The Cynic and Tolstoy

 This piece something I wrote years ago and came across earlier, and have added somewhat to just now.

Cynic: one of a set of Greek philosophers who regarded virtue as the supreme good and despised all comfort and refinement; modern meaning, one who believes that man's conduct is based on self-interest; a misanthrope; a surly, morose man. 

 My eye caught the above definition while searching for something else in a dictionary, which split definition seemed almost amusingly perverse, changing from the old faith in the supremacy of virtue to something of its opposite, where virtue has disappeared altogether from the being and worldview of the cynic, and he having become an embittered misanthrope. Though perhaps the evolution in meaning is more natural than might first appear. I'll make no effort to fill the vacuum of my philosophical knowledge but just work from the sparse definition offered: the Greek cynic and his faith in virtue appears to be a logically conceived morality, more a matter of reason than direct inner experience of a purer state of being; and thus his equal emphasis on that which he despises, and interestingly that being the not particularly harmful things of pleasure, at least compared to some other vices. He already seems to be clinging angrily and maybe desperately to a virtue that is puritanical and threatened by anything more feminine in energy. Morality is in a sense religion without the holiness, an unfree matter of obligation, and apt to become dogmatic and intolerant, which is the very essence of Puritanism.

 

If the individual, or even an entire culture, falls away from the direct spiritual reality, of the divine breath living in him, then the assertion of the reality of virtue becomes a fading linguistically sustained memory of all this, and which if not corrected by genuine experience will continue to fade, and ending with the full disconnect from this positive inner reality, and so leading on to the despairing, misanthropic conclusion. Thus the cynic in the second sense being someone who has lost faith in his ideal; the ideal in the first place being the replacement of living truth with an idea of that truth. The idea without the reality isn’t enough to sustain belief in itself, and so the above process plays out.

 This bullying dogmatism and primacy of concern with the false is especially pronounced in the case of the later Tolstoy, who came to denounce all the art for which he is best known as essentially immoral, not sufficiently concerned with ethical truth - in other words as the initial version of the cynic extolling virtue and denouncing refinement - and while say in his final novel Resurrection on the surface he asserts the moral truth of Christianity, simultaneous to this he displays an unattractive, bullying cynicism about the spiritual world lying beyond the limits of rationality and morality; instead haranguing the reader about the primacy of reason, and the book as a whole reads as a rather remorseless lecture. This same spirit he almost destroyed War and Peace with in the final third or so of the book where the rationalist unashamedly keeps interjecting himself to bludgeon the reader with confused notions such as how all history conforms exactly to some scientific laws, as yet beyond our knowing but certainly allegedly there. If only we can figure out what they are - and this, it should be realised, is very much the spirit of deterministic materialism and Marxism. 

So on the one hand the ascetic Tolstoy praises the simplicity of the peasant life and its faith in the spiritual, and especially so when compared to the corruption of the false forms of the civilised and educated, in thrall to Western European civilisation; but then on the other hand he is convinced all of reality and the flow of life can be rationally explained and fit into some intellectual mode of knowing, exactly in the manner of Western European rationalism which is completely cut off from the simplicity and humility of the organic life of the peasant he is simultaneously preaching. In terms of coherence, it’s a complete mess.

He re-wrote the Gospels but took out anything with which he disagreed, such as the miraculous, and his Jesus he edited and pared down to be simply a very moral being. Holiness or the divine was not necessary.  And related to his intolerant morality is his condemnations in What Is Art of earlier works of art of his own like Sevastopol Sketches, based on his experiences in the Russian army during the Crimean War, and where he is extraordinarily sensitive to the atmosphere in its full sense in which wider humanity lives. When true to himself as an artist he has a kind of direct intuiting, or being at one with life alien to the  rationalistic, moralistic Tolstoy. He was far more spiritual when being true to himself as an artist than when abandoning art and taking on the role of the religious/moralistic lecturer.

And so the remarkable passage below from Sevastopol in May, though of course the effect much weakened by just extracting it from the literary whole: 

 He could feel something wet in the region of his chest - this wet sensation made him think of water, and he could have drunk whatever his chest was wet with. "I must be bleeding from the fall," he thought and, becoming more and more flustered with the fear that the soldiers who were continuing to flicker past were about to trample him, he mustered all his strength and tried to shout: "Take me with you!" Instead, however, he began to groan so horribly that he grew frightened at the sound he was making. Then red lights began to dance in front of his eyes and he had the impression that the soldiers were piling stones on top of him. The lights grew more and more sparse, and the stones being placed on top of him seemed to weigh more heavily on him. He made an effort to heave them aside, straightened himself up, and then neither saw nor heard nor thought nor felt anything more. He had been killed on the spot by a shell splinter that had struck him in the middle of the chest.

The rationalist could of course mock at such artistic intuiting.