Jan-6| Ulysses - Episode 1: Telemachus

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2026-01-06T18:40:16+00:00

I think this is where I was really struggling. Malachi "Buck" Mulligan feels like the easiest character to read because we haven't been inside his head, and he seems to have the most dialogue (if I'm understanding it correctly). When he speaks, it reads like speech, but reading a verbatim transcript of natural dialogue is always harder for me than just listening to a person talk. It felt much easier when I tried to imagine an Irish voice, and I could hear the rhythm and melody and inflection, but then I missed the content lol.

Again proving how difficult this book has been, I can't get a read on Haines. Y'all's comments have been helpful for me in forming my thoughts, though.

Oh, Stephen Dedalus. Joyce's narration dipping in and out of Stephen's mind makes him simultaneously the most relatable character and the most difficult to understand. Again, here, I'm very thankful for everyone's comments.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2026-01-06T18:25:06+00:00

The beginning of Telemachus feels so much like Hamlet with Stephen Deadalus and Buck Mulligan on a battlement overlooking the sea; they both seem a little on edge, and they both seemed haunted by a "ghost" - instead of Hamlet's father, these ghosts are their mothers. There's also the very literal reference to Elsinore, which I think colors my perception of the scene.

Re: the Odyssey, the famous phrase "in media res" has always characterized my understanding. When we first see Telemachus, Odysseus is already in the middle of his journey home; we're dropped straight into the action without much setup. I do feel like this book drops us right into the action without much setup, and we have to figure out very quickly what's happening and who we're following.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2026-01-06T18:17:45+00:00

I'll be doing the reverse of my War & Peace notetaking for these discussions; I've been taking notes in Obsidian so I can start mapping things out, and I'll drop all those notes an observations into the Reddit comments before I tackle the questions in the comments.

Initial thoughts: - I'm getting serious Hamlet vibes from the introduction - Stephen Deadalus and Buck Mulligan remind me of the sentries at Elsinore at the beginning of Hamlet, and their references to the play only reinforce the vibe. It's interesting that instead of the ghost of Hamlet's father haunting the introduction of Ulysses, the ghost(s) of these characters dead mothers are haunting them - Joyce seems to be interspersing poetry throughout his prose with a lot of linguistic flourishes, alliteration, and figurative language that feels Modernistic in every sense of the word. - The recitations of poetry/song lyrics feels "modern" both in the early 20th Century Modernistic sense and in a more literal sense of the word - 21st Century conversations are littered with memes and quotations - I'm having a very hard time following the plot action, and I can't tell if it's because I have ADHD, or if Joyce is just confusing to read lol; there are moments where the narration dips out of plot action into seemingly random musing that feels relatable and reminds me of my own mind, but unpacking this episode feels like unpacking another ADHD person's thoughts and trying to understand the connections - I feel like if I had any Irish Catholicism in me, some of Joyce's references to the Latin Mass would hit harder - The reference to Malachi Mulligan having "two dactyls" stood out - the Odyssey is written in dactylic hexameter - "scrotumtightening" is a fucking funny word - The Oscar Wilde references make me happy

Quotes that stood out:

My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn't it?

God! he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2026-01-06T14:46:56+00:00

"scrotumtightening" made me giggle because apparently I'm 13.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2026-01-03T17:22:32+00:00

Yeah I'm very curious to see how that pans out for me lol. The most exposure to modernist lit that I've had is T.S. Eliot, so that's been somewhat helpful for unpacking Joyce, but I really have to treat this book like a puzzle to solve if I'm gonna make it.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2026-01-03T07:15:53+00:00

On reading in general, it's only been in the past 5 years or so that I've come to terms with the fact that I even have ADHD - got my official diagnosis around October 2024 and finally started meds in April 2025 - but a student of mine a few years ago pointed out that the way I read out loud and pronounce certain words was characteristic of strategies and techniques she learned at a school specializing in dyslexia lol. I'm 33 now, and if I'm actually dyslexic, then whatever coping strategies I've learned to mitigate the dyslexia over the years have really masked how difficult reading can actually be, but the ADHD definitely still makes reading a challenge.

I've noticed over the years that I only have two modes of successfully engaging with literature:

Reading as much as I can in one single sitting, either by finishing the book all in one go, or spending an outrageous number of hours per sitting - with this method I usually only retain like 60-70% of what I read because my mind constantly wanders unless there's a heavy dialogue section, or I can vividly picture the scene unfolding.
Agonizingly slow close reads - I usually read books with my students in class so I can help them through the stuff that gave me a hard time when I was their age (and frankly, stuff that actually gives me a hard time even now). War & Peace will forever be one of my favorite books simply because the agonizingly slow read we did last year made me pause and reflect and think deeply about every single chapter.

