Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy philosopher. One of the main ideas of the philosophy of unity

The brilliant writer and deep thinker L.N. Tolstoy occupies an important place in Russian philosophy of the second half of the 19th century. At the center of his religious and philosophical searches are questions of understanding God, the meaning of life, the relationship between good and evil, freedom and moral perfection of man. He criticized official theology, church dogma, sought to substantiate the need for social reorganization on the principles of mutual understanding and mutual love of people and non-resistance to evil by violence.

For Tolstoy, God is not the God of the Gospel. He denies all those of its properties, which are considered in the Orthodox dogma. He seeks to liberate Christianity from blind faith and sacraments, seeing the purpose of religion in delivering earthly, and not heavenly, bliss to man. God appears to him not as a Person who can reveal himself to people, but as a vague, indefinite Something, an indefinite beginning of the spirit, living in everything and in every person. This Something is also the master, commanding to act morally, to do good and avoid evil.

Tolstoy identified the moral perfection of man with the question of the essence of life. He evaluates the conscious, cultural and social life with its conventions as a false, illusory life and, in essence, unnecessary to people. And this applies, first of all, to civilization. Tolstoy considers it as a lack of people's need for rapprochement, as a desire for personal well-being and ignoring everything that does not directly relate to one's own person, as a conviction that the best good of the world is money. Civilization, according to Tolstoy, cripples people, separates them, distorts all the criteria for evaluating a person and deprives people of the enjoyment of communication, the enjoyment of a person.

For Tolstoy, a genuine, unclouded civilization is the "natural" primary life, which includes eternal nature and the starry sky, birth and death, labor, life, as it is represented by an unbiased view of the world of a simple person from the people. This is the only life that is needed. And all life processes, Tolstoy believes, are directed by the infallible, universal, all-penetrating Spirit. He is in every person and in all people taken together, he puts in everyone the desire for what is due, he tells people to unconsciously huddle together, the tree to grow towards the sun, the flowers to wither towards autumn. And his blissful voice drowns out the noisy development of civilization. Only such a natural beginning of life, and its primordial harmony, can contribute to the earthly happiness of a person, says Tolstoy.

Tolstoy's moral position is most fully revealed by his doctrine of non-resistance to evil by violence. Tolstoy proceeded from the assumption that God established the law of Goodness in the world, which people must follow. Human nature itself is naturally beneficent, sinless. And if a person does evil, it is only out of ignorance of the law of Good. Good in itself is reasonable, and only it leads to well-being and happiness in life. The realization of this presupposes a "higher intelligence" which is always stored in man. In the absence of such an out-of-bounds Everyday life understanding of rationality is evil. Understanding good will make it impossible for evil to appear, Tolstoy believes. But for this it is important to "awaken" the highest rationality in oneself by negating the usual ideas about the rationality of everyday life. And this causes spiritual discomfort in the experience of people, because it is always scary to give up the familiar, visible for the sake of the unusual, invisible.

Hence Tolstoy's active denunciation of the evil and lies of real life and the call for the immediate and final realization of good in everything. The most important step in achieving this goal is, according to Tolstoy, non-resistance to evil by violence. For Tolstoy, the commandment of non-resistance to evil by violence means an unconditional moral principle, obligatory for all, the law. He proceeds from the fact that non-resistance does not mean reconciliation with evil, internal surrender to it. This is a special kind of resistance, i.e. rejection, condemnation, rejection and opposition. Tolstoy emphasizes that, following the teachings of Christ, all of whose deeds on earth were counteracting evil in its diverse manifestations, it is necessary to fight evil. But this struggle should be completely transferred to the inner world of a person and carried out in certain ways and means. Tolstoy considers reason and love to be the best means of such a struggle. He believes that if any hostile action is answered with a passive protest, non-resistance, then the enemies themselves will stop their actions and the evil will disappear. The use of violence against a neighbor, whom the Commandment requires to love, deprives a person of the possibility of bliss, spiritual comfort, Tolstoy believes. And vice versa, turning one's cheek and submitting to someone else's violence only strengthens the inner consciousness of one's own moral height. And this consciousness will not be able to take away any arbitrariness from outside.

Tolstoy does not reveal the content of the very concept of evil, which should not be resisted. And so the idea of non-resistance is abstract in nature, significantly at odds with real life. Tolstoy does not want to see the difference between a person's forgiveness of his enemy for the sake of saving his soul and the inaction of the state, for example, in relation to criminals. He ignores that evil in its destructive actions is insatiable and that the lack of opposition only encourages it. Noticing that there is no and will not be a rebuff, evil ceases to hide behind the guise of integrity, and manifests itself openly with rude and impudent cynicism.

All these inconsistencies and contradictions cause a certain distrust of the position of Tolstoy's non-resistance. It accepts the goal - overcoming evil, but makes a peculiar choice about ways and means. This teaching is not so much about evil, but about how not to overcome it. The problem is not the denial of resistance to evil, but whether violence can always be recognized as evil. Tolstoy failed to solve this problem consistently and clearly.

So, the development of Russian philosophy in general, its religious line in particular, confirms that in order to understand Russian history, the Russian people and its spiritual world, its soul, it is important to get acquainted with the philosophical searches of the Russian mind. This is due to the fact that the central problems of these searches were questions about the spiritual essence of man, about faith, about the meaning of life, about death and immortality, about freedom and responsibility, the relationship between good and evil, about the destiny of Russia, and many others. Russian religious philosophy actively contributes not only to bringing people closer to the paths of moral perfection, but also to familiarizing them with the riches of the spiritual life of mankind.

Introduction ................................................ ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. ....

The second birth of Tolstoy .............................................. ................................................. ................................................. ..........

What is hidden behind the question of the meaning of life? ................................................. ......................

God, freedom, goodness .............................................. ................................................. ................................................. ...............................

The Five Commandments of Christianity .............................................................. ................................................. ................................................. ....

Non-resistance as a manifestation of the law of love .............................................. ................................................. ................

Non-resistance is the law...................................................... ................................................. ................................................. ...........

Why do people hold on to the old? ................................................. ............................................

Conclusion................................................. ................................................. ................................................. ............................................

References................................................ ................................................. ................................................. ..

Introduction

From the point of view of the Russian writer and thinker Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), the drama of human existence lies in the contradiction between the inevitability of death and the thirst for immortality inherent in man. The embodiment of this contradiction is the question of the meaning of life - a question that can be expressed as follows: “Is there such a meaning in my life that would not be destroyed by my inevitable death?” . Tolstoy believes that a person's life is filled with meaning to the extent that he subordinates it to the fulfillment of the will of God, and the will of God is given to us as the law of love, opposing the law of violence. The law of love is most fully and most accurately developed in the commandments of Christ. In order to save himself, his soul, in order to give meaning to life, a person must stop doing evil, commit violence, stop once and for all, and above all when he himself becomes an object of evil and violence. Do not respond with evil to evil, do not resist evil with violence - such is the basis of Leo Tolstoy's life teaching.

Religion and the theme of non-resistance in one form or another are devoted to all of Tolstoy's work after 1878. The corresponding works can be divided into four cycles: confessional - "Confession" (1879-1881), "What is my faith?" (1884); theoretical - "What is religion and what is its essence?" (1884), The Kingdom of God is within you (1890–1893), The Law of Violence and the Law of Love (1908); journalistic - “Thou shalt not kill” (1900), “I cannot be silent” (1908); artistic - "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886), "Kreutzer Sonata" (1887-1879), "Resurrection" (1889-1899), "Father Sergius" (1898).

The second birth of Tolstoy

Tolstoy's conscious life - if we assume that it began at the age of 18 - is divided into two equal halves of 32 years, of which the second differs from the first as day from night. We are talking about a change that is at the same time spiritual enlightenment - a radical change in the moral foundations of life. In the essay “What Is My Faith?” Tolstoy writes: “That which before seemed good to me seemed bad, and that which before seemed bad seemed good. What happened to me is what happens to a person who goes out to do business and suddenly decides on the way that he does not need this business at all - and turned back home. And everything that was on the right became on the left, and everything that was on the left became on the right.

The first half of Leo Tolstoy's life, according to all generally accepted criteria, was very successful, happy. An earl by birth, he received a good upbringing and a rich inheritance. He entered life as a typical representative of the highest nobility. He had a wild, wild youth. In 1851-1854 he served in the Caucasus, in 1854-1855 he participated in the defense of Sevastopol. However, his main occupation was writing. Although novels and stories brought fame to Tolstoy, and large fees strengthened his fortune, nevertheless, his writing faith began to be undermined. He saw that writers do not play their own role: they teach without knowing what to teach, and constantly argue among themselves about whose truth is higher, in their work they are driven by selfish motives to a greater extent than ordinary people who do not claim to be the mentors of society. Without giving up writing, he left the writing environment and after a six-month trip abroad (1857) took up teaching activities among the peasants (1858-1863). During the year (1861–1862) he served as a conciliator in disputes between peasants and landlords. Nothing brought Tolstoy complete satisfaction. The disappointments that accompanied his every activity became the source of a growing inner turmoil from which nothing could save. The growing spiritual crisis led to a sharp and irreversible upheaval in Tolstoy's worldview. This revolution was the beginning of the second half of life.

