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Necessity, Responsibility and Character: Schopenhauer on Freedom of the Will

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2012

Christopher Janaway
Christopher Janaway*
Affiliation:
University of Southampton
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper gives an account of the argument of Schopenhauer's essay On the Freedom of the Human Will, drawing also on his other works. Schopenhauer argues that all human actions are causally necessitated, as are all other events in empirical nature, hence there is no freedom in the sense of liberum arbitrium indifferentiae. However, our sense of responsibility or agency (being the ‘doers of our deeds’) is nonetheless unshakeable. To account for this Schopenhauer invokes the Kantian distinction between empirical and intelligible characters. The paper highlights divergences between Schopenhauer and Kant over the intelligible character, which for Schopenhauer can be neither rational nor causal. It raises the questions whether the intelligible character may be redundant to Schopenhauer's position, and whether it can coherently belong to an individual agent, suggesting that for Schopenhauer a more consistent position would have been to deny freedom of will to the individual.

Keywords

SchopenhauerKantfreedomwillempirical characterintelligible charactercausenecessityindividualityagencyresponsibility
Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , November 2012 , pp. 431 - 457
Copyright
Copyright © Kantian Review 2012

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