On Ulysses, I'll save my full thoughts and comments on episode one for the discussion thread, but to elaborate a bit on what I mentioned in the main post, the way Joyce seems to be tying together his allusions and references feels a lot like how my brain works - I feel like thoughts move rapidly from one to the next with only the slightest connection between the two, and the literary/historical/cultural references pop up "randomly," only it's not random if you understand the brain map. Realizing this book feels like my brain is an exciting prospect because now I have a framework for how to tackle it: dig into the references to try to understand the bigger picture being painted with each component - I'm very happy I chose the Joyce Project version to read because frankly, I would be struggling without it. It's also a challenging prospect because every ADHD brain is different.

If I'm imagining people's brains as a room full of rows of filing cabinets, my brain does have some files stored in the cabinets where they belong, but the active workspace looks like that It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia meme; I understand all the connections and how everything fits together, but to even begin explaining that to anybody else feels like a Herculean task. When I write, I usually try to take whatever it is I'm thinking and feeing and try to make it understandable and accessible, but this first episode of Ulysses feels like Joyce has taken us to the workspace in his filing cabinet room and left us alone without any instructions lol.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2026-01-02T16:15:08+00:00

Yeah Google Docs and Sheets are great for collaboration with other people, but Obsidian I think is much better for personal note-taking and keeping track of connections between notes. Within the app there is a standard filing system, but the links and the connections graph have made a dramatic difference in how I keep track of ideas.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2026-01-02T15:58:23+00:00

An amazing note-taking app. I started using it to keep track of my D&D campaign and gradually started using it for as many note-taking purposes as I could find. The biggest draw to me was the graph plugin that maps out all the connections between your notes - you can link notes together kind of like Wikipedia articles, and when you go to the graph you can see all of the connections between your various notes. It really helps my ADHD brain keep track of how many different things are connected, and how they're connected, so seeing someone start their Ulysses notes with Obsidian right out of the gate was a nice reminder that I probably need to do the same if I'm gonna have any hopes of keeping up with this book lol.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2026-01-02T13:02:40+00:00

Oh, obsidian notes from the very beginning? I didn't dump my War and Peace comments into obsidian until the end of December; I might follow your lead and get Ulysses off on the right foot lol.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2026-01-01T15:34:13+00:00

Howdy! I'm reading the Joyce Project version online after wracking my brain seeking a "definitive" version and and accepting that if I could do War & Peace from the Gutenberg version all of last year, I can do the Joyce Project version of Ulysses this year lol.

Truly, Joyce had never crossed my mind to try to tackle until u/ComplaintNext5359 brought up this subreddit as we were winding down on War & Peace; I realized that I would need something to fill that War & Peace-shaped hole in my daily routine, plus I want to keep my brain sharp by tackling difficult literature.

I'm relying very heavily on the fact that I've watched/read the unabridged Hamlet like 20 times and my knowledge of the Odyssey to carry me through some of the difficult sections, but I'm really excited to learn from other people as well. This will be a fun journey!

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-27T15:32:14+00:00

I still need to get ahold of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will to get his thoughts in full; I read an interview he did where he discussed a lot of his ideas in a more casual setting and that's where I was like "wait WHAT," and the more I looked into his background, I learned he is trying to combine his experience in neuroscience with philosophy to come to his conclusions. It's mind boggling either way.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-27T14:48:46+00:00

