. In War and Peace Tolstoy treats facts cavalierly when it suitshim, because he is above all obsessed by his thesis the contrastbetween the universal and all-important but delusive experience offree will, the feeling of responsibility, the values of private lifegenerally, on the one hand; and on the other the reality ofinexorable historical determinism, not, indeed, experienceddirectly, but known to be true on irrefutable theoretical grounds.This corresponds in its turn to a tormenting inner conict, one ofmany, in Tolstoy himself, between the two systems of value, thepublic and the private. iiiTolstoys interest in history began early in his life. That he read widely, and was inuenced by what he read, cannotbe doubted. is, what power is itthat moves the destinies of peoples? 2 War and Peace, vol. And yet there is much poetic justice in it: for theunequal ratio of critical to constructive elements in his ownphilosophising seems due to the fact that his sense of reality (areality which resides in individual persons and their relationshipsalone) served to explode all the large theories which ignored itsndings, but proved insufficient by itself to provide the basis of amore satisfactory general account of the facts. I will restrict myself to citing modernbattles, famous battles whose memory will never perish, battles that have changedthe face of Europe and that were only lost because such and such a man thoughtthey were lost; they were battles where all circumstances being equal and withouta drop of blood more being shed on either side, the other general could have had aTe Deum sung in his own country and forced history to record the opposite ofwhat it will say. The translations in the notes are taken from Joseph de Maistre,St Petersburg Dialogues, trans. This gure was the famous Joseph deMaistre; and the full story of his inuence on Tolstoy, although ithas been noted by students of Tolstoy, and by at least one critic ofMaistre,2 still largely remains to be written. Applied to Tolstoy, the saying illuminates a paradox that helps explain his philosophy of history: Tolstoy was a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog. After demolishing the jurists and moralists and political philoso-phers among them his beloved Rousseau Tolstoy applieshimself to demolishing the liberal theory of history according towhich everything may turn upon what may seem an insignicantaccident. Popularized by Isaiah Berlin Expand Hedgehogs and Foxes Among Educational Researchers Larry Cuban Thisis pure Maistre, and very remote from Stendhal or Rousseau. What aregreat men? After disposing of the heroic theory of history, Tolstoy turnswith even greater savagery upon scientic sociology, which claims 1 One of Tolstoys Russian critics, M. M. Rubinshtein, referred to above onp. 474 the proper study of mankindhis personality and his thought at this date. (p. 459 above, note 1), col. 526. 14 day loan required to access EPUB and PDF files. And he gave as examples such irrationalinstitutions as hereditary monarchy and marriage, which survivedfrom age to age, while such rational institutions as electivemonarchy, or free personal relationships, swiftly and for noobvious reason collapsed wherever they were introduced. He advocated a singleembracing vision; he preached not variety but simplicity, not manylevels of consciousness but reduction to some single level in Warand Peace, to the standard of the good man, the single, spontane-ous, open soul: as later to that of the peasants, or of a simpleChristian ethic divorced from any complex theology or metaphy-sic; some simple, quasi-utilitarian criterion, whereby everything isinterrelated directly, and all the items can be assessed in terms of Thus we have no doubt about the violence of thecontrast between Pushkin and Dostoevsky; and Dostoevskyscelebrated speech about Pushkin has, for all its eloquence anddepth of feeling, seldom been considered by any perceptive readerto cast light on the genius of Pushkin, but rather on that ofDostoevsky himself, precisely because it perversely representsPushkin an arch-fox, the greatest in the nineteenth century asbeing similar to Dostoevsky, who is nothing if not a hedgehog; andthereby transforms, indeed distorts, Pushkin into a dedicatedprophet, a bearer of a single, universal message which was indeedthe centre of Dostoevskys own universe, but exceedingly remotefrom the many varied provinces of Pushkins protean genius.Indeed, it would not be absurd to say that Russian literature isspanned by these gigantic gures at one pole Pushkin, at theother Dostoevsky; and that the characteristics of other Russianwriters can, by those who nd it useful or enjoyable to ask thatkind of question, to some degree be determined in relation to thesegreat opposites. It was what he wrote the book for. TheJournals of Arnold Bennett, ed. Tolstoy was notprimarily engaged in exposing the fallacies of histories based onthis or that metaphysical schematism, or those which sought toexplain too much in terms of some one chosen element particularlydear to the author (all of which Kareev approves), or in refuting thepossibility of an empirical science of sociology (which Kareevthinks unreasonable of him) in order to set up some rival theory ofhis own. See below, p. 457. 