Today or tomorrow sickness and death
will come (and they had already arrived) to those dear to me, and to myself,
and nothing will remain other than the stench and the worms. Sooner or later my
deeds, whatever they may have been, will be forgotten and will no longer exist.
What is all the fuss about then? How can a person carry on living and fail to
perceive this? That is what is so astonishing! It is only possible to go on
living while you are intoxicated with life; once sober it is impossible not to
see that it is all a mere trick, and a stupid trick! That is exactly what it
is: there is nothing either witty or amusing, it is only cruel and stupid. (Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings, translated by J. Kentish
(London: Penguin Books, 1987), p.31)
And he
asked, rhetorically, “[I]s there any meaning in my life that will not be
annihilated by the inevitability of death which awaits me?” (p.35) Since the inevitability of death awaits not
only Tolstoy but all of us, what he said was supposed to apply to all human
beings: death will annihilate any meaning in our lives. The implicit idea here
is that if life really has meaning, it must consist in something that can
defeat the threat of death to meaningfulness. In other words, life is
meaningless unless we can find some kind of long-lasting and grand
meaningfulness.
What
reason did Tolstoy give for thinking that death implies meaninglessness? It
seems to be simply this: whatever one has achieved “will be forgotten and will
no longer exist”. Literally this is not true, at least not true of Tolstoy, for
his writings still exist and we still read and appreciate them today. What
Tolstoy had in mind might well be this: sooner or later, if not in ten thousand
years, then in a million years, we will all be dead and nothing we have
achieved will still exist. In a million years, there will not be any human
beings; there probably will not be any intelligent beings on this planet to
appreciate and value what some human beings have achieved or created; there
will not be any traces of War and Peace
or Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s
conclusion seems to be that because of this none of the things anyone of us has
achieved matters at all.
Let us
grant that none of the things anyone of us has achieved will matter in a
million years, but this is different from saying that none of the things anyone
of us has achieved matters. ‘X does not matter’ does not follow from ‘X does
not matter in a million years’. Besides, as Thomas Nagel argues:
It is often remarked that nothing we
do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same
token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In
particular, it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now
will matter. Moreover, even if what we did now were going to matter in a
million years, how could that keep our present concerns from being absurd? If
their mattering now is not enough to accomplish that, how would it help if they
mattered a million years from now?
(Nagel, ‘The Absurd’, in Mortal Questions,
p.12)
In terms
of meaningfulness rather than mattering, we can say that the fact that in a
million years there will not be anyone to consider one’s life meaningful does
not imply that one’s life should not be considered meaningful. If one’s life is
meaningful now, it is still a meaningful life even if no one in the further
future will remember one’s life.
It seems
that most of us would agree that a meaningful life will not cease to be
meaningful simply because something happens in the future after the person
whose life it is dies. Indeed, most of us would agree that a life does not even
have to be long to be meaningful. Obvious examples are Mozart and Anne
Frank. But then why do some of us think
death implies meaninglessness? Why is it so natural for some of us to conclude
that life is meaningless (or not meaningful enough) when thinking about death?
It is as if before we think about death, we see our lives as meaningful, but
the meaningfulness suddenly disappears once we think about death. Why?