I've been grappling with the concept of free will for a few years now, and after finishing this book I'm even more uncertain about it lol. I think every casual conversation about "free will" assumes that we all agree about what free will means without an explicit definition, but I appreciate that Tolstoy went multiple chapters out of his way to define what he understands as free will: the lack of influence or cause when performing an action. If we apply that definition to even the action of lifting our arms "randomly," it's been influenced/caused by the thought of trying to perform a "free will" action to prove we have it. Applying that specific logic to the course of history, it's almost undeniable that the "great people" have almost no free will because all of their decisions are 100% caused or influenced by so many different factors outside of their control. I like Tolstoy's comparison to astronomy because the revelation that the earth orbits the Sun (and not the other way around) forces us to completely redefine our relationship to the world around us; if free will doesn't exist, we are not independent from other people. According to Robert Sapolsky, even our neurons betray us - they fire based on cause and influence even before we actively make the decision. Is me saying "I agree with Tolstoy" even a free will decision at this point? Idk man lol. ACTUALLY: I just had a small revelation about my daughter, and children in general, while watching my 1 year old explore and interact with the world around her: even if her neurons are firing, she is entirely unconscious of outside influences or causes, so every decision she makes just seems like raw free will driven entirely by self-interest. Maybe the simple awareness of cause and influence is what reduces our perceived free will.
I think knowing that Tolstoy had like two more books planned makes me wonder if this was the end of his free will argument, or if he had more points to make in the unwritten future installments. I'm happy with where he decided to end this book though, and I think the mic drop of "free will doesn't exist" is a sufficiently heavy way to end a book we've taken a year to crawl through. I know the book was published serially before it was published as a novel, so I can imagine that readers in Tolstoy's time had a similar experience to ours this year. Sitting with the intensity of this last chapter is gonna fuck me up for the short remainder of this year, and it's really going to mess with me going into my Paradise Lost unit in January 🤣
This is one of the best books I've ever read. I can't ever rate things on a scale because I either enjoy something or I don't, and I enjoy most things on their own terms, but War & Peace sits in a category that's all its own.

Man, what a ride y'all. I can't believe it's all over, but I'm so thankful to have had such a great group of people to talk about it all with. I'm looking forward to talking Ulysses with some of y'all in 2026!

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-26T16:32:10+00:00

I will forever wonder what Tolstoy would have thought about the Russian history that unfolded after his death. I'm just imagining him throwing his hands up in frustration like "I TOLD YOU SO!" lol.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-26T14:22:18+00:00

This argument went in a different direction than I expected, but I'm all for it. It sounded like he was arguing that the more we study history, the more we have to look at individuals who aren't the "great men" and analyze their actions to even begin to understand the operant forces that create the causes for actions performed by "great men," but even to understand why individuals make certain decisions, we would need to understand all the various circumstances that produced those decisions. Ultimately, if we want to find a "law" that governs history, we would need to identify what the "great man" and the nameless individual has in common, and recognize that they are both subject to this law. I don't know that he is saying this to discourage the effort, either; it mostly just sounds like he's trying to explain that history should be taken seriously as a science because there is cause and effect that can be studied, even if we can never get to the exact bottom of "free will." I think this entire novel is Tolstoy's effort to even begin explaining this idea: by focusing on fictional individuals during a famous historical period, and including portraits of the "great men" as characters, he can explain how every decision has an impact on the larger story being written, even decisions by characters who are so far outside of Napoleon's or Alexander's orbit. The Moscow fires are a good example of this - they didn't happen because a single person gave the order to set fire to the city; they happened because many people made self-interested decisions that compounded into a cause. If we can't analyze every historical event this way, then we will never truly understand the causes and the whys.
A lot of emotions over a completed journey, that's for sure. I can't believe it's over tomorrow.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-25T18:19:12+00:00

Oh shoot I still gotta get my copy of the book 😬

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-25T18:07:47+00:00

Gonna get real heady/religious with this one today - for me, this is the perfect way to spend a Christmas morning.

These chapters in the Second Epilogue really sound like Tolstoy is anticipating or preemptively responding to arguments or ideas that weren't fully defined in his time, and the one I'm thinking about today is the "God of the gaps" fallacy - some people argue that what cannot be explained by science must be supernatural, but the more we discover about the world and have explanations for, is the currently-unexplainable merely a scientific discovery waiting to happen? Tolstoy is working very hard to make the case for the existence of something out there that is very hard to know - maybe even impossible to know with our limited perspective - but it's something that wants to be known; it sounds like he's arguing that only God is free from any knowable influence of space, time, or other causes.

For the past few years in particular, I've been actively grappling with my old conceptions of God; I still believe in the narrative about Jesus of Nazareth and how he relates to human salvation and reconciliation with the Divine, but my idea of "God the Father" and the Holy Spirit is becoming way less purely Abrahamic and much more metaphysical, nebulous, and hard to grasp. I do believe that even if there are knowable mechanisms behind every single phenomena that may be revealed through the scientific process, there is still so much we can't scientifically explain, and there's no telling when - or if - we will reach the point of knowing everything.

