Tolstoy on the injustice of the philosophy of education

Abstract

Tolstoy had a lifelong interest in education and philosophy. However, he was suspicious of using philosophy as a foundation for educational practice or applying philosophy to the educational problems of his day, most importantly, the development of an education system in Russia around the time of the emancipation of the serfs. Tolstoy’s rejection of the philosophy of education arose from his concerns about what would be identified in contemporary terminology as ‘epistemic injustice’ or ‘epistemicide’. How could European philosophy inform a curriculum and pedagogy for the Russian peasantry when the peasants’ own forms of knowledge were more valuable to their ways of life? Tolstoy sought to answer this question by engaging with children in peasant schools. This experience informed the development of his own worldview, articulated in the latter years of his life—a vision of uniting the insights of indigenous peoples from various times and places to inform what he considered to be the pursuit of authentic knowledge. This article considers Tolstoy’s apparent rejection of the philosophy of education, exploring how this seemingly bombastic position led to the evolution of an innovative meta-philosophy that offers some contribution to thinking about contemporary educational problems.

Introduction

While philosophers of education have long considered issues of justice and rights, in the last decade issues of ‘epistemic injustice’ have become a focus of scholarly attention (Kotzee 2017). Epistemic injustice is said to occur when power relations and social structures support iniquitous representation, credibility, or access to knowledge. Fricker (2007), who coined the term, makes a distinction between ‘testimonial’ and ‘hermeneutical’ injustice—the former, when deficient credibility is given to someone’s views or experience on account of their characteristics or status; the latter, when someone’s ability to interpret something is curtailed by insufficient or unequal access to resources and processes of understanding. Although the present article focuses on Tolstoy’s concern for hermeneutic justice in the main, both kinds of epistemic injustice have a significant bearing on education in that they are relevant to the experiences and needs of marginalized individuals and groups in educational contexts. For example, do educational institutions, curricula, and approaches to teaching give due credence and representation to the experiences and identities of all learners? To what extent are different ways of knowing supported and represented, including those significant to learners who may be marginalized? These educational problems have become particularly important for scholars concerned with the Global South or majority world, well illustrated in the work of de Sousa Santos (2018) who uses ‘cognitive injustice’ and ‘epistemicide’ to conceptualize injustices experienced by the peoples of the Global South who have had indigenous ways of knowing disregarded or destroyed by Eurocentric education systems.

Concerns about epistemic injustice can be directed towards philosophy itself—an academic discipline that in general, and no less in the field of education, has traditionally focused on a limited canon representing the views of elite White European men. The philosophers of education who have sought to expose the various epistemic injustices related to this inheritance often rely, to varying extents, upon the resources of philosophy to make their case. For example, Noddings (2009) like other feminists looked to key figures in the canon, such as Dewey, to make her case about the marginalization of women. Those working for decolonization, on the other hand, while seeking to distance themselves from their roots in Western-centric Marxism, nevertheless appeal to a Marxist framework in their ideals of justice. But what if the very application of philosophy to education were inescapably unjust? This was Tolstoy’s bold view, clearly expressed in several essays published around the time of the emancipation of the serfs. In ‘On Popular Education’ [O narodnom obrazovanii] (1862) he declared ‘the definition of pedagogy and of its aims in a philosophical sense is impossible, useless and injurious’ (Tolstoy 1968: 29 [PSS 4: 24]). He made a similar argument twelve years later in another public appeal of the same title: ‘Philosophy … cannot be the basis of anything, least of all of such an important and simple thing as popular education’ (Tolstoy 1874/1904: 255 [PSS 17: 79]).¹

There are several reasons why Tolstoy made dismissive statements about philosophy when applied to education. His principal arguments were concerned with what we would now understand as hermeneutical and testimonial justice. He called for schools to listen and engage with peasant children’s experiences, to respect peasants’ own forms of knowledge, and to acknowledge peasant children’s rights to make choices about what and how to know. For Tolstoy, the philosophy of education was an impediment to implementing a just education system. The language and arguments of philosophers and theorists of education, when taking place in the absence of children (as they usually did and still do), disenfranchised those that needed education the most—the learners—from decisions about their learning. Philosophers of education, as an elite group of adults—and particularly so in the case of the philosophes Tolstoy read, Kant and Rousseau, and those working in their pedagogical traditions—belonged to a different generation and context. Therefore, their theories could not cater for the needs of future learners, especially the Russian peasantry. Furthermore, the practice of abstract theorizing by philosophers at a distance from learners was far too general in its outcomes to do justice to each individual learner’s unique needs and interests. As in Tolstoy’s view no philosophical questions had been settled definitively by philosophy, using philosophy as a basis to inform pedagogy foreclosed philosophical questions prematurely, removing them from the consideration and discernment of learners. Assuming a given philosophy as a certain foundation of education was therefore, to Tolstoy, to base pedagogy on fallacious epistemic premises and to impose this on learners unjustly.

This article reappraises Tolstoy’s views on the injustice of the philosophy of education. For the first time Tolstoy’s arguments about epistemic justice are identified and brought to the fore, made possible and relevant by the growing understanding of epistemic injustice, which until the work of Fricker (2007) had only been tacit. The article makes a new contribution to scholarship because it refers to primary texts from all of Tolstoy’s life, engaging with arguments in his mature, most philosophical work, On Life (1887/2019 [PSS 26: 310–442]). For while in his early work as a teacher Tolstoy was suspicious of applying philosophy to questions of education without paying attention to the experience of learners, he also had a clear vision of how and why philosophy should be practised with children, which came to fruition in his later works. Tolstoy may therefore be regarded as a philosopher, like others that followed him, such as Wittgenstein (one of Tolstoy’s emulators), who advanced an ‘anti-philosophy’ that rejected some of the assumed foundations of the discipline to advance a new conception (Love 2008). Tolstoy’s contribution to educational thought therefore offers a challenge to philosophers of education to not only understand education in regard to his novel and overlooked worldview, but also to reconsider how philosophy of education may be more just in its method and practice.

