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Essay on the Freedom of the Will (Dover Philosophical Classics), by Arthur Schopenhauer
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The winning entry in a competition held by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences, Schopenhauer's 1839 essay brought its author international recognition. Its brilliant and elegant treatments of free will and determinism elevated it to a classic of Western philosophy, and its penetrating reflections still remain relevant.
Schopenhauer makes a distinction between freedom of acting (which he endorses) and the freedom of willing (which he refutes). The philosopher regards human activity as entirely determined, but he also posits that the variety of freedom that cannot be established in the sphere of human activity resides at the level of individuated will — a reality that transcends all dependency on outside factors. Because the essay's clear and rigorous argument reveals many basic features of his thought, it forms a useful introduction to Schopenhauer for students of philosophy or religion.
- Sales Rank: #1083206 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-03-02
- Released on: 2012-03-02
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"Recommended for large university and public libraries; accessible to general readers, upper-division undergraduates, and above." Choice
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German
About the Author
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) elabore dans sa jeunesse un systeme philosophique dont il explore les consequences dans le domaine de la morale et de la religion. Il passe l essentiel de sa vie a son discours.
Most helpful customer reviews
51 of 58 people found the following review helpful.
Shedding light on the "free will" confusion
By Greg Nyquist
There are few subjects in philosophy which breed so much confusion as this entire issue of "free will" verses determinism. Schopenhauer, who understood human will perhaps better than any philosopher (since will was central to his entire system of thought) contributes what may be the single best work on the subject. Starting where Locke, Hume, and Kant left off, Schopenhauer demonstrates that all versions of the free will doctrine are incoherent and fundamentally opposed to the basic presuppositions of human knowing. His argument is based on the simple idea that human willing contains certain uniformities that allow us to judge other people's character, and that in the absence of these uniformities, it would make no sense to hold people responsible for what they have done. If human beings really had free will in the traditional sense of the concept, their behavior would be inextricably unfathomable. Schopenhauer, as one of the few philosophers to really understand what is at issue in the whole debate, shows that, under the assumption of freedom of the will, a man's "character must be from the very beginning a tabula rasa...and cannot have any inborn inclination to one side or the other." This point of view, however, would utterly destroy the conception of human nature illustrated by the classics of World Literature and the researches of social scientists. Under the free will premise, individuals would have no set character at all, and men in general would have no common nature. It would be useless to study the humanities or the social sciences in order to learn about human beings, because there would be no common human nature. Human beings would either be the products of pure chance, or they would be spontaneous "self-creators," devising their personalities ex nihilio, out of nothing.
Schopenhauer's understanding of the confusion embedded at the very heart of the free will doctrine allows him to lay the groundwork for what is probably the most important insight into the whole problem of determinism verses free will. And while Schopenhauer never explicitly grasped this insight, it is implicit in his analysis nonetheless. This insight is simply the idea that what is important in life is not knowledge of whether human beings, in some obscure and probably meaningless sense, have "free will," but knowledge of how they are actually likely to behave. The whole free will controversy is a product of the anti-scientific teleological philosophy propagated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But science doesn't give a fig whether individuals, in some ultimate sense of the word, can help being what they are. What the scientist wants to know is not whether people are "free," but how they are likely to act in any given situation. So often those advocating free will are motivated by nothing more than the desire to rationalize their unwillingness to accept a scientific conception of human nature. They want to believe that human beings are capable of a degree of moral development which seems improbable in light of all the relevant evidence. So they take refuge in the notion that, because human beings have "free will," they can adopt any kind of nature they please, thus liberating themselves from the constraints of human tradition and social morality and bringing forth the utopian paradise of their fantasies.
Those who are eager to understand the reality of human willing and its primacy in understanding what human life is all about are advised to read Schopenhaeur's elegant writings on the subject, included this masterpiece on the freedom of the will.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Schopenhauer at his best
By meadowreader
We are free when we are able do what we want, that is, when we are not somehow impeded from doing what we will to do. But we decide what to do as a matter of causal necessity; otherwise, our actions would be random and senseless. The notion that we have the power to originate the causal chain by an act of will makes no sense; as Schopenhauer says, causation is not like a cab that you can start and stop wherever it helps your argument. As he notes, that point also defeats cosmological arguments about "prime movers" and "first causes." This is a great read, a chance to experience a first-class mind grappling with a difficult and interesting problem. Schopenhauer generally even avoids his usual bitter broadsides and against Schelling and Hegel and the sort of philosophizing they represent, although those are fun to read and generally on target. (He lost another, later prize because his essay in that case, although the only candidate for the prize, was so full of personal invective that the judges refused to make the award.)
