Essay on the freedom of the will – Arthur Schopenhauer

The Illusion of Voluntary Choice: A Methodical Dissection of Human Agency

Prize Essay on the Foundation of Morals — Foreword and Preliminary Orientation

We begin with Schopenhauer’s own framing of the text. This is not a free-standing philosophical treatise but a response to a prize question posed by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences in 1839. The Society asked: “Is the freedom of the will to be proved from the testimony of self-consciousness?” Schopenhauer, ever the polemicist, seizes this institutional occasion to stage what he considers a decisive confrontation between common illusion and philosophical truth.

In the opening pages, Schopenhauer immediately draws a distinction that will govern the entire argument. He notes that the question of free will has been debated for millennia, but almost always in a confused manner because the very term “freedom” is ambiguous. He isolates four distinct meanings: physical freedom, the absence of material obstacles; intellectual freedom, the unimpeded operation of the understanding; moral freedom, which concerns the determination of action by motives; and finally what he calls “the freedom of the will proper.” The last of these, he insists, is what the Society means, and it refers to the question of whether the human will can choose entirely without grounds, without being necessitated by anything at all.

The key move comes early. Schopenhauer points out that self-consciousness, when carefully examined, tells us only what we do, not why we do it. When I raise my arm, I am conscious of the act as my act — but I am not thereby conscious of whether it could have been otherwise. The testimony of self-consciousness, he argues, is limited to the fact of volition itself; it cannot reveal the *ground* of that volition. Here the author establishes his central methodological claim: that the question of freedom cannot be settled by introspection alone, but requires an understanding of the causal structure that governs all action.

On Self-Consciousness and Its Illusions

Schopenhauer now takes up the Society’s question directly, dedicating a section to examining what self-consciousness actually tells us about willing. He enters into a careful phenomenological description of the experience of choosing. When we deliberate between two alternatives — say, to stay home or go for a walk — we feel ourselves weighing reasons, and we experience the decision as “ours.” This feeling, he argues, has been the primary source of the belief in free will.

But Schopenhauer invites us to look more closely. He describes self-consciousness as a kind of inner theater where the will appears as the sole performer. What we never perceive from within is the mechanism of motivation itself. When I decide to go for a walk, I feel the decision emerge, but I do not simultaneously feel the chain of causes — my desire for fresh air, my restless legs, my memory of a pleasant path — that necessitated that decision. These causes operate silently, below the threshold of inner awareness, and we mistake their absence from consciousness for their absence altogether.

“Self-consciousness, when it is only concerned with the will, has the peculiarity that it only knows the will’s decisions and the resolution that is immediately consequent upon them, but not the motives which produced them.”

This passage is the architectural keystone of the entire first part of the essay. Schopenhauer is not denying that we have conscious experiences of choosing; he is arguing that these experiences are systematically misleading. Self-consciousness is like a spectator who sees only the final move on a chessboard and concludes that the piece moved itself. The motives are the hidden hand, and they are simply invisible from the first-person perspective. The illusion of freedom, then, is not a philosophical mistake but a natural and inevitable feature of how consciousness operates — and it requires a second, external perspective to be corrected.

The Distinction Between Acting and Knowing Why One Acts

Building on this foundation, Schopenhauer introduces a crucial distinction that sharpens his critique. He separates what he calls the empirical character of a person — the observable pattern of their actions — from the intelligible character that lies beneath it. This is a Kantian inheritance, but Schopenhauer gives it his own deterministic spin. The empirical character is what we see: a man who always tells the truth, a woman who consistently acts with compassion. But the empirical character does not explain itself; it is the outward manifestation of an inner, fixed nature that expresses itself necessarily given the right circumstances.

Here Schopenhauer offers an analogy that clarifies his position. He compares the human will to a balance scale. The scale is not free: when weights are placed in the pans, it must tip to the heavier side. But if we could ask the scale how it feels, it might say: “I could tip either way — nothing compels me from within.” And indeed, the scale has no internal constraint; its movement is entirely determined by the external weights. Similarly, the will has no internal constraint — it does not feel forced — but it is entirely determined by external motives, which act as weights on the psyche. The illusion of freedom arises because we mistake the absence of internal coercion for the absence of determination altogether.