The second half of Leo Tolstoy's conscious life was a denial of the first. He came to the conclusion that, like most people, he lived a life devoid of meaning - he lived for himself. Everything that he valued - pleasure, fame, wealth - is subject to decay and oblivion. “I,” writes Tolstoy, “as if I lived and lived, walked and walked, and came to an abyss and clearly saw that there was nothing ahead but death.” It is not certain steps in life that are false, but its very direction, that faith, or rather the unbelief, which lies at its foundation. And what is not a lie, what is not vanity? Tolstoy found the answer to this question in the teachings of Christ. It teaches that a person should serve the one who sent him into this world - God, and in his simple commandments shows how to do this.

Tolstoy awakened to a new life. With heart, mind and will, he accepted the program of Christ and devoted himself entirely to following it, justifying and preaching it.

The question of what caused such a sharp change in the vitality of Leo Tolstoy does not have a satisfactory explanation, however, some assumptions can be made on the basis of his works.

The spiritual renewal of the individual is one of the central themes of Tolstoy's last novel, The Resurrection (1899), written by him at a time when he had become a Christian and non-resistance. Main character Prince Nekhlyudov turns out to be a juror in the case of a girl accused of murder, in which he recognizes Katyusha Maslova - the maid of his aunts, once seduced by him and abandoned. This fact turned Nekhlyudov's life upside down. He saw his personal guilt in the fall of Katyusha Maslova and the guilt of his class in the fall of millions of such Katyushas. “The God who lived in him woke up in his mind,” and Nekhlyudov acquired that point of view, which allowed him to take a fresh look at his life and those around him and reveal its complete internal falsity. Shocked, Nekhlyudov broke with his environment and followed Maslova to hard labor. The abrupt transformation of Nekhlyudov from a gentleman, a frivolous life-breaker into a sincere Christian, began in the form of deep repentance, an awakened conscience and was accompanied by intense mental work. In addition, in the personality of Nekhlyudov, Tolstoy identifies at least two prerequisites that favored such a transformation - a sharp, inquisitive mind that sensitively fixed lies and hypocrisy in human relations, as well as a pronounced tendency to change. The second is especially important: “Each person bears in himself the rudiments of all human qualities and sometimes manifests one, sometimes others, and is often completely unlike himself, remaining all the same and himself. For some people, these changes are especially abrupt. And Nekhlyudov belonged to such people.”

In order for a life choice to receive a worthy status, in the eyes of Tolstoy, it had to be justified before reason. With such a constant vigilance of the mind, there were few loopholes for deceit and self-deception, covering up the original immorality, inhumanity of the so-called civilized forms of life. In exposing them, Tolstoy was merciless.

There is an analogy with the non-Khlyudian model in the way Tolstoy's spiritual crisis proceeded. It began with involuntary internal reactions that testified to malfunctions in the structure of life, “something very strange began to happen to me,” Tolstoy writes, “something very strange began to happen to me: at first they began to find minutes of bewilderment, a stoppage of life, as if I didn’t know how I to live, what to do, and I was lost and depressed. But it passed, and I continued to live as before. Then these moments of bewilderment began to be repeated more and more often and all in the same form. These stops of life were always expressed by the same questions: Why? Well, and then?

Also, the 50-year milestone of life could serve as an external impetus to the spiritual transformation of Tolstoy. The 50th anniversary is a special age in the life of every person, a reminder that life has an end. And it reminded Tolstoy of the same thing. The problem of death worried Tolstoy before. Tolstoy was always baffled by death, especially death in the form of legal murders. In 1866, he unsuccessfully defended in court a soldier who hit the commander and was doomed to death. Tolstoy was especially affected by the death penalty by the guillotine, which he observed in Paris in 1857, and later by the death of his beloved elder brother Nikolai at the age of 37 in 1860. Tolstoy began to think long ago about the general meaning of life, the relationship between life and death. However, earlier it was a side theme, now it has become the main one, now death was perceived as a quick and inevitable end. Faced with the need to find out his personal attitude to death, Tolstoy discovered that his life, his values do not withstand the test of death. “I could not give any reasonable meaning to any act, nor to my whole life. I was only surprised how I could not understand this at the very beginning. All this has been known to everyone for so long. Not today, tomorrow, illnesses, death (and have already come) will come to loved ones, to me, and nothing will be left but stench and worms. My deeds, whatever they may be, will all be forgotten - sooner, later, and I will not be. So why bother?" These words of Tolstoy from the "Confession" reveal both the nature and the immediate source of his spiritual illness, which could be described as a panic before death. He clearly understood that only such a life can be considered meaningful, which is able to assert itself in the face of inevitable death, withstand the test of the question: “What is the trouble, for what is there to live at all, if everything is swallowed up by death?” Tolstoy set himself the goal of finding that which is not subject to death.

What is hidden behind the question of the meaning of life?

According to Tolstoy, a person is in disagreement, discord with himself. It is as if two people live in it - internal and external, of which the first is dissatisfied with what the second does, and the second does not do what the first wants. This inconsistency, self-disintegration is found in different people with varying degrees of severity, but it is inherent in all of them. Self-contradictory, torn apart by mutually denying aspirations, a person is doomed to suffer, to be dissatisfied with himself. A person constantly strives to overcome himself, to become different.

However, it is not enough to say that it is natural for a person to suffer and be dissatisfied. Moreover, a person also knows that he is suffering, and is dissatisfied with himself, he does not accept his suffering position. His discontent and suffering are doubled: to the very suffering and discontent is added the consciousness that this is bad. A person does not just strive to become different, to eliminate everything that gives rise to suffering and a feeling of discontent; he longs to become free from suffering. A person not only lives, he also wants his life to have meaning.

People associate the fulfillment of their desires with civilization, changes in external forms of life, natural and social environment. It is assumed that a person can free himself from a passive position with the help of science, the arts, the growth of the economy, the development of technology, the creation of a comfortable life, etc. them during the first half of his conscious life. However, just personal experience and observation of people in his circle convinced him that this path was false. The higher a person rises in his worldly pursuits and hobbies, the greater the wealth, the deeper the knowledge, the stronger the spiritual anxiety, discontent and suffering from which he wanted to be freed in these occupations. One might think that if activity and progress increase suffering, then inactivity will contribute to its reduction. Such an assumption is incorrect. The cause of suffering is not progress in itself, but the expectations that are associated with it, that completely unjustified hope that by increasing the speed of trains, by increasing the productivity of fields, something else can be achieved besides the fact that a person will move faster and eat better. From this point of view, no big difference whether the emphasis is on activity and progress or inactivity. The very attitude to give meaning to human life by changing its external forms is erroneous. This attitude comes from the conviction that the inner man depends on the outer, that the state of the soul and consciousness of a person is a consequence of his position in the world and among people. But if that were the case, then there would be no conflict between them from the very beginning.

In a word, material and cultural progress mean what they mean: material and cultural progress. They do not affect the suffering of the soul. Tolstoy sees the unconditional proof of this in the fact that progress is meaningless if we consider it in the perspective of a person's death. Why money, power, etc., why try at all, achieve something, if everything inevitably ends in death and oblivion. “One can only live while drunk on life; but when you sober up, you can’t help but see that all this is just a deception, and a stupid deception! The tragedy of human existence, according to Tolstoy, is well conveyed by the eastern (ancient Indian) fable about a traveler caught in the steppe by an angry beast. “Fleeing from the beast, the traveler jumps into a waterless well, but at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its mouth open to devour him. And the unfortunate man, not daring to get out, so as not to die from an angry beast, not daring to jump to the bottom of the well, so as not to be devoured by a dragon, grabs onto the branches of a wild bush growing in the crevices of the well and clings to it. His hands are weakening, and he feels that he will soon have to give himself up to death, which is waiting for him on both sides, but he still holds on, and while he holds on, he looks around and sees that two mice, one black, the other white, are uniformly walking around the trunk of a bush. , on which it hangs, undermine it. The bush is about to break off and break off by itself, and it will fall into the mouth of the dragon. The traveler sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish; but while he is hanging, he searches around him and finds drops of honey on the leaves of a bush, takes them out with his tongue and licks them. White and black mice, day and night, inevitably lead a person to death - and not a person in general, but each of us, and not somewhere and sometime, but here and now, “and this is not a fable, but this is true, undeniable and understandable truth." And nothing will save you from this - neither huge wealth, nor refined taste, nor extensive knowledge.

The conclusion about the meaninglessness of life, to which experience seems to lead and which is confirmed by philosophical wisdom, is, from the point of view of Tolstoy, clearly contradictory logically, so that one can agree with him. How can reason justify the meaninglessness of life if it is itself a product of life? He has no basis for such justification. Therefore, the very statement about the meaninglessness of life contains its own refutation: a person who came to such a conclusion would first of all have to settle his own scores with life, and then he could not talk about its meaninglessness, if he talks about the meaninglessness of life. life and thereby continues to live a life that is worse than death, which means that in reality it is not as meaningless and bad as it is said. Further, the conclusion that life is meaningless means that a person is able to set goals that he cannot achieve and formulate questions that he cannot answer. But aren't these goals and questions being posed by the same person? And if he does not have the strength to realize them, then where did he get the strength to deliver them? No less convincing is Tolstoy's objection: if life is meaningless, then how did millions and millions of people, all of humanity, live and live? And since they live, enjoy life and continue to live, does it mean that they find some important meaning in it? Which?

