History and Happiness
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is about two things: “War” and “Peace”.
The “War” in the title refers specifically to the War of 1812, which is the one where Napoleon invades Russia with an army of over half a million soldiers. He wins every battle and conquers Moscow. But then he is forced to abandon the city for lack of supplies, and makes a 1,500 mile trek home. He arrives with only 10,000 able-bodied men.
The “Peace” refers to romantic love and family happiness, which are recurring themes in Tolstoy's novels. The book immediately preceding War and Peace is literally titled Family Happiness. The next one, Anna Karenina, begins with one of the most famous lines in all literature:
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Tolstoy started writing War and Peace in 1862, about 50 years after the war. So he was a couple generations removed from it. But he was right in the midst of his own family happiness. The same year he started writing the novel, Tolstoy fell in love and married the beautiful, intelligent Sofia. She served as the editor and copyist during the most productive period of his career.
The novel offers up two big theories corresponding to the two main themes: a theory of history and a theory of happiness. So if you ever wanted to either make history or be happy, read on. Tolstoy has the answers.
The Great Man Theory
Tolstoy uses the War of 1812 to delve into the role of great men directing the course of history.1 Specifically, he argues that there are no great men. So yeah, I lied. Tolstoy doesn’t tell you how to make history. Instead he tells you how to not be an asshole. Specifically, he argues against the Great Man Theory of history, using Napoleon as a stand in for the supposed “Great Man”. And the message is: don’t try this.
Here is how he describes Napoleon guiding the course of a key battle:
He fell back into that artificial realm of imaginary greatness, and again—as a horse walking a treadmill thinks it is doing something for itself—he submissively fulfilled the cruel, sad, gloomy, and inhuman role predestined for him…Never to the end of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the significance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness and truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.
Book 10, Chapter 38
War is hell and Napoleon is the devil. His greatness is imaginary, he knows nothing of the good, and worst of all, he is a slave to public opinion.
So if not great men, then what is the cause of history?
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 labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.
Book 9, Chapter 1
History isn't determined by specific actions taken by great men. It’s a continuous sea of interconnected causality that we can’t ever hope to name or understand.2
Tolstoy presents the Russian General Kutuzov as a contrast to Napoleon. Where Napoleon is young and ambitious, Kutuzov is old and humble. Napoleon seeks power, and Kutuzov accepts it reluctantly. Napoleon attacks, Kutuzov retreats. Napoleon wins battles and Kutuzov loses them. But Kutuzov knows the source and limits of his power, and he ultimately wins the war.
By long years of military experience [Kutuzov] knew, and with the wisdom of age understood, that it is impossible for one man to direct hundreds of thousands of others struggling with death, and he knew that the result of a battle is decided not by the orders of a commander in chief, nor the place where the troops are stationed, nor by the number of cannon or of slaughtered men, but by that intangible force called the spirit of the army, and he watched this force and guided it in as far as that was in his power.
Book 10, Chapter 35
Kutuzov is the opposite of a hero. He’s hardly even an individual, being more like an avatar of his people.3 Napoleon isn’t defeated by a single man, he is defeated by Russia itself.
So you want to be a great man? You will succumb to evil. And if you don’t want to be evil? Then don’t try to dictate the course of events. And while you’re at it, don’t try to win all the time. You can lose every battle and still win the war.
The Chad
But Napoleon, Kutuzov and the war in general are really just the background for our novel. The main story involves a number of more relatable characters. Chief among them are Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (the “Chad”) and Count Pierre Bezukov (the “Virgin”).
There are two main things that Tolstoy wants us to know about Andrei: he is good looking, and he is bored.
[Andrei] was a very handsome young man, of medium height, with firm, clearcut features. Everything about him, from his weary, bored expression to his quiet, measured step…among all these faces that he found so tedious, none seemed to bore him so much as that of his pretty wife.
