Thoughts Triggered by Tolstoy's A Confession

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

 

Edited by ajqtrz - 11 Aug 2015 at 21:33

Settles down in armchair with pipe fully charged with Old Holborn Shag and a full cup of Dutch strong coffee.
Waits for various comments to appear below.

Where do you get the time to do this?

Thexion, you are right, I believe, that what you do makes small changes, but knowing of those changes are eternal is different than knowing that they last for some time or other.  The usual formation of the question "Does what I do have meaning," when looked at from a perspective of the infinite ends with a question mark.  We really only know the significance or effect of what we have done when we can measure it...and our abilities to measure the impact of what we are doing fades very rapidly as we look to the future.  But we are wired to the infinite and to the finite.  Most people, I think, want to believe that what they are about here and now is important, but to know it's important they have to conjecture a future state of things where what they are doing right now has helped create.  In fact, even if they were to suppose that what they are doing now has a measurable impact a million years from now, they still have to contend with the question of if it will still have measurable impact on things two million years from now, and then three...and so on.

As for it being human hubris, as I understand the use of hubris, it means a bit of foolish pride.  Perhaps people do take too much stock in being but to some without "faith, hope and love" life is depressing.  And since depressed people sometimes end their own lives, from an evolutionary standpoint it would seem developing an answer to the question of "why" may be natures way of preserving the gene pool.  In other words, the question itself may be genetically driven.


Why the human mind wants to have meaning is, I think, a significant question.  Being is its own meaning, as somebody once said, but the quality of being counts too.  My personal belief is that it all boils down to the structures of the mind and our use of language.

Artefore, two things about where I get the time: 1) I type like a madman ..about 85 wpm or more when I really get going;  and 2) most of what I write about I've been writing about for forty years or so, give or take.  So I have a wealth of experience writing about things and a large storehouse of information/readings etc...from which to draw.   And I actually like this type of thing.

Twi, I'm not sure why such an interesting topic should be left in the fields.  I personally like this cow and the free intellectual milk isn't too bad either. 

I think it's possible that we create our own meanings, and that the meanings we create can lead to misery or contentment.  This is both powerful and dangerous.  Powerful because we may create meanings that lead us to attempt to change circumstance.  Dangerous because our attempts to change circumstance may go awry -- or may work perfectly, with disastrous results.

Edited by Rill - 13 Aug 2015 at 00:28