Schopenhauer then sharpens this into a direct challenge to the Society’s question. If self-consciousness could prove freedom, he argues, then every person would agree that they possess it. But this is not the case: thoughtful people have always been divided on the question, and the most profound thinkers — from the Stoics to Spinoza to Kant — have denied it. The very existence of the debate proves that self-consciousness is not a clear and unanimous witness. What self-consciousness provides is a *feeling* of freedom, not a *proof* of it. And feelings, as Schopenhauer notes with characteristic bluntness, are not arguments.

The Argument from Causality: The Law of Sufficient Ground

At this point Schopenhauer shifts from the introspective to the metaphysical. He introduces the principle that will ground his entire deterministic case: the law of sufficient ground, or more specifically, the law of causality. This law, he argues, is not an empirical discovery but a condition of all possible experience. We cannot think of any change without thinking of a cause. The will’s decisions are changes that occur in time, and therefore they must fall under this law.

Schopenhauer devotes considerable space to demonstrating that the law of causality applies to all phenomena without exception. He distinguishes between four forms of necessity: logical (the necessity of a conclusion from premises), mathematical (the necessity of a geometrical theorem), physical (the necessity of a material effect from its cause), and finally moral necessity — the necessity with which a given motive produces a given action in a character of a certain kind. It is this last form that concerns the free will debate.

“Moral necessity is the compulsion that a motive exercises over the will, when the character is given.”

The passage is deceptively simple but carries enormous weight. Schopenhauer is not saying that motives are like physical forces — he does not reduce the mind to matter. Rather, he argues that the relationship between motive and action is as law-governed and necessary as the relationship between a chemical reagent and its effect. Given a specific character (a fixed set of drives, desires, and dispositions) and a specific motive (an object of perception or thought that appeals to one of those drives), the resulting action follows with the same certainty as night follows day. The only difference is that in the physical world we can see the causal chain, while in the moral world the chain passes through the opacity of self-consciousness.

This argument accomplishes something crucial for Schopenhauer’s project. It shifts the burden of proof onto the libertarian. The defender of free will must show not merely that we *feel* free, but that human action is an exception to the universal law of causality. And since causality is a condition of experience itself — a transcendental principle, not an empirical generalization — to claim an exception is to claim that human action stands outside the very framework that makes experience intelligible. This, Schopenhauer suggests, is not a modest claim but an extravagant one that demands extraordinary evidence — evidence the libertarian cannot provide.

The Example of the Man on the Street

To make his abstract argument concrete, Schopenhauer presents one of his most famous thought experiments. Imagine a man standing on a street corner at noon. He is presented with two alternatives: to stay where he is or to walk to the right. He experiences a moment of indecision, then chooses to go right. The libertarian would say: he could have gone left; his will was free. But Schopenhauer insists we ask: what would have happened if a clear and powerful motive — say, the appearance of a beautiful woman on the left, or the threat of an oncoming car from the right — had been present? The answer is obvious: the man would have gone to the left or stayed put, accordingly. The decision he actually made was determined by the subtle balance of motives that happened to be present — his desire to stretch his legs, his lack of any strong reason to go one way rather than another, and perhaps the slight statistical preference of right-handed people.

Schopenhauer then pushes the example further. Suppose we could know this man’s entire character — all his innate dispositions, his acquired habits, his present physical state. And suppose we could know all the motives acting upon him at this moment — every perception, every thought, every memory. Under these conditions, Schopenhauer claims, we could predict his choice with absolute certainty, just as we can predict which way a released pendulum will swing. The feeling of “I could do otherwise” is real as a feeling, but it is an illusion born of ignorance. It expresses merely our ignorance of the full causal picture.