Book 1, Chapter 4
By contrast, Pierre is fat and curious:
One of the next arrivals was a stout, heavily built young man with close-cropped hair [and] spectacles…Though he was certainly rather bigger than the other men in the room, [the hostess’s] anxiety could only have reference to the clever though shy, but observant and natural, expression which distinguished him from everyone else in that drawing room.
Book 1, Chapter 3
Andrei is driven by an obsession with glory. Pierre is driven by his quest for knowledge. Andrei has good social skills. Pierre is an embarrassment at parties.4 When they try to reform their peasants Andrei succeeds and Pierre is fooled into believing he has succeeded.5 And of course, Natásha, the central female figure in the book, falls in love with Andrei when she has a choice.
Andrei isn’t exactly evil, but he seems like he might be one his way there. One hint we have is that he prefers the pursuit of glory over family happiness. This is the advice he gives Pierre:
“Never marry till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of, and until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and have seen her plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and irrevocable mistake.”
Book 1, Chapter 8
Bored with his marriage, and feeling that he hasn’t done everything he is capable of, Andrei leaves home to fight Napoleon. His first encounter with the enemy is at the Battle of Austerlitz, where Napoleon defeats the combined Austrian and Russian forces–paving the way for his invasion of Russia.
At Austerlitz, Andrei is a bright-eyed young officer attached to General Kutuzov and eager to apply his skills.6 Kutuzov expresses concerns about the battle plan to the other generals, but he is overruled. Of course, the French achieve a great victory and Andrei is severely hurt.
It is Napoleon who sees him and orders him to be saved, but Tolstoy finds a way to diminish the great man even when he is saving an injured officer from death.
[Andrei’s] head was burning, he felt himself bleeding to death, and he saw above him the remote, lofty, and everlasting sky. He knew it was Napoleon—his hero—but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between himself and that lofty infinite sky with the clouds flying over it.
Book 3, Chapter 19
That is, Andrei, on the verge of death, looks up at the sky and experiences the divine. But his perfect moment is interrupted by “a small, insignificant creature”.
After he recuperates, Andrei adopts a new philosophy: living for himself and his family.7 But his newfound humility doesn’t last long. Pierre visits him and reminds him of his higher purpose (again, represented by the sky):
"If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and man’s highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole," said Pierre, and he pointed to the sky…[Andrei] looked up at the sky to which Pierre had pointed, and for the first time since Austerlitz saw that high, everlasting sky he had seen while lying on that battlefield; and something that had long been slumbering, something that was best within him, suddenly awoke, joyful and youthful, in his soul.
Book 5, Chapter 12
The sky has been a symbol of the divine for a long time, but not just any divine. It’s the masculine divine, the sky-father (as opposed to the earth-mother). When you reach for the sky, you are doing something great, but it’s not a humble, wise kind of greatness. It’s a kind of foolish autistic greatness like building a rocket to mars or a brick tower to heaven.
So Andrei decides that he can’t just live for himself, and that life is not over at 31!8 So he rejoins society and falls in love with Natásha. But when her reputation gets tarnished (after she is almost seduced by a married man)9, he rejects her and rejoins the fight against Napoleon.
Thus he fights in his second great battle, the Battle of Borodino, deep in the heart of Russia. However, by this time a cloud has come over him. Without anyone to love, he becomes disillusioned.
“...[W]e shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?" exclaimed Prince Andrei in a shrill, piercing voice. "Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much."
Book 10, Chapter 25
Although the Russians don’t lose as badly this time, Andrei is gravely injured again. Again he undergoes a spiritual transformation. This time he finds a love more perfect than love for his family.
"Yes—love," he thought again quite clearly. "But not love which loves for something, for some quality, for some purpose, or for some reason, but the love which I—while dying—first experienced when I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I experienced that feeling of love which is the very essence of the soul and does not require an object. Now again I feel that bliss. To love one's neighbors, to love one’s enemies, to love everything, to love God in all His manifestations. It is possible to love someone dear to you with human love, but an enemy can only be loved by divine love.”