334. cit. Maistre, whopossessed considerable social charm as well as an acute sense of hisenvironment, made a great impression upon the society of theRussian capital as a polished courtier, a wit and a shrewd politicalobserver. Publication date 1998 Topics Science -- Social aspects, Science and state Publisher Harmony Books Collection inlibrary; printdisabled; internetarchivebooks; china . the hedgehog and the fox 457course of events is described, side by side with the absurd,egocentric explanations which persons blown up with the sense oftheir own importance necessarily give to them; as well as of thewonderful descriptions of moments of illumination in which thetruth about the human condition dawns upon those who have thehumility to recognise their own unimportance and irrelevance.This is the purpose, too, of those philosophical passages where, inlanguage more ferocious than Spinozas, but with intentions similarto his, the errors of the pseudo-sciences are exposed. (p. 445 above, note 2),vol. . Hedgehogs cling to, Based on selected ideas by Isaiah Berlin, Jacques Barzun, Stephen Jay Gould and others, this essay critically discusses different approaches to the production and transmission of knowledge. Both Maistre and Tolstoy regard the Western world as in somesense rotting, as being in rapid decay. There is every reason whyTolstoy should have read this now relatively little-read author.Count Joseph de Maistre was a Savoyard royalist who had rstmade a name for himself by writing anti-revolutionary tractsduring the last years of the eighteenth century. Bioinformatics, a word previously known to only a few specialists, entered the lexicon, and is now used commonly, if inappropriately, to encompass the full range of computational activities in the biological sciences, including the management, mining, and analysis of molecular, cellular, and systemic databases. 3 Honourable exceptions to this are provided by the writings of the Russianwriters N. I. Kareev and B. M. Eikhenbaum, as well as those of the Frenchscholars E. Haumant and Albert Sorel. He was right alsoin demanding that the innitesimals of history be integrated. Les forces se balancent ainsi que les morts, et depuissurtout que linvention de la poudre a mis plus de galite dans lesmoyens de destruction, une bataille ne se perd plus mate riellement;cest-a`-dire parce quil y a plus de morts dun co te que de lautre: aussiFre de ric II, qui sy entendait un peu, disait: Vaincre, cest avancer.Mais quel est celui qui avance? What are we to say? Tolstoy adds that an evendeeper darkness is cast upon this subject by political theorists,moralists, metaphysicians. In short, it is an Tolstoys interest inhistory and the problem of historical truth was passionate, almostobsessive, both before and during the writing of War and Peace.No one who reads his journals and letters, or indeed War andPeace itself, can doubt that the author himself, at any rate, regardedthis problem as the heart of the entire matter the central issueround which the novel is built. . 14. Shelgunov at least honoured it with adirect attack for its social quietism, which he called the philosophyof the swamp; others for the most part either politely ignored it, or 1 Letter to Tolstoy of 11 July 1883. I do not propose in this essay to formulate a reply to thisquestion, since this would involve nothing less than a criticalexamination of the art and thought of Tolstoy as a whole. Tolstoy is particularlyirritated by references to the dominant inuence of great men or ofideas. 97, 113, 114, 117, 1234, 127 (20 March to 27 June 1852). He added that this conception war without panache or embellishments of which his brotherNikolay had spoken to him, he later had veried for himself duringhis own service in the Crimean War. . The best avowed of all Tolstoys literary debts is, of course, that 4, part 3, chapter 19. 1, pp. This passage is omitted from the 1894 reprint(p. 270). The Fox and the Hedgehog - Volume 34 Issue 1-2. . (Berlin, 1921), vol. 1, p. 222. Explain why the most honourablething in the world, according to the judgement of all of humanity, withoutexception, has always been the right to shed innocent blood innocently? Surely it is not merely physical strength thatis meant? Charlatanism, superciality,intellectual feebleness surely Tolstoy is the last writer to whomthese epithets seem applicable: bias, perversity, arrogance, perhaps;self-deception, lack of restraint, possibly; moral or spiritual inad-equacy of this he was better aware than his enemies; but failure ofintellect, lack of critical power, a tendency to emptiness, liability toride off on some patently absurd, supercial doctrine to thedetriment of realistic description or analysis of life, infatuation withsome fashionable theory which Botkin or Fet can easily seethrough, although Tolstoy, alas, cannot these charges seemgrotesquely unplausible. 