catapult magazine

I’m really glad I took the time to plod through this classic by Tolstoy. The author really starts kicking it into high gear around page 837 or so.

I know it’s a long shot that anyone else is reading this right now too, but I’d love to talk about it here. I’ll just put the hook out there for anyone to bite. It’s an excellent book to read at this or any other time in our history.

I am sorry to see so much tension raised over issues I didn’t realize were at stake here, crlynvn.

I agree with your statement regarding Austen, Bronte, etc. We wouldn’t be having the same argument, though I fail to see why we are having the argument about Tolstoy anyhow. You say that Tolstoy was attempting to outline the reality of life – ‘how the world is’, yet Austen and other such novelists do the same, but in a moral rather than political venue. Tolstoy’s world in WandP is based on how he, as subjective being, viewed the times. It seems the assumption of his attempting to write pure history is an opinion that is being read onto the novel, not one inherent in it – again, it is a ‘novel’, a story, not posited as fact. Hence, a placement of WandP in such a genre as historical novel, is not a travesty. It does not seem to ascribe to the story a false level of accuracy. It’s simply descriptive of the genre.

(a side note on your side note re: choice -how do you feel about Thomas Hardy’s novels? ie. Tess)

Finally, I agree with your last statement in the first paragraph. Tolstoy’s story, as well as his historiological perspective, is indeed based largely on conjecture, that was my point from the beginning.

In any case, this is not an attack, nor was it intended as such- merely an expression of opinion. Please take no offense.

i feel the farthest things from offense or tension; i like a good debate and if i come off a little sharp don’t worry. i attempt, but not always suceed, to take the tit for tat in good humor and i hope that others do the same. :D anyway, much of my previous post was pointed at grant and not at you and i believe the answer to why we are having the discussion about tolstoy’s philosophy of history because grant seems enamored of it.:D ;)
good point on the difference between austen and tolstoy on the ‘how the world is’ issue, from what i see austen does not attempt to apply her impression of the world as broadly as tolstoy.

as far as my feelings on thomas hardy; i love his imagery- lovely, but i wouldn’t say that at least Tess (the only of his books i have read) is really my taste in literature. if i remember the book rightly, i read it in high school, the worst that can possibility happen to the characters seems inevitable from the beginning, i prefer endings that are not hinted at in the first chapters.

The idea that history cannot be described using conjecture is exactly the problem with reducing human history to the scientific method!

In War and Peace, Tolstoy sets out to argue against reducing history to objective “provable” facts when he displays all the conjecture of actual historic events. In the heat of battle, amid the smoke and clash of weapons, one side of an army may think they’re winning a battle, while the other side (of the same army) knows it has lost. The Generals of each opposing side may both think they’ve won the battle and then the high society people in St. Petersburg adopt their own conjectural perspective on who was victorious.

So, if the people who actually LIVED the events of history didn’t know how to judge the events at the time without conjecture, how can we expect the scientific historians to come any closer to the truth of the event without conjecture? If you define truth as objective conjectureless facts, then you miss a large dimension of human experience that also plays into history: the subjective perspectives of individuals making decisions based mostly (if not entirely) on conjecture!

right, hmmm, so it’s all relative? and human history falls into the morase of ‘i say it is true so it must be.’ grant, you seem to have latched onto one only one of the trees in the forest of my words; conjecture. explain?

The reason I chose to try to cut down the “conjecture” tree (we’re back to trees again? how does this always happen?) is because questioning Tolstoy’s method of historical description by criticizing it’s conjectural nature seems to suggest that evidence is clear enough to base all historical judgments on.

Tolstoy successfully displays the very human way in which people use and abuse evidence toward their own ends (the Russians use evidence to show the genius tactics of its own generals, the French historians cite evidence supporting the idea that Napoleon was a super-human force with intelligence far beyond the average person). What Tolstoy is trying to display is the subjective USE of evidence so that history (as a science) can recognize its distance from everyday life, which history often tries to describe with statistics and psychology (another scientific reduction).

