The Apogee of Rootlessness

Lev Isaakovich Shestov (1866-1938) – a Russian thinker, writer, and literary historian, whose philosophical views were shaped by the influence of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. L. Shestov was part of the elite of Western thought of his time: he interacted with E. Husserl, C. Lévi-Strauss, M. Scheler, and M. Heidegger. «The Apogee of Rootlessness (An Essay on A-dogmatic Thinking)» was published in 1905 and sparked the sharpest debates and the most polar opposite assessments in the intellectual circles of Moscow and Petersburg. This work became Shestov’s philosophical manifesto, where he raises questions about the limitations and inadequacies of scientific knowledge, distrust of general ideas and systems, rejection of formal morality, universal moral norms and worldviews that obscure real reality in all its beauty and diversity.