All Human Accomplishment Is in Vain

¶ … death means that all human accomplishment is in vain, according to Tolstoy. Do you think Tolstoy is right about this? Explain and defend your reasons for your answer. Death is indeed inevitable, but Tolstoy was incorrect in his conclusion that death's finality and unavoidability meant that it made all human efforts on earth irrelevant and in vain. Tolstoy is incorrect about this idea because he devalues the importance of human effort and human activity.

Human activity on earth is the point of living: the point of human existence is to grow and to develop. Often the desire to accomplish certain things and to achieve certain things is more important than the outcome. For example, if a runner desires to win and run a 10K marathon, often the experience for him that is the most shaping and influential is the time he spends training for the marathon -- all the early mornings and all the times he struggles to push himself past his limits.

All of these moments will be far more important than the actual single moment that he crosses the finish line -- even though that was the single moment that the runner was striving for. Life is the exact same way: just because we are not immortal doesn't mean that the things we do on earth are inconsequential. Death is not powerful enough to destroy the meaning of life. Rather it is the task of an individual during his time on earth to inform life with meaning.

Some say this is the role that religion should play in one's life: this is what C.S. Lewis definitely believed. "All that we call human history -- money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery -- is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine.

A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other" (Lewis, 17). So while Lewis proposed that individuals should fill the void with God, or what he believed to be a Christian God, this is not necessarily the answer.

Creating a sense of something greater than oneself and having a healthy ability to embrace all that is spiritual in the world is part of what can give one's life meaning. Devoting one's life to helping others can easily inform one's life with meaning. For example, it wouldn't seem correct or accurate to say that a woman who devoted her life to helping rape victims get back on their feet or child abuse survivors rebuild self-esteem, as someone who had a meaningless life.

The good that these people did was not negated by death. Rather the good that these people accomplished triumphed in spite of the inevitability of death. What such a sentiment by Tolstoy tells us is not about human nature, but rather the nature of his experience on earth. Tolstoy was extremely wealthy and extremely successful. He never knew struggle: he never had to fight for financial stability, nor did he ever have to fight to have his work accepted or read by others.

Unlike other writers he was hailed as a genius during his life and after his death, during a time when so many others are just accepted or appreciated post-humously. Thus, by arguing that all human accomplishment is meaningless as a result of death in a way illuminates Tolstoy's own God complex. By being so concerned with death, so concerned with it that it highlights a feeling that one's entire work on earth has been meaningless, points to a person who really takes him or herself way too seriously.

Tolstoy sees himself as almost messianic, in his obsession with death. By not having immortality, it's as if Tolstoy feels like his entire experience on earth has been rendered useless and inconsequential. He probably would not have thought and felt that way if he had known just how revered his work would be received after he died, and how it would essentially grant him a certain level of immortality.

However, there will feel like an absence of meaning in life if one just focuses on one's accomplishments and other benchmarks of external goods and other such things. Measuring the meaning of one's life through such achievement-based benchmarks is a surefire way to set oneself up for unhappiness or for dissatisfaction. As the famous philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, "There is something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance.

Besides the good things that he possesses, he every instant fancies a thousand others that death will prevent him from trying if he does not try them soon. This thought fills him with anxiety, fear, and regret and keeps his mind in ceaseless trepidation." Such a mentality can make one's human accomplishments seem meaningless and can make one feel as though one is drowning in a sense of unrest and instability.

One's life will be meaningless if one does not actively work to instill it with meaning, and a deep-ceded unhappiness is likely to result. However, even if one does not instill one's life with meaning or even if one fails at accomplishing anything or even if one lives out all of one's days feeling empty and disillusioned, that still doesn't mean that one has engaged in a meaningless life. Even in the most difficult or uncomfortable life there is still meaning.

There is still meaning in suffering: there is still meaning in a lack of satisfaction. One can still find meaning, if one chooses, in a variety of circumstances, be them fleeting or not. Nothing lasts forever and there is still value in the ephemeral. It is quite likely that one of the tasks of the human experience on earth is to search for meaning, and to find ways to fill up the endless void.

For example, "Nietzsche famously claimed in the 19th century that 'God is Dead' and many people have struggled to find meaning in life without relying on a higher power to provide it. Without god, humans begin to.