442 the proper study of mankindwho are mainly interested in Tolstoy as a prophet and a teacherconcentrate on the later doctrines of the master, held after hisconversion, when he had ceased to regard himself primarily as awriter and had established himself as a teacher of mankind, anobject of veneration and pilgrimage. His genius lay in theperception of specic properties, the almost inexpressible individ-ual quality in virtue of which the given object is uniquely differentfrom all others. Originally published 1953 by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Ltd. No place of pub - lication listed, pages 3-4. Abstract: In the first 24 months of the project, KP-Lab members were highly dedicated to dissemination and were engaged in various dissemination activities that contributed to the prime objective of the KP-Lab dissemination efforts which is" to make the project widely known to a variety of prospective users and, at a later stage, to promote the technological tools and pedagogical . Tolstoy stood at the oppositepole to all this. He thinks this and the ock maythink it too. No man in his senses, during this centuryat any rate, would ever dream of denying Tolstoys intellectualof course, in the phrase of critics, would have been better left out. General, as opposed to national, historians seem to Tolstoymerely to extend this category without elucidating it: instead ofone country or nation, many are introduced, but the spectacle ofthe interplay of mysterious forces makes it no clearer why somemen or nations obey others, why wars are made, victories won,why innocent men who believe that murder is wicked kill oneanother with enthusiasm and pride, and are gloried for so doing;why great movements of human masses occur, sometimes fromeast to west, sometimes the other way. Yet what he believed in was the opposite. Tolstoy is far from such horror, crime andsadism;3 and he is not, pace Albert Sorel and Vogu e , in any sense amystic: he has no fear of questioning anything, and believes thatsome simple answer must exist if only we did not insist ontormenting ourselves with searching for it in strange and remoteplaces, when it lies all the time at our feet. 3 Yet Tolstoy, too, says that millions of men kill each other, knowing that it isphysically and morally evil, because it is necessary; because in doing so menfullled an elemental, zoological law: op. In the same way, an army of 40,000 men is physicallyinferior to another army of 60,000, but if the rst has more courage, experience,and discipline, it will be able to defeat the second, for it is more effective with lessmass. 489. 3, part 3, chapter 1. Why do the events the totalityof which we call history occur as they do? 6, letter 2338,p. Tolstoy possessed the Soire es, as well as Maistresdiplomatic correspondence and letters, and copies of them were tobe found in the library at Yasnaya Polyana. In summary, the fable of the fox and the hedgehog runs as follows: a fox, after crossing a river, got its tail entangled in a bush, and couldn't move. 480 the proper study of mankindsecularism then inuential in Western Europe; and led to adeliberate emphasis on the unpleasant aspects of human history,from which sentimental romantics, humanist historians and opti-mistic social theorists seemed so resolutely to be averting theirgaze. Tolstoy was right to abhor abstractions, but thishad led him too far, so that he ended by denying not merely thathistory was a natural science like chemistry which was correct but that it was a science at all, an activity with its own properconcepts and generalisations; which, if true, would abolish allhistory as such. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button. No doubt if we were omniscient we mightbe able, like Laplaces ideal observer, to plot the course of everydrop of which the stream of history consists, but we are, of course,pathetically ignorant, and the areas of our knowledge are incredi-bly small compared to what is uncharted and (Tolstoy vehementlyinsists on this) unchartable. Je me And yet there is surely a paradox here. One of Berlin's most celebrated works, this extraordinary essay offers profound insights about Tolstoy, historical understanding, and human psychology.This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, English translations of the many passages in foreign languages, a new foreword in which Berlin biographer Michael Ign. In the same strain Belinskys intimate friend and corre-spondent, the philosophical tea-merchant Vasily Botkin, who waswell disposed to Tolstoy, writes to the poet Afanasy Fet: Literary specialists . This remainedTolstoys attitude throughout his entire life, and is scarcely asymptom either of trickery or of superciality. Any comforting theory which attemptedto collect, relate, synthesise, reveal hidden substrata and concealedinner connections, which, though not apparent to the naked eye,nevertheless guaranteed the unity of all things, the fact that theywere ultimately parts one of another with no loose ends theideal of the seamless whole all such doctrines he explodedcontemptuously and without difficulty. Download. 