QuestionsDoes life have a meaning?When everything seems vain: meaning found again in faith
Does life have a meaning?A given meaning

When everything seems vain: meaning found again in faith

Tolstoy's crisis; the traveller in the well; the finite and the infinite

Léon Tolstoï 1828 · 1910At fifty he saw no meaning in anything; he found it again in the faith of simple people.
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What it claims

If life has a meaning, it is found in faith, which links the finite to the infinite. "Faith is the strength of life."

Why

Reason only compares the finite with the finite; only faith links the finite to the infinite, which meaning requires.

The same idea through history
Qohélet (l'Ecclésiaste)250 BCEcclesiastes ("Solomon" for Tolstoy) concludes that all is vanity. In the Confession (ch. VI), Tolstoy places him with Socrates, Schopenhauer and the Buddha among those who saw that life, looked at without the infinite, has no meaning.
Léon Tolstoï1882Tolstoy retells an Eastern fable: a traveller, chased by a beast, clings in a well to a twig that two mice, a black one and a white one (night and day), are gnawing, while a dragon waits at the bottom. He licks a few drops of honey on the leaves. For Tolstoy, this is his own life, once the honey (his family, his writing) no longer consoles.
In short

"When everything seems vain: meaning found again in faith" is an argument by Léon Tolstoï (A Confession, 1882 (written 1879 to 1882), 1882) on the question "Does life have a meaning?" (answer: a given meaning). Its claim: If life has a meaning, it is found in faith, which links the finite to the infinite. "Faith is the strength of life.". According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

A Confession, 1882 (written 1879 to 1882)
Valid with an implicit premise

At fifty, Tolstoy is famous, rich, healthy and loved. Yet everything seems vain to him: he hides a cord so as not to hang himself and no longer dares to go shooting with his gun. He looks for an answer in the sciences and in philosophy, and finds none. Then he notices that billions of people live without despair, and that they live by faith. According to him, reason is not wrong when it says that life is meaningless: it asks the wrong question, because it only compares the finite with the finite. Faith, for its part, links the finite life to the infinite. It gives a meaning that does not come from us. Tolstoy received it; he did not invent it.

P1The real question is "what meaning has my finite existence in this infinite world?" It asks for an explanation of the finite in terms of the infinite: an answer makes sense only if it links the finite life to the infinite.
P2Reason and science always compare the finite with the finite and the infinite with the infinite. They only reach identities such as 0 = 0: they do not link the finite to the infinite.
P3The answers of faith, however irrational they may seem, introduce into every answer the relation between the finite and the infinite, without which there is no solution.
P4 · implicit premiseHuman life can have a meaning: if so many people live while declaring that they know the meaning of life, they are not all mistaken. Tolstoy's despair is not the last word.
P5There are only two kinds of knowledge: the knowledge of reason, and faith, an "irrational" knowledge that gives mankind answers to the questions of life and makes life possible.
Therefore, if life has a meaning, it is found in faith, which links the finite to the infinite. "Faith is the strength of life."

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where a meaning requires the infinite, where reason cannot reach it, where only faith could, but where life has precisely no meaning: faith would then be a consolation without an object.
Valid with P4. P1: a meaning requires a link with the infinite. P2: reason does not make this link. So the meaning, if there is one, does not come from reason alone. P5: there are only reason and faith, hence faith. P3 explains how faith goes about it, without being needed for the deduction. Without P4, one can grant everything and conclude that life has no meaning at all: that is the position of Schopenhauer, of Camus or of Nagel, and the one Tolstoy himself held for a long time. P4 is thus the exact place where Tolstoy parts from his own years of despair.
Analogy. A man measures a room with a tape and asks why the Moon shines. He can measure perfectly and never answer, because his tool does not fit the question. Tolstoy says: reason is a tape measure, very good for what has edges, but the question of the meaning of my life within the infinite has no edges.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus 1942 · attacks the conclusion

Camus calls "philosophical suicide" the movement by which a thought negates itself in order to save itself. He writes: "For the existentials negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason." Thus the "leap" toward faith settles the absurd instead of keeping it: it is a resignation. One should rather keep, lucidly, the reason that asks for a meaning and the world that gives none.