This example does more than illustrate the theory; it performs a kind of philosophical therapy. By asking the reader to imagine themselves in the position of the man on the street, Schopenhauer forces a recognition: the feeling of freedom is not a counterargument to determinism but part of what determinism must explain. A successful determinism does not deny the feeling; it accounts for it. And the account is that the feeling arises precisely because the determining causes are unconscious. We mistake the absence of perceived coercion for the absence of any coercion at all.

The Role of Character and the Impossibility of Self-Creation

The deepest section of this first quarter of the essay concerns the nature of individual character. Schopenhauer argues that each person has a fixed, unchangeable character that is innate and inborn. This is not merely an empirical observation but a logical necessity of his system. If actions are determined by the interaction of character and motive, and if motives are external and variable, then the only stable source of behavioral difference between persons is their character. Character is the *x* that remains constant as motives change.

Schopenhauer anticipates the obvious objection: if character is fixed, how do we account for moral improvement, education, and repentance? His answer is nuanced. He distinguishes between character itself, which is unchangeable, and knowledge, which can grow. What changes in a person over time is not their fundamental desires — the egoist remains egoistic at core — but their understanding of which actions will satisfy those desires. A young egoist might steal because he does not yet understand the long-term costs; an older egoist of the same character might become honest because he has learned that honesty serves his egoism better. The appearance of moral change is real, but it is a change in means, not in ends.

“The so-called transformation of character is only a correction of the understanding; the character itself remains unchanged.”

This passage is crucial because it reveals the depth of Schopenhauer’s pessimism about human agency. We cannot choose what we want at the most fundamental level. We can only become more or less intelligent about how to get what we already want. The will is not a blank slate that writes itself; it is a given, a datum, a fact of nature as fixed as the shape of a rock. What we call “becoming a better person” is really just learning to navigate the world more effectively given our unchanged nature. This is not moral freedom but moral illumination — and illumination does not change the will, only its direction.

The implications of this view are profound. If character is innate and unmalleable, then praise and blame take on a radically different meaning. We do not praise a person for being generous any more than we praise a rose for being red. We praise the *action* as beneficial to others, and we use praise as a motive to reinforce similar actions in the future. But the ultimate source of the action — the character — is not chosen and therefore not merited. Schopenhauer is here preparing the ground for his later argument that moral responsibility requires a different framework entirely, one that moves beyond the illusion of libertarian freedom to a deeper understanding of what it means to be an agent.

Self-Consciousness and the Illusion of Freedom

We are now at a pivotal moment where Schopenhauer turns from the general proposition that the will is determined to a direct confrontation with the most powerful objection: the immediate testimony of self-consciousness. Every person, he acknowledges, has a strong and persistent feeling that they *could have done otherwise*. When I raise my arm, it seems to me that I could just as easily have left it at my side. This feeling, this inner certainty of freedom, is the rock upon which popular belief in free will rests.

Schopenhauer does not dismiss this feeling. Instead, he examines it with surgical precision. The key passage comes as he analyzes what self-consciousness actually reports:

“Self-consciousness says nothing at all about the causal connection; for its whole province is the deed and its opposite, which, since both are thought of as merely taking place in the imagination, leave the will’s relations to the external world entirely out of the picture.”

This is a devastating move. Schopenhauer argues that when we experience the feeling of freedom, we are not experiencing a genuine insight into causation. Rather, we are experiencing the mental representation of two alternative actions side by side in imagination. I picture raising my arm; I picture leaving it at my side. Both images are present equally before my mind. And because I can imagine both, my self-consciousness reports: I could do either. But this is a confusion between what is merely *thinkable* in imagination and what is *possible* in reality given all determining conditions.

The illumination here is crucial for the entire argument. Schopenhauer is not denying that we have a felt experience of freedom — rather, he is denying that this experience tells us anything about the actual metaphysical structure of volition. Self-consciousness, he insists, is a “narrow” faculty that only reports on the immediate content of inner perception. It shows us what we are thinking and feeling *now*, but it cannot reveal the causal chain that produced those thoughts and feelings. When I decide between two options, I am aware of making a choice, but I am not aware of the causes that make that choice inevitable. The feeling of freedom is therefore an illusion generated by ignorance — I mistake my lack of awareness of causes for an absence of causes altogether.

