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Tolstoy, Death and the Meaning of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Roy W. Perrett
Roy W. Perrett
Affiliation:
University of Otago
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Extract

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, but there do exist illuminating recent discussions of these questions by analytic philosophers.1 Perhaps what lurks behind the complaint is a feeling that these discussions are insufficiently close to actual living situations and hence often seem rather thin and bland compared with the vivid portrayals of such situations in autobiography or fiction. I therefore want to focus on two works by Tolstoy—one autobiographical, one fictional—and try to see what philosophical lessons can be learned from them, particularly with regard to questions about the relation of death to the meaning of life.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 60 , Issue 232 , April 1985 , pp. 231 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1985

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References

1 See, for example, the selections in the anthology The Meaning of Life, Klemke, E. D. (ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), and the discussion in Nozick, Robert, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), Ch. 6.Google Scholar

2 References to Tolstoy's, works are to the Maude translations in the Tolstoy Centenary Edition. In particular, volumes 11 and 15: A Confession and The Gospel in Brief (Oxford University Press, 1933) and Ilych, Ivan and Murad, Hadji (Oxford University Press, 1934).A useful general study of Tolstoy's ethico-religious views is William, Gordon Spence, Tolstoy the Ascetic (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1967).Google Scholar

3 For an account of modern developments along these lines see Baillie, John, The Idea of Revelation in RecentThought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956). An outstanding philosophical defence of this non-propositional view is to be found in the writings of Hick, John, especially his Faith and Knowledge, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1967).Google Scholar

4 Flew, Antony, The Presumption of Atheism (London: Elek/Pemberton, 1976), Ch. 12. (This chapter is a revised version of Flew's earlier paper ‘Tolstoi and the Meaning of Life’, Ethics 73 (1963), 110-118.)Google Scholar

5 R. W. Hepburn, ‘Questions About the Meaning of Life’ in E. D. Klemke, op. cit. 215.

6 There is an interesting philosophical discussion of this story in Dilman, Ilham and Phillips, D. Z., Sense and Delusion (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).Google Scholar

7 My thanks to Graham Oddie and Jim Harvie for various valuable suggestions.