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ybuss's review against another edition
4.0
I missed like 2/3 of the content of his book because I'm not cultured enough, but I like reading an idea that is well defined, which is surely the case with this book. (And I read War and Peace not so long ago). Comparing the dude with Maistre is a very uncommon pov, which leads to a lot of reflection.
The end of the book just left me in a really weird/sick mood. I guess I'm a fox that would like to be a hedgehog, always looking for some sort of universal. This is why that last paragraph throws me off guard:
Tolstoy’s sense of reality was until the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to constructout of the fragments into which his intellect shivered the world, and he dedicated all of his vast strength of mind and will to the lifelong denial of this fact. At once insanely proud and filled with self-hatred, omniscient and doubting everything, cold and violently passionate, contemptuous and self-abasing, tormented and detached, surrounded by an adoring family, by devoted followers, by the admiration of the entire civilised world, and yet almost wholly isolated, he is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus.
The end of the book just left me in a really weird/sick mood. I guess I'm a fox that would like to be a hedgehog, always looking for some sort of universal. This is why that last paragraph throws me off guard:
Tolstoy’s sense of reality was until the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to constructout of the fragments into which his intellect shivered the world, and he dedicated all of his vast strength of mind and will to the lifelong denial of this fact. At once insanely proud and filled with self-hatred, omniscient and doubting everything, cold and violently passionate, contemptuous and self-abasing, tormented and detached, surrounded by an adoring family, by devoted followers, by the admiration of the entire civilised world, and yet almost wholly isolated, he is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus.
filiparferreira's review against another edition
3.0
Um ensaio sobre a visão da História de Tolstoi, que serviu para revisitar Guerra e Paz e para aprender sobre a influência que parece ter sido exercida em Tolstoi por Maistre, um intelectual francês caído no esquecimento, que foi diplomata na Rússia por alguns anos e chegou a uma compreensão rara sobre a alma e o ideal russo. O ensaio é acompanhado por algumas críticas e também excertos de entrevistas dadas por Isaiah Berlin, em que defende e explica melhor a tese que apresenta neste livro sobre Tolstoi ser uma raposa que acreditava ser um ouriço.
rachelhelps's review against another edition
1.0
An essay on Tolstoy. Personally I thought it was pretty boring, despite knowing most of the references (Berlin heavily references War and Peace throughout the essay). Maybe I wasn't patient enough to get the most out of it... there was some good biographical information on Tolstoy, as well as information about some of his sources (or lack thereof).
zoebird81's review against another edition
2.0
This is technically a three-star read because I WOULD recommend it to someone. However, because I haven't read WAR AND PEACE (or any Tolstoy) it doesn't feel right to give this that ranking. It's not to say I couldn't follow Berlin's essay; rather, I felt I was doing myself a disservice by trying to engage with it without having read the source material it's based on. That said, the hedgehog/fox categorizations remain ever relevant and compelling to think about, and Berlin's writing is easily digestible and even playful. Will have to return to this in the future
aidaniamb's review against another edition
5.0
A profound essay with reaching insights to Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
ozielbispo's review against another edition
5.0
O pensador britânico, de origem judaica russa Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), baseando-se em uma frase do poeta grego Arquílico de Paros: " A raposa sabe muita coisa, mas o ouriço sabe uma coisa importante" classifica grandes escritores e pensadores do passado baseado em suas personalidades e comportamentos em raposa ou ouriço.
Para Isaiah Berlin as raposas são pessoas com uma mente focada nos assuntos globais, tem uma visão mais ampla do mundo, sabem um pouquinho de tudo.
As raposas também têm uma perspectiva centrífuga e pluralista da realidade, tem mil ardis, adapta-se e por vezes hesita e volta atrás.Shakespeare, Aristóteles, Montaigne e o próprio Isaiah Berlin fazem parte desta família.
Já os ouriços são pessoas mais ligadas à comunidade local a qual eles conhecem como a palmas de suas mãos, têm uma visão unitária e coerente. São mais inflexível, focado num objetivo. Dante, Platão e Hegel fazem parte deste grupo.
Isaiah Berlin passa a maior parte do livro falando sobre Tolstói, que escapa a definição entre ouriço e raposa. Enquanto seus talentos são de raposa, suas crenças são de ouriços. Tolstoi, na opinião de Berlin, era uma raposa que durante toda a vida procurou, sem sucesso, ser um ouriço.
