Tolstoy on Free Will

Why did millions of men set about killing each other, if it had been known ever since the world began that it is both physically and morally bad?

...

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?

...

...there are two sorts of acts. One depends, the other does not depend on my will. And the mistake that produces a contradiction come 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.

—Leo Tostoy, "A Few Words Apropros of the Book War and Peace" [The Russian Archive, March 1868]

The man was a genius.

Comments

[H.M.]

May I ask....
On what do you base your view of Tolstoy being a genius? Is it on the basis of this excerpt, of the whole appendix there in War and Peace? Is it because you agree with what he is saying here? Is it more than that?

Sorry to be difficult. :)

[Sylvia]

I think he's a genius for understanding that the motivation for violence is mediated, it does not come from within, much as we would like to think everything we do is our own idea. The bits I left out explain it more thoroughly. He also mentions working it out in detail elsewhere, but I'm not sure if he did. Perhaps he is referring to "The Kingdom of God is Within You," which I've started but didn't get far with. I might have to pick it up again if it is related to War and Peace.

[Chuck]

You don't think evil comes from within? Not at all?

[Sylvia]

It certainly doesn't happen in a vacuum. Except in the case of true insanity, violence requires external stimulus. As Tolstoy puts it, it is dependent on other people. You could say it is the utmost failure of human autonomy.

[Port Orchard flowers]

i think this just goes to show that one has to foster a stronger personality and a wide range of ideas to avoid falling into a pit of "constricted" freedom.

[Chuck]

The problem with this is one is never responsible for one's own violence if one can always point to the external stimulus that triggered it. Does that stimulus have to be conscious? In other words, are other people knowingly causing us to do bad things? If so, where does the impulse come from that makes them prompt us to do evil? Are they responsible for prompting us to do bad things or are their impulses merely the response to some other external stimuli? Are we all unconsciously making each other do bad things?

I'm not trying to be difficult but I just wonder where the buck stops.

[Sylvia]

The buck doesn't have to stop in just one place. People bear some responsibility for what how they react to those external stimuli, but as a society we have to recognize that outside factors play a crucial role. If we want to prevent bad behaviour it behooves us to look at those factors and try to do something about them. It's not good enough to just punish people after the damage is done.

Look at the US. They have by far the highest prison population of any country, and yet they have triple the murder rate of Canada. Blaming crime entirely on the criminal may feel like justice but it doesn't make us any safer if the conditions that produce criminals still exist. Obviously no social system could ever be perfect, but it can be better than it is now.