For Angrim

 WARNING: This is a LONG and complex article.  If you do not favor lengthy posts about esoteric subjects and/or do not desire to discuss them with civility and thought, you probably will wish to skip this post altogether.

 [Part 1: What Tolstoy Said]

 --"For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite."--

 Many people, like Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and other works, after considerable success entered into a stage of great depression where he pondered the question, "what is the meaning of life?"  He speaks of his circle as "us very liberal and learned people," who have arrived at great knowledge, but found in that knowledge no answer is to why we are here.   And like author of Ecclesiastes, Tolstoy echo's the conclusion, "Emptiness and Emptiness, all is empty like trying to catch the wind."

 This, conclusion has been shared by many over the long course of human history and is felt and experienced most people at one time or another in their lives.  Tolstoy, after a long struggle in which he ponders the answers given by philosophy, science and religion, concludes that if you want to find the answer to the meaning of life you should not look to those who, like yourself, have lost any sense that life is meaningful, and instead not so much what has been said on the subject, but what people do in light of the question.  In his own circle he finds four responses.

 First, as he says, some people choose to remain ignorant of the question itself.  I imagine they would, when asked "what is the meaning of life" respond with, "who know's and who cares?"  A perfectly reasonable response if one has concluded, as many did in Tolstoy's day, that there is no meaning to anything.  By making the question absurd they can ignore the absurdity the question reveals about their own lives.

 A second group decides to just enjoy life.  The nagging question of "why even do that" may echo in the back of their minds, but they enter into a state of somnolence by drugging themselves with as much worldly stimulation as possible.  Perpetually drunk on experience they have little to no time for questions difficult and maybe impossible to answer.

 A third group, Tolstoy identifies, do what he seems to say is the proper response to the meaninglessness of it all.  They check out.  As he says:

 "The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope round one’s neck, water, a knife to stick into one’s heart, or the trains on the railways; and the number of those of our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater, and for the most part they act so at the best time of their life, when the strength of their mind is in full bloom and few habits degrading to the mind have as yet been acquired..."

 And the fourth group, he says, is the way of the weak:

 "It consists in seeing the truth of the situation and yet clinging to life, knowing in advance that nothing can come of it. People of this kind know that death is better than life, but not having the strength to act rationally — to end the deception quickly and kill themselves — they seem to wait for something. This is the escape of weakness, for if I know what is best and it is within my power, why not yield to what is best?"

 The first two and the last answer to the question, seem to Tolstoy, to be not worth a lot of effort exploring as they lead nowhere.  So he ponders why he doesn't, himself, follow the third natural response to the emptiness he feels and which is supported by the conclusions of philosophy and science.  And it is at this point that he comes to discover an assumption upon which the entire edifice of meaninglessness has rested: that enough is known to draw the conclusion drawn.  In other words, he begins to doubt the "progress" that has been made in religion, philosophy, science and modern society. And from this he notes that some have found, or seem to have found, that life has meaning.  He ponders how many of those who work the fields seem to believe, and find hope in the idea that life has meaning. 

 "The reasoning showing the vanity of life is not so difficult, and has long been familiar to the very simplest folk; yet they have lived and still live. How is it they all live and never think of doubting the reasonableness of life?.... And those fools — the enormous masses of people — know nothing about how everything organic and inorganic in the world is arranged; but they live, and it seems to them that their life is very wisely arranged! . . . "

 At which point it strikes him that he could be entirely wrong .  He begins to doubt the very conclusion that reason itself, as presented by the "liberal and learned" among whom he lives, can answer the question.  Perhaps, he thinks, the conclusion that life has no meaning, is itself incorrect.

 Putting these two ideas together, that his learned friends and the conclusions they have drawn could be in error, and that he, himself, is fallible, he begins to re-evaluate the position of the "unlearned masses" whom he has considered unworthy of consideration:

 "And it struck me: “But what if there is something I do not yet know? Ignorance behaves just in that way. Ignorance always says just what I am saying. When it does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid. Indeed, it appears that there is a whole humanity that lived and lives as if it understood the meaning of its life, for without understanding it could not live; but I say that all this life is senseless and that I cannot live."

