  In his prize-winning essay “On the Freedom of the Will,” Schopenhauer follows Kant in espousing a kind of compatibilism. Nature is deterministic but the possibility of freedom is guaranteed by the “in itself” of the world which is independent of the PSR and is in that way undetermined (see Shapshay, 2011 for an account of Schopenhauer’s fuller argument for this claim). In all of his works after the 1813 dissertation, however, Schopenhauer parts ways with Kant’s view of “causality through freedom” through a noumenal self.  The possibility of aesthetic freedom is nonetheless vouchsafed by the transcendental-idealist doctrine of the distinction between the empirical and intelligible character. By virtue of the ‘two-sidedness’ of the individual’s character, the individual can have transcendental/moral freedom, for Schopenhauer views the intelligible character as the act of the free will qua thing in itself [Willensakt] 