Tolstoy's Dissent and Counter-Theory of Human Events
By John Crouch, Attorney at Law,
Crouch & Crouch, Arlington, Virginia; (703)
528-6700;
Brown Daily Herald , Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (U.S.)
Other Crouch Articles
THIS IS PART THREE OF THREE
Part I: Introduction: The Operating Folklore of the Governing
Class
Part II: Hegel's Theory of History and Napoleon Bonaparte
Part III: Tolstoy's Dissent
Part III: Tolstoy's Dissent
Leo Tolstoy found Hegel's explanation of Napoleon and other historical developments
useless, annoying, and obscurative, as it was empirically unverifiable.
17 He hinted at the absurdity of Hegelian ideas by putting retroactive intimations
of them into the heads of Napoleon and other principals in War and Peace.
He also mocked them overtly, juxtaposing the insignificance of Napoleon's
impetuous and blustering decisions and the huge movements of men which he
is supposed to have caused. Tolstoy questioned how the same actions, at
different times, were ascribed to Napoleon as a brilliant restorer of order
and as an international outlaw. Finally, he defied Hegel's own sarcasm by
applying the same standards of human conduct to Napoleon, and to all soldiers,
that usually apply to anyone in peacetime.
To Tolstoy, Napoleon is as much of a bumbler as anyone, but with absurd
self-confidence. Tolstoy takes pains to describe the trivialities of his
behavior and the lack of connection between the busy and grandiose orders
he gave and what actually happened.
Drawing loosely from records left by those who met him, Tolstoy portrays
a Napoleon who seemed "convinced that it was impossible for him to
make a mistake," that "whatever he did was right because he did
it." 18
In Moscow Napoleon did all the energetic things he usually did to distract
and impress the people, but there was no one around to heap laurels on him.
19 Tolstoy's rather complicated indictment of the flight from Moscow holds
that there were many safe courses of action (or inaction) open to Napoleon,
and that he chose the most audaciously ruinous; but also that somehow his
inner tendencies, having little relation to outside reality, made this likely
to happen sooner or later, and that his actions "coincided with the
laws that governed the event." It is hard to say just to what degree
Tolstoy claims Napoleon's disgrace in Russia to be pre-determined. I suppose
he sees it as having been possible for Napoleon to take better care of his
army, and just about impossible for him to control any of the Russians.
But it would also have been out of character for Napoleon to observe this
distinction. 20
War and Peace is an elaboration and extension of the theme that what happens
is "what no one wills." That is the common ground from which Hegel
and Tolstoy both start. It was not widely accepted before the nineteenth
century, and even then, people scrambled harder than usual to get on God's
side of whatever "progress" was foreseen. The rule of unintended
consequences seems to be something which some people need periodically to
be reminded of.
Hegel and Tolstoy also agreed that patriotic and benevolent aims were not
the main factors in the making of history. Hegel observed that "good
designs" seemed especially likely to lead to violence and evil. He
thought "passions, private aims, and selfish desires" to be the
main energies in human history. The aims and desires of the great men were
simply in line with the actual tensions of the time, and based on an understanding
of those tensions. 21
Hegel recognized the abundance of "essential accident" and "contingency,"
giving the example that rain happens to water crops, without intention.
He saw this factor as significant, but merely material, and so temporary
in the very long run, as "spirit" would eventually re-form all
matter. 22
Tolstoy applies this obscurity of the connection between will and result
to the most intimate, taken-forgranted activities, and to the shortest,
simplest links between cause and effect.
To Tolstoy, though these specific causes are hardly traceable, we can perceive
tendencies produced by natural laws. For example, an army without direction
will tend to move towards a source of food, and an abandoned city of wooden
buildings will probably burn. 23 Seeing the knowability of causation dwindling
to infinite smallness, he proposed seeing history as differential calculus,
rather than the analysis of discrete steps. Thus he would try to gauge the
sums and ratios of the infinitesimal movements of average people.