I begin by exploring why the extent of Tolstoy’s contribution to the philosophy of education has yet to be fully considered. I then demonstrate how Tolstoy’s concern for justice in schooling and his initial rejection of philosophy owes much to his experience of teaching in peasant schools. I then reconstruct two principal arguments Tolstoy made about the injustice of the philosophy of education: 1) from philosophical uncertainty; and 2) from the priority of knowledge of how to live. The former, articulated in his early pedagogical essays, is concerned with the inconclusive nature of philosophical inquiry. This is a negative argument in the sense it argues philosophy is unjust because it imposes an unjustified view of the world on learners. The latter, articulated in his later works, originates from Tolstoy’s conviction that both philosophy and education should engage with the central question of human existence: how should we live our lives? This argument is positive in the sense it advocates a kind of philosophizing to establish a just foundation for education while maintaining Tolstoy’s scepticism about academic philosophy that was not at the direction of learners themselves. It should be noted from the outset that while Tolstoy was arguably ahead of his time in regard to identifying epistemic features of justice in education, his sense of justice was blind in other respects, particularly with respect to his views about the emancipation of women. Taking this into account, I conclude by suggesting that although he may have fallen short of some of his own (and certainly our present) ethical standards, Tolstoy’s meta-philosophy offers a fruitful avenue by which to consider issues of epistemic justice in relation to the philosophy of education.

Reconsidering Tolstoy as a philosopher of education

There are often considered to be two Tolstoys. One, the author of great novels, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina; the other, a flawed moralist who, repudiating the novel after a mid-life spiritual crisis, wrote bad philosophy. While in actuality the common themes between his literature and non-fiction are easily traceable, a distinction may be drawn between Tolstoy’s thought before and after a supposed ‘spiritual crisis’ in the late 1870s that followed the publication of Anna Karenina. This is documented in his famous autobiography, A Confession (1879/1987 [PSS 23: 1–59]) which can be used as a pivot to separate the early, ‘pre-Confession’ from later, ‘post-Confession’, thinker. Tolstoy’s work in education is often only considered pre-Confession, yet further engagement with Tolstoy’s post-Confession works demonstrates it was an unceasing preoccupation closely connected to the development of his philosophy.

Tolstoy first founded a school for peasant children in 1857 on his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, which became the title of his radical education journal published from 1860 to1863. The content of the Yasnaya Polyana journal provides the basis of most scholarship about Tolstoy and education. With the exception of Murphy (1992), Moulin (2014), and Roberts and Saeverot (2018), educationists following Archambault (1967) have tended to concentrate upon the writings up to 1863, written well before A Confession, published in 1879. (For a short summary of Tolstoy’s educational career, see Moulin (2022).) Ten years after closing his first school, however, Tolstoy reopened it and trialled his primers for learning to read. These textbooks attempted to be in what we would now understand as ‘epistemic harmony’ with peasant learners. As well as stories about the lives of Russian peasants (some written by students), these included proverbs and fables Tolstoy adapted from India, China, America, and elsewhere—intercultural engagement that Tolstoy later went on to pursue philosophically. Tolstoy engaged in a public trial of his educational methods with the Moscow Literacy Committee. Its inconclusive findings prompted a restatement of his views in a revised essay ‘On Popular Education’ published in 1874 (Tolstoy 1904 [PSS 17: 72–132]) advancing slightly different arguments to the previous essay of the same title a decade earlier.

Education continued to be an inexorable interest to Tolstoy following his spiritual crisis of the late 1870s, considered in a large number of philosophical and religious essays, letters, compilations of aphorisms, and moral fables that followed the publication of A Confession (1879) until his death in 1910. Important in understanding the development of Tolstoy’s views on the injustice of the philosophy of education are On Life published in 1887, and his final restatement on education written in 1909, On Upbringing [‘O vospitanii’] (PSS 38: 62–9). In this article, both of these important texts are considered for the first time in a study of Tolstoy’s philosophy of education. A corollary of the philosophical worldview espoused in these essays, was Tolstoy’s aspiration to create educational resources for adults. Never translated into English and seldom considered by educationists or philosophers, Tolstoy’s last major work was to compile philosophical aphorisms for everyday reading, published in various volumes from the late 1880s onwards, culminating as The Way of Life (1910 [PSS: 45]). These compendia included all the major philosophers of the Western canon. For example, for 1 January in Cycle of Reading (PSS 41: 11), Tolstoy selected adages from Emerson, Locke, Seneca, Thoreau, and Schopenhauer about books—the moral in common being to exercise caution in reading, and only read that which expresses truths clearly. Alongside Western philosophers, Tolstoy also included traditional sayings from the world’s cultures and religious traditions, representing his enduring conviction in the value of the thought and experience of non-European peoples. These volumes were intended to offer an accessible means to prompt the daily philosophical reflection of the ordinary people on how to know how to live ethically. At first, these final works may seem a complete departure from his earlier rejection of the application of philosophy to education. However, as this article will demonstrate, Tolstoy’s concern for epistemic justice was central to the development of his views and his later promotion of accessible, public, and transcultural philosophy.