O ensaio também compara as semelhanças entre Tolstói e Maistre, que apesar das diferenças em coisas superficiais são semelhantes em várias áreas do pensamento.
O segredo, e a tragédia, de Tolstoi, diz Berlin, é que ele era "por natureza uma raposa, mas acreditava ser um ouriço". Em sua visão da história, Tolstói era primeiro uma raposa, combatendo as visões dos ouriços de que a história pode ser reduzida a uma mera ciência, de alguns indivíduos podem, pelo uso dos seus próprios recursos, influenciar o curso da história. A glória dos romances de Tolstoi reside precisamente em sua sensibilidade quase sobre-humana à multiplicidade das coisas, sua capacidade de registrar a sensação individual e o tom das pessoas, lugares e situações em sua objetividade concreta.
A parte ouriço de Tolstói é acreditar que a massa de camponeses não corrompidos da Rússia são mais importantes, em termos históricos, do que qualquer grande líder, e também, particularmente durante seus últimos anos, a busca agonizante por uma visão unificada interna com a qual seu apetite de raposa por multiplicidade repousasse em paz.
Berlin também fala sobre o livro "Guerra e paz", onde Tolstói parece querer nos demonstrar que a compreensão humana nunca pode compreender a história, uma vez que o processo histórico envolve uma infinidade de causas que estão além do nosso alcance. Assim, os grandes heróis que emergem no romance são Kutuzov, o general idoso que como personificação do solo russo triunfa sobre a esperteza intelectual dos generais estrangeiros, e o camponês Karataev que tem uma sabedoria humana muito mais profunda do que o intelectual de Petersburgo Pedro. De fato, "Guerra e Paz" é um dos ataques mais formidáveis contra o o racionalismo já escrito.
Este livro é maravilhoso. É um dos melhores livros de não ficção já escrito!
Para Isaiah Berlin as raposas são pessoas com uma mente focada nos assuntos globais, tem uma visão mais ampla do mundo, sabem um pouquinho de tudo.
As raposas também têm uma perspectiva centrífuga e pluralista da realidade, tem mil ardis, adapta-se e por vezes hesita e volta atrás.Shakespeare, Aristóteles, Montaigne e o próprio Isaiah Berlin fazem parte desta família.
Já os ouriços são pessoas mais ligadas à comunidade local a qual eles conhecem como a palmas de suas mãos, têm uma visão unitária e coerente. São mais inflexível, focado num objetivo. Dante, Platão e Hegel fazem parte deste grupo.
Isaiah Berlin passa a maior parte do livro falando sobre Tolstói, que escapa a definição entre ouriço e raposa. Enquanto seus talentos são de raposa, suas crenças são de ouriços. Tolstoi, na opinião de Berlin, era uma raposa que durante toda a vida procurou, sem sucesso, ser um ouriço.
O ensaio também compara as semelhanças entre Tolstói e Maistre, que apesar das diferenças em coisas superficiais são semelhantes em várias áreas do pensamento.
O segredo, e a tragédia, de Tolstoi, diz Berlin, é que ele era "por natureza uma raposa, mas acreditava ser um ouriço". Em sua visão da história, Tolstói era primeiro uma raposa, combatendo as visões dos ouriços de que a história pode ser reduzida a uma mera ciência, de alguns indivíduos podem, pelo uso dos seus próprios recursos, influenciar o curso da história. A glória dos romances de Tolstoi reside precisamente em sua sensibilidade quase sobre-humana à multiplicidade das coisas, sua capacidade de registrar a sensação individual e o tom das pessoas, lugares e situações em sua objetividade concreta.
A parte ouriço de Tolstói é acreditar que a massa de camponeses não corrompidos da Rússia são mais importantes, em termos históricos, do que qualquer grande líder, e também, particularmente durante seus últimos anos, a busca agonizante por uma visão unificada interna com a qual seu apetite de raposa por multiplicidade repousasse em paz.
Berlin também fala sobre o livro "Guerra e paz", onde Tolstói parece querer nos demonstrar que a compreensão humana nunca pode compreender a história, uma vez que o processo histórico envolve uma infinidade de causas que estão além do nosso alcance. Assim, os grandes heróis que emergem no romance são Kutuzov, o general idoso que como personificação do solo russo triunfa sobre a esperteza intelectual dos generais estrangeiros, e o camponês Karataev que tem uma sabedoria humana muito mais profunda do que o intelectual de Petersburgo Pedro. De fato, "Guerra e Paz" é um dos ataques mais formidáveis contra o o racionalismo já escrito.
