Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

The (Post-)Modern Search for Meaning:

Tolstoy’s Escape from the Trap

 

A Reflection by Sean Howard

 

For the last few years, a close friend has been com­plain­ing, with light touch but increas­ingly heavy heart, of a deep-​​seated cre­ative malaise, an impasse in his search for an authen­tic voice and mes­sage. Among other sources, his depres­sion can be traced to his intense and aca­d­e­m­i­cally accom­plished engage­ment with Wittgenstein, whose hum­bling exposé of the ‘lan­guage game’ – and, there­with, what my friend calls “capital-​​P Philosophy” – leaves him both full of admi­ra­tion and “with every­thing – and noth­ing – to say”. Or, rather, with a desire to say ‘some­thing true’ thwarted by sen­si­tiv­ity to the unre­al­iz­able nature of any such (language-​​based) project. Behind this block­age, we both sus­pect, lurks the Nietzschean dis­so­lu­tion of, indis­sev­er­ably, our union with God and God’s with the Word. ‘The Word is dead, long live words’; Nietzsche was try­ing to open a door to our­selves, roll the stone from the tomb we’re inside, yet for many of his ‘last men’ (and women), the desire for self-​​expression still rubs (itself out) against the para­dox­i­cally defin­i­tive absence of modernity.

 

The vital clues to my own solu­tion of ‘The Problem’ (the chal­lenge set so bravely to us all (and him­self) by Nietzsche) were pro­vided by Carl Jung, whose work posits an entirely dif­fer­ent kind of Grand Source – The Self – for both per­sonal and transper­sonal mean­ing. At the core of Jung’s own life-​​work was a strug­gle to shape a new ‘myth for our time,’[1]the res­ur­rec­tion from the ‘God’-grave not of a Creator tran­scend­ing human­ity but the self-​​transcending cre­ativ­ity of the psy­che. For Jung, Nietzsche’s error, the omi­nous turn from depres­sion to infla­tion, was to search for the new hero in the sphere of the ego: ‘God is Dead, Long Live Superman.’ Yet, I would guess, for every ‘Jungian’ – everyone, that is, who sees in the psy­che the impli­ca­tion of a guid­ing, heal­ing power – there are many more ‘Nietzscheans,’ or ‘last-​​landers,’ dis­miss­ing such ideas merely as meta­physics revamped, new clothes for a dead emperor.

 

In 1879, when Jung was an infant, the 51-​​year-​​old Leo Tolstoy stood at the dizzy sum­mit of his life: a pro­lific and world-​​famous writer, a happy hus­band and father, in excel­lent health, immensely wealthy. From which height he fell, almost overnight, into the Nietzschean pit. Everything he had hith­erto believed, or assumed he did, he wrote, could be summed up in one word, the most per­va­sive and per­ni­cious of his age, ‘Progress’: “Like any indi­vid­ual, I was tor­mented by ques­tions of how to live bet­ter. I still had not under­stood that in answer­ing that one must live accord­ing to progress, I was talk­ing just like a per­son being car­ried along in a boat by the waves and the wind; with­out really answer­ing, such a per­son replies to the only impor­tant ques­tion – ‘Where are we to steer?’ – by say­ing, ‘We are being car­ried some­where.’”[2]

 

As a “lit­er­ary teacher” sud­denly with­out faith in his sec­u­lar god, Tolstoy was con­fronted with an “insol­u­ble prob­lem”: “how to teach with­out know­ing what I was teach­ing.”[3] Whether writ­ing, read­ing, man­ag­ing his estate, spend­ing time with his fam­ily  – “I had to know,” he said, “why I was doing these things,” and “I could find absolutely no reply” except the insuf­fer­able “truth…that life is mean­ing­less.”[4] This truth he found con­firmed in the pro­found­est philo­soph­i­cal and spir­i­tual works he knew. For Socrates, mean­ing is some­thing “we move closer to…only to the extent that we move fur­ther from life”: “The wise man seeks death all his life”. For Schopenhauer, “this uni­verse of ours” which seems “so real, with all its suns and galax­ies, is itself noth­ing­ness.” “Vanity of van­i­ties,” the Book of Solomon cries, “all is van­ity.” And the Buddha: “We must free our­selves from life and from all pos­si­bil­ity of life.”[5] There have been ‘last men’ around for a very long time, it seems, and their worst and most ironic tor­ment has always been the point­less­ness of knowl­edge. We “can­not cease to know what we know,”[6] Tolstoy wrote – yet the one thing we need to know, how to live in mean­ing, can never be known. In art, too, irre­spec­tive of form or medium, only the unnec­es­sary is express­ible; and yet, like Tantalus, we can no more stop thirst­ing, wet­ting our lips to say more, than we can ever hope to find relief.

