribes maxims valid for all, nor does it mirror utilitarian calculation, which reduces the good to consequences weighed and measured. Rather, it resembles the cry of Abraham standing on Mount Moriah, knife in hand, commanded by a voice that no ethical system could validate. From the perspective of universal morality, Abraham is a criminal; from the perspective of faith, he is the father of nations. His act cannot be reconciled with law — it is irreducibly singular, unrepeatable, and scandalous. And yet, it is precisely in such singularity that responsibility emerges, not as compliance with norms, but as a decision that cannot be justified and yet must be made.

This conception strips ethics of its traditional scaffolding. It leaves behind the comfort of principles that apply equally to all, and forces one to stand exposed before a demand that comes without credentials. To act responsibly, in Shestov’s vision, is not to obey the known good but to bear the weight of the unknown, to respond without assurance that the response is right. In this sense, responsibility is inseparable from risk. Every act may be a mistake, a betrayal, a leap into absurdity; yet to refuse to act is itself a form of betrayal. The ethical life, therefore, cannot be secured by necessity. It is lived in trembling, in uncertainty, and in faith that cannot be proved.

One may protest that such an ethics invites chaos, that without certainty we are left to arbitrariness. But for Shestov, arbitrariness belongs not to freedom, but to systems that impose their order without listening to the singular cry of the soul. True responsibility does not emerge when all paths are mapped; it begins when the map fails. It does not reside in the repetition of what reason declares necessary, but in the courage to step into the unknown, to act without the comfort of inevitability. Where systematic ethics seeks to eliminate risk, responsibility without certainty embraces it as the very condition of freedom.

This refusal of certainty aligns Shestov with Kierkegaard, whose “teleological suspension of the ethical” marked the break between universal morality and individual faith. It also resonates with Dostoevsky’s vision of characters who act not in accordance with rational calculation, but in the tumult of conscience, love, or defiance. In both, Shestov finds confirmation that the deepest moral experiences resist generalization. They occur in solitude, in decision, in the abyss where reason offers no guide.

To live ethically under such conditions is to accept that responsibility is not grounded, that it cannot be secured by proof or law. It is to carry the weight of one’s acts without recourse to necessity, to endure the silence of God and the absence of guarantees. It is, in short, to discover that responsibility is not diminished by uncertainty, but revealed through it. For only when nothing is certain does the demand of the other, the cry of conscience, the summons of faith, appear in its full force — without mediation, without justification, without end.

Here, Shestov finds the dignity of ethics: not in order, but in struggle; not in knowledge, but in freedom; not in certainty, but in the restless fidelity to a call that reason cannot hear.

Decision Without Guarantees

The essence of Shestov’s ethical vision reveals itself most clearly in the figure of decision — decision made not under the protection of certainty, but in the raw exposure of uncertainty. For the dominant philosophical tradition, a responsible act is one that can be justified, defended before the tribunal of reason, explained in terms of principles or consequences. To act otherwise is judged reckless, arbitrary, even immoral. Yet Shestov turns this assumption upside down: what if the very act of grounding decision in guarantees is itself the betrayal of responsibility? What if true decision begins only when every foundation has collapsed, when one must act without assurance, without proof, without promise of success?

Decision, for Shestov, is inseparable from risk. To decide with guarantees is no decision at all — it is mere compliance, the execution of what has already been secured by necessity. Genuine decision arises when the soul stands alone, abandoned by law, stripped of certainty, trembling before the unknown. It is Abraham walking to Mount Moriah with no explanation he can offer to Sarah, to Isaac, or even to himself. It is Job refusing to yield to the arguments of his friends, clinging to innocence in the face of inexplicable suffering. These moments cannot be subsumed under universal rules; they are singular ruptures, irreducible events where the only choice is to decide or to betray oneself.

Philosophical systems, anxious to avoid such abyssal moments, cover them with the language of necessity. They insist that true decisions must rest on reason, that freedom is valid only when exercised in accordance with laws that all can accept. But this conception reduces the act to a logical consequence. It transforms decision into deduction. For Shestov, this is no longer freedom but slavery to necessity — an obedience masked as autonomy. The decisive moment is robbed of its anguish, its unpredictability, its creative power.

