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Science, Conciousness, and Art: from Anna Karenina to What Is Art?

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Science, Conciousness, and Art: from Anna Karenina to What Is Art? MICHAEL KELLY (Provo, UT, USA) SCIENCE, CONCIOUSNESS, AND ART: FROM ANNA KARENINA TO WHAT IS ART? In the concluding chapter of What Is Art?, Tolstoy adds to his contentious critique of art an equally disputatious assessment of the realm of science. Just as he derides "art for art's sake," which focuses on bringing pleasure to the upper classes, he also censures "science for science's sake," which focuses simply on "the study of objects that interest us." Such an approach to science may pursue fascinating issues and be all-encompassing in scope, but its energies are dissi- pated either in attempting to justify the existing social and political order or in producing technological advances that, stunning though they may be, largely promote the well-being of only a single class. "The proper activity of genuine science," he asserts, is the study of "how human life should be arranged" so as to answer such questions as "how to bring up children, how to use the land, how to cultivate it without oppressing others," and so on (159, 160; PSS 30: 188, 189).' Not only does What Is Art? address the nature of genuine art and science, but it suggests an indissoluble bond between these two activities. "True sci- ence," Tolstoy declares, "studies and introduces into human consciousness the truths and the knowledge which are regarded as most important by the people of a certain period and society," while "art transfers these truths from the realm of knowledge to the realm of feeling." If art is to "abandon the false path it has taken" it is necessary that science, "upon which art has always been closely de- pendent-also abandon the false path on which it finds itself. (161, 157; PSS 30: 190, 186). Tolstoy's assertions about science and art pose puzzling questions as to why he so inextricably links such seemingly divergent realms of endeavor. I would suggest that Anna Karenina and several essays and letters from the time period Tolstoy was working on his novel are key texts in illuminating this enigma. From them we see how Tolstoy was grappling at that time with many of the is- sues pertaining to science and art that he later would declare with such contro- versial certitude in What Is Art?. During the interim between Anna Karenina I. Leo Tolstoy, Whnt Is Art?, trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Pen- guin, 1995), pp. 159, 160; L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. G. Chertkov, 90 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1928-58), 30: 188, 189. For all subsequent parenthetical references to What Is Art?, I cite first the excellent translation by Peaver and Volokhonsky and then the Russian text by providing the volume and page numbers from the Ju- bilee edition of Tolstoy's works, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, hereafter referred to as PSS. and What Is Art?, Tolstoy continued to refine and reformulate his key ideas re- garding science and art and the connection between them in his expository and theoretical writings. I concur with Richard Gustafson's premise that "any Tol- stoyan text takes its meaning only from within the complete oeuvre" and that we must "understand any part of his life's text, a story or novel, an essay or tract, a diary entry or a letter" within the context of all he has written.2 My analysis will thus explore Tolstoy's dialogue on science and art in both his fiction and non- fiction. In attempting to outline his views on science, Tolstoy was led repeatedly to confront the nature of knowledge. In all of his writings, Tolstoy kept returning to questions about th# epistemological foundations of life that he posed so force- fully in War and Peace, and he continued to see the phenomenon of conscious- ness as an essential means for coping with inherent cognitive limits He sets forth consciousness as a third cognitive position in addition to reason and faith. Not only does Tolstoy conclude that genuine science is dependent on an episte- mological foundation supported by consciousness, but he applies this thinking to the realm of art as well. Good and genuine art becomes, at least in part, a ques- tion of epistemology. As Tolstoy examines the nature and implications of con- sciousness, this concept becomes for him a critical linchpin that links the fields of science and art. Purposes and epistemological challenges ofscience When Tolstoy temporarily ceased work on Anna Karenina in 1874, he wrote a philosophical dialogue entitled "A Conversation about Science" in which he posed the question of the aims and purposes of science.4 In this dialogue, Niko- lai Nikolaevich, one of the interlocutors, expresses dismay over the fact that he is told that questions such as "whether or not humanity is perfecting itself, whether the soul is immortal, whether the death penalty is just, and so on" do not belong "to the domain of science." He suggests that while the sciences for- merly were willing to address the fundamental philosophical questions underly- ing them, history now says "that questions about the destiny of humankind" are "outside the realm of science." Physiology readily expounds on "the operation 2. Richard F. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and 7heology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 6-7. 3. Gustafson suggests that "the central philosophical issue in War and Peace is the problem of knowledge" (Leo Tolstoy, p. 218). For an outstanding discussion of epistemology and consciousness in War and Peace, see Jeff Love, The Overcoming of History in War and Peace, Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, Vol. XLII (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004). 4. In the Jubilee edition of Tolstoy's works, this document is dated as having been written in 1875-1876. However, the commentary provided by V. F. Savodnik suggests that it can be attributed "to the first half of the 70s" (PSS, 17: 619). Eikhenbaum also suggests, "The dating of the sketch as 1875-1876 seems erroneous to me.... One must suppose that the sketch was being written in 1874" (Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, Tolstoi in the Seventies, trans. Albert Kaspin [Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982], p. 17 1).). .
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