On the Freedom of the Will (German: Ueber die Freiheit des Willens) is an essay presented to the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences in 1838 by Arthur Schopenhauer as a response to the academic question that they had posed: "Is it possible to demonstrate human free will from self-consciousness?" It is one of the constituent essays of his work Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik (The Two Basic Problems of Ethics).[1][2]
Essentially, Schopenhauer claimed that as phenomenal objects appearing to a viewer, humans have absolutely no free will. They are completely determined by the way that their bodies react to stimuli and causes, and their characters react to motives. As things that exist apart from being appearances to observers (noumenon), however, human life can be explained as following from the freedom of will (though not in a way satisfying Christian and other theology, as he says in other works[3]).
- ^ Schopenhauer 2010, p. xxviii
- ^ Schopenhauer 1840
- ^ Cf. e.g. On Human Nature, c. 3.