Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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

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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

of history. But in a sense he missed the point. Tolstoy was not primarily

engaged in exposing the fallacies of histories based or. this or that

metaphysical schematism, or those which sought to explain too much

in terms of some one chosen element particularly dear to the author

(all of which Kareev approves), or in refuting the possibility of an

empirical science of sociology (which Kareev thinks unreasonable of

him) in order to set up some rival theory of his own. Tolstoy's concern

with history derives from a deeper source than abstract interest in

historical method or philosophical objections to given types of historical

practice. It seems to spring from something more personal, a bitter

inner conflict between his actual experience and his beliefs, between

his vision of life, and his theory of what it, and he himself, ought to

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be , if the vision was to be bearable at all; between the immediate

data which he was too honest and too intelligent to ignore, and the

need for an interpretation of them which did not lead to the childish

absurdities of all previous views. For the one conviction to which his

temperament and his intellect kept him faithful all his life was that all

previous attempts at a rational theodicy-to explain how and why what

occurred occurred as and when it did, and why it was bad or good that

it should or should not do so- all such efforts were grotesque absurdities,

shoddy deceptions which one sharp, honest word was sufficient to blow

away. The Russian critic, Boris Eikhenbaum, who has written the

best critical work on Tolstoy in any language,1 in the course of it

develops the thesis that what oppressed Tolstoy most was his lack of

positive convictions: and that the famous passage in Anna Karmina

in which Levin's brother tells him that he- Levin- had no positive

beliefs, that even communism, with its artificial, 'geometrical', symmetry, is better than total scepticism of his- Levin's- kind, in fact refers to Lev Nikolaevich himself, and to the attacks on him by his

brother Nikolay Nikolaevich. Whether or not the passage is literally

autobiographical-and there is little in Tolstoy's writing that, in one

way or another, is not-Eikhenbaum's theory seems, in general, valid.

Tolstoy was by nature not a visionary; he saw the manifold objects

and situations on earth in their full multiplicity; he grasped their

individual essences, and what divided them from what they were not,

with a clarity to which there is uo parallel. Any comforting theory

which attempted to collect, relate, 'synthesise', reveal hidden subst.rata and concealed inner connections, which, though not apparent to the naked eye, nevertheless guaranteed the unity of all things-the

fact that they were 'ultimately' parts one of another with no loose

ends-the ideal of the seamless whole-all such doctrines he exploded

contemptuously and without difficulty. His. genius lay in the perception of specific properties, the almost inexpressible individual quality in virtue of which the given object is uniquely different from all

others. Nevertheless he longed for a universal explanatory principle;

that is, the perception of resemblances or common origins, or single

purpose, or unity in the apparent variety of the mutually exclusive

bits and pieces which composed the furniture of the world. 1 Li�e all

1 B. M. Eikhenbaum, Uv Tokwy (Leningrad, 1918-6o), vol. 1, pp. 11 3-4.

1 Here the parado:r: appeara once more; for the 'inlinitesimals', whose

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

very penetrating, very imaginative, very dear-sighted analysts who

dissect or pulverise in order to reach the indestructible core, and justify

their own annihilating activities (from which they cannot abstain in

any case) by the belief that such a core exists, he continued to kill

his rivals' rickety constructions with cold contempt, as being unworthy

of intelligent men, always hoping that the desperately-sought-for

'real' unity would presently emerge from the destruction of the shams

and frauds- the knock-kneed army of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury philosophies of history. And the more obsessive the suspicion that perhaps the quest was vain, that no core and no unifying principle

would ever be discovered, the more ferocious the measures to drive

this thought away by increasingly merciless and ingenious executions

of more and more false claimants to the title of the truth. As Tolstoy

moved away from literature to polemical writing this tendency

became increasingly prominent: the irritated awareness at the back

of his mind that no final solution was ever, in principle, to be found.

caused Tolstoy to attack the bogus solutions all the more savagely

for the false comfort they offered-and_ for being an insult to the

intelligence.1 Tolstoy's purely intellectual genius for this kind of

lethal activity was very great and exceptional, and all his life he looked

for some edifice strong enough to resist his engines of destruction

and his mines and battering rams; he wished to be stopped by an

immovable obstacle. he wished his violent projectiles to be resisted

by impregnable fortifications. The eminent reasonableness and tentative methods of Professor Kareev. his mild academic remonstrance.

were altogether too unlike the final impenetrable. irreducible, solid

bed-rock of truth on which alone that secure interpretation of life

could be built which all his life he wished to find.

The thin. 'positive' doctrine of historical change in War and Ptact

is all that remains of this despairing search. and it is the immense

superiority of Tolstoy's offensive over his defensive weapons that

integration is the task of the ideal historian, must be reasonably uniform to

make this operation possible; yet the sense of 'reality' consists in the sense of

their unique dilferences.

1 In our day French existentialists for similar psychological reasons have

struck out against all explanations as such because they are a mere drug to

still serious questions, shortlived palliatives for wounds which are unbearable

but must be borne, above all not denied or 'explained'; for all explaining is

explaining away, and that is a denial of the given-the existent-the brute facts.

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has always made his philosophy of history-the theory of the minute

particles, requiring integration-seem so threadbare and anificial to

the average, reasonably critical, moderately sensitive reader of the

novel. Hence the tendency of most of those who have written about

War and Peace, both immediately on its appearance and in later years,

to maintain Akhsharumov's thesis 'that Tolstoy's genius lay in his

quality as a writer, a creator of a world more real than life itself; while