The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics

The two problems are the freedom of the will and the foundation of morality. Schopenhauer paired them because he believed they were the two questions on which all ethical theory ultimately rests, and that previous philosophers—especially Kant—had confused them. The first essay, 'On the Freedom of the Will,' was written for a competition sponsored by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences in 1839 and won the prize [citation:1][citation:5]. The second, 'On the Basis of Morals,' was submitted to the Royal Danish Society in 1840 and was not awarded the prize, despite being the only entry [citation:3][citation:5]. Schopenhauer published them together in 1841 with a preface defending the second essay against the Danish Society's judgment [citation:3].

Schopenhauer's answer is stark: the will is not free. He distinguishes freedom of acting from freedom of willing, affirming the former while denying the latter [citation:5]. Human actions are thoroughly determined by motives and character, and the feeling of freedom we have when deliberating is an illusion—we are aware of our desires but not of the causes that produced them. However, Schopenhauer preserves a kind of freedom at the level of the intelligible character, the timeless act of self-determination that constitutes what we are, prior to the phenomenal world of causation [citation:5]. This is not freedom of choice in any ordinary sense; it is a metaphysical claim about the noumenal ground of the person, and it does not exempt any particular action from causal determination.

The Danish Society's judgment, which Schopenhauer published in full at the end of the book and rebutted at length in his preface, objected that he had misunderstood the question. The Society claimed it had asked for an investigation of the connection between metaphysics and ethics, but that Schopenhauer had instead attempted to establish a principle of ethics [citation:3]. Schopenhauer argued that this was a contradiction: the Society had not asked for a metaphysics to be presupposed, and no unanimous metaphysics existed to serve as a starting point. He also noted, with characteristic outrage, that the Society had complained about his 'indecent' treatment of 'several distinguished philosophers of recent times'—by which they meant Fichte and Hegel, whom Schopenhauer considered frauds [citation:3]. The rejection became a lifelong grievance.

Schopenhauer locates the foundation of morality in compassion (Mitleid), not in reason, duty, or the categorical imperative. He argues that genuinely moral action arises when the egoistic illusion of separateness is momentarily pierced and one feels another's suffering as one's own [citation:10]. This is not a rational recognition of duty but an immediate, pre-reflective identification. Schopenhauer explicitly rejects Kant's attempt to ground morality in reason and the categorical imperative, arguing that Kant's system is merely 'theological morals in disguise'—an unproved assertion that cannot motivate action [citation:10]. For Schopenhauer, morality is natural and affective, not rational and prescriptive, and its highest expression is the saint or ascetic who transcends egoism entirely.

The Two Fundamental Problems is a deliberate simplification and application of the metaphysics developed in The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer wrote the essays to present his ethics in a more accessible, self-contained form that does not presuppose the intricate metaphysical apparatus of his magnum opus [citation:7][citation:8]. The first essay's claim that the will is determined yet noumenally free presupposes the distinction between the phenomenal world of representation and the thing-in-itself as will. The second essay's ethics of compassion presupposes the metaphysical insight that individuality is an illusion, a veil cast by the principle of sufficient reason. The essays are thus both an introduction to and a practical extension of his system.

The most persistent misreading treats Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion as a form of sentimentalism or as a soft-hearted alternative to rigorous philosophy. In fact, compassion in Schopenhauer is a metaphysical insight, not a mere feeling. It is the practical consequence of recognizing that the distinction between self and other is phenomenal rather than noumenal—that beneath the veil of individuation, all beings are expressions of the same will. This is why Schopenhauer's ethics is ascetic and world-denying rather than philanthropic in the ordinary sense: compassion reveals the suffering inherent in all existence, and its logical culmination is the negation of the will to live. Reading the book as a defense of ordinary benevolence misses its radical, pessimistic core.