Not satisfied with the negative solution to the question of the meaning of life, Leo Tolstoy turned to the spiritual experience of ordinary people living by their own labor, the experience of the people.

Ordinary people are well acquainted with the question of the meaning of life, in which for them there is no difficulty, no riddle. They know that they must live according to God's law and live in such a way as not to destroy their souls. They know about their material insignificance, but it does not frighten them, because the soul remains connected with God. The lack of education of these people, their lack of philosophical and scientific knowledge does not prevent them from understanding the truth of life, rather, on the contrary, it helps. In a strange way, it turned out that ignorant, prejudiced peasants are aware of the depth of the question about the meaning of life, they understand that they are being asked about the eternal, undying meaning of their life and about whether they are afraid of impending death.

Listening to the words of ordinary people, peering into their lives, Tolstoy came to the conclusion that the truth speaks through their lips. They understood the question of the meaning of life deeper, more precisely than all the greatest thinkers and philosophers.

The question of the meaning of life is the question of the relationship between the finite and the infinite in it, that is, whether finite life has an eternal, indestructible meaning, and if so, what does it consist of? Is there anything immortal in her? If the finite life of man contained its meaning in itself, then this question would not exist. “To solve this question, it is equally insufficient to equate the finite with the finite and the infinite with the infinite,” one must reveal the relationship of one to the other. Consequently, the question of the meaning of life is wider than the scope of logical knowledge, it requires going beyond the scope of the area that is subject to reason. “It was impossible to look for an answer to my question in rational knowledge,” writes Tolstoy. We had to admit that “all living mankind has some other kind of knowledge, unreasonable - faith, which makes it possible to live.”

Observations on the life experience of ordinary people, who are characterized by a meaningful attitude towards their own life with a clear understanding of its insignificance, and the correctly understood logic of the very question of the meaning of life, lead Tolstoy to the same conclusion that the question of the meaning of life is a question of faith, and not knowledge. In Tolstoy's philosophy, the concept of faith has a special content that does not coincide with the traditional one. It is not the realization of things hoped for and the assurance of things not seen. "Faith is a person's awareness of such a position in the world that obliges him to certain actions." “Faith is the knowledge of the meaning of human life, as a result of which a person does not destroy himself, but lives. Faith is the power of life." From these definitions it becomes clear that for Tolstoy a life that has meaning and a life based on faith are one and the same.

The concept of faith in Tolstoy's understanding is completely unrelated to incomprehensible mysteries, incredibly miraculous transformations and other prejudices. Moreover, it does not mean at all that human knowledge has any other instrumentation than reason, based on experience and subject to strict laws of logic. Describing the peculiarity of the knowledge of faith, Tolstoy writes: “I will not seek an explanation of everything. I know that the explanation of everything must be hidden, as the beginning of everything, in infinity. But I want to understand in such a way that I can be led to the inevitable-inexplicable, I want everything that is inexplicable to be such, not because the demands of my mind are wrong (they are correct, and outside of them I cannot understand anything), but because that I see the limits of my mind. I want to understand in such a way that every inexplicable situation appears to me as a necessity of reason, and not as an obligation to believe. Tolstoy did not recognize unproven knowledge. He took nothing on faith except faith itself. Faith as the force of life goes beyond the competence of the mind. In this sense, the concept of faith is a manifestation of the honesty of the mind, which does not want to take on more than it can.

From such an understanding of faith, it follows that doubt and confusion are hidden behind the question of the meaning of life. The meaning of life becomes a question when life is deprived of meaning. “I understood,” writes Tolstoy, “that in order to understand the meaning of life, it is necessary first of all that life be not meaningless and evil, and then only reason in order to understand it.” Confused questioning what to live for is a sure sign that life is wrong. From the works written by Tolstoy, one and only conclusion follows: the meaning of life cannot lie in the fact that it dies with the death of a person. This means: it cannot consist in life for oneself, as well as in life for other people, for they also die, as well as in life for humanity, for it is not eternal either. “Life for oneself cannot have any meaning ... To live intelligently, one must live in such a way that death cannot destroy life.”

God, freedom, goodness

That infinite, immortal principle, in conjunction with which life only acquires meaning, is called God. Nothing else can be said with certainty about God. The mind can know that God exists, but it cannot comprehend God himself (therefore, Tolstoy resolutely rejected church judgments about God, the trinity of God, his creation of the world in six days, the legend of angels and devils, the fall of man, immaculate conception etc., considering all this as gross prejudice). Any meaningful statement about God, even such that God is one, contradicts itself, for the concept of God, by definition, means that which cannot be defined. For Tolstoy, the concept of God was a human concept that expresses what we humans can feel and know about God, but not what God thinks about people and the world. In it, in this concept, as Tolstoy understands it, there was nothing mysterious, except that it denotes the mysterious foundation of life and knowledge. God is the cause of knowledge, but not its object. “Since the concept of God cannot be other than the concept of the beginning of everything that the mind cognizes, it is obvious that God, as the beginning of everything, cannot be comprehensible to the mind. Only by following the path of rational thinking, at the extreme limit of the mind, one can find God, but, having reached this concept, the mind already ceases to comprehend. Knowledge about God Tolstoy compares with the knowledge of the infinity of number. Both are certainly assumed, but cannot be defined. “I am brought to the certainty of the knowledge of an infinite number by addition, to the certainty of the knowledge of God I am brought by the question: where am I from?”.

The idea of God as the limit of reason, the incomprehensible fullness of truth sets a certain way of being in the world when a person is consciously oriented towards this limit and fullness. This is what freedom is. Freedom is a purely human property, an expression of the middle of his being. “A person would not be free if he did not know any truth, and in the same way would not be free and would not even have the concept of freedom, if all the truth that should guide him in life, once for all, in all its purity, without the admixture of error would have been revealed to him.” Freedom also consists in this movement from darkness to light, from lower to higher, "from truth, more mixed with errors, to truth, more freed from them." It can be defined as the desire to be guided by the truth.

Freedom is not identical with arbitrariness, a simple ability to act on a whim. It is always associated with truth. According to Tolstoy's classification, there are three kinds of truths. First, the truths that have already become a habit, the second nature of a person. Secondly, the truths are vague, insufficiently clarified. The first is no longer with all the truth. The second is not entirely true. Along with them there is a third series of truths, which, on the one hand, were revealed to a person with such clarity that he cannot get around them and must determine his attitude towards them, and on the other hand, did not become a habit for him. In relation to the truths of this third kind, the freedom of man is revealed. It is important here that we are talking about a clear truth, and that we are talking about a higher truth in comparison with that which has already been mastered in life practice. Freedom is the power that allows a person to follow the path to God.

But what does this work and this path consist of, what duties follow for a person from his belonging to God? The recognition of God as the beginning, the source of life and reason puts a person in a completely definite relationship to him, which Tolstoy likens to the relationship of a son to his father, a worker to a master. The son cannot judge the father and is not able to fully understand the meaning of his instructions, he must follow the will of the father, and only as he obeys the father's will he realizes that it has a beneficial meaning for him, a good son is a loving son, he does not act as he wants , but in the way the father wants, and in this, in the fulfillment of the will of the father, he sees his destiny and good. In the same way, a worker is a worker because he is obedient to the owner, carries out his orders - for only the owner knows what his work is for, the owner not only gives meaning to the efforts of the worker, he also feeds him; a good worker is a worker who understands that his life and well-being depend on the owner, and treats the owner with a sense of selflessness, love. Man's attitude to God should be the same: man does not live for himself, but for God. Only such an understanding of the meaning of one's own life corresponds to the actual position of a person in the world, follows from the nature of his connection with God. The normal, human relation of man to God is the relation of love. “The essence of human life and the highest law that should guide it is love.”

But how to love God and what does it mean to love God if we know nothing about God and cannot know, except that he exists? Yes, it is not known what God is, his plans, his commandments are not known. However, it is known that, firstly, in every person there is a divine principle - the soul, and secondly, there are other people who are in the same relationship to God. And if a person does not have the opportunity to communicate directly with God, then he can do it indirectly, through the right attitude towards other people and the right attitude towards himself.

The right attitude towards oneself can be briefly defined as concern for the salvation of the soul. “In the soul of man there are not moderate rules of justice, but the ideal of complete, infinite divine perfection. Only striving for this perfection deviates the direction of human life from the animal state to the divine state as far as it is possible in this life. From this point of view, the real state of the individual does not matter, because no matter what height of spiritual development he reaches, it, this height, is vanishingly insignificant in comparison with the unattainable perfection of the divine ideal. Whatever end point we take, the distance from it to infinity will be infinite. Therefore, an indicator of the correct attitude of a person towards himself is the striving for perfection, this very movement from oneself to God. Moreover, “a person who stands on a lower level, advancing towards perfection, lives more morally, better, fulfills the teaching more than a person who stands on a much higher level of morality, but does not advance towards perfection.” Consciousness of the degree of discrepancy with ideal perfection is the criterion of a correct attitude towards oneself. Since in reality this degree of discrepancy is always infinite, then a person is the more moral, the more fully he realizes his imperfection.

