War And Peace

(1) However hard we try to imagine a man excluded from any influence of the external world, we can never achieve a concept of freedom in space. A man’s every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him, and his own body. I raise my arm and let it fall again. My action seems to be free, but when I start wondering whether I could have raised my arm in any direction, I notice that I moved it in the direction where the action encountered least resistance from any surrounding bodies or from my own bodily structure. If I chose one particular direction out of all those available I did so because in that direction I encountered least resistance. For my action to be completely free it would have to have encountered no resistance at all. In order to imagine a man who was completely free we would have to imagine him existing beyond space, an obvious impossibility.

(2) However much we shorten the time-lapse between action and judgement, we could never arrive at a concept of freedom within time. For if I examine an action performed only one second ago, I must still acknowledge it to be unfree, since the action is locked into the moment when it was performed. Can I lift my arm? I do lift it, but this sets me wondering: could I have decided not to lift my arm in that moment of time that has just gone by? To convince myself that I could, I do not lift my arm the next moment. But the non-lifting of my arm did not happen at that first moment when I was wondering about freedom. Time has gone by which I had no power to detain, and the hand which I lifted then and the air through which I lifted it are no longer the same as the air which now surrounds me and the hand that I now decide not to move. The moment when the first movement occurred is irrevocable, and at that moment there was only one action I could have performed, and whatever movement I made, that movement was the only one possible. The fact that the very next moment I decided not to lift my arm did not prove that I had the power not to lift it. And since there was only one possible movement for me at that one moment in time, it couldn’t have been any other movement. In order to think of it as a free movement, it would have to be imagined as existing in the present on the very edge where past and future meet, which means beyond time, and that is impossible.

(3) However much we build up the difficulty of pinning down causes we can never arrive at a concept of complete freedom, the total absence of any cause. However elusive the cause behind an active expression of free will, our own or somebody else’s, the first demand of an intelligent mind is to look for an assumed cause, without which no phenomenon is conceivable. I raise my arm in order to perform an action independent of any cause, but my wish to perform an action without a cause is the cause of my action.

But even if we could imagine a man excluded from all outside influence and examine one momentary action of his, performed in the present and unprovoked by any cause, thus reducing the infinitely small amount of necessity to zero, even then we would not have achieved a concept of complete free will in a man, because a creature impervious to all outside worldly influence, existing beyond time, and with no dependence on cause, is no longer a man.

In just the same way we could never conceive of a human action lacking any element of free will and entirely subject to the law of necessity.

(1) However much we expand our knowledge of the spatial conditions in which mankind dwells, such knowledge could never become complete since the number of these conditions is infinitely great, because space itself is inifinite. And as long as it remains true that not all the conditions that could influence a man can be defined, there can be no such thing as total necessity and there is always a certain amount of free will.

(2) However much we extend the time-lapse between an action under examination and our judgement of it, the period itself will be finite, whereas time is infinite, so here is another sense in which there can be no such thing as absolute necessity.

(3) However accessible the chain of causation behind a given action, we can never know the whole chain, because it is infinitely long, so once again we cannot attain absolute necessity.

And beyond that, even if we reduced the minimal amount of free will to zero by acknowledging its total absence in some cases – a dying man, an unborn baby, or an idiot – in the process of doing so we should have destroyed the very concept of what it is to be human, which is what we are examining, because once there is no free will, there is no man. And therefore the idea of a human action subject only to the law of necessity and devoid of all free will is just as impossible as the idea of a completely free human action.