Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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

how things happen is not due to some inherent inaccessibility of the

first causes, only to their multiplicity, the smallness of the ultimate

units, and our own inability to see and hear and remember and record

and coordinate enough of the available material. Omniscience is in

principle possible even to empirical beings, but, of course, in practice

unattainable. This alone, and nothing deeper or more interesting, is

the source of human megalomania, of all our absurd delusions. Since

we are not, in fact, free, but could not live without the conviction

that we are, what are we to do? Tolstoy arrives at no clear conclusion,

only at the view, in some respect like Burke's, that it is better to

realise that we understand what goes on as we do in fact understand it

- much as spontaneous, normal, simple people, uncorrupted by theories,

not blinded by the dust raised by the scientific authorities, do, in fact,

understand life-than to seek to subvert such commonsense beliefs,

which at least have the merit of having been tested by long experience,

in favour of pseudo-sciences, which, being founded on absurdly

inadequate data, are only a snare and a delusion. That is his case

against all forms of optimistic rationalism, the natural sciences, liberal

theories of progress, German military expertise, French sociology,

confident social engineering of all kinds. And this is his reason for

inventing a Kutuzov who followed his simple, Russian, untutored

instinct, and despised or ignored the German, French and Italian

experts; and for raising him to the status of a national hero which he

has, partly as a result of Tolstoy's portrait, retained ever since.

'His figures', said Akhsharumov in 1 868, immediately on the

appearance of the last part of War and Ptact, 'are real and not mere

pawns in the hands of an unintelligible destiny';1 the author's theory,

on the other hand, was ingenious but irrelevant. This remained the

general view of Russian and, for the most part, foreign literary critics

too. The Russian left-wing intellectuals attacked Tolstoy for 'social

indifferentism', for disparagement of all noble social impulses as a

compound of ignorance and foolish monomania, and an 'aristocratic'

cynicism about life as a marsh which cannot be reclaimed; Flaubert

and Turgenev, as we have seen, thought the tendency to philosophise

unfortunate in itself; the only critic who took the doctrine seriously

and tried to provide a rational refutation was the historian Kareev.1

1 op. cit. (p. 26, note 4 above).

1 N. I. Kareev, 'Istoricheskaya filosofiya v "Voine i mire" ', YtstTiiA: tflrrJPJ,

July t 887, pp. 227-69.

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R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

Patiently and mildly he pointed out that fascinating as the contrast

between the reality of personal life and the life of the social ant-hill

may be, Tolstoy's conclusions did not follow. True, man is at once

an atom living its own conscious life 'for itself', and at the same time

the unconscious agent of some historical trend, a relatively insignificant

element in the vast whole composed of a very large number of such

elements. War and Ptau, Kareev tells us, 'is a historical poem on

the philosophical theme of the duality of human life'- and

Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to

happen by the combination of such obscure entitles as the 'power' or

'mental activity' assumed by naive historians; indeed he was, in

Kareev's view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of metaphysically minded writers to attribute causal efficacy to, or idealise, such abstract entities as 'heroes', 'historic forces', 'moral forces',

'nationalism', 'reason' and so on, whereby they simultaneously committed the two deadly sins of inventing non-existent entities to explain concrete events and of giving free reign to personal, or national, or

class, or metaphysical bias. So far so good, and Tolstoy is judged to

have shown deeper insight-'greater realism'-than most historians. He

was right also in demanding that the infinitesimals of history be

integrated. But then he himself had done just that by creating the

individuals of his novel who are not trivial precisely to the degree to

which in their characters and actions, they 'summate' countless others,

who between them do 'move history'. This is the integrating of

infinitesimals, not, of course, by scientific, but by 'artistic-psychological' means. Tolstoy was right to abhor abstractions, but this had led him too far, so that he ended by denying not merely that history

was a natural science like chemistry-which was correct-but that it

was a science at all, an activity with its own proper concepts and

generalisations; which, if true, would abolish all history as such.

Tolstoy was right to say that the impersonal 'forces' and 'purposes'

of the older historians were myths, and dangerously misleading myths,

but unless we were allowed to ask what made this or that group of

individuals-who, in the end, of course, alone were real-behave thus

and thus, without needing first to provide separate psychological

analyses of each member of the group and then to 'integrate' them all,

we could not think about history or society at all. Yet we did do this,

and profitably, and to deny that we could discover a good deal by social

observation, historical inference and similar means was, for Kareev,

tantamount to denying that we had criteria for distinguishing between

46

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

historical truth and falsehood which were less or more reliable-and

that was surely mere prejudice, fanatical obscurantism. Kareev declares

that it is men, doubtless, who make social forms, but these forms-the

ways in which men live-in their turn affect those born into them ;

individual wills may not be all-powerful, but neither are they totally

impotent, and some are more effective than others: Napoleon may

not be a demigod, but neither is he a mere epiphenomenon of a

process which would have occurred unaltered without him; the

'important people' are less important than they themselves or the

more foolish historians may suppose, but neither are they shadows;

individuals, besides their intimate inner lives which alone seem real

to Tolstoy, have social purposes, and some among them have strong

wills too, and these sometimes transform the lives of communities.

Tolstoy's notion of inexorable laws which work themselves out whatever men may think or wish is itself an oppressive myth ; laws are only statistical probabilities, at any rate in the social sciences, not hideous

and inexorable 'forces' -a concept the darkness of which, Kareev

points out, Tolstoy himself in other contexts exposed with such

brilliance and malice, when his opponent seemed to him too naive or

too clever or in the grip of some grotesque metaphysic. But to say

that unless men make history they are themselves, particularly the

'great' among them, mere 'labels', because history makes itself, and

only the unconscious life of the social hive, the human ant-hill, has

genuine significance or value and 'reality'- what is this but a wholly

unhistorical and dogmatic ethical sceptil;ism? Why should we accept

it when empirical evidence points elsewhere?

Kareev's objections are very reasonable, the most sensible and

clearly formulated of all that ever were urged against Tolstoy's view