ABSTRACT
There is an important reason why Schopenhauer has been rather neglected as an ethical theorist, namely, it is widely held that despite his invocations of transcendental freedom, Schopenhauer’s view really amounts to a hard determinism , the view that human beings (in addition to non-human animals) are determined to act as they do on the basis of psycho-physical laws. Dale Jacquette, for one, acknowledges Schopenhauer’s discussion of “transcendental freedom” but in the final analysis holds that “there can be no meaningful human freedom in Schopenhauer’s system.” He cites two main reasons why Schopenhauer’s view amounts to hard determinism: “First, the actions undertaken by moral agents, like all events in the phenomenal world, are governed by the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason, and in particular by causal laws . . . [and second] Schopenhauer regards the character of each willing subject . . . [as] unalterable, incapable of change” (Jacquette, 2005, 186). Similarly, Günter Zöller maintains that while Schopenhauer holds onto a “transcendental freedom” founded on his metaphysics of will, “freedom is not to be found in the world as representation or the world known under the forms of space, time and causality. In that case freedom would be the miraculous suspension of the natural order . . . freedom is a mystery but not a miracle” (Zöller, 2004, xxix). Most recently, Christopher Janaway has argued that despite Schopenhauer’s invocation of a Kantian intelligible character on which to ground the freedom of the human will, “a more consistent position would have been to deny freedom of the will to the individual” (Janaway, 2012, 431). This is because, according to Janaway, the differences between Schopenhauer’s account of the intelligible character and Kant’s are so stark (viz. its rationality and causal efficacy) that Schopenhauer should have dropped his talk of the intelligible character, and should have recognized that his “picture of human existence . . . has no room for genuine individual freedom at all” (Janaway, 2012, 455).