Tolstoy’s philosophical and ethical writings were widely influential worldwide among anti-colonialists, pacifists, and radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet they received little positive appraisal from philosophers or philosophers of education. Berlin (1953) and Russell (1945), for example, though engaging with his writings, perceived Tolstoy’s thinking as defective, intellectually inferior to those they considered genuine philosophers. Dewey concurred with this view, judging only Tolstoy’s art as meritorious. Although Dewey’s approach to education bears some striking similarities with Tolstoy’s, he considered Tolstoy’s philosophy incoherent. Significant to the argument of the present article, Dewey (1910) suggested it was Tolstoy’s artistic and over-heightened sense of justice that was the cause of his deficiency as a philosopher. When Tolstoy saw the suffering of the urban poor or the injustice of capital punishment, Dewey comments, he was too hasty in his conclusion that this suffering was unnecessary and could be traced back to a false philosophy of life. Dewey here assumes that evil in the world cannot only be attributed to missing the right approach to education and philosophy. Tolstoy on the other hand, founded his entire engagement with education and philosophy on the assumption that the horrors and injustices of modern civilization had at their root cause both false education and erroneous philosophy. This was a position that put him at odds with the Tsarist regime who heavily censored or banned his philosophical works. Although Tolstoy is, and was, highly regarded in Russia for his novels, he was a vocal critic of any form of violence and imperialism, and as a pacifist, would likely have been so of the present war in Ukraine.

Tolstoy’s often neglected non-fiction works were well ahead of their time in identifying problems of injustice across a range of issues including but not limited to animal rights, ecological justice, capital punishment, slavery, economic exploitation, urban poverty, war, as well as epistemic injustices—the various deceptions that allowed humankind to persist in causing evil to one another. At the height of European imperialism and militarism, he wrote scathing analyses of the colonial system, championing forms of indigenous knowledge as alternatives to both the hegemony of scientific positivism and religious superstition. By ‘indigenous’ I mean the various minority ethnic groups living in close-knit communities with whom Tolstoy engaged directly and drew inspiration, for example, the Bashkirs of the Southern Urals. A good example of Tolstoy’s representation of indigenous values and practices as ethical and sustainable ways of living in his literature is given in the famous short story ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ (1886/2001 [PSS 25: 67–78]; see Moulin (in press) for an exposition). A further example of Tolstoy’s informed understanding of the oppression of the indigenous peoples gleaned from secondary sources is given in his detailed explanation of the plight of the Fuji islanders in What Then Must We Do? (1884/1935 [PSS 25: 182–411]). We should note in the same essay, however, Tolstoy advanced a retrograde view on the role of women of which we can make parallel observations of his literature, perhaps deplorable on account of his simplistic depiction of female characters.

Despite the synergies between his art and thought, Tolstoy’s reception as a brilliant artist but failed philosopher has impacted on perceptions of his educational ideas. When educationists do engage with him, they still often look to philosophical themes in his literature rather than to his philosophical writings per se (e.g. Roberts 2021, Roberts and Saeverot 2018), or they even consider his religious and moral interests outside the remit of political philosophy (Suissa 2006). Archambault, who was one of the only philosophers of education to deem Tolstoy’s writings on education significant, nevertheless concurred with the general reception, declaring Tolstoy’s educational writings ‘illogical’ and ‘sentimental’, and concluding ‘Tolstoy is not a philosopher’ (Archambault 1967: viii, emphasis in original). This is perhaps unsurprising given the kind of analytic philosophy that prevailed in the philosophy of education in the twentieth century. Yet the social turn in epistemology along with other intellectual and cultural change, now affords more credence to thinkers like Tolstoy who paid attention to the experiences of the marginalized. In regard to anti-colonization for instance, Tolstoy could be considered alongside his most influential emulator, Gandhi, as what de Sousa Santos (2018: 47) identifies as offering a ‘conception of science otherwise’. Tolstoy expressed an alternative view overlooked by the intellectual establishment on account of the intellectual establishment’s commitments to the industrialization, imperialism, and violence that Tolstoy single-mindedly rejected.

Tolstoy’s pedagogical laboratory and the development of his philosophy

Tolstoy’s criticism of the role of philosophy in determining the practice of education was based upon an earnest engagement with pedagogical theory, but also visiting schools. The Yasnaya Polyana journal was published shortly after returning from a tour of schools in France, Germany, Switzerland, and England. Tolstoy’s observations demonstrate his concern with the injustice of schooling, identifying modern European education as systematized epistemic injustice that drastically limited and skewed children’s ability to interpret the world. He was appalled at corporal punishment, rote learning, and the stupefying effect of schooling. He noted the injustice of disallowing the vernacular dialect of pupils, and the artificial division between school-based learning and the knowledge necessary for real life. Tolstoy’s pedagogical experiments conducted on his return to Russia consequently attempted a ‘schooling otherwise’, a schooling that started with the testimony and experience of children and fostered a collaborative inquiry into the world with them.

