One of the lessons a long life teaches is how formed we are by characteristics that were entirely beyond our control. Being who we were, we were bound to act the way we did. To have acted differently we would have had to be a different person. Maybe a better person, because, tragic as it may appear, even unfair, there are good people, not so good people, and bad people. And the big discovery we make in life is the person we have been revealed to be. (Holloway Reference Holloway2012: 226–7)
1. Introduction
In 1841 Schopenhauer published an essay on human freedom, which had its origin in a competition set by the Royal Society of Sciences in Norway.Footnote 1 Schopenhauer entered his piece anonymously, which prevented him from elaborating the metaphysical system he had developed in the virtually neglected World as Will and Representation more than twenty years earlier, and arguably gave him a better purchase on the issues per se. To his great satisfaction he was awarded a prize. The Norwegian Society set an apparently rather precise question: ‘Can the freedom of the human will be proved from self-consciousness?’ Schopenhauer's basic answer to that question is No, at least in the following sense: if we construe freedom as absence of necessity, or liberty of indifference, liberum arbitrium indifferentiae – the only genuinely contentful sense of the term for SchopenhauerFootnote 2 – and take freedom of the will to require that some episodes of human willing do not happen of necessity, then self-consciousness cannot prove freedom of the will, because self-consciousness is powerless to grasp whether the willing that it apprehends is necessitated or not. In phenomenological terms I do not regard my willing as necessitated, but self-consciousness alone is unable to settle either way the question of its necessitation. And if I look beyond self-consciousness, I find, in a straightforwardly Kantian way, that everything that can possibly occur as an experienceable event in space and time is governed by the law of causality. Those events that are my acts of will are part of the experienceable world in space and time, so they too must follow of necessity from causes. The fact that the causal history of my acts of will is not transparent to self-consciousness may partially explain why we are tempted to regard ourselves as subject to no necessity; but more importantly it explains why self-consciousness cannot prove the freedom of the human will.
So the outline of Schopenhauer's answer is in two parts: for all I know in my self-consciousness, my willing can perfectly well be necessitated by prior grounds, and so may not be free; but from what I know independently of self-consciousness, my willing cannot but be necessitated by prior grounds, and so must not be free. This tight argumentative structure is clearly discernible through the characteristically Schopenhauerian presentation of the essay, with its habits of prolixity, digression and literary example, and its bravura rhetoric. A justly famous passage is the following:
Let us think of a human being who, while standing in the street, say, might say to himself: ‘It is six o'clock in the evening, the day's work is ended. I can now go for a walk; or I can go to the club; I can also climb the tower to see the sun going down; I can also go to the theatre; I can also visit this friend, or again that one; yes, I can even run out of the gate into the wide world and never return. All of that is solely up to me, I have total freedom over it; and yet I am doing none of that now, but am going home with just as much free will, to my wife.’ That is exactly as if water were to speak: ‘I can strike up high waves (yes! in the sea and storm), I can rush down in a hurry (yes! in the bed of a stream), I can fall down foaming and spraying (yes! in a waterfall), I can rise freely as a jet into the air (yes! in a fountain), finally I can even boil away and disappear (yes! at 80° of heat); and yet I am doing none of all that now, but I am staying with free will calm and clear in the mirroring pond.’ Just as water can do all of that only when the determining causes to one thing or the other occur, so that human being can in no way do what he imagines he can do except under the same condition. Until the causes occur it is impossible for him: but then he must do it, just as much as the water when it is placed in the corresponding circumstances. (FW 62–3)
Case closed? Well, not entirely. Because there is still an inescapable sense of agency, of being ‘the doer of the deed’, of feeling responsible for one's actions. Going home to his wife is something the man does, and he is aware that it is something he is doing. His wife would hold him responsible, and probably blameworthy, if he disappeared into the wide world instead; she would not hold him responsible for an event that was not a deed of his, such as his falling off the tower because of a strong gust of wind.
Though obvious in common sense, this sense of agency is puzzling. For Schopenhauer it cannot require an absence of necessitation, or groundlessness, or uncaused spontaneity in one's willed actions. What we do, we do necessarily. Nevertheless, he is convinced that the feeling of responsibility, of being the doer, must be warranted. His position now involves a difficult combination of claims. For even though the individual's phenomenology of willing and acting must be regarded as erroneous if it delivers the conviction that his or her actions are not causally determined, it must now be considered reliable in presenting the sense of being a responsible agent. There are two points to raise here. First, on what grounds should we regard the deliverance of phenomenology with regard to causality as faulty, and the deliverance of the same phenomenology with regard to responsibility as truthful? If the absence of causal necessity is an illusion, what prevents us from saying the same about responsibility? Secondly, the very idea of this split implicitly commits Schopenhauer to a kind of compatibilism between determinism and responsibility: it is true that actions are causally determined, but also true that agents are responsible for those actions. We shall return to these issues later.
Schopenhauer's solution, to save genuine responsibility in the face of the necessitation of action, is to say that we really feel responsibility, and have responsibility, for what we are – for our character – rather than for what we do. The doing merely reveals the character, and what we feel is a deep awareness of being the one from whom the action issued with necessity. To negotiate this distinction Schopenhauer invokes Kant's distinction between empirical and intelligible characters, which, he says, ‘belongs among the most beautiful and most profoundly thought products of this great mind, and indeed of human beings ever’ (FW 107). But here we enter treacherous territory. The notion of an intelligible, non-empirical character is, to say the least, hard to grasp. The interpretation of Kant's original version of the intelligible character is itself fraught with difficulty and contention; on some readings it emerges as something incredible, if not incoherent. Then there is the further complication that Schopenhauer puts the Kantian distinction to his own idiosyncratic use, attempting to fit it into a picture of agency and responsibility that is really radically different from Kant's.
