War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

• Tolstoy was a determinist. He still believed firmly in the ability to influence others toward good by example, that is, changing oneself to change others. But he also saw man’s life as having two forms, an individual life where there is relative freedom, and a social life swarmed by a pressure to conform. “Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal aims of humanity.”
• Tolstoy believed that the grander the immersion in a group, the smaller the scope of freedom of choice. He also makes the distinction between reason and consciousness and how reason can only take one so far, being overwhelmed by unknowables and unpredictability. Consciousness, on the other hand, sources from the whole and thus empowers the characters from war and peace.
• Tolstoy demonstrates in his fiction how people’s thoughts are far more complex than their actions, and being absorbed in this complexity places a gloss upon our active awareness. This causes us to blurt out words irrelevant to conversation, and to wear the truth of what we feel elsewhere, such as in a facial expression
• In War and Peace, War acts as a metaphor for false values by which the characters live, and Peace represents true values and spiritual harmony.
• “The focus of War and Peace is the contrast between two opposite states: on the one hand selfishness, self-indulgence, self-importance, and the attendant evils of careerism, nepotism, vanity, affectation, and the pursuit of purely private pleasures; on the other hand, a turning outwards from the self, a groping towards something larger, an endeavour to surmount individualism, a recognition that the cult of the self is an unworthy alternative to the service of one’s neighbours, one’s family, the community and the country at large.” - R.F Christian
• “[War and Peace] reveals a profound understanding of human psychology—but no more so than…Stendhal. Turgenev and Jane Austen wrote more economically and with greater wit. Smollet, Fielding, or Sterne had more humour, more entertainment value. Balzac had more historical colouring, more period detail. Dickens had a greater creative imagination; George Eliot no less moral earnestness.” But Tolstoy encapsulates a golden mean of across these qualities, provoking profound thought and emotion in readers.

  Book one

• “But the princess never saw the beautiful expression of her own eyes—the look they had when she was not thinking of herself. As with everyone, her face assumed a forced unnatural expression as son as she looked in the glass.”
• “His son made no rejoinder, but it was evident that whatever arguments were presented he was as little able as his father to change his opinion.” - Prince Andrew and his father while discussing matters of war
• ‘We don’t love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them.’ - Sterne
• “He was evidently pleased at his own display of anger and walking up to the regiment wished to find a further excuse for wrath.”
• “You fear and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will inevitably have to learn what lies the other side of death. But you are strong, healthy, cheerful, and excited, and are surrounded by other such excitedly-animated and healthy men.”
• “Prince Vasili did everything to get Pierre to marry his daughter,” but never thought out his plans before hand. His subconscious would assemble plans unbeknownst to him, and nudge him in a certain direction. This allowed Vasili to remain authentic and natural in pursuing selfish desires while his schemes remained hidden.
  • This happens to us more often than we think.
• “She was so plain that neither of them could think of her as a rival, so they began dressing her with perfect sincerity, and with the naive and firm conviction women have that dress can make a face pretty.”
• “Rostov was a truthful young man and would in no account have told a deliberate lie. He began his story meaning to tell everything just as it happened, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably he lapsed into falsehood.”
  • When discussing his war story
• “He was like a horse running downhill harnessed to a heavy cart. Whether he was pulling it or being pushed by it he did not know, but rushed along at headlong speed with no time to consider what this movement might lead to.”
• During a fated battle, the French outsmart the Russians and demolish them. Prince Andrew starts the battle with a hunger for fame, glory, and recognition, hoping to valiantly lead a regimen to victory. In reality, he ends up charging forward with an unprepared and chaotic group, and gets knocked off his horse almost instantly. He lays on his back, looking at the calm, infinite sky while wounded. All the glory he seeked now seemed unimportant. Napoleon, his hero, later happens upon him and takes him as prisoner. The importance Prince Andrew once gave to Napoleon is extinguished by his brush with mortality
• Meanwhile, Rostov gallops across the losing battle hoping to send a message to the Emperor. As the loss becomes apparent to him, he cares not for the fallen soldiers but hastens to learn whether the emperor is okay. While the world around him burns, the real war he experiences is within, that is, in his infatuation with the emperor. He eventually finds the emperor alone, but doesn’t dare approach, like a boy that’s afraid to approach his crush. Then, someone else rides up to the emperor and consoles him, and Rostov is filled with despair while thinking that could have been me!

