The Philosophy of Leo Tolstoy

Far too long have I felt like the only sane person in the world, increasingly isolated and surrounded with never-ending pits of eternal chaos. I finally settled on a thought. I entered this world alone and I shall depart the same. Therefore, solitude is the answer. Furthermore, if I do not participate in a hierarchy voluntarily, that means I am beyond it. Fantastic! Better yet, I shall be an artist. Then it will be justified. My way will be understood. Although it escapes me why it is not understood in the first place. Why isn't humanity rolling around on the ground screaming in constant panic? We're all going to die and everyone just goes about their car troubles and lattes. Everyone surely is insane. However, if it is everyone, then it is probably you, hits me one day. Welcome insanity. Stuck in a constant preoccupation with my upcoming journey back into the unknown. Unable to rationalize human existence. Swinging between states of drowsy, hopeless apathy and wicked folly desperation. Worse yet is the ignorant feeling of being the lone soul on earth that is possessed by this despair. Sure, I was always aware that everyone encounters these thoughts occasionally. However, I was certain of my position's uniqueness. The length, depth and width of my sober awareness was extraordinary. Oh youthful arrogance, if only you stayed bound by youth. In my darkest of hours, having reached the ultimate logical conclusion of nihilism, uttering words that were renouncing life, not unlike those of Schopenhauer, it was Leo Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich that sparked unlikely hope. A human is a strange creature. Knowing of others, if not greater than at least equivalent suffering, brings peace to us. The similarity of Tolstoy's thoughts and hopelessness shined forth to me through this novella. It was a bit later that I discovered his confessions in which he openly professed his despair in a manner that propelled me out of my self-centered pity and finally opened my eyes. I was not alone. I could not be deceived. All is vanity. Happy is he who has never been born. Death is better than life. We must rid ourselves of life, wrote Tolstoy. Exactly the conclusions I made following my own rational path of despair, Tolstoy summed up my feelings exactly in this desperate passage. Involuntarily, it appeared to me that there, somewhere, was someone who amused himself by watching how I lived for thirty or forty years, learning, developing, maturing in body and mind, and how, having with matured mental powers reached the summit of life from which it all lay before me, I stood on that summit like an arch-fool, seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and there has been and will be nothing, and he was amused. But whether that someone laughing at me existed or not, I was none the better off. I could give no reasonable meaning to any single action or to my whole life. I was only surprised that I could have avoided understanding this from the very beginning. It has been so long known to all. Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come, they had come already, to those I love or to me. Nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later, my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort? How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising. One can only live while one is intoxicated with life. As soon as one is sober, it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud. That is precisely what it is. There is nothing either amusing or witty about it. It is simply cruel and stupid. This mentality generates plenty of spite and disdain for the ones intoxicated with life. The analogy of a sober person in an intoxicated group works perfectly. These fools are drowning and they do not even care. It sparks outrage. It seems to me that what Tolstoy calls sobriety is a heightened level of consciousness or perhaps a consciousness that is over-activated. It is reaching a certain level of so-called rational thinking that gives way to this sort of illness. In Tolstoy's words, reaching a point of perspective on one's existence, glimpsing outside of the confines of the material or dogmatic world, our rationality then becomes capable of destroying, well, anything. It is not in vain that rationality is embodied as the devil in Christianity. The positive side of its power requires considerable effort to manifest, as with anything. Destruction, arrogance and pride, on the other hand, are easy. It is therefore a one-sided battle that occurs in a Tolstoyan sober person's mind. Eventually, one's embodied rituals and faith are rooted out, thrown out with the bathwater and inner chaos ensues. How one reaches this state of over-activated consciousness seems like a mystery to me. However, one tipping point that I have noticed of this sort of sobriety is chronic or, better yet, terminal illness. When one is face-to-face with death, with no ability to escape the gift of ignorance snatched away from him, he reaches that vantage point that Tolstoy wrote about. You are unable to hide anymore, not truly anyway. No amount of vanity, indulgence or folly will suffice. You have officially, consciously embodied Sisyphus. Welcome aboard, friend. I believe our sickness unto death is the inability to accept the fundamental and inescapable fact of change. It is our innate wish to hold on to a moment. If ever I to the moment shall say, beautiful moment, do not pass away, then you may forge your chains to bind me, and I will put my life behind me, wrote Goethe. Oh, how much we wish to be a rock! We identify, we capture, we eternize, we record, we control. However, we hardly let go. Fair enough, you might say. Perhaps the world is a place of change. However, I am not. What I am is rational, stable and concrete. I am a person. Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is, said Albert Camus. What escapes us is the realization that we are more so a cloud than a rock. Perhaps if a cloud were captured in a photograph, frozen in a moment, one could easily make the mistake of perceiving it to have form and boundaries. However, we know that is only an illusion. You are never able to grab hold of a cloud, and with time it disperses, and it is never truly concrete. It is never one thing. Neither is a human. I believe an answer is to identify with the process itself. Accept your ultimate vulnerability before existence. Accept the dance of life. Identify with being the one who sees rather than the one being seen. Realize that you are a sort of apparatus through which chaos is turned to order, a being that existence itself filters through. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, Camus echoes. Due to our consciousness, individuals face the problem of mortality every day. Mortality is THE problem. Yet, the paradox is that the process of consciousness is precisely what makes us immortal. We, as a body of consciousness, are the prerequisite for existence itself. Perhaps it is not we who exist but rather it is we who enable existence to exist. For if there was no light of consciousness to shine, there would be nothing at all. The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart and through all human hearts, Solzhenitsyn wrote. We are what divides the world. We are the perspective. Without humans, there is no good or evil. There is no light or dark, no masculine or feminine. We embody the force that divided the world. Humanity is the gap, the border between yin and yang. Without consciousness, there just is not. What exists is the ultimate chaos out of which everything emerged as portrayed in mythology. In other words, what exists is nothing at all but an indiscernible totality of possibility, of potential, or simply chaos. What we conceptualize as God is the totality of human being through eternity in relation with this infinite fabric of chaos. If anyone out there is feeling solitude with their existential dread, I wish to exclaim through eternity, if it is the only thing I do, you are not alone. Dogma shall not suffice, neither shall ideology. We may be hopeless and ill with nihilism. We may be mortal and fragile. We may be having a cruel joke played on us. Yet I will be damned if I give way to entropy and do not stand tall in the face of existence. One foot in order, the other in chaos until death provide me relief. I shall depart with a quote that encapsulates all that ever needed to be said. We may be dying, but we are not dead yet. Happy Existing.