Leo Tolstoy on the Meaning of Life: The Contemporary Search for Ethics

Abstract

In no other age, however distinguished it may have been by brilliant discoveries, has the question of the meaning of life faced humanity as acutely and urgently as in recent times. Considerable interest in this realm of philosophical thought has been aroused chiefly by the fact that now more than ever, the most urgent and dramatic crises of being have emerged and grown more threatening, taking the form of eternal questions for mankind as a whole: will humanity, its culture, science, and art, exist or not exist? How can we ward off the threat that hangs over the entire world, and how with the aid of reason can we defend the humanistic principles of the human community? and what is reason itself in the contemporary person—the ethically neutral intellect of the bourgeois scholar, or a special capability, characteristic only of those who can understand life's phenomena through an inner spiritual-valuative relation to themselves and others as human beings? It is precisely the problem of the ethical orienta...