Why does the past always look so inevitable when the future is still unwritten?
Published just a few days ago in The Hedgehog Review, this essay returns to Leo Tolstoy’s conviction that history is far less predictable than scholars—and now algorithms—would like to believe. While modern thinking prizes data-driven foresight, the piece finds a more human wisdom in the novel's insistence on chance. It argues that the future isn't a destination already on the map, but a series of local choices and accidents. It’s a quiet defense of human agency against the pull of automated certainty.
An examination of Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy of history in War and Peace, focusing on the tension between human agency and deterministic models of reality. Contrasts Tolstoy’s emphasis on contingency and alertness with the scientific pursuit of predictability, from Newtonian physics to modern artificial intelligence. Argues that retrospective narratives create an illusion of inevitability, obscuring a view of time as fundamentally generative and open.
Read at source: The Hedgehog Review