Book 11, Chapter 32
This universal love allows him to face death without fear.
During the hours of solitude, suffering, and partial delirium he spent after he was wounded, the more deeply he penetrated into the new principle of eternal love revealed to him, the more he unconsciously detached himself from earthly life. To love everything and everybody and always to sacrifice oneself for love meant not to love anyone, not to live this earthly life. And the more imbued he became with that principle of love, the more he renounced life and the more completely he destroyed that dreadful barrier which—in the absence of such love—stands between life and death…
Book 12, Chapter 16
Like Napoleon, Andrei sets off in a quest for glory. But despite his talents, Andrei does not find glory in war. He loses, he is injured. And it is these losses that ensure that he doesn’t follow the path of evil.
Unlike Napoleon, his love of glory is transformed into divine love. Interestingly, both seem to have the effect of suppressing your need for actual human love and eliminating the fear of death. So while the temptation to experience a more earthly love continues to tempt him to the end,10 Andrei ultimately dies from his injuries comforted by his connection to the divine.
The Virgin
But Andrei isn’t even our main character. That honor belongs to Pierre, Andrei’s nerdy counterpart. Like the Russians in the war, Pierre mostly fumbles around, retreating from one failure to the next. He survives mostly out of luck.
Earlier I referred to Pierre as “the Virgin” to help illustrate the difference between him and Andrei. If he were alive today, he would probably be an incel. Yet his story, in large part, revolves around his relationships with two women: Hélène and Natásha.
Hélène is the greatest beauty in town, and she has no real interest in Pierre until he inherits a lot of money. Then she becomes very interested. Pierre suspects the marriage won’t work. He feels weird when he is around her, and not just because of his raging hormones.
He felt ashamed; he felt that he was occupying someone else’s place here beside Hélène. “This happiness is not for you,” some inner voice whispered to him. “This happiness is for those who have not in them what there is in you.
Book 3, Chapter 2
Hélène covets his wealth and manipulates him into an engagement. Being the clever man that he is, he ignores his gut and lets it happen. But as soon as they get married, Hélène goes ice cold and won’t even touch him. Even his servants pity him.11
Since he can’t seem to do anything right, Pierre decides to focus on self-work. He becomes a Mason.12 He also discovers feelings for a young girl named Natásha, who was raised with French tutors but somehow represents everything good and wholesome about Russia, including somehow mastering traditional Russian peasant dances.13
So when Natásha falls for Andrei, Pierre becomes completely depressed, abandons his self-work, and becomes a nihilist.
After Prince Andrei’s engagement to Natásha, Pierre without any apparent cause suddenly felt it impossible to go on…perfecting his inner man, to which he had devoted himself with such ardor—all the zest of such a life vanished…He had the unfortunate capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it. Every sphere of work was connected, in his eyes, with evil and deception. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he engaged in, the evil and falsehood of it repulsed him and blocked every path of activity.
Book 8, Chapter 1
Eventually, he goes insane and discovers, using some dubious numerology, that everything is happening for a reason and that he is destined for greatness.14 So naturally he decides to kill Napoleon. First, he goes to the front lines and stumbles around ineffectually during the Battle of Borodino. Then, when Napoleon takes Moscow, Pierre returns and tries to assassinate him.
Being Pierre, he fails miserably, becomes a prisoner of war, marches across Russia with the retreating French army. Like all good Russians, it is through intense and prolonged suffering that Pierre learns wisdom.
While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth—that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the other was warming; and that when he had put on tight dancing shoes he had suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet that were covered with sores—his footgear having long since fallen to pieces. He discovered that when he had married his wife—of his own free will as it had seemed to him—he had been no more free than now when they locked him up at night in a stable. Of all that he himself subsequently termed his sufferings, but which at the time he scarcely felt, the worst was the state of his bare, raw, and scab-covered feet.
Book 14, Chapter 12
Pierre learns wisdom. So what does he do? Basically, he stops trying to argue with people.
