(he often used aphorisms) the style may be deemed more web-like than linear, and more explosive than argumentative. The author argues that life itself is, in the last analysis, not comprehensible through logical or rational inquiry. Shestov maintains that no metaphysical speculation can conclusively solve the mysteries of life. Fundamentally, his philosophy is not 'problem-solving', but problem-generating, with a pronounced emphasis on life's enigmatic qualities. Critique of reason For Shestov, philosophy has employed reason to place humans and God alike in a servile position with respect to "necessities" that are eternally true, unchangeable, and ultimately tyrannical. It is important to note that Shestov does not entirely oppose reason, or science in general, but only rationalism and scientism: the tendency to consider reason as a sort of omniscient, omnipotent God that is eternally true and justified. He points to the work of Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel alike as reflecting belief in an eternal knowledge discoverable through reason—mechanistic, rational laws (i.e. the law of non-contradiction) that would constrain even God by logical necessity. For Shestov, this tendency to deify reason itself results from fear of an arbitrary, unpredictable, and dangerous God; this causes philosophers to deify that which is unchanging or "dead"—that is, opposed to life and the absolute. Shestov targets this as a repressed flaw in Western philosophy and counters, following Kierkegaard, that God entails the notion that "there is nothing that is impossible"—the absolute need not be limited by reason. For this reason, no conclusive knowledge about the way that things necessarily must be can be arrived at through reason. As he explained in conversation with his student Benjamin Fondane: In Athens and Jerusalem, he states that, while men seek coherence in life, Through this attack on "self-evident truths", Shestov implies that we are all seemingly alone with our experience and suffering, and cannot be helped by philosophical systems. Echoing Martin Luther, Dostoyevsky, and Kierkegaard, he argues that true philosophy involves thinking against the limits of prescribed reason and necessity, and can only begin once, "according to the testimony of reason, all possibilities have been exhausted’’ and ‘‘we run up against the wall of impossibility." Shestov's student Fondane explained that genuine reality "begins beyond the limit of the logically impossible" and only once "every humanly thinkable certainty and probability has proven its impossibility." This explains his lack of a systematic philosophical framework. Such ideas would influence Gilles Deleuze