Schopenhauer's Critique of Free Will: Determinism and Human Decision-Making Explained

Extract

[...] Schopenhauer begins his reflection by giving what he considers to be 'the natural image of a free will'. When he evokes a natural image, he is referring to the common sense that we give to the words that follow, in other words, he is announcing that he will try to explain this notion as most people perceive it, he will give an alkaline definition, that which would seem, at first glance, to be the right one. By 'free will', he speaks of a decision that would be the fruit of our personal and free will in as much as it would not be constrained by any external element. [...]

[...] He then analyzed this foreign body and deduced that it is our receptivity. He therefore concluded that the hypothesis of free will is no longer conceivable since an external motive would be the source of all our decisions. In short, Schopenhauer considers our receptivity to certain motives as the weight placed on the scale of a balance that is the cause of our decisions. [...]

[...] Schopenhauer adds that these tendencies, these currents, "can differ from individual to individual" but the use of potentiality is not innocent here since it clarifies the author's thought: although the same motif does not always seem to produce the same action, it is not true to say that the same motif cannot produce the same action several times. The author concludes his reasoning by explaining that the motifs would therefore exercise their action "after" these tendencies." Schopenhauer therefore seems to have called into question the idea that motifs produce identical actions by themselves and has therefore concluded that the latter depend on innate tendencies in an individual, which generate a certain action in response to a certain motif. [...]

[...] He justifies this by explaining that the "tendencies" he mentioned earlier "represent precisely the weight placed on the scale." While he initially considered an unloaded scale, it is ultimately observed that the tendencies that have been integrated and that generate a certain receptivity to a given motif are precisely a weight placed on the scale and therefore lead to a decision; this reduces to nothing the potentiality of free will since one would always be driven by one's "receptivity" to certain motifs. To conclude, Schopenhauer sought to understand how a decision can be made if nothing pushes us to choose one option over another. He first took the example of an unloaded balance to represent free will and then deduced that if the balance were to tilt, a foreign body would have to be pulling it, since it cannot move on its own. [...]

[...] External forces would therefore be the cause of our decisions, but Schopenhauer's reflection does not stop there, as he then seeks to understand how these forces act on Man. The philosopher explains that this can only be explained in two ways; he therefore firmly reduces the possibilities and introduces his thought. He begins by defining what he calls the "motifs." These designate external events that lead to an action, as he puts it, they designate "external circumstances." These "motifs," therefore, according to his first idea, would produce "action by themselves," that is, each motif would generate a defined action, which would therefore certainly mean that "man is not responsible," more clearly, that man is not guaranteed of his actions since he is powerless in the face of motifs that always cause the same actions in him. [...]