  Book two

• “The faces of these young people, especially those who were military men, bore that expression of condescending respect for their elders which seems to say to the older generation, ‘We are prepared to respect and honour you, but all the same remember that the future belongs to us.’”
• “Bagration on seeing the [gift, an engraved tray] glanced around in dismay, as though seeking help. But all eyes demanded that he should submit. Feeling himself in their power, he resolutely took the salver with both hands and looked sternly and reproachfully at the count who had presented it to him.”
  • A rugged military man being brought to submission by high society
• “Three hundred person took their seats in the dining room, according to their rank and importance: the more important nearer to the honoured guest, as naturally as water flows deepest where the land lies lowest.”
• “I know your outlook,” said the mason, “and the view of life you mention, and which you think is the result of your own mental efforts, is the one held by the majority of people, and is the invariable fruit of pride, indolence, and ignorance. Forgive me, my dear sir, but if I had not known it I should not have addressed you. Your view of life is a regrettable delusion.”
  • A mason addressing Pierre
• “Can I receive that pure liquid [the highest wisdom and truth] into an impure vessel and judge its purity? Only by the inner purification of myself can I retain some degree of purity the liquid I receive.”
• “And especially obedience—which did not even seem to [Pierre] as a virtue but a joy. (He now felt so glad to be free from his own lawlessness and to submit his will to those who knew the indubitable truth.”
• Recognize no other distinctions but those between virtue and vice. Beware of making distinctions that could infringe equality. “Fly to a brother’s aid whoever he may be, exhort him who goeth astray, raise him that falleth, and never bear malice or enmity towards thy brother. Be kindly or courteous. Kindle in all hearts the flame of virtue. Share thy happiness with thy neighbours, and may envy never dim the purity of that bliss. Forgive thy enemy, do not avenge thyself except by doing him good.”
• “…growing up and dying with no idea of God and truth beyond ceremonies and meaningless prayers, and are now instructed in a comforting belief in future life, retribution, recompense, and consolation?”
• “We often think that removing all the difficulties in our life we shall more quickly reach our aim, but…it is only in the midst of world cares that we can attain our three chief aims: 1) self-knowledge — for man can only know himself by comparison. 2) self-perfecting, which can only be attained by conflict and 3) The attainment of the chief virtue — love of death. Only the vicissitudes (unfortunate changes) of life can show us its vanity, and develop our innate love of death or rebirth to a new life.”
• “[He] was … a diligent newsmonger — one of those men who choose their opinions like their clothes, according to the fashion.”
• “The chief reason [for his urge to weep] was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable within him, and that limited and material something he…was.”
• Pierre notices Vera, being carried away by her self-satisfied talk, talking to Prince Andrew. She references girls ‘these days’, mentioning ‘these days’ as “people of limited intelligence are fond of doing, imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of ‘these days’ and that human characteristics change with times.”
• Pierre was gloomy, bothered by Prince Andrew’s love story while his love story was nonexistent. “[Pierre] pointed to his manuscript-book with that air of escaping from the ills of life with which unhappy people look at their work.”
• “The brighter Prince Andrew’s lot appeared to him, the gloomier seemed his own.”
• “…there was no longer the former poetic and mystic charm of desire, but there was pity for her feminine and childish weakness, fear at her devotion and trustfulness, and an oppressive yet joyful sense of duty that now bound him to her for ever. The present feeling, though not so bright and poetic as the former, was stronger and more serious.”
• “[Prince Andrew] seldom laughed, but when he did he abandoned himself entirely to his laughter, and after such a laugh [Natasha] always felt nearer to him.”
• “That latent grudge a mother always has in regard to a daughter’s futures married happiness.”
• “He was only quite at ease when, having poured several glasses of wine mechanically into his large mouth, he felt a pleasant warmth in his body, an amiability towards all his fellows, and a readiness to respond superficially to every ideal without probing it deeply.”
• “And she burst into sobs with the despairing vehemence with which people bewail disasters they feel they have themselves caused.”
• “He did not know that Natasha’s soul was overflowing with despair, shame, and humiliation, and that it was not her fault that her face happened to assume an expression of calm dignity and severity.”
• “All seemed so pitiful, poor, in comparison with these feeling of tenderness and love he experienced…Only looking up at the sky did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised.”

