Leo Tolstoy’s Ethics: Dilemma of Freedom and Law

Abstract

The author addresses the legacy of Leo Tolstoy – the great Russian writer, philosopher, moralist and original religious thinker. The article focuses on the dilemma between law and freedom – essential for the understanding of Leo Tolstoy's moral and religious ideas. The author reconstructs and analyses the correlation between deontological and perfectionist arguments in Leo Tolstoy’s moral and philosophical teaching. Tolstoy’s Ethics of Love is regarded as a way of overcoming the traditional antinomy of freedom and necessity.

Leo Tolstoy’s moral and religious teaching is examined in the wide ideological context, which includes all fundamental philosophical ideas, spread in Russia and Europe in the late 18^th – early 19^th century. The author compares Tolstoy’s and Kant’s interpretations of the moral duty and moral law. The articles emphases the special features of Tolstoy’s apprehension of metaphysical and ethical aspects of Christian doctrine, first of all as combining the ethics of law and the ethics of merciful love.

The author comes to the conclusion that the moral law, as Tolstoy sees it, is the imperative formula of the human being’s real freedom, i.e. the freedom of the sentient being directed towards the idea of absolute perfection.