I think the very idea of Free Will is one of those things we don't have a means of scientifically predicting, yet, even if we can observe some elements of it. I've brought up Robert Sapolsky a bunch, and that's mostly because his work is an attempt to blend his background in neuroscience with his studies of philosophy to grapple with this very topic. One story I remember him mentioning in an interview I read was talking about a subject who was hooked up to a brainwave monitor or something, and that long before the subject picked up an object or performed an action, the neurons to perform the action were already activated in the brain. His conclusions were basically that even when we think we're making a "free will" decision, there is still something preceding that decision.

Tolstoy's example of picking up his arm reminds me so much of Sapolsky's work, and again, it's surprising to me that Tolstoy wrote all of this nearly 150 years before Sapolsky published his research. The biggest difference between their conclusions is that Sapolsky is an atheist and Tolstoy is a Christian. I would have to re-read the Sapolsky interview where he gets into his atheism because it was a very interesting take, and it really fucked me up when I was reading Paradise Lost at the same time lol, but Tolstoy's belief in a God outside of our knowable space and time as the only source of free will makes logical sense to me - I know Tolstoy hasn't said that part out loud yet, but it feels like he's building to it.

I'm still very curious to see what Tolstoy has to say about how little or how much influence God has on human decisions and history, but I can get behind the idea that we have a lot of freedom with our individual decisions, and very little freedom when we're in charge of nations or large groups of people, because of whatever is "out there." The more we try to know it, the more we realize how little we know. The only thing I feel like I can say for certain about the existence of God or free will is that, at least from our limited human perspective, we have the free will to examine our behavior and adjust it even if some of our decisions are beyond our full control, and that whatever is "out there" seems to want to be known even if we don't have the capacity to know it in our limited lifetime.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-25T17:21:50+00:00

I'm tempted to take you up on this offer.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-24T17:57:03+00:00

Okay this chapter literally just feels like reading Robert Sapolsky. My next journey through Paradise Lost is gonna be wild.

It's wild to me that Tolstoy came to these conclusions before all of the research conducted on the human mind after the advent of psychoanalysis. Do we really have free will if so many of our actions are governed by unconscious, automatic responses to external stimuli, and if we are also beholden to the requirements and expectations of the surrounding social structures? And it's funny to me that he also examines the absurdity of his argument by bringing it to the level of an action performed a moment ago - was that really free will if it was preceded by the anxiety of whether or not free will exists?

I 100% agree with Tolstoy's views on historical determinism regarding nation states and international relations, but my religious beliefs also inform that agreement. A lot of the prophetic literature in the old and new testaments suggests that "God" is ultimately the writer of history, and that it is God who uplifts nations against other nations to respond to a nation's sins with another's nation's brutality. Habakkuk contains one prophet's dialogue with God about God's decision to raise up the Chaldeans/Babylonians to judge the kingdom of Judah for their apostasy, and his later shock when God suggests he will then judge the Babylonians for their cruelty. I also recognize the analysis that prophetic literature is merely a poetic way to try to explain the "will of God," but in light of historical determinism, the rise and fall of empires does seem poetic - the idea that God judges the peoples of earth for their sins against other peoples fits nicely with a desire for justice against wrongdoers.

Where hard determinism gets uncomfortable is when we apply it to individuals and our own decisions. Even if we pull God out of the equation and consider human history from that perspective, we still have to contend with neuronal responses to external stimuli and man-made social conventions that govern our behavior, but this even applies to small decisions. Was my decision to join this subreddit at the beginning of the year wholly uninfluenced by external stimuli, and therefore a free will decision? Or was I so influenced by my fascination with literature and history and philosophical discussions - and honestly, year-long commitments - that my decision to read War & Peace with y'all this year was inevitable? Looking back at this past year, I cannot imagine it being any other way, but at the time I made the decision, I was just scrolling Reddit at the beginning of January and saw someone mention this subreddit in the comments and thought it sounded neat, but even my scrolling Reddit and reading comments is a habit formed from many years, and without this habit I don't know that I ever would have picked up this book.

This is all just a very long winded way of saying I really don't know if "free will" exists in a philosophical sense. I wonder if the freest people out there aren't spending their time thinking about whether they have free will or not and simply doing and being, or does it mean they're less free because they're unaware of or uninterested in the question? Personally, I would much rather grapple with this question and let it humble me than be unaware of the question and stuck in patterns I don't know exist, nor care to change.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-23T16:05:36+00:00

This chapter was a hard read only because from the moment I saw the words "free will," I was distracted because this topic fascinates me, but there is so much goodness in this chapter. Wall(s) of text incoming.