To embrace decision without guarantees is to accept that error, failure, even catastrophe are inseparable from the moral life. There can be no final assurance that one’s act is right, no system to absolve the responsibility of choice. And yet, precisely in this exposure lies the dignity of the human being. For responsibility is not diminished by uncertainty — it is intensified. The one who acts without guarantee bears the full weight of freedom, unshared, unmediated, unprotected.

This vision demands courage, but not the heroic courage of triumph. It is the courage of endurance, of fidelity to the singular demand that speaks only once, in one life, without repetition. To act under such conditions is not to secure righteousness but to risk everything. And in that risk, ethics reveals its true form — not as a science of certainty, but as a trembling leap into the unknown.

Thus, for Shestov, the greatest decisions are not those that conform to universal laws, but those that defy them in obedience to something deeper — something irrational, paradoxical, and unprovable. The measure of responsibility is not the ability to justify but the willingness to decide when no justification is possible.

Faith as Condition for Moral Action?

In the face of a world where no foundation secures morality, the question inevitably arises: is faith the necessary ground from which moral action must spring? Shestov approaches this question with a paradoxical sharpness. He does not offer faith as a replacement for reason in the role of arbiter, nor as a new foundation that would once again bind morality to necessity. Faith, for him, is not a principle but an encounter, not a guarantee but a rupture. It cannot be codified, taught, or generalized. If faith becomes a system, it collapses into the same necessity it sought to resist.

For this reason, Shestov distances himself from all attempts to rationalize faith into doctrine. He sides with Kierkegaard, who saw in faith not a universal category but the singular trembling of the individual before the absurd. Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac was not a moral act in the sense of conforming to law; it was an act that shattered law, a leap into the impossible. To call such an act “moral” by ordinary standards would be to domesticate its scandal, to erase the very abyss in which it takes place. And yet, without this leap — without faith — Abraham’s decision would be nothing but madness or crime. Faith does not provide certainty, but it makes possible an action that resists every system of justification.

The danger here lies in misunderstanding faith as another form of grounding. Many moral philosophers have hoped to find in religion a firm basis for obligation, a voice of eternal authority that could substitute for the collapsing structures of reason. But Shestov insists that this search repeats the very mistake it seeks to overcome. To demand that faith provide security is to deny what faith is: the risk of stepping into the unknown. Faith as necessity is no longer faith — it is law, transformed into dogma. And in dogma, freedom vanishes once more.

So is faith the condition of moral action? Yes — but only in the sense that faith liberates the act from necessity. It allows the individual to act in defiance of the rational, the calculable, the justified. It opens a space where decision becomes possible, where one can choose even when no rule permits it. Faith, in this sense, is not the opposite of freedom but its very form. It does not command — it makes possible. It does not resolve uncertainty — it sanctifies it.

Yet Shestov knows that this vision is intolerable for those who desire order. Faith understood as risk, as exposure to the absurd, threatens every system that seeks to regulate human action. It cannot be tamed into moral pedagogy, nor integrated into the framework of ethics. It stands outside, scandalous, irrational. And it is precisely there, outside the bounds of necessity, that Shestov locates the possibility of true responsibility.

Thus, the question is not whether faith grounds morality, but whether morality without faith is anything more than conformity. For Shestov, faith does not guarantee the good, but it alone preserves the freedom to pursue it when all guarantees fail. In the trembling space between madness and revelation, faith becomes the only condition under which moral action can remain both free and alive.

Levinas and the Face of the Other

When Lev Shestov denounced the tyranny of necessity, he tore away the foundations upon which Western ethics had been built. His revolt was directed against systems, rules, and eternal laws that sought to bind the soul to inevitability. But this rebellion left open a question that would haunt later thinkers: if morality cannot be grounded in reason or necessity, if the good is not secured by law, where does responsibility arise? Emmanuel Levinas, writing in the shadow of both Shestov and the catastrophes of the twentieth century, responded with an answer at once different and deeply related: responsibility does not come from law, but from the encounter with the face of the Other.

For Levinas, the ethical demand is not deduced, nor is it imposed by rational universals. It erupts in the moment when one is confronted by another human being who, in his vulnerability, speaks the silent command: “Thou shalt not kill.” This command is not a law in the Kantian sense, nor is it mediated by institutions or traditions. It precedes all contracts, all systems, all principles. In its naked immediacy, it resembles the kind of ungrounded demand Shestov recognized in the cry of Job or the impossible leap of Abraham. Both thinkers, in their own idioms, turn away from universality and point to singularity — the irreducible event in which one is called to respond.

