Chapter 12, Part 5 in The Kingdom of God is Within You: Free Will and Determinism

Chapter 12, Part Five:

In the previous part we saw that Tolstoy believed that it was erroneous to ascribe moral and religious progress to political and economic circumstances and that by thinking that contributing positively to the state or economy will lead to progress, one is only serving and strengthening the state. In Part Five, the second to last part of the book, Tolstoy connects this to a complicated vision of free will. He does this first by equating the "arguments" of liberal hypocrisy with those that claim that men is not free.

" Man cannot change his life, because he is not free ; he is not free, because all of his acts are conditioned by previous causes. No matter what a man may do, there always exist these or those causes, from which the man has committed these or those acts, and so man cannot be free and himself change his life," say the defenders of the metaphysics of hypocrisy. They would be absolutely right, if man were an unconscious being, immovable in relation to truth ; that is, if, having once come to know the truth, he always remained on the selfsame stage of his cognition. But man is a conscious being, recognizing a higher and still higher degree of the truth,

Just, as how, in the last part, Tolstoy's differentiation from and disputation of social circumstances playing a giant role in the rise of certain religious teachers seemed confusing and contrary to the fatalism he had expressed, especially in War and Peace, Tolstoy's rejection of determinism in this part is important for his framework, but confusing and at times, seemingly razor-thin. Here, he argues against the premise that humanity is an unconscious being, which seems contrary to a very fundamental principle that drives War and Peace (that is, that humanity is not conscious of the significance of its actions and its history is not driven through the actions of individuals, but by an unconscious force that they cannot be aware of). However, Tolstoy walks a tightrope throughout the chapter in order to keep the determinism of War and Peace and simultaneously make humanity free enough to drive moral progress. Tolstoy is often represented as having changed many of his fundamental views over time and going an evolution of thinking following his conversion detailed in A Confession. I don't think this is necessarily the case. Instead, I think you can find the very basis of this thinking, the mix of determinism and free will, in War and Peace itself. The difference here is that it is just further explained and explored. Just as the five main protagonists (even Nikolai to some extent) of the novel have higher truths about life, death, and their relationship to others revealed to them, humanity senses greater truths, which expands their freedom, which when used to explore "the truth", expands their freedom even more.

something as the engineer of a locomotive, who is not free as regards the change of an accomplished or actual motion of the locomotive, is none the less free in determining beforehand its future motions. No matter what a conscious man may do, he acts in this way or that, and not otherwise, only because he either now recognizes that the truth is that he ought to act as he does, or because he formerly recognized it, and now from inertia, from habit, acts in a manner which now he recognizes to be false.

As usual, Tolstoy is full of analogies to help explore his ideas and I think this one, as well as the horse pulling the cart that I cut out, is probably the most instructive. An individual person cannot combat their circumstances, and the more they try to do so, the less free they will feel themselves. However, if a person acts has a new realization of the truth and continues to act the same way that they have, doing what they did when they thought it was what was right, then they will be acting in a hypocritical way that they now realize is incorrect.

The recognition of a certain truth or the non-recognition of it does not depend on external causes, but on some others, which are in man himself. Thus with all the external, apparently advantageous conditions for the recognition of truth, one man at times does not recognize it, and, on the contrary, another, under all the most unfavourable conditions, without any apparent cause, does recognize it.

Key to understanding Tolstoy's relationship with free will is to differentiate between external and internal causes. The external is always outside of a person's will, though many people (Napoleon in War and Peace being the most obvious example) believe that they have some sort of control over the will of others or eternal forces. What influences a person to accept the truth has nothing to do with their external conditions, because those who accept or reject the truth seems, at least from outside, random. Instead, those that accept the truth depends on what is inside of them. This rejects, in a way that makes sense in Tolstoy's philosophy, the way that upbringing and poverty can affect moral behavior, and I don't necessarily think disputes or runs contrary to the idea that biology and the inner working of each individual's brain affects decision making. However, Tolstoy's thought and focus works a little differently here, as evidenced by the following analogy.