Another reviewer correctly notes that Schopenhauer undermines his own argument at the last minute, or tries to, in a strange concluding chapter. There he argues that our feelings of personal responsibility for our actions points to freedom of some kind, a species of argument that he had earlier dismantled. Anyway, this freedom would have to exist beyond the empirical level, as his arguments have decisively eliminated any possibility of freedom there. The position Schopenhauer presents in that chapter involves the idea that we, somehow, choose our own characters at some mysterious point of emergence from the Kantian noumena. No commentator I have read has been able to make sense of it. In any case, it's completely skippable, a brief, tacked-on chapter that makes no difference for the rest of the book, which is very well worth reading.
24 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
A powerful examination of free will and determinism
By A Customer
For those who are convinced that determinism has been refuted (ie. Popper, Sartre, Kierkegarrd) it is quite obvious that they haven't read this essay because if they had they might put their own presuppositions about the validity of free will into question.
Schopenhauer does a fantastic job at dissecting the concept of the 'freedom of the will' by first showing that it cannot be proven from self-consciounsess. He follows this by meticulously distinguishing between the changes that occur in inorganic objects (cause), plants (stimulus), and animals(intuitive and particularly for humans, abstract motives). He points out that in regards to the automatic organic function of animals bodies, changes occur in the form of a "stimulus" but in willed action motivation is the cause (but not in the mechanical sense that the narrow definition of casaulity implies). Schopenhauer writes, in regards to motivation, "causality that passes through cognition... enters in the gradual scale of natural beings at that point where a being which is more complex, and thus has more manifold needs, was no longer able to satisfy them merely on the occasion of a stimulus that must be awaited, but had to be in a position to choose, seize, and even seek out the means of satisfaction."
Schopenhauer thinks that humans have "relative freedom" but that relative freedom is to act in accordance with the motives that are necessitated by the Will-- which in turn is the determining factor of human behavior. In humans the linkage of cause and effect is of a far greater distance than that of intuitive animals-- causing us to mistakingly exclude our behavior from the law of casaulity-- but in the end 'the Will' still determines actions by what he calls "sufficient necessitiy".
"For he (human beings) allows the motives repeatedly to try their strength on his will, one against the other. His will is thus put in the same position as that of a body that is acted on by different forces in opposite directions - until at last the decidedly strongest motive drives the others from the field and determines the will. This outcome is called decision and, as a result of the struggle, appears with complete necessity."
Unlike Sartre's treatise on freedom, which ultimately collapsed into obscurity and contradiction, Scophenhauer's rightly contends that a fixed essence is inborn (what we would today call DNA). In other words, it contradicts Sartre's saying that "existence precedes essence." For Schopenhauer, neither precedes the other. The two are inseparable. The expression of the essence can change through experience within the environment but the fundamental aspects of it remain instrinsic to the organism (Genes/Biology). Schopenhauer responds to the proponents of absolute free will, who haven't carefully analyzed what it means for the 'will' to be free, by writing: "Closely considered, the freedom of the will means an existentia without essentia; this is equivalent to saying that something is and yet at the same time is nothing, which again means that it is not and thus is a contradiction." So my guess is that if Sartre had happened to stumble upon this particular essay he might have realized that it was he who was in "bad faith" about man being condemned to be free.
It should also be noted that if Schopenhauer is wrong about mans intrinsic nature then all of the social sciences are a fraud and particularly psychology is wrong when it takes genes, biology, and the environment into consideration when interpreting and analyzing human behavior.
The reason people object to philosophical determinism is that it makes morality and personal responsibility a precarious thing. One valuable thing we can adopt from Sartre's ideas is that it is imperative that we take responsibility for our choices. But being that pragmatism is the philosophy of the U.S. and not existentalism, it is more than likely the masses will always assume that Free Will exists because the stability of civil society depends on it. In light of all of this it should be mentioned that Schopenhauer does not think that people can't be morally reformed. In other words he thinks that the expression of behavior can be cultivated. Many people credit Nietzsche for coming up with the idea of sublimation that would later be used by Freud, but it was actually Schopenhauer who was the first speak of the idea.
"Cultivation of reason by cognitions and insights of every kind is morally important, because it opens the way to motives which would be closed off to the human being without it."
Schopenhauer also condemns a moral system that tries to root out the defects of a person's character rather than utilizing sublimation.
For those who consider this type of philosophy immoral because it seems to exclude the possibility of moral responsibility we should remember that in Christianity there is the concept of predesination, and in Islam there is a religious fatalism. On top of that fact, many of the church fathers (Augustine and Luther) didn't accept the notion of free will either.
I highly recommend this book!
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