Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Considered noumenally, Schopenhauer says, the world is will.   Considered phenomenally, it is representation.

All people and animals naturally and inevitably fear death above all else because what we are is will, and specifically the will to live.  The will to live, though, is irrational, because life contains more pain than pleasure, and we are more conscious of pain than we are of pleasure.  So life is bad, and seems even worse than it is.

Death, though, is not so bad.  The dead cannot suffer because they are not conscious, and our non-existence before this life does not bother us, so neither should our non-existence after this life.

Death is the end of the individual consciousness, but not of the matter of which we are composed, and not of the force that makes us alive in the first place.  As noumena we are indestructible and can have neither beginning nor end, as Kant showed.  Time itself is a feature of phenomena only.  Our individual being is merely phenomenal and is a kind of illusion.  So too is death.

Our phenomenal world ends at death, but the noumenal self, the will, goes on.  A will focused on the ego or phenomenal self therefore makes a big mistake.  But an altruistic will, focused on the world, gets it right.  Death teaches the moral lesson that selfishness, egoism, is a lie.

So the self is will, but is this will free?  It depends what you mean by freedom, according to Schopenhauer.

Physical freedom is the ability to do what you want without chains or bars stopping you.  This is the only meaning 'liberty' or freedom can have, according to Hume, but he is wrong.  There is also political freedom, which is the ability of a country to make laws for itself.  Then there is moral freedom.

Moral freedom is not the ability to do what one wants, but the ability to want what one wants.  It is freedom for the will from determining causes.   Schopenhauer denies that we have this kind of freedom.

All acts, he says, have a motive, and all motives are causes.   "Every action of a human being is the product of two factors: his character along with a motive."

Character is individual, i.e. different in each person, empirical, i.e.  knowable only through experience, constant, and inborn.

Existence presupposes essence.  That is, to be, one be something specific, something definite.  These defining characteristics are one's essence.  So from birth one must have some essence, and this means one's will cannot be free.  What one desires will always be determined by one's character and the conditions one finds oneself in.  For instance, if from birth one is heterosexual, then the sight of an attractive member of the opposite sex will arouse one's interest.   You are not free to choose not to be interested.

Since we lack free will, all events happen necessarily.   There is no point in hope or regret.

The opposite view is that we create our own essences by the choices we freely make.  This is existentialism according to the definition of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980).