Schopenhauer: Man Can Do What He Wills

The Quote

"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills" is Arthur Schopenhauer's most famous epigram on freedom. It appears in his prize essay On the Freedom of the Will (1839), where he deploys it to show that the freedom we actually possess — the power to execute our choices — is not the freedom philosophers have claimed. The sentence has been quoted ever since, notably by Albert Einstein, as the definitive statement of the determinist's position.

Context

The essay was composed for a competition set by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences, which asked whether the freedom of the will could be demonstrated from self-consciousness. Schopenhauer's answer is that self-consciousness reveals only that we can do what we will; it tells us nothing about whether the willing itself is free. He then argues that every action follows necessarily from the conjunction of a fixed, innate character and the motives presented by circumstance. The will, as the thing in itself, is outside time and hence outside the distinction between free and unfree; the empirical character, by contrast, is fully determined.

Meaning & Interpretation

The paradox turns on the two senses of "will." The first clause — we can do what we will — describes freedom of action: if you choose to raise your arm, your arm rises. The second clause — we cannot will what we will — describes the absence of freedom of volition: the choosing itself is caused by character and motives, over which we have no control at the moment of choice. The sense of choosing freely is explained away as ignorance: self-consciousness delivers the decision but not the causes that produced it, and we project the freedom of action onto the freedom of the will.

Legacy

The sentence became the standard formulation of the incompatibilist challenge: even the most thorough account of free action must confront the fact that the will is not self-causing. Einstein quoted it in defense of his belief in a fully lawful universe, and it is cited in contemporary debates about determinism and moral responsibility. Schopenhauer's wider account of the will — as endless striving, source of desire, and therefore of suffering — has also made him the great modern pessimist, whose philosophy of desire continues to influence ethics, aesthetics, and the psychology of happiness.

Sources

1. Wicks, R. (2021). "Arthur Schopenhauer." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/
2. Schopenhauer, A. (1839). On the Freedom of the Will, trans. K. Kolenda. Basil Blackwell.
3. Cartwright, D. E. (2020). "Arthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/schopenhauer/
4. Schopenhauer, A. (1818/1844). The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne. Dover Publications.