Lev Shestov. A wonder read for anyone struggling with some existential problems. I'll quote:<p>"We stand between two "madnesses" - between the madness of a reason for which the "truths" which it reveals about the horrors of real being are ultimate, definitive, eternal truths, obligatory for all, and the madness of Kierkegaard's "Absurd," which ventures to begin the struggle when, on the testimony of reason and self-evidence, struggle is impossible, is foredoomed to humiliating failure. With whom should we go - with the Hellenic symposiasts, or with Job and the prophets? Which madness is preferable? The book of Job, the lamentations of Jeremiah, the thundering of the prophets and of the Apocalypse leave no doubt that the horrors of human existence were not hidden from the "private thinkers" of the Bible, and that they had enough courage and fortitude to gaze squarely into the face of what is customarily called reality. Nevertheless - unlike the great representatives of philosophia perennis - they do not feel compelled by reality and its horrors to submit to the inevitable. At that point where speculative philosophy sees the end of all possibilities and submissively folds its hands, existential philosophy begins the great and final struggle. Existential philosophy is not Besinnung, "interrogating" reality and seeking truth in the immediate data of consciousness; it is a surmounting of what to our understanding seems insurmountable. "For God," Kierkegaard repeats unceasingly, "all things are possible," summing up in these few words what had hitherto reached men s ears from scriptural sources. Possibilities are not determined by eternal truths inscribed by a dead or dying hand in the structure of the universe; possibilities are in the power of a living, all-perfect being who has created and blessed man. Whatever horrors being may reveal to us, and despite the assurances of reason, these horrors do not exhibit "truth" nor preclude the possibility of their own eradication. "