Leo Tolstoy on Finding Meaning in Our Meaningless World
Death is the inexorable fate of everything and everyone we know of. Our bodies entropy; our minds slower; and, our spirits jaded by the unforgiving nature of reality. There’s nothing we can do to escape the terror that awaits us at the end of the tunnel.
If we are bound to die and to be forgotten in the cosmic river of time, why live? Why suffer in a meaningless world when all of this hardship amounts to nothing at the end?
These existential questions have been the object of debate for centuries amongst our greatest thinkers and philosophers. Many have offered their interpretations and even formulated new schools of thoughts to answer this fundamental question, in the hope of shining some light onto the dark crevices indented in the deepest rifts of our soul.
With our increasingly fervent obsession with the capitalistic game we are born into, these questions reverberate louder than ever through our societies. Like a replaceable cog in a machine, or like one of trillions of perishable cells in our bodies, we feel insignificant — more importantly, our suffering feels insignificant. Confronted with this cruel reality, who won’t at the very least feel anxious, adrift and nihilistic?
This was exactly how Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy felt when grappling with the pointlessness of life. Yet this might come as a surprise to many, especially if you consider his professional accomplishments. To many, he is one of the most distinguished writers of the 19th century, and is often viewed as a crucial cornerstone of the Russian literary edifice. Some of his notable works include the novels War and Peace (1867) and Anna Karenina (1878).
Despite all of his worldly success, Tolstoy started experiencing a profound moral crisis in the 1870s, followed by what he regarded as an equally profound spiritual awakening. As such, he wrote an autobiographical essay titled A Confession (1882), in which he documented the existential voyage he has embarked on in search for answers to profound questions, like “What will come of my life” and “What is the meaning of life?”
In his early years, Tolstoy was driven by his fanatical belief in a possibility of perfection, whether it be physically, intellectually or morally. The ultimate purpose of life was to transcend to new heights of goodness. This may take the form of religion, of science, of art and even of politics. Mankind’s greatest calling was this pursuit of a more noble and abstract state of perfection.
“But perfection according to who?” — this was the question that shattered Tolstoy’s reason to live. He realized that this perfection was not seen through the eyes of a higher being, but rather by his equals and contemporaries. Beneath its repainted façade hid the same earthly desires he actively tried to sidestep — his cravings for wealth, for fame and for social distinction.
Without a robust purpose in life, Tolstoy was swept into a state of spiritual turmoil. He questioned the point of living by recounting a short story:
There is an old Eastern fable about a traveller in the steppes who is attacked by a furious wild beast. To save himself the traveller gets into a dried-up well; but at the bottom of it, he sees a dragon with its jaws wide-open to devour him. The unhappy man dares not get out for fear of the wild beast, and dares not descend for fear of the dragon, so he catches hold of the branch of a wild plant growing in a crevice of the well. His arms grow tired, and he feels that he must soon perish, death awaiting him on either side, but he still holds on; and then he sees two mice, one black and one white, gnawing through the trunk of the wild plant, as they gradually and evenly make their way round it. The plant must soon give way, break off, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveller sees this, and knows that he must inevitably perish; but, while still hanging, he looks around him, and, finding some drops of honey on the leaves of the wild plant, he stretches out his tongue and licks them.
This, of course, is an analogy for human existence. Each one of us is clinging as tightly as we can onto the plant. The branch will break and we’ll be devoured by the dragon that resides beneath us — this is and has been the fate of mankind.
According to Tolstoy, there are four primary kinds of reaction:
- Ignorance: This consists in not perceiving and understanding that life is evil and absurd. You see the dragon beneath you, the branch slowly snapping and the numbing sensation in your hands, but don’t realize what all of this will mean.
- Epicurean escape: This consists in taking advantage of every good there is in the hopelessness of life. You pay no heed to the dragon or the mice, and consume as much honey as you can.
- Strength: This consists in destroying life, and seeing premature death as an expedient way of “bettering” life itself, and as a violent revolt against the evilness of life.
- Weakness: This consists in continuing to drag on life, though aware that nothing can come of it. This was Tolstoy’s response when writing this essay. The only thing that stood between him and suicide was the desire to clear away the confusion of his thoughts and avoid acting rashly.
Our world exists, because of our will to live which prolongs the passage to complete annihilation. We are simply a temporal and arbitrary agglomeration of atoms. The mutual action and reaction of these atoms on each other produces what you call your life. Over time, this combined lump of atoms decomposes and falls apart. This process of decay, suffering and privation can be ceased instantly through our will. So why shouldn’t we?
Tolstoy argues that we cannot answer this by studying the nature of life, for it is not confined within the perimeters of the initial question proposed — why live? What he is concerned about, in other words, is: what real and imperishable thing may come out of our shadowy and temporal life? What meaning can we endow our finite existence in the infinite universe? Examining the finiteness of life, without relating it to the backdrop of infinity in which our lives are inextricably woven into, is irrelevant and pointless.
Following this enlightenment, Tolstoy attempted to survey his existential weariness through the lens of reason. He came across the position assumed by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who claimed that: life is meaningless, because of the suffering found in it. Tolstoy found this interpretation foolish, because if life is meaningless and people cared so much for reason, life should be terminated immediately, and no one would deny it.
Dissatisfied by Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the meaning of life, Tolstoy turned to other branches of knowledge, such as science. But similarly, science could not offer an adequate response to his queries, because in his view it either avoids inquiring into finite causes or looks upon man only in relation to finite causes. None of which directly tackles the core questions of existence.
Finding no satisfactory answers in science and philosophy, Tolstoy turns to the deep religious convictions of the ordinary people for succor. Here, he found the missing piece of the puzzle. It was the key to reconciling the finite existence of man with the infinite:
If a man lives, he believes in something. If he did not believe that there was something to live for, he would not live. If he does not see and understand the unreality of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he sees that unreality, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith there is no life.
Faith is the force of life. It’s the deepest wellspring of human wisdom that bridges the rational to the irrational, clothes the finite existence of man with infinity, and imbues a meaning to life powerful enough to triumph over suffering and death.
In faith, Tolstoy finally found the missing jigsaw, only to discover the puzzle he thought he has completed was unfinished once again. Faith, as he later acknowledged, also comes with its own set of shortcomings, akin to reason.
For instance, Tolstoy felt that faith could not serve the majority of mankind who were born to create a life for themselves, rather than to be comforted by the labors of others. The Church’s connection with war and executions also contradicted their most rudimentary principle — which was to love thy neighbor as thyself — which made Tolstoy more skeptical of the infallibility of faith as a way of living life. Further, his subscription to faith is motivated by a completely different force, as opposed to other leaders and members of the Church:
I am in search of faith, the staff and strength of life, while these men seek the best means of fulfilling in the sight of men certain human obligations, and having to deal with earthly affairs they fulfil them as ordinary men ever do [...]
By the end of his existential journey, Tolstoy comes to terms with the limitations of both reason and faith. Despite this, he is still firmly convinced that bits of truth can be fished out from both ways of knowing. He responds to the existential questions previously bothering him with a unified answer, by asserting that reason works in tandem with faith to suffuse our lives with a meaningful and vital force needed to live. Tolstoy’s faith is very much akin to Kierkegaard’s concept of leap — whereby the individual is faced with a situation that cannot be justified with reason and has to leap into faith, because idle thinking can never replace the bountiful experience that comes from praxis.
Tolstoy’s entire argument was predicated on the idea that: all of us live to die. But what if we inverted this logic, and saw life as a consequence of death — that we die to live instead. Perhaps it’s the finiteness of our lives that makes infinity such a tantalizing ideal to chase after.