Yet Levinas departs from Shestov in a crucial respect. Shestov emphasizes the abyss, the terrifying solitude in which the soul must act without guarantees, without justification, exposed to the absurd. Levinas shifts the focus: responsibility is not solitude, but relation. The abyss does not open in the silence of freedom alone, but in the gaze of the other person. Where Shestov speaks of faith as the leap beyond reason, Levinas speaks of ethics as the interruption of self by the Other. Both resist necessity, but where Shestov hears the voice of God in paradox, Levinas locates transcendence in the human face.

This comparison is illuminating. Shestov insists that morality cannot be grounded in knowledge, that it appears only in the trembling decision that defies law. Levinas would agree that it cannot be grounded, but he insists that it is given — not in an inner leap, but in the exteriority of the Other. “The face,” he writes, “orders and ordains me.” In that order there is no necessity, no system, no justification — only the infinite responsibility that precedes freedom itself.

The resonance between them lies in their mutual rejection of certainty. Both affirm that morality begins where reason ends, that the good cannot be derived but must be encountered. The divergence lies in where they locate this encounter: for Shestov, in the scandal of faith; for Levinas, in the vulnerability of the Other. One appeals to God beyond logic, the other to humanity beyond comprehension. Both, however, resist the moral coercion of universality and insist on the singular, the unrepeatable, the moment that cannot be captured by law.

Thus, in bringing Shestov and Levinas into dialogue, one discovers not contradiction but complementarity. Shestov guards against the temptation to reduce ethics to system; Levinas shows that the refusal of system does not dissolve responsibility, but deepens it. In the face of the Other, freedom is not lost, but transformed into obligation — an obligation that cannot be guaranteed, cannot be justified, and yet is inescapable. It is precisely here, in the fragile space between abyss and encounter, that the ethics of responsibility without certainty finds its fullest voice.

Derrida’s Justice Without Ground

In Jacques Derrida’s reflections on justice, one finds a striking echo of Shestov’s rebellion against necessity, though expressed in the vocabulary of deconstruction rather than existential revolt. Both thinkers are animated by the conviction that true responsibility cannot be contained within established systems, that every attempt to codify justice into law betrays its essence. Derrida insists that justice, unlike law, has no foundation, no final principle, no definable form. Law is always calculable, grounded in procedures, subject to rules; justice, by contrast, is infinite, incalculable, and never present as a stable object. It haunts law, disrupts it, calls it into question, but can never be captured by it.

This resonates profoundly with Shestov’s refusal to tie morality to necessity. Shestov declared that the most decisive moral acts are those which defy generalization, which cannot be justified within the logic of universality. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, Job’s refusal to accept the logic of retribution — such acts are unthinkable within the order of rational ethics. They cannot be defended, only lived. In much the same way, Derrida argues that justice “is not deconstructible” precisely because it does not belong to the order of law or rationality. It demands decisions that cannot be secured by precedent or principle, decisions that are always made in trembling, under the weight of the undecidable.

Yet Derrida’s formulation adds a dimension Shestov leaves implicit. For Derrida, the absence of ground does not mean the absence of responsibility; it means its intensification. Every time a judge applies the law, he must do so in the awareness that the law is finite, imperfect, historical — and that justice demands more. The decision is therefore never guaranteed by the system; it must always leap beyond it. This is where Derrida and Shestov converge most sharply: both see that the moral act, if it is to be real, cannot be the mechanical application of necessity. It must risk error, it must risk injustice, it must risk everything.

Where they diverge lies in the horizon of transcendence. Shestov anchors the possibility of decision without guarantees in faith, in the God who breaks the chains of necessity and calls the soul into the abyss of freedom. Derrida, by contrast, avoids theological anchoring; his justice is not revealed by God but promised by the very structure of language and relation. It is an event always “to come,” never fully given, never final. If Shestov urges the leap into faith, Derrida speaks of the infinite deferral of justice — a waiting without end, a responsibility without closure.

And yet both point to the same scandal: justice cannot be founded. To ground it in reason is to reduce it to law, to tame it into necessity. To ground it in morality is to repeat the coercion of universality. True justice, like true morality, demands the impossible. It requires the courage to decide without certainty, to act without proof, to bear the responsibility of freedom without appeal to any higher guarantee.

