Essay on the Freedom of the Will (Dover Philosophical Classics) [Paperback]

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.

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!