Tolstoy, Death and the Meaning of Life; Parrett 1985 Flashcards
questions about the meaning of life have traditionally been regarded as being of particular concern to philosophers…
it is sometimes complained that contemporary analytic philosophy fails to address such questions
Tolstoys A Confession (1879) is a vivid record of his own crisis connected with his
search for the meaning of life
philosophy (…) while recognising his problem as legitimate
seemed to have no answer
he infers that ‘there is a whole humanity that lived and lived as if it understood the meaning of its life’
this lead him to break away from his own narrow circle of social equals in order to attend to what the simple folk had to teach him
rational knowledge presented by the learned and the wise
denies the meaning of life but the enormous masses of men, the whole of mankind, receive that meaning in irrational knowledge
the problem of the meaning of life can only arise for a rational being,
it is hardly a solution to it to abandon rationality
the answers given by faith, however
through ‘irrational and distorted’ attempt to provide such a relation between finite and infinite
inevitably he found himself confronted with
rival faiths and interpretations so that reason is once again introduced to arbitrate
Tolstoys position on faith is very much in keeping with modern…
non-propositional accounts of revelation and faith
he is opposed to the traditional propositional account that makes faith the acceptance of…
a body of propositional truths which are not accessible to human reason
faith becomes the willing to believe something
that cannot be known through reason
faith then is a non-propositional…
knowledge of how to live, through this knowledge may imply certain propositions that are open to rational criticism
In ‘What I Believe’, Tolstoy wisely remarks:
‘To live rationally one must live so that death cannot cannot destroy life’
a confession records the experienced collapse of the supposed rationality of one man’s life
in the face of the realisation of his own inevitable death
the life Tolstoy was living was one
that death would defeat