Writing on Kant's theory of freedom, Henry Allison offers the following general observation which may provide a helpful start:
Very roughly, act attribution seems to be subject to two conflicting requirements. First, the action must be regarded as something the agent ‘does’ of itself, as opposed to being the result of something ‘done’ to the agent. This can be called the ‘activity requirement’, which is a necessary condition for an act to be attributed to an agent. Second, the action must be explicable in terms of the agent's nature or character. This may be called the ‘explicability requirement’, and it is a necessary condition for attributing any motivation to the agent. (Allison Reference Allison1990: 28)
When the matter is put in these terms, Kant ‘insists that the activity requirement can be met only by an incompatibilist conception of freedom’ (ibid.). So although one might think that explaining an action in terms of the agent's empirical character leaves open the possibility of attributing the action to the agent as something ‘done’, Kant insists that such an explanation, which will always be deterministic, does not leave room for a proper conception of the action as ‘done’ or the agent as its ‘doer’. Instead we require the idea of something non-empirical: the intelligible character of the acting subject, ‘its character as a thing in itself’, something ‘through which it is indeed the cause of those actions as appearances, but which does not stand under any conditions of sensibility and is not itself appearance’ (CPR A539/B567).
If the matter is put in these terms, what is Schopenhauer's position? He too holds that both the activity requirement and the explicability requirement must be met, and that they both can be met; furthermore he argues that the empirical explicability of an act in terms of the agent's character and motivation leaves no room for an empirical account of the agent's being ‘the doer of the deed’. Hence the activity requirement must be met in a ‘transcendental’ way, again by reference to the agent's ‘intelligible character’. So to this extent Schopenhauer's view is a genuine variant of Kant's. However, the appropriation of Kantian terminology here can be grossly misleading as to the nature of Schopenhauer's position. In The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer states that the Third Antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason is ‘the point where Kant's philosophy leads to my own, or where mine grows from the stem of Kant's’ (WWR I, 531). Yet Schopenhauer's view of morality, character and selfhood diverges markedly from Kant's, and Schopenhauer wants to make substantive metaphysical claims about the will as thing in itself, of the kind that Kant studiously avoided. None of this deters Schopenhauer, who audaciously opines ‘I think it is likely that whenever Kant spoke about the thing in itself, he was already thinking obscurely of the will [in Schopenhauer's conception of it] in the darkest depths of his mind’ (WWR I, 535). There is reason to think, however, that if Kant had lived to see this wayward offshoot of his theory brought to light, he might well have been horrified to be associated with it.
In the remainder of this piece I undertake the following tasks: a more detailed presentation of Schopenhauer's case against freedom with respect to acts of will (section 2); an account of Schopenhauer's attempt to meet the ‘activity’ requirement (section 3); an outline of relevant divergences between Schopenhauer and Kant over the intelligible character (section 4); an argument suggesting that the intelligible character may be redundant to Schopenhauer's position (section 5); and an argument that in his position the intelligible character cannot coherently be that of an individual agent, with the result that the individual has no freedom of will (section 6).
2. The Case Against Free Will
The problem of free will that Schopenhauer addresses is effectively this: given what falls within the cognition of a given individual at some time, and in fact causes a particular willed action, could they have performed a different willed action at that time than the one they did? Could they have willed something different? Was their willing free? But now Schopenhauer observes that something strange happens to the ordinary or ‘popular’ concept of freedom here. Ordinarily someone is considered free if there is no hindrance to their doing what they will: ‘in terms of this concept “free” means “in accordance with one's own will”’ (FW 34). But if someone is free just in case nothing prevents them from acting in accordance with their will, how can we even pose the question whether their willing is free? Are we asking ‘Can you will in accordance with your will?’ – that, as Schopenhauer points out, ends in an absurd regress. So to make it workable, the concept of freedom has to be modified; it then becomes equivalent to ‘the absence of all necessity in general’. The central question then emerges as: ‘Is human willing subject to necessity or not?’
Schopenhauer next defines ‘necessary’, leaning on what he had expounded in his earliest publication, the doctoral dissertation of 1813, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. There Schopenhauer argued that the notion of a ‘ground’ (Grund) is ambiguous: not all grounds are of the same type. For instance, a judgement has empirical evidence or a prior judgement as its (justificatory) ground, the ground of a figure's being a triangle is its having three sides, a cause is the ground of its effect, a motive is the ground of an action. However, one point on which Schopenhauer is insistent is that the relation between any ground and its consequent is one of necessity. And the definition of ‘necessary’ that operates throughout the essay is ‘that which follows from a given sufficient ground’. The Norwegian Society's question, then, is again analysed out into a more precise question: can self-consciousness decide whether human actions follow by necessity from a given sufficient ground?
Schopenhauer holds that when I am conscious of myself, of my inside or interior, as he often puts it, or of the arena in which my experience occurs, as opposed to some object that presents itself as external to me, then I find states such as
decisive acts of will that immediately become deeds, … formal decisions … desiring, striving, wishing, longing, yearning, hoping, loving, enjoying, rejoicing and the like, … not-willing or resisting, and detesting, fleeing, fearing, being angry, hating, grieving, suffering pain, in short all affects and passions. (FW 38)
All of these he classes as ‘movements of the will’ of different polarities, tones and intensities. We do not, he suggests, encounter ourselves in our own cognition as cognizing beings, a claim he repeats in the companion piece to the freedom essay, On the Basis of Morals:
through inner sense we cognize the continuing series of our strivings and acts of will which arise on the occasion of external motives, and finally also the manifold weaker or stronger movements of our own will, to which all inner feelings can be reduced. That is all: for the cognizing (das Erkennen) is not itself cognized in turn. (BM 250)
The self that meets us ‘within’, in the arena of consciousness, is fundamentally conative and affective, concerned with trying, striving, acting and feeling positively or negatively towards things. We might think that if self-consciousness taps exclusively into the will in this way, then it should be the prime means by which we discover the will's freedom, if it has freedom, or, if it has none, its subjection to necessity. But no: Schopenhauer argues that, although it is an easy and almost unavoidable mistake to think that self-consciousness reveals the will's freedom, self-consciousness is simply incapable of deciding the crucial question. The truth is that by examining our ‘inside’, leaving out any considerations concerning the external world, we ascertain nothing at all about the relation between the grounds of our acts of will and those acts of will themselves.