If we take these two attitudes towards God - the attitude towards others and the attitude towards oneself - then the initial and fundamental, from the point of view of Tolstoy, is the attitude towards oneself. A moral attitude towards oneself, as it were, automatically guarantees a moral attitude towards others. A person who realizes how infinitely far from the ideal he is is a person free from superstition that he can arrange the life of other people. Human concern for cleanliness own soul is the source of a person's moral obligations in relation to other people, the state, etc.

The concepts of God, freedom, goodness connect the finite human existence with the infinity of the world. “All these concepts, in which the finite is equated with the infinite and the meaning of life is obtained, the concepts of God, freedom, goodness, we subject to logical research. And these concepts do not withstand the scrutiny of reason. They go away in content to such a distance, which is only indicated by the mind, but is not comprehended by it. They are given to man directly, and the mind not so much substantiates these concepts as clarifies them. Only a kind person can understand what goodness is. In order to comprehend the meaning of life with the mind, it is necessary that the very life of the one who owns the mind should be meaningful. If this is not so, if life is meaningless, then the mind has no object to consider, and at best it can point to this non-objectivity.

However, the question arises: “If it is impossible to know what the infinite is and, accordingly, God, freedom, goodness, then how can one be infinite, divine, free, kind?” The problem of connecting the finite with the infinite has no solution. The infinite is infinite because it can neither be defined nor reproduced. L. N. Tolstoy in the afterword to the “Kreutzer Sonata” speaks of two ways of orientation on the way: in one case, specific objects that must be met on the way in the second case, the correctness of the path is controlled by a compass. Similarly, there are two different ways moral guidance: the first is that an exact description of the actions that a person should do or which he should avoid is given, the second way is that the guidance for a person is the unattainable perfection of the ideal. Just as the compass can only determine the degree of deviation from the path, in the same way the ideal can become only a starting point for human imperfection. The concepts of God, freedom, goodness, revealing the infinite meaning of our finite life, are the very ideal, the practical purpose of which is to be a reproach to a person, to point him to what he is not.

five commandments of christianity

According to Leo Tolstoy, the essence of the moral ideal is most fully expressed in the teachings of Jesus Christ. At the same time, for Tolstoy, Jesus Christ is not God or the son of God, he considers him a reformer, destroying the old and giving new foundations of life. Tolstoy, further, sees a fundamental difference between the true views of Jesus, set forth in the Gospels, and their perversion in the dogmas of Orthodoxy and others. Christian churches.

“The fact that love is a necessary and good condition for human life was recognized by all the religious teachings of antiquity. In all the teachings: the Egyptian sages, Brahmins, Stoics, Buddhists, Taoists, etc., friendliness, pity, mercy, charity and love in general were recognized as one of the main virtues. However, only Christ elevated love to the level of the fundamental, highest law of life.

As the highest, fundamental law of life, love is the only moral law. The law of love is not a commandment, but an expression of the very essence of Christianity. This is an eternal ideal towards which people will endlessly strive. Jesus Christ is not limited to the proclamation of an ideal. Along with this, he gives commandments.

In Tolstoy's interpretation there are five such commandments. Here they are:

1) Don't be angry;

2) Don't leave your wife;

3) Never swear an oath to anyone and in anything;

4) Do not resist evil by force;

5) Do not consider people of other nations as your enemies.

The commandments of Christ are “all negative and show only what, at a certain stage of human development, people can no longer do. These commandments are, as it were, notes on the endless path of perfection...”. They cannot but be negative, since we are talking about the awareness of the degree of imperfection. They are nothing more than a step, a step on the path to perfection. They, these commandments, together constitute such truths that, as truths, are not in doubt, but have not yet been mastered in practice, that is, truths in relation to which freedom is revealed. modern man. For a modern person, they are already truths, but have not yet become a daily habit. A person already dares to think so, but is not yet able to act so. Therefore, these truths proclaimed by Jesus Christ are a test of human freedom.

Non-resistance as a manifestation of the law of love

According to Tolstoy, the main of the five commandments is the fourth: "Do not resist evil," which imposes a ban on violence. The ancient law, which condemned evil and violence in general, allowed that in certain cases they could be used for good - as a fair retribution according to the "eye for an eye" formula. Jesus Christ abolishes this law. He believes that violence can never be a blessing, under any circumstances. The prohibition of violence is absolute. Not only kindness must be reciprocated with kindness. And evil must be repaid with good.

Violence is the opposite of love. Tolstoy has at least three related definitions of violence. First, he equates violence with murder or the threat of murder. The need to use bayonets, prisons, gallows and other means of physical destruction arises when the task is to force a person to do something externally. Hence the second definition of violence as an external influence. The need for external influence, in turn, appears when there is no internal agreement between people. So we come to the third, most important definition of violence: "To rape means to do what the person being abused does not want." In this understanding, violence coincides with evil and it is directly opposite to love. To love means to do as the other wants, to subordinate one's will to the will of the other. To rape means to subjugate another's will to one's own.

Non-resistance is more than a rejection of the law of violence. “Recognition of the life of every person as sacred is the first and only foundation of all morality.” Non-resistance to evil just means the recognition of the original, unconditional sanctity of human life.

Through non-resistance, a person recognizes that the issues of life and death are beyond his competence. At the same time, he refuses to be a judge in relation to another at all. It is not given to man to judge man. In those cases when we seem to judge other people, calling some good, others evil, then we either deceive ourselves and others, Man has power only over himself. “Everything that is not your soul, everything is none of your business,” says Tolstoy. Calling someone a criminal and subjecting him to violence, we take away this human right from him. Refusing to resist evil with violence, a person recognizes this truth, he refuses to judge another, because he does not consider himself better than him. You don't need to fix other people, but yourself.

Man plays his own role only when he fights the evil in himself. By setting himself the task of fighting evil in others, he enters into an area that is not under his control. People who commit violence tend to hide it. They hide from others and from themselves. This is especially true of state violence, which is so organized that “people, committing the most terrible deeds, do not see their responsibility for them. ... Some demanded, others decided, the third confirmed, the fourth proposed, the fifth reported, the sixth ordered, the seventh fulfilled. And no one is to blame. The blurring of guilt in such cases is not simply the result of a deliberate attempt to hide the ends. It reflects the very essence of the matter: violence is objectively an area of unfree and irresponsible behavior. People, through a complex system of external obligations, turn out to be accomplices in crimes that none of them would have committed if these crimes depended only on his individual will. Non-resistance differs from violence in that it is an area of individually responsible behavior. No matter how difficult the fight against evil in oneself, it depends only on the person himself. There are no forces that could prevent someone who decided to non-resistance.

Tolstoy examines in detail the common arguments against non-resistance. Three of them are the most common.

The second argument is that "one person cannot go against the whole world." What if, for example, I alone will be as meek as the doctrine requires, and all the rest will continue to live according to the old laws, then I will be ridiculed, beaten, shot, I will ruin my life in vain. The teaching of Christ is the way of salvation for those who follow it. Therefore, anyone who says that he would be glad to follow this teaching, but it is a pity for him to ruin his life, at least does not understand what is at stake. It is as if a drowning man, to whom a rope was thrown to save him, would object that he would willingly use the rope, but was afraid that others would not do the same.

The third argument is a continuation of the previous two and calls into question the implementation of the teachings of Christ due to the fact that it involves great suffering. In general, human life cannot be without suffering. The whole question is when these sufferings are greater, whether when a person lives in the name of God, or when he lives in the name of the world. Tolstoy's answer is unequivocal: when he lives in the name of peace. Considered from the point of view of poverty and wealth, sickness and health, the inevitability of death, the life of a Christian is not better life pagan, but in comparison with the latter, it has the advantage that it is not completely absorbed by the empty occupation of the imaginary provision of life, the pursuit of power, wealth, health. In the life of supporters of the teachings of Christ, there is less suffering, if only for the reason that they are free from suffering associated with envy, disappointment from failures in the struggle, rivalry. Experience, says Tolstoy, also confirms that people suffer mainly not because of their Christian forgiveness, but because of their worldly selfishness. The teaching of Christ is not only more moral, but it is also more prudent. It warns people not to do stupid things.

Thus, the commonplace arguments against non-resistance are nothing more than prejudices. With their help, people seek to deceive themselves, to find a cover and justification for their immoral and disastrous way of life, to escape personal responsibility for how they live.

Non-resistance is the law

The commandment of non-resistance unites the teaching of Christ into a whole only if it is understood not as a saying, but as a law - a rule that knows no exceptions and is obligatory for execution. To allow exceptions to the law of love is to recognize that there may be instances of morally justified use of violence. If we assume that someone, or under certain circumstances, can oppose by force what he considers evil, then anyone else can do the same. After all, the whole peculiarity of the situation lies in the fact that people cannot come to an agreement on the issue of good and evil. If we allow at least one case of a “justified” murder, then we open an endless series of them. To use violence, it is necessary to find such a sinless one who can accurately judge good and evil, and such people do not exist.

