Why do I want to be known?
It is not something people say out loud. Wanting money sounds practical, and wanting love sounds human. Wanting strangers to know your name sounds vain, so the wish goes unspoken. Often it goes unexamined too. It shows up as a sting when someone else is praised, or as a daydream that ends too quickly when someone walks into the room.
Leo Tolstoy gave this wish to one of his most serious characters. In War and Peace, Prince Andrew Bolkónski spends the night before Austerlitz walking alone outside a farmhouse.
A daydream with a second voice
Andrew is not a shallow man. He is clever, impatient with the court, contemptuous of flattery. That night he imagines the battle going wrong and himself stepping in: he states his plan, takes a division, wins alone. Then another battle, also won by him alone.
A second voice keeps asking: and then what? Andrew answers it honestly, perhaps for the first time:
"if I want this—want glory, want to be known to men, want to be loved by them, it is not my fault that I want it"
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, tr. Louise and Aylmer Maude
A few words later he adds that he will never tell anyone.
Two moves in one breath
He names the wish and defends himself against it in the same sentence. "It is not my fault" answers an accusation nobody made. He is alone in the fog. The judge he is arguing with lives inside him.
The existential school would notice that order. The shame arrives before anyone could see. The wish is admitted only on condition that it stays secret, and only after a plea of innocence. So it gets no chance to be looked at for what it is. Andrew can neither give it up nor own it, and he never asks what the hunger for strangers' love is standing in for.
Tolstoy does not mock him for it. He lets Andrew mean every word.
Feeling small in front of important people is a related knot, though a different one, and it has its own page. This one is about a wish that is not allowed out of the dark.
What the scene leaves
The novel does not tell us whether wanting glory is wrong. It shows a man who would rather plead not guilty than look at his own desire in daylight. The question stays: what do I want that I would never tell anyone?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.