Brodsky and Clio: the Profile of Skeptical Philosophy of History

Abstract

In the wake of mounting disasters of the last century, poets and philosophers de­veloped the notion of the total arbitrariness of history. In the wording of Karl Löwith, “the skeptic and the believer have a common cause against the easy reading of history and its meaning. Their wisdom, like all wisdom consists not the least in disillusion and resignation, in freedom from illusions and presump­tions”. The Hegelian claim that history has an ultimate meaning, or final pur­pose, or goal was vehemently rejected, as well as Plato’s utopia of a “just city”. In his essays and poems, Brodsky postulates the randomness of history. He bor­rowed the notion of randomness from the book by Lev Shestov “The Apotheosis of Groundlessness”. Shestov promoted the idea of mental nomadism, or freedom from causal thinking and scientism. For Brodsky, being a nomad mentally meant to escape from both rationalist interpretation of history and the theological idea of Providence. He believed that rationalism’s greatest casualty was individual­ism. Besides, the doctrine of historical determinism and the notion of Provi­dence’s general benevolence translated itself into a patient waiting for a Storm Trooper. Seeing problems with such patient waiting in place, such as deportation of Jews to death camps, Brodsky suggested that it would be much better to be­come a nomad. Brodsky developed his ideas against the foil of the Bible, the Re­public of Plato and Hamlet by Shakespeare. He described nomadism as Israel’s Exodus from Egypt and the expulsion of poets from Plato’s Just City.