When Napoleon fought his wars, his motives were deeply personal — power, glory, the drive to conquer. He never felt he was completing some larger task on someone else’s behalf. He only felt this was his own war, his own ambition, something he built step by step, with his own hands.
That certainty was entirely real, and entirely necessary — if a person didn’t wholly believe this war was being fought for himself, he probably wouldn’t have been able to throw everything into it the way he did.
Hegel said that figures like this appear to be pursuing their own ambitions, but in fact, the direction history itself is heading uses that ambition to push something far grander forward — the individual is a tool, entirely without knowing it. The first time you hear this, it sounds like it’s describing some special situation reserved for giants of history.
But think about it a bit longer, and you’ll find this structure isn’t necessarily limited to people like Napoleon. An ordinary person, working hard for a promotion, working hard for a better life — the motives are just as personal, just as real. But could it be that this same private desire is, at the very same time, completing the purpose of something much larger — say, an entire operating logic?
This question naturally leads to another one — could it be that the motive a person believes is perfectly clear to them was never the whole truth to begin with? What he sees is only the layer he’s willing to see. Underneath it, there’s another layer, one he’s never even become aware of, being driven, being borrowed, without his knowledge. This isn’t to say the person is deceiving himself — it’s that the structure itself allows two layers of motive to exist at once: one, clearly perceived by the person himself; the other, capable of running entirely on its own, with no need for him to ever know about it.
A person can be, at the same time, the protagonist of his own life, and a component part of something else — and these two things never conflict. If anything, it’s often precisely because he throws himself in wholeheartedly, believing only that he’s the protagonist, that the component role gets to run so smoothly.
This “complete unawareness” is actually crucial — if Napoleon had known, at the time, that he was just a borrowed link in some chain, he probably wouldn’t have thrown himself in so completely. It was precisely because he treated it entirely as his own affair, and his alone, that he had that kind of real, that kind of fierce capacity to act.
This leads to a rather interesting corollary — whether a thing truly matters, truly leads toward some greater meaning, seemingly can never be seen clearly by the person doing it, at the moment they’re doing it. Meaning tends to only slowly surface afterward, when someone else, or time itself, looks back on it. The person involved can only ever see the concrete, personal reason sitting right in front of them.
Thinking about it this way, the real meaning of something a person is throwing themselves into right now might not surface until long afterward — and that delay itself isn’t a shame. It might, in fact, be the one precondition that allows the thing to be thrown into so completely in the first place.
But Napoleon, in the end, was lucky — what he did was big enough, singular enough, that later, someone was always willing to look back and spell out its meaning for him, bind it into books, put it in museums, write it into history textbooks. After he was used up, he at least got a belated account of it all.
But the vast majority of people this mechanism has ever borrowed from never get that belated meaning at all. An ordinary person spends a whole life working diligently, chasing the concrete things they can actually see — a stable job, a small bit of progress, a life that’s good enough. This private desire, too, was thrown into wholeheartedly, and it too may have had its energy borrowed by some larger current the person could never see. But no one will ever look back on his behalf, and no one will write that borrowing into a history anyone remembers.
He simply finishes what he was supposed to do, then quietly exits — and no one will ever come to tell him even one sentence: what he once helped make happen. “Meaning always eventually surfaces” is, in the end, only the luck of a few. Most of the people who’ve ever been borrowed from never get meaning at all — what they get, instead, is being quietly set down, once they’ve been used up.
Looking back at Napoleon this way, you realize he probably never knew, even at the moment of his death, what he’d truly left behind. But compared to most people, his not-knowing was still, in a sense, a dignified kind of not-knowing — at least someone, afterward, worked out the answer on his behalf.
Reason never promises an accounting to every tool, once that tool has been used up. It borrows what strength it needs, then turns and walks toward the next person willing to throw themselves in completely for their own private desires, and keeps on borrowing — never once stopping to look back at the person it just finished using.