War And Peace

It happens all too often that our concept of a greater or lesser amount of freedom varies according to our different attitudes to an event, but every human action unfailingly appears to us as a kind of compromise between free will and necessity. In every action examined we see a certain amount of freedom and a certain amount of necessity. And the same thing always happens: the more freedom we see in any action, the less necessity there is, and the greater the necessity the smaller the amount of freedom.

The proportions of freedom and necessity will rise and fall according to one’s attitude to the event, but there is always an inverse ratio between them.

A drowning man who clutches at another drowning man and drags him under, or a starving mother weakened by feeding her baby who steals some food, or a man drilled and disciplined who obeys an order to kill a defenceless man in the course of duty – these people will all seem less guilty, in other words less free and more subject to the law of necessity, to anyone who knows their circumstances, and more free to anyone who did not know the man himself was drowning, the mother was starving, the soldier was on duty and so on. In the same way a man who committed a murder twenty years ago and has gone on living calmly and innocently in society ever since will seem less guilty, and what he did will seem more subject to the law of necessity, to anyone looking back on it after a lapse of twenty years than to someone looking at the same deed the day after it was done. And again, anything done by a madman, a man who was drunk or a violently excited man will seem less free and more inevitable to anyone who knows the mental state of the man who did the deed, and more free and less inevitable to someone who doesn’t. In each case the concept of freedom increases or diminishes, and the concept of necessity diminishes or increases, according to the onlooker’s point of view. The greater the necessity, the less freedom there is, and vice versa.

Religion, everyday common sense, the science of jurisprudence and history itself share the same understanding of this relationship between necessity and free will.

In every single case, where our concept of free will and necessity increases or diminishes there are only three basic variable entities:

1. The relationship between the man committing the act and the external world.

2. His relationship to time.

3. The relationship between him and the causes which led to the act.

The first variable (1) concerns the greater or lesser clarity with which we see the man’s relation to the external world, the greater or lesser clarity of his particular situation in relation to everything existing along with him at the time. It is this point that makes it obvious that a drowning man is less free and more subject to necessity than a man standing on terra firma; it makes the actions of a man living in close contact with other people under crowded conditions, a man bound by ties of family, service or business, seem undoubtedly less free and more subject to necessity than those of a man living in solitude and seclusion.

If we study one man on his own, removed from his surroundings, all of his actions will seem to be free. But if we see the slightest relationship between him and his surroundings, if we see him in contact with anything at all, a man talking to him, a book that he is reading, a job that he is busy with, even the air he breathes or the light that falls on the objects around him, we shall soon see that every one of these circumstances has some kind of influence on him, and determines at least one aspect of his behaviour. And the more we take account of these influences, the more our perception of his freedom is reduced, and our concept of his being subject to necessity is increased.

The second variable (2) is the greater or lesser extent of a man’s visible temporal relationship with the world, and the greater or lesser clarity by which we perceive the place in time occupied by his action. Because of this variable the fall of the first man, which led to the origin of the human race, stands out rather obviously as less free than the act of getting married is for a man of today. Because of this variable, the lives and actions of men who lived centuries ago and have a temporal connection with me cannot seem to me as free as the life of a contemporary, with all its consequences still unknown.

In the present case, this variability, our concept of greater or lesser freedom or necessity, will depend on the greater or lesser time-lapse between the action and our judgement of it.