Idealism can be a problem (Part II)
Yesterday I was musing about the nature of what the leaders of Melos might have had to deal with when confronted by the Athenian navy. Even in their plight I can see that they are somewhere on a continuum which has as points, the Greeks at Thermopylae, and the Jews at Masada. You can consider where to put there point on a line… they all deal with living and dying by the consequences of their acts.
These dramatic last stands are always replete with lots of deeply help and cherished principles. Do these principles resonate with us because of what they were standing against, or by the fact that there was so much loss as a consequence?
What if we were to take the scale of action down to merely one person, albeit a rather important person? Leo Tolstoy changed much of his life. He started out as a spoiled member of the aristocracy, and ended up trying desperately to become a saint.
Our story starts at the end of his life, Count Tolstoy had changed into someone who was trying to renounce many of the physical things in life.
Tolstoy’s Answer to the Riddle of Life
http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/ocj/vol1903/iss12/2
"A strange figure—this peasant nobleman, this aristocrat, born into the ruling class of an autocracy, who condemns all government and caste, this veteran of two wars who proscribes all bloodshed, this keen sportsman turned vegetarian, this landlord who follows Henry George, this man of wealth who will have nothing to do with money, this famous novelist who thinks that he wasted his time in writing most of his novels, this rigid moralist, one of whose books at least, the Kreutzer Sotiata, was placed under the ban of the American Post Office. That same dramatic instinct which made him a great novelist, which impelled Sir Henry Irving to rank his two plays among the best of the past century, and which, as we have seen, has so often led him to find lessons in the active world around him, this same instinct has made of this least theatrical and most self-forgetful of men the dramatic prefigurement in his own person of a reunited race, set free by love from the shackles of caste and violence. As it was with the prophets of old, so with him, there is a deeper significance in his life, in the tragedy of himself, than in the burden of his spoken message."
It was at the very last, where he tried to escape his life. His ancestral home at Yasnaya Polyana must have held too many pieces of his aristocratic life for him…He ran away to the train station…
Leo Tolstoy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy
Tolstoy died in 1910, at the age of 82. He died of pneumonia at Astapovo train station, after falling ill when he left home in the middle of winter. His death came only days after gathering the nerve to abandon his family and wealth and take up the path of a wandering ascetic, a path that he had agonized over pursuing for decades. He had not been at the peak of health before leaving home; his wife and daughters were all actively engaged in caring for him daily. He had been speaking and writing of his own death in the days preceding his departure from home, but fell ill at the station not far from home. The station master took Tolstoy to his apartment, where his personal doctors were called to the scene. He was given injections of morphine and camphor.
This dramatic end to the life of a great man raised plenty of questions: Was this final act the sort of thing someone in their ‘right mind’ would do? Was this necessarily a supreme act of renunciation, or of an addled old man? Would this sort of action have more or less merit if he had done this many years earlier? What would the consequences of an act like this have resulted in?
As with the people on the island of Melos, the Spartans at Thermopylae, and many others over the years…are they possibly aspects of these sorts of actions which can’t be adequately summed up using these sorts of intellectual tools?
Tolstoy’s Answer
http://www.ornaross.com/2010/09/tolstoys-answer
