Lev Shestov’s Epistemological Aporia: The Struggle against the Logos

Abstract

The article offers an epistemological reading of Lev Shestov’s philosophy that moves beyond its conventional interpretation within a religious frame. The key focus is placed on the struggle against Logos, which is not merely understood as a localized debate with rationalism or its straightforward negation, but rather as an impasse in the attempt to articulate the irreducible uniqueness of experience through the use of universal rational constructs. The paper traces a genealogy of the European Logos in its opposition to “private” and existential thinkers, demonstrating that Shestov’s critique of knowledge unfolds as resistance to Necessity at the level of the very structure of thinking and philosophical writing. Existential philosophy is interpreted here as a philosophy of the possible, in which aporia functions not as a deficiency but as a mode of sustaining lived experience that resists the finality of language. Paradox thus appears not as a logical flaw, but as a fundamental condition of discourse that opposes closure and totalization. Special attention is devoted to Shestov’s writing style as a deliberate gesture refusing the conversion of the inexpressible into conceptual intelligibility. In this sense, Shestov not only emerges as a forerunner of contemporary critiques of logocentrism, but also as an intellectual who radically questions the very possibility (or impossibility) of philosophical expression itself.