"Tolstoy presents three main ways to support his claim that the meaning of life is to find faith in God and a simple life of work, doing God's work. One is that his own intellectual autobiography helps to make the answer he comes up with into a reasonable alternative, since he does a good job of exploring and eliminating all the other alternatives. The second is that he has an insight that the rational mind cannot provide an answer to the meaning of life because the question requires us to understand the relation between the finite world and the infinite, something beyond the power of rationality. The third is that his answer resolves his own distress as it resolves the peasants' lives, making life a joyful thing rather than a dirty trick.
But there's a problem with Tolstoy's argument, in that the second seems to contradict the other two. That is, the fact that his life and the peasants' lives can be taken as
some kind of evidence looks like an argument, a rational argument. And if faith is the last alternative left standing after science and philosophy have been shown unable to
provide an answer, that too looks like a rational argument."
It is an oddity that this objection to Tolstoy is generally sound, but does very little harm to his case. Contrary to our philosophical convictions that being self-contradictory
condemns one to the lowest reaches of Hell, all this does is show that Tolstoy is too hard on himself and his own critical faculties.
His idea is that our ability to inquire into the universe is bounded by the universe itself. He thinks that we can ask, perhaps as a scientist might ask, about what exists and how it works, but then the question of the meaning of life suddenly transgresses or ruptures the boundaries of those inquiries. This is because the question about the meaning of life, understood as the huge question about why there is something rather than nothing and what is the purpose of existence, asks us to take stock of what exists but then to go further, to ask about something which cannot be contained in the universe, namely the universe's purpose or function or significance or meaning. We are asking about something which lies outside what exists. If we grant that the universe is finite, yet we in asking this question march up to the boundary of the finite and look beyond. Tolstoy takes it to be obvious that we are at this point in over our heads--our rationality at this point has nothing to which it can appeal, nothing which exists, nothing which can be proven, nothing which can even be hypothesized, certainly nothing which can be checked on or verified.
And to the extent that rationality is proof or science, it is right that we are in asking this question going beyond proof or science. The problem is that our ability to give reasons is more broad than our ability to prove or to do science, and that Tolstoy has been unfair to his own rationality. That is, this objection is right, Tolstoy has contradicted himself by on one hand giving a rational argument that rationality is not going to get us to the meaning of life and on the other by giving a rational argument for taking faith, work, and simplicity as correct answers to the meaning of life. But this only means he's underestimated rationality and so underestimated our ability to deal with issues bigger than existence. The result of all this is that it helps out Tolstoy's argument-the contradiction is based on his misunderstanding what rationality is and once we fix that, his argument is stronger than before because it is not necessarily either self-contradictory or non-rational. -Well, at least so far as the support for the claim that faith, work, simplicity are parts of the meaning of life-when we get to the specificity of his faith and the unsupported choice among possible faiths, his argument no longer is rational just because no reasons are even attempted.
So this objection is right but does little harm. Instead it points to a way Tolstoy's argument can be fixed, and having been fixed, is stronger than ever.
Tolstoy misunderstands the nature of his question
In particular, he fails to distinguish between the personal questions and the cosmic ones. Why do we exist? why is there something rather than nothing? what's the human
race for? how did we get here? -all these are huge abstract questions which clearly continue to drive Tolstoy, but there is some evidence that he needs instead to pay
more attention to a more personal question, something like What do I need in order to justify my continuing to live? He does pay attention to this question, and what he
finds at the end provides him with an answer to this question in a fairly direct way. What he needs is faith, and indeed what he needs is a faith remarkably like the faith in
which he was raised as a child; what he needs is simplicity which helps him to be honest amid all the highly cultured and academic temptations to delude or fool ourselves,
and what he needs is work to draw him outside his self-absorption. It is evidence for this claim (that the real question for him is the personal one) that his inquiry comes
full circle, back to the doctrines of his childhood. But he thinks this answer is also an answer to the Big Questions too, and fails to see that that case is incomplete.
Tolstoy misunderstands the answer that the peasants lived by.
Perhaps this can be excused by the fact that they too may misunderstand it. He takes them to be saying that they are living based on religious faith. But in fact they may
be living not based on that religious faith but on the basis of something far deeper, namely something like a Zen kind of lack of concern for the question and a joy in their
present moments which makes the worry about the meaning of life seem remote and unnecessary, so that the question does not come up for them. Tolstoy thinks they
have asked about the meaning of life and have found the answer, but in fact they may have found something better than the answer in their lack of a need to ask.
Tolstoy's argument has some strength in supporting a general faith, but faith has to be a particular faith and there is no support for any particular faith in his argument.
Like color, having a faith requires specificity-you have to have faith in something, not just faith. Tolstoy does provide some reasons supporting faith as the answer to the
question of the meaning of life, but then he endorses a particular kind of faith (how particular we don't need to worry about even) at the same time he acknowledges that
the choice of a faith is not something that can be reasoned. That faiths disagree, that if some of them are right then others of them have to be wrong because they
contradict each other, shows a need for some kind of support for making any particular choice. In the absence of any such support, getting it right requires that we trust to
luck, to having been born in the right place or having been raised by people who get it right, and this idea cannot be supported either-since the results of such trust also
contradict each other. (For example, some religions ask us to take on faith that there is an afterlife and others ask us to take on faith that there is no afterlife, and some
religions ask us to agree that the Jews are heathen and others that Muslims are heathen and others that Catholics or Hindus are heathen.)