There was a new feature in Pierre’s relations…which gained for him the general good will. This was his acknowledgment of the impossibility of changing a man’s convictions by words, and his recognition of the possibility of everyone thinking, feeling, and seeing things each from his own point of view. This legitimate peculiarity of each individual which used to excite and irritate Pierre now became a basis of the sympathy he felt for, and the interest he took in, other people. The difference, and sometimes complete contradiction, between men’s opinions and their lives, and between one man and another, pleased him and drew from him an amused and gentle smile.
Book 15, Chapter 13
Now that he has stopped trying to change other people, he is finally worthy. Meanwhile, Hélène dies trying to abort another man’s child and Andrei has dumped Natásha. Pierre is her only option so they get married and live happily ever after.
So while Tolstoy doesn’t give us a recipe for greatness, Pierre’s story does give us a recipe for finding happiness:
Be curious
Do a lot of dumb shit
Suffer
Stop doing dumb shit
Get married
And what does happiness look like? Well, it mainly consists of telling your wife about all the dumb shit you’ve dumb.
Now that he was telling it all to Natásha he experienced that pleasure which a man has when women listen to him—not clever women who when listening either try to remember what they hear to enrich their minds and when opportunity offers to retell it, or who wish to adopt it to some thought of their own and promptly contribute their own clever comments prepared in their little mental workshop—but the pleasure given by real women gifted with a capacity to select and absorb the very best a man shows of himself. Natásha without knowing it was all attention: she did not lose a word, no single quiver in Pierre's voice, no look, no twitch of a muscle in his face, nor a single gesture. She caught the unfinished word in its flight and took it straight into her open heart, divining the secret meaning of all Pierre's mental travail…“People speak of misfortunes and sufferings,” remarked Pierre, “but if at this moment I were asked: "Would you rather be what you were before you were taken prisoner, or go through all this again?" then for heaven's sake let me again have captivity and horseflesh! We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness.
Book 15, Chapter 17
As for Natásha, she becomes completely absorbed in her role as a wife and mother.
The subject which wholly engrossed Natásha's attention was her family: that is, her husband whom she had to keep so that he should belong entirely to her and to the home, and the children whom she had to bear, bring into the world, nurse, and bring up. And the deeper she penetrated, not with her mind only but with her whole soul, her whole being, into the subject that absorbed her, the larger did that subject grow and the weaker and more inadequate did her powers appear, so that she concentrated them wholly on that one thing and yet was unable to accomplish all that she considered necessary. There were then as now conversations and discussions about women's rights, the relations of husband and wife and their freedom and rights, though these themes were not yet termed questions as they are now; but these topics were not merely uninteresting to Natásha, she positively did not understand them.
First Epilogue, Chapter 10
Epilogue
So there you have it. Tolstoy’s theory of greatness (or rather, his theory against greatness) and his theory of happiness. But I would be remiss if I didn’t fill you in on a few more details.
First, it’s not so clear that Napoleon was such a bad guy. For Tolstoy and other Russians at the time, Napoleon was basically Hitler. But his influence wasn’t entirely negative. For example, regions conquered by Napoleon seem to have benefited from his reforms.15 And of course, Russia, which he wasn’t able to hold, remains a mess. So maybe great men aren’t so bad after all?
Perhaps even more disappointing is that despite having a lovely relationship while writing War and Peace, Tolstoy’s own family happiness soon fell apart. After a brief honeymoon period, he and Sofia became famously antagonistic. He was constantly trying to give up his wealth, and she opposed him at every turn. He brought a procession of strange cultish followers to live on their property and repeatedly threatened to leave his family. At 82 years old, he finally followed through with his threats, left home, and died destitute and alone.
