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WorkLeo Tolstoy

On Life

Tolstoy's answer to the fear of death: a life lived by reason and love, over which death has no hold.

by Leo Tolstoy375 passages held

  • Russian, the original language
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Original title
О жизни
First published
(aged 60)
Original language
Russian

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Overview

An injury taken while working on the estate kept Tolstoy in bed for more than two months in the summer of 1886, and he used the time to begin a meditation on dying: the working title was On Life and Death. By the time he finished, he had struck out the word death, having decided that it had lost its meaning. In between, after talks with Nikolai Grot, a Moscow University philosophy professor, he read a draft on 14 March 1887 as a paper to the Moscow Psychological Society, the university's forum for academic philosophy. The book opens on the parable of a miller who becomes so absorbed in tracing how the river turns his wheel that he stops checking the flour. That, for Tolstoy, is what the learned men of his day were doing with the question of life: the scientists studied its mechanism and the theologians its rituals, and neither asked what it was for. His answer is that a person's real life is not the animal existence enclosed between birth and death but the life of reason, which seeks the good of all beings and shows itself as love. Someone who lives that life has nothing in death to fear. The censor banned the book, and it was promptly translated abroad; Isabel Hapgood's English version, titled Life, came out in New York in 1888. In Russia it travelled in copies and foreign editions, and the academic philosophers it had been read to answered it in print in 1890 and 1891, Aleksei Kozlov among the first. Orthodox hierarchs attacked it, and under Stalin it was censored again. Its first annotated English translation, from Northwestern University Press, appeared in 2018.

Key concepts

What does the parable of the miller mean in On Life?

It is Tolstoy's picture of learning that has lost its purpose. A miller becomes so absorbed in tracing how the river turns his wheel that he stops checking the flour, which was the reason for the mill. The scientists who study life's mechanism, and the theologians who study its rituals, are in the same position: expert in the workings, silent on what life is for.

What is the difference between animal existence and true life in On Life?

Animal existence is the life enclosed between birth and death; true life is the life of reason, which seeks the good of all beings. Only the second, Tolstoy argues, is a person's real life. It is not a higher layer added on top of the first, and it can be recognised from outside, because it shows itself as love.

How is love related to reason in On Life?

Love is the form the life of reason takes. Because reason seeks the good of all beings, not only one's own, a life lived by it shows itself outwardly as love. Love is therefore not an emotion that may or may not arrive, nor a preference for those close to us, but the visible sign that a person is living their real life rather than their animal existence.

Why does On Life say death has lost its meaning?

Because death ends only the animal existence, and a person who lives by reason does not take that for their life. Tolstoy began the book as On Life and Death and struck out the word death by the end. Someone who lives the life of reason and love, he argues, has nothing in death to fear, since what they live for was never enclosed between birth and death.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

How Life Works, and Never What It Is For

Can anyone understand life by studying its mechanism? The scientists and theologians of Tolstoy's day, he argues, forgot to ask what it was for.

It opens on the parable of a miller who grows so absorbed in tracing how the river turns his wheel that he stops checking the flour. That, for Tolstoy, is what the learned men of his day were doing with the question of life. The scientists studied its mechanism and the theologians its rituals, and neither asked what life was for. Their inquiries could go on without end and still leave a person with nothing to live by, because they were answering a different question.

  • science
  • scientific method
  • reductionism
  • epistemology
  • knowledge
  • religion
  • meaning of life
  • human life
  • life

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The Life of Reason, Which Shows Itself as Love

Is a person's real life the animal existence between birth and death? Tolstoy says it is not: it is the life of reason, which seeks the good of all beings.

Tolstoy distinguishes two lives in every person. One is animal existence, enclosed between birth and death. The other is the life of reason, which seeks the good of all beings and shows itself as love. Only the second, he argues, is a person's real life. What follows is a reversal of self-interest: the good a person seeks for themselves alone belongs to the part of them that ends, and the life that does not end is the one spent on the good of others.

  • reason
  • love
  • the good
  • altruism
  • self-interest
  • personal identity
  • selfhood
  • consciousness
  • human nature
  • embodiment
  • desire
  • well-being
  • happiness

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Why Death Lost Its Place in the Title

Must a person fear death, if their real life was never the part that ends? The book began as On Life and Death and dropped the word death.

Tolstoy began it in the summer of 1886 as a meditation on dying, under the working title On Life and Death. By the time he finished, he had struck out the word death, having decided that it had lost its meaning. The reasoning follows from the rest of the book. Someone who lives the life of reason, seeking the good of all beings, has nothing in death to fear, because what death ends is the animal existence, and that was never where their life was.

  • death
  • mortality
  • fear of death
  • immortality
  • time
  • suffering

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Within this work

passages held
375
distinct concepts
324
by passages held, corpus-wide
#201

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “human nature” and “reason”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
human naturereason17
consciousnesspersonal identity16
deathlove15
reasonsuffering14
deathlife13
lovereason13
deathpersonal identity11
lifereason11
consciousnessdeath9
consciousnesslife8
consciousnessreason8
deathreason8
lovesuffering8
deathsuffering7
lifelove7
personal identityreason6
human naturelove5
human naturesuffering4
consciousnesshuman nature3
human naturelife3
personal identitysuffering3
lifepersonal identity2
lovepersonal identity2
consciousnesslove1
deathhuman nature1
human naturepersonal identity1
lifesuffering1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1884 A Confession (Исповедь)

    Tolstoy submitted it as an introduction to a larger, then-unpublished work, his critique of church theology and his own reading of the Gospels, and it stands at the door of everything he wrote after his conversion.

     RU
  2. 1885 What I Believe (В чём моя вера?)

    A statement of positive faith, written between 1882 and 1884: where A Confession ends at the threshold of belief, this book sets out what the belief is.

     RU
  3. 1886 What Then Must We Do? (Так что же нам делать?)

    Of all Tolstoy's post-conversion books, this is the one that starts in the street: it turns the religious conclusions of What I Believe onto money, work and the city he was living in.

     RU
  4. 1888 On Life (О жизни) you are here RU
  5. 1892 The Four Gospels Harmonized and Translated (Соединение и перевод четырёх Евангелий)

    The workshop behind What I Believe and everything after it, and the long study that A Confession was written to introduce: a work of translation and commentary rather than argument.

     RU
  6. 1893 Religion and Morality (Религия и нравственность)

    In the same year he finished The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Tolstoy set down here, in compact form, what he meant by religion.

     RU
  7. 1893 The Kingdom of God Is Within You (Царство Божие внутри вас)

    The doctrine of non-resistance that What I Believe set out as a personal faith is here turned against the state itself.

     RU
  8. 1897 What Is Art? (Что такое искусство?)

    Standing apart from the religious and political writing around it, this is Tolstoy's treatise on aesthetics.

     RU
  9. 1900 Patriotism and Government (Патриотизм и правительство)

    It follows "Christianity and Patriotism" (1894) and "Patriotism or Peace?" (1896), and goes further than either, from the feeling itself to the governments that live by it.

     RU
  10. 1908 I Cannot Be Silent (Не могу молчать!)

    Two years before his death, Tolstoy turned from the treatise to the newspaper page: a signed article addressed to everyone who ordered, carried out or lived by the executions of 1908.

     RU
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