In this sense, Derrida’s justice without ground is a modern counterpart to Shestov’s ethics without necessity. Both reveal that responsibility begins not in knowledge, but in exposure; not in assurance, but in risk. To act justly is never to rest in certainty — it is to tremble, to decide in the dark, and to remain open to a demand that no system, no law, no principle will ever exhaust.

Responsibility Born in Uncertainty

Responsibility, in the Shestovian sense, does not arise from knowledge, nor does it rest on the comfort of principles. It is not secured by the clarity of reason or the immutability of law. On the contrary, it is born precisely where knowledge falters, where principles collapse, where the soul is stripped of every guarantee and still confronted with the necessity to act. Uncertainty, which philosophy traditionally treated as a defect to be overcome, becomes in Shestov’s thought the very condition for authentic moral life.

The history of ethics has often been written as an effort to overcome uncertainty. From the Platonic forms to the Kantian categorical imperative, systems promised to deliver the soul from ambiguity by showing that the good is necessary, universal, and knowable. Responsibility, under this view, is nothing more than obedience to what reason has already disclosed. But such a conception, for Shestov, empties responsibility of its essence. If one’s act is dictated by law or deduced from principle, it is no longer a decision but a consequence. Freedom becomes compliance, and responsibility is replaced by necessity disguised as duty.

Against this tradition, Shestov insists that true responsibility only emerges when there are no certainties to lean on. The biblical figures who inhabit his writings illustrate this vividly. Abraham is not praised because he followed a universal rule — he is praised because he obeyed a command that shattered every rule, a summons that could not be justified or defended. Job is not revered because he accepted a rational explanation of his suffering, but because he refused all explanations, standing in the ashes with nothing but his protest and his faith. Their responsibility was not supported by guarantees; it was born in the abyss of uncertainty.

This paradox — that uncertainty, far from undermining responsibility, is its very birthplace — runs counter to the logic of philosophy. It implies that responsibility is not diminished but heightened when nothing is secure. To act without knowing, to respond without assurance, is to bear the full weight of freedom. The risk of error, of failure, even of madness, is inseparable from such responsibility. But it is precisely in bearing this risk that the human being discovers dignity. Responsibility without uncertainty is a shadow; only in uncertainty does it become real.

Later thinkers such as Levinas and Derrida deepen this insight. For Levinas, responsibility arises in the face of the Other — a demand that precedes knowledge and resists justification. For Derrida, justice is inseparable from undecidability; every decision worthy of the name must pass through the ordeal of uncertainty. Both echo Shestov’s conviction that the ethical moment cannot be secured by rules. It is always singular, always ungrounded, always fragile.

To embrace this vision is to renounce the dream of moral peace. One cannot rest in the assurance that one’s actions are correct by necessity. One can only decide, act, and bear the consequences without appeal to higher proof. Yet this renunciation is not despair. It is a liberation from the tyranny of systems that promise certainty but deliver only conformity. It is the discovery that responsibility, though terrifying, is also the deepest form of human freedom.

In Shestov’s thought, then, uncertainty is not the enemy of morality. It is its hidden source. Only when the scaffolding of necessity falls away does the soul encounter the full force of its freedom. Only then does responsibility cease to be obedience and become what it truly is: the courage to act without ground, in the trembling openness of the unknown.

We can find Shestov’s sharpest strokes of irony, where his style blends philosophical critique with the bite of sarcasm. When he writes: “The philosopher, more than anyone else, fears vagueness and uncertainty, and for one clear error will give you a dozen transcendental but shaky truths,” he exposes the peculiar psychology of philosophy itself.

The sarcasm works on two levels. First, it ridicules the philosopher’s obsession with clarity. Shestov suggests that clarity, so often celebrated as the virtue of reason, may itself be a mask for cowardice. The philosopher prefers a well-defined falsehood over an ambiguous truth because the falsehood, at least, feels solid, graspable, usable in constructing a system. Vagueness and uncertainty — where living truth might actually reside — terrify him, for they resist control.

Second, the remark unmasks the trade-off at the heart of philosophy: in its hunger for certainty, it sacrifices depth. Shestov’s sarcasm lies in the image of a philosopher eagerly exchanging “ten shaky transcendental truths” for “one clear error.” The absurdity is deliberate: philosophy, which boasts of its devotion to truth, is here portrayed as satisfied with error as long as it is neat, well-cut, and orderly. It is not truth that philosophy loves, Shestov suggests, but clarity — clarity even at the price of falsehood.