Having undermined the testimony of self-consciousness, Schopenhauer now introduces a distinction that he considers absolutely fundamental. The feeling of freedom, he argues, belongs properly to what he calls the consciousness of *acting*, not to the consciousness of *the grounds of acting*. Every human being knows with certainty that they can act on their decisions — that is, they can translate their will into physical movement. This is the empirical freedom of being able to do what one wills. But this is not the same as the metaphysical freedom of being able to will otherwise than one does.

Schopenhauer makes the point with characteristic bluntness:

“The question is not whether he can *do* what he wills, but whether he can *will* what he wills.”

This single sentence crystallizes the entire problem. The ordinary person, when asked whether they are free, thinks immediately of the connection between will and action. “Of course I am free,” they say, “I can raise my arm whenever I decide to.” And this is true — as far as it goes. The healthy human being can indeed act on their decisions. But this is not the freedom that the free will debate is about. The real question is whether the decision itself is free — whether the will is self-determining in its very origin, or whether it too is subject to causal law.

Schopenhauer’s illumination here uncovers a persistent confusion in ordinary thinking about freedom. People conflate two very different things: the unhindered execution of a decision and the uncaused origin of that decision. A man in chains who decides to walk is not free to *act* on his decision — his empirical freedom is restricted. But a man who is not in chains, who can act on his decision, may still not be free in the deeper sense if his decision itself is determined by forces outside his control. The feeling of freedom in action tells us nothing about whether the will itself is free to choose its own determinations. This distinction, once understood, reveals that the whole weight of the free will doctrine rests on an equivocation — on confusing the freedom to *do* with the freedom to *will*.

The Hypothesis of an Absolutely Free Will

Having cleared the ground, Schopenhauer now turns to a direct examination of what an absolutely free will would have to be. This is a crucial section where he forces the reader to think through the logical implications of libertarian freedom. What would a will look like if it were truly free — if it were not determined by motives, character, circumstances, or any preceding cause whatsoever?

The passage that carries the argument is characteristically precise:

“A free will would be a will that is not determined by any ground at all; hence its individual acts of volition would follow from nothing; each one would be absolutely a first beginning, and would arise of itself from the will’s own nature, without being brought about by anything else.”

Schopenhauer then pushes this thought to its conclusion. Such a will would be utterly random, not in the sense of being unpredictable, but in the sense of being *groundless*. Nothing whatsoever could account for why it chose one thing rather than another. If a man with such a will stood at a crossroads, with all motives perfectly balanced on both sides, his decision would not be a response to any reason or inclination — it would be a pure, inexplicable eruption of choice from nothing.

The illumination here cuts to the heart of the matter. Schopenhauer is showing that the concept of absolute freedom, when thought through rigorously, is actually incoherent. A will that is not determined by anything is a will that has no connection to the agent’s character, desires, values, or circumstances. But such a will would not be *my* will in any meaningful sense. It would be a random event generator, not a locus of agency. If I choose coffee over tea for no reason whatsoever, that choice is not an expression of my identity — it is a brute accident. And accidents cannot bear the weight of moral responsibility. The defender of free will wants a will that is both self-determining and meaningful, but Schopenhauer argues that these two requirements pull in opposite directions. True self-determination requires grounding in the agent’s character and reasons; absolute freedom requires the absence of any ground at all. They cannot be simultaneously satisfied.

The Example of the Man at the Crossroads

To make this abstract argument concrete, Schopenhauer offers a vivid thought experiment that has become famous in the history of philosophy. He asks us to imagine a man standing at a street corner, presented with two equally attractive alternatives. The man asserts that he could just as easily go to the right as to the left — he feels himself to be perfectly free. Schopenhauer then reveals the hidden determinism at work:

“One man says he can do what he wills: he can, if he wills, go to the right, and also, if he wills, go to the left. But the question is: Can he will both? For if he can will both, then his will would be free.”

