Tolstoy: Free Will, History, and Human Motivation (4/4)

Can human beings determine their own destiny, or are we the inevitable product of our environment and nature? Sam Harris is convinced that free will is an illusion. After all, if the world is just matter and motion, how could there be free will? Not everyone agrees with Harris, however, and many thinkers see free will as a self-evident axiom on which morality is based. The question of free will is one that every serious thinker must consider, and for Tolstoy, this is an essential prerequisite for the question of human motivation and therefore the cause and direction of history.

Notes

• The intro music for this series is a section from a piece by Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844—1908) titled The Sea and Sinbad's Ship. Rimsky-Korsakov was a contemporary of Leo Tolstoy and my favorite Russian composer of the era. I hope you enjoy the segment and the podcast.
• The artwork is titled Battle of Moscow, 7th September 1812, painted in 1822 by Louis-François Lejeune.

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