  Book three

• “To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research, and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present themselves. The deeper we delve in search of the causes the more of them we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance compare to the magnitude of the events [war].”
• Tolstoy gives a number of counterfactuals that if they had occurred the war wouldn’t be. Yet, “all these causes—myriads of causes—coincided to bring it about. And so there was no one cause for that occurrence, but it had to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to west slaying their fellows.”
• “Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but predestined significance.”
• “There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life which is the more free the more abstract in its interests, and his elemental swarm-life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.”
• “Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity…The higher a man stand on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and inevitability of his every action…A king is history’s slave.”
• “When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur.”
• “In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like the labels they have but the smallest connexion with the event itself.”
• “One of those men who purposely put themselves in most depressing conditions to have a justification for being gloomy. For the same reason they are always hard at work and in a hurry.”
• “To talk with the sort of eloquence and unrestrained irritability to which spoilt people are so prone.”
• “It was evident that he had long been convinced that it was impossible for him to make a mistake, and that in his perception whatever he did was right, not because it harmonized with any idea of right and wrong, but because he did it.”
• “He was now concerned only with the nearest practical matters unrelated to his past interests…It was as if that loft infinite canopy of heaven that had once towered above him had suddenly turned into a low solid vault that weighed him down, in which all was clear, but nothing eternal or mysterious.”
  • Narrow intellect provides the illusion that all is known, but what is known is finite. Submitting to and pursuing the infinite leads to more fulfillment and wonder.
• “Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who disputing honestly.”
  • Tolstoy on the group of men who used war and conflict for political and personal gain, wearing opinions like fashions and wearing only what will get the favour with those higher in rank than them.
• “He was one of those hopelessly and immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom…because he was self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge only an absolute truth.”
• “His love of theory made him hate everything practical, and he would not listen to it. He was even pleased by failure, for failures resulting from deviations in practice from the theory, only proved to him the accuracy of the theory.”
  • We build theories in our minds of how things should be. When things in the real world inevitably deviate from the theories in our minds, we claim the real world is the problem.
  • We make a plan of how things should be. When the plan fails, we don’t blame the plan, we blame the fact that the plan wasn’t properly executed. The world should fit to our plan, we shouldn’t have to remodel our plan to fit the world!
• “Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes—love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he’s doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader.”
• “Formerly, when going in to action, Rostov had felt afraid, now he had not the least feeling of fear. He was fearless not because he had grown used to being under fire (one cannot grow used to danger), but because he had learned how to manage his thoughts when in danger.”
• Tolstoy describes doctors as useful not because they cure people, but because they were “indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her—and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering.”
• “At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.” In solitude, man listens to the former voice; in society, the latter.
• “‘We were just talking of you,’ she said with the facility in lying natural to a society woman.”
• Pierre acts kindly to the eldest unmarried princess, to whom he is benefactor, when she makes a reproachful demand of him. “The princess was apparently vexed at not having any one to be angry with.”
• Pierre experienced a new and joyful feeling he had not experienced before: a “sense of the necessity of undertaking something and sacrificing something. […] He was not occupied with the question of what to sacrifice for, the fact of sacrificing in itself afforded him a new and joyous sensation.”
• “But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder, the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country’s inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The military life is characterized by absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone.”