The ordinary person recognizes the following as true: ‘I can do what I will’. And it is this that the ordinary person takes to be freedom of the will. And, we may add, so does the rather simple philosophical position known as classical compatibilism, what we are used to locating in Hobbes's notion of ‘liberty of the man … which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to doe’ (Leviathan, ch. xxi, 110) or in Hume's ‘power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may’ (Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 8. 23). But, Schopenhauer objects, freedom of doing, freedom of acting, is crucially different from freedom of willing. If you had willed to turn to the right, and were not restrained, paralysed, drugged and so on, then you would have done so; equally, if you had willed to turn to the left, you would have done so. But this tells us nothing about whether we could equally have willed to turn to the right or to the left. We cannot know that on the basis of self-consciousness alone, Schopenhauer claims, because here we reach a kind of bedrock:
If we now say: ‘But your willing itself, what does that depend on?’ then the person will answer out of self-consciousness: ‘On nothing at all but me! I can will what I will: what I will, that I will.’ … [P]ressed to the extreme here, he speaks of a willing of his willing, which is as if he spoke of an I of his I. We have driven him back to the core of his self-consciousness, where he encounters his I and his will as indistinguishable, but nothing is left over to judge them both. (FW 44–5)
The familiar and elusive sense of being the source of one's actions could be expressed either by saying that it is my will, not some external cause, that is the source of my action, or by saying that I, not some external cause, was the source of my action. We can say ‘it was up to me that I turned left and not right’; or ‘I turned left and not right simply because I willed to.’ But – so Schopenhauer suggests here – we are not saying anything further if we try to elucidate either of these locutions in terms of the other. To say that I am the source of my will, or that my willing to turn left was up to me, really adds nothing.
Schopenhauer argues, then, that we can know in self-consciousness that we can do what we will, but that although it is natural to feel that we are thereby conscious of our will as free, that is really an illusion. As he comments, that answers the question that was set. Can the freedom of the human will be proved from self-consciousness? No it cannot. But Schopenhauer seeks to strengthen his case further. What if we look beyond self-consciousness? If we find from examining our cognition of the external world that there is no such thing as a willing free from necessity, then we would not just be contingently unable to prove freedom of the will from self-consciousness; rather we would learn that it is impossible to have evidence of freedom of the will in self-consciousness, because it is impossible for us to be inwardly conscious of something that simply does not exist anyway. Shifting from self-consciousness to ‘consciousness of other things’, Schopenhauer argues that nowhere in the objective world is there an exception to the rule that whatever happens, happens necessarily as the consequent of some ground. So there is no free will in the world of our outer experience, the intuited or empirical world. Schopenhauer has two basic lines of argument here. (1) A Kantian claim: it is a universal principle knowable a priori that every event in the empirical realm has a cause from which it follows with necessity. (2) An argument from continuity throughout nature: at every point, from the inanimate realm, through plants, animals in general and finally human beings, causality is at work, and proceeding stepwise we find no radical break where necessity can be seen to lapse. Schopenhauer distinguishes three different manifestations of causality: sheer cause and effect, which operates at the level of physics and chemistry, then stimulus and response, to which plants and animals are susceptible, then motive and action, the sphere of creatures with minds that can cognize the world and provide mental representations that function as motives for their willed behaviour. Finally in this hierarchy there occurs rationality. In this case a creature has the capacity to develop representations which are general concepts, in addition to mere intuitions of the here and now. When we have concepts, we can make judgements, think about past and future, make inferences and act upon deliberation, and such judgements and inferences are motives – i.e. causes – of our willed actions. Because of the complexity of thought and action in this final case, and because the connection of actions with their causes is often quite remote – a belief you formed ten years ago and a piece of ratiocination you went through last week might cause your action today – we are tempted to see rationally motivated human action as of quite another kind from the simple cases of cause and effect. But rational human action, as part of what occurs in the natural world, is as much subject to the necessity of consequent following on ground as any other kind of event – a non-rational animal's moving upon seeing its prey, a plant's moving upon the stimulus of sunlight or even (as we saw above) the diverse behaviour of water when subject to various causes.
Motivation is ‘causality that goes through cognition’ (FW 54). A motive is an object of cognition, and thus in Schopenhauer's view is a representation for the subject of cognition. It is a representation that causes willed action. A qualification, as we shall see below, is that Schopenhauer recognizes the possibility of deliberating between motives, hence something can be a motive without in fact being acted upon, without in fact causing a willed action. Let us say, then, that a motive is a conscious perception or thought that occurs in a subject's consciousness and causes, or is at least apt to cause, a willed action of that subject. Schopenhauer says further:
the act of will, which itself is at first only an object of self-consciousness, arises on the occasion of something that belongs to consciousness of other things, thus something that is an object for the cognitive faculty, an object that, in this relation, is called a motive and at the same time is the material of the act of will, in the sense that the act of will is directed towards it, i.e. aims at some alteration in it, or reacts to it. (FW 40)
We must bear in mind throughout that ‘act of will’ (Willensakt or Akt des Willens) for Schopenhauer is equivalent to ‘willed action’. There is no such thing as a purely mental ‘act of will’ (or ‘volition’) standing in a causal relation to bodily action.Footnote 3 There is willed bodily action, whose causes are occurrent motives. Acts of will are the effects of cognitive states which give them their particular aim or content.
Schopenhauer's conception of will is complex and in some ways baffling. But a couple of remarks may be appropriate here by way of orientation. First, acts of will are the tip of an iceberg for Schopenhauer, the highest in a hierarchy of states which can also be called willing, or manifestations of will. In fact, all of any organism's behaviour can be embraced by this term for him, and in this sense will amounts to ‘end-directed activity’. It matters not whether the activity is rational or non-rational, learned or instinctive, conscious or unconscious, or even whether it is the activity of the organism as a whole or merely a sub-function of the organism. The end of the heart's beating is circulation of blood and life for the organism, the end of the wasp's nest-building is protecting its offspring, the end of the cat's crouching in the grass is its catching a smaller animal, the end of my flinching is to avoid a missile, the end of my catching a train is to go to Berlin. We do not normally call all of these willing, because in normal usage ‘willing’ applies to acts of will, which most of the above are not. So in the normal sense it would just be silly to extend the term in this way. But Schopenhauer thinks that we should see how all these end-directed activities in nature have a common essence. Everything in nature is constantly striving, and the common essence of the world is will, in this extended sense of the term. This commonality among the species and processes of nature is metaphysically basic for Schopenhauer. So in answer to the question ‘What exists in reality?’ he answers: striving activity, which manifests itself to experience as multiple, distinct spatio-temporal individuals and events. But since all such individuals and events share the same essence, dichotomies such as conscious/unconscious, rational/non-rational, personal/sub-personal are not metaphysically basic for Schopenhauer.