The premise of Tolstoy’s experimental school was—given the absurdity of educational theory and the impossibility of establishing criteria of pedagogy a priori—to begin a practical but reflective investigation with, and alongside, peasant children as to what public education could and should be. Stemming from Tolstoy’s concern to give peasant children a ‘voice’ about their schooling as part of the process of schooling itself, he was also concerned with making this experiment known so that educators, policymakers, and the general public could be informed in making decisions about universal education. Thus Tolstoy’s ‘pedagogical laboratory’ of the 1860s—a term that Tolstoy uses in the Russian [‘pedagogicheskaya laboratoriya’ (PSS 8: 16)]—predates Dewey’s three decades later. Tolstoy’s concept of the laboratory was necessary to encourage and comprehend the development of learners’ own understanding of experience and to give opportunity to them to pursue their own thinking. This process, rather than imposing an alien philosophy or worldview on learners via the imposition of one or other pedagogical theories, was supposed by Tolstoy to allow for justice. For Tolstoy the aim of education was to make learners equal in knowledge to their teachers: if education were to have a criterion, this was ‘freedom’ and if it were to have a method, this could only be ‘experiment’—a flexible definition of pedagogy prioritizing the context-specific judgement of both teacher and learner.

Because of his emphasis on the freedom of learners, it has been stated that Tolstoy’s experiments fit into the ‘progressive’ tradition along with Dewey, Froebel, Pestalozzi, and Rousseau. However, Dewey (1929) and other commentators greatly overestimate Tolstoy’s reliance on Rousseau. Though Tolstoy, as an inheritor of the European enlightenment, was much impressed and inspired by Rousseau in his early life, he emphatically set himself apart from this pedagogical tradition. He rejected Rousseau’s philosophy of education on the grounds that it was only fanciful theory and was not based on real engagement with children. Like all theories, it was ‘based on nothing’ (1862/1968: 10 [PSS 8: 9.]). Interestingly, Tolstoy also rejected the supposed progressive pedagogues that followed Rousseau on account of their romanticism and idealization of the ‘savage’. In a draft of his later essay of the same title, he renounced Pestalozzi’s ideas because of their assumptions about children passing through a ‘savage’ stage of development—an idea that despite Tolstoy’s concern, endured for many years among progressives, including Dewey (Fallace 2015). In ‘On Popular Education’ (1874) Tolstoy vociferously criticized Russian pedagogues because they adopted Pestalozzi’s idea of ignorant ‘savages’ to conceive peasant learners.

Rather than being at a primitive stage of development, Tolstoy believed peasant children possessed values, experiences, and indeed philosophies, from which adults could learn. A salient early example of this is to be found in his article ‘Should We Teach the Peasant Children to Write, or Should They Teach Us?’ (Tolstoy 1862/1982 [PSS 8: 301–25]). Tolstoy argues adults should learn from children’s creative writing on account of their candour, simplicity, and receptivity to feelings of truth, beauty, and goodness. These epistemic virtues evident in their literary creations were also, in Tolstoy’s view, what made children worthy philosophers.

The impact of Tolstoy’s experience of philosophizing with children was documented by his English friend and translator, Aylmer Maude. In his translation of Tolstoy’s What is Art? (1898), Maude (1930) recounts that Tolstoy explained to him children are able to understand any worthwhile philosophy. It is for this reason that Maude included an excerpt of the Yasnaya Polyana journal of 1862 alongside Tolstoy’s later philosophy of aesthetics. In this description [PSS 8: 44–7], Tolstoy narrates a walk in the woods after school. The children’s questioning leads to a debate on the purpose of art, and then whether the purpose of anything could be reduced to just utility, or if beauty were part of the natural order of things, like the lime trees that surrounded them. Tolstoy observed the children could discuss all there was to discuss about the philosophy of beauty but concluded that he was unable to satisfactorily answer their questions about ‘what art was for’. Tolstoy ruminated on this discussion for over three decades before writing his essay on the topic. The value Tolstoy placed on children’s ability to philosophize here and elsewhere in his oeuvre may seem to conflict with his rejection of the philosophy of education. However, it is precisely because of Tolstoy’s conviction in children’s ability to philosophize that made him concerned about their disenfranchisement from deliberation about the aims and practices of education as presented in the philosophy of education of contemporaneous and past pedagogues.

The argument from philosophical uncertainty

I now return to Tolstoy’s arguments about the injustice of the philosophy of education, focusing on the argument from philosophical uncertainty made in ‘On Popular Education’ first published in 1862 (Tolstoy 1968 [PSS 8: 4–29]). One of Tolstoy’s lifelong concerns was the relationship between certainty and justice. Basing schooling on erroneous premises would violate the rights of learners to know, a principal feature of epistemic injustice. Tolstoy argued as any given philosophy (represented as ‘X’) is not certain—whether conceived as a religious conception, pedagogical theory, or system of ethics—we must reject it as a comprehensive philosophical foundation for schooling. This argument can be reconstructed as follows:

1. Only if we are certain a given foundation to schooling (X) is true, it is a justified approach to schooling.

2. We are not certain X is true.

3. Therefore, X is not a justified foundation to schooling.

Premise 1 may be contested on the grounds that there are counter examples where educational practices are not concerned with what is true, for example, using simplified atomic theory or even Tolstoy’s fiction. Nevertheless, it is the epistemic foundations of the entire enterprise of schooling—curriculum, pedagogy, and all—that Tolstoy is concerned with here, of which he could concede localized and expedient falsehoods or gaps in knowledge for the sake of a general epistemic foundation to schooling based on general truths. Premise 2 may be sound, depending on what X refers to. Many readers of this journal will hold premise 2 to be sound when X refers to a religious doctrine. Tolstoy sees this argument applying to all religions, the existence of many religions being the principal reason to be uncertain of the truth of any one of them—an argument he then also applies to philosophy and ethics generally. Interestingly, Tolstoy discounts science as a theoretical foundation for schooling for similar reasons. Because of the variety of scientific methods available, selecting with certainty the best approach to knowledge leaves the educator with an unsurmountable task, one open to bias, and one that would foreclose alternatives by narrowing down to the methods of a subdiscipline.