 Finding it unreasonable to ask the blind what they see, he says:

 "...if I wished to live and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this meaning not among those who have lost it and wish to kill themselves, but among those milliards of the past and the present who make life and who support the burden of their own lives and of ours also."

 He decries the state of "lunacy" in which he has lived his life and declares that,

  In the delusion of my pride of intellect it seemed to me so indubitable that I and Solomon and Schopenhauer had stated the question so truly and exactly that nothing else was possible — so indubitable did it seem that all those milliards consisted of men who had not yet arrived at an apprehension of all the profundity of the question — that I sought for the meaning of my life without it once occurring to me to ask: “But what meaning is and has been given to their lives by all the milliards of common folk who live and have lived in the world?”

 And so it is to the "common folk" with whom he has rubbed shoulders his entire life and yet considered intellectually inferior that he now turns.  And in doing so, makes some interesting observations.

 First, he comes to see, that those "common folk" "are not so stupid as we suppose."  That they have discovered and found meaning where the intellectuals have only found emptiness makes him wonder about the wisdom of the intellectuals.  But it also makes him wonder about the efficacy of reason itself.

 "Rational knowledge presented by the learned and wise, denies the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of mankind receive that meaning in irrational knowledge. And that irrational knowledge is faith, that very thing which I could not but reject. It is God, One in Three; the creation in six days; the devils and angels, and all the rest that I cannot accept as long as I retain my reason."

 At which point he comes to a crises for, as he says:

 "My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life; and there — in faith — was nothing but a denial of reason, which was yet more impossible for me than a denial of life. From rational knowledge it appeared that life is an evil, people know this and it is in their power to end life; yet they lived and still live, and I myself live, though I have long known that life is senseless and an evil. By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason,..."

 Out of which, he concludes:

 "[T]here were two exits. Either that which I called reason was not so rational as I supposed, or that which seemed to me irrational was not so irrational as I supposed."

 Having been driven to re-examine the reasonableness of his position he discovers a significant error.  He says that he has thought of the question of "the meaning of life" in "infinite" terms.  In other words, the question he has asked, is" "What, in eternity, is the meaning of my life."  And like a drop of water dripped into the ocean, he can find no real answer.  The vastness of the ocean is so great that discovering the impact a drop of water has upon the state of that ocean in a thousand years or a million years would seem to be impossible, and this desire to know the impact of his own life upon eternity is so far beyond any abilities of reason he concludes that reason cannot answer the question at all.

 "I asked: “What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause, and space?” And I replied to quite another question: “What is the meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?” With the result that, after long efforts of thought, the answer I reached was: “None.”

The question he asked, was one of eternal significance, but as he examined his own life kept asking what the significance he would have within history (i.e. "time, cause, and space").  The distinction between the "eternal" ....i.e. that which is beyond or outside of "mere history" and that which is bounded by history, is important to Tolstoy as he recognizes that anything within history is bound to decay and destruction, so anything done in history is meaningless.

 His determination after having come to this conclusion was,

 "Having understood this, I understood that it was not possible to seek in rational knowledge for a reply to my question, and that the reply given by rational knowledge is a mere indication that a reply can only be obtained by a different statement of the question and only when the relation of the finite to the infinite is included in the question. And I understood that, however irrational and distorted might be the replies given by faith, they have this advantage, that they introduce into every answer a relation between the finite and the infinite, without which there can be no solution."

 And from this, he continues:

 "So that besides rational knowledge, which had seemed to me the only knowledge, I was inevitably brought to acknowledge that all live humanity has another irrational knowledge — faith which makes it possible to live. Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life, and that consequently it makes life possible."

 [End of Part I: What Tolstoy Said]

 AJ

Thoughts Triggered by Tolstoy's A Confession

For Angrim

WARNING: This is Part II of a LONG and complex article.  If you do not favor lengthy posts about esoteric subjects and/or do not desire to discuss them with civility and thought, you probably will wish to skip this post altogether.