Let us return to acts of will. They are a specific kind of natural end-directed activity on the part of an organism: namely, episodes of end-directed activity that are caused by conscious objective cognition that provides the activity with its particular end. Humans are distinguished from other animals by having the ability to choose (Wahlentscheidung Footnote 4), and he grants that this gives humans a ‘relative freedom’. But that means simply that the range of causes for their actions is not restricted to present intuitive experience through the senses: by contrast with other animals a human being ‘determines himself independently of present objects, according to thoughts which are his motives’ (FW 57):
By means of his capacity for thought the human being can make present to himself the motives whose influence on his will he senses, in any order he likes, in alternation and repeatedly, to hold them before his will, which is called reflecting: he is able to deliberate, and because of this ability has a much greater choice than is possible for an animal…. [But] only a very superficial viewpoint can take that relative and comparative freedom for an absolute freedom, a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae. The capacity for deliberation that arises through that freedom in fact produces nothing other than the frequently troubling conflict of motives, over which indecision presides, and whose battle ground is the entire mind and consciousness of the human being. For he repeatedly allows the motives to try their force upon his will in competition with one another, whereby the will gets into the same state that a body is in when different forces work in different directions – until finally the decidedly strongest motive beats the others off the field and determines the will, an outcome that is called a resolve (Entschluß), and that occurs with full necessity as the result of the conflict. (FW 57–8)
How plausible is this as an account of deliberation? If we were to take it as a description of the phenomenology of deliberation, we must regard it as wildly off the mark. After all, it does not normally feel to the human deliberator as if he or she is the spectator of a battleground, or as if the resolve is the mere product of different forces, like the movement of a physical object. The outcome will be regarded as a resolve only if it at least seems that it was not necessitated by any of the motives. At times Schopenhauer appears to deny even this phenomenology, for example when he says that our intellect is a ‘spectator’ that regards the outcome of deliberation as indeterminate, while it ‘waits for the true decision as passively and with the same eager curiosity as if it were someone else's will’, and when he says the process is in principle ‘just the same as if we were to look at a vertical pole that has become unbalanced and is wobbling and say “it can fall to the right or to the left”’ (WWR I, 317–18). But I would argue there is a better way to construe such passages. It is not that we experience ourselves as awaiting our own decisions passively: we experience ourselves as being in control and actively making them – after all, says Schopenhauer, the naive viewpoint of the ordinary person is ‘everything I do is entirely up to me’. The images of the intellect awaiting a decision, of a play of forces pushing the will around like a falling pole, are meant as correctives to that ordinary phenomenology, not as bizarre attempts to evoke it. They have a parallel function to the water example quoted above, where we are to imagine an inanimate substance having a phenomenology, solely to reveal how erroneous that phenomenology would be. The upshot for Schopenhauer is that the human capacity for deliberation in no way points to a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae.
So Schopenhauer has argued that since all motives, whether rational or not, are a species of causes, they give rise to our willed action with necessity. To complete the picture, however, he has to give some account of what it is that the motives operate upon. And here he turns to the notion of character. In explaining the behaviour of anything when causes exert an influence on it, we must presuppose that the constitution of the thing, of whatever kind it is, interacts with the cause to produce the necessary effect. To use an example similar to some of Schopenhauer's own, the heat of the sun produces effects on water, wax, growing fruit and human skin, but while the heat remains the same, the difference in the effects depends on the nature of the thing affected. The effect of motives on human action similarly depends on the character of the individual human being, for although there is a species character of human beings, Schopenhauer is also quite certain that human character is individual.
The individual's character, he claims, is something discovered empirically, even for the person whose character it is, something inborn, and something constant that never changes. Schopenhauer also calls this intrinsic unchanging character the individual's will. It is opposed to the intellect, the malleable medium of cognition, and constitutes the core, the very being of the person him- or herself. Schopenhauer produces anecdotal evidence for the claim that character is unchanging, some from popular sayings and attitudes, some from poets and dramatists, some from authorities in classical antiquityFootnote 5 – though in truth this really only establishes that it has often been believed that character is individual, inborn and unchanging. Despite aligning himself with this popular view, Schopenhauer leaves room for some moral improvement in an individual's behaviour. Character cannot be changed, but if the same person in the same circumstances had different cognitive states to motivate their will, then they might well act quite differently. So by enlarging people's knowledge of the world and enabling them to understand better both their own characters and the situations in which they act, we can teach people to become susceptible to new motives:
no moral influence reaches further than the correction of cognition, and the undertaking to remove the character faults of a human being through talking and moralizing and thus wanting to re-shape his character itself, his intrinsic morality, is just the same as the proposal to transform lead into gold by external influence, or to bring an oak tree, by careful tending, to the point of bearing apricots. (FW 72)
In a succinct summary of Schopenhauer's position and its relation to Kant's, Allison has written: ‘Schopenhauer's denial of freedom of the will rests not only on the universal scope of causality and the conception of motives as causes, but also on his core doctrine of the unchangeableness of character’ (Allison Reference Allison2006: 409). However, it is not clear that Schopenhauer's case against freedom strictly requires this unchangeableness of character. Suppose instead that my character develops and changes in some way over time: I tend to be mean and resentful in some contexts during a period spanning times t1 to tn, but for times after tn I tend to be more generous and forgiving in the same kinds of context. Schopenhauer would say that all that has changed here is our knowledge of the character: it was more complex than anyone had yet realized, and a new context revealed a new facet of what was there all along. But if we insist in construing such a case as a genuine change in character, need the overall picture be altered? Schopenhauer can still say that the willed actions of the individual human being are determined by a combination of motives that enter his or her cognition and the particular character upon which they impact. The question need not be whether at every time in my life it was possible for me, under provocation of qualitatively identical experiences, to act differently from the way I in fact act on some particular occasion. The only question is: given who I was at the time I acted, and given these experiences, was I necessitated to act? If we imagine me with my character on that occasion unchanged, having the same thoughts and experiences in the same circumstances, then by Schopenhauer's arguments we must conclude that my action would be just the same again. In this sense we do whatever we do necessarily. So on the face of it the unchangeableness of character is a dispensable premise at least in the negative part of Schopenhauer's case, his argument against freedom in the case of individual, empirical acts of will. Allison expresses Schopenhauer's position as ‘our (empirical) character is something with which we are born and cannot change’ (2006: 409). But note a distinction here: we cannot change our character – right. If Schopenhauer thought that that kind of change were possible, he would be in quite a different place. But it is not possible: our character is our will, our fundamental set of dispositions to act. We of course do not have the power to change our will at will. But it does not follow from that that our set of dispositions to act can never vary over time, which would have to be established, if at all, on other grounds. I have suggested that, even if it cannot be established, a version of Schopenhauer's negative case still stands.