Tolstoy also considered untenable the argument in favor of violence, according to which violence is justified in those cases when it stops greater violence. When we kill a man who has raised a knife over his victim, we can never know with complete certainty whether he would have put his intention into action or not, whether something would have changed at the last moment in his mind. When we execute a criminal, then again we cannot be absolutely sure that the criminal will not change, will not repent, and that our execution will not turn out to be a useless cruelty. But even assuming that we are talking about an inveterate criminal who would never change, the execution cannot be justified, because executions have such an impact on those around them, primarily people close to the executed, that they give rise to enemies twice as large and twice as evil as those who were killed and buried in the ground. Violence tends to be reproduced on an expanding scale. Therefore, the very idea of limited violence and limitation of violence by violence is false. It was this idea that was abolished by the law of non-resistance. Violence is easy to commit. But it cannot be justified. Tolstoy is talking about whether there can be a right to violence, to kill. His conclusion is categorical - such a right does not exist. If we accept Christian values and believe that people are equal before God, then it is impossible to justify the violence of a person against a person without violating the laws of reason and logic. That is why Tolstoy considered the death penalty a form of murder, which is much worse than just killing out of passion or for other personal reasons. It is quite possible to understand that a person, in a moment of anger or irritation, commits a murder in order to protect himself or a loved one; But one cannot understand how people can commit murder calmly, deliberately, how they can consider murder necessary. It was beyond Tolstoy's understanding. “The death penalty,” writes Tolstoy in “Memoirs of the Trial of a Soldier,” “as it was, and remains for me, one of those human acts, information about the commission of which in reality does not destroy in me the consciousness of the impossibility of their commission.”

Why do people hold on to the old?

“When people believe the teaching of Christ and follow it, there will be peace on earth.” But people in their mass do not believe and do not fulfill the teachings of Christ. Why? According to Leo Tolstoy, there are at least two main reasons. This is, firstly, the inertia of the previous understanding of life and, secondly, the distortion of Christian teaching.

Before Jesus Christ formulated the commandment of non-resistance, society was dominated by the belief that evil could be destroyed by evil. It was embodied in the corresponding structure of human life, entered into everyday life, a habit. The most important focus of violence is the state with its armies, compulsory military service, oaths, taxes, courts, prisons, etc. In a word, the whole civilization is based on the law of violence, although it is not reduced to it.

L. N. Tolstoy believes that the truth of Christ, which we find in the Gospels, was subsequently distorted by the churches that succeeded him. The distortions touched on three main points. First, every church has declared that only it correctly understands and fulfills the teachings of Christ. Such a statement is contrary to the spirit of the teaching, which aims at the movement towards perfection and in relation to which none of the followers, either an individual or a collection of people, can claim that they have finally understood it. Secondly, they made salvation dependent on certain rites, sacraments and prayers, elevated themselves to the status of mediators between people and God. Thirdly, the churches perverted the meaning of the most important fourth commandment of non-resistance to evil, questioned it, which was tantamount to abolishing the law of love. The scope of the principle of love was narrowed down to personal life, domestic use, “for public life, it was recognized as necessary for the good of most people to use against evil people all kinds of violence, prisons, executions, wars, actions that are directly opposite to the weakest feeling of love.

“Instead of leading the world in his life, the church, for the sake of the world, reinterpreted the metaphysical teaching of Christ in such a way that no requirements for life followed from it, so that it did not prevent people from living the way they lived ... The world did everything that wanted, leaving the Church, as she knows how, to keep up with him in their explanations of the meaning of life. The world established its own life, in everything contrary to the teachings of Christ, and the church invented allegories, according to which it would appear that people, living contrary to the law of Christ, live in accordance with it. And it ended up that the world began to live a life that became worse than pagan life, and the church began not only to justify this life, but to assert that this is precisely the teaching of Christ. As a result, a situation has developed when people profess in words what they deny in deeds and when they hate the order of things that they themselves maintain. Violence has continued in deceit. “Lies support the cruelty of life, the cruelty of life requires more and more lies, and, like a ball of snow, both grow uncontrollably.”

Conclusion

Tolstoy is often accused of abstract moralism. That, for purely moral reasons, he denied all violence and considered all physical coercion as violence, and that for this reason he closed his way to understanding all the complexity and depth of life relationships. However, this assumption is incorrect.

The idea of non-resistance cannot be understood as if Tolstoy was against joint actions, socially significant actions, in general, against the direct moral duties of a person in relation to other people. Quite the opposite. Non-resistance, according to Tolstoy, is the application of the teachings of Christ to social life, a specific path that transforms the relationship of enmity between people into a relationship of cooperation between them.

It should also not be considered that Tolstoy called for the rejection of opposition to evil. On the contrary, he believed that it was possible and necessary to resist evil, only not by violence, but by other non-violent methods. Moreover, only then can you really resist violence when you refuse to respond in kind. “Defenders of the public life-conception objectively try to confuse the concept of power, i.e., violence, with the concept of spiritual influence, but this confusion is absolutely impossible.” Tolstoy himself did not develop the tactics of collective non-violent resistance, but his teaching allows for such tactics. He understands non-resistance as a positive force of love and truth, in addition, he directly names such forms of resistance as persuasion, argument, protest, which are designed to separate a person who commits evil from evil itself, call to his conscience, the spiritual principle in him, which cancel the previous evil in the sense that it ceases to be an obstacle to subsequent cooperation. Tolstoy called his method revolutionary. And one cannot but agree with this. It is even more revolutionary than ordinary revolutions. Ordinary revolutions make a revolution in the external position of people, as far as power and property are concerned. Tolstoy's revolution is aimed at a radical change in the spiritual foundations of life.

References

1. Introduction to Philosophy: In 2 vols. M., 1990

2. Guseynov A. A. Great moralists. M., Republic, 1995

3. Rosenthal M. M. Philosophical Dictionary. M., Publishing house of political literature, 1975

4. Philosophical encyclopedic Dictionary. M., 1983

The teachings of L.N. Tolstoy

1. Historical and philosophical foundations of the worldview of L. Tolstoy (Rousseau, Kant, Scholengauer)

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) is not only an outstanding artist-writer of world significance, but also a deep thinker-philosopher of the second half of the 19th - early 20th century.

The point of view that has developed under the influence of articles by V.I. Lenin and became dominant in the Soviet era, according to which L.N. Tolstoy is great as an artist, but "weak" as a thinker, is wrong. Recognition of the greatness of L.N. Tolstoy as a thinker does not mean, however, the assertion that everything philosophical ideas thinkers retain their relevance in modern conditions, that they are entirely justified from the standpoint of modern philosophy. The greatness of Tolstoy as a philosopher is, first of all, in the depth of the formulation of problems, the remarkable ability to explore this or that idea in its entirety, the totality of all possible consequences. It can be said without exaggeration that L.N. Tolstoy spent his entire life in tireless philosophical searches. Like many other Russian thinkers, he was driven by a powerful desire for truth, goodness and justice. He was inspired by the search for an ideal - an image perfect life and perfect social order. With great force, sincerity and depth, he raised a number of questions concerning the main features of the political and community development his contemporary era.

L.N. himself Tolstoy considered himself to have no "professional attitude to philosophy". At the same time, in Confession, he wrote that philosophy had always interested him, and he liked to follow the tense and harmonious train of thought, in which all the complex phenomena of the world were reduced to something single.

During the life of L.N. Tolstoy was influenced by the ideas of various philosophers. Especially strong was the influence of I. Kant, A. Schopenhauer, the Eastern sages Confucius and Lao Tzu, and Buddhism.

His teacher in the field of philosophy L.N. Tolstoy considered Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was passionately carried away by his ideas, which had a decisive influence on the formation of the spiritual image and worldview of L.N. Tolstoy, for all his subsequent work. On the meaning of J.-J. Rousseau for L.N. Tolstoy is evidenced by the words written in the mature period of his life: “I read the whole of Rousseau, all twenty volumes, including the Dictionary of Music. I more than admired him, I idolized him. At fifteen, I wore a medallion around my neck with his portrait instead of pectoral cross. Many of its pages are so close to me that it seems to me that I wrote them myself. Many researchers talk not just about the influence of J.-J. Russo on L.N. Tolstoy, but about the congeniality of two thinkers - the striking coincidence of the spiritual mood of the great Genevan and the Russian writer-philosopher, who lived in different countries and in completely different eras. From Russo L.N. Tolstoy embraced the cult of naturalness, a distrustful and suspicious attitude towards modernity, which in him turned into a criticism of any culture in general.

Sharing Rousseau's conviction about the "natural man", who comes out beautiful from the hands of nature and then becomes corrupted in society, L.N. Tolstoy reflects on how a morally demanding person can overcome the harmful effects of the surrounding social environment.

Close to the philosophy of Rousseau and the view of L.N. Tolstoy on nature and man's attitude to it. Nature appears in his view as a moral guide, showing a person a natural and simple path of personal and public behavior. In this regard, he sharply contrasts the "natural" laws of nature and the "artificial" laws of society. A strong, direct and sincere protest against public lies and falsehood is transformed into a denial of progress and the assertion of the thesis that the recognition of civilization as a blessing destroys the instinctive, primitive desire for the good of human nature.