Tolstoy claims that the higher up someone is, the more helpless he or she
is -- that all decisive momentum and inertia are in the mass. This seems
calculated perversely to invert Hegel, who saw more form, and more will,
in the more highly placed individuals and structures, who work out their
ideas on the materialistic masses. Like a materialist, Tolstoy sees most
effective power in those who actually do the work of history. But he also
sees these common people as closer to the working of spirit, of God, as
they presumably don't clutter up their minds with fanciful plans and theories.
Thus Napoleon, wrapped up in the expression and promotion of his self, in
ubiquitous busyness, is prtrayed as the most helpless and material of men.
Tolstoy's idea of General Kutuzov, and of the typical peasant, indeed, of
any Russian who goes about his assigned business, is of one who knows and
trusts a few laws and facts of nature, who can take stock of others without
imagining that he can manipulate them completely.
Tolstoy's Kutuzov, though he understands some of the forces behind events,
still cannot control them. At Tarutino he is forced to give battle, though
he knows it is unnecessary, as the end of a chain of events begun when a
common soldier shoots a hare. He is nearly as helpless as Napoleon, but,
to his advantage, he knows it. 24
In "The Hedgehog and the Fox", Isaiah Berlin argued that the most
important thing about Tolstoy is his pluralism, his recognition of a material,
disintegrated world flying apart towards entropy, defying any attempt to
control it or to make sense of the whole. Berlin believes that Tolstoy was,
inescapably, a pluralist "fox," but desperately wanted to be a
monistic "hedgehog." He explains that "the fox knows many
things, but the hedgehog knows one thing" and knows it very well. He
seems to think that Tolstoy's monism has no grounds except for the human
hunger to believe. Tolstoy's greatest value, to him, is as a discoverer
of meaninglessness and utter subjectivity, and secondarily as an example
of what people who make such discoveries suffer.
Berlin compares Tolstoy to Joseph Demaistre, who saw only disorder in mankind
and nature and believed in punishment as the only thing that preserved society.
Demaistre, like Tolstoy, had studied war, and found that unquantifiable
but real factors like morale, the temper of individual soldiers, and mass
behavior mattered more than anything generals did. 25 They both claimed
to find truth in the concrete, the experienced, and to despise abstraction
and transcendentalism. 26
For Demaistre, as well as Tolstoy, a tangled skein of "imponderables"
somehow added up to an "inexorable" march of cause and effect
which clearly made some things inevitable, and some impossible. 27 They
both drew back from this horrifying vision to embrace forms of absolute
faith which appeared to affirm tradition, but which were actually remodeled
to suit their own preoccupations.
Both, in a way, shrunk from the illusion of control. Demaistre abdicated
any hope of benevolent direction of his inferiors, in favor of the concrete,
somewhat effective methods of the whip and the gallows. Tolstoy tried desperately
to stay in his social position without asserting it. He despaired of changing
people's ways directly. The fruitless pursuit of control, Tolstoy felt,
only cut one off from any true reflection or contact with God. 28
Tolstoy dramatizes the questions of epistemology, causation and predestination
in the lives of his protagonists: the philosophically-inclined Pierre Bezukhov,
and Andrei Bolkonsky, who aspires to be a man of action and make history
intelligently.
Infiltrating the highest circles at the army's headquarters, Andrei finds
that all their plans and intrigues have no apparent effect on anything that
actually happens, and that great men fail to live up to his expectations.
