Individuality and determinism in Schopenhauer

You do not need to search long to find philosophers that rate Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) as the ultimate advocate of determinism. Nonetheless, they are wrong; their categorization of Schopenhauer as deterministic is superficial and overlooks a large number of key aspects in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. When analysing a philosopher, one must place his ideas at a certain point in the scale of determinism versus individuality. It is particularly easy to err if you don’t study philosophical ideas in detail. If you reduce Schopenhauer’s lifetime work to a caricature, you will tend to place him at the end of the scale. However, the reality is more nuanced and interesting. When we look into the details of Schopenhauer’s ideas, we must definitely rate him as an individualist, not as deterministic. Let me explain the logic by comparing Schopenhauer to the Ancient Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who lived in the first century AD. Schopenhauer’s two key works “On the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason” (1814) and “The world as will and representation” (1818) argue that the cosmos is dominated by the will. Schopenhauer regards the will as a blind life force. Similarly, Stoic philosophers like Epictetus believed that the cosmos is governed by a force called “logos.” This force is to blame for every good and bad occurrence in the world. The definition of the logos had been shaped by Cleanthes (331-232 BC), Zeno of Citium (334-262 BC), and Chrysippus (280-206 BC) of Cilicia, all of them predecessors of Epictetus. Schopenhauer’s definition of the will includes the adjective “irrational,” but strongly resembles the Stoic “logos.” It doesn’t change much that Zeno and Cleanthes had called their logos “rational.” In any case, the Stoic deterministic framework was stronger than Schopenhauer’s theory of the will. Here is the link to the original article: https://johnvespasian.com/individuality-and-determinism-in-schopenhauer/