Search of Truth: Tolstoy's War and Peace in Plato's Republic

       In Plato's cave analogy, many people seem to approach truth, but according to Plato, they fail.  Puppeteers, crossing before the fire, carry ``artifacts'' that create the misleading shadows.  Some prisoners watch the shadows carefully, learning about them and trying to formulate the laws they follow.  However, Plato claims that only philosophers, those who escape their bonds and leave the cave, have access to the truth.  Why are philosphers so special and what about them gives them this ability for observation beyond all their fellow citizens?  To answer this question, Plato's analogy has to be expanded and explored in depth, which I will try to do this by exploring the connections between his analogy and some important analogies developed by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace.
       In the last section of War and Peace, Tolstoy tries to develop a theory for how history progesses.  He starts by attacking other historians for emphasizing the influence of individuals in the course of history.  These men, according to Tolstoy, are completely bound to the circumstances surrounding them, and the power they seem to wield is nothing more than an illusion which occurs when history happens to move in the direction they believe it should.  To drive his point home, he comes up with analogies which share many characteristics with Plato's cave analogy.  For each analogy, I will note similarities and then some things it suggests about aspects of Plato's.
	Tolstoy relates the movement of humanity in history to that of animals in a herd of cattle.  As the herd moves and the animals which make it up mill about, the animal at the front of the herd constantly changes.  An observer looking only at the herd and ignoring the various aspects of their environment, might claim that the animal at the front of the herd is its leader, because all the cattle move in its direction.  Such an observer is like a historian who fails to see that one animal is no different from the rest.  Its actions reflect the actions of the whole rather than prompt them.  We notice them more only because they happen to be at the fringes of a much larger progression.
	The animals in the herds are isomorphic to the prisoners in Plato's cave.  Necessity makes those animals as much prisoners as the people in the cave.  Even the observer watching the herd is a prisoner.  His idea of the herd from what he sees on its fringes are like the view the prisoners get, only able to see what is illuminated by firelight.
	Tolstoy mentions cultural leaders on the fringes of the herd, in addition to the supposed political leaders.  These cultural leaders are like authors, artists, religious leaders, and scientists.  The puppeteers in Plato's cave, passing above the prisoners on the road, play the same role by leading and largely defining the thoughts and beliefs of their people.  Tolstoy suggests that these puppeteers are no different from the rest of the prisoners.  Although Plato does not have them tied down like the other prisoners, the chains are probably only significant as a means of ensuring that prisoners look at nothing directly but the shadows on the wall.  Plato's puppeteers are just like the animals on the edges of the herd, where the firelight happens to hit them and make them visible in shadows.  They are no different from the rest of the prisoners, either in their abilities or their dillusions.
	Another of Tolstoy's analogies is of a ship moving on a course with an unknown source of propulsion.  The ship is similar to the herd above, and with us as passangers rather than cattle.  As the ship moves forward, it creates waves cut out in front of it and wake behind it.  To people on the boat, unable to tell the motion of the ship but by the formation of the waves, it would seem like the waves control the ships mostion, because they constantly move out ahead of it.  As we move through history, it appears that certain people have power as they give commands and history turns to meet those commands.  However, Tolstoy wants to show that it is only the commands which happen to lie in the path which history is already set to take which are seen as power, while the others are largely ignored.
	The parallels between this ship analogy and Plato's cave analogy are many.  Once again, the cave is analogous to the ship.  The shadows on the cave walls are analogous the the waves preceding the boat.  In each case, one has to ask the question if they are the artifacts of people and how those people are different from us.  In fact, these people are no different from us and act no different from the rest of the prisoners, but an observer will tend to notice just those actions which are in the rays of the fire or in the path of the ship, respectively.  In each case, it is almost impossible to deduce that what we see are more a function of the conditions than the people who are acting.
	However, the ship analogy is more concerned with how things change over time.  Tolstoy argues that no man can affect how things will change-- history will simply resolve itself according to predefined laws.  In some ways, Plato seems to agree.  For Plato, people fall into different types, or natures.  These natures define what kind of person they are and how they will act.  Moreover, on a scale beyond individuals, he notes that ``for everything that has come into being there is decay'' (546a), and we can assume that there is a force opposing this.  As generations change, so will governments and all institutions.
	Tolstoy uses this argument to show that free-will actually does not exist.  While we feel that it must exist at every instant, as we look back over our actions, we can see that they were defined by the circumstances surrounding them.  The different natures of people for Plato suggest the same.  I will return to these points later.
	One of the major points Tolstoy and Plato disagree on is the way to seek truth.  For Tolstoy, in the absence of free-will, history becomes a science.  The task of the historian is to gather information from as many sources as possible, both from the leaders and the led.  He suggests that rather than taking the actions of the leaders as something inspired and powerful, we should compare these to the circumstances and the motion of the whole of humanity, and by this we can find the laws governing it.
	In contrast, Plato seems to believe that science is not the answer.  He mentions those among the prisoners who study ``which of [the shadows] are accustomed to pass before, which after, and which at the same time as others, and who is thereby most able to divine what is going to come'' (516d).  However, Plato claims that the man who has seen the truth outside the cave would scorn these scientests.  Elsewhere (546), Plato has Socrates term his argument as a string of meaningless numbers, clearly showing the nonsense of the approach in the search for truth.
	In his own way, Plato is confronting the problem of induction, which Tolstoy largely ignores.  The shadowy shapes on the cave wall are single instances of the forms which give rise to them.  For example, if one prisoner were to somehow pick up the form of courage, his actions and his shadows would show his courage as specific examples of its use, but someone watching these actions would see the examples and not courage itself.  Similarly, as the animals in Tolstoy's herd of cattle move about, different ones will be visible at different times.  Although one can look beyond the outer set of animals, there will always be animals blocked from sight.  In either case, any law an observer tries to make through induction could be disproved by future data.