Andrei takes note of persnickety warring
intellectual factions among officers which have no measurable effect on
any outcome, and then realizes that 99 percent of people in the war, including
many in the highest councils, only sought their own "advantage and
pleasure." On the battlefield, as well, he finds little that corresponds
to any of his ideas of history or of warfare. 29
The progress of Tolstoy's two protagonists, Bolkonsky and Bezukhov, up to
the time the latter is taken prisoner, corresponds to Hegel's example of
how a thoughtful person might respond to events. As Bolkonsky came to observe
how nearly everyone moved according to their own private interest and pleasure,
so did Hegel and Demaistre. Hegel recalled that, on viewing the scenes of
decay, waste and tragedy which surround us, we are faced with unconsoled
sadness and incoherent fear. We try to endure by telling ourselves that
"this is the way it had to be - it is fate." Finally, we retreat
into the ephemeral bustle and trivial pursuits of the present moment. 30
Superficially, this describes a major part of Pierre Bezukhov's intellectual
journey. He does go beyond and beneath it, in a way which Tolstoy describes
in rich detail and yet still demands that the reader take on faith. Pierre
begins by wanting to make sense of everything, to impose reason on mankind
and matter by persuasion. As events disillusion him, he persists in trying
to induce some general rule from even the most dispiriting, degrading observations
which he is forced to make. When somehow forced, as far as he can tell,
into marrying someone he is not particularly attached to for no good reason,
he feels likewise forced to believe that his action "could not be otherwise
it is good because it is definite." 31
Disappointed in his former hero Napoleon, Pierre feels constrained to believe
in the movements of reaction against him, though they offer little that
really makes sense to him. He further realizes, in the battle of Borodino,
how little sense events seem to make, and how little intelligible effect
he can have on them. He sets out to assassinate Napoleon during the occupation
- apparently the ultimate act of involvement with, and intervention in,
the huge forces that seem to determine history. Instead he becomes involved
in seemingly minute but concrete events, saving a displaced child and defending
an unknown Armenian woman from French pillagers. 32
Pierre was terrified by "the terribly tangled skein of life,"
and imagined that everyone had to find way to avoid facing "the evil
and falsehood of life," the universal triviality, "deception and
confusion." 33 To Tolstoy, the most reflective, liberal Russians were
inescapably aware of this dark chaos, and yet were also certain that there
must be some attainable guiding reason.
There is even more of the "hedgehog" in "War and Peace"
than Berlin gives Tolstoy credit for. Imprisoned, Pierre falls under the
loving influence of Platon Karataev, an egoless peasant who seems to live
only for others, and only for the moment. Hearing of his wife's death, Pierre
attains a state which exhibits characteristics of the hedgehog _and_ the
fox. He becomes quite a pluralist, listening to everyone with pleasure,
heedless of their mutual contradictions. 34
Yet everything is somehow tied together by a God which Pierre senses in
everyone, everywhere, which keeps him on an even keel even as his world
appears to slide towards entropy. He feels within him a "judge"
who confidently guides him "by some rule unknown." But does he
consciously decide to follow this unknown force? And why does he think it
is God? Does he believe this because only a god could make men act like
Platon Karataev? Or because whatever makes a person like him truly, permanently
happy must be God?35 These are questions which he understandably does not
ask, or anyhow does not press, since they might well take him back to where
he started. Pierre's peace of mind is "not the result of logical reasoning
but a direct and mysterious reflection." 36
In real life Tolstoy, as Berlin sees him, could not stop asking these questions.
He seems to have wanted to, and was even popularly identified with the beatific
state in which he left Pierre. But in real life, he felt his wife becoming
more and more like the Countess whom he had so conveniently killed off in
the novel. Berlin, albeit not in an uncharitable fashion, chalks this up
as a victory for the "foxes" and their vision.
Tolstoy's other hedgehog-like conclusion is also somehow unsatisfying, though
it fits the evidence. He claims to use his historical calculus successfully,
and to find one general, ongoing reason for the wars, and apparently for
all wars. It is simply man's aggressive impulse, which finds in war a convenient
outlet and the peer support and social approval which validates murder and
other unreasonable, but natural, behavior. 37
This conclusion is frightening because it claims to solve a question which
plagues us, and to explain an activity that we _like_ to think we cannot
comprehend. It declares it useless to pick apart the causes of any particular
war, or to trace the consequences of well-known people's actions. It reduces
this time-honored question of history to an object of science, independent
of time, claiming wars themselves to be the province of art, whose job is
not to explain but only to describe. It tries to threaten historian's jobs
in the most direct way - by arguing for ahistorical treatment of wars. In
other words, war is to be analyzed and described in the same way that weather
is: by science and art, but not by history.
