32 pages • 1 hour read
Leo TolstoyA Confession
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1880A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Tolstoy’s search for answers to the questions of life, “What will come of what I do today and tomorrow? What will come of my entire life?” (34), yielded no real answers. He discovered that the sciences pretend to have answers but never properly address the meaning of life. The experimental sciences, including mathematics, do not even acknowledge the question, although they provide answers to other questions. What Tolstoy calls the “speculative” sciences, including psychology, sociology, and metaphysics, do address the question of life but never answer it.
For a time, Tolstoy found satisfaction in the idea that everything in life is evolving and becoming more complex, that laws governed this process, that he was part of a whole, and that through a process of education he could understand his place in the whole. He also believed that humanity “develops according to the spiritual principles, according to the ideals that guide it” (37) and felt his mission was to help humanity realize these ideals. Tolstoy finally dropped these ideas when he realized they were meaningless because “in the infinite there is nothing either simple or complex, nothing before or after, nothing better or worse” (36).
Tolstoy chastises scientists who stray from their proper task, which for the experimental scientist is “to determine the causal sequences of material phenomena” and for the speculative scientist is “to discover the essence of life that lies beyond cause and effect” (39). When they stick to what they know, honest scientists can only answer the ultimate question of life by replying, “I do not know” (40).
Chapter 6 Summary
Tolstoy conveys that he felt lost. His search through the “forest of human knowledge” (41) only led him deeper into darkness. Science’s answer to the question of life, that humans are random lumps of particles that are stuck together for now but will eventually fall apart, is not a proper answer. Agreement between the sciences that meaning exists as a general trend toward development is debunked by the reality that, in an infinite universe, development is an illusion.
He states that great thinkers who tackled the question of life have given similar answers. Socrates says that approaching truth means moving “further from life” (43) and that truth-lovers seek to detach from the body and find death. Schopenhauer writes that, since the essence of the universe is “will” (43), the destruction of will leaves nothingness, unless we renounce will and thereby turn the content of the universe itself into nothingness. The author of Ecclesiastes writes that more wisdom brings more grief, that all effort is vanity, that everybody falls victim to death, and that the best thing for a person to do is “eat and drink and let his soul find delight in his labor” (46). Tolstoy found that, in his despair, he agreed with the great minds of the world. He maintained the gloomy conclusion that “All is vanity. Happy is he who has never been born; death is better than life; we must rid ourselves of life” (49).
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
During his search through the fields of human knowledge for answers to the meaning of existence, Tolstoy discovered the limitations of human inquiry. “Hard” sciences like math and physics examine cause and effect in the physical world but have nothing to say about why anything exists or what point there is to anything. Other fields of inquiry, like philosophy, offer no real answers despite their obsession with questions about meaning.
The social sciences, like sociology and psychology, come under the greatest criticism from Tolstoy. He finds in these fields “a striking poverty of thought and the greatest obscurity; we find in them a completely unjustified pretension to decide questions lying outside their scope” (37) as well as endless contradiction between individuals in the fields. The honest scientist says, “I do not know” (40), to all questions outside her grasp, including questions regarding the meaning of life.
In Chapter 6, Tolstoy takes pains to demonstrate how some of the most intellectually honest individuals in history—including Socrates, Schopenhauer, and the author of Ecclesiastes—agreed that all is vanity and rational minds should seek death. At this point in the narrative, it seems difficult to escape the conclusion shared by all brilliant people that life is meaningless, and death is a valid escape. Tolstoy effectively communicates the feeling of being trapped in despair caused by his extreme commitment to rationality.
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