	According to Plato, the only way to know truth in the world is to see the true forms.   The forms are like an equation which can yeild any parabolas, in contrast to a collection of many specific parabolas, which could fall into more general equations.  In this sense, the forms are exactly like physical laws.  For discovering the laws of history, Tolstoy notes that as one collects progressively more information and as one sees more of the circumstances underlying an event, one sees the event less as a matter of specific people than as a complete motion of all people.  This method is essential trying to look at every instance in order to get formulate the laws, but this is impossible.
	Although Plato states that to see the forms, one must come free of the cave and look at them directly, it is not clear what this means outside the metaphor.  To interpret the metaphor, he suggest that we ``liken the domain revealed through sight to the prison home, and the light of the fire in it to the sun's power; and in applying the going up and the seeing of what's above to the soul's journey up to the intelligibile place'' (517b).  To understand what he means by this, we need to look at his method more closely.
	The method Plato uses for looking into the soul is to blow it up-- to take something which we concieve of as an atom and recreate it as a civilization.  For Plato, there is no real difference between virtues, his most common forms, and the men characters by those virtues.  For example, one can inquire about the courageous man and by doing so learn about courage, and visa versa.  Therefore, I claim that the method for the soul can be applied to the form.  Plato's method for discovering the form is to blow it up and turn it into an infinite variety of instances, and then shrink all these instances down to a single unit as the soul.  
	According to this interpretation, Plato is claiming that in order to see the forms and the turth, one must consider them subjectively, rather than or in addition to doing so objectively.  By subjectively consider something, I mean thinking about it as one would if one were the thing itself.  One takes many instances and many people and shinks them down into one person, the self.  In so doing, all the shadows disappear, leaving the form perfect.
	The fault in the prisoners' methods is that they invariably look at the effects of the forms, their objective results.  When one looks at something, one is actually seeing the photons which bounced off it.  In contrast, one does not ``watch'' one's thoughts-- one just thinks them.  If the prisoners could somehow have a connection like this with the objects they study, then they could truely know them.
	However, according to Plato's analogy, to see the truth, one must see objects outside the cave, in broad daylight.  This implies that they must be looked at directly and with the proper illumination.  However, looking at the shadows on the cave walls in already analogous in the real world to looking at an object, person, their action directly and with ample lighting.  To look at something outside Plato's cave, we need to do more than look at it directly, because there is still a barrier which corresponds to the reflections on the cave wall between the object and the observer.  The only way to remove this barrier is to find a way to observe the object as directly as one thinks thoughts.
	Therefore, subjectivity, in some sense, allows induction.  However the induction Plato is concerned with is a different one than that of Tolstoy and scientists.
	Tolstoy shows that ``power'' is really just a thing a instances and shadows.  It seems to exist when we look at it on a small scale, with individual people who seem to wield power, but when we abstract our viewpoint, he claims that we will see a movement of history unconcerned with the ambitions of individuals.  However, we have already shown that such induction is tricky and faulty.
	When we apply Plato's method to Tolstoy's problem, we get a contradiction.  By taking the entire of humankind and instead of trying to catalog all its movements, shrink it down until it lies within the observer, as we did before, the shadows disappear, and thus power disappears.  However, along with power goes free-will and free-will is a fundamental aspect of subjectivity.  One characteristic inseparable from thought is that the thought is one's own doing, and this is free-will.
	In the above discussion, we neglected one aspect of Plato's method.  In seeing the truth, we leave the cave, the shadows, and inprisonment behind.  I claim that to be set free of the cave is equivalent to being set free of necessity and laws.
	Plato considers the connection between the human race and nature thoroughly.  Without free-will, according to Plato, we are trapped in an inevitable decline.  From Plato's Republic, could such a state exist, civilization falls into timocracy, ologarchy, democracy, and finally tyranny.
	I mentioned before that there must be a force opposing this, but I claim it is not in the laws of nature.  Other creatures are ruled entirely by necessity, and they drop into the lowest energy states appropriate to them, either into lives ruled by thumos, like the spirit of a dog, or epithumia, like creatures ruled entirely by cruder instincts.  Human beings, on the other hand, have logos, though only rarely do they live their lives by it.
	Philosophy should be, according to Plato's, separate from nature.  It is the task of the philosopher, according to the Socrates in the Phaedo, to live as though dead-- that is to live a life free from the necessities and laws of the universe.
	Plato calls the force which is ``the cause of all that is right and fair in everything,'' that is the force opposing decline, ``the idea of the good'' (517c).  Here the word 'idea' comes from 'eidos' yet Allan Bloom chooses not to translate it as 'form' because there is in its use an emphasis on the ``a thing's being seen or its looks'' (448).  The significance is that good itself is not a force, however when it is glimpsed at or seen in the mind of a philosopher, it acts against decline.
	Plato does more than put philosophers in control of a theoretical state-- he defines their powers.  Through philosophy and with logos, one can discover truth about the world.  Through philosophy and with the good, one can rise above the unending increase in entropy inherant in our world.  In Tolstoy's analogies, there is nothing equivalent to escaping from the cave and entering the daylight.  Escaping from the analogy is the same as escaping from the necessities of laws, gaining free-will. a thing science cannot allow.  Plato's analogy is unique in that one can leave the cave, and as the philosopher leaves the cave he gains his most important power-- he becomes free.