Schopenhauer wrote these two essays on ethics in response to prize contests. The first one was offered by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences on the question of morality and free will. He suggests, “Our deeds are truly no first beginning, and so in them nothing really new attains existence: but rather through what we do, we merely come to experience what we are…. The character is the empirically cognized, enduring and unalterable constitution on an individual will…. The strict necessity of our actions nonetheless co-exists with that freedom of which the feeling of responsibility provides evidence, and by means of which we are the doers of our deeds and they are morally attributable to us…. The perfect empirical reality of the world of experience is compatible with its transcendental ideality, in just the same way the strict empirical necessity of acting is compatible with its transcendental freedom. For as an object of experience the empirical character is, like the whole human being, a mere appearance, and so bound to the forms of all appearance, time, space, and causality, and subordinate to their laws; by contrast, that which as thing in itself is independent of these forms and so subordinate to no time distinction, is therefore the enduring and unalterable condition and foundation of this whole appearance, is his intelligible character, i.e. his will as thing in itself, to which, in this capacity, there certainly pertains absolute freedom…. This freedom is, however, transcendental…. By this freedom all deeds of the human being are his own work…. Consequently the will is indeed free, but only in itself and outside of appearance…. We have to seek the work of our freedom no longer in our individual actions, as the common view does, but in the whole being and essence (existentia et essentia) of the human being himself…. Thus freedom, which cannot be encounterable in the operari, must reside in the esse…. In what we do, we come to know what we are…. In one word: a human being does at all times only what he wills, and yet does it necessarily. But that rests on the fact that he is what he wills.”
Schopenhauer’s second prize essay was offered by the Royal Danish Society of Sciences on the topic of the grounding basis of moral laws. The society did not grant the prize to Schopenhauer, nor to anyone else. He was understandably sore about this result. Schopenhauer began, “So in philosophy the ethical foundation itself, whatever it may be, must in turn have its basis and its support in some metaphysics, i.e. in an explanation given of the world and existence in general—seeing that the ultimate and true revelation concerning the inner essence of the entirety of things must necessarily cohere tightly with that concerning the ethical meaning of human acting.” Next, he gets into the grounding of human ethics, as he sees it. “The principle or the highest basic proposition of an ethics is the shortest and most concise expression of the way of acting that it prescribes…. So it is the instruction to virtue as such that ethics gives, expressed in a single proposition, in other words the ‘what’ of virtue—The foundation of an ethics, by contrast, is the ‘why’ of virtue, the ground of that obligation or recommendation or approbation.” The what, for Schopenhauer, is simple, “Harm no one; rather help everyone to the extent that you can.” He continues, “It is the ‘what’ for which the ‘why’ is still being sought.” Furthermore, “Every other moral principle is to be regarded as a circumlocution, an indirect or oblique expression of that simple proposition.” Schopenhauer explains, “The individual—with his unalterable, inborn character, strictly determined in all its manifestations by the law of causality, which here, being mediated by the intellect, is called motivation—is only the appearance. The thing in itself that lies at the basis of this, situated as it is outside of space and time, is free from all succession and plurality of acts, one and unalterable. Its constitution in itself is the intelligible character…. This doctrine of Kant’s of the co-existence of freedom and necessity I hold to be the greatest of all achievements of human profundity…. Freedom belongs not to the empirical but solely to the intelligible character…. In his esse, that is where freedom resides. He could have been another: and in what he is resides blame and merit…. With regard to the matter and the occasion, in other words objectively, a completely different action, even an opposed one, was perfectly possible and would have come about, if only he had been another. But that he is such a one and no other, as emerges from his action—that is what he feels responsible for. Here, in his esse, lies the place where the sting of conscience hits home. For conscience is in fact just acquaintance with one’s own self.” Schopenhauer concludes, “If the ultimate motivating ground for an action, or an omission, resides directly and exclusively in the well-being and woe of someone other who is passively involved in it, so that the active party has in view in his acting, or omitting, simply and solely the well-being and woe of another and has nothing at all as his end but that that other should remain unharmed, or indeed receive help, support and relief. This end alone impresses on an action or omission the stamp of moral worth.”
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