Este livro é maravilhoso. É um dos melhores livros de não ficção já escrito!
rosekk's review against another edition
3.0
Although I'm yet to read War and Peace (I'm putting it off until I get my hands on a really nice copy), the essay was still a thought-provoking read. I liked the style of writing and arguing, and found the text surprisingly easy to get into given how little I know about the subject matter.
leic01's review against another edition
5.0
A brilliant essay by the late Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin about Tolstoy's philosophy and view of history. Recommended to be accompanied read to War and Peace (on which I'm attempting to write a review for 3 months), especially to the parts of Tolstoy's essay about history.
Berlin divides thinkers and writers into two categories; foxes, ones that know many things (Shakespeare, Goethe, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Montaigne, Erasmus, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce), and hedgehogs, ones that know one big thing (Dante, Plato, Pascal, Hegel, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust, Dostoevsky, Henry James). Hedgehogs are the ones who relate everything to a single central vision, one coherent and articulate system in which they understand, think and feel, a universal organizing principle, unitary unchanging inner vision. Foxes, on the other side, pursue many ends, sometimes even unrelated and contradictory, related to no governing aesthetic or moral principle, connected only through some psychological or physiological cause. Their thought can be scattered or diffused, moving on many levels and seizing upon the essence of the vast variety of objects and experiences. The main point he makes about Tolstoy is that he is a fox by nature, pluralist of many visions, one of the most brilliant, gifted and genius foxes that ever existed, but wants to be a hedgehog and vivisect himself into one, longing for a single substance.
“The celebrated lifelikeness of every object and every person in his world derives from this astonishing capacity of presenting every ingredient of it in its fullest individual essence, in all its many dimensions, as it were: never as a mere datum, however vivid, within some stream of consciousness, with blurred edges, an outline, a shadow, an impressionistic representation; nor yet calling for, and dependent on, some process of reasoning in the mind of the reader; but always as a solid object, seen simultaneously from near and far, in natural, unaltering daylight, from all possible angles of vision, set in an absolutely specific context in time and space – an event fully present to the senses or the imagination in all its facets, with every nuance sharply and firmly articulated. Yet what he believed in was the opposite. He advocated a single embracing vision; he preached not variety but simplicity, not many levels of consciousness but reduction to some single level.”
Tolstoy's has an immense gift that enables him to see all the details and finesses that makes things individual and unique, creating "marvellously accurate reproduction of the irreproducible, the almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatable individuality of the individual, which induces in the reader an acute awareness of the presence of the object itself, and not of a mere description of it, employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality of a particular experience as such, and avoiding those general terms which relate it to similar instances by ignoring individual differences – the ‘oscillations’ of feeling – in favour of what is common to them all". That leads to his genius both microscopic and macroscopic view of the course of history. Tolstoy's interest in history began early in his life. The interest was not nearly in past things as such, but in history as a means to an end to understand how and why things happen, and to penetrate the first cause, to get to the root of every matter. He had a great love for empirical, concrete, verifiable, among with disbelief in abstract, metaphysical, impalpable, supernatural. In Tolstoy's eyes, history can provide the ”hard” facts he was looking for, one that could be grasped by the intellect and uncorrupted by theories divorced from tangible reality, as the answers served by theologians and metaphysicians struck him as absurd. But history is not absurd, it is a sum of truths, empirically discoverable data, the sum of the actual experience of men and women in the relation to one another and physical environment - that is material from this genuine answers can arise, as history holds the key to mysteries of universe.
“He is obsessed by the thought that philosophical principles can be understood only in their concrete expression in history.‘To write the genuine history of present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one’s life.”
As we can see in Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace, experience, not knowledge, generate wisdom, as theories only give corrupt answers to main life's questions. Patient empirical observation leads to wisdom and simple people often know the truth better than learned men, because their observation is less clouded by empty theories. That lead to his heroes, idealization of "simple people" close to "universal truth" in their folk wisdom, who go with the flow of life, accepting the circumstance, rather than trying to change the course of events in the illusion of its possibility.
