I've been working pretty hard on my presentation today, so it'll have to be a short journal entry this time. (I've also got a Nietzsche presentation due for Friday!)
Today's student presentation discussed the principle of sufficient reason of motivation. I suddenly came to comprehend Schopenhauer's prima facie puzzling claim about all willing being necessarily active. Previously I'd taken 'will' in this context in the narrow psychological sense, but of course, it's much better to read it in the wider sense of Schopenhauer's general metaphysic. Now the idea of will as necessarily active is far more congenial.
We also briefly touched upon Schopenhauer on the question of free will. Though an arch-determinist, he does make sort of Kantian noises on this. In an essay titled ‘On The Antitheses of Thing in itself and Appearance', he writes about the determination of all objects in the empirical world, including the individual, but notes that, nevertheless, at the level of the noumenal, the ‘same man would have to be explained as the apparitional form of his own, utterly free and primal will, which has created for itself the intellect appropriate to it.’ Dina pointed out that Nietzsche's conception of freedom was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer; I will be interested to investigate this further.
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