War and Peace

Just finished Tolstoy's War and Peace; it comes off like a 1,300+ page treatise about how historians criminally over-simplify historical causation and how free will is an illusion. Not that I'm smarter than Tolstoy or anything, but though I agree with him on how countless interdependent causes-economic, religious, political, personal-go into every historical event and most histories are vastly oversimplified, I have to differ with him on his free will conclusion. The same countless and contradictory forces that go into every event are also present within every individual, and each individual must navigate these forces within themselves. We cannot obey all these forces at once, so we pick and choose the ones we can as we can.

If by lack of free will Tolstoy means that we can't just disobey physical law and fly off into the sky a la Neo at the end of The Matrix, then no, of course we don't have free will; but I don't think that's what anyone means by it, either. Personally I found the whole debate rather silly; just trying to convince me they have no free will in itself suggests free will, because you are asking me to privilege certain rationale-causations within my psyche over others, and my only response is: what else did you think free will is? I never get a cogent response.

But all that aside, what I found most intriguing about War and Peace is that the only characters who experience any sort of true happiness--Andrey staring at the sky while on his back on the battlefield, Pierre with Karatayev in the POW camp, even Kutuzov holding back his troops against the retreating French--are those who see the world, life, history, humanity, etc, not as a means to an end, not for personal aggrandizement or for some noble cause or what have you, but as an end unto itself, something beautiful because it is beautiful, an intrinsic value, that defines rather than is defined, a good of first intent, something that is its own reason for being. They seek not to bend the world to their will like some reckless Napoleon (in contrast to Hugo whom I just finished, Tolstoy is clearly not a fan), but rather seek to join it. Those indeed were the most moving parts of this gargantuan novel for me, and the most rewarding, and the moments of happiness that I agree with Tolstoy are the most genuine.

This novel by the end actually reminded me of Homer's Iliad, in that a great number of people are being swept away in events beyond their control, waging a war that both sides explicitly admit is unjust, yet for them the question is not whether or not they can escape, but whether or not they will still be noble in spite of all around them, in spite of history, in spite of the gods themselves.