More on Isaiah Berlin's Reading of Tolstoy

Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy's philosophy of history ("The Hedgehog and the Fox") is, perhaps, the best introduction to Tolstoy's thought and the Tolstoyan dilemma yet composed. In any event, it is indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand Tolstoy as a religious thinker. It is also remarkable for the deep sympathy that Berlin, famously liberal, was able to muster--despite his antipathies towards Tolstoy's point of view. On the whole, I find Berlin fair to Tolstoy, almost to a fault: his biases intrude only occasionally and, even then, are kept somewhat muted. He does insist upon presenting Tolstoy's agon (the inner conflict he suffered as a fox who, nevertheless, wished to be a hedgehog) as a kind of personal failing rather than the spur to his genius, and one wonders how Berlin managed to maintain the sort of Olympian equipoise towards the world that he did--but maybe that is the privilege of a liberal in a liberal's world.

In a prior post, I made a brief comparison between Tolstoy and Plotinus that I stand by (as far as it goes). I am well aware that Berlin might have placed Plotinus among the hedgehogs without a second thought. My understanding of Plotinus, however, is mediated by Hadot's nuanced study (The Simplicity of Vision) and so, even though I would agree that Plotinus was more hedgehog than fox (just as I would describe Tolstoy as more fox than hedgehog), I think we are faced, in both thinkers, with a difference of degree rather than kind.

It is to Berlin's magnificent treatment of Tolstoy's "positive doctrine" (thin though it may be) in parts VI and VII of his essay that I wish to draw the reader's attention. As Berlin argues throughout, the Russian thinker can be devastating whenever he turns his attention to the short-comings of the positive doctrines of others; but when it comes to offering a viable alternative to the doctrines he criticizes, he is frequently (and uncharacteristically) silent. Berlin is unwilling to settle for Tolstoyan silence in this regard and, to his credit, teases out of his writings (particularly War and Peace) what we might call (for lack of a better term) the "deep structure" of Tolstoy's philosophy. For Berlin, this Tolstoyan "deep structure" consists in an understanding of "the need to submit." Submit to what? To "the permanent relationships of things, and the universal texture of human life, wherein alone truth and justice are to be found by a kind of 'natural'--somewhat Aristotelian--knowledge" (Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 71). Although he neglects to expand explicitly upon his invocation of Aristotle, I presume that Berlin has in mind the Greek philosopher's notion of phronesis: the sort of wisdom that one acquires through experience--and, as I think Tolstoy would wish to add, the most educational form of experience is suffering.

But here we have a mystery: for what is meant by the phrase "universal texture of human life"? Berlin spills much ink in the attempt to elaborate this phrase and, in the process, makes an indirect argument on behalf of Tolstoy's relative silence on the matter. His attempts to express what Wittgenstein (one of Tolstoy's most astute disciples) termed "the inexpressible" come down to something like "the context in which one's life is lived." And I think Berlin is quite right. However, had he availed himself of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, I think he could have offered his reader additional insight into Tolstoy's point of view. For Tolstoy, the context in which one's life is lived is not limited to one's immediate environment (social, cultural, religious, political, etc.) but also--and especially--one's "ultimate" environment: the fact that all human beings are mortal.

Tolstoyan phronesis consists in reconciling oneself to this inescapable fact (a process Norman O. Brown characterized as overcoming one's repression of it and, in the event, choosing "life against death"). Whether or to what extent Tolstoy's thinking on the matter is consonant with Brown's is a discussion for another time. What matters here is finding the door that Berlin opened onto Tolstoy's thinking and entering it. Once "inside," as it were, we can begin to find our way about.