3. Doers of our Deeds
As intimated above, the final chapter of Schopenhauer's essay on freedom takes us in a different, more positive and more challenging direction:
If in consequence of our presentation so far we have entirely removed all freedom of human action and recognized it as thoroughly subordinate to the strictest necessity, we have now been led in that very process to the point where we will be able to grasp true moral freedom, which is of a higher kind. (FW 105)
The liberum arbitrium indifferentiae does not exist. But there is something called freedom after all. The account so far is unsatisfying because of its neglect of the ‘activity requirement’. We have excluded from consideration the fact that we feel responsible for what we do, our ‘unshakeable certainty that we ourselves are the doers of our deeds’ (FW 105). So unshakeable is this sense of ourselves that even the conviction that determinism is true and our willing necessitated cannot remove it. As Schopenhauer says (BM 173), even the reader wholly convinced by his theoretical arguments and examples will not try to duck responsibility for his or her actions on the grounds that they followed necessarily from his or her occurrent motives and character. This seems a roughly accurate picture of a persistent attitude we have towards our own actions – though of course there are, to say the least, a number of routes one could pursue from this point, from ascribing the feeling of certainty to mere illusion, to invoking the duality of subjective and objective viewpoints upon actions, or the duality of practical and theoretical standpoints, or arguing that the attitude in which we regard ourselves as responsible is more central to our self-understanding than any commitment we could have to the theoretical standpoint from which our actions are seen as determined.Footnote 6
Schopenhauer's line here is as follows: the unshakeable certainty is not an illusion, we really are responsible, but not for our deeds, rather for our being or essence. Schopenhauer's argument has not shown, as he now reminds us, that there is an absolute necessity attaching to the occurrence of any particular human action. Suppose that someone is hungry and steals an enticing-looking apple from a market-stall. It is not necessary tout court that some such event take place here and now: rather, it is just because the motives and the circumstance worked upon this human being in particular that this act of stealing took place:
quite another action, indeed the action directly opposed to his own, was after all entirely possible and could have happened, if only he had been another: this alone is what it depended on. For him, because he is this one and not another, because he has such and such a character, no other action was indeed possible; but in itself, and thus objectively, it was possible. So the responsibility he is conscious of relates only provisionally and ostensibly to the deed, but fundamentally to his character: it is for this that he feels himself responsible. And it is for this that others hold him responsible … The deed, along with the motive, comes into consideration merely as evidence of the character of the doer, but counts as a sure symptom of it, by which it is discovered irrevocably and forever. (FW 105–6)
But, he then argues, this kind of responsibility must concern not our empirical being, but our intelligible character, the thing in itself that we timelessly are:
For as an object of experience the empirical character is, like the whole human being, a mere appearance, and so bound to the forms of all appearance, time, space and causality, and subordinate to their laws; by contrast, that which as thing in itself is independent of these forms and so subordinate to no time distinction, and is therefore the enduring and unalterable condition and foundation of this whole appearance, is his intelligible character, i.e. his will as thing in itself, to which, in this capacity, there certainly also pertains absolute freedom, i.e. independence from the law of causality (as a mere form of appearances). This freedom is, however, transcendental, i.e. not occurring in appearance, but present only in so far as we abstract from appearance and all its forms, so as to reach that which, outside all time, is to be thought as the inner essence of the human being in himself. By way of this freedom all deeds of the human being are his own work, however necessarily they issue from the empirical character upon its coincidence with motives – because this empirical character is merely the appearance of the intelligible character in our faculty of cognition … i.e. it is the mode and manner in which the essence in itself of our own self presents itself to the faculty of cognition. Consequently the will is indeed free, but only in itself and outside of appearance: …
This way leads, as is easy to see, to the point that we have to seek the work of our freedom no longer in our individual actions, as the common view does, but in the whole being and essence (existentia et essentia) of the human being himself, which must be thought of as a free deed that merely presents itself for the faculty of cognition, linked to time, space and causality, in a plurality and diversity of actions – actions which nonetheless, precisely because of the original unity of what presents itself in them, must all bear exactly the same character and so appear as strictly necessitated by the motives by which they are called forth and individually determined on each occasion. (FW 107–8)
So this is where Schopenhauer seems to put himself in the same camp as Kant, on whose distinction of empirical and intelligible characters he lavishes such praise. We now turn to the thorny issues surrounding this assimilation of what I have claimed are two quite different positions.