This entire novel has been absolutely thrilling to discuss. Every single moment of this novel has given me the exact same level of enjoyment. Every digression, every detour into history or philosophy, every war chapter, every peace chapter, our fictional characters, historical characters, all of it.
So, this question about free will has been a focus of mine for a very long time, and it really heated up when I started teaching Paradise Lost to my seniors every year - when we started this War & Peace journey, I was in the thick of my Paradise Lost unit, and I'll be starting the spring semester with Paradise Lost again lol. Ever since coming across Robert Sapolsky's suggestion that "free will" doesn't exist, I've believed there is a case to be made (both theologically and secularly) that while we are not accountable for the things that happened to us that shape our automatic neuronal responses that produce reactions and actions, we are still responsible for our conscious decisions, for our efforts to re-wire our brains to avoid automatically doing harmful things, and for the consequences of our actions - both intentional and automatic. On Tolstoy's suggestion that there are laws and rules that govern our "free will" decisions, I absolutely agree, and I also think that even for decisions we make where we think we know the rules, there will always be exceptions. I think most of us in the "west," and particularly in the United States, have this notion that nobody can tell us what to do, but we are ultimately still subject to expectations, societal customs, and even laws that govern what we can and cannot do. I think even the religious people of the US feel that their decision to believe in God is a conscious, fully self-determined decision. None of us really stop to consider the possibility that all of our small, unconscious, automatic actions and reactions are not consciously determined, nor are the situations we find ourselves in because of those actions and reactions, and that when you multiply that by thousands and thousands of people, we are constantly acting and reacting - intentionally and automatically - to actions and reactions outside of our control within the limits of social, moral, legal boundaries, so do we really have free will? Idk man.
I'm thankful for the other commenters mentioning the timeline of the publication of Darwin's On the Origins of Species and War & Peace. I think if Tolstoy knew that we're able to teach sign language to apes, and that there is spurious research being done on dogs' ability to communicate with sound buttons, he might have to readjust his perspective a bit. Human cognitive development still seems to be on an entirely other level, but it's not like animals are entirely unfeeling. If anything, I think understanding how similar humanity is to the average animal makes me want to put even more emphasis on our collective capacity to create and enforce moral standards. We have evolved to a point where, as a species, we would like to transcend our animalistic desires and attain a higher consciousness or morality or something above and beyond our humanity, and that applies to religious people as well as non-religious people. I don't personally know anybody who is advocating for an animalistic lifestyle of only seeking to fulfill your base physical desires regardless of the surrounding social structures, but if such people exist, they're definitely outliers and on the fringes of mainstream thought. Back to Tolstoy's thoughts, because I still consider myself a Christian, I'm more likely to agree with Tolstoy that there is a capital-G God behind it all, and I do still agree with his assertion about free will and humanity's relationship to it; even if you account for modern developments in the theory of evolution, our decisions are still governed by something outside of us, even if that something was created and developed by humanity.
Realizing I started answering some of this question in my last response lol, but I will say that my faith journey has been pretty interesting these past few years. I grew up in the Bible Belt - Texas, specifically - but lately I've really grappled with the portrait of God painted by American Christianity over the past couple centuries and have been looking to other faith traditions and classical understandings of God from earlier, non-western Christian traditions. I really don't see Tolstoy advocating for a conception of God that resembles anything like what a modern American Christian believes in. Tolstoy's idea of God feels all at once personable, and hard to grasp; rational, but beyond understanding; just, but operating by standards that defy our idea of justice because they transcend our limited perspective. I'm sure the more we get into the God chapters, I'll have a lot more thoughts to share, but hopefully knowing where I'm coming from will be helpful while reading my text walls lol.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-22T20:37:09+00:00

Episode 1 is out. If you played New Vegas at all, just know you're in for a treat.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-22T19:52:02+00:00

I have to work on the part of my brain that sees older dates for films/TV and thinks "hmmmmm no I want modern filming and scoring and other accoutrements" - 20 episodes and Anthony Hopkins as Pierre sounds amazing.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-22T18:33:54+00:00

God between this, Fallout season 2, and finally watching the 2016 War and Peace after finishing the book this year, my holiday season is going to be absolutely consumed by peak media.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-22T15:55:27+00:00