• “So the way in which these people killed one another was not decided by Napoleon’s will but occurred independently of him, in accord with the will of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took place by his will.”
• “The profoundest and most excellent dispositions and orders seem very bad, and every learned miniaturist criticizes them with looks of importance, when they relate to a battle that has been lost, and the very worst dispositions and orders seem very good, and serious people fill whole volumes to demonstrate their merits, when they relate to a battle that has been won.”
  • This also shows that no matter how profound and excellent a plan might be, if the hive executing the plan are weak willed it cannot succeed. But then we blame the plan and not the innumerable decisions made by the hive.
• “The forest at the farthest extremity of the panorama seemed carved in some precious stone of a yellowish-green colour…”
• “As the flames of the fire hidden within come more and more vividly and rapidly from an approaching thunder-cloud, so, as if in opposition to what was taking place [the battle], the lightning of hidden fire growing more and more intense glowed in the faces of these men.”
• “As soon as [soldiers] left the place where the balls and bullets were flying about, their superiors, located in the background, re-formed them and brought them under discipline, and under the influence of that discipline led them back to the zone of fire, where under the influence of fear and death they lost their discipline and rushed about according to the chance promptings of the throng.”
• “Napoleon did not notice that in regard to his army he was playing the part of a doctor who hinders by his medicines.”
• “To speak of what would have happened had Napoleon sent his Guards is like talking of what would happen if autumn became spring. It could not be.”
• “Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind. Laws of motion of any kind only become comprehensible to man when he examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the same time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements.”
• “In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing happens. The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary human wills, is continuous.”
• “The first method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, though there is and can be no beginning to any events, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from another.”
• “The second method is to consider the actions of some one man—a king or a commander—as equivalent to the sum of many individual wills; whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed by the activity of a single historic personage.”
• “Only by taking an infinitesimally small unit for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.”
• “‘But every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors; every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been great men,’ says history[…]Whenever I see the movement of a locomotive I hear the whistle and see the valves opening and wheels turning; but I have no right to conclude that the whistling and turning of wheels are the cause of the movement of the engine.”
• “In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going…but as soon as a storm arises…suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.”
• “As happens with passionate people he was mastered by anger but was still seeking an object on which to vent it.”
• “To a man unswayed by passion, what’s best for the crowd is never certain, but those mastered by passion think they know exactly where that welfare lies.”
  • Rostopchin, to direct the frustration of the mob to someone other than himself, found a French prisoner, blamed all their woes on the Frenchman, and commanded the crowd to beat him. The Frenchman was beaten to death, and Rostopchin’s cowardly psyche did everything it could to deflect responsibility for, or justify, the death. “The crowd needed a vent for their anger and I obeyed their calls,” he thought. Who can be sure what the crowd needed at that moment?
• “Like a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow neck of a jug, and having seized a handful of nuts will not open its fist for fear of losing what it holds, and therefore perishes, the French when they left Moscow had inevitably to perish because they carried their loot with them,” unable to let go.
• “When water is spilt on dry ground both the dry ground and the water disappear and mud results; and in the same way the entry of the faminished army into the rich and deserted city resulted in fires and looting and the destruction of both the army and the wealthy city.”
  • The army had been destroyed because the once orderly soldiers transformed into lawless men in the rich and deserted city of Moscow
• “When living with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change. No, neither death nor anything else can destroy it. It is the very essence of the soul.”