462 the proper study of mankindobservation, historical inference and similar means was, for Kareev,tantamount to denying that we had criteria for distinguishingbetween historical truth and falsehood which were less or morereliable and that was surely mere prejudice, fanatical obscurantism. But all is well:for we never shall discover all the causal chains that operate: thenumber of such causes is innitely great, the causes themselvesinnitely small; historians select an absurdly small portion of themand attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny section.How would an ideal historical science operate? There is a hard cutting edgeof common sense about everything that Tolstoy wrote whichautomatically puts to ight metaphysical fantasies and undisci-plined tendencies towards esoteric experience, or the poetical ortheological interpretations of life which lay at the heart of theSlavophil outlook, and (as in the analogous case of the anti-industrial romanticism of the West) determined both its hatred ofpolitics and economics in the ordinary sense, and its mysticalnationalism. All Napoleons alliessuddenly became his enemies; and this army marched against Napo-leon, who had gathered new forces. The hedgehog and the fox: an essay on Tolstoy's view of history by Berlin, Isaiah, 1909-1997. a fox trying to be a hedgehog, as Berlin said of Leo Tolstoy, Elton is the opposite, a hedgehog trying to be a fox.2 2 Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross. Great men, we are told, are typical of the movements of theirage: hence study of their characters explains such movements. 4 War and Peace, vol. In the case of both Maistre and Tolstoy,for all their unbridgeably deep psychological, social, cultural andreligious differences, the disillusionment took the form of an acutescepticism about scientic method as such, distrust of all liberalism,positivism, rationalism, and of all the forms of high-minded 1 op. Alternatively, Mikhailov may have been capitalising onthe fact that an existing Russian expression tted Heines words like a glove, but Ihave not yet seen an earlier published use of it. He was 440 the proper study of mankindto his true vocation that of the great writer of the Russianland.1 Flaubert, despite his shouts of admiration over passagesof War and Peace, is equally horried: il se re pe`te et il philosophi-se,2 he writes in a letter to Turgenev, who had sent him theFrench version of the masterpiece then almost unknown outsideRussia. He begins to understand the truth earlier,during the period when he is making efforts to meet the impor-tant persons who seem to be guiding the destinies of Russia; hethen gradually becomes convinced that Alexanders principaladviser, the famous reformer Speransky, and his friends, andindeed Alexander himself, are systematically deluding themselveswhen they suppose their activities, their words, memoranda,rescripts, resolutions, laws and so forth, to be the motive factorswhich cause historical change and determine the destinies of menand nations; whereas in fact they are nothing: only so much self- It is not a mystical or an intuitionist view of life. . the hedgehog and the fox 481Maistres mordant obiter dicta about the hopeless barbarism,venality and ignorance of the Russians cannot have been toTolstoys taste, if indeed he ever read them. But history is one of the most backward of sciences a science which has lost its proper aim.8 The reason for this is thathistory will not, because it cannot, solve the great questions whichhave tormented men in every generation. cit. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009 Patrick Gardiner Article Metrics Get access Cite Rights & Permissions Abstract Whatever we may think of the general validity of such anoutlook, it is something of a historical irony that Tolstoy shouldhave been treated in this fashion; for it is virtually his own waywith the academic historians at whom he mocks with suchVoltairian irony. cit. We were among the first university presses to offer titles electronically and we continue to adopt technologies that allow us to better support the scholarly mission and disseminate our content widely. Perhaps Archilochus simply meant that the hedgehog's single defense defeats the fox's many tricks. But whenwe come to Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and ask this of him ask whether he belongs to the rst category or the second, whether the hedgehog and the fox 447be possible to discover and formulate a set of true laws of historywhich, in conjunction with the data of empirical observation,would make prediction of the future (and retrodiction of the past)as feasible as it had become, say, in geology or astronomy. 3 ibid., vol. 2, pp. By clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our. V. P.Obninsky and T. I. Polner (Moscow, 1912), after taking Tolstoy mildly to task forobscurities, exaggerations and inconsistencies, swiftly retreats into innocuousgeneralities. This is what we can see on every page of history. 3 ibid., p. 31. Rien nest plus vrai. There is a particularly vivid simile1 in which the great man islikened to the ram whom the shepherd is fattening for slaughter.Because the ram duly grows fatter, and perhaps is used as a bell-wether for the rest of the ock, he may easily imagine that he is theleader of the ock, and that the other sheep go where they gosolely in obedience to his will. In Erasmus's Adagia from 1500, the expression is recorded as Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. 30, pp. They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant andvain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society,individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties,injustices, disasters justied in their name than recognise their owninsignicance and impotence in the cosmic ow which pursues itscourse irrespective of their wills and ideals.
Top 10 Place To Visit In Johor,
Hammond Castle Parking,
Best Jobs In Uk For Foreigners,
Can Russian Orthodox Priests Marry,
Perryville, Mo Restaurants,
Articles T