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08 - A Confession - Leo Tolstory · Philosophy and Faith

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  Speaker 1: Chapter eight of a confession by Leo Tolstoy. All these doubts,
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  Speaker 1: which I am now able to express more or less systematically,
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  Speaker 1: I could not have then expressed. I then only felt that,
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  Speaker 1: however logically inevitable were my conclusions concerning the vanity of life,
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  Speaker 1: confirmed as they were by the greatest thinkers, there was
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  Speaker 1: something not right about them. Whether it was the reasoning
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  Speaker 1: itself or in the statement of the question, I did
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  Speaker 1: not know. I only felt that the conclusion was rationally convincing,
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  Speaker 1: but that it was insufficient. All these conclusions could not
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  Speaker 1: so convince me as to make me do what followed
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  Speaker 1: for my reasoning, that is to say, kill myself. And
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  Speaker 1: I should have told an untruth had I, without killing myself,
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  Speaker 1: said that reason had brought me to the point that
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  Speaker 1: I had reached. Reason worked, But something else was also working,
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  Speaker 1: which I can only call a consciousness of life. A
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  Speaker 1: force was working which compelled me to turn my attention
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  Speaker 1: to this and not to that. And it was this
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  Speaker 1: force which extricated me from my desperate situation and turned
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  Speaker 1: my mind in quite another direction. This force compelled me
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  Speaker 1: to turn my attention to the fact that I and
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  Speaker 1: a few hundred similar people are not the whole of mankind,
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  Speaker 1: and that I did not yet know the life of mankind.
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  Speaker 1: Looking at the narrow circle of my equals, I saw
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  Speaker 1: only people who had not understood the question, or who
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  Speaker 1: had understood it and drowned it in life's intoxication, or
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  Speaker 1: had understood it and ended their lives, or had understood
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  Speaker 1: it and yet from weakness for living out their desperate life,
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  Speaker 1: and I saw no others. It seemed to me that
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  Speaker 1: the narrow circle of rich, learned and leisured people to
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  Speaker 1: which I belonged formed the whole of humanity, and that
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  Speaker 1: those millards of others who have lived in are living
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  Speaker 1: were cattle of some sort, not real people. Strange, incredibly incomprehensible,
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  Speaker 1: as it now seems to me that I could, while
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  Speaker 1: reasoning about life, overlook the whole life of mankind that
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  Speaker 1: surrounded me on all sides, that I could to such
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  Speaker 1: a degree blunder so absolutely as to think that my
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  Speaker 1: life and Solomon's and Schopenhauer's is the real normal life,
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  Speaker 1: and that the life of the millards is a circumstance
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  Speaker 1: undeserving of attention. Strange as this is now to me,
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  Speaker 1: I see that so it was in the delusion of
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  Speaker 1: my pride and of intellect. It seemed to me so
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  Speaker 1: indubitable that I in soil all men in Schopenhauer had
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  Speaker 1: stated the question so truly and exactly that nothing else
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  Speaker 1: was possible. So indubitable did it seem that all those
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  Speaker 1: millards consisted of men who had not yet arrived in
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  Speaker 1: an apprehension of all the profundity of the question, that
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  Speaker 1: I sought for the meaning of my life without at
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  Speaker 1: once occurring me to ask, but what meaning is and
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  Speaker 1: has been given to their lives by all the millards
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  Speaker 1: of common folk who live and have lived in the world.
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  Speaker 1: I long lived in this state of lunacy, which in fact,
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  Speaker 1: if not in words, is particularly characteristic of us very
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  Speaker 1: liberal and worded people. But thanks either to the strange
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  Speaker 1: physical affection I have for the real laboring people, which
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  Speaker 1: compelled me to understand them and to see that they
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  Speaker 1: are not so stupid as we suppose, or thanks to
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  Speaker 1: the sincerity of my conviction that I could know nothing
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  Speaker 1: beyond the fact that the best I could do was
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  Speaker 1: to hang myself. At any rate, I instinctively felt that
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  Speaker 1: if I wished to live and understand the meaning of life.
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  Speaker 1: I must seek this meaning not among those who have
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  Speaker 1: lost it and wish to kill themselves, but among those
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  Speaker 1: millards of the past and the present who make life,
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  Speaker 1: and who support the burden of their own lives and
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  Speaker 1: of oars. Also. And I considered the enormous masses of
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  Speaker 1: those simple, unlearned, and poor people who have lived in
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  Speaker 1: our living, and I saw something quite different. I saw that,
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  Speaker 1: with rare exceptions, all those millards who have lived in
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  Speaker 1: our living do not fit any of my divisions. That
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  Speaker 1: I could not class them as not understanding the question,
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  Speaker 1: for they themselves stated and replied to it with extraordinary clearness.
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  Speaker 1: Nor could I consider them epicureans, for their life consists
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  Speaker 1: of more privations and sufferings than of enjoyments. Still less
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  Speaker 1: could I consider them as irrationally dragging on a meaningless existence,
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  Speaker 1: For every act of their life, as well as death,
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  Speaker 1: is explained by them. To kill themselves they considered the
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  Speaker 1: greatest evil. It appeared that all mankind had a knowledge,
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  Speaker 1: unacknowledged and despised by me, of the meaning of life.
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  Speaker 1: It appeared that reasonable knowledge does not give the meaning
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  Speaker 1: of life, but excludes life. While the meaning attributed to
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  Speaker 1: life by millards of people. By all humanity rests on
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  Speaker 1: some despised pseudo knowledge. Rational knowledge presented by the learned
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  Speaker 1: and wise, denies the meaning of life. But the enormous
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  Speaker 1: masses of men, the whole, the whole of mankind, received
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  Speaker 1: that meaning and irrational knowledge. And that irrational knowledge is faith.
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  Speaker 1: That very thing which I cannot but reject. It is
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  Speaker 1: God one in three the creation in six days, the
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  Speaker 1: devils and angels, and all the rest that I cannot
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  Speaker 1: accept as long as I retain my reason. My position
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  Speaker 1: was terrible. I knew that I could find nothing among
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  Speaker 1: the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life.
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  Speaker 1: And there in faith was nothing but a denial of reason,
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  Speaker 1: which was yet more impossible for me than a denial
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  Speaker 1: of life. From rational knowledge, it appeared that life is
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  Speaker 1: an evil. People know this, and it is in their
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  Speaker 1: power to end life. Yet they lived and still live,
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  Speaker 1: and I myself live, though I have long known that
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  Speaker 1: life is senseless and and evil. By faith, it appears
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  Speaker 1: that in order to understand the meaning of life, I
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  Speaker 1: must renounce my reason, the very thing for which alone
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  Speaker 1: a meaning is required. End of Chapter eight