  Book four

• “Those who try to understand the general course of events, and to take part in it by self-sacrifice and heroism, were the most useless members of society […] and all they did for the common good turned out to be useless and foolish.”
• “In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable. Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance. If he tries to realize it his efforts are fruitless.”
  • Those who move the dials of history are those who act authentically and naturally
• The maggot gnaws the cabbage, yet dies first.
• “Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life brought him in contact with, particularly with man—not any particular man, but those with whom he happened to be.”
• “Platon Karaetev knew nothing by heart, except his prayers. When he began to speak he seemed not to know how he would conclude.”
  • Platon radiates authenticity, creativity, and simplicity. To plan his speech would pervert the authenticity and creativity; part of his speech would service the plan rather than the relationship between speaker and spoken to, and thus hinder that harmony between them.
• “But his life, as he regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only as part of a whole of which he was always conscious. His words and actions flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken separately.”
• “During the whole of that period Napoleon, who seems to have been the leader of all those movements—as the figure-head of a ship may seem to a savage to guide the vessel—acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it.”
• Talks of a dog “basking in the sun with a thoughtful air of importance.” Perfect.
• “A sweating hand’s an open hand, a dry hand’s close.”
• “It was terrible, but he felt that in proportion to the efforts of that fatal force to crush him, there grew and strengthened in his soul a power of life independent of it.”
• “There was within him a deep unexpressed conviction that all would be well, but that one must not trust to this and still less speak about it, but must only attend to one’s own work. And he did his work, giving his whole strength to the task.”
• “With his sixty years’ experience he knew what value to attach to rumours, knew how apt people who desire anything are to group all news so that it appears to confirm what they desire, and he knew how readily in such cases they omit all that makes for the contrary.”
  • Confirmation bias.
• Near the end of the campaign, “all Kutuzov’s activity was directed towards restraining his troops, by authority, by guile, and by entreaty, from useless attacks, maneuvers, or encounters with the perishing enemy.”
• “One must have a prospect of a promised land to have the strength to move.”
• “Momentum (quantity of motion) is the product of mass and velocity. In military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its men and some unknown x. […] That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army […] Men who want to fight will always put themselves in the most advantageous conditions for fighting.”
• “And the escort, as if afraid, in the grievous condition they themselves were in, if giving way to the pity they felt for the prisoners, and so rendering their own plight still worse, treated them with particular moroseness and severity.”
• “That happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. […] He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in the bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping in the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the other was warming.”
• “Only now did Pierre realize the full strength of life in man, and the saving power he has of transferring his attention from one thing to another, which is like the safety valve of a boiler that allows superfluous steam to blow off when the pressure exceeds a certain limit.”
• “To love life is to love god. Harder and more blessed than all is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in innocent sufferings.”
• “When actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of ‘greatness’. ‘Greatness,’ it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the ‘great’ man nothing is wrong; there is no atrocity for which a ‘great’ man can be blamed.”
• “All the profound plans about cutting off and capturing Napoleon and his army were like the plan of a market-gardener who, when driving out of his garden a cow that had trampled down the beds he had planted, should run to the gate and hit the cow on the head.”
• “The Russians, half of whom died, did all that could and should have been done to attain an end worthy of the nation, and they are not to blame because other Russians, sitting in warm rooms, proposed that they should do what was impossible.”
• “A spiritual wound produced by a rending of the spiritual body is like a physical wound and, strange as it may seem, just as a deep wound may heal and its edges join, yet physical and spiritual wounds alike can heal completely only as the result of a vital force within. Natasha’s wound healed in that way. She thought her life was ended, but her love for her mother unexpectedly showed her that the essence of life—love—was still active within her. Love awoke, and so did life.”
• “She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the layer of slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which, taking root, would so cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that it would soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound had begun to heal from within.”
• “Such is the fate, not of great men whom the Russian mind does not acknowledge, but of those rare and always solitary individuals who discerning the will of Providence submit their personal will to it. The hatred and contempt of the crowd punishes such men for discerning the higher laws.”
• “…who by experience of life had reached the conviction that thoughts, and the words serving their expression, are not what move people.”
• “In his captivity he had learnt that in Karataev [a good-natured peasant] God was greater, more infinite, more unfathomable, than in the Architect of the Universe the Freemasons acknowledged.”
• “Yet Pierre’s cunning consisted simply in finding pleasure in drawing out the human qualities of the embittered, hard, and (in her own way) proud princess.”
• “Though he considered it his duty as a doctor to pose as a man whose every moment was of value to suffering humanity…”
• “By being ruined I have become much richer.”
• “Prince Vasili, who having obtained a new post and some fresh decorations was particularly proud at this time, seemed to him a pathetic, kindly old man, much to be pitied.”
• “Pierre’s insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to discover personal attributes, which he termed ‘good qualities’, in people before loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people without cause he discover indubitable causes for loving them.”