In the genius of his instinctive judgment, he is painfully aware of how much we don't know about the cause of all things, but in his deeply metaphysical conviction, he is desperate to believe in a unique system to which we must belong. The strain and conflict of conviction opposite of his judgment, from which he could not liberate himself, his gifts and opinions, causes him to vigorously discredit all the flawed systems of beliefs, illusions of laws that govern everything, falsely made by humans.
“Tolstoy was the least superficial of men: he could not swim with the tide without being drawn irresistibly beneath the surface to investigate the darker depths below; and he could not avoid seeing what he saw and doubting even that; he could close his eyes but not forget that he was doing so; his appalling, destructive sense of what was false frustrated this final effort at self-deception as it did all the earlier ones; and he died in agony, oppressed by the burden of his intellectual infallibility and his sense of perpetual moral error, the greatest of those who can neither reconcile, nor leave unreconciled, the conflict of what there is with what there ought to be.”
Going deeper and wider than anyone before in vivisection of both individual and collective history, in a complex web of event, object, characteristics, connected and divided by innumerable unidentifiable links - Tolstoy is painfully aware that we can only know a neglige portion of causes and laws that govern everything. His view on reality makes all logical and clear constructions ineffective as means of description or analysis of life.
“ ....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.”
So he passionately rejects both the liberal theory of history and scientific sociology, the scientists and historians who explain history by their own theories and are lying and deceiving in the process, as well as the concepts they use – ‘cause’, ‘accident’, ‘genius’ – that explain nothing: they are merely thin disguises for ignorance. ” Tolstoy was also furious that some historians attribute events to actions of individuals. He was exceptionally passionate to strip the "great men" of history from the imaginary power we attach to them.
“...there is a natural law whereby the lives of human beings no less than that of nature are determined; but that men, unable to face this inexorable process, seek to represent it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for what occurs upon persons endowed by them with heroic virtues or heroic vices, and called by them ‘great men’. What are great men? They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name than recognise their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals.”
Tolstoy is set to expose the lie and the great illusion that individuals can, by their own resources understand and control the course of events.
"And side by side with these public faces – these hollow men, half self-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent, talking, writing desperately and aimlessly in order to keep up appearances and avoid the bleak truths – side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence and irrelevance and blindness lies the real world, the stream of life which men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily existence.”
To attach history to one cause of things and to look at events only through your own lens of theories is a saturated explanation that Tolstoy despised and rejects as a cowardly escape from the vastness of causes of the unknown and our irrelevance. Tolstoy also believed that the history written as it is, is more than flawed, representing ‘perhaps only 0.001 per cent of the elements which actually constitute the real history of peoples’. In War and Peace Tolstoy makes his stance and take on history, one in which collective and individual are of equal importance, as political and public events are not greater than the spiritual, inner events, that are largely forgotten in all other written histories. Tolstoy emphasized the inner world, as the human experience of both individuals and communities contains more truth than big events of history, usually shallowly glorified by political historians. In brilliant passages of War and Peace, he compares the actual course of events side by side with the absurd, egocentric explanation, inflated with a sense of the importance of the will of one man. That is a real texture of life with its treasures, in juxtaposition to the often distorted, "unreal" picture of great events painted by historians, the tension between reality described and reality that occurred. In War and Peace Tolstoy put on himself what he perceived as the ultimate historian's task - to describe the subjective experience, personal lives lived by men, ”the ‘thoughts, knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hate, passions’ of which, for Tolstoy, ‘real’ life is compounded.” Tolstoy clings to historical determinism, undermining the importance of free will. Freedom is real but confined and relevant only in trivial acts. The individual is free when he alone is involved, but once he is in a relationship with another, he is no longer free, but part of an inexorable stream.
“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.”
Tolstoy made an impeccable case for protesting to the view of history which attributed the power to make things happen to abstract entities such as heroes, ideas, nationalism. He rejected the political reform because he believed that the ultimate revolution will come from within and that the inner life was lived truly only in the untouched depths of the mass of the people. But man must learn how little even the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, and how much of perceived is meaningless chaos - reflected in an intense degree in war.