Some original but less controversial themes of War and Peace should not
be ignored. Tolstoy uses natural law in history, in a more verifiable, less
deterministic way than it can be used in geography. He asserts the importance
of such natural tendencies as an army's drift toward food supplies, the
psychology of crowds, the breakdown of controls, and the insignificance
of unenforced proclamations. Though such "laws" are tendencies,
not inescapable destinies, this threatens to reduce history to a hard science,
and to brand many interesting historical subjects as irrelevant. But by
the same token, it invites the development of social history, and the possibility
of rediscovering meaningful changes in the way ordinary people lived.
In the matter of pluralism and monism, Berlin is mostly accurate: Tolstoy
seems to have grown so fond of the concrete and infinitesimal that he simply
deified it. Whatever the source, God, harmony and inner peace do play a
pivotal role in the story, and I suppose his use of them will appear more
or less artificial depending on one's own remembered experiences of such
things (or lack thereof). In Tolstoy's own experiences, he did not maintain
an unbroken record of unquestioned inner peace for forty-two years after
he wrote War and Peace. Then again, neither did he make such a claim for
Pierre Bezukhov: the book does not end with the assurance that everyone
lived happily ever after, but with an argument for the non-existence or
irrelevance of free will which the author may have wholeheartedly believed
at the time, and from which he may well have deduced happiness for a while.
When Berlin observes how much Tolstoy wanted to believe in God, the strength
of his country and its people, and an ordered universe, the question of
where to draw the line between believing and wanting to believe remains
open. How much does he have to tell himself that he believes in it before
we should decide that he believes? If he believes, yet describes the beatific
state in which he believes in a way which some of us currently find unconvincing,
that should give us legitimate reason to question his belief; but it may
ring less than true with us simply because it is unfamiliar to our experience
so far. If he believed as confidently as Bezukhov did, but later found reason
to doubt, that would mean both that War and Peace's entire argument should
be taken seriously and that Berlin is right to emphasize the staying power
of Tolstoy's doubt.
Introduction: The Operating Folklore of the Governing
Class
Part II: Hegel's Theory of History and Napoleon Bonaparte
Footnotes
_______________________________
1 Mure, p. 61.
2 Mure, p. 61. Hegel, Reason in History, p. 38.
3 Mure, p. 63.
4 Mure, pp. 4-5.
5 Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 438.
6 Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 451.
7 Mure, p. 74. Hegel, Reason in History, p. 40.
8 Mure, p. 76.
9 Mure, p. 64.
10 Hegel, Reason in History, pp. xxx-xxxiv.
11 Reason, p. 43.
12 Reason, p. 38
13 Reason, pp. 21, 31.
14 Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 451.
15 Reason, p. 43-45.
16 Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 451.
17 Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, pp. 10-11.
18 War and Peace, p. 667.
19 p. 937
20 p. 1071.
21 Reason, p. 26.
22 G. Muré, pp. 26-27.
23 War and Peace, p. 1055
24 p. 1061
25 Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, p. 51.
26 Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, pp. 10-11.
27 Berlin, pp. 51, 63-64.
28 Berlin, pp. 47, 62.
29 War and Peace, p. 677-679.
30 War and Peace, p. 677-679; Reason, p. 26-27.
31 War and Peace, p. 223.
32 pp. 993-4.
33 p. 574-575.
34 pp. 1183-4
35 p. 1184
36 p. 1240.
37 p. 1313.
Copyright John Crouch 1991, 1998
- John Crouch
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