Not without the influence of J.-J. Russo L.N. Tolstoy, already in his early works, makes critical remarks about capitalist civilization, the contradictions of which he could not fail to notice during two long trips abroad. Philosophical treatise L.N. Tolstoy's "On the Purpose of Philosophy" is entirely in line with these ideas. How a person can achieve happiness and prosperity - that, according to L.N. Tolstoy, the main question of philosophy. What is the meaning of life and what is its purpose - these are the problems on the solution of which philosophical thought must work.

In one of his philosophical reflections, the great Russian writer and thinker acts as a resolute opponent of the rationalism of R. Descartes with his thesis “I think, therefore I am”. Instead of Cartesian "cogito" L.N. Tolstoy considers it necessary to put "volo", i.e. wish, feel.

It must be said that Tolstoy highly appreciated the philosophy of Schopenhauer, understood the finest nuances of the thought of the German philosopher, and this trace can be traced in all the writings of Leo Nikolayevich relating to the late period of his work.

In all cases, L.N. Tolstoy was primarily interested in the ethical aspects of philosophical systems.

It is also necessary to note the influence on the formation of philosophical views of L.N. Tolstoy's ideas of L. Feuerbach about a person and the role of love in his life.

In general, the philosophy of L. Tolstoy can be characterized by the term "panmoralism". This means that he considered and evaluated all phenomena exclusively from the standpoint of morality. Not a single phenomenon could be positively assessed by him if it did not meet a moral need, if it did not serve in the most direct way the moral education of man and mankind. Everything that is torn away from good does not directly serve morality, L.N. Tolstoy is strongly condemned and rejected.

In the area of philosophical anthropology L.N. Tolstoy departs from the condemnation of egoism. However, in his condemnation of egoism, he goes so far as to come close to impersonalism, i.e. to the denial of any positive meaning of the individual and the personal principle. Separateness of personality, separateness of individual human existence, according to Tolstoy, is just an illusion generated by human corporeality. Therefore, the thinker connects the personal principle in man primarily with corporality, with the animal manifestations of human nature. It is animal manifestations and passions that underlie the egoistic inclinations of man. Man, as a spiritual, moral being, is not only connected by thousands of threads with other people and the whole world, but forms with them a single whole, indecomposable into parts. The task of a person is to find a way to unity with the world, to overcome the desire for individual existence. The individual will is fundamentally vicious, because it is rooted in the animal, and therefore, the egoistic nature of man.

In turn, the teachings of L. Tolstoy had a significant impact on the formation of the ethics of non-violence. In particular, the ideas of renunciation of violence as a means of combating oppression were in tune with M. Gandhi, who considered L.N. Tolstoy was his associate and teacher, was in correspondence with him and highly appreciated his literary and philosophical works.

2. The teachings of L. Tolstoy and his religious-utopian essence

Faith like moral basis human life.

From the point of view of L. Tolstoy, that infinite, immortal principle, in conjunction with which life only acquires meaning, is called God. Nothing else can be said with certainty about God. The mind may know that there is a God, but it cannot comprehend God himself. Therefore, Tolstoy resolutely rejected church judgments about God, the trinity, the creation of the world in six days, legends about angels and devils, the fall of man, the virgin birth, etc., considering all this to be gross prejudice. Any meaningful statement about God, even such that he is one, contradicts itself, for the concept of God, by definition, means that which cannot be defined. For Tolstoy, the concept of God was a human concept that expresses what we humans can feel and know about God, but not what God thinks about people and the world. In it, in this concept, as Tolstoy understands it, there was nothing mysterious, except that it denotes the mysterious foundation of life and knowledge. God is the cause of knowledge, but not its object. “Since the concept of God cannot be other than the concept of the beginning of everything that the mind cognizes, it is obvious that God, as the beginning of everything, cannot be comprehensible to the mind. Only by following the path of rational thinking, at the extreme limit of the mind, one can find God, but, having reached this concept, the mind ceases to comprehend. Knowledge about God Tolstoy compares with the knowledge of the infinity of number. Both are certainly assumed, but cannot be defined. “I am brought to the certainty of the knowledge of an infinite number by addition, to the certainty of the knowledge of God I am brought by the question: where do I come from?”

The idea of God as the limit of reason, the incomprehensible fullness of truth sets a certain way of being in the world when a person is consciously oriented towards this limit and fullness. This is what freedom is. Freedom is a purely human property, an expression of the middle of his being. “A person would not be free if he did not know any truth, and in the same way would not be free and would not even have the concept of freedom, if all the truth that should guide him in life, once for all, in all its purity, without the admixture of error would have been revealed to him. Freedom consists in this movement from darkness to light, from lower to higher, "from truth, more mixed with errors, to truth, more freed from them." It can be defined as the desire to be guided by the truth.

But what does this work and this path consist of, what duties follow for a person from his belonging to God? The recognition of God as the beginning, the source of life and reason puts a person in a completely definite relationship to him, which Tolstoy likens to the relationship of a son to his father, a worker to a master. The son cannot judge the father and is not able to fully understand the meaning of his instructions, he must follow the will of the father, and only as he obeys the father's will he realizes that it has a beneficial meaning for him, a good son is a loving son, he does not act as he wants , but in the way the father wants, and in this, in the fulfillment of the will of the father, he sees his destiny and good. In the same way, a worker is a worker because he is obedient to the master, carries out his orders - for only the master knows what his work is for, the master not only gives meaning to the efforts of the worker, he also feeds him; a good worker is a worker who understands that his life and well-being depend on the owner, and treats the owner with a sense of selflessness, love. Man's attitude to God should be the same: man does not live for himself, but for God. Only such an understanding of the meaning of one's own life corresponds to the actual position of a person in the world, follows from the nature of his connection with God. The normal, human relation of man to God is the relation of love. “The essence of human life and the highest law that should guide it is love.”

The correct attitude towards other people is determined by the fact that one must love people as brothers, love everyone, without any exceptions, regardless of any worldly differences between them. Before God, all human distances between wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness, youth and decrepitude, strength and squalor, etc. lose any meaning whatsoever. It is necessary to appreciate in every person the dignity of divine origin. “The kingdom of God on earth is the peace of all people among themselves”, and a peaceful, reasonable and harmonious life is possible only when people are connected by the same understanding of the meaning of life, by the same faith.

The right attitude towards oneself can be briefly defined as concern for the salvation of the soul. “In the soul of man there are not moderate rules of justice, but the ideal of complete, infinite divine perfection. Only the striving for this perfection deviates the direction of human life from the animal state to the divine as far as it is possible in this life. From this point of view, the real state of the individual does not matter, because no matter what height of spiritual development he reaches, it, this height, is vanishingly insignificant in comparison with the unattainable perfection of the divine ideal. Whatever end point we take, the distance from it to infinity will be infinite. Therefore, an indicator of the correct attitude of a person towards himself is the striving for perfection, this very movement from oneself to God. Moreover, “a person who stands on a lower level, moving towards perfection, lives more morally, better, fulfills the teaching more than a person standing on a much higher level of morality, but not advancing towards perfection.” Consciousness of the degree of discrepancy with ideal perfection is the criterion of a correct attitude towards oneself. Since in reality this degree of discrepancy is always infinite, then a person is the more moral, the more fully he realizes his imperfection.

If we take these two attitudes towards God - the attitude towards others and the attitude towards oneself - then the initial and fundamental, from the point of view of Tolstoy, is the attitude towards oneself. A moral attitude towards oneself, as it were, automatically guarantees a moral attitude towards others. A person who realizes how infinitely far from the ideal he is is a person free from superstition that he can arrange the life of other people. A person's concern for the purity of his own soul is the source of a person's moral obligations in relation to other people, the state, etc.

However, the question arises: “If it is impossible to know what the infinite is and, accordingly, God, freedom, goodness, then how can one be infinite, divine, free, good?” The problem of connecting the finite with the infinite has no solution. The infinite is infinite because it can neither be defined nor reproduced. L.N. Tolstoy, in the afterword to the Kreutzer Sonata, speaks of two ways of orienting along the way: in one case, specific objects that must sequentially meet on the way can be landmarks of the right direction, in the second case, the correctness of the path is controlled by a compass. In the same way, there are two different ways of moral guidance: the first is that the exact description of the actions that a person should do or that he should avoid is given, the second way is that the guidance for a person is the unattainable perfection of the ideal. Just as the compass can only determine the degree of deviation from the path, in the same way the ideal can become only a starting point for human imperfection. The concepts of God, freedom, goodness, revealing the infinite meaning of our finite life, are the very ideal, the practical purpose of which is to be a reproach to a person, to point him to what he is not.

Moral and religious progress in the mind of man is the engine of history.

