War And Peace

Thus in order to imagine a human action subject only to the law of necessity and lacking all freedom, we would have to postulate knowledge of an infinite number of spatial conditions, an infinitely long period of time and an infinite line of causation.

And in order to imagine a man who was perfectly free and not subject to the law of necessity, we would have to imagine a man who existed beyond space, beyond time, and beyond all dependence on cause.

In the first case, if necessity was possible without free will, we would have to define the law of necessity in terms of necessity itself, which means form without content.

In the second case, if free will was possible without necessity, we would arrive at unconditional free will existing beyond space, time and cause, which by its own unconditional and limitless nature would amount to nothing but content without form.

In general terms, we would have arrived at two fundamentals underlying the entire world view of humanity – the unknowable essence of life and the laws that determine that essence.

Reason tells us: (1) Space and all the forms that give it visibility, matter itself, is infinite, and cannot be imagined otherwise. (2) Time is endless motion without a moment of rest, and cannot be imagined otherwise. (3) The connection between cause and effect has no beginning, and can have no end.

Consciousness tells us: (1) I alone exist, and I am everything that exists; consequently I include space; (2) I measure the course of time by a fixed moment in the present, in which moment alone I am aware of being alive; consequently I am beyond time; and (3) I am beyond cause, since I feel myself to be the cause of my own life in all its manifestations.

Reason gives expression to the laws of necessity. Consciousness gives expression to the essence of free will.

Unlimited freedom is the essence of life in man’s consciousness. Necessity without content is human reason in its threefold form.

Free will is what is examined; necessity does the examining. Free will is content; necessity is form.

Only by separating the two sources of cognition, which are like form versus content, do we arrive at the mutually exclusive and separately unimaginable concepts of free will and necessity.

Only by bringing them together again do we arrive at a clear concept of human life.

Beyond these two concepts, which share a mutual definition when brought together, like form and content, there is no other possible representation of life.

All that we know about human life is a certain relationship between free will and necessity, or between consciousness and the laws of reason.

All that we know about the external world of nature is a certain relationship between the forces of nature and necessity, or between the essence of life and the laws of reason.

The forces of life in nature lie beyond us and our cognitive powers, and we put names to these forces: gravity, inertia, electricity, the life force and so on. But the force of life in man is not beyond our cognitive powers, and we call it free will.

But just as the force of gravity, intrinsically unintelligible despite being sensed by everyone, is understandable only in terms of the laws of necessity to which it is subject (from our first awareness that all bodies possess weight to Newton’s law), the force of free will is also intrinsically unintelligible but recognized by all and understandable only in terms of the laws of necessity to which it is subject (all the way from the fact that all men die to knowledge of the most complex laws of economics or history).

All knowledge is simply the essence of life subsumed by the laws of reason.

Man’s free will differs from all other forces in being accessible to human consciousness, but in the eyes of reason it is no different from any other force.

The forces of gravity, electricity or chemical affinity differ from each other only by being differently defined by reason. Similarly, the force of man’s free will is distinguished by reason from the other forces of nature only by the definition assigned to it by reason. And free will divorced from necessity, from the laws of reason by which it is defined, is no different from gravity, heat or the force of organic growth; in the eyes of reason it is only a fleeting and indefinable sensation of life.