  First Epilogue

• “Do not the very actions for which the historians praise Alexander I flow from the same sources: the circumstances of his birth, education, and life, that made his personality what it was and from which the actions for which they blame him also flowed?”
• “‘Chance created the situation; genius utilized it,’ says history. But what is chance? What is genius? The words chance and genius do not denote any really existing thing and therefore cannot be defined. Those words only denote a certain stage of understanding of phenomena. I do not know why a certain event occurs; I think I cannot know it; so I do not try to know it and I talk about chance. I see a force producing effects beyond the scope of ordinary human agencies; I do not understand why this occurs and I talk of genius.”
• By delving into the essence of extraordinary movements, we have no need to see the extraordinary abilities and genius of extraordinary people, “but we shall be unable to consider them to be anything but men like other men, and we shall not be obliged to have recourse to chance for an explanation of those small events which made these people what they were, but it will be clear that all those small events were inevitable.”
• “The flood of nations begins to subside into its normal channels. The waves of the great movement abate, and in the calm surface eddies are formed in which float the diplomatists who imagine that they have caused the floods to abate.”
• “It is not beauty that endears, it’s love that makes us see beauty.”
• “‘Always the same thing,’ said Pierre […] ‘Everybody sees that things are going so badly that they cannot be allowed to go on so and that it is the duty of all decent men to counteract it as far as they can.’”
• “…and promised in her heart to do better and to accomplish the impossible—in this life to love her husband, her children, little Nicholas, and all her neighbours, as Christ loved mankind. Countess Mary’s soul always strove towards the infinite, the eternal, and the absolute, and could therefore never be at peace.”