Behind the sarcasm lies a serious existential critique. For Shestov, life itself is unclear, paradoxical, filled with contradictions. To demand transparency is to betray life. Philosophy, with its systems and deductions, attempts to eliminate ambiguity, to domesticate mystery, to substitute necessity for the openness of existence. But in doing so, it builds impressive structures on foundations of error — error that only appears noble because it is “clear.”

This is why Shestov so often appeals to Job, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky. They did not exchange living uncertainty for clean abstractions; they endured the tremors of ambiguity without seeking shelter in the false comfort of system. Shestov’s sarcasm thus functions not as a mere rhetorical flourish but as a scalpel, cutting away the pretense of philosophy and revealing its hidden fear: that truth, if faced honestly, might be unclear, unstable, and ungrounded.

Creativity as the Burden of Uncertainty

In one of his most revealing aphorisms, Shestov observes: “Creative striving is an unbroken passage from one failure to another. The general state of the creator is uncertainty, the unknown, insecurity about tomorrow, nervous exhaustion. And the more serious, significant, and original the task one takes upon oneself, the more tormenting the condition becomes. That is why most people, even the most gifted, à la longue, cannot endure creative activity.”

Here again his irony bites with precision, but beneath the irony is an existential diagnosis. Creative striving, for Shestov, is not triumph, not the serene unfolding of a plan, but a continual confrontation with failure. To create is to dwell not in clarity but in obscurity, not in mastery but in fragility. Every work is haunted by the suspicion that it falls short, that it collapses before it begins. And this suspicion is not incidental — it is the very atmosphere of creativity.

The passage also lays bare Shestov’s understanding of uncertainty as the lifeblood of any genuine act. The one who creates does not know where his work will lead, nor whether it will endure. He moves through shadows, compelled by a demand he cannot fully name. This is why Shestov links creativity so closely with suffering: the greater the task, the greater the torment, because originality resists both certainty and comfort. To step into originality is to abandon the safe repetition of what is already known, and thus to abandon security itself.

What Shestov says of creative striving could equally be said of moral life. Just as the artist cannot rely on formulas without betraying creativity, the moral agent cannot rely on necessity without betraying freedom. Both are condemned to uncertainty. The creator, like Abraham or Job, is forced to act without proof, to move forward without assurance. And this endless vulnerability explains why, as Shestov notes with almost cruel clarity, most people — even the gifted — cannot endure creative striving indefinitely. The nervous exhaustion, the solitude, the ceaseless risk become unbearable. Thus, they turn away, back to systems, laws, routines, consolations.

Shestov does not condemn this retreat, but he exposes it. His words carry a tone of grim respect for those few who continue — who bear the torment of creative striving despite failure after failure, who endure the uncertainty of existence without seeking shelter. For them, uncertainty is not a defect to be eradicated but the very element of life. To create, whether in art, philosophy, or morality, is to stand within the storm of not knowing, to accept that torment is inseparable from originality.

In this sense, Shestov’s insight into creative striving complements his critique of philosophy’s obsession with clarity. The philosopher seeks a single “clear error” instead of ten “shaky truths”; the creator accepts only shaky truths, refuses clear errors, and pays the price with his entire being. Where system-builders find rest, creators remain restless. And for Shestov, it is precisely this restlessness, this refusal to abandon uncertainty, that marks the path toward both freedom and truth.

Knowledge, Limits, and the Russian Temptation of Truth

Lev Shestov contrasts the temperaments of Russia and the West by asking the most unsettling of questions: how can we ever know whether human knowledge has limits? For the Western mind, the unknown is treated as temporary, a gap that further inquiry will eventually close, a defect awaiting remedy through method and discipline. The Russian spirit, by contrast, does not veil the abyss. It dares to face the raw truth without adornment, though even in its deepest skepticism it clings instinctively to hope. From this paradox — reckless exposure to despair coupled with an irrational refusal to surrender — arises a uniquely Russian boldness in “truth-telling,” a frankness that startled European critics who preferred to soften realism with theories, consolations, and metaphysical shelters.

