On the Freedom of the Will
On the Freedom of the Will (German: Ueber die Freiheit des Willens) is an essay presented to the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences in 1838 by Arthur Schopenhauer as a response to the academic question that they had posed: "Is it possible to demonstrate human free will from self-consciousness?"
It is one of the constituent essays of his work Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik (The Two Basic Problems of Ethics).
[1][2] Essentially, Schopenhauer claimed that as phenomenal objects appearing to a viewer, humans have absolutely no free will.
As things that exist apart from being appearances to observers (noumenon), however, human life can be explained as following from the freedom of will (though not in a way satisfying Christian and other theology, as he says in other works[3]).
On the Freedom of the Will was written for an essay contest of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and submitted in 1838 with the original title On the Freedom of the Human Will (German: Ueber die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens).
[4][5] The piece was republished under the title Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will (German: Preisschrift über die Freiheit des Willens), along with On the Basis of Morals, in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (German: Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik) in September 1840, with an 1841 publication date.
He asserted that there are three types of freedom; physical, intellectual, and moral (the terms were sometimes used in philosophy, as he shows in chapter four).
He concludes that liberum arbitrium indifferentiae would mean exactly such incident (a chance), an absolutely fortuitous or random occurrence.
According to Schopenhauer, when a person inspects their self-consciousness, they find the feeling "I can do whatever I will as long as I am not hindered."
[A]s little as a ball on a billiard table can move before receiving an impact, so little can a man get up from his chair before being drawn or driven by a motive.
Now I can go for a walk, or I can go to the club; I can also climb up the tower to see the sun set; I can go to the theater; I can visit this friend or that one; indeed, I also can run out of the gate, into the wide world, and never return.
(Theoretically, although Schopenhauer does not consider this, a specific realization of a random variable—like the mentioned liberum arbitrium indifferentiae—could perhaps still be amongst the set of conditions.)
Schopenhauer claimed that the necessity of our actions can coexist with the feeling of freedom and responsibility in a way that was explained by Kant.
When a person has a mental picture of himself as a phenomenon existing in the experienced world, his acts appear to be strictly determined by motives that affect his character.
We have responsibility for our acts because what we are is a result of our inner essence and being, which is a transcendentally free will (its effects are the inborn characters of all people).