Tolstoï replies
see the argument
Tolstoï Tolstoy, A Confession (without naming Camus)
Tolstoy writes that his position, with that of Schopenhauer and Solomon, was stupid: they see that life is an evil and yet continue to live. That is evidently stupid to him.
The debate goes on (our summary) Camus wrote in 1942 about Kierkegaard, Chestov and Jaspers, not about Tolstoy: the objection is therefore reconstructed by us. Tolstoy's passage answers only one side: he refuses to live while saying that life is bad. It does not answer Camus's third path (living lucid and in revolt). Tolstoy himself says that in practising the Church he "humbled" his reason (ch. XIII, §6): this is the exact point Camus calls a sacrifice of the intellect. The disagreement is clear: is this act a betrayal of truth (Camus) or the recognition that reason does not answer this question (Tolstoy)?
Thomas Nagel, "The Absurd" 1971 · attacks premise 1

Nagel examines those who want to give their lives meaning by linking them to something larger: society, history, or God. He answers that a role in a larger enterprise confers significance only if that enterprise is itself significant. And he adds: "any such larger purpose can be put in doubt in the same way that the aims of an individual life can be, and for the same reasons." Linking the finite to the infinite would then only move the question.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1971, after the author's death (1910).
The debate goes on (our summary) Tolstoy died in 1910: he cannot answer Nagel (a specific argument by him is planned on the site). Our summary: Tolstoy does not claim to justify faith by reasons. He says reason cannot answer and that one has "no right to deny" the answers of faith "on the ground of reason" (ch. IX, §23). Nagel holds that doubt about the ultimate aim remains legitimate; Tolstoy holds that this doubt is the work of reason stepping outside its domain. Who is right to stop, or not to stop?
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, II, ch. 17 1844 · attacks premise 5

Schopenhauer distinguishes two kinds of metaphysics. Some prove themselves and are reserved for a very small number. The others are made "for the great majority of men who are not capable of thinking", who can only believe and bow to an authority: these are the religions, which he calls "metaphysics of the people". The faith of simple people that Tolstoy admires would then be an answer fitted to those who do not think, not a knowledge the philosopher should envy.

Tolstoï replies
Tolstoï Tolstoy, A Confession (without citing this passage)
Tolstoy writes that he began to understand that in the replies given by faith is stored up the deepest human wisdom, that he had no right to deny them on the ground of reason, and that they are the only ones which reply to life's question.
The debate goes on (our summary) Tolstoy knows Schopenhauer: he cites him as one of those who see that life is an evil, and reproaches them for remaining alive in spite of it (ch. IX, §23). But his text does not answer Schopenhauer's thesis on religions, which dates from before Tolstoy's crisis. The disputed point is clear: is the faith of the people a truth that the learned have lost (Tolstoy, ch. X, §10) or a useful allegory for those who do not philosophise (Schopenhauer)?
Susan Wolf, "The Meanings of Lives" 2007 · attacks premise 1

Wolf names Tolstoy and the idea that if God does not exist "nothing matters", then judges this reasoning "ridiculous": if one activity is worthwhile and another is a waste, then one has reason to prefer the former, even if there is no God to look down on us and approve. It is therefore not necessary to link life to the infinite: it is enough that it be engaged in activities that have value.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 2007, after the author's death (1910).
The debate goes on (our summary) Tolstoy died in 1910, Wolf writes in 2007. Wolf announces Tolstoy as "an interesting case" among her examples of lives full of meaning, and writes that, on this criterion (the value of what one devotes oneself to, not the amount of good done), he "fares exceptionally well". Her disagreement is therefore partial: she does not contest that his life had meaning, only that the infinite or God is needed for that. See the argument "wolf-sens". The disagreement is about the nature of value: does it come from our relation with the infinite (Tolstoy) or does it already exist in things worth doing (Wolf)?