“How are we to know whether limits exist for human knowledge? It seems to us that if we do not know, it is only because we have not yet searched thoroughly enough. The experience of others does not bind us — for of it one can obtain only the vaguest and most fragmentary reports from the most unreliable source, books. It is natural for man to believe in the best until the contrary is proven, and every attempt to deprive him of this faith we ordinarily meet with vigorous resistance. Even the most skeptical Russian, in the depths of his soul, secretly harbors hope. From here comes our fearlessness in “truth-telling,” which so astonished European critics.

Realism was invented in the West, there it was established as a theory — but there too, in counterbalance, countless other theories were devised to soften the cheerless conclusions to which realism leads. There one finds the être suprême, deus sive natura, the Hegelian Absolute, Kant’s postulates, English utilitarianism, the idea of progress, and dozens, hundreds of other philosophical and sociological notions with which even the most radical realists so skillfully wrap the “truth of life” that it ceases to be truth at all.

The Western man places his hope in himself and in himself alone. He is firmly convinced that if he does not help himself, then no one will help him.”

In this passage Shestov unfolds one of his most subtle contrasts between Western and Russian intellectual temperaments. He begins with a question that philosophy has never ceased to repeat: How do we know whether human knowledge has limits? The common assumption, he notes, is that ignorance is always temporary, a mere absence of effort. What is unknown today will be known tomorrow, provided that we search hard enough. This optimism, so deeply ingrained, functions as an article of faith even among skeptics. The Russian mind, Shestov observes with irony, carries this hope with peculiar fervor: even the most skeptical Russian secretly hides a reserve of confidence, a refusal to relinquish the belief that truth must ultimately disclose itself.

Here we see the root of what Shestov elsewhere calls the “Russian recklessness of truthfulness,” the stark directness that so startled European critics. Russians, unlike their Western counterparts, do not veil harsh truths with theories or soften them with compensatory illusions. The European philosophical tradition invented realism, but immediately tempered it with concepts designed to make reality bearable: the être suprême of French rationalists, Spinoza’s deus sive natura, Hegel’s Absolute, Kant’s moral postulates, English utilitarianism, the doctrine of progress, and countless other ideas. Each of these serves not simply as explanation but as consolation, wrapping the brutal facts of life in the fabric of system, offering mankind metaphysical shelters against despair.

The Russian disposition, Shestov claims, is harsher, less willing to compromise. It dares to confront life without adornment, even when that confrontation leads to the abyss. Hence Dostoevsky’s cry: if God does not exist, everything is permitted. It is not merely a syllogism but a revelation of the naked condition of man when deprived of metaphysical shelter. The West would rush to weave systems around such a thought, to neutralize its destructive power. The Russian thinker, by contrast, refuses the weave — he lingers in the rawness of the wound.

And yet, Shestov does not present this Russian courage as a triumph. Beneath the fearless realism lies another kind of faith — irrational, ungrounded, but persistent. “Even the most skeptical Russian keeps hope in his heart,” he says. What is denied to reason returns as a stubborn instinct, an unwillingness to accept that the unknown may be final, that truth may remain forever hidden. In this sense, Russian realism is paradoxically coupled with Russian messianism: the conviction that one must face life’s abyss, and yet, somehow, beyond the abyss, there will be light.

The contrast, therefore, is not between optimism and pessimism, but between two ways of coping with uncertainty. The West consoles itself with philosophical systems, carefully designed to transform the harsh truth into a more livable version of reality. The Russian, rejecting such mediations, lives nearer to despair, but clings — without proof, against reason — to a hope that truth, however terrifying, will not betray him. Shestov’s irony sharpens here: realism in Russia does not dissolve into resignation, but into a new faith, one that refuses to be tranquilized by systems and yet cannot cease to expect the impossible.

For Shestov, this double movement — facing despair, yet refusing to accept it as final — is the source of Russia’s distinctive philosophical voice. It is a voice that exposes the limits of knowledge without softening them, and yet insists, irrationally, that those limits may not be ultimate. In this paradox he sees both the torment and the creative power of his culture: the willingness to endure truth in its harshest form, and the refusal to abandon hope even when hope itself has no foundation.

Virtue Beyond Fear and Calculation

Shestov sharpens his paradox by turning to the question of virtue itself. What, he asks, becomes of courage and generosity if the world is not bound by necessity but opened by faith? For Socrates and Kant, both skeptics of the divine, virtue could only be justified through calculation — whether by measuring risks or by grounding action in rational law. Fearlessness and prodigality, therefore, were judged suspect, inappropriate for mortals condemned to poverty, fragility, and death. Yet Shestov insists that such reasoning arises from disbelief. If there is no God, then indeed mortals must tremble, conserve, and obey necessity. But if God exists, if men are truly His children, then fear and thrift lose their dignity, and virtues take on a wholly different form.