4. The Intelligible Character: Schopenhauer and Kant
One set of issues here concerns the epistemic and ontological status of talk about the intelligible character. Is my intelligible character, my character as thing in itself, posited as something really existing? Or is it only that we must operate ‘as if’ there were such a thing, ‘under the idea of’ their being such a thing, with no serious ontological claim being made? And is the intelligible character knowable? Can assertions that there is such a thing as my intelligible character, or assertions about what it is or does, be regarded as knowledge-claims? Depending on how we read him, Kant answers one or both of these questions with more caution (and more complication) than Schopenhauer. If Kant posits a really existing non-empirical character, it is one whose bare possibility we may assert, but of which we can have no knowledge and must remain ‘austere metaphysical skeptics’, as Allen Wood has put it (Wood Reference Wood2005: 98). On other recent readings – accused by Wood (Reference Wood2005: 99–100) of lacking any genuine basis in Kant's writings – the position is that the intelligible character should not be regarded as any really existing non-empirical kind of thing, and rather indicates a viewpoint or an aspect, a way of thinking of ourselves that is required in order to regard ourselves as rational agents. This can be explained in terms of a duality of practical versus theoretical viewpoints, as in Korsgaard: ‘the role of the idea of freedom and the intelligible world is … a practical one. It provides a conception of ourselves which motivates us to obey the moral law’ (Korsgaard Reference Korsgaard1996: 174). Or as in Allison: ‘[transcendental] idealism allows for the possibility of considering … an agent from two points of view’; ‘not propounding a noumenalistic metaphysics but simply describing how subjects, qua responsible moral agents, must take themselves’ (Allison Reference Allison1990: 52, 141).Footnote 7
For Schopenhauer my intelligible character is decidedly meant to be metaphysically real, an ‘essence in itself’, my very being (existentia), and to be more fundamentally real than anything in the empirical world of appearance. Does Schopenhauer also think it is possible to have knowledge of the intelligible character? Despite some hesitancy in later reflections over whether, or in what sense, we can know the thing in itself at all,Footnote 8 he is cavalier about the overall prospects for metaphysical knowledge of what lies beyond the empirical realm, regarding Kant's austerity here as a position of despair.Footnote 9 As regards self-knowledge he says on the one hand ‘we come to know ourselves … only empirically, and have no cognition a priori of our character’ (BM 175), but on the other hand when he says we might ‘abstract from appearance and all its forms, so as to reach that which … is to be thought as the inner essence of the human being in himself’, a kind of knowledge of our essence in itself seems implied. We can at least know that we have a real inner essence and know that it is will, even if what it wills only becomes available empirically as our actions unfold.
But more glaring differences between Schopenhauer and Kant appear in connection with the notions of rationality and causality. Whatever its precise status is supposed to be, the ‘causality of reason’ is fundamental to Kant's account of freedom. That is why the following question is so urgent for him: ‘Suppose now that one could say reason has causality in regard to appearance: could reason's action then be called free even though in its empirical character … it is all precisely determined and necessary?’ (CPR A551/B579). It is in the idea of ‘pure reason, as a merely intelligible faculty’, in ‘the causality of reason in the intelligible character’ that freedom is to be located for Kant. Kant might have been surprised to find his term ‘intelligible character’ applied to something that is explicitly neither rational nor in any sense causal – yet this is the case with Schopenhauer's version of it. The intelligible character for him is the will that is consistently expressed in the human individual. In The World as Will and Representation we are told that (even in Kant) the distinction of empirical and intelligible characters concerns ‘the relationship … between will as thing in itself and its appearance in time’ (WWR I, 180), and the intelligible character ‘is the will as thing in itself, to the extent that it appears in a particular individual’ (WWR I, 315–16). But, as we saw, the Schopenhauerian will is not essentially rational; it is essentially non-rational. The essence or ‘core’ of each individual is a disposition to strive in certain end-directed ways towards various kinds of ends. Rationality is something that occurs when one particular sub-class of causes moves this core disposition into action in particular ways. Reason can be accounted for wholly empirically, in terms of occurrent thoughts and processes of inference that impact causally on the underlying striving disposition of the individual and bring about action. So reason is not the essence, the underlying thing in itself, even of rational beings; and the rational motives we act upon delineate ‘only the inessential features of this appearance [empirical character], the outer shape of our life's course’ (WWR I, 328).
On the relation between the intelligible character and empirical acts of will, Schopenhauer says what he thinks Kant should have said plainly if he were sticking to his own principles: the relation cannot be causal. ‘When we speak of cause and effect, the relation of the will to its appearance (or of the intelligible character to the empirical) should never be introduced … because it is completely different from a causal relation’ (WWR I, 536). Schopenhauer takes the opportunity to renew the more general complaint made by Kant's ‘first opponents’,Footnote 10 the charge being that Kant is grossly inconsistent over causality and the thing in itself: ‘after constantly insisting that the categories, and thus the category of causality too, could only ever be applied to possible experience: they are merely forms of the understanding that serve to spell out the appearances in the sensible world and have absolutely no meaning above and beyond this, etc.’, Kant nevertheless gives the impression of inferring the thing in itself, an intelligible cause, as a requirement of the world's being an appearance (WWR I, 532). But whatever ‘intelligible causality’ might be, it could not strictly be causality. Or if we are compelled faute de mieux to think of it as if it were causality, that thought should only have the status of a metaphor. Schopenhauer's no-nonsense attitude is: instead of facing this awful tangle over whether intelligible causality is causality or not, and incurring at least the suspicion of some kind of fudge, just stick to the principle that causality only operates in the empirical realm, and have done with it. A similar point would apply to any notion of causality that treated it as some relation of ground and consequent. For Schopenhauer all forms of the principle of sufficient reason that relate grounds to consequents must concern only the relations among representations for the subject (this being the central thread of argument throughout On the Fourfold Root). So Schopenhauer rules out any attempt to have the empirical grounded in, or necessitated by, the intelligible.
Schopenhauer himself admittedly says that the intelligible character ‘determines’ (bestimmt) the empirical character (BM 173), but immediately explicates that as its being ‘equally present in all the individual's deeds and stamped on them like the cachet (Petschaft) in a thousand seals’. Elsewhere he characterizes the empirical character as ‘merely the temporal unfolding of the extra-temporal intelligible character’ (WWR I, 328), and uses another analogy:
Just as the entire tree is simply the constantly repeated appearance of one and the same drive, which … recurs and is easily recognized in the construction of the leaf, stem, branch and trunk, similarly all human deeds are just the constantly repeated expression of the intelligible character, only somewhat varied in form, and the empirical character is an induction based on the summation of these expressions. (WWR I, 316)
The relation we seek between empirical acts and intelligible character is thus one of ‘unfolding’, ‘expressing’ or ‘showing the presence of’. We seem to have a version of the rather traditional notion of an underlying, non-plural, timeless reality revealing a manifest aspect of itself in multiple instantiations through time – a notion whose general merits we cannot debate here, although it would arguably constitute a mysterious and ontologically rather expensive way of accounting for free will.
