the critique on the evidence of the reason in Benjamin Fondane and Léon Chestov’s work.

Abstract

Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944), a Romanian poet, philosopher, playwright, filmmaker and literary critic, and his master Leon Chestov (1866-1938), a Russian philosopher, both Jewish established in Paris, developed from a dialogue established with Greek philosophy, the modern philosophy, literature, anthropology, and science, what they called, as the mark of their thought, "the critique of reason". Two main axes guide Chestov's work and its developments can be recognized also in Fondane's work: 1) the critique of the “evidences of reason" and 2) the search for what they have always pointed out, from Plotinus, as "the most important", what is "beyond Being" - the epekeina tes ousias (Republic 509b9) -, which is "beyond knowledge" on the perspective of Athens and what is beyond Good and Evil, therefore previous to the Fall, in Jerusalem's perspective. Between Athens and Jerusalem, the works of Chestov and Fondane correspond to an essay on "philosophy of religion" avant la lettre, when they point out to the philosophical dimension of faith, that come to be called The Second Dimension of Thought.