Although he admits as soldier to having killed others, Tolstoi is driven to despair by two deaths in particular. Why? How did these deaths differ? So he turns to reason and finds form Solomon to Schopenhauer ways to cope. Which one does he choose and why, and then why does that position become untenable? Finally what, how and where does he find a solution. Last but not least, why does he reject organized religions?
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As said, “A Confession” documents the impact on Tolstoy of the death of his brother and the death of a man in Paris by execution. His brother dies of tuberculosis in his arms and reaffirms the inevitability, agony and irrationality of death. The death by execution reveals society’s lack of progress and its inability to understand and find an answer for death. The author is stirred by his own moral convictions; “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.” Tolstoy can no longer find satisfaction in writing and family life. The two deaths inspire him to endeavor headfirst into the world of philosophy in an attempt to assuage the fears and preoccupations that were always present in, but that now dominate his life. In searching through the philosophical works of Socrates, Solomon, and others, he is left with the conclusion that life is meaningless beside death. He contemplates suicide as an escape from this melancholia, but then follows a different path. The peasants he reasons, who live such a hard life compared to the Russian aristocracy, are not torn by the meaninglessness of life. They find solace in faith. Although he cannot rationalize faith, he finds that it is the only solution to questions of the value and purpose of human life.
Tolstoy writes that these two deaths that profoundly affected him – that of a man executed and his brother – made him question the belief that one can live life “in conformity with progress” and that this progress would dictate truly what is right and wrong. While the death of the executed man made him realize that morality was something to be decided internally and not by progress, his brother’s death was harder to rationalize and understand the reasons for life and death, especially because his death was caused by internal disease and not carried out by a justice system. Tolstoy finds solace in the simplicity and freedom of the Russian peasantry and works as an Arbiter. However he became extremely ill from overwork, and continued to question why life and death existed and what was right and wrong, and even feels a force making him question whether or not to commit suicide. He eventually decides against it and chooses life.
However, Tolstoy feels like he cannot take the advice some give him, that he should stop thinking and simply live – and regards death to be the only truth in life. He believes what many philosophers write: that life is a lie, and illusion, and death is something good, something to be desired. He amidst a long period of resolving to commit suicide that the one way to make life tolerable is through faith, which he describes as “a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives.” Tolstoy states that the idea of an infinite god and faith are necessary for one to live. However, he struggles as he does not want to accept faith if it makes him deny reason. He takes refuge in the laborers who “produce life,” partially based on their labor and partially on their faith which holds up society. He enjoys this faith of the people, but denounces the organized religion because, as others have mentioned, it perpetuates irrational knowledge.
Tolstoy is deeply disturbed by the death of his brother (who “fell ill as a young man”) and by the public decapitation of a man, presumably a convict, that he witnesses in Paris. As noted by several classmates, these two deaths affect Tolstoy in different ways. The death of his brother stuns him on a more spiritual and existential level, confirming and advancing his conviction of the absurdity of life, that it is a sort of twisted joke. The execution, on the other hand, sickens him on a physical and intellectual level, and evidences the inherent brutality of society (it reveals to him “the instability of [his] superstitious belief in progress”). These thoughts can be seen as sort of precursors for the ideology he later puts forth in “What I Believe” (namely the rejection of society/the state as a force of violence).
Thus, the author turns to the austere philosophies of Schopenhauer, Solomon, Socrates, and Buddha. He finds the same principal thought in each of these philosophers, namely that “all is vanity” and that truth can only be achieved in death, when we are freed from the body. The works of these thinkers are clearly no barrel of laughs, and thus plunge him deeper into darkness. Tolstoy comes to see these philosophies as being completely at odds with experience, as they offer suicide as the only viable option in the face of the “stupid joke” of life. Seeing the happiness of his fellow men, namely the peasant classes he so adored, he rejects this bleak worldview. He observes that happy people are those who have faith, which is life-affirming and stems from the “hidden infinity of human thought.” While maintaining his religion, he rejects the Church, seeing its deep hypocrisy in falsely promoting the words of Christ, while using them to validate violence and judgement.
