We are Our World; We are Only But Our World

"We are what we are, and live in a given situation which has the characteristics -- physical, psychological, social -- that is has; what we think, feel, do is conditioned by it, including our capacity for conceiving possible alternatives ... Our images and powers of conception are limited by the fact that our world possesses certain characteristics and not others; a world too different is (empirically) not conceivable at all; some minds are more imaginative than others, but all stop somewhere."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Wisdom?

"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 other '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."

"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, that is the root of Tolstoy's determinism, and of his realism, his pessimism, and his contempt for the faith placed in reason alike by science and by worldly common sense."

"Tolstoy himself 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."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Ignorance?

"Men's acts may seem free of the social nexus, but they are not free, they cannot be free, they are part of it. Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it. 'Power' and 'accident' are but names for ignorance of the casual chains, but the chains exist whether we feel them or not. Fortunately we do not; for if we felt their weight, we could scarcely act at all; the loss of the illusion would paralyse the life which is lived on the basis of our happy ignorance. But all is well: for we never shall discover all the causal chains that operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small; historians select an absurdly small portion of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny section."

"Since we are not, in fact, free, but could not live without the conviction that we are what do we do?...it is better to realise that we understand what goes on as we do in fact understand it -- much as spontaneous, normal, simple people, uncorrupted by theories, not blinded by the dust raised by scientific authorities, do, in fact, understand life -- than to seek to subvert such commonsense beliefs, which at least have the merit of having been tested by long experience, in favour of pseudo-sciences, which, being founded on absurdly inadequate data, are only a snare and a delusion."

"Man is at once an atom living its own conscious life 'for itself', and at the same time the unconscious agent of some historical trend, a relatively insignificant element in the vast whole composed of a very large number of such elements."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Recognising Unimportance and Irrelevance

"There are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name than recognise their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Ole Ordinaire

"And so Tolstoy arrives at one of his celebrated paradoxes: the higher soldiers or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller the effect of the words and acts of such remote personages, despite all their theoretical authority, upon that history."

"Those who went about their ordinary business without feeling heroic emotions or thinking that they were actors upon the well-lighted stage of history were the most useful to their country and community, while those who tried to grasp the general course of events and wanted to take part in history, those who performed acts of incredible self-sacrifice or heroism, and participated in great events, were the most useless."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Tolstoy's History and Anti-history

"History, only history, only the sum of the concrete events in time and space -- the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment -- this alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers -- answers needing for their apprehension no special senses of faculties which normal human beings did not possess -- might be constructed."

"History alone -- the sum of empirically discoverable data -- held the key to the mystery of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century. What is to be done? How should one live? Why are we here? What must we be and do? The study of historical connections and the demand for empirical answers to these proklyate voprosy became fused into one in Tolstoy's mind, as his early diaries and letters show very vividly."

"But side by side with this there is the beginning of an acute sense of disappointment, a feeling that history, as it is written by historians, makes claims which it cannot satisfy, because like metaphysical philosophy it pretends to be something it is not -- namely, a science capable of arriving at conclusions which are certain."

"History will never reveal to us what connections there are, and at what times, between science, art, and morality, between good and evil, religion and the civic virtues...What it will tell us (and that incorrectly) is where the Huns came from, when they lived, who laid the foundations of their power, etc."

"History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names. The death of Igor, the snake which bit Oleg -- what is all this but old wives' tales? Who wants to know that Ivan's second marriage, to Temryuk's daughter, occured on 21 August 1562, whereas his fourth, to Anna Alekseevna Koltovskaya, occurred in 1572...?"

"History does not reveal cause; it presents only a blank succession of unexplained events."

"If we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed."

"No matter how scrupulous the technique of historical research might be, no dependable laws could be discovered of the kind required even by the most undeveloped natural sciences. He further thought that he could not justify himself the apparently arbitrary selection of material, and the no less arbitrary selection of emphasis, to which all historical writing seemed to be doomed."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

The Hedgehog and the Fox

"For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel -- a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance -- and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision."

Hedgehogs - Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzache, Ibsen, Proust.
Foxes - Shakespere, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce.

"Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous; like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation."

Isaiah Berlin