L.N. Tolstoy was concerned with the question of what is the course of history and whether a person can make any plans for the reorganization of society. According to L.N. Tolstoy, a certain goal independent of man is realized in history. This position is called providentialism. Tolstoy is convinced that "no one can know either those laws by which the life of peoples changes, or that best form life, in what should be modern society". He called a different position "the superstition of the organization." It is one step away from the recognition of violence as a necessary measure in history. “Some people, having drawn up a plan for themselves about how, in their opinion, it is desirable and should be arranged in society, have the right and opportunity to arrange the life of other people according to this plan.” The presence of such a layer of administrators who, through violence, will arrange a new system, will lead to despotism worse than capitalist, because there are a hundred ways to distort the scheme. The revolution and civil war of 17-21 in Russia showed how right L.N. Tolstoy.

Man can and must contribute to the realization of the divine plan in history. As an answer to the traditional Russian question "What to do?" Tolstoy proposed the idea of non-violence and the theory of non-resistance to evil by violence. The question "What to do?" You have to decide for yourself, not for others. Any violence is unacceptable. The meaning of human life lies not in remaking other people, but in cultivating the good, human in oneself. Do not do what is contrary to God, love, wish good to others. Each of us who does good gives the world a new look. Tolstoy is sure that "as soon as love for one's neighbor becomes natural for every person, new conditions of Christian life will form by themselves."

According to L.N. Tolstoy, the essence of the moral ideal is most fully expressed in the teachings of Jesus Christ. At the same time, for Tolstoy, Jesus Christ is not God or the son of God, he considers him a reformer, destroying the old and giving new foundations of life. Tolstoy, further, sees a fundamental difference between the true views of Jesus, set forth in the Gospels, and their perversion in the dogmas of Orthodoxy and other Christian churches.

In Tolstoy's interpretation, there are five such commandments:

Don't be angry; 2. Don't leave your wife; 3. Do not swear ever to anyone and in anything; 4. Do not resist evil by force; 5. Do not consider people of other nations as your enemies.

The commandments of Christ are “all negative and show only what, at a certain stage in the development of mankind, people can no longer do. These commandments are, as it were, notes on the endless path of perfection…”. They cannot but be negative, since we are talking about the awareness of the degree of imperfection. They are nothing more than a step, a step on the path to perfection. Together they constitute such truths that are not in doubt, but have not yet been mastered in practice. For a modern person, they are already truths, but have not yet become a daily habit. A person already dares to think so, but is not yet able to act so. Therefore, these truths proclaimed by Jesus Christ are a test of human freedom.

According to Tolstoy, the main of the five commandments is the fourth: "Do not resist evil," which imposes a ban on violence. The ancient law, which condemned evil and violence in general, allowed that in certain cases they can be used for good - as a fair retribution according to the "eye for an eye" formula. Jesus Christ abolishes this law. He believes that violence can never be a blessing, under any circumstances. The prohibition of violence is absolute. Not only kindness must be reciprocated with kindness. And evil must be repaid with good.

The denial of power

Tolstoy was an extreme anarchist, an enemy of all statehood on moral and idealistic grounds. He rejected the state as based on sacrifice and suffering, and saw in it the source of evil, which for him amounted to violence. Tolstoy's anarchism, Tolstoy's enmity towards the state also won a victory among the Russian people. Tolstoy turned out to be the spokesman for the anti-state, anarchist instincts of the Russian people. He gave these instincts a moral-religious sanction. And he is one of the culprits of the destruction of the Russian state. Tolstoy is also hostile to any culture. Culture for him is based on untruth and violence, in it is the source of all the evils of our life. Man by nature is naturally kind and benevolent and inclined to live according to the law of the Master of life. The emergence of culture, like the state, was a fall, a falling away from the natural divine order, the beginning of evil, violence. Tolstoy was completely alien to the feeling of original sin, the radical evil of human nature, and therefore he did not need the religion of redemption and did not understand it. He was deprived of a sense of evil, because he was deprived of a sense of freedom and originality of human nature, he did not feel a person. He was immersed in impersonal, inhuman nature, and in it he sought sources of divine truth. And in this Tolstoy proved to be the source of the entire philosophy of the Russian revolution. The Russian revolution is hostile to culture, it wants to return to natural state folk life in which he sees immediate truth and goodness. The Russian revolution would like to destroy our entire cultural stratum. drown him in the natural darkness of the people. And Tolstoy is one of the culprits of the destruction of Russian culture. It morally undermined the possibility of cultural creativity, poisoned the sources of creativity. He poisoned the Russian man with moral reflection, which made him powerless and incapable of historical and cultural action. Tolstoy is a real poisoner of the wells of life. Tolstoy's moral reflection is a real poison, a poison that decomposes all creative energy and undermines life. This moral reflection has nothing to do with the Christian sense of sin and the Christian need for repentance. For Tolstoy there is no sin, no repentance, reviving human nature. For him, there is only a weakening, graceless reflection, which is the reverse side of the rebellion against the divine world order. Tolstoy idealized the common people, in them he saw the source of truth and idolized the physical heap in which he sought salvation from the meaninglessness of life. But he had a dismissive and contemptuous attitude towards any spiritual work and creativity. The entire edge of Tolstoy's criticism has always been directed against the cultural order. These Tolstoyan assessments also triumphed in the Russian revolution, which elevates the representatives of physical labor to the heights and overthrows the representatives of spiritual labor. Tolstoy's populism, Tolstoy's denial of the division of labor are the basis of the moral judgments of the revolution, if only one can speak of its moral judgments. Truly, Tolstoy is no less important for the Russian revolution than Rousseau was for the French revolution. True, violence and bloodshed would have horrified Tolstoy; he imagined the realization of his ideas in other ways. But even Rousseau would have been horrified by the deeds of Robespierre and the revolutionary terror. But Rousseau is just as responsible for the French revolution as Tolstoy is for the Russian revolution. I even think that Tolstoy's teaching was more destructive than Rousseau's. It was Tolstoy who made the existence of Great Russia morally impossible. He did a lot to destroy Russia. But in this suicidal affair he was Russian, fatal and unfortunate Russian traits showed in him. Tolstoy was one of the Russian temptations.

Considering all power to be evil, Tolstoy denied the need for a state and rejected violent methods of transforming society. He proposed to abolish the state by refusing to perform public and state duties.

Power as an institution is an ineradicable evil, and Tolstoy in his theory rejects the state, proposing to replace it with a kind of anarchist system, namely, the organization of agricultural communities consisting of morally improving people. In the system of ideological coordinates, the main feature or, to put it better, the dominant of behavior should be a complete rejection of violence no matter what. So the writer came to his famous thesis "about non-resistance to evil by violence." The theory of non-resistance to evil by violence is very often interpreted in a simplified way: if you hit on the left cheek, turn the right one. Such a position is unlikely to satisfy any reasonable person. But this is not what Tolstoy calls for. His theory is not a theory of doing nothing, but of doing with oneself, an effort towards oneself to cultivate goodness in oneself. The calling of a person in this world is to fulfill his human duties, and not to rebuild the world. A person bears responsibility before God and his conscience, and not before history or subsequent generations, as Lenin thought.

The revolutionary Bolshevik tradition is in clear opposition to Tolstoy's thinking. The absolute truth discovered by the most advanced members of society must be put into practice. And the trouble is with those people who cannot accept this truth. But their happiness lies in the fact that other, most responsible members of society will lead them to a happy life. Victims are inevitable, but the forest is cut down - chips fly. The Bolsheviks were guided by the ideal of the transformation of society, Tolstoy called for the discovery of the "kingdom of God within us."

Literature

thick religious worldview power

1.Berdyaev N.A. About Russian classics. - M., 1993.

2.Berlin I. History of freedom. Russia. - M.: New Literary Review, 2001. - 544 p.

.Introduction to philosophy. In 2 volumes. Volume 1. - M., 1990.

.Gavryushin N.K. Russian Philosophy and Religious Consciousness // Questions of Philosophy. -1994. - . No. 1.

.Huseynov A.A. Great moralists. - M., 1995.

.Huseynov A.A. The concepts of violence and non-violence // Questions of Philosophy. -1994. - . No. 6.

7.Zenkovsky V.V. History of Russian Philosophy. - L., 1991.

8.History of Philosophy. Volume 4. - M., 1959.

.History of philosophy in the USSR in five volumes. Volume 3. - M., 1968.

.Kantor V.K., Kiseleva M.S.L.N. Tolstoy, "Russoism", Russian culture // Philosophical sciences. - 1991. - No. 9.

.Karasev L.V. Tolstoy and the World // Questions of Philosophy. - 2001. - No. 1.

.Lenin V.I.L.N. Tolstoy as a mirror of the Russian revolution. // Lenin V.I. Full coll. op. T. 16.

.Lunacharsky A.V. About Tolstoy. Digest of articles. - M., 1928.

.Martynov A. About the fate of Russian philosophical culture // Questions of Philosophy. - 2002. - No. 10.

.Monin M.A. Tolstoy and Fet. Two readings of Schopenhauer // Questions of Philosophy. - 2001. - No. 3.

.Nazarov V.N. Metaphors of misunderstanding: L.N. Tolstoy and the Russian Church in the Modern World // Questions of Philosophy. -1991. - . No. 8.

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Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1821 - 1910) great both as a writer and as a thinker. He is the founder of the concept of non-violence. His teaching was called Tolstoyism. The essence of this doctrine was reflected in many of his works. Tolstoy also has his own philosophical writings: “Confession”, “What is my faith?”, “The Way of Life”, etc.