Premise 2 draws support from the fact that where there is certainty in philosophy, it tends to be the certainty of refutation, as many positions can be refuted a priori with some degree of confidence. Tolstoy includes as examples the famous and influential philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and the prominent pedagogues, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel. Although we may be able to ascertain strengths and weaknesses of their arguments (noting the successors of these figures modified the ideas of their predecessors), we can take Tolstoy’s point that each thinker’s perspective represents a solution constrained by its place in history, to which its relevance is limited, and which will be superseded by other philosophies. Indeed, it is unlikely readers of this present article could, without reservation, endorse the philosophy of education of any of these key thinkers as a conceptual foundation for schooling. Yet clearly many people did in the past.

Tolstoy stresses the mutability of theory by appeal to the context-dependence of ethics. As there are various and contradictory conceptions of ethics, he argues, they are limited by the context of their articulation, and are soon superseded. Hence, we cannot base a system of schooling on an ethical theory. This version of the argument from uncertainty can be reconstructed about philosophy as such, pedagogical theory, or science. Each discipline shares the problem that any theoretical knowledge upon which a system of education could be based would ultimately become obsolete. This may be reconstructed with any given theory substituted for X:

1. Only if we are certain a given foundation to schooling (X) is based on truth, is it a justified approach to schooling.

2. We cannot be certain of the truth of a theory if beliefs about its truth change according to time and context.

3. Theories of X change according to time and context.

4. Therefore, X is not a justified approach to schooling.

This argument is valid. It could be contested on the grounds that premise 2 is unsound: we can be certain of some truths even if beliefs change according to time and context; or, conversely, by rejecting premise 3, on the grounds that some theoretical principles do not change significantly enough according to time and context.

Before going on to evaluate these arguments more conclusively, it is necessary to consider their place in the development of Tolstoy’s thought. As we have seen, at the time of the Yasnaya Polyana journal, in considering the above arguments, Tolstoy chose to avoid the problem of philosophical uncertainty by conducting an experiment based on a position of radical ignorance, perhaps redolent of Socrates’ epistemic humility. As peasant children were naturally inclined to learn, it therefore made sense to learn about their learning from observation. Thus, the Yasnaya Polyana journal represents an early example of educational research foregrounding an epistemology based on an open concept of education that was concerned with the future needs of learners. As such, it was concerned with social justice, in the sense that the insights and experience of otherwise marginalized learners were the priority, not the arguments of philosophers.

The argument from the priority of knowledge of how to live

When Tolstoy restated his views on public education in 1874 (Tolstoy 1904 [PSS 17: 72–132]), he added a further dimension to the argument from philosophical uncertainty: that any existing philosophy of education is incomplete when compared to the complexity and richness of the experience of life. If a philosophy of education is used by teachers as a way of structuring the acquisition of knowledge, Tolstoy argued, it would not allow learners to understand what is most important to know. This variation on his previous argument was, however, indicative of his growing interest in solving the problem of philosophical uncertainty. If a philosophy of life could be developed and there could be certainty of some foundational ethical truths, it followed the argument from philosophical uncertainty would not hold. Although the 1874 essay does not go this far in its argument, it is evident from Tolstoy’s notes around this time that his suspicion of philosophy was morphing from rejection to revision. During the spiritual crisis a few years later, he acknowledged his dissatisfaction when trying to teach from a position of ignorance at the Yasnaya Polyana school, lamenting in A Confession: ‘I could not possibly teach what was needed because I did not know what it was’ (Tolstoy 1987: 27 [PSS 23: 9]). As suggested in the example of his aesthetics, working with children spurred Tolstoy on to develop what he considered to be a more authentic philosophy. While his concerns about the injustice of the philosophy of education began with the inconclusivity of philosophical arguments, this developed into concern about the incompleteness of philosophy as a hermeneutic to apprehend life. Though this development demonstrates to some extent his acceptance of philosophical inquiry, his position still allowed him to maintain a firm conviction that the philosophy of education, as it had been conceived hitherto at least, was the cause of epistemic injustice. This argument, rather than functioning from uncertainty, approaches epistemic justice from the position of a novel principle: the prioritization of knowledge of how to live. In Tolstoy’s philosophy, ‘how to live’ is an ethical question, concerned with developing the right relationship with the world, for Tolstoy, that means treating all living things with respect and love.