Although he confronted death during his time in service, Tolstoi was especially disturbed by the death of his brother and the execution of a man in Paris. These deaths signify to Tolstoi society’s abject failure to improve itself and the necessity of an internal moral intervention in determining meaning and justice. Despite society’s attempts to rationalize the meaninglessness of life through institutions which claim moral authority, Tolstoi becomes overwhelmed by humanity’s failure to understand and explain life or death.
Tolstoi turns to the philosophers who have addressed this issue, but is ultimately unsatisfied with their treatment of the question. To concede the meaninglessness of life, to treat it as an absurdity which must be recognized as such in order to avoid self-deception, is, in Tolstoi’s mind, an untenable solution. He turns away from the philosophies of Solomon and Schopenhauer and takes inspiration from the happiness of simpler minds, the Russian peasantry. Unreasonable thinking, that is, faith, alone possesses the ability to connect humans with each other and to meaning. The idea of solidarity of mankind gives meaning to Tolstoi’s life, meaning which he could not find when he considered his life as an isolated entity.
Beyond the obvious differences between the deaths of Tolstoi’s brother and the criminal in Paris–that one of the men he knows and loves, and the other he assumes is a proper criminal–I think that they each inform the other in a way that significantly affects how Tolstoi conceptualizes both in “Confession.”
I am speaking for Tolstoi in a way that I probably shouldn’t be (and I know the chronology is backwards here, but “Confession” is a work of retrospection, so Tolstoi’s reflections to the deaths are conflated anyway) but I think that seeing this execution–this symbol of “justice,” “progress,” and “morality”–together with having experienced the agony of his brother’s death and its circumstances was a forcible way of opening his eyes to the understanding that the evilness of life can be found not only in its cruelty to the individual, but also in the way people can channel its violence while professing to do good (or to work for progress). That the man who was executed could have been someone’s brother, struggling with the same questions about how to live and how to die that Nikolai and Lev did, implicates the forces that would allow for his death at the hands of other people doing the exact same thing.
I also see a direct parallel between Tolstoi’s dismissal of progress as an ideology and his rejection of organized religion. By refusing to kill himself, Tolstoi assented to life, though he rejected the prevailing means of ordering it, that is, normative social ideologies; by converting to Christianity, Tolstoi assented to faith, though he rejected the prevailing means of ordering it, that is, the orthodoxy of the Church and its imposition of willful “denial.”
As already mentioned, the two deaths witnessed by Tolstoy shattered his believe in progress of humanity and resulted in a painful acknowledgment of the ephemeral nature of life. Having given up faith after the second year at university, Tolstoy struggled to live and teach others without understanding the purpose of it all. Having found an illusion of joy in health, wealth, fame and family earlier in his life, he became absolutely consumed with the quest for meaning. Even art ceased to yield answers. Art, according to him, was a mirror reflection of life, and since life had no meaning, neither did his work. Similarly, neither Schopenhauer’s, nor Salomon’s epicurean solutions to dealing with the senselessness of existence satisfied Tolstoy. He failed to find answers in experimental sciences, Eastern teachings, and Western ideas. As a matter of fact, the European philosophy introduced the idea of individualism to Russia, which, according to some scholars corrupted the collective and communal character of the Russian people. Thus, Tolstoy’s second attempt to bring faith back into his hearth could be seen not only as his reconciliation with god, but also as a return to pre-Petrine Slavic ideal of togetherness: “I told myself that divine truth cannot be accessible to a separate individual; it is revealed only to the whole assembly of people united by love.”
In regard to his rejection of organized religions, in addition to the reasons already mentioned, Tolstoy was being disillusioned with the very institution of the church, or cerkov’, for this institution approved of war, its prayers asked for the ‘success of our weapons’, it discriminated and antagonized the followers of other Abrahamic religions and its branches.
Tolstoy’s brother’s death recalls for the line in Ivan Ilych about Caius being mortal in that it makes death familiar and immediate in Tolstoy’s understanding of his own life. The execution shakes Tolstoy’s faith in society.
Ultimately Tolstoy’s search for rational answers is, as the Teacher (ostensibly Solomon) in Ecclesiastes says, “vanity, and a striving after wind” (Eccl. 1:14). So, like the seekers in his earlier novels, Tolstoy turns to the extrarational life models of the peasantry to justify his continuing to live, although rationally he has concluded that suicide is the only justifiable option. Actually, it seems to me, in reading the parable about the dragon in the well, that we could all profit from taking Stiva’s advice and enjoying the honey on the branch while we have the chance.
