Christopher Janaway

The final part of Schopenhauer’s argument in The World as Will and Representation concerns “affirmation and negation of the will”. He argues, with a fervor that borders on the religious, that “negation of the will” is a condition of unique value, the only state that enables “true salvation, redemption from life and from suffering”. Some commentators have asserted without qualification that this condition is his “highest good.” However, Schopenhauer in fact claims that there cannot be a highest good, because 'good' is always relative to sstisfaction of a will, and there is no possible final satisfaction of the will. It is only figuratively the will-lessness is the highest good. The article examines the coherence of Schopenhauer's position. Because of the relation of 'good' to willing, he appears reluctant to call will-lessness 'good' at all, despite rating it a state of superior value. The article suggests that Schopenhauer should either abandon his univocal account of 'good' as related to willing, or accept that things can be good in relation to different kinds of willing, namely egoistic and non-egoistic willing. It is argued that the latter resolution if preferable.

Arthur Schopenhauer's The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics consists of two groundbreaking essays: 'On the Freedom of the Will' and 'On the Basis of Morals'. The essays make original contributions to ethics and display Schopenhauer's erudition, prose-style and flair for philosophical controversy, as well as philosophical views that contrast sharply with the positions of both Kant and Nietzsche. Written accessibly, they do not presuppose the intricate metaphysics which Schopenhauer constructs elsewhere. This is the first English translation of these works to re-unite both essays in one volume. It offers a new translation by Christopher Janaway, together with an introduction, editorial notes on Schopenhauer's vocabulary and the different editions of his essays, a chronology of his life, a bibliography, and a glossary of names.

This paper gives an account of the argument of Schopenhauer's essay On the Freedom of the Human Will, drawing also on his other works. Schopenhauer argues that all human actions are causally necessitated, as are all other events in empirical nature, hence there is no freedom in the sense of liberum arbitrium indifferentiae. However, our sense of responsibility or agency (being the ) is nonetheless unshakeable. To account for this Schopenhauer invokes the Kantian distinction between empirical and intelligible characters. The paper highlights divergences between Schopenhauer and Kant over the intelligible character, which for Schopenhauer can be neither rational nor causal. It raises the questions whether the intelligible character may be redundant to Schopenhauer's position, and whether it can coherently belong to an individual agent, suggesting that for Schopenhauer a more consistent position would have been to deny freedom of will to the individual