Tolstoy with huge force moral condemnation criticized state institutions, court, economics. However, this criticism has been controversial. He denied the revolution as a method of solving social issues. Historians of philosophy believe that “containing some elements of socialism (the desire to create a hostel of free and equal peasants on the site of landlordism and a police-class state), Tolstoy’s teaching at the same time idealized the patriarchal order of life and considered the historical process from the point of view of “eternal”, "original" concepts of the moral and religious consciousness of mankind".

Tolstoy believed that getting rid of violence, which keeps modern world, possibly on the path of non-resistance to evil by violence, on the basis of a complete rejection of any struggle, as well as on the basis of the moral self-improvement of each individual person. He emphasized: “Only non-resistance to evil by violence leads mankind to replace the law of violence with the law of love.”

Thinking power is evil, Tolstoy came to the denial of the state. But the abolition of the state, in his opinion, should not be carried out through violence, but through the peaceful and passive avoidance of members of society from any state duties and positions, from participation in political activity. Tolstoy's ideas had a wide circulation. They were simultaneously criticized from the right and from the left. On the right, Tolstoy was criticized for his criticism of the church. On the left - for the propaganda of patient obedience to the authorities. Criticizing L. N. Tolstoy from the left, V. I. Lenin found “screaming” contradictions in the writer’s philosophy. Thus, in his work “Leo Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution”, Lenin notes that Tolstoy “On the one hand, ruthless criticism of capitalist exploitation, exposure of government violence, court comedies and government controlled revealing the entire depth of the contradictions between the growth of wealth and the gains of civilization and the growth of poverty, savagery and torment of the working masses; on the other hand, the foolish preaching of “non-resistance to evil” by violence.”

Tolstoy's ideas during the revolution they were condemned by the revolutionaries, since they were addressed to all people, including themselves. At the same time, while manifesting revolutionary violence against those who resisted revolutionary transformations, the revolutionaries themselves, stained with foreign blood, wished that violence would not be manifested in relation to themselves. In this regard, it is not surprising that less than ten years after the revolution, the publication of the complete works of Leo Tolstoy was undertaken. Objectively, Tolstoy's ideas contributed to the disarmament of those who were subjected to revolutionary violence.

However, it is hardly legitimate to condemn the writer for this. Many people have experienced the beneficial influence of Tolstoy's ideas. Among the followers of the teachings of the writer-philosopher was Mahatma Gandhi. Among the admirers of his talent was the American writer W. E. Howells, who wrote: “Tolstoy is the greatest writer of all time, if only because his work is more than others imbued with the spirit of goodness, and he himself never denies the unity of his conscience and his art."

PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS OF L.N. TOLSTOY (1828-1910)

1. General characteristics of the philosophy of L. Tolstoy

L.N. Tolstoy is not only among the greatest artists-writers of world significance, but also among the remarkable thinkers-philosophers. The point of view that has developed under the influence of articles by V.I. Lenin and which became dominant in the Soviet era, that L. Tolstoy is allegedly great as an artist, but “weak” as a thinker, is incorrect. Recognition of the greatness of L. Tolstoy as a thinker does not mean, however, the assertion that all the philosophical ideas of the thinker retain their relevance in modern conditions, that they are fully justified from the standpoint of modern philosophy. The greatness of L. Tolstoy the philosopher lies, first of all, in the depth of the formulation of problems, in the remarkable ability to explore this or that idea in its entirety, in the aggregate of all possible consequences. It can be said without exaggeration that L. Tolstoy spent his entire life in tireless philosophical searches. Like many other Russian thinkers, he was driven by a powerful desire for truth, goodness and justice. He was inspired by the search for an ideal - an image of a perfect life and a perfect social order.

The biography of L. Tolstoy is known to the reader from school course literature and other sources. Therefore, we recall only its most important milestones. L. Tolstoy spent most of his life at the Yasnaya Polyana estate, near Tula. In 1844 he entered the Kazan University, but in 1847 he left it. In 1851, having entered military service, went to the Caucasus, where he took part in hostilities. In 1854-1855. participated in the defense of Sevastopol. The first publications that brought L. Tolstoy literary fame were the trilogy "Childhood", "Boyhood", "Youth" and "Sevastopol Stories". In addition to the world-famous novels and stories, the writer's pen belongs to whole line treatises of philosophical and journalistic content, such as "Critique of dogmatic theology", "What is my faith?", "The kingdom of God is within us", "I can not be silent", "About life", "What is art", etc. Special place among the works of L. Tolstoy is occupied by "Confession". “It is hardly possible to find another monument in world literature written with such force as “Confession”, where all the words are full of burning fiery elements,” notes V. Zenkovsky.

During his life, L. Tolstoy was influenced by the ideas of various philosophers. Especially strong was the influence of I. Kant, A. Schopenhauer, the Eastern sages Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Buddhism. In his youth, he was passionately fascinated by the ideas of J.-J. Rousseau, who had a decisive influence on his spiritual appearance and worldview, on all subsequent work. On the meaning of J.-J. Rousseau for L. Tolstoy is evidenced by the words written in the mature period of his life: “I read the whole of Rousseau, all twenty volumes, including the Dictionary of Music. I more than admired him, I idolized him. At the age of fifteen, I wore a medallion with his portrait around my neck instead of a pectoral cross. Many of its pages are so close to me that it seems to me that I wrote them myself. Many researchers talk not just about the influence of J.-J. Rousseau on L. Tolstoy, but about congeniality two thinkers - an amazing coincidence of the spiritual mood of the great Genevan and the Russian writer-philosopher, who lived in different countries and in completely different eras. From J.-J. Rousseau L. Tolstoy adopted the cult of naturalness, distrustful and suspicious attitude towards modernity, which turned into criticism of any culture in general.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the sermon of L. Tolstoy, with which he spoke literally in every work of his, shocked readers not only because of their exceptional sincerity,

but above all because of its attractiveness moral pathos, that thirst for absolute goodness, which did not appear in anyone with such depth as in L. Tolstoy. The desire for absolute good gave rise to special exactingness and exactingness with which the writer treated himself. Evidence of this may be an entry in the Diary of a young L. Tolstoy: “What am I? One of the four sons of a retired colonel, left without parents from the age of seven ... who received neither secular nor scientific education and was released at the age of 17 without a great fortune, without any social position and, most importantly, without rules, a man who upset his affairs to the last extreme, without purpose and pleasure spent best years of his life, finally exiling himself to the Caucasus in order to avoid debts, and, most importantly, habits ... I am bad-looking, awkward, unscrupulous and secularly uneducated. I am irritable, boring to others, indiscreet, intolerant and bashful, like a child. I am almost ignorant.... I am intemperate, indecisive, fickle, stupidly conceited and ardent, like all spineless people. I'm not brave. I am careless in life and so lazy that idleness has become an almost irresistible habit for me. I am smart, but my mind has not yet been thoroughly tested on anything. Throughout his life, L. Tolstoy was engaged in careful introspection and struggled with his shortcomings.

In general, the philosophy of L. Tolstoy can be characterized by the term "panmoralism". This means that he considered and evaluated all phenomena exclusively from the standpoint of morality, from the standpoint of moral and ethical. Not a single phenomenon could be positively assessed by him if it did not meet a moral need, if it did not serve in the most direct way the moral education of man and mankind. Everything that is torn away from goodness does not directly serve morality, L. Tolstoy resolutely condemns and discards.

In the area of philosophical anthropology L. Tolstoy departs from the condemnation of egoism. However, in his condemnation of selfishness, he goes so far as to come close to imperialism, i.e. to the denial of any positive meaning of the individual and the personal principle. The separateness of the personality, the separateness of individual human existence, according to L. Tolstoy, is just an illusion generated by the corporality of man. Therefore, the personal principle in a person is associated by the thinker primarily with corporality, with the animal manifestations of human nature.

It is animal manifestations and passions that underlie the egoistic inclinations of man. Man, as a spiritual, moral being, is not only connected by thousands of threads with other people and the whole world, but forms with them a single whole, indecomposable into parts. Man's task is to find a way to unite with

world, to overcome the desire for individual existence. The individual will is fundamentally vicious, because it is ultimately rooted in the animal, and therefore the egoistic nature of man. However, a person cannot completely renounce his will. But he is able to renounce personal good. In the treatise "On Life" L. Tolstoy writes: "not renounce personality owes to man, but to renounce the good of the individual. He does not think of an individual good (such a good is always selfish), but thinks of it as a universal good: “If a desire for good has awakened in a person, then his being is no longer a separate bodily being, but this is the very consciousness of life, the desire for good. Desire for the good ... is God. “The essence of life is not him (man. - V.Sh.) separate being, God, prisoner in a person ... the meaning of life is revealed when a person recognizes yourself its divine essence.

Zenkovsky V.V. Decree. op. T. 1.4.2. S. 197.
Cit. Quoted from: Rozanov M.N. Rousseau and Tolstoy. L., 1928. S. 4.
Cit. Quoted from: Eikhenbaum B. Young Tolstoy. Pg.-Berlin, 1922. S. 56-57.