>CHAPTER I
>Seven years had passed. The storm-tossed sea of European history had
>subsided within its shores and seemed to have become calm. But the
>mysterious forces that move humanity (mysterious because the laws of
>their motion are unknown to us) continued to operate. [...]
>
>Tolstoy must have thought that the "hankering down" of the couple was
>also historically determined as well, rather than that the couple
>chose to hanker down.
>
>At 3:50 PM -0600 12/18/02, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>Milton's world is radically individualistic with a future, Tolstoi's
>>radically individualistic with a perceived boundary.
>
>Tolstoy (in _War and Peace_) seems to have thought of everyone's
>action as historically determined, except his -- the artist's -- own.
>
I'm no student of Tolstoi but I seem to recall that his (perhaps later) theory of history incorporated a good deal of chance; history was proceeding not just from unknown laws but proceeding in an unavoidably opaque way since the forces (in, for example, war) are working hard to conceal their intent and action from one another, indeed, to mislead the other where possible. So scientists of history, like the actors in war, are set a near-impossible task, just as physics would be considerably more difficult if particles were intentionally misleading each other and us. Does that reconcile with determinism?
jks writes:
>I wrote a high school English teacher I had had who mentored me and who was
very >conservative, that I had discovered Milton. He wrote back, "Don't read
him! He's a >revolutionary, and very seductive." But it was too late for me.
I love this quote. How did he know? He must've taken a peek before he threw the burka over Milton.
Jenny Brown