Thus a gambler or a drunkard, who has not withstood temptation and has succumbed to his passion, remains none the less free to recognize his gambling or his intoxication either as an evil or as an indifferent amusement. In the first case, he, though not at once, frees himself from his passion, the more, as he the more sincerely recognizes the truth ; in the second, he strengthens his passion and deprives himself of every possibility of liberation.

Just as acceptance is thought of as the first step to recovery, realizing that their actions were wrong, and not excusing them, is the first necessity for someone to make moral progress. By acting in a way that is contrary to moral progress and then justifying it, a person's heart becomes hardened and they find themselves further from moral progress. In this way, moral progress is limited by the freedom of the individual, which is limited by previous moral progress.

Not that a man is always free to recognize every truth, or not. There are truths which have long ago been recognized by a man himself or have been transmitted to him by education and tradition, and have been taken by him on faith, the execution of which has become to him a habit, a second nature ; and there are truths which present themselves to him indistinctly, in the distance.

Moral progress is habit forming over many generations in the same way that taboo is habit forming over many generations. Marriage equality would have been unthinkable to American or European society 150 years ago (and indeed, would have been unthinkable to Tolstoy himself, proving that the moral conception has moved past him) but is generally accepted by public opinion today. For future generations, it and many aspects of society that we have perhaps been unable to imagine will become habitual, furthering moral progress and the freedom of humanity.

Man is unquestionably not free, if we represent him to ourselves as immovable, if we forget that the life of man and of humanity is only a constant motion from darkness to the light, from the lower stage of the truth to the higher, from a truth which is mixed with errors to a truth which is more free from them...But man is not immovable in relation to truth, and every individual man, as also all humanity, in proportion to its movement in life, constantly cognizes a greater and ever greater degree of the truth, and is more and more freed from error.

Humanity and history is going in a certain direction that is not contrary or antithetical to freedom, but supported by it. Just as in the allegory of the cave, where the man loses his chains and heads out into the light, humanity is able to, as time goes on, move closer and closer to moral truth and embracing progress. The positivist attitude of the book as it nears its end rears its head here, with the embrace of the idea of progress as not only possible, but something that is going to happen, with history not only moving in a certain direction, but the right direction.

Truth not only indicates the path of human life, but also reveals that one path, on which human life can proceed. And so all men will inevitably, freely or not freely, walk on the path of life : some, by naturally doing the work of life destined for them, others, by involuntarily submitting to the law of life. Man's freedom is in this choice. Such a freedom, within such narrow limits, seems to men to be so insignificant that they do not notice it : some (the determinists) consider this portion of freedom to be so small that they do not recognize it at all ; others, the defenders of complete freedom, having in view their imaginary freedom, neglect this seemingly insignificant degree of freedom.

This positivism leads to what again looks like a contradiction or embrace of determinism. The difference lies here in that humanity has the choice to participate in this progress or be dragged along with it. Change is going to happen, with or without their consent, so each person must choose to embrace the moral progress or to stand against it. Many, as Tolstoy notes, would say that this is not freedom. What I think, especially in the context of revolutionary thought, best illustrates the freedom that each human has is whether or not they will participate in the change and embrace it, or if they will try to remain the same and fight against the change.

In placing his life in carnal things, a man does that work which is always in dependence on spatial and temporal causes, which are outside of him. He himself really does nothing, — it only seems to him that he is doing something, but in reality all those things which it seems to him he is doing are done through him by a higher power, and he is not the creator of life, but its slave ;

Similar to some aspects of Christian thought, the carnal or material is placed as something that is external, something that should be avoided and is outside of the control of the person, while the internal is the true freedom. This also emulates some 19th century thought against the herd mentality where the individual that is self-sufficient or not reliant on those outside of themselves is the most free one, while those reliant on the outside world and others are subject to what comes with them, making themselves no longer free. For Tolstoy, this is because moral progress comes from within and comes from recognizing the folly of previous behavior. To relapse into behavior that is clearly contrary to moral progress is to become a slave to it and reject freedom and moral progress.