My point is not that we should abolish science. Rather, I agree with Tolstoy’s point that human history ought to be described in a way that acknowledges the contingencies (for lack of a better word) that are also involved in life events. I am not promoting relativism, but we ought to acknowledge the relationality of God’s world since we ourselves are created IN RELATION TO God, others, the earth etc. etc.

This relationality is exactly what one of our Church fathers, John, affirms in 1 John when he’s trying to replace the Greek Gnostic idea of knowledge (which is a knowledge separated from the body) with a knowledge RELATED to Christ himself. How do we know the way things really are (or were) unless what we see—evidence—is properly related to God’s Word in the flesh. As John himself acknowledges, the “appearance” of something always has to match up with the “is”. What you “see” has to be in proper RELATION to what “is” if you want to claim to know the truth.

Another good example is the War of 1812. Americans learn in school that they won, or that there were more important things to do than conquer Canada. Canadian kids learn that Canada kicked Yankee butt after the Americans pre-emptively invaded, assuming they would be welcomed by the oppressed British subjects. For the truth, of course, we’ll have to hear the Mexican story.

Americans don’t learn about Canada.

True, true. Silly me. But since you bring it up, ignorance is another factor behind different perspectives on historical and current events.

grant, you seem to assert often that historians and their work are purposely distant from the realities of everyday life, because you go on about statistics, military movements, psychology, etc. i am curious why that is, bad experience with history in high school? on some level i understand the gripe, blegh, the amount of dry historical work that i have waded through because it is suppose to be good for me. however, i have also found that true in literally every discipline that i have spent anytime participating in; ever spent significant amounts of time attempting to plod through dooyeweerd, hegel, or kant? i shudder thinking about all the hours i have, but i don’t see grant asserting that philosophers are inaccessible and don’t address everyday life, though those are common complaints of intro philosophy students that have never consciously thought about philosophy.

perhaps historians on the general level could do a better job of addressing ‘everyday’ life (whatever that means) they are not doing the hacked up job grant seems to think they are. beyond high school, and to a certain extent the college intro history class, there is a world of historical work that attempts to address ‘everyday life’. historians attempt to straddle the fine line between the relatively inaccessible scholarship of the past, like 19th c. historiography, and a novel claiming to be historical. a good historian attempts to address an educated but uniformed audience, so she provides definitions to terms, ideas, and happenings that most likely are not in the common vocabulary, part of the definition is the evidence cited in the work and the source in the footnotes. my basic point is that tolstoy does not have a bibliography, there is no way for the reader to go back and check, read for oneself the same sources, check for plagerism, etc. that is why i consider tolstoy’s attempts at historical work conjecture.

It should be obvious that I don’t find historical theories dry or boring and that I especially enjoy working through the complexities of philosophies of history—I’m the one who read through Tolstoy’s historical theories while you skipped over them, after all.

I’m merely trying to affirm Tolstoy’s argument, which is as evident in the War and Peace story-line as it is in the sections where he clearly explains his argument. In War and Peace, there are several criticisms of a way of thinking that leans toward the development of perfect abstract systems which would surely work, if only actual events obediently followed the theories proposed. Tolstoy goes against this kind of “cleaning up” of events into neat packages that make “reasonable” sense. As Tolstoy reminds us, events only make sense from a certain framework. If Napoleon won and all of Europe became one revolutionized whole, we would see Napoleon differently. History would be written differently, no matter how “objective” and detached from relativity it would try to be.

Recognizing this reality, Tolstoy boldly writes his work of imagination based on actual documents written by the generals, soldiers and political leaders of that day. Granted, Tolstoy does not leave us an academic bibliography. He expects his readers to know the events and quotations about which he’s writing, just as the apostle Paul doesn’t reveal his sources everytime he cites an Old Testament prophet or quotes from David’s Psalms. Should we distrust Paul’s accuracy because he doesn’t follow the academic rules for good scholarly writing?