regard unfavourably with peasants or savages who, being not so
very much more ignorant, at least make more modest claims; but
this is not the view of the world that, in fact, underlies either W or and
Ptoct or Anno Kormino or any other work which belongs to this
period of Tolstoy's life. Kutuzov is wise and not merely clever as, for
example, the time-serving Drubetskoy or Bilibin are clever, and he
is not a victim to abstract theories or dogma as the German military
experts are; he is unlike them, and is wiser than they-but this is so
not because he knows more facts than they and has at his finger tips
a greater number of the 'minute causes' of events than his advisers or
his adversaries-than Pfuel or Paulucci or Berthier or the King of
Naples. Karataev brings light to Pierre, whereas the Freemasons did
·'
69
RU SSIAN T H IN K E R S
not, but this i s so not because h e happens to have scientific information
superior to that possessed by the Moscow lodges; Levin goes through
an experience during his work in the fields, and Prince Andrey while
lying wounded on the battlefield of Austerlitz, but in neither case
has there been a discovery of fresh facts or of new laws in any ordinary
sense. On the contrary, the greater one's accumulation of facts, the
more futile one's activity, the more hopeless one's failure-as shown by
the group of reformers who surround ·Alexander. They and men like
them are only saved from Faustian despair by stupidity (like the
Germans and the military experts and experts ge:1erally) or by vanity
(like Napoleon) or by frivolity (like Oblonsky) or by heartlessness (like
Karenin). What is it that Pierre, Prince Andrey, Levin discover? And
what are they searching for, and what is the centre and climax of the
spiritual crisis resolved by the experience that transforms their lives?
Not the chastening realisation of how little of the totality of facts
and laws known to Laplace's omniscient observer they- Pierre, Levin
and the rest-can claim to have discovered; not a simple admission of
Socratic ignorance. Still less does it consist in what is almost at the
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