One of the harder specifics to swallow in Schopenhauer's treatment of the intelligible character is his description of it as an act of will or a deed: ‘an extra-temporal and thus indivisible and unchanging act of will’ (WWR I, 316), ‘a free deed that merely presents itself for the faculty of cognition, linked to time, space and causality, in a plurality and diversity of actions’ (FW 108). Something like this idea is also present in Kant. In the Critique of Pure Reason he says, for example, ‘Pure reason, as a merely intelligible faculty, is not subject to the form of time … The causality of reason in the intelligible character does not arise or start working at a certain time in producing an effect’ (CPR A551/B579); ‘in the intelligible character … no before or after applies, and every action … is the immediate effect of the intelligible character of pure reason’ (CPR A553/B581); and in his ethical works he talks of a timeless choice of Gesinnung, one's overall disposition or character.Footnote 11 This has led commentators to note at least a superficial similarity with Schopenhauer's statements about the free act outside of time.Footnote 12
Schopenhauer appears to mean that we choose our character, and that we do so once and for all in a single timeless act that leaves us fated with respect to whatever issues temporally from that character. Evidence for this is found in his remark that Plato's myth of Er at the end of the Republic is an allegorical expression of the central point concerning intelligible and empirical characters. In the exegesis of the myth in a text by Porphyry that Schopenhauer quotes from,
before they fall into bodies and different life-forms souls have the freedom to choose this or that other life-form, which they then implement through the appropriate life and the body that is suitable to that soul … But that freedom is removed as soon as the soul has attained one or other of the life-forms. (BM 176)
Schopenhauer can find only allegory here because he rejects any dualism of soul and body, and indeed has no use for the concept soul at all. His point is solely to highlight the contrast of a timeless free choice with the fixedness of character that results from what is chosen.
Schopenhauer states that the myth of Er anticipates Kant's position – which must go down as a questionable interpretation. Some Kantian commentators admit that Kant's words sometimes invite this interpretation, but argue that we do not have to see Kant as saddled with the kind of fatalism Schopenhauer seems to embrace. Two examples: Allen Wood argues that Kant holds with the idea of a single timeless choice of character, but that such a choice does not import the alleged fatalism, because ‘we must treat our timeless choice as spontaneously determining each individual act as that act occurs in time…. [O]ur timeless choice does not predetermine our actions but has its influence immediately and on each of them’ (Wood Reference Wood1984: 96). So every time I act I am free, because my timeless free choice becomes operative at that time, a choice which can be called a decision as to ‘the kind of person I will be, or as Kant puts it in the Religion, the “fundamental maxim” on which I will act (Rel 31 g 26e)’ (Wood Reference Wood1984: 93) – and that is not Schopenhauerian fatalism. Allison suggests that in Kant's case the notion of a timeless choice can be explained as expressing an idea of reason rather than an actual event, psychological, metaphysical or of any kind. There is no timeless choice of character on this view, just the regulative idea of reason's determining the will by legislating to it according to a chosen fundamental maxim or set of principles.Footnote 13 But the larger point for our purposes is that, however it is read, any such idea of timeless choice in Kant must concern the force of reason and the rules that the agent takes as those which are to be acted upon – and it is here that the really decisive difference between Kant and Schopenhauer lies.
Kant invokes the intelligible character because he is seeking a distinct sense in which I am a source of my action, or have a power over my action. The crux of the idea is that reason has a force that is quite other than the causal power to be found in nature. Without this alternative force – marked, albeit inadequately, by the term ‘intelligible causality’ – the ‘activity requirement’ cannot be met, and I cannot properly regard myself as an agent. Reason sets a rule for me to act on, and in order to act on it I must spontaneously take it to be a rule that has normative force. In Allison's words,
a rational agent is not regarded as being determined in a quasi-mechanistic fashion by the strongest desire (roughly the Leibniz–Hume model). On the contrary, to the extent to which actions are taken as genuine expressions of agency … they are thought to involve an act of spontaneity on the part of the agent, through which the inclination or desire is deemed or taken as an appropriate basis of action.… Moreover, … this occurs by subsuming the inclination or desire under a practical rule or principle. (Allison Reference Allison1990: 39)
We have seen already how different Schopenhauer's account must be. His picture of rational agency and deliberation is in a relevant sense ‘quasi-mechanistic’, with empirical character (the agent's will) and occurrent motives determining action. But the intelligible character, whatever it is, is not rational and therefore cannot offer the kind of alternative force Kant seeks to place in it. Indeed, Schopenhauer's intelligible character is designed to root the agent even more firmly within nature, since it counts as his or her real essence, common in kind with the willing and striving that is the essence of everything in nature. The Schopenhauerian intelligible character, therefore, cannot play anything like the role of the Kantian.
5. Why the Intelligible Character?
Having noted some differences between Kant's position and Schopenhauer's, we must question why the latter requires the intelligible character at all. He, like Kant, is also seeking a locus for responsibility or agency. But with reason and motivation already present on the empirical side in his picture, and no clear sense of how the intelligible can exert influence on action, would a better solution not be to situate responsibility or agency in the enduring empirical character, the disposition to end-directed behaviour that is firmly entrenched in empirical nature and, along with occurrent motives, causes all the individual's actions? I would then be responsible for a sub-species of events: those in which the will of the particular human being I am is caused to move by certain cognitive events in the conscious mind I find myself as (as Schopenhauer puts it, WWR I, 25). That might be the basis for an account of my being the doer of my deeds, an account satisfying what we called the ‘activity requirement’, without any recourse to the timeless or non-empirical. So why would this be inadequate? A simple reconstruction of a Schopenhauerian answer might run as follows:
(1) Our certain feeling of being doers of our deeds confirms that we are responsible.
(2) Responsibility attaches only to what is free.
(3) Freedom is absence of necessitating grounds.
(4) There can be no absence of necessitating grounds in anything in the empirical realm.
From this we can conclude that a part or aspect of us must be outside the empirical realm. It is as if our very feeling of agency demands that we be more than empirical parts of nature.
