Has anyone understood what conclusion Leo Tolstoy came to in his "Confession"?
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Tolstoy apparently adopts a thought orientation vaguely akin to Zen, in the end. God or "the meaning of life" (or whatever the gist) cannot be apprehended through rational endeavor, so the route is instead via the practice of living itself ("God is life") and direct or non-analyzed experiences. In essence, the quest itself is the encountering of God. He also doesn't reject doctrine or instructional narratives completely, but recognizes that there's a mixture of falsehood and truth in such.
- A Confession
https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1882/a-confession/index.html
EXCERPTS: I do not live when I lose belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live, really live, only when I feel Him and seek Him. "What more do you seek?" exclaimed a voice within me. "This is He. He is that without which one cannot live. To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life."
"Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God." And more than ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and the light did not again abandon me. And I was saved from suicide.
[...] Rational knowledge presented by the learned and wise, denies the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of mankind receive that meaning in irrational knowledge. And that irrational knowledge is faith...
[...] From rational knowledge it appeared that life is an evil, people know this and it is in their power to end life; yet they lived and still live, and I myself live, though I have long known that life is senseless and an evil. By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which alone a meaning is required.
[...] I wish to recognize anything that is inexplicable as being so not because the demands of my reason are wrong (they are right, and apart from them I can understand nothing), but because I recognize the limits of my intellect. I wish to understand in such a way that everything that is inexplicable shall present itself to me as being necessarily inexplicable, and not as being something I am under an arbitrary obligation to believe.
That there is truth in the teaching is to me indubitable, but it is also certain that there is falsehood in it, and I must find what is true and what is false, and must disentangle the one from the other. I am setting to work upon this task.
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David Darling (Zen Physics, Chapter 12): Living in a world of words and concepts and inherited beliefs, says Zen, we have lost the power to grasp reality directly. Our minds are permeated with notions of cause and effect, subject and object, being and nonbeing, life and death.
Inevitably this leads to conflict and a feeling of personal detachment and alienation from the world. Zen's whole emphasis is on the experience of reality as it is, rather than the solution of problems that, in the end, arise merely from our mistaken beliefs. [...] Zen is convinced that no language or symbolic mapping of the world can come close to expressing the ultimate truth.
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Additionally...
Below, Tolstoy didn't seem to understand that via the phenomenal slash noumenal dichotomy, Kant was actually providing a refuge for Western traditions like "God, free will, and immortality", etc. Rather than eliminating God, via the latter concept's incapacity to be vetted.
The phenomenal world was what was amenable to study and the territory of science. And even though the noumenal domain (what exists behind the "simulation", so to speak) was unknowable as any kind of experience and in a precise or non-general way, its very inscrutability allowed moral and prescriptive cultural significances to be projected upon it for purely practical reasons. (The natural or phenomenal world supposedly being useless for grounding "oughts" in, since [especially later] items like evolution relativistically allow any kind of animal behavior as long as it is more successful than detrimental overall, for the species.)
Below, Tolstoy didn't seem to understand that via the phenomenal slash noumenal dichotomy, Kant was actually providing a refuge for Western traditions like "God, free will, and immortality", etc. Rather than eliminating God, via the latter concept's incapacity to be vetted.
The phenomenal world was what was amenable to study and the territory of science. And even though the noumenal domain (what exists behind the "simulation", so to speak) was unknowable as any kind of experience and in a precise or non-general way, its very inscrutability allowed moral and prescriptive cultural significances to be projected upon it for purely practical reasons. (The natural or phenomenal world supposedly being useless for grounding "oughts" in, since [especially later] items like evolution relativistically allow any kind of animal behavior as long as it is more successful than detrimental overall, for the species.)
- A Confession: Part 12
https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1882/a-confession/part-12.html
Tolsoty (excerpt): Though I was quite convinced of the impossibility of proving the existence of a Deity (Kant had shown, and I quite understood him, that it could not be proved), I yet sought for God, hoped that I should find Him, and from old habit addressed prayers to that which I sought but had not found. I went over in my mind the arguments of Kant and Schopenhauer showing the impossibility of proving the existence of a God, and I began to verify those arguments and to refute them...
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Critique of Pure Reason
https://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/cpr/toc.html
Immanuel Kant (excerpt): But as will be shown, reason has, in respect of its practical employment, the right to postulate what in the field of mere speculation it can have no kind of right to assume without sufficient proof. For while all such assumptions do violence to [the principle of] completeness of speculation, that is a principle with which the practical interest is not at all concerned.
In the practical sphere reason has rights of possession, of which it does not require to offer proof, and of which, in fact, it could not supply proof. The burden of proof accordingly rests upon the opponent.
But since the latter knows just as little of the object under question, in trying to prove its non-existence, as does the former in maintaining its reality, it is evident that the former, who is asserting something as a practically necessary supposition, is at an advantage (meliorest conditio possidentis). For he is at liberty to employ, as it were in self-defence, on behalf of his own good cause, the very same weapons that his opponent employs against that cause, that is, hypotheses.
These are not intended to strengthen the proof of his position, but only to show that the opposing party has much too little understanding of the matter in dispute to allow of his flattering himself that he has the advantage in respect of speculative insight. Hypotheses are therefore, in the domain of pure reason, permissible only as weapons of war, and only for the purpose of defending a right, not in order to establish it.
But the opposing party we must always look for in ourselves. For speculative reason in its transcendental employment is in itself dialectical; the objections which we have to fear lie in ourselves. We must seek them out, just as we would do in the case of claims that, while old, have never become superannuated, in order that by annulling them we may establish a permanent peace. External quiescence is merely specious.
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Yeah, Tolstoy had read both Laozi and Confucius, and I believe also Maimonides but I can't find confirmation on that at the moment. Still, his approach seems more Zen than Taoist, but I don't believe that he was familiar with any of the literature. That said, there's also some commonality along these lines with American Pragmatists--who also had no knowledge of Zen or Ch'an, at least in the early part of the 20th century. Maybe it was something in the air or the water at the time.
Я почему то вспомнила знаменитый эксперимент Джона Кэлхуна с мышами "Вселенная-25". Толстой конечно же не мог о нём знать, но подсознательно пришёл к такому же выводу - жизнь живого существа, каковым является и человек, возможна только в борьбе за выживание. Поэтому простые рабочие люди, по его наблюдению, были счастливее, чем аристократия, к которой принадлежал и сам Толстой. И весь смысл жизни - в самой борьбе. В идеальных условиях смысл теряется. Даже мыши перестают размножаться и вымирают. Мы уже можем видеть это на примере благополучной Европы, и стран с тяжёлыми условиями для жизни. В Европе падает рождаемость, несмотря на хорошие условия для жизни, а в бедных африканских странах рождаемость растёт. Почему же люди во все времена мечтали о Рае (идеальных условиях), если весь смысл не в цели (Рай), а в пути к цели?
Yes. Tolstoy was also an admirer of Kropotkin, anarchist and biologist (of a sort), whose Mutual Aid proffered a theory than ran counter to the popular "Social Darwinism" of the time which emphasized cooperation over (or perhaps even in tandem with) competition as the means for survival and thriving amongst social animals. Kropotkin's work sort of pre-figures Marshall Sahlins' notion of "the original affluent society", positied within his Stone Age Economics, which suggests that early, pre-sedentarist societies attained affluence by desiring little and basically being content with what is there. And this is also consistent with much Buddhist thought, and Sahlins even terms it, "the Zen road to affluence": the meaning lies within the struggle.