“A life in which the very notion of perdition does not exist, where responsibility for actions, if not abolished altogether, at least does not bear the fatal and accidental character it does with us, and where, on the other hand, there is no “necessity,” and therefore an infinite number of possibilities — there fear, the most shameful of feelings, disappears. And there, accordingly, the virtues are not the same as here. Fearlessness before danger and generosity, even prodigality, are counted as virtues among us, but they are esteemed without any real foundation. Socrates was quite right when he argued that not every kind of courage but only that courage which first measures the danger and calculates the chances of victory can justify itself. And just as right are those economical, calculating people who condemn prodigality.

Fearlessness and prodigality do not befit mortals, who, in view of their helplessness and poverty, must always tremble and count every penny. That is why these two virtues are so rarely found among men; and in those cases when they do appear, they evoke in the crowd a superstitious reverence toward their bearers: “This man fears nothing and spares nothing; surely he is not a man but a demigod, perhaps even a god.”

Socrates did not believe in gods, and therefore sought to justify virtue by calculation. Kant also did not believe in God, and therefore derived his morality from “law.” But if God exists, if all people are God’s children, then one may fear nothing and spare nothing. Then the man who recklessly squanders his own and others’ lives and well-being, even his talent, his genius, is more in the right than the prudent philosophers who in vain seek to arrange humanity upon the earth.”

In this passage Shestov strikes at the very core of what Western philosophy has called “virtue.” For Socrates and for Kant, morality required justification. Courage, for the Athenian sage, was not mere boldness but a measured disposition, a rational weighing of risk and advantage. For the Königsberg philosopher, goodness could not be founded on divine command or reckless impulse, but only on obedience to the moral law dictated by reason itself. Both, though separated by centuries, sought to domesticate virtue within the boundaries of calculation — either prudential or rational.

Shestov reverses the entire scheme. What if the highest virtues cannot be justified by calculation at all? What if the noblest acts — fearlessness, generosity, even prodigal waste of one’s life, one’s fortune, one’s genius — derive their value precisely from their refusal to count, to measure, to preserve? For mortals who live under necessity, who tremble before death, prudence and thrift may seem appropriate; such virtues guard life against its fragility. But if there is God, if man is truly His child, then death is not final, loss is not ultimate, and the human soul is not bound by necessity. In such a world, fear and thrift lose their dignity, and courage and wastefulness become truer expressions of divine freedom.

Here Shestov draws a sharp line between two orders of morality. The first, which belongs to Socrates and Kant, is human morality, the morality of those who do not believe in God. It is the morality of fear — fear of death, fear of scarcity, fear of failure. It is a morality of accounting, always asking whether an act is safe, sustainable, justifiable. Its virtues are prudence, moderation, economy, self-preservation. It produces respectability, stability, and order. But it does not produce freedom.

The second order, the one Shestov dares to envision, is divine morality — the morality that becomes possible if God exists and man is His child. Here the weight of necessity vanishes, and with it the reign of fear. The virtues shift accordingly: fearlessness, prodigality, wasteful generosity. The saint, the martyr, the prophet, the genius who “squanders” his life for an impossible calling is nearer to truth than the cautious philosopher who seeks to preserve humanity through calculation. For if God is real, then no life is wasted, no loss irredeemable, no death final. To risk everything, even to throw it away, may in fact be the most faithful act.

This paradox scandalizes reason, which always demands justification. To waste one’s gifts, to endanger one’s life, to act without prudence — these appear as madness. But Shestov, like Dostoevsky, insists that madness may be closer to the divine than rational moderation. The “reckless squanderer” of life, he suggests, is more justified than the philosophers who build systems of order. For the system-builder builds on sand, while the squanderer, in trusting what reason cannot see, testifies to freedom.

Thus Shestov’s ethic once again dissolves the boundary between morality and faith. Courage and generosity, as rationally justified virtues, belong to the realm of necessity, where fear still governs. Courage and generosity as waste, as madness, as acts beyond all prudence — these belong to the realm of God, where fear is abolished. To live in such a realm is not to calculate but to abandon calculation, not to measure but to give, not to preserve but to lose. And in that loss, paradoxically, lies the truest expression of freedom.

