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Prince Andrei: The Education of a Rational Man
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Extract
To refer to Prince Andrei as a rational man seems to flout Tolstoian psychological theory. In a passage from the second (unpublished) part of Youth that Boris Eikhenbaum treats as autobiographical, Tolstoi explains that one of his earliest maxims arose from a refutation of Descartes's “I think, therefore I am.“
I recall that the basis of my new philosophy was that man consisted of body, feelings, reason and will, but that the essence of the soul was will, not reason: that Descartes, whom I had not read then, in vain had said Cogito, ergo sum, because he had thought because he had wanted to think. Consequently it was necessary to say Volo, ergo sum.
Tolstoi alters Descartes's maxim to make it consistent with the metaphysical underpinnings of science and psychology as he understands them. Life is self-propelled motion, while reason is the principle that defines it or, as he puts it in the second epilogue of War and Peace, gives it form. The essence of a living being, therefore, must be desire or impulse, not thought, which gives form to impulse but does not itself move. To live is to will, not to think.
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References
1. Lev Tolstoi, Semidesiatye gody (Leningrad, 1974), p. 213.
2. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii L'va Nikolaevicha Tolstogo (hereafter cited as PSS), 90 vols. (Moscow, 1928-58), vol. 2, p. 343. Translations are my own.
3. “Reason expresses the laws of necessity. Consciousness expresses the essence of freedom. Completely unlimited freedom is the essence of life in human consciousness. Necessity without content is human reason in its three forms [i.e., time, space, causation]. Freedom is that which is examined. Necessity is that which examines. Freedom is content. Necessity is form. Only by separating the two sources of cognition, which are related to one another as form to content, does one arrive at the mutually exclusive and separately incomprehensible concepts of freedom and necessity. Outside these two concepts, like form and content mutually defining one another when joined, no understanding of life is possible. Everything we know about human life is only a certain relation of freedom to necessity, that is, of consciousness to the laws of nature. Everything that we know about the external life of nature is only a certain relation of the forces of nature to necessity, or the essence of life to the laws of nature. The forces of nature are outside us and not known to us through consciousness and we call these forces gravity, inertia, electricity, animal vitality and so on; but we are conscious of the force of life in man and we call it freedom.” PSS 12:336-37.
4. PSS, 46:265-66.
5. PSS, 9:321.
6. Among other places, Rousseau discusses these terms in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. See The First and Second Discourses, ed. and trans. Roger D. Masters (New York, 1964), pp. 221-22.
7. Tolstoy and the Novel (New York, 1967), pp. 50-51.
8. PSS, 23:470.
9. PSS, 2:75.
10. PSS, 13:753.
11. These are Tolstoi's own categories, borrowed, as he says in a letter written June 28, 1867, from A. A. Fet: “That's the reason we love each other — because we both think with the heart's mind as you put it. (Many thanks for that letter. The mind's mind and the heart's mind [um uma, um serdtsa] — that explained a lot to me).” L. N. Tolstoi, Perepiska s russkimi pisateliami (Moscow, 1962), pp. 270-71. Emphasis Tolstoi's.
12. See n. 3.
13. PSS, 9:36.
14. PSS, 3:95.
15. PSS, 13:528-29.
16. PSS, 9:355.
17. See Patricia, Carden, “The Expressive Self in War and Peace,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, vol. 12, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 528–30Google Scholar and Bocharov, S., ‘“Voina i mir’ L. N. Tolstogo,” in Tri shedevra russkoi klassiki (Moscow, 1971), pp. 11, 15, 39, 50-52, 85Google Scholar, passim.
18. PSS, 9:321.
19. PSS, 10:115.
20. PSS, 10:110.
21. ‘“No, life is not over at 31,’ Andrei decided finally and definitely. ‘It's not enough that I know everything that's in me — everyone has to know it. Both Pierre and that young girl who wanted to fly up to the sky — everyone has to know me. My life shouldn't be lived for me alone, they shouldn't live independently of my life, it should be reflected in everyone and they should live together with me.'” PSS, 10:157.
22. PSS, 10:167.
23. PSS, 10:167.
24. PSS, 10:168-69.
25. PSS, 10:211.
26. PSS, 10:211. Olenin experiences love as “'something stronger than I am guiding me.'” PSS, 6:124.
27. PSS, 11:384.
28. PSS, 10:211.
29. PSS, 11:211.
30. See n. 3.
31. PSS, 11:202.
32. PSS, 14:104-105.
33. PSS, 11:208-209.
34. PSS, 11:251.
35. PSS, 11:255.
36. PSS, 11:256.
37. PSS, 9:128.
38. PSS, 11:38.
39. PSS, 10:63.
40. PSS, 11:383.
41. As such it is related to other insect imagery in Tolstoi's fiction. See the mosquitoes in The Cossacks (PSS, 6:76-77) and the “green bug” in Anna Karenina (PSS, 19:378).
42. Compare this to the candle imagery in Anna Karenina. PSS, 19:331.
43. PSS, 12:56-57.
44. PSS, 12:62.
45. PSS, 12:290.
46. “Some Aspects of Tolstoy's Intellectual Development: Tolstoy and Schopenhauer,” California Slavic Studies, 5 (1970): 189.
47. Ibid., p. 196.
48. PSS, 12:63.
49. PSS, 10:191, 11:384.
50. “If one grants that human life can be directed by reason — then one destroys the possibility of life.” PSS, 12:238. “Natasha, alone with her husband, also conversed with him as only husbands and wives do; that is, understanding and communicating thoughts to one another with unusual clarity and speed, by means entirely contrary to all rules of logic, without benefit of judgments, deductions and conclusions.“ PSS, 12:290.
51. PSS, 9:353.
52. PSS, 12:59.
53. PSS, 48:23.