Arthur Schopenhauer’s doctrine of free will

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of the phenomenon of free will in the philosophical system of Arthur Schopenhauer, the identification of the lines of continuity of this problem and the discovery of new and specific features in the development by the German thinker of the question of free will, on the basis of the use of methods of historical and philosophical analysis and rational reconstruction. The article demonstrates Schopenhauer’s desire to avoid two opposite poles in the solution of the question of free will, one of which asserts the fact of the dominance of rigid necessity over the events of nature, and the other, on the contrary, deduces everything from a certain universal act of will. The third alternative proposed by Schopenhauer in continuation with the ideas of I. Kant’s transcendental idealism is analyzed in detail. The author focuses on the modifications Schopenhauer himself made to Kant’s concept of the co-existence of freedom and necessity. Schopenhauer’s attitude to the concept of fatalism is considered separately and his understanding of necessity as such is clarified. The main point of the first part is the statement that the world has not only an empirical side, reflecting the existence of phenomena in accordance with the law of sufficient reason in a certain time and space, but also an intelligible side, identical with the baseless will. In addition, the author emphasizes the importance of the premise of autocracy, independence as a basic characteristic of free will. In the second part of this article, the relation of the empirical and intelligible nature of the world in relation to the analysis of human behavior is revealed in more detail. The relationship between the original autonomy of the will, freedom and moral responsibility is clarified. The author reconstructs Schopenhauer’s arguments in the work “On the Freedom of the Will”. The fallacy of the empirical understanding of free will is revealed and the possibility of transcendental freedom is justified. The key thesis of the second part of the article is reduced to the statement that it is impossible to find true freedom in individual concrete actions of a person; that a person in her particular manifestations cannot choose to be this way or to be different.