The example then plays out in precise stages. Suppose the man decides to go to the left. The defender of free will says: “See, he freely chose left over right.” But Schopenhauer asks what determined that choice. If the man’s character is such that he prefers novelty, he might choose left because he has been to the right before. If he is cautious, he might choose right because he knows what is there. If neither motive operates, then his choice is groundless — a random event. But a random event is not a free choice; it is a chance occurrence. The man does not *determine* himself by choosing; rather, something indeterminate happens *in* him, and he calls it freedom.

The illumination deepens the argument considerably. Schopenhauer is showing that the feeling of freedom in the moment of choice is actually compatible with complete determinism. The man’s sense that he could have chosen otherwise is not a perception of metaphysical possibility but a reflection of his ignorance of the determining causes. If we knew his character perfectly, his past experiences, his current state of mind, and all the external circumstances, we could predict with certainty which way he would go. The feeling of freedom is therefore a kind of epistemic limitation — we do not feel the causes working upon us, so we assume they are not there. But this is like an object in a dark room feeling itself to be floating freely simply because it cannot see the strings that hold it in place.

The Distinction Between Intelligible and Empirical Character

We now arrive at one of the most philosophically demanding sections of the work, where Schopenhauer introduces the Kantian distinction between intelligible character and empirical character to resolve the apparent contradiction between freedom and necessity. This is not a digression but the theoretical core of his entire argument: how can he claim that all actions are necessitated while still preserving the undeniable fact that we experience ourselves as responsible agents?

Schopenhauer begins by recalling Kant’s insight that the same action can be understood from two different perspectives: as a phenomenon in time, subject to the law of causality, and as a thing-in-itself, standing outside time and therefore outside the chain of causal determination. The empirical character is what we observe over the course of a person’s life — the consistent pattern of conduct that reveals a fixed, individual nature. This character is not chosen but discovered; we learn what we are through what we do.

“The empirical character, like the whole of man as phenomenon, is subject to the law of causality in its form of time, space, and experience; while the intelligible character, standing behind this phenomenon as the thing-in-itself, is independent of all forms of appearance and therefore free.”

The illumination here is crucial: freedom is not denied but relocated. It does not reside in individual acts of will — each of which is determined with iron necessity by motives and character — but in the timeless being of the person as a whole. The intelligible character is the ground of the empirical character, the inscrutable essence from which the entire sequence of a life unfolds with lawful regularity. When we say a man is free, we mean that his essential nature, the core of his being beyond time and causality, is not produced by anything else. But the specific actions that flow from this nature in the face of particular motives are as necessary as the motions of a clock.

The Example of the Clock and the Maker

To make this abstract distinction concrete, Schopenhauer offers a striking analogy that transforms the metaphysical into something almost tangible. The reader is asked to imagine a clock that has been designed and wound by a craftsman. The clock’s movements are entirely determined by its internal mechanism and the force stored in its spring. Yet the clock itself, as a whole, owes its existence and structure to the free act of the maker who designed it.

Here Schopenhauer argues that the human being is analogous: each person’s empirical character — the specific set of dispositions, talents, weaknesses, and inclinations that determine how they respond to every possible situation — is the manifestation of an intelligible character that is itself not subject to the causal chain. “The empirical character is the unfolding in time of the intelligible character,” he writes, “just as the clock’s motion is the unfolding of the design that was freely chosen by its maker.”

The passage draws the reader into a profound rethinking of what freedom means. Freedom is not the ability to do otherwise in the moment of choice — that is precisely what Schopenhauer has argued is impossible. Instead, freedom is the property of the entire being that underlies all choices. The man who commits a crime does so necessarily, given his character and the circumstances. But the fact that he has this character rather than some other character is not itself necessitated by anything further — it is the ultimate given, the bedrock of his individual existence. This is what Schopenhauer means when he says that a man can be free in his essence while being determined in every particular act.

The Recognition of Necessity in Self-Reflection

Having established the metaphysical framework, Schopenhauer now turns to a more directly experiential question: what happens when a person reflects on their own past actions and recognizes that they could not have acted otherwise? This is not a hypothetical exercise but a common experience, particularly in moments of moral seriousness.