[Part II: Thoughts on What Tolstoy Said]

Tolstoy's A Confession follows a similar line of reasoning as Kierkegaard's.  And while Kierkegaard predates Tolstoy by a few decades, both men lived in the shadow of a tying enlightenment belief in the powers of rationalism, and both subscribed to a common cultural bias among the educated, that the traditional forms of faith held to by the masses, were inherently irrational.  Some scholars, myself included, tend to view this period of history as the last gasp of  the Enlightenment who's hey day was fifty to one hundred years earlier and which, by this time comes to some sort of pinnacle from which mankind stares off into the vastness of a cold, dark and empty universe, and finds nobody looking back.

The response to the coldness in Kierkegaard and later in Tolstoy is to turn to faith.  But the faith of which they speak is not anything like that which was "once delivered to the saints."  Both men, having followed the modernist faith (delivered to them by a different set of saint), with its' assumptions about rationality and the actual state of things, discover that path ends in a night time garden of decay and despair, and both men argue that the only reasonable thing to do is to pretend the plants are all living and the sun is shining brightly. 

Kierkegaard argues that this leap of faith is the will of God as that which is least rational calls for the greatest faith and thus, God is well pleased by the leap we make without hope of being caught.  The more irrational the faith, Kierkegaard argues, the more one should make the leap.  Tolstoy appears to step back and require a different kind of irrational faith, but his view still pits the irrational against the rational and asks for a choice.  Tolstoy argues for a leap to believing that the natural man demonstrates evidence of faith and thus, one can simply accord to the natural man a rationality which cannot be encompassed by reason alone.

In other words, Tolstoy, following the romantic idea of a "great soul" present in those closest to nature (and thus more valuable) makes the leap to romanticism as he discovers the faith of the common (irrational) man and in it "the evidence of things hoped for."  Yet, in this both men reflect existentialism with it's emphasis on independence  and willful living.  And both men, I think, give in too early because they assume too much about rationality, reason and what we really know about anything.  In other words, they demonstrate a naive faith in the very structures of reasoning by which men and women discover or miss discovering what it true and real.

Let's ask ourselves what these men assume in their desire to be rational, a desire which they contrast to faith, and which, to some degree both find unrewarding and which Tolstoy labels "lunacy."  They assume that the rationality of which they are capable is the end point of rationality itself.  But is it?  Are the forms of reasoning experienced by the human mind the only forms possible?  To answer this we must first ask what is human reasoning and what are it's limits?

The human mind is actually two minds.  A right and a left hemisphere joined by a bundle of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum.  When this bundle is cut by a procedure called corpus callosotomy  or is naturally missing or damaged (a condition called Agenesis), it is possible to test the effects and in doing so to find that each side of the human mind is able to comprehend certain forms of metaphor or metonymy, but not the other.  The right brain comprehends metonymy and the left metaphor.  Metonymy, if you remember your high school English, has to do with contiguity, the placement or relationship of things in the immediate environment.  Metaphor concerns things in parallel relationship where you use a known set of relationships to characterize or reveal the relationships in another set.

The classical metonymic example is "forty head of cattle," with the "head" representing metonymically, the entire cow.  Because the rest of the cow must be present for the head to be there, we extrapolate to understand the presence of the whole.  The usefulness of this method of perception is that we also use the same function to pick up clues from our environment and to make decisions.  For instance, if it's late at night and we her some growling in the bushes and see a couple of large eyes staring out at us, we don't need to fully investigate if there is a tiger there before we run!  Metonymy allows to extrapolate from clues (which are parts of something)  in our immediate environment and thus, to take action against potential threats.  Metonymy measures the significance of things in our immediate environment.

 There are a number of definitions of metaphor as it is larger subject and more varied in it's application than metonymy.  But for purposes of this we focus on the parallelism of metaphors as they structure experience into meaning.  One class of metaphor is the analogy.  In fact, some scholars, myself included, tend to think all language is analogous.  If you examine any language on the planet you will find there are what we call prepositions in English...words denoting the relationship of categories of objects and actions (nouns and verbs) to each other.  "With, upon, over, under, in, to, etc...are preposition denoting relationships, all of which are themselves analogies to physical space and time.   This observation was first put forth by Aristotle in De Anima when he equated reasoning with "the proportional mental space" with our mind, "not unlike that of geometry."  Languages reflect the four dimensions of human experience and borrow from those experiences to create understandings.  Thus, language is analogous.

