Schopenhauer

Essay on the Freedom of the Will

by Arthur Schopenhauer

The individual character is inborn; it is not a work of art or of accidental circumstances, but the work of nature itself. It manifests itself already in the child and shows there on a small scale what it will be in the future on a large one. Hence two children who have exactly the same upbringing and surroundings will most clearly exhibit fundamentally different characters, characters which they will still have as old men. In its basic features character is even hereditary.

From this presentation of the nature of the individual character it follows of course that virtues and vices are inborn. This truth may be inconvenient to some prejudices and some old wives' philosophy, with its so-called practical interests, that is, its petty, narrow concepts and limited school-children views, but it was already the conviction of the father of morality, Socrates, who according to Aristotle maintained: "Being virtuous or vicious is not a matter of our choice." What Aristotle maintains to the contrary here is evidently bad: for he also shares this opinion of Socrates and expressed it most clearly in the Nicomachean Ethics: "For all men think that each type of character belongs to its possessors in some sense by nature; for from the very moment of birth we are just or fitted for self-control or have the other moral qualities."

If we survey all the virtues and vices in Aristotle's book On Virtues and Vices, where they are reviewed briefly, we shall find that in actual people all of them can be thought of only as inborn traits, and only as such can they be authentic. If on the other hand they came from reflection and were arbitrarily assumed, they would really amount to a sort of dissimulation; they would be unauthentic. Also for this reason we could not count at all on their permanence and reliability under pressure of circumstances.

When we consider in addition the Christian virtue of love, caritas - which is absent in Aristotle and in all ancients - the matter is no different. How could the untiring goodness of one man and the incorrigible, deeply rooted wickedness of another - say the character of the Antonines, Hadrian, or Titus on the one hand, and that of Caligula, Nero, or Domitian on the other - alight upon them from the outside, be the work of accidental circumstances, or of mere knowledge and teaching?

On the other hand, if one assumes the freedom of the will, it is absolutely impossible to say what is the source both of virtue and of vice, or of the fact that two men who were brought up in the same way act quite differently, indeed in an opposite way, under entirely equal circumstances and occasions. The actual, original, basic difference of the characters is incompatible with the assumption of a freedom of the will which means that for any man, in any situation, two contrary actions are equally possible. For then his character must be by nature a tabula rasa (blank slate), like Locke's intellect, and can have no inborn tendency in one direction or another, since this would indeed eliminate that complete equilibrium which one thinks of in the liberty of indifference. Hence, when this is assumed, the basis of the difference in manner in which different people act cannot be found in the subjective aspect. But even less can it be found in the objective aspect, for then the objects would determine action, and the required freedom would be completely lost. Then at best only this way out would be left, namely to locate the origin of that truly great difference in behavior in a middle ground between subject and object, that is, to regard it as arising from the different ways in which the objective is grasped by the subjective, or as it was cognized by different people. But then everything would revert to a correct or incorrect knowledge of the given circumstances, whereby the moral difference in behavior would be transformed into a mere difference of the correctness of judgment, and morality would be transformed into logic.

If now the adherents of the freedom of the will should try to get out of that difficult dilemma by saying that there is indeed no inborn difference of characters but that such a difference arises from external circumstances, impressions, experiences, examples, teaching, etc. - and if a character had come into being for once in this way, the difference of behavior could be subsequently explained from that - then we must reply, first, that according to this view the character would put in an appearance very late in life (whereas actually it can already be recognized in children) and that most people would die before having attained a character; and second, that all those external circumstances whose effect the character was supposed to be lie completely outside our power and would be brought about in one or the other way by chance (or, if one prefers, by Providence). Now, if it is from these that the character and from this in turn the difference of behavior arises, then all moral responsibility for the latter would completely disappear, since obviously this difference would ultimately be the work of chance or of Providence.

The question of the freedom of the will is really a touchstone by which one can distinguish the deeply thinking minds from the superficial ones, or it is a milestone at which their ways part, all the former maintaining the necessary occurrence of an action when the character and the motive are given, and the latter, together with the great masses, clinging to the freedom of the will. There is also a type of middle-of-the-roader who, feeling embarrassed, tack back and forth, shifts the target for himself and others, hides behind words and phrases, or turns and twists the question so long that one no longer knows what it amounted to. This was what Leibniz did, who was much more of a mathematician and a learned man than a philosopher. But in order to make such vacillating talkers face the question, one must put it to them in the following way and insist that they answer it.

1) To a given man under given circumstances, are two actions possible, or only one? - The answer of all who think deeply: only one.

2) Let us consider that a man's character remains unchanged and also that the circumstances whose influence he had to experience were necessarily determined throughout and down to the last detail by external causes, which always take place with strict necessity and whose chain, entirely consisting of likewise necessary links, continues into infinity. Could the completed life course of such a man turn out in any respect, even the smallest, in any happening, any scene, differently from the way it did? No! is the only consistent and correct answer.