”Tolstoy can say only what it is not. His genius is devastatingly destructive. He can only attempt to point towards his goal by exposing the false signposts to it; to isolate the truth by annihilating that which it is not – namely all that can be said in the clear, analytical language that corresponds to the all too clear, but necessarily limited, vision of the foxes. Like Moses, he must halt at the borders of the Promised Land; without it his journey is meaningless; but he cannot enter it; yet he knows that it exists, and can tell us, as no one else has ever told us, all that it is not – above all, not anything that art, or science or civilisation or rational criticism, can achieve.“
That is a tragic, genius and beautiful philosophy of Tolstoy, one he couldn't be at peace at. Tolstoy was always at war, more than anything with himself because he could "close his eyes, but never be rid of the awareness that his eyes were closed."
Berlin divides thinkers and writers into two categories; foxes, ones that know many things (Shakespeare, Goethe, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Montaigne, Erasmus, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce), and hedgehogs, ones that know one big thing (Dante, Plato, Pascal, Hegel, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust, Dostoevsky, Henry James). Hedgehogs are the ones who relate everything to a single central vision, one coherent and articulate system in which they understand, think and feel, a universal organizing principle, unitary unchanging inner vision. Foxes, on the other side, pursue many ends, sometimes even unrelated and contradictory, related to no governing aesthetic or moral principle, connected only through some psychological or physiological cause. Their thought can be scattered or diffused, moving on many levels and seizing upon the essence of the vast variety of objects and experiences. The main point he makes about Tolstoy is that he is a fox by nature, pluralist of many visions, one of the most brilliant, gifted and genius foxes that ever existed, but wants to be a hedgehog and vivisect himself into one, longing for a single substance.
“The celebrated lifelikeness of every object and every person in his world derives from this astonishing capacity of presenting every ingredient of it in its fullest individual essence, in all its many dimensions, as it were: never as a mere datum, however vivid, within some stream of consciousness, with blurred edges, an outline, a shadow, an impressionistic representation; nor yet calling for, and dependent on, some process of reasoning in the mind of the reader; but always as a solid object, seen simultaneously from near and far, in natural, unaltering daylight, from all possible angles of vision, set in an absolutely specific context in time and space – an event fully present to the senses or the imagination in all its facets, with every nuance sharply and firmly articulated. Yet what he believed in was the opposite. He advocated a single embracing vision; he preached not variety but simplicity, not many levels of consciousness but reduction to some single level.”
Tolstoy's has an immense gift that enables him to see all the details and finesses that makes things individual and unique, creating "marvellously accurate reproduction of the irreproducible, the almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatable individuality of the individual, which induces in the reader an acute awareness of the presence of the object itself, and not of a mere description of it, employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality of a particular experience as such, and avoiding those general terms which relate it to similar instances by ignoring individual differences – the ‘oscillations’ of feeling – in favour of what is common to them all". That leads to his genius both microscopic and macroscopic view of the course of history. Tolstoy's interest in history began early in his life. The interest was not nearly in past things as such, but in history as a means to an end to understand how and why things happen, and to penetrate the first cause, to get to the root of every matter. He had a great love for empirical, concrete, verifiable, among with disbelief in abstract, metaphysical, impalpable, supernatural. In Tolstoy's eyes, history can provide the ”hard” facts he was looking for, one that could be grasped by the intellect and uncorrupted by theories divorced from tangible reality, as the answers served by theologians and metaphysicians struck him as absurd. But history is not absurd, it is a sum of truths, empirically discoverable data, the sum of the actual experience of men and women in the relation to one another and physical environment - that is material from this genuine answers can arise, as history holds the key to mysteries of universe.
“He is obsessed by the thought that philosophical principles can be understood only in their concrete expression in history.‘To write the genuine history of present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one’s life.”
As we can see in Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace, experience, not knowledge, generate wisdom, as theories only give corrupt answers to main life's questions. Patient empirical observation leads to wisdom and simple people often know the truth better than learned men, because their observation is less clouded by empty theories. That lead to his heroes, idealization of "simple people" close to "universal truth" in their folk wisdom, who go with the flow of life, accepting the circumstance, rather than trying to change the course of events in the illusion of its possibility.
In the genius of his instinctive judgment, he is painfully aware of how much we don't know about the cause of all things, but in his deeply metaphysical conviction, he is desperate to believe in a unique system to which we must belong. The strain and conflict of conviction opposite of his judgment, from which he could not liberate himself, his gifts and opinions, causes him to vigorously discredit all the flawed systems of beliefs, illusions of laws that govern everything, falsely made by humans.