Can we stop defending Stiva!? The image of the dragon at the bottom of the well and the beast on land was particularly striking because it vividly depicts the existential struggle Tolstoy faced in the latter half of his life. I would be cautious about glorifying Stiva’s character though, because eventually THE HONEY NO LONGER SATISFIES YOU. In the end what I think Tolstoy was trying to convey is the fundamental importance of addressing the issue of death rather than obscure it (as he argues religion does). Stiva in my opinion could represent religion in the Tolstoyan sense – and therefore be rendered useless. (#StopStiva2014)
The execution of the man in Paris and Tolstoy’s brother affect Tolstoy personally because in both situations he is forced to acknowledge his own mortality; thus leading him to question the meaning of his own existence. Much like Pierre and Andrei in War and Peace, the question of death haunted Tolstoy for the rest of his life, and causes him to seek refuge in the teachings of Solomon. But he refuses to give up logic and reason the way Solomon and Schopenhauer do (in Tolstoy’s opinion). He finds that the rational thing to do is commit suicide, but is dissatisfied with that answer and ultimately concludes that the meaning of life can only be determined by the individual himself. This definition of life is in no way concrete and requires some level of faith. Despite Tolstoy’s spiritual nature, he rejects organized religion because he did not think that they addressed the fundamental questions about the meaning of life and death adequately.
As mentioned, the particular deaths of a stranger executed in Paris and of his brother contribute to driving Tolstoy deeper into despair and his personal crisis. The deaths obviously differ in that one is a criminal sentenced to die by men and the other is Tolstoy’s “wise, good, serious” brother who dies painfully over the course of a year. In regard to the criminal, Tolstoy can not justify the death with the goal of progress. Here he alludes to the point which he will elaborate in “What I believe”; both that social institutions like courts of law contradict the doctrine of Christ and that philosophers often cite the goal of progress of mankind to justify acts that in the moment seem irrational. In neither death can Tolstoy justify the result and his uncertainty towards the meaning of life grows.
Tolstoy continues to write that there are four possible positions to take in order to cope with the fact of death and the meaning of life. First, is ignorance, an option which is impossible for Tolstoy because he is already aware of his position. Second, like Stiva in Anna Karenina, one can live life sensually to receive as much epicurean pleasure as possible from it. The third, is the active escape of suicide. This is the answer that Tolstoy rationally comes to, but he chooses the way of weakness. This is that of Solomon and Schopenhauer who understand the truth of the situation but still cling to life. As Sam says, this path, however, Tolstoy eventually finds this to be stupid and untenable. If reason leads him to a conclusion that seems innately wrong, he must be missing something. This is when the element common to much of Tolstoy’s work appears: the happiness of the peasants. Tolstoy concludes that their irrational knowledge, i.e. faith, gives meaning to life. He resolves his conflict with reason when he realises that in asking “what is the meaning of my life?” he was concentrating on himself and that the question should be simply about the meaning of life of mankind. Faith presents itself as the only rational, albeit irrational, solution to connect the finite with the infinite.
With regard to organised religion, Tolstoy finds that the various doctrines destroy Christ’s teachings and that the lives of those religious persons does not conform to their teachings. Their is a conflict between the teachings of man and those of God. He elaborates on this considerably in “What I believe”.
The first death that drives Tolstoy to despair is that of a man whose public execution Tolstoy witnesses in Paris. Society’s approval of such barbarism, which Tolstoy knows to be “unnecessary and bad”, leads him to reject the notion that society is constantly “progressing” and to accept himself and his heart, rather than society, as the arbiter of good and evil. On a more personal and existential level, the death of Tolstoy’s brother convinces him that life and death are absurd; despite all of our striving there is no explanation ever given as to why we live or why we die.
In turning to reason and philosophy, Tolstoy sees that the greatest minds, including Solomon, Buddha, Schopenhauer and Socrates, have all reached the same conclusion that he has: all life is vanity and it is only through death, or freeing oneself from life, that one can gain wisdom and transcend the absurdity of our existence. To cope with this dark worldview and to avoid the only rational way of dealing with the meaninglessness of life (that is, suicide) Tolstoy follows the path followed by Schopenhauer and Solomon, what he calls the path of weakness, which “consists in seeing the truth of the situation and yet clinging to life, knowing in advance that nothing can come of it.”
