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Volume 3, Part 2: Chapters 26–29
Explanation and Analysis—Napoleon's Will :
Tolstoy interweaves his own theory of history into his more personal narratives of the Rostov, Bolkonsky, and Bezukhov families. In one passage, in which he turns his attention to what he regards as the fallacies of previous historians, he wields logos to present his argument that history is not affected by the choices of individual men. Using Napoleon's invasion of Russia as his example, he argues that:
The way these people were killing each other occurred not by the will of Napoleon, but went on independently of him, by the will of the hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. To Napoleon it only seemed that the whole thing happened by his will. And therefore the question whether Napoleon had or did not have a cold is of no greater interest to history than the question of the last convoy soldier having a cold.
Here, Tolstoy proceeds through his argument in a logical fashion. The war, he notes, was not fought by one man who wiped out whole armies, but rather by "the will of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action." Each of these people, Tolstoy reasons, found themselves participating in the war as a result of their own complex choices, motivations, and circumstances. "To Napoleon," he writes, "it only seemed that the whole thing happened by his will." Though a man like Napoleon might believe, as a result of his own experiences, that his will alone directs an entire army, Tolstoy suggests that this is a fallacy based upon limited human perception. In the end, he concludes, Napoleon's individual choices and circumstances matter no more than that of any soldier, as all have been swept up in the same historical moment.
Related Themes:
Volume 3, Part 3: Chapters 1–4
Explanation and Analysis—Zeno's Paradoxes:
While reflecting upon the nature of history and historical narratives, Tolstoy alludes to one of the famous paradoxes of the Ancient Greek philosopher Zeno:
A well-known so-called sophism of the ancients posits that Achilles can never overtake a tortoise that is walking ahead of him, even though Achilles walks ten times faster than the tortoise: while Achilles covers the distance that separates him from the tortoise, the tortoise will get ahead of him by one tenth of that distance; Achilles covers that one tenth, the tortoise gets ahead by one hundredth, and so on to infinity. The ancients considered this problem insoluble.
In Zeno's well-known thought problem, "Achilles can never overtake a tortoise" in a race because the tortoise, despite its slower speed, will still continuously advance in the interval of time that it takes Achilles to reach the tortoise. By the time Achilles has gotten halfway to the tortoise, the tortoise has already moved past its original point, requiring Achilles to, again, catch up with it.
Here, Tolstoy alludes to this apparent paradox in order to explain his theory of history. Humans, he notes, must divide the "continuous" flow of time into "arbitrarily chosen units." While time is constantly moving forward, then, historians must nevertheless divide history into a series of sequential but distinct events in order to create an intelligible "story" with a beginning and end. For Tolstoy, the human inability to perceive time, and history, as a continuous and eternal flow leads to various fallacies in our understanding of history, such as our focus on the personalities of famous individuals such as Napoleon.
Related Themes:
