War And Peace

In order to understand, observe and draw any conclusions a man must first of all be conscious of being alive. A man’s sense of being alive derives from his yearning, which means being conscious of his own will. But there is only one way that man becomes conscious of his will, the very essence of his being – he conceives of it as free will.

If during self-observation a man sees that his will always operates by the same law (whether it be the need to consume food, exercise the brain, or whatever else), he can only see this unvarying direction of his will as a limitation placed upon it. It wouldn’t be possible to limit something without it being free in the first place. A man’s will seems limited precisely because he cannot conceive of it as anything but free.

You tell me I’m not free. But I have just raised my arm and put it down again. Everybody understands that this reply may be illogical, but it is also irrefutable evidence of freedom. It is an expression of consciousness and not subject to reason.

If consciousness of freedom was not a separate source of self-awareness independent of reason, it would be subject to reason and experience, which in fact it is not and never could be.

Every man discovers from a series of experiments and arguments that he, the object under examination, is subject to certain laws, and he submits to them; once he has been told about the law of gravity, for instance, or the law of impermeability, he will never try to overcome them. But he also discovers from the same series of experiments and reflections that the total freedom he is conscious of is an impossibility; any action depends on his organization, character and motivation. But he never submits to the conclusions offered by these experiments and arguments.

Once he knows from experience and reasoning that a stone falls in a downward direction man accepts this as beyond doubt and expects this known law to be observed in every instance. But when he knows also beyond doubt that his own will is subject to laws, he will not, and cannot, believe it.

However often a man learns from experience and reason that in the same circumstances and with the same character he will always do what he did before, the thousandth time he encounters the same circumstances with the same character and this leads to an action that always ends in the same way, he still feels beyond doubt that he is free to do whatever he wants, no less now than before the experiment. Every man, savage or sage, despite the irrefutable evidence provided by reason and experience that there is no possibility of two different courses of action emerging from exactly the same circumstances, still feels that without this nonsensical concept (the very essence of freedom) he cannot conceive of life. He feels that, however impossible it might be, it is still true; without that concept of freedom he would not only find life incomprehensible, he would be unable to live for a split second. Unable to live because all human striving, all the motivation for living, is nothing other than a striving towards greater freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, authority and subjugation, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, labour and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice – these are all greater or lesser degrees of freedom.

To imagine a man without freedom is impossible except as a man deprived of life.

If reason sees the concept of freedom as a meaningless contradiction, like the possibility of doing two different things at exactly the same time or something occurring without a cause, this tells us one simple thing: consciousness is not subject to reason.

It is this unwavering, irrepressible consciousness of freedom, not subject to experience or reason, acknowledged by all thinking people and sensed by everybody without exception, this consciousness without which no concept of humanity is imaginable, that constitutes the other side of the question.

Man is the creation of an omnipotent, infinitely good and omniscient God. What is sin, the concept of which flows from man’s consciousness of freedom? That is a question for theology.

All human actions are subject to universal and immutable laws which can be expressed in statistics. What is social responsibility, the concept of which flows from consciousness of freedom? That is a question for jurisprudence.

A man’s actions flow from his innate character and motivation. What is conscience and the sense of right and wrong in relation to actions that flow from the consciousness of freedom? That is a question for ethics.

Man in connection with the life of humanity in general appears to be governed by laws determining that life. But the same man without that connection appears to be free. How are we to look on the past life of nations and humanity, as the product of activity by people who are free or not free? That is a question for history.