War and Peace: Epilogue, Part 2: Chapters 6–12 Summary & Analysis

A divine being exists outside of time and can determine the direction of humanity’s movement over time. But human beings necessarily participate in time. When a human being issues an order, it never exists spontaneously without representing a whole chain of events that have gone before it. For example, saying that Napoleon ordered the army to go to war actually reflects a long series of consecutive events that led up to his order. Plenty of orders are issued that are never carried out. So an order shouldn’t be viewed as the cause of an event. Describing any given order is always a generalization.

Then what is the relationship between orders and events? The answer lies in the fact that the individual who orders is also a participant in events. The relationship between the one who orders and the ones who are ordered is called power. This relationship is exemplified in an army, which can be pictured as a pyramid with the largest number of people (the army’s privates, who participate most directly in the action) on the bottom and fewer and fewer people (officers, generals, the commander) rising toward the apex. Both here and in other areas of joint action, the greater mass of people participate more directly and give fewer orders; the smaller number give more orders and participate little or not at all. In other words, the one who orders does little else.

When events take place, like Europeans slaughtering one another, people offer various justifications—like the welfare of France, the ideal of liberty, and others. These justifications don’t make much sense, but they help remove people’s sense of moral responsibility for what they’re doing.

When historians only consider historical figures’ orders, they conclude that events depend on orders. When we consider the relationship between figures and the masses, we find that they and their orders depend on the event.

Now it is possible to answer “those two essential questions of history”: first, what is power? —The relationship between people in which one who expresses opinions and justifications for a joint action has taken the less direct part in it. Second, how is a group action produced? —Not by power, but by all people’s joint activity, such that those who participate in the event most directly take the least responsibility upon themselves, and vice versa.

If history were simply about external things, then this argument would be sufficient. But history has to do with humanity. Therefore the matter of human free will is important. If people truly had free will and were able to act as they pleased, then history would just be a series of accidental events. On the other hand, if people’s actions are governed by any laws, then there can’t be free will, because human actions would have to submit to laws.

Human beings are conscious of themselves as free. Experiments and arguments show that human beings are subject to laws like gravity, for example; the same kind of experiments could show that a human being’s actions are subject to constitution, character, and motives. But even if the results of such an experiment could be shown to a person, they wouldn’t believe it. Nobody could live that way, because a person’s efforts, the very impulse to live, are “strivings towards greater freedom.”

Theology, jurisprudence, ethics, and history have addressed the question of free will in various ways. It’s only in our day that so-called “advanced” people— “a crowd of ignoramuses”—have determined that the naturalists’ response to the question gives the full answer. Naturalists, citing the theory of evolution, claim that the soul and freedom do not exist. But human beings’ origins—whether through evolution or through direct creation by God at a specific point in time—make no difference in addressing the question of free will. It leaves unanswered how human consciousness of freedom combines with the law of necessity to which humans are subject.

History has an advantage over theology, ethics, and philosophy in addressing the question, because it’s not concerned with the essence of the human will, but with the manifestation of that will under certain conditions. In other words, it studies the conjunction of free will and necessity after that combining has already occurred. Instead of defining freedom and necessity in advance, history studies many phenomena to derive definitions of freedom and necessity. Every such phenomenon is a product partly of freedom and partly of necessity. Depending on the perspective from which an action is examined, the ratio of freedom and necessity in that action differs, but it’s always inversely proportional—the greater necessity appears, the lesser freedom appears, and vice versa.

Understanding the relationship between freedom and necessity rests on three bases. The first is the relationship of the person committing an action to the external world. If a person is considered in isolation, their actions appear free. But when that person’s relationships are taken into account—whether other people, work, or their environment—it becomes clear that the person is influenced by other things. Freedom decreases, necessity increases.

The second basis is a person’s relationship to time. In such cases, our sense of a person’s freedom decreases or increases depending on the amount of time that’s passed between the committing of the act and our judgment of it. An action close to us in time seems more free, while an event that’s distant in time appears foreordained because we can’t imagine it not happening as it did. For example, the Napoleonic Wars, relatively recent in time, appear to be the product of heroes’ wills. In contrast, the Crusades appear to be the product of necessity, because of the way the history of Europe subsequently unfolded.

The third and final basis is the relationship to the causes that produced the act. When we don’t understand the cause of an act, we recognize more freedom in the act. But the more causes we recognize, the more we see the law of necessity at work. For example, if we know that a criminal was raised by wicked people, it mitigates his guilt.

No matter how we examine a historical event, however, we cannot imagine total freedom or total necessity. We can’t imagine a person totally freed from external influences, whether freedom within space, within time, or from any causes. In fact, a being who is outside of space and time and totally independent of causes isn’t actually a human being.

In the same way, we can’t imagine a person who’s subject only to the law of necessity. It is impossible to know all the spatial conditions within which a person operates, time is infinite, and the chain of causes of any event is endless—so we necessarily imagine some room for freedom.

Reason concludes that human beings are subject to laws of necessity. A human being’s consciousness is aware only of freedom. Necessity (reason) studies freedom (consciousness). Thus these two forms of thinking are related to each other as form (necessity) to content (freedom). When we separate these two forms, we get the concepts of freedom and necessity; when we unite them, we see human life clearly. For the historian, what is knowable is called the laws of necessity; what is unknowable is freedom. Freedom is “the expression of the unknown remainder of what we know about the laws of human life.”

If history recognized human freedom as a force that influences events, it would be the same as if astronomy recognized a free force that moves the planets. The recognition of free action destroys the existence of laws. History’s task is to examine laws. All sciences are like this. When Newton formulated the law of gravity, he applied it to all heavenly bodies, both great and small. In the same way, history shouldn’t concern itself with causes, but should instead look for the laws common to all events.

Ancient cosmology was destroyed when Copernicus proved that the earth moves, not the sun. Ever since historians began to look at mathematical laws, relationships, and conditions that contribute to human events, the foundations of history were shaken. Yet history continued to be studied as if events were the result of free will. Both approaches are engaged in a fierce struggle. However, the law of necessity doesn’t destroy the foundations of society, as its detractors fear.

In astronomy people fought over the supposed immobility of the earth; in history they fight over human freedom. Just as we can’t feel the earth moving, we can’t feel our dependence on externalities and causes. In both cases, it is necessary “to renounce a nonexistent freedom and recognize a dependence we do not feel.”