Men need but understand this : they need but stop troubling themselves about external and general matters, in which they are not free, and use but one hundredth part of the energy, which they employ on external matters, on what they are free in, on the recognition and profession of the truth which stands before them, on the emancipation of themselves and of men from the lie and hypocrisy which conceal the truth, in order that without effort and struggle there should at once be destroyed that false structure of life which torments people and threatens them with still worse calamities, and that there should be realized that kingdom of God or at least that first step of it, for which men are already prepared according to their consciousness. 

Because what is outside of oneself is outside of one's control, the effort towards controlling it is entirely in vain and that effort should be turned inward. If done so, especially on a mass basis, there will be a massive change in humanity and the institutions that enslave humanity will be dissolved. For Tolstoy, Jesus's teachings are what prepared humanity for its next great moment of moral progress, and that step can be taken once the shackles of our institutions are removed by the inward change of humanity rather than the outward action of organizations.

What will become of the world, if the existing order of things shall be destroyed ?...If Columbus had reflected thus, he would never have weighed anchor. It is madness to sail the sea without knowing the way, to sail the sea no one has traversed before, to make for a country, the existence of which is a question. With this madness he discovered a new world.

For the rest of the part, Tolstoy combats the fear of change that humanity will inevitably have in regards to the revolution of the current order and the destruction of institutions. The Columbus analogy, in irony because of history and moral progress, might sit wrongly with a modern reader, but the exploration of the world was a revolutionary event for Europe, just as the revolution against institutions was, and the dissolving of them if there is further moral progress would be. We, even now, cannot imagine our lives radically different than it currently is and the thought of radical change frightens us. But, Tolstoy argues, the lack of change should frighten us as well.

From the simplest, lowest, worldly point of view it is already clear that it is madness to remain under the vault of a building, which does not sustain its weight, and that it is necessary to leave it. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a state which is more wretched than the one in which is now the Christian world, with its nations armed against each other, with the ever growing taxes for the support of these ever growing armaments, with the hatred of the labouring class against the rich, which is being fanned more and more, with Damocles's sword of war hanging over all, and ready at any moment to drop down, and inevitably certain to do so sooner or later.

Of course it is easy to read passages like this and see Tolstoy making the prediction of communist revolutions and two massive world wars that threatened to devastate society's very fundamental structure. Society did not change radically, so in the end, it changed radically, afterwards making a new structure that was stronger and took violence and oppression to maintain. Even today, our current world order is threatened and even looks like it may be on the point of collapse or point of no return. But even so, many people cling to this way of life, even for ones that do not reap that advantages because of a fear of change or connection to what they view in the institutions as important.

"The sciences, arts, civilizations, and cultures will disappear ! " All these are only different manifestations of the truth, and the imminent change is to take place only in the name of an approximation to truth and its realization. How, then, can the manifestations of the truth disappear in consequence of its realization ? They will be different, better, and higher, but they will by no means be destroyed. What will be destroyed in them is what is false ; but what there was of truth in them will only blossom out and be strengthened.

Again, Tolstoy's optimism shines through here, with the belief that anything lost in the replacement of the old society will be replaced with a better version. And I think a non-theistic version of philosophy begins to have to jump ship from Tolstoy here. Positivist truth or the faith that God (thought Tolstoy, to be fair, does not say as much) will direct history in a positive direction is difficult to swallow. Even optimistic progressivism is wounded by the continual amassing of corporate power resulting in a pure neglect of the planet, displaced peoples, and rising inequalities. There is, in revolutionary thinking, a sense that time is running out, that things must change quickly or it will be too late. The next post on the book will cover the final part, where Tolstoy makes his final exhortations, and I'll try to contextualize them and whether or not they are too optimistic.