War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [782]
This consciousness is a totally separate source of self-knowledge, independent of reason. Through reason man observes himself, but he knows himself only through consciousness.
Without consciousness of oneself, no observation and no application of reason are thinkable.
In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive. A living man knows himself not otherwise than as wanting, that is, he is conscious of his will. And his will, which constitutes the essence of his life, man is conscious of and cannot be conscious of otherwise than as free.
If, subjecting himself to observation, man sees that his will is always directed according to one and the same law (whether he observes the necessity of taking food, or the activity of the brain, or whatever), he cannot understand this always identical direction of his will otherwise than as a limitation of it. That which is not free cannot be limited. Man’s will appears limited to him precisely because he is conscious of it not otherwise than as free.
You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.
This answer is the expression of a consciousness not subject to reason.
If the consciousness of freedom were not a separate source of self-knowledge, independent of reason, it would be subject to reasoning and experience; but in reality such subjection never occurs and is unthinkable.
A series of experiments and arguments shows each man that as an object of observation he is subject to certain laws, and man submits to them and never fights against the law of gravity or of impermeability, once he knows them. But that same series of experiments and arguments shows him that full freedom, which he is conscious of in himself, is impossible, that his every action depends on his constitution, his character, and the motives that influence him; yet man never submits to the conclusions of these experiments and arguments.
Having learned from experience and argument that a stone falls downwards, man believes it unquestioningly and in all cases expects the law he has learned to be fulfilled.
But, having learned as unquestionably that his will is subject to laws, he does not and cannot believe it.
However many times experience and argument have shown a man that in the same conditions, with the same character, he would do the same thing he did before, he, when he sets out for the thousandth time, in the same conditions, with the same character, on an action that has always ended the same way, undoubtedly feels no less certain that he can act as he pleases than he did before the experience. Every man, savage or sage, however irrefutably argument and experience prove to him that it is impossible to imagine two acts in the same conditions, feels that without this senseless notion (which constitutes the essence of freedom), he cannot imagine life. He feels that, impossible as it may be, it is so; for without this notion of freedom, he not only would not understand life, but could not live for a single moment.
He could not live, because all man’s strivings, all his impulses to life, are but strivings towards greater freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and submission, strength and weakness, health and sickness, education and ignorance, work and idleness, satiety and hunger, virtue and vice are nothing but greater or lesser degrees of freedom.
It is impossible to imagine to oneself a man who has no freedom otherwise than as deprived of life.
If for reason the concept of freedom presents itself as senselessly contradictory, like the possibility of performing two acts in the same moment of time or an action without a cause, that only proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.
This consciousness of freedom, unshakable, irrefutable, not subject to experience or argument, recognized