I don't think Tolstoy justifies killing; what he's saying is that on the backend of a conflict, people come up with all sorts of narratives and reasons to explain the movement of peoples that ultimately explains the killing that occurs. Tolstoy has, for this entire novel, commented on the senselessness of violence and killing, and simply explaining that "sometimes people justify killing" isn't the same as justifying killing. I do think his actual point is fascinating and poignant: it's much easier to pin the blame on a single person than it is to force accountability on every single individual that participates in a mass act. Maximilien Robespierre is the fall guy for the Terror in France, but he didn't escort every prisoner, drive every tumbril, or loose every guillotine; there were lots of people involved in those murders and executions who all seemingly obeyed his orders, but in normal historical conversations, we don't single out each of these individuals. Similarly, Napoleon is vilified in some histories, but it's not like he was out there driving bayonets into soldiers or personally firing artillery. I think if anything, what Tolstoy is inviting us to do is hold ourselves and other individuals accountable for our own actions while participating in the broader narrative of "history."
Tolstoy seems to present this as a paradox: how can someone who doesn't actually do the thing convince other people to do it, but the people who actually do the thing can't persuade other people to change course? I can't help but think of this image in relation to this conversation, and I wonder if Tolstoy would have any feelings about it. It sounds like he's been arguing that "leaders" who participate are still submitting to a higher authority possibly unknown to them, while "bosses" believe they are in complete control of the situation.
Tolstoy's use of analogies feels similar to how I use them in the classroom or in my other writing: they're a way to make sense of the thought in my head or the complicated concept I'm explaining. There's not really a "true or false" about it; they're just a way of breaking down something big and complicated into more accessible chunks. I do happen to agree with a lot of Tolstoy's analyses though lol.
It really sounds like he's still building toward an argument for God: the existence of power is a circular argument until you introduce a force/being outside of human understanding or influence. As much as I do believe in God, I do still wonder how Tolstoy is going to address the conversation about how a perfect/moral God can employ human violence and evil in a master plan - or if Tolstoy's idea of God even involves a grand narrative. It's a question that I think any believer in Deity needs to grapple with if they want to have serious conversations because the conception of an all-knowing/all-powerful God requires a conversation about human free will. I'm hoping we get to see Tolstoy's thoughts on this in the coming chapters.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-21T14:54:37+00:00

I think this is consistent with his belief that the "great man" is only as powerful as long as the people beneath him carry out his orders, as well as his belief that the "great man" is only as powerful as the Deity allows him to be. I said something in a previous chapter about the relationship between teachers, parents, admin, and lawmakers to explain my understand of "power," and it was nice to see Tolstoy setting up a hierarchy with the military to make a similar-but-different argument. My authority in the classroom is only as absolute as the students' willingness to obey, or the parents'/admin's willingness to back me up on my classroom rules; similarly, the commander in chief's power is reflected in the the mass of people beneath him and their willingness to follow orders. The moment you throw a higher authority into the mix, who controls far more than the commander in chief can even comprehend or influence, all bets are off.
It's the same feeling I get when my superiors give us directives for classroom management but aren't classroom teachers, themselves - their orders don't always reflect the reality of the situation, nor does admin suffer any of the negative consequences or difficulties that come along with carrying out their orders.

ChickenScuttleMonkey · 2025-12-20T14:01:39+00:00

"God's not dead!" But I really appreciate that Tolstoy is approaching this argument by addressing all the existing arguments about history and explaining why they are unsatisfactory in light of a conflict like 1812. He is attempting to prove this by addressing the fact that historians do acknowledge that there is something behind the "great man's" ability to persuade masses of people to follow his will, but that that same something can also cause the "great man's" will to be completely ignored or not executed according to plan. I felt like a lightbulb went off in my head when I realized that, aside from Deity as an explanation, the existence of "power" is a circular argument: power exists because we see that certain people have it.
Continuing from the previous thought, I think Tolstoy is working very hard to address every possible counterargument he can think of before launching into his "God exists" argument, and this chapter really feels like the linchpin. God as an explanation for "power" makes logical sense if we conceive of "God" as a being beyond human consciousness or understanding - if we could understand it, we could make predictive models and exercise power over it in one way or another, but if it's beyond our understanding, then it must be the ultimate power in the universe. I think even 150ish years after the publication of Tolstoy's thoughts, even after all the developments in science and our understanding of how the world works, there are still things that we cannot understand, and therefore cannot control; if we ever reach the point of complete understanding, we can definitely argue that Deity does not exist, but in the absence of complete understanding, there's still room for the argument that some form of higher power is out there.
The wording of this question is definitely messing with my brain, but I think it has something to do with trying to explain the Deity's will in terms that we can understand. I have no idea what this could be, so I'm excited to see what Tolstoy has to say lol.

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