The principle of the priority of knowledge about how to live is perhaps well illustrated by the famous vignette from Tolstoy’s literature of Levin harvesting with peasants in Part 8 of Anna Karenina [PSS 19: 370–7] (often considered to resemble Tolstoy’s own spiritual crisis that took place while writing it). Levin desperately seeks life’s meaning and purpose. He had been drawn to materialism but determines life cannot just be biological. Dissuaded by the scientific account of life, Levin rereads the works of the philosophers (Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer) only to find them unsatisfying. Philosophical argumentation and the pursuit of definitions appear to him as meaningless logomarchy—any philosophical conception of life is dry and incomparable with life itself. Rather than through philosophy, Levin unexpectedly finds his search for meaning answered in conversation with a peasant labourer. The peasant explains the purpose of life is to live ethically and according to God, to be goodly and kind to others. This encounter has an illuminating impact on Levin who draws together the latent truths he had somehow known into a profound and blinding realization: the explanation of life could not be solved by philosophy because life needs to be lived, and knowledge of how to live, of right or wrong, is innate. It cannot be deduced by philosophy because it must be the foundation of philosophy. Goodness cannot be reduced to reason but must rest on something prephilosophical. It is interesting to pause and consider the implicit Platonism of this episode. That Tolstoy’s exemplary peasant is named Platon has not gone unnoticed by literary scholars (Orwin 1983). However, of further interest is how Levin’s conversion experience follows Plato’s metaphor of the cave with one crucial difference. Once determining the falsehoods of the world, Levin is able to see the truth founded upon innate knowledge. But this truth is not gleaned through philosophy, but through life. It is not exposed by a philosopher, but by a peasant. This principle is comparable to that of the Yasnaya Polyana journal. The definition of education could not be worked out by philosophy, but by peasant children. In this move, Tolstoy dispenses with the traditional philosophical prioritization of definitional knowledge—what Gail Fine identifies as the Socratic ‘principle of the priority of knowledge what’ (Fine 1992). Rather, Tolstoy prioritized the knowledge of how to live over the pursuit of definitional knowledge. This once novel philosophy has much to share with the existential movement that followed him in the twentieth century.

In On Life Tolstoy gives a longer philosophical argument for the same position. According to Tolstoy, the principal question of how to live, that is, to live in harmony with others and the universe at large, though present in every indigenous and premodern culture, had been obscured in and by the modern world, including by modern European education. Tolstoy argues humankind in the modern predicament is presented with two prevailing false doctrines which limit its ability to see and understand life for what it truly is. On one hand there are ‘Scribes’, scientific materialists that hold life is nothing more than biology (interpreted by Tolstoy as the selfish animal existence for personal gain). On the other hand, there is the equally erroneous interpretation of the ‘Pharisees’, doctrines of the Church founded on dogma and superstition. Like other aspects of his later philosophy, the origins of this dichotomy can be traced to his experiences in peasant schools in which he observed first-hand the confusing juxtaposition of science lessons exploring the nervous system of frogs, followed by religious education classes positing the existence of the soul. Either position, Tolstoy maintained, deceived learners, constituting what would in today’s parlance be understood as epistemicide. The perils of these deceptions are vehemently represented in the later fable the ‘Restoration of Hell’ (Tolstoy 1903/1934a [PSS 34: 99–116]) in which various devils personify elements of the modern world. Each devil explains how they have spread falsehoods in the name of religion, science, education, philosophy, and nationalism to destroy the innate goodness of people. This demonic success has been achieved in education through the pursuit of unnecessary knowledge—such as studying the writings of Aristotle as opposed to considering the questions posed by life, to use one of Tolstoy’s most germane examples for the present article.

What Tolstoy sought in On Life was a third way that preserved what he saw as knowledge of how to live—the simple ethical values of goodwill, harmony, and love manifest in every culture, including the Russian peasantry—and to free people from the deceptions of the Church and/or science. In his view, this could be achieved philosophically by reordering the process of inquiry to prioritize the ethical questions of how to live rightly. To make this point On Life begins with an analogy. Tolstoy asks readers to imagine a miller’s grandson. Taking on the family business, he knows how to operate the mill and adjust the grinding stone and machinery. But rather than attending to milling he becomes interested in theorizing its workings. He traces the power source from the flour between the grinding stones, to the shaft, through the gears, finally to the river. He concludes his theoretical inquiry that as the river is the source of power, it is the most important part of the mill. However, because of this theory and his direction of inquiry, he neglects the real purpose of the mill and his previous work attending to its machinery, resulting in it becoming run-down and dysfunctional. Tolstoy points out the miller’s theory, though, is in a strict sense correct, but in another sense mistaken. To keep producing flour, the miller should have followed a different direction of inquiry: starting his reasoning at the river but following that power through the cogs to concentrate on running the mill.

It is worth considering this analogy in two applications. The first is to the philosophy of education, the second to a philosophy of life more generally. In regard to education, the analogy of the mill leads to a position similar to that of the Yasnaya Polyana journal, that abstract theorizing on education is at the expense of the learner. One could imagine a teacher like the miller. They learn how to teach by experience and are good at it, but in attempting to make a theory of teaching and learning, lose sight of beneficial practice because of their distraction in fruitless theory. In regard to life more generally, Tolstoy uses the analogy to show that before undertaking any inquiry we must first prioritize what kind of knowledge we seek. The miller makes the mistake of not attending to the knowledge of how to mill. This folly can be compared to that of both Tolstoy’s Scribes and Pharisees. Science and religion posit theories about life that do not prioritize the ethical question of how to live. Science, as Tolstoy understands it, ignores questions of value, while religion erroneously predicates important ethical questions on the afterlife, superstition, and ritual.

While rejecting organized religion, Tolstoy’s meta-philosophy represents to some extent a modern rearticulation of the traditional Christian doctrine of faith seeking understanding. For Tolstoy, faith is not assent to certain dogmas established on authority but, following Schleiermacher, each individual establishing the ‘correct relationship’ between ourselves and the universe (see Moulin 2017). This relationship, as Levin’s example shows, cannot rely on rational thought alone. Indeed, Tolstoy suggests that this relationship, determined by our connection and awareness of every aspect of the world and all its living beings, sets the priority for any inquiry.

