War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [784]
History has as its subject not the will of man itself, but our notion of it.
And therefore the insoluble mystery of the combining of the two opposites, freedom and necessity, does not exist for history, as it does for theology, ethics, and philosophy. History examines the notion of man’s life in which the combining of these two opposites has already taken place.
In actual life, every historical event, every human action, is understood quite clearly and definitely, without the least sense of contradiction, even though each event appears partly free and partly necessary.
To solve the question of how freedom and necessity are combined and what constitutes the essence of these two concepts, the philosophy of history can and must follow a path opposite to the one other sciences have taken. Instead of defining the concepts of freedom and necessity in themselves, and then fitting the phenomena of life to the worked-out definitions, history must take the immense number of phenomena lying before it, which always appear dependent on freedom and necessity, and from them derive a definition of the concepts of freedom and necessity themselves.
Whatever notion of the activity of many people or one man we examine, we understand it not otherwise than as a product partly of freedom and partly of the law of necessity.
Whether we are speaking of the migration of peoples and the raids of barbarians, or of the decrees of Napoleon III, or of the act of a man, performed an hour ago, which consisted in choosing one direction out of many for a stroll—we see not the slightest contradiction. The measure of freedom and necessity that guided the acts of these men is clearly defined for us.
Quite often the notion of greater or lesser freedom varies according to the different points of view from which we examine a phenomenon; but—always in the same way—every human action appears to us not otherwise than as a certain conjunction of freedom and necessity. In every action examined, we see a certain portion of freedom and a certain portion of necessity. And always, the more freedom we see in whatever action, the less necessity; and the more necessity, the less freedom.
The ratio of freedom to necessity decreases or increases depending on the point of view from which the action is examined; but this ratio always remains inversely proportional.
A drowning man who clutches another and drowns him, or a hungry mother, exhausted from nursing her baby, who steals food, or a man accustomed to discipline who stands in a firing squad and kills a defenseless man on command, appears less guilty, that is, less free and more subject to the law of necessity, to someone who knows the conditions these people were in, and more free to someone who does not know that the man was himself drowning, that the mother was hungry, that the soldier was in a firing squad, and so on. In the same way, a man who twenty years ago committed a murder, and after that lived peacefully and harmlessly in society, appears less guilty—his act more subject to the law of necessity—for someone who examines it after a lapse of twenty years, and more free to someone who examined it the day after it was committed. And in the same way, every act of a crazy, drunk, or greatly agitated man appears less free and more necessary to someone who knows the inner state of the one who commits the act, and more free and less necessary to someone who does not know it. In all these cases, the concept of freedom increases or decreases and, correspondingly, the concept of necessity decreases or increases, depending on the point of view from which the act is examined. So that the greater the necessity appears, the lesser the freedom appears. And vice versa.
Religion, mankind’s common sense, jurisprudence, and history itself understand this ratio between necessity and freedom in the same way.
All occasions without exception in which our notion of freedom and necessity increases and