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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."
bernieanderson's review against another edition
4.0
Classic -- and helpful in some odd ways. Berlin makes light of his own boxes. "There are two kinds of people in this world ... but it's actually way more complex than that" is sort of where he goes with this. It's helpful to think in terms of foxes and hedgehogs (and it does almost feel like some sort of categorization game, at least for a moment) -- but, to read about Tolstoy as someone "with all of the giftings of a Fox, with no desire to be one" was entirely relatable.
The reading was a little dense. As another reviewer stated, this would have made a nice 10-page article in a literary journal. This is definitely worth the read.
The reading was a little dense. As another reviewer stated, this would have made a nice 10-page article in a literary journal. This is definitely worth the read.
schildpad's review against another edition
4.0
Wat een retoriek, schitterend. Wie weet volgt nog een uitgebreidere recensie (ha, dat zeg ik altijd en dan schrijf ik ze nooit), want voorlopig ben ik nog niet klaar met dit boek.
De eerlijkheid gebiedt me dan ook te zeggen dat ik dit, naast de originele tekst, in (nieuwe) vertaling heb gelezen om die vertaling te controleren. Hoe dan ook kan niet opgemerkt worden dat ik niet grondig door het boek heen ben gegaan.
De grote vraag is: ben ik nu overtuigd om eindelijk Oorlog en Vrede te gaan lezen?
Het antwoord: ik heb nooit gedacht dat ik 't nog eens serieus weer zou overwegen, maar ik vrees dat ik dat nu wel doe.
De eerlijkheid gebiedt me dan ook te zeggen dat ik dit, naast de originele tekst, in (nieuwe) vertaling heb gelezen om die vertaling te controleren. Hoe dan ook kan niet opgemerkt worden dat ik niet grondig door het boek heen ben gegaan.
De grote vraag is: ben ik nu overtuigd om eindelijk Oorlog en Vrede te gaan lezen?
Het antwoord: ik heb nooit gedacht dat ik 't nog eens serieus weer zou overwegen, maar ik vrees dat ik dat nu wel doe.
mariabarroso97's review against another edition
3.0
3.5
Só recomendo este livro a quem realmente ame Tolstoi. Este é um ensaio complexo, cheio de referências a diversos filósofos, escritores clássicos, outros críticos etc. A leitura deste livro requer muita pesquisa e uma bagagem cultural muito grande, tanto acerca de Tolstoi como dos outros entes aqui referidos.
▪️
Também acho que Berlin podia ter feito uma análise um pouco mais ampla, restringiu-se apenas a alguns temas e a algumas comparações e apesar de as ter analisado a fundo, senti falta de mais.
▪️
A minha avaliação deste livro recai puramente na minha apreciação de principiante e nesta primeira leitura, um pouco mais superficial. Com certeza irei reler este livro várias vezes para ver a mudança do meu grau de compreensão! ✨
Só recomendo este livro a quem realmente ame Tolstoi. Este é um ensaio complexo, cheio de referências a diversos filósofos, escritores clássicos, outros críticos etc. A leitura deste livro requer muita pesquisa e uma bagagem cultural muito grande, tanto acerca de Tolstoi como dos outros entes aqui referidos.
▪️
Também acho que Berlin podia ter feito uma análise um pouco mais ampla, restringiu-se apenas a alguns temas e a algumas comparações e apesar de as ter analisado a fundo, senti falta de mais.
▪️
A minha avaliação deste livro recai puramente na minha apreciação de principiante e nesta primeira leitura, um pouco mais superficial. Com certeza irei reler este livro várias vezes para ver a mudança do meu grau de compreensão! ✨
claudiaswisher's review against another edition
4.0
As I read about WAR AND PEACE, this slim book kept coming up in the commentary. Tolstoy's detours from his plot into essays about war and history left me frustrated, confused, and wishing his editor had had a red pen.
This book talks about Tolstoy and his views of history (and Napoleon) in the framework of foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes know a lot about a lot of things...hedgehogs know a lot about one thing...Foxes take various theories and ideas and human behavior and play with them. Shakespeare was a fox. Hedgehogs focus on one world-view and fit everything into that one view. Berlin says Dante was a hedgehog.
Berlin tells us Tolstoy was a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog. I got lost in the weeds of the argument, and the names of other philosophers...but I was only reading this to enlighten me on Tolstoy...so my attitude was probably not as open as it could be. THis would be a great book to discuss in a class, where I could listen to others.
But it did reinforce my understanding of the novel, and of Tolstoy's manipulation of the history of the War of 1812 to fit his own love of country, and his world view.
This book talks about Tolstoy and his views of history (and Napoleon) in the framework of foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes know a lot about a lot of things...hedgehogs know a lot about one thing...Foxes take various theories and ideas and human behavior and play with them. Shakespeare was a fox. Hedgehogs focus on one world-view and fit everything into that one view. Berlin says Dante was a hedgehog.
Berlin tells us Tolstoy was a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog. I got lost in the weeds of the argument, and the names of other philosophers...but I was only reading this to enlighten me on Tolstoy...so my attitude was probably not as open as it could be. THis would be a great book to discuss in a class, where I could listen to others.
But it did reinforce my understanding of the novel, and of Tolstoy's manipulation of the history of the War of 1812 to fit his own love of country, and his world view.
xuma's review against another edition
Came here from Superforecasting (Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner), as I was promised more information on Hedgehogs and Foxes. Do not feel as though I can provide a rating, given I have not actually read War & Peace, and a lot of this book's commentary draws upon the reader being knowledgeable about W&P. There were also some sections I skimmed for the same reason.
BUT. Must come back and re-read this if I do ever read War & Peace, as it is an incredibly well-written essay that's both amusing and thought-provoking (and 80 pages short – a pair of initials etched into a tree in comparison to W&P).
BUT. Must come back and re-read this if I do ever read War & Peace, as it is an incredibly well-written essay that's both amusing and thought-provoking (and 80 pages short – a pair of initials etched into a tree in comparison to W&P).
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