Again, the Call

"There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move." Jack London, The Call of the Wild, New York: The Library of America (1982), 33-34.

In what Jack London termed the "call of the wild," out of the "deeps" of one's animal nature, there is something that beckons us to interrogate the limits of our world: "That the world is my world," Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus, "shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world" [Proposition 5.62].

For Tolstoy, the job of the artist, then, is to master his or her own language to such an extent that he or she can test and push those limits to their farthest extremity. This is not in any way a denial of humanism, nor is it a leap into the mystical or supernatural. Pindar's self-counsel in his 3rd Pythian Ode to abandon the desire for immortal life in favor of the effort to exhaust the limits of the possible remains good advice in Tolstoy's view. Indeed,

"Tolstoy's reflections on man and the aims and meaning of his life were a powerful contribution to the development of humanist thought and the enrichment of mankind's moral experience. He did not, by any means, deny the material, or as he put it, the 'animal' nature of man, but he brought to the fore the 'spiritual,' 'rational,' 'good' element immanently inherent in a human being, and man's capacity for constructive labor and creative activity. Life was the main value. The meaning and aim of existence of each person was therefore to maintain life as a universal good. For Tolstoy a life, whatever it was, was a good than which there was nothing higher. When one said that life was evil, one did so only in comparison with another, imaginary, better life. Yet one did not know, and could not know, any other, better life; therefore, life, whatever it was, was the highest good attainable" Nikita Kozlov and Valery A. Kuvakin, "Leo Tolstoy," A History of Russian Philosophy, Vol. 2, edited by Valery A. Kuvakin, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books (1994), 391.

That which calls to us from what Yeats named "the deep heart's core" is a polyphony of voices--often a cacophony; but, for Tolstoy, the insistent call of conscience that beckons us to our best selves is the voice to which we must learn to listen--for that voice is the voice of God. Our best selves, for Tolstoy, are those that honor life by making the otherwise unvoiced heard and the otherwise invisible seen.

And so William Blake: "How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,/Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?" [The Marriage of Heaven and Hell].

Tolstoy would reply that we do "know" this because, as Marshall McLuhan argued, "We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." Chief among our self-shaping and world-shaping tools is language. We therefore determine, by means of language, that beyond the reach of our five senses are worlds available to imaginative rendering. Such imaginative renderings permit us to deal sympathetically with other human beings, even other species--anything that possesses life--because life itself is sacred and our highest value.

"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no god..." [Psalm 14:1]. Why is this foolish? From the Tolstoyan perspective, such statements are not only foolish but morally irresponsible: for it is our duty to affirm the reality of the Divine (i.e., that which animates us) and, thereby, to substantiate our best selves.

For Tolstoy, every effort to inject love (eros) and reason (logos) into our lives is a realization of God. We have no right to deny our world God. To do so is an abdication of our calling, as human beings, to exhaust the limits of the possible.