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A review by stephenmeansme
Essay on the Freedom of the Will by Konstantin Kolenda, Arthur Schopenhauer
4.0
The tighter (and prize-winning-er) of the two essays collected in TWO FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF ETHICS Cambrige University Press edition. This is the Dover edition, with a different translator, although one of Schopenhauer's strengths is that he seems to be rather straightforward to translate - not a small thing for a 19th-century(!) German(!) philosopher(!!!). Overall I prefer the Cambridge version just slightly more, because it has more useful annotations/footnotes/translation notes, where here the translator might leave a Latin philosophical term as printed, and unnoted.
As for the content, it's really good. At issue is a concept called (in the modern day) "libertarian free will" and (in Schopenhauer) liberum arbitrium indifferentiae. We feel like we have a free choice in our actions, particularly our moral actions; but physical objects sure don't seem to have any freedom of choice. Every action causes a reaction, and a particular reaction depending on the context and forces at work. Libertarian free will says that the feels are reals, and that humans do in fact have a free element in our choices.
The problem with that is that, even though it accords with our feelings (and flatters our theologies) it seems really strange and problematic when examined closely. Free choice in every action means that every action is a "brute fact" admitting no complete explanation. But as Schopenhauer shows, even if that wasn't mysterious enough, admitting it into one's worldview dissolves any hope of moral accountability, divine authority (or goodness, take your pick), and so on.
Better to bite the bullet and accept determinism of phenomena but transcendental freedom of character - essentially, since character is arbitrary (humans don't all have the same characters) that is a degree of freedom, and it enables one to own responsibility for one's moral actions. It's maybe not all the way right (perhaps "freedom" is more about non-uniform probability than this-or-that), and I think Schopenhauer is too characteristically pessimistic about character development, but it blows a hole in libertarian free will that I don't think is salvageable.
4 stars.
As for the content, it's really good. At issue is a concept called (in the modern day) "libertarian free will" and (in Schopenhauer) liberum arbitrium indifferentiae. We feel like we have a free choice in our actions, particularly our moral actions; but physical objects sure don't seem to have any freedom of choice. Every action causes a reaction, and a particular reaction depending on the context and forces at work. Libertarian free will says that the feels are reals, and that humans do in fact have a free element in our choices.
The problem with that is that, even though it accords with our feelings (and flatters our theologies) it seems really strange and problematic when examined closely. Free choice in every action means that every action is a "brute fact" admitting no complete explanation. But as Schopenhauer shows, even if that wasn't mysterious enough, admitting it into one's worldview dissolves any hope of moral accountability, divine authority (or goodness, take your pick), and so on.
Better to bite the bullet and accept determinism of phenomena but transcendental freedom of character - essentially, since character is arbitrary (humans don't all have the same characters) that is a degree of freedom, and it enables one to own responsibility for one's moral actions. It's maybe not all the way right (perhaps "freedom" is more about non-uniform probability than this-or-that), and I think Schopenhauer is too characteristically pessimistic about character development, but it blows a hole in libertarian free will that I don't think is salvageable.
4 stars.