Lev Shestov on the Fall of Man

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[EG]

Bill writes:

"And if all things are possible, then it is possible that some things are impossible. Therefore, possibly (all things are possible & Some things are not possible), whence it follows that it is possible that some contradictions are true.

So the position of Shestov is absurd, which fact will not budge him, he being an embracer of absurdities. But it does give us a reason to ignore him and his interpretation of the Fall. So I consider his theory of the Fall refuted."

Bill, I am not in complete disagreement with your conclusion per se, but I don't think this is a (conclusive) refutation. We may as your argument makes more plain, just ignore the conclusion. The real sticking point for me is the conclusion that ends in a contradiction/absurdity. To me this points to either an incapacity of knowing or understanding, rather than a sure proof of falsity.

You argue only that his position ends in a contradiction, which you position as making it "false." This is perfectly reasonable, but the subject of the propositions does not I think allow us to properly use this framework (rules/methods of [classical] logic) as a method of determining true or false about the subject of these propositions since, as you have shown, all we have really determined is that it ends in a contradiction. So to say, you have provided only an opposing or countervailing position, which as I say is reasonable.

I more and more believe that concepts like God and Existence, etc., are limit concepts, and what we can actually know about them we can only approach asymptotically but which we never actually get to, to say nothing of even the limits of our own possible knowledge. I hold, defeasibly, that actual knowledge--including even if it was known only to one particular being at some point in time--is always necessarily strictly less than all possible actual knowledge. So then in some sense, the knowledge of things that lay near and at the edge of our possible actual knowledge will by the limit of our actual knowledge at all times, forever be foreclosed to us. So, as I consider the above, we are always at best postulating and reordering the references and pointers to God, himself a reference, as an ultimate limit concept, instead of being able to engage the Real thing. Thus, I begin to think that genuine paradoxes/antimonies are the intersection points of "space-time" and something "beyond," and they tell us, or point us to, something "true" but which we cannot parse, constrained as we are here trying to argue about things we have a sense of but cannot definitely articulate.