Tolstoy’s philosophy of life has profound implications for understanding his implicit conception of epistemic justice. Firstly, it follows that learners should not be deceived by the falsehoods of the Scribes or Pharisees. Secondly, learners should be supported in understanding how to live ethically and form their relationship to the world. Tolstoy’s restatement on education ‘On Upbringing’ [PSS 38: 62–9]² emphasizes these principles. He argues education should be directed at well-being, guaranteed through learners’ freedom. There should be no narrow focus of study but an equal engagement with different disciplines and their constituent forms of knowledge. This balance is to be achieved by first understanding how to live, which should guide the whole process. A clear rationale for his compendia of ethical aphorisms published around the same time, Tolstoy suggests this task may be supported through an engagement with diverse cultures. As the modern progress of Christian nations has replaced faith in religion with faith in science, people have lost understanding of the values with which to live. Therefore, engagement with non-Christian cultures is essential so people can re-engage with ethical guidance for living. Attaining such a relationship is the main purpose of education—to understand the religious and moral teaching that focuses on the interconnection of all people and living things. As the same moral principles can be found at the heart of all religions, including the teachings of Krishna, Buddha, Confucius, Christ, and Muhammad, education can be served through a values-engaged ethnography—learning about how the ignored people from the non-Christian nations live, those who form the majority of the world’s population. (This enterprise is different from Geography or History Tolstoy explains, which as a school subject typically charts imperialism and conquest rather than considering the principles by which people live.)

From Tolstoy’s later philosophy as considered here we can now reconstruct another formal argument considering the relationship between epistemology and justice:

1. Education should prioritize the most important knowledge.

2. The most important knowledge is knowledge of how to live.

3. Knowledge of how to live is shared between the ethical principles of the world religions and cultures.

4. Education should prioritize knowledge of the ethical principles of world religions and cultures.

This argument is valid. Few would contest premise 1. Premise 2 would be difficult to argue against, although counter-arguments about the importance of knowledge for its own sake undermine this proposition. Premise 3, however, is very contentious even if we accept, as Tolstoy did, that the world’s wisdom includes all kinds of ethical philosophies and non-religious, non-European worldviews. It also reflects a complete departure from Tolstoy’s earlier argument from the mutability of ethics. While the late Tolstoy would maintain that philosophy is incomplete in its ability in establishing certain truths, it is difficult to see how he can complete his survey of the world’s religions in order to find truths without beginning first with his own ethical principles on which to base his selection. This of course, while a problem for an outsider, is not a problem for Tolstoy given his moral realism and his assumption, articulated in the analogy of the mill, that an affective relationship with the world must precede any ratiocination of it. Nevertheless, we are still faced with the same problem which Tolstoy identified in his early years, that the framing of education via a philosophically derived curriculum presents a problem of epistemic justice in the sense that it curtails learners’ ability to interpret the world differently.

Conclusion

Is the philosophy of education inescapably unjust? The earlier pre-Confession Tolstoy would certainly say so—any educational method must be worked out in conjunction with the learner from whom it was intended, not in the remoteness of abstract theorizing. The later Tolstoy, post-Confession, would also concur that the philosophy of education was unjust if it did not prioritize the question of how to live, or it were used to support an educational framework that promoted scientific materialism or religious dogma. However, the post-Confession Tolstoy believed if philosophy were guided by the right relationship with the world, then a comparative approach to the ethics of the world’s cultures and philosophies could lead to a genuine education, equipping learners to challenge the mass deception of the modern world. Ensuring testimonial and hermeneutic justice for children in this sense was crucial to Tolstoy’s late view of education. Education should be founded upon, and be open to, the testimony and scrutiny of children. It should also be centred on giving them the powers of interpretation to identify moral evil and choose the right relationship to the world and others, in the face of widespread deception. It is on these principles that Tolstoy’s post-Confession moral fables and essays are also constructed. Hermeneutic justice can be achieved by supporting the self-awareness and development of an individual’s moral principles through negative narrative moral examples or through a consideration of moral axioms (see Moulin in press). In this way, although certainly an activist as well as writer, Tolstoy is no anti-intellectual. He is better understood as a precursor to Wittgenstein in that he saw philosophy in some sense inadequate when encountering the mysterious responsibility of ethics.

The post-Confession Tolstoy may seem appealing to philosophers because, despite his suspicion of academic philosophers of education, his late views give the opportunity for the re-entry of philosophy into education as the practice of philosophy with learners. However, it is important to observe a tension in Tolstoy’s views on the injustice of the philosophy of education. This is stark if we compare his pre- and post-Confession views. The argument from philosophical uncertainty and the argument from the priority of knowledge of how to live cannot both be sound. The former is premised on radical philosophical doubt about ethics, the latter, moral certitude. Tolstoy’s later fervent belief in universal ethical principles, although arguably nascent in his earlier works, is unmissable in the post-Confession works. This intransient philosophical worldview risks the imposition of his own values upon learners, contradicting his earlier concern for their freedom—a tension which arises in the philosophy of education more generally. For any view of education, no matter how non-indoctrinatory or ‘free’, must be located in the values of the theorizer that pre-exist the learner.