They even wrote novels criticizing each other. For example, Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata tells the story of a man who kills his wife after she has an affair. In the epilogue he explained his views on marriage love:
Let us stop believing that carnal love is high and noble and understand that any end worth our pursuit – in service of humanity, our homeland, science, art, let alone God – any end, so long as we may count it worth our pursuit, is not attained by joining ourselves to the objects of our carnal love in marriage or outside it…
The Kreutzer Sonata
Sofia wrote a novel in reply, titled "Whose Fault?"). It was banned because it was too critical of her husband, who was by then a national hero.
So why didn’t Tolstoy have a happy family? Part of it may be that he held some unrealistic expectations about women. Although she bore 13 children and was completely dedicated to the family, she had been exposed to some modern ideas and wanted to be more than just a copy editor.
But Sofia’s theory of why their marriage broke down was that he ultimately chose universal love over the kind of love that has a particular object (i.e., her). And his obsession with divine love made him insufferable.
All the things that he preaches for the happiness of humanity only complicate life to the point where it becomes harder and harder for me to live…His sermons on love and goodness have made him indifferent to his family, and mean the intrusion of all kinds of riff-raff into our family life. And his (purely verbal) renunciation of worldly goods has made him endlessly critical and disapproving of others.
Diary of Sofia Tolstaya
Or, in the words of another famous Russian author who may have been describing Tolstoy:
The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Of course, we saw similar ideas expressed in the character of Andrei–both the ambivalence to marriage and the emphasis on divine love. But this perspective really took hold after Tolstoy started reading Schopenhauer, who he calls a “genius among men”.16 Schopenhauer was famously critical of family happiness, being one of the first known proponents of anti-natalism, the theory that it's morally wrong to have children. Contrast this with his take on Nietzsche, that famous advocate of great men. Tolstoy called him an “abnormal German, suffering from power mania”.17
But perhaps Tolstoy’s obsession with universal love is just another form of power mania…a testosterone-driven striving for greatness. Napoleon fought a doomed campaign to conquer Russia and Tolstoy engaged in a foolhardy quest to conquer the human spirit.
In this view, the breakdown of his marriage can be understood as a continuation of the age-old battle of the sexes: a husband feels trapped by a marriage that seems to hinder his quest for greatness, while his wife tries to harness his efforts and direct the earthly benefits toward her children.
It was the sky god who called Tolstoy to leave Sofia and become a monk, just as He called Moses to leave Midian and return to Egypt, Aeneas to leave Carthage to found Rome, and Napoleon to leave France and conquer Russia. And so Tolstoy, like these men, “submissively fulfilled the cruel, sad, gloomy, and inhuman role predestined for him”.
So what can we take away from it all? Should we reject ambition, aggression…masculinity? To be honest, this didn’t work out too well for Tolstoy. Maybe a healthy masculinity probably starts off Napoleon and ends up Kutuzov.18 Tolstoy’s problem is that he starts off like Pierre and ends up like Andrei.
What does all this mean? Why did it happen? What made those people burn houses and slay their fellow men? What were the causes of these events? What force made men act so?
Second Epilogue
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 event, 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. Historical science in its endeavor to draw nearer to truth continually takes smaller and smaller units for examination. But however small the units it takes, we feel that to take any unit disconnected from others, or to assume a beginning of any phenomenon, or to say that the will of many men is expressed by the actions of any one historic personage, is in itself false.
Book 11, Chapter 1
The source of that extraordinary power of penetrating the meaning of the events then occuring lay in the national feeling which [Kutuzov] possessed in full purity and strength. Only the recognition of the fact that he possessed this feeling caused the people in so strange a manner, contrary to the Tsar's wish, to select him—an old man in disfavor—to be their representative in the national war. And only that feeling placed him on that highest human pedestal from which he, the commander in chief, devoted all his powers not to slaying and destroying men but to saving and showing pity on them. That simple, modest, and therefore truly great, figure could not be cast in the false mold of a European hero—the supposed ruler of men—that history has invented.
Book 15, Chapter 5
[Pierre explaining his theory of Napoleon at a party] “The execution of the Duc d’Enghien," declared Monsieur Pierre, "was a political necessity, and it seems to me that Napoleon showed greatness of soul by not fearing to take on himself the whole responsibility of that deed….Napoleon alone understood the Revolution and quelled it, and so for the general good, he could not stop short for the sake of one man’s life."
