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A review by rvandenboomgaard
Mijn biecht by Leo Tolstoy, Bogdan Baran
5.0
This work initiated a seminal turn in my perspective. Although I cannot, will not, nor want to explain this right now, I do feel, intuit and believe it without a doubt.
Tolstoj brilliantly touches upon a theme that I have been considering since the start of my studies in philosophy; the inadequacy of pure rationality in the living of our lives.
Tolstoj argues, although less emphatically so, that rationality can ultimately only lead to negative conclusions, to denial; never to positive conclusions, to affirmation. Or at least this is the case in relation to the question of the meaning of life. All of this follows, and founds, his contemplation of the logical necessity of suicide. In this work, one of many things he discusses is his struggle with the inclination he has to commit suicide in face of the meaninglessness of life.
And indeed, when following the rational route, bound and founded by restrictive, one-dimensional, purely meaningless logic, there is no other option; if life is indeed meaningless, and indeed evil, why continue living it?
Still, despite the depths he has reached already in these contemplations, there is a fickle power that withholds him from the act; and it is not simple, cowardly fear. No, it is the nagging sense that something is wrong in his argumentation. That there is something he has not taken into account in his contemplations of the necessity of suicide in the face of the meaninglessness of life.
This something is the inadequacy of rationality, the notion that there are more explicative faculties that do not follow the means of rationality. At first, Tolstoj speaks of irrationality. Later, this becomes belief. Initially, this is belief as performed in institutionalised religion, the very system of which he discarded at the start of this text, and at the start of his life.
Then, he notices that it is not the belief of a religion, as there is a multitude of religions; all professing the truth, and all professing the falsity of the others. Still, Tolstoj recognises there is something to belief. This dynamic he explains by the inherent necessity of force, coercion, subjugation that is native in humans, and in the streamlining of human relations.
What he comes to, then, is a more general or transcendent form of belief. Belief as a counterweight or counterpart to rationality. Belief as that which provides the irrational reason, the reason that is not subject to knowing, for the living of life. And this he has found not in the thought of all the wise, no, those were mere digressions from the path of life, parasites on the fruits of the labour of its fields.
Tolstoj found this wisdom in those we tend to deem unwise, uneducated and without sovereignty; the simple people, those that work to support the life of the generations, the species. They do not wonder about the meaning of life, and although this — indeed — often has to do with an incapacity to see the rational implications of the question of the meaning of life, as the question itself they do see, they simply live it from the belief they have therein.
Now, I would say this belief has nothing to do with God. Merely with that which we mean when we use the moniker ‘God’. Truthfully, I believe that ‘God’ is — in most cases — a substitution for our individual self. With belief in our self, possibly our self as part of an indefinite whole, the absolute, most troubles of life would be resolved. Rationally, this definitely does not work out, is completely incorrect.
Luckily, that might very well not be all there is to life.
Tolstoj brilliantly touches upon a theme that I have been considering since the start of my studies in philosophy; the inadequacy of pure rationality in the living of our lives.
Tolstoj argues, although less emphatically so, that rationality can ultimately only lead to negative conclusions, to denial; never to positive conclusions, to affirmation. Or at least this is the case in relation to the question of the meaning of life. All of this follows, and founds, his contemplation of the logical necessity of suicide. In this work, one of many things he discusses is his struggle with the inclination he has to commit suicide in face of the meaninglessness of life.
And indeed, when following the rational route, bound and founded by restrictive, one-dimensional, purely meaningless logic, there is no other option; if life is indeed meaningless, and indeed evil, why continue living it?
Still, despite the depths he has reached already in these contemplations, there is a fickle power that withholds him from the act; and it is not simple, cowardly fear. No, it is the nagging sense that something is wrong in his argumentation. That there is something he has not taken into account in his contemplations of the necessity of suicide in the face of the meaninglessness of life.
This something is the inadequacy of rationality, the notion that there are more explicative faculties that do not follow the means of rationality. At first, Tolstoj speaks of irrationality. Later, this becomes belief. Initially, this is belief as performed in institutionalised religion, the very system of which he discarded at the start of this text, and at the start of his life.
Then, he notices that it is not the belief of a religion, as there is a multitude of religions; all professing the truth, and all professing the falsity of the others. Still, Tolstoj recognises there is something to belief. This dynamic he explains by the inherent necessity of force, coercion, subjugation that is native in humans, and in the streamlining of human relations.
What he comes to, then, is a more general or transcendent form of belief. Belief as a counterweight or counterpart to rationality. Belief as that which provides the irrational reason, the reason that is not subject to knowing, for the living of life. And this he has found not in the thought of all the wise, no, those were mere digressions from the path of life, parasites on the fruits of the labour of its fields.
Tolstoj found this wisdom in those we tend to deem unwise, uneducated and without sovereignty; the simple people, those that work to support the life of the generations, the species. They do not wonder about the meaning of life, and although this — indeed — often has to do with an incapacity to see the rational implications of the question of the meaning of life, as the question itself they do see, they simply live it from the belief they have therein.
Now, I would say this belief has nothing to do with God. Merely with that which we mean when we use the moniker ‘God’. Truthfully, I believe that ‘God’ is — in most cases — a substitution for our individual self. With belief in our self, possibly our self as part of an indefinite whole, the absolute, most troubles of life would be resolved. Rationally, this definitely does not work out, is completely incorrect.
Luckily, that might very well not be all there is to life.