War And Peace

If we are to explain the conditions of that dependency, we must first of all reinstate the concept of the expression of will, but with reference to man rather than the Deity.

If we think of the Deity giving a command, expressing His will, the expression of that will, as ancient history relates, is timeless and uncaused, since the Deity has no connection with the event. But when we speak of commands as the expression of men’s will, men existing in time and interacting, we must recreate two conditions if we are to clarify for ourselves the connection between command and event: (1) that of the occurrence in its entirety, the dynamic time-bound wholeness of the event itself and the person commanding it; and (2) that of the indispensable bond which links the person issuing the command with those who carry it out.

CHAPTER 6

Only the will of a timeless Deity could possibly affect a whole series of events occurring over years or centuries, and only a spontaneous Deity could by sheer will power direct the movement of humanity. Man acts within time, and is involved in events.

Reinstating the first condition – time – we perceive that no order can be carried out without an earlier order making its execution possible.

There is no such thing as a command that comes from nowhere or one that embraces a whole series of events. Every command flows from an earlier one, and never relates to a whole series of events, being always limited to a single moment within those events.

When we say, for instance, that Napoleon ordered his troops to go to war, we are bringing together under one word of command a whole series of subsequent commands, all of them interdependent. Napoleon couldn’t have ordered the invasion of Russia, and he never did. All that happened was that one day he ordered certain documents to be sent to Vienna, Berlin and Petersburg, and the next day he issued one or two decrees and some instructions to the army, the fleet, the quartermaster service and so on and so forth – millions of orders coming together in a series of orders associated with a series of events which brought the French troops to Russia.

If it is true that Napoleon kept issuing orders throughout his reign for an expedition to England, and spent more time and effort on this than any other enterprise without ever carrying it out in the whole of his reign, though he did carry out an expedition against Russia (even though, as he emphasized on numerous occasions, this was a country that would make a useful ally) – all of this is due to the fact that in the first case his orders did not correspond with the course of events, and in the second case they did.

For an order to be properly carried out it is necessary for a man to issue an order that is capable of being carried out. But to know what is and what isn’t capable of being carried out is impossible, not only in the case of Napoleon’s campaign against Russia, involving millions, but even in the case of the simplest occurrence, since millions of obstacles can always get in the way of either of these. Every order carried out is always one of many that are not. All the impossible orders fail to engage with the course of events and don’t get carried out. It is only the possible ones that do engage with the run of subsequent orders, do correspond with the course of events and do get carried out.

Our false impression that an order preceding an event is the cause of it is due to the fact that when an event has occurred and one or two orders out of a thousand issued have been carried out (the ones that happen to correspond with events), we forget those that were not carried out because they never could have been. Apart from that, our major source of error arises from the fact that in any historical account a whole series of innumerable, disparate and trivial events (say every single thing responsible for bringing the French soldiers over to Russia) are subsumed into the single end-result of that series of events, and the whole series of orders issued are correspondingly subsumed into a single expression of will.

We say: Napoleon chose to invade Russia and did so. In point of fact, we shall never discover in all that Napoleon ever did anything resembling such an expression of will. What we shall find is a series of commands or expressions of his will issued with maximum vagueness in a multiplicity of ways. From the incalculable series of Napoleon’s orders that were never carried out, one series of orders for the campaign of 1812 was carried out, not because of any essential difference between these and the ones not carried out, but simply because this series happened to correspond with the course of events bringing the French soldiers into Russia, just as in stencil-work the eventual figure depends not on the direction or the working of the paint, but on the stencilled cut-out being filled in, in every corner.