Schopenhauer points out that when we look back at a decision we deeply regret, we often say to ourselves, “I could have acted differently” — but this feeling, he argues, is a form of self-deception or incomplete reflection. If we genuinely reconstruct the situation with all its details, including our state of mind at the time, we realize that given exactly the same person in exactly the same circumstances, only one outcome was possible. The feeling of alternative possibilities arises because we cannot fully recapture the force of the motives that were operating on us in that moment.

“Only by abstractly detaching the motives from the character, and considering each in isolation, do we imagine that the will could have decided differently; but when the character is actually confronted with the motives in reality, there is no alternative: the decision follows with the same necessity as the effect from the cause.”

The illumination here is that Schopenhauer is not merely making a logical point but describing a psychological process. The illusion of freedom persists even in hindsight because our memory of past states is incomplete. We remember the options we faced but not the precise weight of each motive as it pressed upon us. We therefore imagine a kind of mental weighing scale where the balance could have tipped either way, when in fact the mechanism of decision is as deterministic as a physical scale under the influence of actual weights. The recognition of this necessity is the beginning of wisdom, for it allows us to understand our own actions as natural phenomena rather than as inexplicable violations of causality.

The Objection from Moral Responsibility

Schopenhauer now confronts the most powerful objection to his determinism: if every action is necessary, then how can anyone be held morally responsible for what they do? The entire edifice of law, punishment, and moral judgment seems to presuppose that the agent could have done otherwise. A murderer, on Schopenhauer’s view, could not have refrained from murder — so what right do we have to condemn him?

This objection is given full weight before Schopenhauer offers his response. He acknowledges that the ordinary understanding of responsibility — the one presupposed by courts and common morality — does indeed require the freedom to choose otherwise. If a man is merely a link in a causal chain, then punishing him seems as absurd as punishing a stone for falling. The objection appears to show that determinism is not only empirically false but morally disastrous, undermining the very foundations of justice.

Schopenhauer’s response is characteristically bold and counterintuitive. He does not retreat from determinism but redefines the basis of responsibility. The criminal is not punished because he could have chosen otherwise — he is punished because he is what he is, and punishment is a response to his being. The intelligible character is responsible for the empirical character, and the empirical character is responsible for the actions. Responsibility therefore attaches to the person as a whole, not to individual acts considered in isolation.

“The deed is the expression of the character; the character is the expression of the intelligible essence; and this essence, being timeless, bears the entire responsibility for all that proceeds from it in time.”

This is a remarkable move. Schopenhauer is not saving moral responsibility by finding room for freedom within determinism; he is instead grounding responsibility in the very necessity of action. The criminal is responsible not because he could have refrained but because the crime truly expresses who he is. Punishment is therefore not a retribution for a free choice but a response to a revealed nature. The state punishes to deter others, but the deeper moral meaning of punishment is that it confronts the criminal with the consequences of his own being — and in this confrontation, he may come to recognize what he truly is.

The Practical Impossibility of Changing One’s Character

Having established the theoretical framework, Schopenhauer now draws a practical consequence that is both sobering and liberating: a person cannot fundamentally change their character. The empirical character is fixed; it unfolds over time but does not alter in its core. All the moral education, self-discipline, and good intentions in the world cannot transform a fundamentally selfish person into a generous one, or a coward into a hero.

This is not pessimism for its own sake but a logical consequence of the determinist position. If character were malleable through will, then the will would have to act on itself — which is precisely the kind of self-causation Schopenhauer has shown to be impossible. A man can learn to manage his character, to redirect its expression, to avoid situations that trigger his worst tendencies — but he cannot change the bedrock of his being.

“To wish that a man were different than he is, is to wish that he were not himself at all — it is to wish for nothing less than the annihilation of his individual existence.”

The illumination here is profound and cuts against many of our comforting illusions about self-improvement. Schopenhauer is not saying that people cannot learn or grow — they can acquire new knowledge, develop new habits, and refine their skills. But all of these changes happen within the fixed boundaries of the given character. A naturally cruel person may learn to restrain their cruelty out of prudence, but the underlying impulse remains. A generous person may become embittered by experience, but the generosity that defined their youth was not a choice — it was the expression of their deepest nature.