Tolstoy ultimately concludes that this coping mechanism and entire philosophy are “stupid.” After all, he did not turn to reason to answer life’s mysteries so that he might be led to the entirely unreasonable position of knowing suicide is the logical thing to do yet avoiding it because it is unpleasant or difficult. So he determines that it is through faith, which is seemingly unreasonable, that one shares in the “deepest human wisdom” and is able to find meaning in life. Yet Tolstoy rejects organized religion for he believes religion perpetuates irrationality by hypocritically rejecting Christ’s very teachings (more of this in What I Believe”). It is only through personal faith that he is able to rationally justify life, death, and his personal search for meaning.
I find Tolstoy’s explanation of why he cannot answer his questions to be the best part of “A Confession.” Jake, I think you’ve described faith – Tolstoy’s answer – well. It’s got to be irrational knowledge. Tolstoy couldn’t answer what meaning life has by philosophy because the question cannot be answered by reason. Tolstoy says:
“I had asked: what meaning has life beyond time, beyond space, and beyond cause? And I was answering the question: ‘What is the meaning of my life within time, space, and cause?’ The result was that after long and labored thought I could only answer: none.” (Ch. 9)
Maybe the question, “what purpose does my life have?” contains no reasonable meaning, and that is why reason cannot answer it. We want life to have some meaning beyond all that we see, beyond our experiences, but what can we know of that? Science cannot address the question because it deals only with experience, and he says that philosophy addresses a different question. He had earlier thought that philosophy tries to answer the right question, but fails. At this point he seems to think that when we ask the question, we are looking for a meaning beyond understanding, and philosophy is not able to address it.
Faith gives him a way to deal with the problem. It seems to be the insistence that there is a solution, even when it is not given. It’s “irrational knowledge” because we have to say we know it in order to keep living, but it doesn’t make any sense.
Is Tolstoy not still asking for self-deception? Levin’s answer seemed to be a better one: life is worth living even without purpose. I think what Tolstoy gives here is a very different answer: life would not be worth living if there were no purpose so we must insist on it. Have I understood his solution?
Two deaths affected Tolstoy greatly—his brother’s and a man executed in Paris. Whereas the decapitation sickened him physically, his brother’s untimely demise affected Tolstoy psychologically and spiritually. In that regard, Tolstoy searched meticulously for something rational to explain why these deaths happened, which in turn refers to Tolstoy’s own understanding of his own life. After sifting through documents from Solomon to Buddha to other bright philosophical minds, Tolstoy found one concept he believes all these texts have in common—and that is vanity. They showed that the only truth is death. As Solomon says, “And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For much is grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (19). In short, one must free himself from the vanities on earth, which clouds consciousness and clears thought, and the only way to achieve this freedom is through death. And though Tolstoy did contemplate suicide, he realized that position became untenable after conversing with peasants and witnessing how they remained happy despite their meager lifestyle. Through them, Tolstoy found a solution to his question—faith. As he states, “How am I to live? –According to the law of God. What real result will come of my life? –Eternal torment or eternal bliss. What meaning has life that death does not destroy? –Union with the eternal God: heaven” (28). Faith gave Tolstoy answers to his questions that he diligently searched throughout his life. Yet, as many of you pointed out, the Church did not affirm Tolstoy’s faith. He viewed the rituals, fasts, and support for warfare as irrational. In his opinion, some of the Church’s teachings undermined his understand of faith—God’s love and salvation. Thus, this was why he viewed the Church (at least the ones he has attended) as hypocritical and most peasants’ spirit, their faith, as genuine.
The first death that affected Tolstoy for the rest of his life was the death of his brother; this death brought up the fact that Tolstoy didn’t have the answers to the questions that he and his brother were asking. This moment affects Tolstoy for years to come because he wishes that he was able to help his brother find answers during a terrible time in his life. The other death that affects Tolstoy is of a stranger in a city, where Tolstoy is unaware of why men are able to do such terrible things to one another.
Tolstoy rejects religions because he wants answers! We see that he almost drives himself to become suicidal because he cannot answer why things in his life aren’t going the way that he expected or wanted. He claims that the only way to know your own life is to study all of human history, something that we don’t know even a small part about. At this point, Tolstoy seems to turn towards science because , more often than not, science can give Tolstoy the concrete answers that he is looking for.
