Step at a time

Shestov again, from a 1921 letter to his daughters: “When the infant grows up, he is no longer attracted by his mother’s breast, but it would not be natural if, from the first day, he rejected it. When we ascend a staircase we leave behind the lower step in passing to the higher, but previously the lower one was before us. This must not be forgotten; otherwise, one will obtain exactly the opposite of what he would have wished to obtain – this is to say, in place of a complete, living knowledge, a truncated, abstract knowledge. This is what sometimes happened to Tolstoy when, in his so-called ‘philosophical’ works, he attempted to show life as proceeding from a single principle that he called ‘the good.’ That is not right. That is, men cannot unify in their human language all that they live through and feel in such a way that it can be expressed by a single word or single concept. It is a great art, a difficult art, to be able to keep oneself from the exclusivism toward which we are unconsciously drawn by our language and even by our thought, which is educated by language.”