“Won't you come over to the other table?” suggested Anna Pávlovna.
But Pierre continued his speech without heeding her.
"No," cried he, becoming more and more eager, "Napoleon is great because he rose superior to the Revolution, suppressed its abuses, preserved all that was good in it—equality of citizenship and freedom of speech and of the press—and only for that reason did he obtain power."
Book 1, Chapter 5
The chief steward, who considered the young count’s attempts almost insane—unprofitable to himself, to the count, and to the serfs—made some concessions. Continuing to represent the liberation of the serfs as impracticable, he arranged for the erection of large buildings—schools, hospitals, and asylums—on all the estates before the master arrived. Everywhere preparations were made not for ceremonious welcomes (which he knew Pierre would not like), but for just such gratefully religious ones, with offerings of icons and the bread and salt of hospitality, as, according to his understanding of his master, would touch and delude him.
Book 5, Chapter 10
[Andrei predicts that the key action will be on the right flank] His idea was, first, to concentrate all the artillery in the center, and secondly, to withdraw the cavalry to the other side of the dip. Prince Andrei, being always near the commander in chief, closely following the mass movements and general orders, and constantly studying historical accounts of battles, involuntarily pictured to himself the course of events in the forthcoming action in broad outline. He imagined only important possibilities: “If the enemy attacks the right flank,” he said to himself, “the Kiev grenadiers and the Podólsk chasseurs must hold their position till reserves from the center come up.”
Book Book 2, Chapter 19
[Andrei explaining his theory after recovering from Austerlitz] “I only know two very real evils in life: remorse and illness. The only good is the absence of those evils. To live for myself avoiding those two evils is my whole philosophy now.” “And love of one’s neighbor, and self-sacrifice?” began Pierre. “No, I can’t agree with you! To live only so as not to do evil and not to have to repent is not enough. I lived like that, I lived for myself and ruined my life.”
Book 5, Chapter 11
“No, life is not over at thirty-one!” Prince Andrei suddenly decided finally and decisively. “It is not enough for me to know what I have in me—everyone must know it: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted to fly away into the sky, everyone must know me, so that my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, but so that it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!”
Book 6, Chapter 3
[Natásha] was tormented by the insoluble question whether she loved Anatole or Prince Andrei. She loved Prince Andrei—she remembered distinctly how deeply she loved him. But she also loved Anatole, of that there was no doubt. “Else how could all this have happened?” thought she. “If, after that, I could return his smile when saying good-by, if I was able to let it come to that, it means that I loved him from the first. It means that he is kind, noble, and splendid, and I could not help loving him. What am I to do if I love him and the other one too?” she asked herself, unable to find an answer to these terrible questions.
Book 8, Chapter 13
[Andrei on his deathbed] But after…he had seen [Natásha] for whom he longed appear before him and, having pressed her hand to his lips, had shed gentle, happy tears, love for a particular woman again crept unobserved into his heart and once more bound him to life. And joyful and agitating thoughts began to occupy his mind.
Book 12, Chapter 16
[Shortly after Pierre’s marriage] Particularly vivid, humiliating, and shameful was the recollection of how one day soon after his marriage he came out of the bedroom into his study a little before noon in his silk dressing gown and found his head steward there, who, bowing respectfully, looked into his face and at his dressing gown and smiled slightly, as if expressing respectful understanding of his employer’s happiness.
Book 4, Chapter 6
For a long while after [his Masonic Mentor] had gone, Pierre did not go to bed or order horses but paced up and down the room, pondering over his vicious past, and with a rapturous sense of beginning anew pictured to himself the blissful, irreproachable, virtuous future that seemed to him so easy. It seemed to him that he had been vicious only because he had somehow forgotten how good it is to be virtuous. Not a trace of his former doubts remained in his soul. He firmly believed in the possibility of the brotherhood of men united in the aim of supporting one another in the path of virtue, and that is how Freemasonry presented itself to him.