Schopenhauer takes (3) as definitional of freedom in the only sense that has any proper content. He takes (4) as an a priori necessary principle of the understanding. So there would be no convincing him to abandon either of these premises. But (1) and (2) look more vulnerable. Nietzsche's remarks in ‘The Fable of Intelligible Freedom’, Human All Too Human, I, 39, attack (1) head on:
Schopenhauer concluded … thus: because certain actions bring after them a feeling of displeasure (‘consciousness of guilt’), there must exist a sense of accountabilityFootnote 14 … From the fact of that displeasure Schopenhauer believes he can demonstrate a freedom which man must have acquired somehow, not in respect of his actions, but in respect to his nature … Here the erroneous conclusion is drawn that from the fact of a feeling of displeasure there can be inferred the justification, the rational admissibility of this feeling of displeasure … But a feeling of displeasure after a deed is absolutely not obliged to be rational; on the contrary, it cannot be, since it rests precisely on the erroneous presupposition that that deed need not have taken place with necessity.
However, Nietzsche's point seems to trade on (2) (Responsibility attaches only to what is free): for the inference he bars is that from feeling that we are doers to our having responsibility in the sense of being non-necessitated. He asserts that we are not responsible precisely on the grounds that our deeds are necessitated. This seems to trade on the point raised earlier, that if the phenomenology of willed action is mistaken in presenting us as not necessitated in our actions, then it is eo ipso mistaken in presenting us as responsible agents.
However, there is a case for saying that in Schopenhauer's account (2) itself looks vulnerable. Schopenhauer has arguably made ground on two fronts, showing that we cannot attribute our actions to a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, and that nonetheless we have an unshakeable sense of agency. (2) looks like an unnecessary obstacle to holding these two claims together. Would he not produce a more consistent account by abandoning the claim that we must be free in order to be responsible (assuming still that freedom is absence of necessitating grounds)? Abandoning (2) would obviate the wild goose chase of finding something, somewhere, that is ‘free’. There is a case, in other words, for saying that Schopenhauer should consistently have abandoned any positive claim that we have freedom, and accepted that we lack freedom, in his sense, not just empirically, but altogether – while retaining his claim that this lack of freedom does not remove our sense of agency.
6. The Problem of Individuality
In this final section I want to argue that, even if we grant Schopenhauer the step that if there is responsibility then there must be freedom somewhere in the system, and grant him the further consequence that whatever has this freedom must be something intelligible or non-empirical, there remains the serious problem of how this non-empirical something can coherently be individual. Space and time, as Schopenhauer repeats endlessly, are the principium individuationis. The thing in itself is not separable into individuals because it is not subordinate to space and time. But if the intelligible character is the thing in itself that, by virtue of being outside of time and space, cannot be divided into distinct individuals, how can it be just what this particular individual is in itself? Individuation should not obtain at the level of the ‘in itself’, where the intelligible character is supposedly located. In a later comment Schopenhauer acknowledges the difficulty, only to concede quietly that he cannot resolve it:
[I]ndividuality does not rest solely on the principium individuationis and so is not appearance through and through, but … it is rooted in the thing in itself, the will of the unique being (des Einzelnen): for his character itself is individual. But how far down its roots here go, is one of those questions I do not undertake to answer. (PP II, §116, 227, trans. modified)
One recourse available to Schopenhauer lies in his notion of Ideas, which are plural and distinct from one another while also being non-spatio-temporal. In his theory of artistic portraiture Schopenhauer holds that each human individual's character expresses a unique Idea (see WWR I, 250). But in the context of freedom he does not address this question of non-empirical individuation, and so remains open to the challenge that the individual must be empirical, and the empirical must be necessitated. It would follow not only that the non-necessitated, free locus of responsibility must be non-empirical, but that it must be non-individual. As a result there is at best serious unclarity, at worst total contradiction, in the very idea that the free, non-necessitated inner essence that unfolds itself in my actions should be anything individual at all, that it should be an essence pertaining uniquely to me, this human being. Likewise if we put Schopenhauer's attempted point in terms of the free, extra-temporal act of will, a myth-of-Er-like choice of one's fixed nature, there is the same difficulty in that act's being mine, if its being mine is supposed to relate, as it surely must for Schopenhauer, to its issuing from one particular human individual.
This difficulty is deepened when Schopenhauer has his full metaphysics in hand, in The World as Will and Representation. He then makes a point of stating that ‘genuine freedom, i.e. independence from the principle of sufficient reason, accrues only to the will as thing in itself, not to its appearance’ (WWR I, 430). But now it becomes clear that it is only the will that is the single inner essence of the world, lying outside of space and time, and hence not subject to any grounding or necessitation at all, that can really be free. It freely manifests itself in space and time as a multiplicity of individuals and actions, me and mine included. But I, as individual, am not free at all. In the end, all the Schopenhauerian individual can say is ‘If only I had been another’ (see FW 105, quoted above). The individual turns out to be powerless, stuck with responsibility and guilt for the individuality the world has seen fit to express in him or her. And in Schopenhauer's system individuality per se emerges as a curse and an error from which we need an escape. Death is the ‘great opportunity no longer to be I’ (WWR II, 507), and only by thus losing the individual does the will regain its true freedom. The values to be found in aesthetic experience, in compassionate action and in the ‘salvation’ of which this life of suffering allegedly stands in need, all revolve around changes in consciousness which disassociate the subject of experience from its identification with the individual. In his more religious moments Schopenhauer is happy to say that to exist as an individual manifestation of willing is already to bear guilt, a view that he associates with the Christian doctrine of original sin:
Since we are what we ought not to be, we also necessarily do what we ought not to do … Although the guilt lies in action, in the operari, yet the root of the guilt lies in our essentia et existentia, for the operari proceeds necessarily from these, as I have explained in the essay On the Freedom of the Will. Accordingly, original sin is really our only true sin. (WWR II, 604, translation slightly modified)
Schopenhauer's picture of human existence therefore has no room for genuine individual freedom at all. Nature's fundamental drive to manifest itself in diverse life forms freely wills my individual existence with an essence that reveals itself unmistakeably in all my actions. I feel responsible for them because they all issue inescapably from me, bearing my stamp upon them – but I, as the individual human being I am, could not have made my fixed and inborn character any different, and, given that I have this character and no other, I could not have acted any differently. Nonetheless the feeling of responsibility, and especially the feeling of guilt, must fall upon me: guilt ultimately for existing as the individual that the world has freely willed me to be, but not a guilt that is owed to any genuine freedom of mine.Footnote 15