In response to this problem, Tolstoy’s initial solution to pass philosophical problems on to the next generation in the pedagogical form of humble dialogue is perhaps apposite, and one that he never completely abandoned. Tolstoy’s free pedagogy was ahead of its time, predating the work of Freire, for example, by more than a century. This comparison is relevant as all the critical pedagogues, such as Freire’s, begin with a conviction in their own philosophy and values. It has arguably only been Tolstoy who began thinking about education with the ideal of complete experiment, from an assumed position of radical doubt. It is important to consider his conclusion to this experiment, however: that values are, in fact, the most significant aspect of the educational transaction and therefore, cannot be abandoned. This realization of Tolstoy’s, worked out over years, demonstrates an important dimension of the relationship between epistemic justice and education. It exposes the dilemma that it is equally a problem of epistemic justice to allow complete freedom in the determination of values, as it is to impose them absolutely. Either approach could mean learners’ abilities to interpret the world are curtailed by insufficient or unequal access to resources and processes of understanding. We might then be inclined to consider one of Tolstoy’s observations, that an overly generalized theory is unlikely to help us. Rather than an abstract philosophy, teaching is informed by practical judgement and balance, and one that is best left to the expertise of the teacher, who like the miller, must make daily adjustments to their work rather than become preoccupied with the distracting occupation with theory. Thus, for Tolstoy, while the ideas of philosophers should be engaged with, the teacher and learner should be the arbiters and evaluators of these ideas—taking on the role of philosophers to inform the practical business of living and living ethically at that.

A good illustration of how Tolstoy believed his moral realism to be compatible with free pedagogy in such a manner is given in ‘The Teaching of Jesus’ (Tolstoy 1908/1934b [PSS 37: 96–148]). In this late work, Tolstoy gives an account of a class he held with peasant children on the ethical teachings of Jesus. The purpose of the class was to summarize the Gospels by iteratively abridging and retelling them according to the children’s questions and their responses. Each section of Jesus’ life and teachings is followed by questions for the class, some on comprehension of the story, others open and philosophical, such as the inevitable ‘How should we live?’ (PSS 37: 100). But this was clearly not a class of Christian catechesis in any conventional sense. The pupils were told to revise the text, to suggest which parts should be kept and which discarded. Putting aside Tolstoy’s bias to remove what he perceived to be the unreasonable and miraculous aspects of the Bible, this lesson was both ethics focused and free. Though this example may appear perverse to some as an example of hermeneutic justice, it illustrates Tolstoy’s firm and unwavering conviction that the task of philosophizing should not be left to professionals or great historical figures, but be brought into the ownership of all, even peasant children. While Tolstoy’s is the dominant voice in the final text, in attempting such an ambitious task of rewriting Jesus’ ethics with children, Tolstoy cannot be accused of distracting them with a task irrelevant to the reform of a corrupt and unjust social order. He was providing a means of resisting deception by engaging with the real problems of human life by seeking to improve their hermeneutical powers. Such a vision of education therefore addresses the principal concerns of epistemic justice. By employing the opportunity for free hermeneutic interpretation, the pedagogical method allows for the testimony and representation of different voices, supporting different ways of knowing.

Re-engaging with Tolstoy on the injustice of the philosophy of education brings to the fore important issues of the ethics of past historical figures. When we write we give to the future and thus, arguably, we should be expected to conform not just to the ethical standards of our time but of all time. The late Tolstoy, a moral realist and universalist, believed that. For him, ignoring an injustice, passing over the experience of others, and their right to self-understanding, is something for which we can be held culpable. By this token we can judge Tolstoy on his response to the rights of women but we can also see that his understanding of issues of epistemic justice puts into question the assumptions of those most often lauded and as philosophers of education. Dewey serves as a suitable foil here, although Kant or others could be compared with Tolstoy in leading to similar conclusions.

Whereas Dewey’s commitment to a vision of the progress of modernity, science, and democracy is increasingly acknowledged as having blinded him to issues of inequality and injustice (Fallace 2010; Peters 2020), Tolstoy’s prioritization of ethics over academic philosophy in order to seek out a more just foundation for education is a position that has perhaps only just come of age. Like Tolstoy, Dewey argued education is a dynamic activity and therefore educators’ conceptions of it must change and accommodate the needs of learners. Yet unlike Dewey, Tolstoy was preoccupied with the plight of oppressed indigenous peoples and the importance of their own forms of traditional knowledge and wisdom. The supposed progress offered by science, technology, and democracy, so important for Dewey, were for Tolstoy just as false as the doctrines of the Church that had preceded them. In a time when Deweyan ideals seem so far from realizable, we are reminded that where social justice is not possible through democracy, there must be a search for our own personal values. We need a Tolstoy to remind us of that. His initial suspicions of the philosophy of education on the grounds of its infringement of learners’ rights to hermeneutic and testimonial justice did not diminish or contradict the importance he also gave to the practice of philosophy as a search for justice. Over his lifetime it led to the development of a radical alternative pedagogy that attempted to put the world to rights. Noting this, we perhaps might conclude by reflecting upon Tolstoy’s ongoing concerns for the injustice of the philosophy of education and how they may inform our own practices of philosophizing, particularly how our work may be informed by the testimony of learners and how it may strengthen their powers of interpretation, and their access to different forms of knowledge—issues perhaps often considered in the pages of this journal, but well worthy of continued future deliberation and scrutiny.

Footnotes

These are Leo Wiener’s English translations. I reference Tolstoy’s writings to an appropriate translation when possible and to the Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii v 90 Tomakh [Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works in 90 Volumes] (Tolstoy 1958), abbreviated ‘PSS’ followed by volume and page numbers.

I am grateful to Alan Cockerill for sharing an unpublished draft of his English translation of ‘On Upbringing’.