Book 5, Chapter 2
[Natásha dancing in the countryside] Natásha threw off the shawl from her shoulders… and setting her arms akimbo also made a motion with her shoulders and struck an attitude. Where, how, and when had this young countess, educated by an émigrée French governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit and obtained that manner which the pas de châle would, one would have supposed, long ago have effaced? But the spirit and the movements were those inimitable and unteachable Russian ones…As soon as she had struck her pose, and smiled triumphantly, proudly, and with sly merriment, the fear … that she might not do the right thing was at an end, and they were already admiring her. She did the right thing with such precision, such complete precision, that [her aunt] had tears in her eyes, though she laughed as she watched this slim, graceful countess, reared in silks and velvets and so different from herself, who yet was able to understand all that was … in every Russian man and woman.
Book 7, Chapter 7
[Pierre experimenting with numerology] So he wrote Le russe Besuhof (The Russian Bezukhov) and adding up the numbers got 671. This was only five too much, and five was represented by "e", the very letter elided from the article le before the word Empereur. By omitting the e, though incorrectly, Pierre got the answer he sought. L’russe Besuhof made 666. This discovery excited him. How, or by what means, he was connected with the great event foretold in the Apocalypse he did not know, but he did not doubt that connection for a moment. His love for Natásha, Antichrist, Napoleon, the invasion, the comet, 666, L’Empereur Napoléon, and L’russe Besuhof—all this had to mature and culminate, to lift him out of that spellbound, petty sphere of Moscow habits in which he felt himself held captive and lead him to a great achievement and great happiness.
Book 9, Chapter 19
See, e.g., Law and social capital: Evidence from the Code Napoleon in Germany, JC Buggle - European Economic Review, 2016
Do you know what this summer has been for me? An endless ecstasy over Schopenhauer, and a series of mental pleasures such as I’ve never experienced before. I have bought all his works and have read and am reading them (as well as Kant's). And assuredly no student in his course has learned and discovered so much as I have during this summer. I do not know whether I shall ever change my opinion, but as present I’m confident that Schopenhauer is the greatest genius among men.
Diary of Leo Tolstoy
If anyone doubted that the Christian world of today has reached a frightful state of torpor and brutalization (not forgetting the recent crimes committed in the Boers and in China, which were defended by the clergy and acclaimed as heroic feats by all the world powers), the extraordinary success of Nietzsche's works is enough to provide irrefutable proof of this. Some disjointed writings, striving after effect in a most sordid manner, appear, written by a daring, but limited and abnormal German, suffering from power mania. Neither in talent nor in their basic argument do these writings justify public attention. In the days of Kant, Leibniz or Hume, or even fifty years ago, such writings would not only have received no attention, but they would not even have appeared. But today all the so-called educated people are praising the ravings of Mr N, arguing about him, elucidating him, and countless copies of his works are printed in all languages.
Turgenev made the witty remark that there are inverse platitudes, which are frequently employed by people lacking in talent who wish to attract attention to themselves. Everyone knows, for instance, that water is wet, and someone suddenly says, very seriously, that water is dry, not that ice is, but that water is dry, and the conviction with which this is stated attracts attention.
Similarly, the whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions). One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche's books.
The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the superman, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of the pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love - virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the ideas of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.
“What is Religion and of What Does its Essence Consist?”
Like the old proverb about the month of March: In like a lion, out like a lamb.
Thank you, fantastic material to think through.
“He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom.”
What’s the syllogism? From the first part of the sentence:
If happy -> ~free
(If free-> ~happy)
But then he says so there’s no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom
If ~happy -> ~free
(If free->happy)
I dunno….this seems logically faulty? Like the two parts of the sentence don’t fit. Maybe it’s not supposed to be a perfect syllogism or maybe I’m just messing it up.
What do you make of it?