War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [796]
A man killing another, Napoleon giving the order to cross the Niemen, you and I applying for a job, raising and lowering our arm, are all unquestionably convinced that each of our acts is based on reasonable causes and our own will, and that it depended on us to act that way and not otherwise, and that conviction is so inherent and dear to each of us that, despite the arguments of history and the statistics of crime, which convince us of the involuntariness of other people’s actions, we extend the consciousness of our freedom to all our acts.
The contradiction seems insoluble: in committing an act, I am convinced that I am committing it according to my own good pleasure; examining this act in terms of its being part of the common life of mankind (in its historical significance), I am convinced that this act was predetermined and inevitable. Where does the mistake lie?
Psychological observations of man’s ability to make an instantaneous retrospective adjustment of a whole series of allegedly free conjectures to an accomplished fact (I intend to set this forth in more detail elsewhere), confirm the assumption that man’s consciousness of freedom in the committing of acts of a certain sort is mistaken. But those same psychological observations prove that there are acts of another sort in which the consciousness of freedom is not retrospective, but instantaneous and unquestionable. Whatever the materialists may say, I can unquestionably commit an action or refrain from it, insofar as that action conerns me alone. By my will alone I have unquestionably just raised and lowered my arm. I can presently stop writing. You can presently stop reading. Unquestionably, by my will alone and outside any obstacles, I can mentally transport myself right now to America or to any mathematical problem. Testing my freedom, I can raise and forcefully lower my arm in the air. I have just done so. But there is a child standing beside me: I raise my arm over him and want to lower it with the same force upon the child. I cannot do that. A dog attacks the child: I cannot help raising my arm against the dog. I stand in the ranks and cannot help following the movements of the regiment. In battle, I cannot help attacking with my regiment and fleeing when everyone around me flees. When I am standing in court as defender of an accused man, I cannot help speaking or knowing what I am going to say. I cannot help blinking when a blow is aimed at my eye.
And so there are two sorts of acts. One depends, the other does not depend on my will. And the mistake that produces a contradiction comes only from the fact that I wrongly transfer the consciousness of freedom, which legitimately accompanies any act connected with my I, with the highest abstraction of my existence, to my acts committed jointly with other people and depending on the coinciding of other wills with my own. To determine the boundaries of the domains of freedom and dependence is very difficult, and the determining of those boundaries is the essential and sole task of psychology; but, observing the conditions of the manifestation of our greatest freedom and greatest dependence, it is impossible not to see that the more abstract our activity is and therefore the less connected with the activity of others, the more free it is, and, on the contrary, the more our activity is connected with other people, the more unfree it is.
The most strong, indissoluble, burdensome, and constant connection with other people is the so-called power over other people, which in its true meaning is only the greatest dependence on them.
Mistakenly or not, having become fully convinced of that in the course of my work, it was natural that, in describing the historical events of 1805, 1807, and especially of 1812, in which this law of predetermination*761 stands out most prominently, I could not ascribe importance to the activity of those people who fancied they were governing events, but who introduced less free human activity into them than all the other participants in the events. The