Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

There is a particularly vivid simile1 in which the great man is likened

to the ram whom the shepherd is fattening for slaughter, Because the

ram duly grows fatter, and perhaps is used as a bell-wether for the rest

of the .Rock, he may easily imagine that he is the leader of the .Rock,

and that the other sheep go where they go solely in obedience to his

will. He thinks this and the .Rock may think it too. Nevertheless

the purpose of his selection is not the role he believes himself to play,

but slaughter-a purpose conceived by beings whose aims neither he

nor the other sheep can fathom. For Tolstoy Napoleon is just such

a ram, and so to some degree is Alexander, and indeed all the great

men of history. Indeed, as an acute literary historian has pointed out,1

Tolstoy sometimes seems almost deliberately to ignore the historical

evidence and more than once consciously distorts the facts in order

to bolster up his favourite thesis. The character of Kutuzov is a case

in point. Such heroes as Pierre Bezukhov or Karataev are at least

imaginary, and Tolstoy had an undisputed right to endow them with

all the attributes he admired-humility, freedom from bureaucratic

or scientific or other rationalistic kinds of blindness. But Kutuzov

was a real person, and it is all the more instructive to observe the steps

by which he transforms him from the sly, elderly, feeble voluptuary,

1 W11r 11trJ Pt11u, epilogue, part 1, chapter 2.

1 See V. B. Shklovsky, op. cit. (p. 26, note 3 above), chapten 7-9, and alJo

K. V. Polaovsky, 'lstochnilci romana "Voina i mir"', in Obninsky and Polner,

op. cit. (p. 27, note 2 above).

T H E H E D G E HO G AND THE FOX

the corrupt and somewhat sycophantic courtier of the early drafts of

War and P�ac� which were based on authentic sources, into the unforgettable symbol of the Russian people in all its simplicity and intuitive wisdom. By the time we reach the celebrated passage-one

of the most moving in literature-in which Tolstoy describes the

moment when the old man is woken in his camp at FiJi to be told

that the French army is retreating, we have left the facts behind us,

and are in an imaginary realm, a historical and emotional atmosphere

for which the evidence is flimsy. but which is artistically indispensable

to Tolstoy's design. The final apotheosis of Kutuzov is totally unhistorical for all Tolstoy's repeated professions of his undeviating devotion to the sacred cause of the truth. In War and P�ac� Tolstoy

treats &cts cavalierly when it suits him, because he is above all

obsessed by his thesis-the contrast between the universal and allimportarit but delusive experience of free will, the feeling of responsibility, the values of private life generally, on the one hand; and on the other, the reality of inexorable historical determinism, not, indeed,

experienced directly, but known to be true on irrefutable theoretical

grounds. This corresponds in its turn to a tormenting inner conflict,

one of many, in Tolstoy himself, between the two systems of value,

the public and the private. On the one hand, if those feelings and

immediate experiences. upon which the ordinary values of private

individuals and historians alike ultimately rest are nothing but a vast

illusion, this must, in the name of the truth, be ruthlessly demonstrated,

and the values and the explanations which derive from the illusion

exposed and discredited. And in a sense. Tolstoy does try to do this,

particularly when he is philosophising, as in the great public scenes

of the novel itself, the battle pieces, the descriptions of the movements

of peoples, the metaphysical disquisitions. But, on the other hand, he

also does the exact opposite of this when he contrasts with this panorama of public life the .superior value of personal experience, the

'thoughts, knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hates, passions'

of which real life is compounded -when he contrasts the concrete

and multi-coloured reality of individual lives with the pale abstractions

of scientists or historians, particularly the latter, 'from Gibbon to

Buckle', whom he denounces so harshly for mistaking their own

empty categories for real facts. And yet the primacy of these private

experiences and relationships and virtues presupposes that vision of

life, with its sense of personal responsibility, and belief in freedom

and the possibility of spontaneous action, to which the best pages of

43

R U S S I AN T H IN K E R S

W or and Peact are devoted, and which i s the very illusion to be

exorcised, if the truth is to be faced.

This terrible dilemma is never finally resolved. Sometimes, as in

the explanation of his intentions which he published before the final

part of War and Peact had appeared,1 Tolstoy vacillates; the individual

is 'in some sense' free when he alone is involved: thus, in raising his

arm, he is free within physical limits. But once he is involved in

relationships with others, he is no longer free, he is part of the inexorable stream. Freedom is real, but it is confined to trivial acts. At other times even this feeble ray of hope is extinguished : Tolstoy

declares that he cannot admit even small exceptions to the universal

law; causal determinism is either wholly pervasive or it is nothing,

and chaos reigns. Men's acts may seem free of the social nexus, but

they are not free, they cannot be free, they are part of it. Science

cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is

no morality and no art, but it can refute it. 'Power' and 'accident' are

but names for ignorance of the causal chains, but the chains exist

whether we feel them or not; fortunately we do not; for if we felt

their weight, we could scarcely act at all; the loss of the illusion would

paralyse the life which is lived on the basis of our happy ignorance.

But all is well : for we never shall discover all the causal chains that

operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes

themselves infinitely small ; historians select an absurdly small portion

of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny

section. How would an ideal historical science operate? By using a kind

of calculus whereby this 'differential', the infinitesimals-the infinitely

small human and non-human actions and events-would be integrated,

and in this way the continuum of history would no longer be distorted

by being broken up into arbitrary segments.2 Tolstoy expresses this

notion of calculation by infinitesimals with great lucidity, and with his

habitual simple, vivid, precise use of words. Henri Bergson, who made

his name with his theory of reality as a flux fragmented artificially by

the natural sciences, and thereby distorted and robbed of continuity

and life, developed a very similar point at infinitely greater length, less

clearly, less plausibly, and with an unnecessary parade of terminology.

It is not a mystical '>r an intuitionist view of life. Our ignorance of

1 'Neskol'ko slov po povodu knigi: "Voina i mir" ', Rrmltii arltnifl 6 (I 868),

columns 5 I 5-28.

1 War and Ptau, vol. 3• part 3, chapter I .