Death and Its Illusion

When a person dies, what ceases is the animal personality: the body, with its desires, fears, memories, and individual history. This is real and this is loss. But Tolstoy argues that this is not the loss that most people fear when they fear death. What they fear is the cessation of consciousness — the snuffing out of the light. And here, Tolstoy claims, there is a confusion. The animal personality is not the same as consciousness; it is consciousness's current vehicle and limitation. Consciousness, in so far as it has genuinely expanded beyond the animal personality through love, is not confined to the body in the way that the fear of death assumes.

Tolstoy approaches the problem through time: the animal personality exists in time, is constituted by a past and a future, and death is the termination of this temporal continuity. But genuine love — the mode of rational consciousness — exists in the present: it is not an investment in a future return or a memory of a past pleasure but an immediate orientation toward what is. This temporal presence is, Tolstoy suggests, the form of existence that does not require a future to be real. What is fully alive in the present moment is not threatened by the ending of future moments in the same way that what lives only in hope or memory is.

Tolstoy is careful not to assert a simple doctrine of personal immortality — he does not claim that the individual soul persists as a distinct entity after bodily death. His point is more subtle: a person who has genuinely lived from rational consciousness, who has made love rather than self-preservation the centre of their existence, does not have the relationship to death that the fear of death presupposes. Death matters so much because we have invested so much in what is dying. The person who has learned to live in and for others finds, on examination, that less is at stake at their own death than they had supposed.

Tolstoy's treatment of death in On Life is connected to his intense personal preoccupation with the subject throughout his life — most famously in The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), written at almost the same time, which depicts the terror of a man who has lived only for the animal personality and faces its extinction without having developed any alternative centre of existence.