This leads to a striking conclusion about moral responsibility that anticipates later existentialist and psychoanalytic thought: we are responsible for what we are, but we cannot choose what we are. Our character is given to us — by birth, by nature, by whatever metaphysical ground one prefers — and yet we are judged for it as if we had chosen it. The intelligible character, being outside time, is precisely the act of “choosing” oneself that appears in time as the fixed empirical character. We are, in Schopenhauer’s vision, the authors of our own being in a way that transcends our conscious experience — and the burden of this authorship is carried by every action we perform.

The Objection from Remorse and Its True Significance

We must now address an objection that seems to strike at the heart of Schopenhauer’s determinism: the phenomenon of remorse. If all actions are strictly necessitated by character and motive, why do we experience guilt and regret for past deeds? Do not these powerful feelings testify to our sense that we could have done otherwise, that we were free when we acted?

Schopenhauer does not dismiss this objection but instead reinterprets it. The author argues that remorse is not a sign that we could have chosen differently given the same circumstances. Rather, it is the painful realization that we are the kind of person who would commit such an act. The feeling is retrospective: looking back, we see that our character itself is defective, and we regret not being a different sort of person entirely. But this regret does not imply that, at the moment of action, we had two genuine possibilities. It implies that we wish we had been constituted differently — a wish that, unfortunately, cannot change what we are.

“Remorse is the bitter feeling that we have been the kind of person who could commit such a deed.”

This insight is crucial for understanding the moral psychology of the work. Remorse does not point backward to a missed alternative choice; it points inward to the fixed nature of the self. When we feel remorse, we are not saying “I could have done otherwise” but rather “I am the one who did that, and I wish I were not.” The pain comes from self-knowledge, not from the memory of a fork in the road where we chose wrongly. Schopenhauer thus transforms what seems like the strongest evidence for libertarian freedom into evidence for determinism: our very guilt confirms that our actions flow from a character we cannot change.

The Feeling of Freedom Explained Away

But if all actions are necessary, why do we feel free? Schopenhauer devotes considerable attention to this question, for he knows that the immediate testimony of self-consciousness is the layman’s strongest argument against his position. Every person, when about to act, feels that they could choose either way. The man at the crossroads feels he could turn left or right. The woman deciding whether to speak feels she could remain silent. This feeling seems undeniable.

Schopenhauer’s answer is subtle and psychologically acute. The feeling of freedom, he argues, arises not from the act of choice itself but from the absence of external compulsion. When we say we feel free, what we actually experience is that nothing is forcing us: no chains, no threats, no physical restraint. The feeling of “I can do what I will” is real enough, but it says nothing about whether the will itself is free from the law of causality. Schopenhauer illustrates this by noting that a person can say “I can do what I will” but cannot say “I can will what I will.” The first statement merely registers the absence of external obstacles; the second would require a freedom that self-consciousness never actually testifies to.

“I can do what I will: I can, if I will, give all I possess to the poor and thus become poor myself — if I will! But I cannot will this; the motive has no power over me.”

This passage is the pivot of the entire argument. The feeling of freedom collapses once we distinguish between doing and willing. We can indeed perform whatever we decide to will, but the willing itself is governed by the interplay of character and motive. The man standing at the crossroads can feel that he is not chained to one path, but his actual willing — which path he takes — is determined with necessity the moment the motives present themselves to his character. The feeling of freedom is not an illusion; it is simply misattributed to the wrong thing.

The Psychological Mechanism of Deciding

To make his case more concrete, Schopenhauer describes the actual process of deliberation. When a person stands before a difficult choice, the mind oscillates between alternative courses of action. First one motive gains the upper hand; then another. This back-and-forth is experienced as uncertainty, as weighing pros and cons, as the struggle of reasons. The conscious mind feels this oscillation as freedom because it does not yet know which motive will prevail.