 

There are “for the peo­ple of my class,” Tolstoy noted, “four means of escap­ing” this “ter­ri­ble sit­u­a­tion”. The first is “igno­rance,” mer­ci­fully “fail­ing to…understand that life is evil and mean­ing­less.” The sec­ond, “fully aware of the hope­less­ness of life,” is “epi­cure­anism”, “enjoy­ing for the present the bless­ings that we do have” – gifts pro­vided, as Tolstoy con­cedes, by the hard labour and suf­fer­ing of oth­ers. The third ‘escape’ is sui­cide, or “strength and energy” as Tolstoy calls it, “destroy­ing life once one has realized…the stu­pid­ity of the joke that is being played on us.” And the fourth is “weak­ness,” “con­tin­u­ing to drag out a life,” know­ing “before­hand that noth­ing can come of it.”[7]

 

From this tempt­ing menu, Tolstoy ordered ‘No. 3’, sui­cide, only to be served, again and again, with what he took to be the peren­nial house-​​special, cow­ardice. In ret­ro­spect, how­ever, he saw “that if I did not kill myself, it was because I had some vague notion that my ideas were all wrong. However con­vinc­ing and unques­tion­able the train of my thoughts and the thoughts of the wise seemed to me, the ideas that had led us to affirm the mean­ing­less­ness of life, I still had some obscure doubt about the point of depar­ture of my reflec­tions.”[8] Sociologically, this ‘point of depar­ture’ was his class, an utterly atyp­i­cal and pro­foundly par­a­sitic posi­tion of priv­i­lege and excess. And in reflect­ing on this arti­fi­cial, con­structed aspect of his cri­sis, Tolstoy began to med­i­tate on its oppo­site, the still-​​natural (‘unpro­gres­sive’) ways of being human in the world:

 

I would not be speak­ing the truth if I were to say that it was through rea­son that I had arrived at this point with­out killing myself. Reason was at work, but there was some­thing else at work too, some­thing I can only call a con­scious­ness of life… This force led me to focus my atten­tion on the fact that like…others of my class I was not the whole of human­ity, and that I still did not know what the life of human­ity was.[9]

 

The ques­tion of mean­ing, recast in this way, invites an eth­i­cal – that is, a lived – response, a par­tic­i­pa­tory mode of inquiry far broader than the com­pass of philo­sophic inves­ti­ga­tion. “My stray­ing,” he now saw, “had resulted not so much from wrong think­ing as from bad liv­ing. I real­ized that the truth had been hid­den from me not so much because my thoughts were in error as because my life had been squan­dered in the sat­is­fac­tion of lusts, spent under the excep­tional con­di­tions of epi­cure­anism. I real­ized that in ask­ing, ‘What is my life?’ and then answer­ing, ‘An evil,’ I was entirely cor­rect. The error lay in the fact that I had taken an answer that applied only to myself and applied it to life in gen­eral…”[10]

 

What, then, was this ‘hid­den’ truth? For three years, Tolstoy sought it in the strict rit­ual obser­vance of the Russian Orthodox faith, keep­ing any doubts he had even from him­self. “At that time,” he wrote, “I found it so nec­es­sary to believe in order to live that I uncon­sciously hid from myself the con­tra­dic­tions and the obscu­ri­ties in the reli­gious teach­ings.”[11] It took a moral absur­dity, the Church’s sup­port for the Czarist state in the Russo-​​Turkish War, to break the spell and open the road to the rad­i­cal polit­i­cal stance of the last thirty years of his life; an advo­cacy, in word and deed, of paci­fist com­mu­nal­ism, or ‘Christian anar­chism,’ as it became known. The Church, he acknowl­edged, con­tained a real “knowl­edge of the truth”, but “in these teach­ings there was also a lie,” and even among the most devout believ­ers this “lie was mixed with the truth.”[12] To see this blend, Tolstoy real­ized, to acknowl­edge both shadow and sun, the light of rea­son was required; just as the severe lim­its of rea­son require illu­mi­na­tion from out­side, the ‘other worlds’ of heart, faith, spirit and dream. Here is his conclusion:

 

I shall not seek an expla­na­tion of all things. I know that the expla­na­tion of all things, like the ori­gin of all things, must remain hid­den in infin­ity. But I do want to under­stand in order that I might be brought to the inevitably incom­pre­hen­si­ble; I want all that is incom­pre­hen­si­ble to be such not because the demands of the intel­lect are not sound (they are sound, and apart from them I under­stand noth­ing) but because I per­ceive the lim­its of the intel­lect. I want to under­stand, so that any instance of the incom­pre­hen­si­ble occurs as a neces­sity of rea­son and not as an oblig­a­tion to believe.[13]

