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AGAINST_FREEDOM
WAR_AND_PEACE
Quoting from Tolstoy's
"War and Peace" (1865-1869):
The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labour --
idleness -- was a condition of first man's blessed-ness
before the Fall. Fallen man has retained a love of
idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only
because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our
brows, but because our moral nature is such that we
cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells
us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could
find a state in which he felt that though idle he was
fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the
conditions of man's primitive blessedness. And such a
state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the
lot of a whole class -- the military. The chief
attraction of military service has consisted and will
consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.
Book VII, Chapter I, p. 99 (WC)
The satisfaction of one's needs -- good food,
cleanliness, and freedom -- now that he was deprived
of all this, seemed to Pierre to constitute perfect
happiness -- and the choice of occupation, that is,
of his way of life -- now that that choice was so
restricted -- seemed to him such an easy matter that
he forgot that a superfluity of the comforts of life
destroys all joy in satisfying one's needs, while
great freedom in the choice of occupation -- such
freedom as his wealth, his education, and his social
position had given him in his own life -- is just
what makes the choice of occupation insolubly
difficult, and destroys the desire and possibility of
having an occupation.
Book XIII, Chapter XII, p.259 (WC)
While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned, not
with his intellect but with whole being, by life
itself, that man is created for happiness, that
happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of
simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises
not from privation but from superfluity. And now
during these last three weeks of the march he had
learned still another new, consolatory truth -- that
there is nothing in the world that is terrible. He
had learned that, as there is no condition in which
man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no
condition in which he need be unhappy and not free.
He learned that suffering and freedom have their
limits and that those limits are very near together;
that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled
petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping on the
bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while
the other was warming; and that when he had put on
tight dancing shoes he had suffered just as he did
now when he walked with bare feet that were covered
with sores -- his footgear having long since fallen
to pieces.
Book XIV, Chapter XII, p. 324 (WC)
((And there's more of this stuff:
Book XV, Chapter XII, p.386 (WC) ))
TERRIBLE_KNOWLEDGE
Only in our self-confident day of the popularization
of knowledge- thanks to that most powerful engine of
ignorance, the diffusion of printed matter- has the
question of the freedom of will been put on a level on
which the question itself cannot exist. In our time
the majority of so-called advanced people- that is,
the crowd of ignoramuses- have taken the work of the
naturalists who deal with one side of the question for
a solution of the whole problem.
They say and write and print that the soul and freedom
do not exist, for the life of man is expressed by
muscular movements and muscular movements are
conditioned by the activity of the nerves; the soul
and free will do not exist because at an unknown
period of time we sprang from the apes. They say this,
not at all suspecting that thousands of years ago that
same law of necessity which with such ardor they are
now trying to prove by physiology and comparative
zoology was not merely acknowledged by all the
religions and all the thinkers, but has never been
denied. They do not see that the role of the natural
sciences in this matter is merely to serve as an
instrument for the illumination of one side of it. For
the fact that, from the point of view of observation,
reason and the will are merely secretions of the
brain, and that man following the general law may have
developed from lower animals at some unknown period of
time, only explains from a fresh side the truth
admitted thousands of years ago by all the religious
and philosophic theories- that from the point of view
of reason man is subject to the law of necessity; but
it does not advance by a hair's breadth the solution
of the question, which has another, opposite, side,
based on the consciousness of freedom.
Second Epilogue, Chapter VIII, p.521 (WC)
"War and Peace": The anti-book.
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