{"id":218062,"date":"2022-08-15T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2022-08-15T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=218062"},"modified":"2022-08-15T05:29:13","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T04:29:13","slug":"life-and-death-and-more-life-leo-tolstoy-on-science-spirituality-and-our-search-for-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/08\/life-and-death-and-more-life-leo-tolstoy-on-science-spirituality-and-our-search-for-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"Life and Death and More Life: Leo Tolstoy on Science, Spirituality, and Our Search for Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cA caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn\u2019t see the butterfly which flies out of it.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cHow can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?\u201d asks the poetic physicist and scientific novelist Alan Lightman on the pages of his exquisite inquiry into the nature of existence<\/a>. We can\u2019t, of course \u2014 but out of those creaturely limits, out of our longing to transcend them, arises our eternal hunger for meaning, arises everything we might call art. Nick Cave intuited this in his lovely meditation on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of artificial intelligence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A century before Cave and Lightman, as he lay dying, Leo Tolstoy<\/strong> (September 9, 1828\u2013November 20, 1910) \u2014 one of the vastest intelligences our species has produced, and one of the most deeply and therefore fallibly human \u2014 collided with this question on the pages of his final journals, included in the altogether revelatory Last Steps: The Late Writings of Leo Tolstoy<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>

Leo Tolstoy<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Two decades after the uncommonly brilliant and prematurely death-bound Alice James wrote in her journal that \u201c[dying] is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life,\u201d<\/a> Tolstoy writes in his:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m beginning to get used to regarding death and dying not as the end of my task, but as the task itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One night, he dreams about \u201ca clear, simple refutation of materialism comprehensible to all\u201d; one morning, he wakes up filled with self-pity, feeling disgusted with himself. He rides the waves as they come. In the midwinter of his seventy-seventh year, having outlived the life expectancy of a Russian peasant twofold and having begun his life with a fierce search for purpose<\/a>, he writes:<\/p>\n

I woke up, and two things became especially and absolutely clear to me: (1) that I am a very worthless man. I say this absolutely sincerely, and (2) that it would be good for me to die, and that I would like to do so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Along the way, he reckons with the meaning of life and with our making of meaning. In one of the most poignant entries from the journal, and in one of the most titanic acts of character a human being can perform, Tolstoy \u2014 a deeply spiritual man<\/a> \u2014 scrutinizes his own blind spot as he considers the mutual blindnesses of science and spirituality, blinkered by the irreconcilable fact of our materiality and our hunger for meaning:<\/p>\n

Normally people (myself included) who recognize the spiritual life as the basis of life deny the reality, the necessity, the importance of studying the physical life, which evidently cannot lead to any conclusive results. In just the same way, those who only recognize the physical life completely deny the spiritual life and all deductions based on it \u2014 deny, as they say, metaphysics. But it is now absolutely clear to me that both are wrong, and both forms of knowledge \u2014 the materialistic and the metaphysical \u2014 have their own great importance, if only one doesn\u2019t wish to make inappropriate deductions from the one or the other. From materialistic knowledge based on the observation of external phenomena one can deduce scientific data, i.e. generalizations about phenomena, but one should not deduce any guiding principles for people\u2019s lives, as the materialists \u2014 Darwinists for example \u2014 have often tried to do. From metaphysical knowledge based on inner consciousness one can and should deduce the laws of human life \u2014 how should we live? why are we living? \u2014 the very thing that all religious teachings do; but one should not deduce, as many people have tried to do, the laws of phenomena and generalizations about them.<\/p>\n

Each of these two kinds of knowledge has its own purpose and its own field of activity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
One of a series of illustrations of how nature works<\/a> from a nineteenth-century French physics textbook. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In another entry, which reads like the metaphysical counterpart to the science of entropy<\/a>, Tolstoy confronts the crux of living and dying:<\/p>\n

Life is continual creation, i.e. the formation of new, higher forms. When this formation comes to a stop in our view or even goes backwards, i.e. when existing forms are destroyed, this only means a new form is taking shape, invisible to us. We see what is outside us, but we don\u2019t see what is within us, we only feel it (if we haven\u2019t lost our consciousness, and don\u2019t take what is visible and external to be the whole of our life). A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn\u2019t see the butterfly which flies out of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Radiolab<\/em> creator Jad Abumrad\u2019s soulful commencement address about monarch butterflies and the meaning of life<\/a> and Alan Lightman on what makes life worth living<\/a>, then revisit Einstein\u2019s dialogue with the Indian poet Tagore about science and spirituality<\/a> and Tolstoy on kindness and the measure of love<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> My name is Maria Popova<\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What <\/em>is<\/em> all this? (More<\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cA caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn\u2019t see the butterfly which flies out of it.\u201d \u201cHow can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":218063,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[1169,1177,1318,1170,308,1911,805],"class_list":["post-218062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spirituality","tag-death","tag-inspirational","tag-leo-tolstoy","tag-life","tag-philosophy","tag-science-and-spirituality","tag-spirituality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}