A Change of Heart: What It’s Like to Live in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Abstract: Michael W. Clune argues in A Defense of Judgment that aesthetic education can unleash our capacity to critique our values and transform our preferences and desires. Works of art hold the possibility of self-transcendence and unselfing; expertise in aesthetic judgment enables us to enter into this possibility. But how do we come to want to change what we want within a culture that conceals the value of this practice? Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) stages how a change of heart in the midst of everyday reality can reorient us to the possibility of a new life.