 

This posi­tion, I think, res­onates pow­er­fully with Jung’s view of the con­scious ego, the ratio­nal self, as a ‘storm lantern,’ the “lit­tle light”[14] of con­scious­ness assist­ing human pas­sage through a fiercely beau­ti­ful, far more than mean­ing­ful, world. It also accords with a defence of phi­los­o­phy by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. We “are not enriched,” Borges said, by the “solu­tions” of phi­los­o­phy, its meta­phys­i­cal claims to truth, as “these solu­tions” are unavoid­ably “doubt­ful” and nec­es­sar­ily “arbi­trary”: “But phi­los­o­phy does enrich us by demon­strat­ing that the world is more mys­te­ri­ous than we thought.” Philosophy as an inter­face between rea­son and mys­tery, the demon­stra­ble and the inef­fa­ble; and is this not also the lim­i­nal ‘home’, the porous bor­der, of poetry? Borges thinks it is, that phi­los­o­phy “is exactly the same as poetry, although the syn­tax is from two dis­tinct places,” and that “phi­los­o­phy deserves a place in the order of aes­thet­ics.”[15]

 

In explor­ing this com­par­a­tive syn­tax, as he intends to, I hope and believe that my friend will trace his own way back to what Borges’ calls ‘The Sea’[16] – Jung’s ‘Self’, per­haps – that both answers and tran­scends our calling:

 

Before our human dream (or ter­ror) wove

Mythologies, cos­mogo­nies, and love,

Before time coined its sub­stance into days,

The sea, the always sea, existed: was.

Who is the sea? Who is that vio­lent being,

Violent and ancient, who gnaws the foundations

Of earth? He is both one and many oceans;

He is abyss and splen­dor, chance and wind.

Who looks on the sea, sees it the first time,

Every time, with the won­der distilled

From ele­men­tary things – from beautiful

Evenings, the moon, the leap of a bonfire.

Who is the sea, and who am I? The day

That fol­lows my last agony shall say.

 

 

_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​

Sean Howard moved to Nova Scotia from England in 1999. His poetry has been pub­lished in Canadian jour­nals includ­ing Geist, Other Voices, Quills, Prairie Journal, The Antigonish Review, The Nashwaak Review and Prairie Fire as well as zafusy (UK) and 4AM Poetry Review (USA). Sean holds a Ph.D in Peace Studies from the University of Bradford, UK, and is adjunct pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Cape Breton University, pur­su­ing research inter­ests in nuclear dis­ar­ma­ment and the phi­los­o­phy of sci­ence. A recent paper — ‘Very Different Butterflies’: The Scope for Deep Complementarity Between Western and Native American Science’ — was pub­lished in ‘The Pari Dialogues: Essays in Science, Religion, Society and the Arts’ (Pari Publishing, 2007). To view some more of Sean’s poetry on-​​line, visit www.zafusy.org/poetry/seanhoward.

Copyright ©2009 by Sean Howard. All Rights Reserved.

FOOTNOTES
1.  The phrase is adapted from the title of Marie-​​Louise von Franz’s study, C.G. Jung: His Myth In Our Time, Inner City Books, 1998.↑
2.  Tolstoy, Confession (1884), trans­lated by David Patterson, W.W. Norton & Company, 1983, p. 22.↑
3.  Ibid., p. 24.↑
4.  Ibid., pp. 26 – 27.↑
5.  Quoted in Part VI of Confession, op. cit., pp. 40 – 49.↑
6.  Ibid., p. 49.↑
7.  Ibid., pp. 49 – 52.↑
8.  Ibid., p. 52.↑
9.  Ibid., p. 55.↑
10.  Ibid., p. 68.↑
11.  Ibid., p. 80.↑
12.  Ibid., p. 89.↑
13.  Ibid., pp. 90 – 91.↑
14.  Jung’s phrase, quoted by von Franz in C.G. Jung: His Myth In Our Time, op. cit., p. 46.↑
15.  From ‘The Destiny of Borges,’ extracts from a 1984 inter­view with the author (con­ducted by three phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sors) fea­tured in Harper’s Magazine, April 2008, pp. 21 – 22.↑
16.  ‘The Sea,’ trans­lated by John Updike, in Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems 1923 – 1967, Penguin Books, 1985, p. 235.↑