Schopenhauer on Freedom of the Will and Mental Causation

Barbara Hannan

Arthur Schopenhauer's "Prize Essay on Freedom of the Will" is one of the best articles ever written on the subject. Taken together with Schopenhauer's other major works, "The World as Will and Representation" and "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason," the Prize Essay reveals an account of moral freedom and empirical determinism unmatched in clarity and deeply intriguing in its philosophical implications. Like Kant, Schopenhauer believes that as empirical beings, humans must accept that our actions are causally determined. The causes are motives (external objects of desire and aversion) together with character (the unique and unalterable set of reactive tendencies possessed innately by each human personality). Schopenhauer agrees with Kant that since causation is the form of empirical intuition rather than a feature of the noumenon, we are free from causation as noumenal selves --- "Freedom is transcendental." What Schopenhauer means by this, however, goes beyond Kant. Schopenhauer holds that the vital force --- that which manifests itself in humans as character, that which in all animals reacts to motives to produce action --- is one aspect of the thing-in-itself, the natural force(s) presupposed by all causal explanations. Other aspects of the thing-in-itself are physical forces such as electromagnetism and gravity. Schopenhauer believes that the vital force behind what we now call "mental causation" is irreducible to any other basic forces; it is itself a fundamental part of the fabric of reality. Schopenhauer's position is both a sort of monism (there is ultimately only one force constituting the thing-in-itself; Schopenhauer calls this force the Will) and a sort of dualism (explanations of action, terminating in reference to the aspect of the Will known as the vital force, do not reduce to any other sort of causal explanation, such as those terminating in reference to other aspects of the Will such as electromagnetism or gravity). I believe Schopenhauer's position is comparable to the dual-aspect theory of Spinoza, and I argue that it may well be correct. At any rate, it has the attractive feature of making the otherwise-intractable problem of mental causation go away.