 Analogy is a sub-set of metaphor and the symbolic systems we use to explain things to ourselves (i.e. to understand) represent a complex desire to be ourselves, significant.  Which brings us back to Tolstoy.

 Tolstoy's journey began with a set of assumptions, among which was that his own understanding of the "real" was true.  In other words, having learned at the feet of various scholars that in the end nothing he did had any eternal significance, he believed them and faced what that meant.  From the same scholars he learned that the average person does not know enough to warrant being listened to, and that whatever the average person, the "common folk" believed was irrational at best.   It is interesting to note that this process of throwing off the beliefs of the less sophisticated academic environments is still common today.  Seldom are the students of our modern universities told that the "uneducated" have anything to say to academia, but it is assumed that academia has much to say to the common folk.   I won't get side tracked with what that might mean to open debate, but suffice it to say I find the attitude pretty elitist.

 In any case, what Tolstoy begins to discover through his severe depression is that, given his assumptions he cannot be both faithful (i.e. full of faith) and rational at the same time.  My personal feeling is that he is mistaken.  I think the true error of his thinking was two fold, and I might add, Kierkegaard also falls into the same error.

 Smart people and quite accomplished often run circles around those who have less education and experience.  And if those smart people are leaders taking stances they begin to sincerely believe their own spin.  "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely," is paralleled by "Knowledge informs, but absolute knowledge just makes you stupid."   I say that because the number one problem facing smart people is not what they know but what they think they know and never go back and ask again.  I think of David Hume in this regard who, at the end of his life declared that he no longer considered any arguments about the existence of God because it was just a waste of his time considering he had proved that God is not.

 Anytime I hear somebody say they have "proved" something I wonder what standards they are using.  In Hume's case, one of his more famous utterances was on Miracles where he argued that looking into a claim of a miracle is a waste of time because they don't happen.  His logic runs like this: examine all the things that are not claimed to be miraculous.  If, in that set you find no miracles then the chances of a miracle are 0 and you have proved that miracles don't exist.  I studied this in graduate school, and I kid you not!  Of course my professor pointed out that my use of probabilities and sets as a basis of the critique would not have worked in Hume's day, as there was no formal understanding of those things in that day.  Which demonstrates my point: if you think you have proved something today, don't worry, tomorrow is another day and further evidence may show you that you were wrong.

 Thus the problem with Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, (and Hume or course) to some extent is the certainty in which they endow themselves about matters of which they may not know as much a they think.  As I described above, the human mind is really two minds, one dealing with the immediate environment, the other the meaning of that environment through time.  One side understands metonymy, the other metaphor.  But of course, and here's the kicker, one can suppose there may be other methods of understanding, but one cannot conceive of what they might be.  Similar to what AS J.B.S. Haldane, noted about the universe: "The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose," I would say that while the human mind can comprehend much, what may be needed to comprehend the universe may be an entirely new mind altogether.

 Now for that central question of Tolstoy's that sent him off on his journey, I would say that he is correct that the question of meaning is both infinite and finite.  We are of two minds. When we comprehend ourselves we do so in the here and now.  Thus what we want to be significant, to have meaning is what we are doing in the relative short term of now, with only the slightest nod in the direction of the future.  Most people who experience things do so with an eye toward something in the future, but that future is, at best, a few years or maybe decades into their future.  Thus, it is the relative "today" that concerns them.  At the same time though, they recognize that whatever they are doing "today" may have an impact upon the "forever."  Ideally we want what we are doing has both significance in the here and now of our brief visit to planet Earth, but also impacts the eternal heavens.  That is the finite and the infinite of meaning we seek.  Tolstoy, I believe, thought it impossible that voices singing in a church in Toledo would be heard at the throne of God, but I'm not so sure.  And that gives me hope.  For stranger things may be just around the corner.

 AJ