Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

wisdom, practical genius, a sense of the past, an understanding of life

and of human character.

Tolstoy's view is not very different; save that he gives as the reason

for the folly of our exaggerated claims to understand or determine

events not foolish or blasphemous efforts to do without special, i.e.

supernatural knowledge, but our ignorance of too many among the

vast number of interrelations-the minute determining causes of

events; if we began to know the causal network in its infinite variety,

we should cease to praise and blame, boast and regret, or look on

human beings as heroes or villains, but should submit with due

humility to unavoidable necessity. Yet to say no more than this is to

give a travesty of his beliefs. It is indeed Tolstoy's explicit doctrine in

War and Ptoct that all truth is in science-in the knowledge of material

causes-and that we consequently render ourselves ridiculous by

arriving at conclusions on too little evidence, comparing in this

regard unfavourably with peasants or savages who, being not so

very much more ignorant, at least make more modest claims; but

this is not the view of the world that, in fact, underlies either W or and

Ptoct or Anno Kormino or any other work which belongs to this

period of Tolstoy's life. Kutuzov is wise and not merely clever as, for

example, the time-serving Drubetskoy or Bilibin are clever, and he

is not a victim to abstract theories or dogma as the German military

experts are; he is unlike them, and is wiser than they-but this is so

not because he knows more facts than they and has at his finger tips

a greater number of the 'minute causes' of events than his advisers or

his adversaries-than Pfuel or Paulucci or Berthier or the King of

Naples. Karataev brings light to Pierre, whereas the Freemasons did

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69

RU SSIAN T H IN K E R S

not, but this i s so not because h e happens to have scientific information

superior to that possessed by the Moscow lodges; Levin goes through

an experience during his work in the fields, and Prince Andrey while

lying wounded on the battlefield of Austerlitz, but in neither case

has there been a discovery of fresh facts or of new laws in any ordinary

sense. On the contrary, the greater one's accumulation of facts, the

more futile one's activity, the more hopeless one's failure-as shown by

the group of reformers who surround ·Alexander. They and men like

them are only saved from Faustian despair by stupidity (like the

Germans and the military experts and experts ge:1erally) or by vanity

(like Napoleon) or by frivolity (like Oblonsky) or by heartlessness (like

Karenin). What is it that Pierre, Prince Andrey, Levin discover? And

what are they searching for, and what is the centre and climax of the

spiritual crisis resolved by the experience that transforms their lives?

Not the chastening realisation of how little of the totality of facts

and laws known to Laplace's omniscient observer they- Pierre, Levin

and the rest-can claim to have discovered; not a simple admission of

Socratic ignorance. Still less does it consist in what is almost at the

opposite pole-in a new, a more precise awareness of the 'iron laws'

that govern our lives, in a vision of nature as a machine or a factory,

in the cosmology of the great materialists, Diderot or Lamettrie or

Cabanis, or of the mid-nineteenth century scientific writers idolised by

the 'nihilist' Bazarov in Turgenev's Fathers and Children; nor yet in

some transcendent sense of the inexpressible oneness of life to which

poets, mystics and metaphysicians have in all ages testified. Nevertheless, something is perceived ; there is a vision, or at least a glimpse, a moment of revelation which in some sense explains and reconciles, a

theodicy, a justification of what exists and happens, as well as its

elucidation. What does it consist in? Tolstoy does not tell us in so

many words: for when (in his later, explicitly dida<:tic works) he sets

out to do so, his doctrine is no longer the same. Yet no reader of

War and Peace can be wholly unaware of what he is being told. And

that not only in the Kutuzov or Karataev scenes, or other quasitheological or quasi-metaphysical passages- but even more, for example, in the narrative, non-philosophical section of the epilogue, in which

Pierre, Natasha, Nikolay Rostov, Princess Marie are shown anchored

in their new solid, sober lives with their established day to day routine.

We are here plainly intended to see that these 'heroes' of the novelthe 'good' people-have now, after the storms and agonies of ten years and more, achieved a kind of peace, based on some degree of under-

THE H E D G E H O G AND THE FOX

standing: understanding of what? Of the need to submit: to what! Not

simply to the will of God (not at any rate during the writing of the

great novels, in the J 86os or 7os) nor to the 'iron laws' of the sciences;

but to the permanent relationships of things,1 and the universal

texture of human life, wherein alone truth and justice are to be found

by a kind of 'natural'-somewhat Aristotelian-knowledge. To do this

is, above all, to grasp what human will and human reason can do, and

what they cannot. How can this be known? Not by a specific inquiry

and discovery, but by an awareness, n'Jt necessarily explicit or conscious,

of certain general characteristics of human life and experience. And the

most important and most pervasive of these is the crucial line that

divides the 'surface' from the 'depths' -on the one hand the world of

perceptible, describable, analysable data, both physical and psychological, both 'external' and 'inner', both public and private, with which the sciences can deal, although they have in some regions-those

outside physics-made so little progress; and, on the other hand, the

order which, as it were, 'contains' and determines the structure of

experience, the framework in which it-that is, we and all that we

experience-must be conceived as being set, that which enters into

our habits of thought, action, feeling, our emotions, hopes, wishes,

our ways of talking, believing, reacting, being. We-sentient creatures

-are in part living in a world the constituents of which we can discover,

classify and act upon by rational, scientific, deliberately planned

methods; but in part (Tolstoy and Maistre, and many thinkers with

them, say much the larger part) we are immersed and submerged in a

medium that, precisely to the degree to which we inevitably take it for

granted as part of ourselves, we do not and cannot observe as if from

the outside; cannot identify, measure and seek to manipulate; cannot

even be wholly aware of, inasmuch as it enters too intimately into all

our experience, is itself too closely interwoven with all that we are

and do to be lifted out of the flow (it is the flow) and observed with

scientific detachment, as an object. It-the medium in which we aredetermines our most pennanent categories, our standards of truth and falsehood, of reality and appearance, of the good and the bad, of the

central and the peripheral, the subjective and the objective, of the

beautiful and the ugly, of movement and rest, of past, preso:nt and