Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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

future, of one and many; hence neither these, nor any other explicitly

1 Alm01t in the senae in which tlW phrase is used by Montesquieu in the

opening sentence of De /'esprit des lois.

R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S

conceived categories o r concepts can b e applied to it-for it i s itself

but a vague name for the totality that includes these categories, these

concepts, the ultimate framework, the basic presuppositions wherewith we function. Nevertheless, though we cannot analyse the medium without some (impossible) vantage point outside it (for there is no

'outside'), yet some human beings are better aware-although they

cannot describe it-of the texture and direction of these 'submerged'

portions of their own and everyone else's lives; better aware of this

than others, who either ignore the existence of the all-pervasive

medium (the 'flow of life'), and are rightly called st�perficial; or else

try to apply to it instruments-scientific, metaphysical etc. -adapted

solely to objects above the surface, i.e. the relatively conscious,

manipulable portion of our experience, and so achieve absurdities in

their theories and humiliating failures in practice. Wisdom is ability

to allow for the (at least by us) unalterable medium in which we actas we allow for the pervasiveness, say, of time or space, which characterises all our experience; and to discount, less or more consciously, the

'inevitable trends', the 'imponderables', the 'way things are going'. It

is not scientific knowledge, but a special sensitiveness to the contours

of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity

for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor

which cannot be either altered, or even fully described or calculated;

an ability to be guided by rules of thumb-the 'immemorial wisdom'

said to reside in peasants and o�her 'simple folk' -where rules of

science do not, in principle, apply. This inexpressible sense of cosmic

orientation is the 'sense of reality', the 'knowledge' of how to live.

Sometimes Tolstoy does speak as if science could in principle, if not

in practice, penetrate and conquer everything; and if it did, then we

should know the causes of all there is, and know we were not free,

but wholly determined -which is all that the wisest can ever know.

So, too, Maistre talks as if the school men knew more than we, through

their superior techniques: but what they knew was still, in some sense,

'the -facts' : the subject-matter of the sciences; St Thomas knew

incomparably more than Newton, and with more precision and more

certainty, but what he knew was of the same kind. But despite this

lip-service to the truth-finding capacities of natural science or theology,

these avowals remain purely formal : and a very different belief finds

expression in the positive doctrines of both Maistre and Tolstoy.

Aquinas is praised by Maistre not for being a better mathematician

than d' Alembert or Monge; Kutuzov's virtue does not, according to

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

Tolstoy, consist in his being a better, more scientific theorist of war

than Pfuel or Paulucci. These great men are wiser, not more knowledgeable; it is not their deductive or inductive reasoning that makes them masters; their vision is 'profounder', they see something the

others fail to see; they see the way the world goes, what goes with

what, and what never will be brought together; they see what can be

and what cannot; how men live and to what ends, what they do and

suffer, and how and why they act, and should act, thus and not otherwise. This 'seeing' purveys, in a sense, no fresh information about the universe; it is an awareness of the interplay of the imponderable with

the ponderable, of the 'shape' of things in general or of a specific

situation, or of a particular character, which is precisely what cannot

be deduced from, or even formulated in terms of, the laws of nature

demanded by scientific determinism. Whatever can be subsumed under

such laws scientists can and do deal with; that needs no 'wisdom';

and to deny science its rights because of the existence of this superior

'wisdom' is a wanton invasion of scientific territory, and a confusion

of categories. Tolstoy, at least, does not go to the length of denying

the efficacy of physics in its own sphere; but he thinks this sphere

trivial in comparison with what is permanently out of the reach of

science-the social, moral, political, spiritual worlds, which cannot be

sorted out and described and predicted by any science, because the

proportion in them of 'submerged', uninspectable life is too high. The

insight that reveals the nature and structure of these worlds is not a

mere makeshift substitute, an empirical pis oller to which recourse is

had only so long as the relevant scientific techniques are insufficiently

refined; its business is altogether different: it does what no science

can claim to do; it distinguishes the real from the sham, the worth.!

while from the worthless, that which can be done or borne from

what cannot be; and does so without giving rational grounds for its

pronouncements, if only because 'rational' and 'irrational' are terms

that themselves acquire their meanings and uses in relation to-by

'growing out of' -it, and not vice versa. For what are the data of

such understanding if not the ultimate soil, the framework, the

atmosphere, the context, the medium (to use whatever metaphor is

most expressive) in which all our thoughts and acts are felt, valued,

judged, in the inevitable ways that they are? It is the ever present

sense of this framework-of this movement of events, or changing

pattern of characteristics-as something 'inexorable', universal, pervasive, not alterable by us, not in our power (in the sense of 'power'

·'

73

R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S

i n which the progress of scientific knowledge has given u s power

over nature), that is at the root of Tolstoy's determinism, and of his

realism, his pessimism, and his (and Maistre's) contempt for the faith

placed in reason alike by science and by worldly common sense. It is

'there' -the framework, the foundation of everything-and the wise

man alone has a sense of it; Pierre gropes for it; Kutuzov feels it in

his bones; Karataev is at one with it. All Tolstoy's heroes attain to

at least intermittent glimpses of it-and this it is that makes all the

conventional explanations, the scientific, the historical, those of unreRective 'good sense', seem so hollow and, at their most pretentious, so shamefully false. Tolstoy himself, too, knows that the truth is

there, and not 'here' - not in the regions susceptible to observation,

discrimination, constructive imagination, not in the power of microscopic perception and analysis of which he is so much the greatest master of our time; but he has not, himself, seen it face to face; for