"that bubble is -me", or, levin's worries

i recently finished reading anna karenina. it is no secret that, with respect to a number of features of his life and outlook, the co-protagonist of the book, konstantin levin, mirrors his author, leo tolstoy:




in book eight, in we find levin in a troubled state:

" 'without knowing what i am and why i'm here, it is impossible for me to live. and i cannot know that, therefore i cannot live,' levin would say to himself.
'in infinite time, in the infinity of the matter, in infinite space, a bubble-organism separates itself, and that bubble holds out for a while and then bursts, and that bubble is- me....'
and, happy in his family life, a healthy man, levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself.
but levin did not shoot himself or hang himself and went on living."

what should we make of levin's position? i suspect that many contemporary readers may think that someone like levin is suffering from some sort of mental illness -perhaps he is depressed? but tolstoy tells us levin is happy and healthy. moreover, his life is rooted in caring relationships and honest work. for levin, this crisis in his thought and life was born from his encounter with death:

"from that moment when, at the sight of his beloved brother dying, levin had looked at the questions of life and death for the first time through those new convictions, as he called them, which imperceptibly, during the period from twenty to thirty-four years of age, had come to replace his childhood and adolescent beliefs, he had been horrified, not so much at death as at life without the slightest knowledge of whence it came, wherefore, why, and what it was."

i'm not certain why levin's experience of death leads him to ask such questions about life, and to be troubled by his lack of ability to answer them. perhaps the point is that in encountering death, and the prospect of one's own death, one comes to see one's own life as a whole, as something bounded, and thereby one comes to ask questions about the whole of life. that is, one asks not only what? and why? about things within one's life, but what? and why? about one's whole life.

levin's questions are those that have traditionally been answered by religion and philosophy. indeed, in his search for answers levin reads plato, kant, hegel and schopenhauer. in contemporary academic philosophy, however, there is something decidedly unfashionable about levin's predicament. one way to see this is to note that, in spite of the volumes and volumes that is written about what is right or good, there is little said about the meaning of life. and the unspoken assumption seems to be that we can adequately address questions about acting well without facing the questions that so troubled levin.

i would guess that many contemporary philosophers might think that levin has made some sort of mistake in his thinking. it turns out, after all, that it is possible for him to live; in fact he does so. doesn't that suggest that levin was wrong to think he couldn't live without an answer to the question of why he exists? and even if there answer were just 'you are a bubble that will burst', one could still live perfectly well; there is no need for the different or deeper answer about life for which levin is searching.

i'm not sure what to say about this, except that i am skeptical about the too-easy manner in which levin's predicament seems to be brushed aside by otherwise thoughtful people. its as if 'we' have all somehow come to see that there is something adolescent about levin's concerns, something that one outgrows -that it is enough to simply enjoy the things within one's life, to find them worthwhile, and that asking for more is a sophomore's mistake.

but i want to resist this attitude. i want to say that there is something artificial and unsatisfying about attempts to do moral philosophy without addressing the very questions that preoccupy levin. and, moreover, it seems natural to expect that whatever answers one gives to those questions will have a direct impact on how one understands living well. if there is something adolescent about levin's worry, i think most of us would, in the words of a friend, do well to 'mind our adolescence a bit more.'