In regard to Tolstoy’s understanding of Schopenhauer, Solomon, Buddhism, and Socrates’ thoughts on the will and nature of man, he wants to believe how they see life and think that the largest desire of man is nothing. Overall he comes to the conclusion that these people “see neither the dragon that awaits them nor the mice gnawing the shrub by which they are hanging.” Overall, he claims that “fro them I had nothing to learn–one cannot cease to know what one does not know.” Tolstoy then decides “life is a senseless evil, that is certain”. In terms of faith, throughout the story he decides that “in faith was nothing but denial of reason”.
In A Confession, Tolstoi seems to reach a spiritual precipice at the sight of two deaths: that of an anonymous man at a public execution in Paris, and that of his brother. The former brought Tolstoi to the realization that society had not progressed, for no “reasonableness” could justify such a deed. The latter incident also disillusioned him to the idea of “progress”, but in the sense that no answers evolved in response to his brother’s slow and agonizing death.
After much philosophical and introspective wandering, Tolstoi discovers a common current in Schopenhauer, Solomon, Buddhism, Socrates, etc.—that life is all vanity, and that the wise man desires “nothingness”. While under the influence of Schopenhauer and Solomon, Tolstoi believes that ignorance, Epicureanism, strength, and weakness empower the masses to live without existential torment. However, the cracks begin to show in this belief when Tolstoi begins to note the happiness of his fellow human beings. Rather than dismissing the happiness of the milliards as “undeserving of attention”, he realizes that there may be wisdom in the lives of simpler men (“God’s folk”—the peasants), who guide themselves (albeit, unconsciously) with irrational knowledge.
The epitome of this irrational knowledge is faith, and Tolstoi seeks understanding in it. While he does not subscribe wholly to the Christian tradition, Tolstoi sees wisdom in the Christian model of communality, of truth accessible only to an “assembly of people united by love”. However, he also criticizes people who use God as a sort of epicurean consolation. In response, Tolstoi asserts, “that is not what I seek. I seek that without which there can be no life.”
Tolstoy seemed to be specifically disturbed by his brother’s death because his brother wanted to know why he had lived and why he was dying, but Tolstoy could not answer those questions for him, which would have given his brother solace, during his painful death. After that, Tolstoy dedicated his life to trying to figure out the meaning of life.
Tolstoy understood that his “position with Schopenhauer and Solomon, notwithstanding [their] wisdom, was stupid.” They knew that life was “evil,” but made a conscious decision to continue living. Tolstoy struggled with this because it was illogical to him, and he sought all that was reasonable, so the reasonable thing to do would be to kill himself. However, reason cannot be used to answer what the meaning of life is because, obviously suicide is not a great option. This is why Tolstoy concludes that you can only have an answer to the meaning of life if you find faith.
Tolstoy rejects organized religion because he sought to find a faith that did not “demand of [him] a direct denial of reason.” Tolstoy saw that the organized religions’ faiths did not attempt to explain the meaning of life, but rather “obscured it.”
Tolstoy describes his early life as having revolved around money and praise. He challenged men in duels merely to kill them and essentially had no moral compass. The first death that “drives Tolstoy to despair” is an execution of a man in Paris. As he saw this, Tolstoy knew that it was “unnecessary and bad” and that there was absolutely nothing that could justify that execution. The other death that struck Tolstoy immensely was the death of his brother. These two deaths contrast each other greatly because one of deaths he witnessed was right in his own family while the other man Tolstoy had not even been acquainted with. It was incredibly painful for Tolstoy to cope with the death of his brother because neither his brother nor Tolstoy could understand why he had to die or why he even lived.
As Tolstoy deals with the concept of death, he turns to suicide because he believes that life is evil and senseless. He reflects on the words of Schopenhauer who says that what we do is merely to free ourselves from our body and Solomon, who says that the living are forgotten and that the dead known nothing. After exploring the words of philosophers and scientists, Tolstoy ultimately finds a solution in irrational knowledge because he claims that it cannot be rejected. Irrational knowledge for Tolstoy deals with faith, yet he does not believe in organized religion because they appear to be mixed with superstition and overcome by vanity.