The First Sentence of Anna Karenina
Is it true?
Anna Karenina opens famously with the sentence, “All happy families are like one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
I’ve thought about this sentence for decades. When I first read it, it immediately resonated with me, and I thought it was true.
Some time ago I read someone insist that the famous first sentence was not true, and it should actually be the opposite: “unhappy families are all unhappy in the same way, and happy families are happy in diverse ways.”
This also immediately struck me as true.
So which is it?
Recently, while thinking about it, I picked up a copy of Anna Karenina and began again trying to tackle the book that Dostoevsky called “a perfect work of art.” I love Tolstoy, especially his short fiction, which combines brilliant writing with an intense moral and spiritual sensibility. Anna Karenina, though, is emotionally very dense and tragic, and its messages are framed in the exquisitely presented minutiae of a domestic drama. When I tried to read it years ago I wasn’t in the mood and stopped after a few hundred pages, but this time I’m deeply enjoying it.
Tolstoy’s maxim is based on the idea that there is one way, pattern, or set of truths that leads to flourishing and happiness.
Although different traditions differ in how much scope they offer for creativity and diversity in applying those truths, many premodern wisdom traditions agree with him. Buddhists and Vedic, Yogic and Tantric lineages1 all speak of Dharma. Daoists speak of the Dao. For a Western defense of this idea, C.S.Lewis’ excellent —and dated, title-wise, on gender— The Abolition of Man is worth reading.
The idea of dharma is similar to the Graeco-Roman idea of logos. The logos is the intelligible structure of things which holds them together, the wisdom of the order of things. One way the Stoics described their goal was to live in harmony with the logos. This closely echoes the Bhagavadgita’s call to live in harmony with the dharma.
I like to define dharma, which literally means that which “upholds all things” as that which empowers all beings in their nature. Dharma is that which empowers beings to flourish within the ecology of life.
Although there is disagreement about contingent details, all of these traditions largely agree about the virtues that help people- families, communities, and individuals, flourish. Happy families demonstrate these virtues, and unhappy ones depart from them in all kinds of variegated and toxic ways. That is the defense of Tolstoy’s sentence.
On the other side of the argument, we could say that unhappy families are all marked by the same tiresome, mechanistic enslavements to dysfunction and neurosis. Happy families find vital, creative ways to live free of those chains, and not only do they not all look alike, they are all creative and suprising, fresh and alive. It is unhappiness that is repetitive and sterotyped.
I think—to take the Rabbinical position— that they are both right.
I am a believer in karma, dharma, and logos. Karma, as I argued in Philosophy Now some time ago, is the belief that certain types of mental intentions, expressed through thought, speech or physical action, give predictable results in the short and long term. Dharma refers to patterns of behaviour which support all beings in their flourishing, and logos to the one intelligible structure of all things. Taken together, these form my idea of moral truth.
So yes, I believe all happy families are happy in the same way, though like all pithy statements it’s incomplete. I would translate it as “all happy families follow the same principles.” In other words, they follow the dharma of the family. They’ve grokked its logos. They make good karma in their domestic scene.
Yet it is also true that all unhappy families are unhappy in the same way. They are unhappy in the way of neglecting family dharma, not understanding its logos, and making bad karma at home.
What I take Tolstoy to be saying about unhappy families is that they all diverge from the dharma in different ways, and there are indeed many diverse and creative ways to do that. What I take Tolstoy’s interlocutor to be saying is that when one follows dharma, it does not result in some kind of stultifying pattern of conformity or sameness. Neurosis is what is boring; flourishing is fun.
As I said above, I think they’re both right.
Photo by 𝐄𝐛𝐚𝐡𝐢𝐫: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cozy-coffee-break-with-anna-karenina-book-30127884/
I have been trying to avoid the use of the word “Hindu.” This is tricky and I don’t know if I’ll stick with this approach or not, but the logic is: 1) there is no monolithic “Hindu” tradition in India, but rather thousands of differing lineages of thought and practice which share a spiritual and social culture and lexicon but disagree with each other on many fundamental things; 2) some of these lineages themselves do not identify as “Hindu”; 3) the word Hindu was invented originally by Muslims to refer to the people living by the Indus River. Later, faced with Islam and Christianity as (relatively) centralized and monolithic traditions some Indian thinkers began conceptualizing a “Hindu” religion which confronted them (Swami Vivekananda being a great example of this). Although there are interesting and sympathetic aspects to these efforts, in the late 20th century this conception lended itself more and more to weaponization by the rightwing proponents of “Hindutva,” which ties an (arguably imaginary) “Hindu” religion to nationalism and takes a confrontational attitude to Hindu-Muslim relations. Hence here I use the terms “Vedic, Yogic and Tantric” to cover the main types of spiritual lineages in India, all of which are rooted in a shared culture and its experiments and debates.