Quotation
Last reviewed:
“A person can do what they will, but they cannot will what they will.”
Arthur Schopenhauer · Philosophical pessimism · Modern · 1839
What does it mean?
You can do what you will. You cannot, Schopenhauer argues, stand behind your character and choose which will you have. Motives move a nature you did not pick out of a catalogue. A rival reading, libertarian and also some later existentialist, says this confuses a hard character with a closed one: people do revise what they care about, and the revision is not just another push from behind. He thinks that reply still smuggles in a willer behind the will. The essay is a hard determinism, not a sermon about sticky habits.
Did Arthur Schopenhauer really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Schopenhauer states this sharply in the prize essay on freedom and repeats the thought elsewhere. English versions differ slightly ('man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills'). The thesis is his.
Where it comes from
On the Freedom of the Will (1839), a standard English of his formulation
Approximate date: 1839.
How to use it
When a manager in a Manchester warehouse praises or blames a picker, Schopenhauer would separate the act, which followed the will, from the fantasy that the person chose their temperament on the way in from Ancoats. You can reject his separation. Do not pretend he wrote the softer one.
A mindset reading
This is determinism about the will itself. Softening it into 'habits are sticky but we can always start over' produces a different philosopher, one he spent the prize essay arguing against.
Understand the philosophy
The 1839 essay attacks a libertarian freedom of the will while keeping a moral interest in character. Compassion, not self-invention, becomes the basis of the ethics he writes the following year.
- freedom
- self
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
You can do what you will. You cannot, Schopenhauer argues, stand behind your character and choose which will you have. Motives move a nature you did not pick out of a catalogue. A rival reading, libertarian and also some later existentialist, says this confuses a hard character with a closed one: people do revise what they care about, and the revision is not just another push from behind. He thinks that reply still smuggles in a willer behind the will. The essay is a hard determinism, not a sermon about sticky habits.
Did Arthur Schopenhauer really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Schopenhauer states this sharply in the prize essay on freedom and repeats the thought elsewhere. English versions differ slightly ('man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills'). The thesis is his.
Which work is it in?
On the Freedom of the Will (1839), a standard English of his formulation Approximate date: 1839.