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Question Many great thinkers are pessimists and often reach the conclusion that everything is pointless. Tolstoy even said that life is just a "sick joke". I started to read a lot of philosophy and I reach the same conclusion, that there is no absolute meaning and life is pretty pointless. And please don't reply that we should live in the now or we make our own happiness, etc.

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August 4, 2008

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Speaking of sick jokes: I just typed a long answer to your question and then hit the wrong key before submitting it and now poof, now it's in the ether. But alas let's try again.

In Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy it takes Deep Thought 7 and 1/2 million years to compute the answer to the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. On the day the answer is to be revealed, the people are understandably excited: "Never again will we wake up in the morning and think Who am I? What is my purpose in life? Does it really, cosmically speaking, matter if I don't get up and go to work?" And then the answer comes: Forty-two. The people are, to put it mildly, disappointed. When pressed, Deep Thought tells them: "I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

So what is the question of meaning that you're asking for? What are you looking for, that you're not able to find?

Some philosophers, like you, think that life is meaningless, pointless, absurd. We're all just like Sisyphus, endlessly pushing our rocks up the hill. But other philosophers look to a supreme being, God, and claim that God imbues our lives with meaning. And yet other philosophers think that we can find meaning in life even in the absence of God. Peter Singer for example urges us to live ethically, and claims that when we do so, we will find the meaning that we seek. Harry Frankfurt says that we should aim to achieve what's important to us, what we care about, and that's how we get meaning in our lives. (I'm afraid that you will hear that answer as: make your own happiness, but so be it...) And Susan Wolf urges a combination of these claims. When we are subjectively fulfilled by objectively fulfilling things, then our life can have meaning. Getting fulfillment from Sudoko puzzles might not do it, but caring for your family, creating great works of art, climbing mountains, educating others -- if you can find fulfillment in these activities, then your life can have meaning.

Are these philosophers giving different answers to the same question, or answering different questions? I'm not sure. But as I suggeted above, you should really try to ask yourself what you are looking for in looking for meaning. And if you can't find it, if life really is absurd, then what? What choice do we have but to go on in the face of absurdity? What's up to us is the attitude with which we choose to face the absurdity. As Camus said, better that we do so defiantly.

The implication in the question, that Tolstoy was straightforwardly among the pessimists and thought that life is a sick joke, should perhaps not be let pass without comment.

In A Confession, Tolstoy looks back at the period of his greatest worldly success. War and Peace and Anna Karenina had been received with immense acclaim. "I was not yet fifty, I had a kind, loving and beloved wife, lovely children, and a large estate that was growing and expanding with no effort on my part. I was respected by relatives and friends far more than ever before. I was praised by strangers and could consider myself a celebrity without deceiving myself." Yet despite all that, as Tolstoy eloquently reports, he found himself at a loss to find meaning in it all, and "gave up taking a rifle with me on hunting trips so as not to be tempted to end my life in such an all too easy function".

In sum -- and I imagine that this is the passage that the questioner is alluding to -- Tolstoy writes "This spiritual condition presented itself to me in the following manner: my life is some kind of stupid and evil joke that someone is playing on me."

But as A Confession and Tolstoy's other later religious writings tell, this bleak sense of meaningless wasn't Tolstoy's final judgement, but his spur to a quest for meaning that led to his struggles with Orthodox Christianity, and his seeking a core of simple faith separated out from the Church's distortions of the messages of the Gospels as he read them. And he eventually found such a faith. "Man's purpose in life is to save his soul; in order to save his soul, he must live according to God. In order to live according to God one must renounce all the comforts of life, work, be humble, suffer and be merciful ... In the liturgy the most significant words for me were: 'Love one another in unity'."

Wittgenstein, it is said, much admired Tolstoy's religious writings. I don't know how much they are read nowadays. But do read A Confession and The Gospel in Brief for a sense of how far Tolstoy came from finding life a "sick joke". (And I can't resist mentioning Orlando Figes' wonderful Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia for some insight into the wider Russian religious context in which Tolstoy was thinking.)