The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics

"I’ve mentioned half of it. The book is Schopenhauer’s The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. It has two constitutive essays. One is the essay on free will and the other is the essay on the basis of morality. So that suggests the two fundamental problems for Schopenhauer are: ‘Do we have moral freedom?’ and ‘What is the basis of moral worth?’ It’s a middle work, I’d say. The two essays were written for a specific purpose in 1839 and 1840 and then published in one volume in 1840. But there’s an interesting story behind why they were produced. The essay on free will was written in response to a competition question put out by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences. It was a short question: ‘Can the freedom of the will be proved from self-consciousness?’ And Schopenhauer wrote this essay and won the competition. Then he tries to do it again in response to an essay question put out by the Royal Danish Society of Sciences, which is a more long-winded question, but basically a question about the connection between metaphysics and the basis of morality. This time he loses. He was the only entrant to the competition, but he still lost. From then on, he always had it in for the Danes. There are complicated reasons why he lost. It was partly because he spent so much of the essay Hegel-bashing, which he did a lot. He later found out—or thought he did—that a philosopher called Hans Lassen Martensen was on the judging panel. He was somebody who had a formative influence on Kierkegaard (who also hated Hegel). At that time, Danish philosophy was really under the sway of Hegel and all that Hegel-bashing wouldn’t have washed with them. What’s interesting about these essays is that they were anonymously submitted. Even though Schopenhauer had already written his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation , more than a decade before, he couldn’t refer to it. They had to stand up on their own. When they were put together in book form, he did put some references in, but these essays really hold up as standalone pieces. So, if somebody was reading Schopenhauer for the first time and wanted to get a handle on his thought, it would be a good place to start. It is often the first thing I recommend."