Morality as the Most Refined Weapon of Vengeance

Shestov’s distrust of morality reaches its most biting expression when he exposes its hidden will to power. What parades as justice, he argues, often masks a subtler cruelty: the transformation of personal resentment into universal judgment. Morality grants the offended not only the right to condemn but the authority to compel others — and even the accused’s own conscience — to join in the verdict. In this way, morality becomes the most effective weapon of vengeance, unrivaled in its ability to destroy under the guise of righteousness.

“Moral people are the most vengeful of all, and they use their morality as the finest and most subtle instrument of revenge. They are not satisfied merely to despise and condemn their neighbors; they want their condemnation to be universal and binding — that is, they want all people to rise up with them against the one they have judged, and even the condemned person’s own conscience to take their side. Only then do they feel fully gratified and at peace. Nothing in the world, apart from morality, can achieve such brilliant results.”

In this bitter fragment Shestov unmasks morality not as a shield of justice or an expression of compassion, but as the most refined and devastating instrument of revenge. He writes with the precision of a surgeon and the sarcasm of one who has seen through every veil: “The moral people are the most vengeful people, and they use their morality as the best and most subtle weapon of revenge.” Here morality no longer appears as the foundation of peace but as the machinery of condemnation, binding the many against the one and transforming private resentment into universal obligation.

Shestov observes that ordinary contempt or personal judgment rarely satisfies. To despise another in isolation leaves one’s hatred weak, uncertain. But when morality enters the scene, it lends the weight of universality: the accuser does not merely condemn; he speaks in the name of all, demanding that everyone rise against the condemned, even that the victim’s own conscience join in the assault. Only then, Shestov remarks, does the moral avenger feel peace, for his private grievance has been transfigured into cosmic justice. What sharper weapon could revenge ever wield?

This insight cuts to the heart of Shestov’s critique of “ethical necessity.” Morality, when universalized into law, becomes coercive not only in the abstract sense of binding freedom, but in the concrete sense of legitimizing cruelty. It cloaks hatred in righteousness, envy in duty, vengeance in the mantle of virtue. It is not content with punishing deeds; it demands the humiliation of the soul. To be condemned morally is to find not only the community but even one’s own conscience turned into an enemy. Such is morality’s power — and its danger.

Nietzsche, whom Shestov knew intimately through study and instinct, also described morality as revenge, as ressentiment sanctified. But where Nietzsche saw this primarily in the genealogy of values, Shestov presses further into the existential and theological dimension. For him, the cruelty of morality lies in its universality. It is not enough for the moral man to despise — he must compel the whole world, even God, to despise with him. And once this happens, vengeance achieves its “most brilliant result”: the annihilation of the condemned in the name of the good.

The irony here is unmistakable. Morality, which claims to preserve human dignity, becomes the very force that most effectively destroys it. A sword of justice becomes a tool of vengeance. Shestov’s sarcasm is as sharp as it is unsettling: no power in the world — not law, not politics, not violence — can rival morality in its capacity to wound, because morality wounds with the consent of conscience itself.

This passage illuminates why Shestov rejected any ethics based on universality. For universality is precisely what transforms personal judgment into an irresistible condemnation, leaving the accused defenseless. Only by tearing morality away from necessity, by breaking its claim to universal binding force, can the soul be freed from this tyranny. In this light, responsibility without certainty appears not as chaos but as liberation — from the vengeance of the moral law, from the cruelty of collective judgment, from the false peace of those who avenge themselves in the name of virtue.[i]

[i]

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Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Practical Reason (M. J. Gregor, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1788)

Kierkegaard, S. (1985). Fear and Trembling (A. Hannay, Trans.). London, UK: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1843)

Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1994). On the Genealogy of Morality (C. Diethe, Trans.; K. Ansell-Pearson, Ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1887)

Nietzsche, F. (2002). Beyond Good and Evil (J. Norman, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1886)

Shestov, L. (1969). All Things Are Possible and Penultimate Words and Other Essays (B. Martin, Trans.). Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Shestov, L. (1970). Athens and Jerusalem (B. Martin, Trans.). Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Shestov, L. (2001). Apotheosis of Groundlessness [Апофеоз беспочвенности]. Moscow, Russia: Respublika.