“Tolstoy was the least superficial of men: he could not swim with the tide without being drawn irresistibly beneath the surface to investigate the darker depths below; and he could not avoid seeing what he saw and doubting even that; he could close his eyes but not forget that he was doing so; his appalling, destructive sense of what was false frustrated this final effort at self-deception as it did all the earlier ones; and he died in agony, oppressed by the burden of his intellectual infallibility and his sense of perpetual moral error, the greatest of those who can neither reconcile, nor leave unreconciled, the conflict of what there is with what there ought to be.”
Going deeper and wider than anyone before in vivisection of both individual and collective history, in a complex web of event, object, characteristics, connected and divided by innumerable unidentifiable links - Tolstoy is painfully aware that we can only know a neglige portion of causes and laws that govern everything. His view on reality makes all logical and clear constructions ineffective as means of description or analysis of life.
“ ....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.”
So he passionately rejects both the liberal theory of history and scientific sociology, the scientists and historians who explain history by their own theories and are lying and deceiving in the process, as well as the concepts they use – ‘cause’, ‘accident’, ‘genius’ – that explain nothing: they are merely thin disguises for ignorance. ” Tolstoy was also furious that some historians attribute events to actions of individuals. He was exceptionally passionate to strip the "great men" of history from the imaginary power we attach to them.
“...there is a natural law whereby the lives of human beings no less than that of nature are determined; but that men, unable to face this inexorable process, seek to represent it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for what occurs upon persons endowed by them with heroic virtues or heroic vices, and called by them ‘great men’. What are great men? They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name than recognise their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals.”
Tolstoy is set to expose the lie and the great illusion that individuals can, by their own resources understand and control the course of events.
"And side by side with these public faces – these hollow men, half self-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent, talking, writing desperately and aimlessly in order to keep up appearances and avoid the bleak truths – side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence and irrelevance and blindness lies the real world, the stream of life which men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily existence.”
To attach history to one cause of things and to look at events only through your own lens of theories is a saturated explanation that Tolstoy despised and rejects as a cowardly escape from the vastness of causes of the unknown and our irrelevance. Tolstoy also believed that the history written as it is, is more than flawed, representing ‘perhaps only 0.001 per cent of the elements which actually constitute the real history of peoples’. In War and Peace Tolstoy makes his stance and take on history, one in which collective and individual are of equal importance, as political and public events are not greater than the spiritual, inner events, that are largely forgotten in all other written histories. Tolstoy emphasized the inner world, as the human experience of both individuals and communities contains more truth than big events of history, usually shallowly glorified by political historians. In brilliant passages of War and Peace, he compares the actual course of events side by side with the absurd, egocentric explanation, inflated with a sense of the importance of the will of one man. That is a real texture of life with its treasures, in juxtaposition to the often distorted, "unreal" picture of great events painted by historians, the tension between reality described and reality that occurred. In War and Peace Tolstoy put on himself what he perceived as the ultimate historian's task - to describe the subjective experience, personal lives lived by men, ”the ‘thoughts, knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hate, passions’ of which, for Tolstoy, ‘real’ life is compounded.” Tolstoy clings to historical determinism, undermining the importance of free will. Freedom is real but confined and relevant only in trivial acts. The individual is free when he alone is involved, but once he is in a relationship with another, he is no longer free, but part of an inexorable stream.
“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.”
Tolstoy made an impeccable case for protesting to the view of history which attributed the power to make things happen to abstract entities such as heroes, ideas, nationalism. He rejected the political reform because he believed that the ultimate revolution will come from within and that the inner life was lived truly only in the untouched depths of the mass of the people. But man must learn how little even the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, and how much of perceived is meaningless chaos - reflected in an intense degree in war.
”Tolstoy can say only what it is not. His genius is devastatingly destructive. He can only attempt to point towards his goal by exposing the false signposts to it; to isolate the truth by annihilating that which it is not – namely all that can be said in the clear, analytical language that corresponds to the all too clear, but necessarily limited, vision of the foxes. Like Moses, he must halt at the borders of the Promised Land; without it his journey is meaningless; but he cannot enter it; yet he knows that it exists, and can tell us, as no one else has ever told us, all that it is not – above all, not anything that art, or science or civilisation or rational criticism, can achieve.“
That is a tragic, genius and beautiful philosophy of Tolstoy, one he couldn't be at peace at. Tolstoy was always at war, more than anything with himself because he could "close his eyes, but never be rid of the awareness that his eyes were closed."