Schopenhauer argues that this state of indecision is precisely what gives rise to the illusion of freedom. Because we do not know the outcome of our own deliberation until it is complete, we project our uncertainty onto the world and imagine that either outcome is possible. But the deliberation itself is a causal process: each motive has a certain force relative to our character, and the strongest motive will necessarily win. The feeling of “I could choose either” is really the feeling of “I do not yet know which I will choose.”

“The freedom of the will is only the feeling of being able to do as we will, without any awareness of the determining grounds.”

This formulation is deeply instructive. The freedom we experience is simply ignorance of our own determination. A clock does not feel its own mechanism; a person does not feel the hidden springs of their action. Self-consciousness only registers the surface — the moment of decision — not the deep structure of character and motive that makes that decision inevitable. The feeling of freedom is therefore not a proof of libertarian freedom but a demonstration of the limits of self-knowledge. We are most convinced of our freedom precisely where we are most ignorant of what moves us.

The Practical Consequences for Ethics and Life

Schopenhauer does not leave his reader in despair at this deterministic conclusion. He draws practical consequences for how we should understand ourselves and others. If all actions are necessary, then resentment and moral indignation lose their justification. The person who wrongs us acted necessarily from their character given their motives; they could not have done otherwise. This does not mean we should not defend ourselves or restrain wrongdoers — those are motives that will determine *our* actions — but it does mean that hatred and vengefulness are based on a false understanding of responsibility.

This leads to a profound ethical stance: forgiveness becomes not a moral achievement but a recognition of necessity. When we truly understand that no one could have acted differently, we cease to demand the impossible. Schopenhauer writes that the recognition of necessity produces a kind of tranquility — the calm of seeing oneself and others as part of a necessary order. The wise person does not rage against the tide; they accept that what happened had to happen, given the characters and motives involved.

“Operari sequitur esse — the deed follows from being. This is the true foundation of all moral judgment.”

The Latin maxim is the work’s final philosophical anchor. What we do follows necessarily from what we are. Judgment — whether moral or practical — is therefore always a judgment of being, not of discrete acts that could have been otherwise. We condemn the character that produced the deed, not the deed as if it were an isolated choice. And we reform ourselves, to the extent that reform is possible, not by sudden acts of will but by exposing ourselves to new motives that may gradually reshape our character over time.

The Final Reconciliation: Determinism and Moral Life

In his concluding passages, Schopenhauer addresses the deepest worry his argument might provoke: if everything is necessary, why strive? Why resist temptation? Why try to improve? Does determinism not drain life of all moral seriousness?

Schopenhauer’s answer is that determinism does not eliminate effort; it explains it. The person who strives does so because their character is such that certain motives — the desire for virtue, the fear of consequences, the love of others — move them. The effort itself is part of the causal chain, not an exception to it. To say “I might as well not try because my action is determined” is self-defeating: if that thought truly determines you to inaction, then you were determined to inaction. But if other motives are stronger, you will act. Determinism is not a command to stop trying; it is a description of how trying actually works.

“The stone that falls says, ‘I must fall — but I could have chosen to fly.’ The man who acts says, ‘I must act thus — but I could have done otherwise.’ Both are mistaken. The stone has no choice, and neither does the man — but the man, unlike the stone, feels the illusion of choice.”

This final comparison between the falling stone and the acting man captures the work’s entire argument. Both are subject to necessity, but the man’s consciousness of motives creates the illusion of alternatives. The stone never imagines flying; the man always imagines choosing otherwise. This difference in subjective experience is real and important — it is the foundation of our moral psychology — but it does not change the objective reality of determination.

The work closes with the recognition that the feeling of freedom and the reality of necessity coexist in human experience. We cannot live as if we are determined; we must deliberate, choose, and take responsibility. But the philosopher, standing back from the stream of life, sees that this very deliberation and choice are themselves determined by the causes that shape us. The freedom of the will is an illusion — but it is a necessary illusion, one without which moral life as we know it could not function. Schopenhauer has not abolished responsibility; he has deepened it, grounding it not in the freedom to choose otherwise but in the inescapable reality of what we are.