“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.
Leo Tolstoy. “War And Peace”
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 branches of human science have gone the same way. Confronted by infinite smallness, mathematics, the most exact of all the sciences, drops the habit of continual sub-division and enters on a new process of integration of the infinitesimal unknown. Abandoning the concept of causation, mathematics now seeks a new law, a set of properties common to all infinitely small unknown elements.
Leo Tolstoy. “War And Peace”
The other sciences in their different ways have taken the same route. When Newton promulgated the law of gravity, he did not say that either the sun or the earth has the property of attraction. What he said was that all bodies, large and small, seem to have the property of attracting one another; in other words, putting to one side questions about the cause of the movements of bodies, he expressed one property common to all bodies, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. The natural sciences are doing the same thing as they abandon the question of cause and search for laws.”
“Once the first person had said and demonstrated that the birth-rate or crime-rate is subject to mathematical laws, that certain geographical and politico-economical laws determine this or that form of government, or that a given relationship between the population and the soil causes mass migration – from that moment the foundations on which history had been built were essentially destroyed.”
Leo Tolstoy. “War And Peace
“ But just as in astronomy the new attitude was, ‘No, we cannot feel the earth’s movement, but if we accept its immobility we are reduced to absurdity, whereas if we accept the movement that we cannot feel we arrive at laws,’ so in history the new attitude is, ‘No, we cannot feel our dependence, but if we accept free will we are reduced to absurdity, whereas if we accept dependence on the external world, time and causation we arrive at laws.”
Leo Tolstoy. “War And Peace”
I read this passages among the last chapters in the Epilogue of War and peace by Leo Tolstoy.
Tolstoy’s approach to writing, and dealing with meaning and history, is built on a certain perspective. That perspective he tried to describe in the Epilogue. One of the main terms he uses as part of his Humanistic approach is free will. If we search for the definition we get these :
Free will :
Definition by google
the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion.
Fate :
Definition by google
the development of events outside a person’s control [i.e. free will], regarded as predetermined by a supernatural power.
So it’s clear that determinism and fate (in the materialistic sense) are lack of free will and vice versa. Google even uses the terms supernatural power.
Power :
Definition by google
the ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way.
And then power can be, also with Tolstoy, the characteristic of a certain entity, like gravity as an inherent property of bodies. He does relate the Newtonian science to the Aristotelean actualism (meaning science as the process of finding an entity’s properties).
We can see clearly how the definition of one term is using the other and vice versa, one term always refers to another, the essence we cannot get, it is only the extension of something else, unless we connect it with our feelings, our sensual and emotional data. This is the old famous mind-body dualism.
What Einstein suggested with his general theory of relativity is that our choice as humans, influences what we ‘discover’ as natural laws, as links of causality. It is nothing new, but nevertheless important to understand.
Einstein assumed a fixed speed for light only as an assumption, a possible axiom, or as starting point for investigation. The wholeness of the general theory of relativity is then only judged in terms of Occam’s razor, in terms of efficiency, the less assumption you have to make, the less Principle of Sufficient Reasons. True and efficient are the same thing in that sense.
Why many people hold different world views, is that the criteria for judgement is different and so as its foundation, and these two are linked together.
Words like : nature, force, law, god are Principles of Sufficient Reason. Where our intelligence stops its investigation and takes something for granted, or refers to something else, as starting point, a foundation. Around a main concept a whole view of the world can be build.
It is hard for us, nevertheless for Tolstoy, to understand this new contemporary notion, of meaning being built around language, and that language goes in circles but never reaches a solid element. It might have to do with how Tolstoy described conciseness looking at itself.
Today we find say in a Neo-Kantian way, that the only meaning in the world is the one coming from our mind, it is our choice. Absolute laws are just patterns of similarity which our intelligence can identify and assign meaning to. The thought of having one essence, having shared as a guiding principle for all humans is religion, it can also be a good base for agreement and/or war. The highest form of mutual tolerance might be the agreement about disagreement.
Free will, from this perspective, is our ability to make a choice, what makes us human.
PARTICIPATORY UNIVERSE, An attempt to illustrate the universe’s reflective, metacognitive nature.