What does Schopenhauer mean by 'A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants'?

Question

_{I first encountered the bolded quote on p 80, Philosophy: A Complete Introduction (2012) by Prof Sharon Kaye (MA PhD in Philosophy, U. Toronto), part of Chapter 6 on Thomas Hobbes, Rousseau, free will, determinism, and compatbilism.}

[ Reddit :] I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, "A man can do what he [wants]₁, but not [want]₂ what he [wants]₃," has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life's hardships, my own and others', and an unfailing well-spring of tolerance.

I conjecture the 3 wants above mean different desires: 1 and 2 mean primitive superficial urges or John Stuart Mill's phrase 'lower pleasures' (eg:chocolate, guilty pleasures, etc...); but 3 means John Stuart Mill's phrase 'higher pleasures' or second-order virtuous aretes. Did I neglect anything?

Answer 1

This is just an old paradox in discussions of free will.

You are free to do whatever you desire. But you are not free to choose your desires. Similarly, Marx said, "man" makes his own history, but not under the historical conditions of his choosing. And Mill attempted to secularize the paradox by observing that we are slaves to habit, but can step back and form those habits. We can, in some measure, both rely on causes and effects and intervene between them.

The idea, which arises in many forms, is that "freedom" is indeed inevitably paradoxical. There is no such thing as "absolute" freedom nor "absolute" constraint. There are only indeterminacies and determinations on different levels, of which one may or may not be aware.

Answer 2

It's hard to translate from German where the sentence is very clear:

Der Mensch kann zwar tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will.

I think a more understandable way to translate it would be:

A man can do what he wants, but not choose or select what he wants.

We have a free will to do what we want but our free will doesn't choose what we want.

Very simplified example: We can eat or not if we want, but we can't choose to want to eat or not. It probably depends if we are hungry or not, which we can not control. We can't turn off being hungry by free will.

Answer 3

It strikes me that:

A man cannot want ... what he wants

is an expression of 'inner necessity'; it ought to be read as 'a man can only want what he wants'; and in this way its tautological structure of necessity comes forward:

• he cannot want what he is not wanting - because he is not wanting it.

• he can only want what he is wanting, because he is wanting it

It shouldn't be read as say the admission of an opium addict in 19th C London, as Sherlock Holmes was, who comes to realise 'he does not want what he wants'; or the cri de coeur writ large of Jenny Holzer's 'Protect me from what I want'.

Also, thinking that wanting is a kind of desire, and desire is the general name under which any passion can put under, it is similar - but not quite - to the Humean

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office.

Answer 4

I think it is quite simple. A man can do what he wants. This, of course, means he is free to choose to do what he likes. A man however, cannot want what he wants. This, to me, means that I cannot have a choice in my desires. If I desire or want a red car, can I feel the same "wanting" for a blue one? Who knows why I want what I want? Can I want something which I never liked? Can I choose my desires? A man cannot want what he wants.

Answer 5

Wants form a hierarchy. This is the key. Not all wants are on a level; some wants refer to other wants.

Simply put, we can have wants and also wants about our wants - meta-wants. For example, I can want to smoke at time t (this minute) but also want, still at time t, that at time t +1 (a future time) I will not want to smoke. I have a want (now) to smoke and a meta-want that in future I will not to want to smoke. This is the kind of phenomenon Harry Frankfurt was concerned with in 'Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person', Journal of Philosophy, 68, 1971, 5-10.

It this phenomenon that Schopenhauer has in mind. Freedom comes into the picture because even if our intentional actions are determined causally by our wants and desires (on the Humean model) our meta-wants can cause our other wants to weaken or disappear. Our meta-wants have the capacity to free us from our other wants.

@Canada - Area 51 Proposal. I don't think Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures ('Utilitarianism', c.2) comes into it. The want that I want to be rid of may be - yield - a lower pleasure; but I may well want to be rid of it - I may want-not-to-have-that-want - in order to cultivate a want for another lower pleasure, say horse-racing. I may want not to smoke in order to have more money to spend on the horses.

Answer 6

A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. In other words, you can choose what you want, but your wants are chosen for you. Your free will is constrained.

Answer 7

I’ve seen this translated as “A man can do what he wills, but cannot will what he wills.”

In German, “will” primarily means want. A better translation would be “A man can do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.” Point being man doesn’t get to pick his desires. Just as you can’t pick who you love or what you love. Your wants and needs are not controlled by you, yourself.

Answer 8

Two cents.

Schopenhauer began by analyzing the basic concepts of freedom and self-consciousness. He asserted that there are three types of freedom; physical, intellectual, and moral (the terms were sometimes used in philosophy, as he shows in chapter four).

• Physical freedom is the absence of physical obstacles to actions. This negative approach can also be expressed positively: only he is free who acts according to one's will and nothing else. (This is commonly thought to constitute freedom of the will.) But when this simple meaning is used in connection with the will itself and the answer "will is free" is assumed—like with the question "can you will what you willed to will?" (and so on, because then one can always ask for the source of "willing to will" and whether it was free)—one eventually commits an error of infinite regress, because one always seeks an earlier will which the current one adheres to. Also the verb "can", when understood physically in the above question, does not really solve the problem satisfactorily, so other meanings were sought.
• Intellectual freedom results when the mind has a clear knowledge of the abstract or concrete motives to action. This occurs when the mind is not affected by, for example, extreme passion or mind-altering substances.
• Moral freedom is the absence of any necessity in person's actions. As "necessary" means "that what follows from a given sufficient basis"—whereas, likewise, all sufficient bases act with necessity (because they are sufficient), and thus there is no possibility that a cause does not bring its effect—a will containing a free element (liberum arbitrium) and thus arising without necessity would imply the existence of something that has no cause whatsoever and is completely arbitrary and unaffected (liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, freedom of will not influenced by anything). This would be the undetermined part (whereas apart from that something could, possibly, still influence man).
• Self-consciousness is a person's awareness of their own willing, including emotions and passions.

In the course of the analysis Schopenhauer declares that the opposition of necessary is known as contingent or incidental, which is normally encountered in the real world as just relative contingency (a coincidence) of two events—of which both still have their causes and are necessary with regard to them. Two things are incidental, or contingent, to each other when one does not cause the other. He then derives the concept of absolute contingency by extending the former term so that no sufficient basis exists whatsoever; such thing would not be incidental with regard to something, but with regard to all and everything. He concludes that liberum arbitrium indifferentiae would mean exactly such incident (a chance), an absolutely fortuitous or random occurrence. He notes that with such liberum arbitrium indifferentiae one would be equally capable of doing one thing or the other.

According to Schopenhauer, when a person inspects their self-consciousness, they find the feeling "I can do whatever I will as long as I am not hindered." But, Schopenhauer claimed that this is merely physical freedom. He asserted "You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing." Therefore, the Royal Society's question has been answered "No."

Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will - Wikipedia

Translation of "On the Freedom of the Will" by Arthur Schopenhauer

For counter-arguments to Schopenhauer's thesis see:

1. What are some counterarguments to Schopenhauer's refutation of free will?
2. Strawson on Free Will: What are the most persuasive challenges to his position?