Schopenhauer maintains that each person's character is both constant and inborn. We can neither choose nor change what we are. We can be educated to understand the world and ourselves better, giving us better, more refined motives on which to act, but the self that these motives prompt into action really has not altered:" Under the changeable shell of his years, hhis relationshhips, and even his store of knowledge and opinions, there hides, like a crab under its shell, the identical and real man, quite unchangeble and always the same" . Schopenhauer thinks that many of ordinary attitudes bear out this claim: we assume not just identity of the person, but constancy in the moral character as well. When we have gone on trusting someone to behave in a certain way, and have eventually been disa... (查看原文)
