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wars and battles appear as a series of happenings that have no rational
order. On the other hand, above and beyond all this, there is History,
the great movement that carries individuals and pcoplcs away, as if
they were completely dctermincd by it. The true law of this movement
eludes both the individual who is subject to it and the historian who
observes it from the outside. The only truth that can be affirmed about
it is, according to Tolstoy, that events are determined by a force, a
"power," a necessity which dominates everything and everybody from
Napoleon to the last soldier. From this we get the well-known opposition
between Napoleon who claims to direct evcnts, and Kutuzov who does
not, with Kutuzov being closer to the truth insofar as he recognizes and
submits to the inescapable force that drives men before it. "The greater
the claim, the greater the lie."
That is Tolstoy's argument reduced to its barest outlines. But mere
polemicizing could not satisfy him. It was the truth he was after. And
in his search for it, he falls into a series of stupendous contradictions.
If
the truth about history cannot be founel either in the constructions
of the historians or in the expericnce of the actors themselves, where is it?
The only character in
War and Peace
who can be said to be the
repository of
a
truth is the simple peasant Platon Karataiev, who makes
no claim at all. But even if the "natural" wisdom of Platon Karataicv
is recognized, the basic question rcmains unanswered, as Tolstoy is well
aware. What is history? Why do things happen as they do and not
otherwise? And, above all, why do men act as they do? What is the
power that drives them to kill and die as masses, while as individuals
they do not want to kill and die, but simply to go on living?
Confronted by the contradiction between men's intuitive experience
of freedom in action and the evident fact that large-scale events must
be determined by general causes, Tolstoy seeks two ways out, one based
on the possibility of historical knowledge, the other, more important, on
truth in life. As for the first, he argues that in order to give an account
of historical events one must be able to "integrate the infinitesimals,"
that is to find the law covering Napoleon's cold on the eve of Borodino
as well as the disposition of his troops and all the innumerable incidents
and accidents that make up the reality of a battle-without establishing
a priori
a hierarchy of importance. Mr. Berlin properly notes that this
is the solution attempted by Bergson (and, we might add, Proust), the
reconstruction of "real duration" from the inside. Even if it were possible
to know all the infinitesimals that are to be put together, it must be re–
membered, however, that they are by essence qualitatively different from
each other, being as they are human phenomena and not mathematical
symbols, nor scientific data. The integration could not be purely rational,