  Second Epilogue

• The only conception that can explain the movement of a locomotive is that of a force commensurate with the movement observed. That force does not lie in the devil, although this can’t be refuted. It doesn’t lie in the wheels, for the comes the question of what causes the wheels to turn. And so with movements of people. “Some people see it as a force directly inherent in heroes, as the peasant sees the devil in the locomotive; others as a force resulting from several forces, like the movement of the wheels.”
• “As gold is gold only if it is serviceable not merely for exchange but also for use, so universal historians will only be valuable when they can reply to history’s essential questions: What is power? The universal historians give contradictory replies to that question, while the historians of culture evade it and answer something quite different. And as counters of imitation gold can only be used among a group of people who agree to accept them as gold or among those who do not know the nature of gold, so universal historians and historians of culture, not answering humanity’s essential question, only serve as currency for some purposes of their own in universities and among the mass of readers who have a taste for what they call serious reading.”
• “No command ever appears spontaneously, or itself covers a whole series of occurrences; but each command follows from another, and never refers to a whole series of events but always to one moment only of an event.”
  • Taking a jab at free will. We act as though we spontaneously make commands of ourself, that is, we will our own decisions. This is a product of hubris, a neglecting of the continuity. Our decisions don’t spontaneously arise within us, they are provoked by a collection other sources. Our assumption that the individual’s power to spontaneously choose their path is a result of a lack of understanding of what caused that choice (ignorance), and also reflects of our self-serving, hubristic desire to be the sole author of our decisions
• Justifying atrocities generally serve the purpose of allowing those who produce the atrocities from moral responsibility. The French kill and drown one another, and say it necessary for the welfare of France, liberty, and equality of man. Hamas kill and mutilate Israelis, call it a necessary cost to bring justice for years of power imbalance. These justifications merely enable horrendous behaviour that serves selfish aims.
• “Is there any collective action which cannot find its justification in political unity, in patriotism, in the balance of power, or in civilization?”
• Organizations of humans arrange themselves into a hierarchical cone. The plentiful at the bottom tend to participate most but command least, and thus have the least responsibility; whereas those at the top participate least but command most, thus having the most responsibility.
• What is power? “Power is the relation of a given person to other individuals, in which the more this person expresses opinions, predictions, and justifications of the collective action that is performed, the less his participation in that action.
• What force produces the movement of nations? Not power, nor intellectual activity, or a combination of the two as historians suppose, “but by the activity of all the people who participate in the events, and who always combine in such a way that those taking the largest direct share in the event take on themselves the least responsibility and vice versa.”
• “Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event, physically it is those who submit to the power. But as the moral activity is inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event is neither in the one nor in the other, but in the union of the two.”
  • Struggling to understand the second sentence.
• Without a conception of free will, it seems man would be unable to understand life and unable to live for a single moment, for freedom (seemingly) is life. “All man’s efforts, all his impulses into life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom. A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.”
• Our conception of freedom and necessity is increased or decreased by the following:
  1. How we perceive the spatial relationship of the actor. * A man alone seems more free in his actions than a man in society. Societal conditions seem to bind us more. Yet, if we look deeper, we can find that the man in solitude is just as influenced by his environment: in the food he hunts, the books he reads, and the air he breathes.
  2. The temporal relationship between us and the actor. * Our actions performed a moment ago feel more in our control than those taken in the past. The longer the duration, the more inevitable they seem. ‘Of course I picked up the cup! But that traumatic event in my past, well, that happened because I was naive and couldn’t have known otherwise.’ This is because time provides perspective, and increased perspective always increases inevitability, because it unveils more that hubris hides from us.
  3. The degree to which we apprehend the endless chain of causation that led to a decision to act. * The more we learn, the more we reveal the reason that an event turned out the way it did. This is interesting; the scientific pursuit of Truth (the real truth—the one unrestricted to merely one group or one species) will necessarily decrease perceived freedom and increase perceived necessity. * The less we understand something, the more freedom we ascribe to it. For a crime we don’t understand, we attribute more blame to the actor; for a virtuous act we don’t understand, we attribute more merit to the actor.
• “Thus our conception of free will and inevitability gradually diminishes or increases according to the greater or lesser connexion with the external world, the greater or lesser remoteness of time, and the greater or lesser dependence on the causes, under which we contemplate a man’s life.”
  • Spatial and temporal continuity (interconnectedness) and interdependence. An understanding of the causal links in that interconnected chain, that is, the chain of dependencies.
• The action of a man absent of free will assumes infinite knowledge of space relations, an infinitely long period of time, and an infinite series of causes.
• The action of man perfectly free assumes man is all alone, beyond space, beyond time, and free from dependence on cause.
• Reason says: space is infinite, time is infinite motion without a moment of rest, and the connection between cause and effect has no beginning or end.
• Consciousness says: I am all there is, I measure flowing time by a fixed moment of the present, and I feel myself to be the cause of every manifestation of my life.
• “Freedom is the thing examined. Inevitability is what examines. Freedom is the content. Inevitability is the form.”
• “In history what is known to us we call laws of inevitability, what is unknown we call free will. Free will is for history only an expression for the unknown remained of what we know about the laws of human life.”
• “But as in astronomy the new view said: ‘It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws,’ so also in history the new view says: ‘It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.’”
• As in astronomy, which revealed to humanity a motion we do not feel, so with free will we must recognize dependencies of which we are not conscious.