Christopher Janaway’s Essays on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: Values and the Will of Life advances a precise scholarly stake: it shows, across fourteen carefully argued studies, how Schopenhauer’s conception of will to life and Nietzsche’s critique and revaluation of values intersect at the level of first-order psychological explanation, second-order evaluative grammar, and the conditions of aesthetic and moral experience. The distinctive contribution lies in a method that keeps the exegetical claims anchored in textual detail while repeatedly testing them against the internal pressures of each philosopher’s system. The volume’s unity emerges from the way its parts recompose the same problem—how to understand agency, suffering, meaning, and value when one treats willing as our inner essence—until that problem is displaced by an alternative picture of affirmation, art, and greatness that transforms the original vocabulary.
The book frames itself with an Introduction and a concise Preface, which together delineate the outer remit and the compositional logic of the collection. The Preface identifies the volume as a set of previously written and newly integrated essays, and the Acknowledgements record the earlier publication contexts. These signals, textually secured, establish a practice: arguments are returned to over multiple essays from different angles, sometimes with new evidence, sometimes with a new conceptual grammar that reclassifies earlier claims. The Abbreviations and References section sets out the critical editions and citation conventions for both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, making clear that philological exactness underwrites the interpretive risk-taking that follows. It is methodologically salient that the Introduction formulates the shared post-theological horizon—God is dead is given a Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean inflection as a crisis of meaning and evaluative orientation—while refusing to collapse one thinker into the other. That refusal is secured by recurrent attention to what can be textually warranted about the status of will, intellect, suffering, compassion, art, and redemption in Schopenhauer, before turning to what can be equally warranted about suspicion, drive-psychology, artistic illusion, and Ja-sagen in Nietzsche.
Part I, on Schopenhauer’s theory of the will, opens by reconstructing what the text calls the “real essence of human beings” as will, elaborated through the theme of the unconscious will. The essay’s argumentative tactic is to unfold a layered picture of psychic economy in which the intellect is derivative: the will initiates, the intellect rationalizes, and self-consciousness presents only a thin surface over deeper causality. The textual warrant lies in Schopenhauer’s reiterated subordination of representation to willing in the World as Will and Representation and in the marginalia and Parerga that describe intellect as the will’s tool. Janaway presses the consequence that moral psychology cannot begin with reflective choice; it must take determinative character as given, and character is not the outcome of deliberation but the manifestation of an inner essence that antecedently fixes what an agent finds salient, tempting, irresistible, or repellent. The inferential extension is that an agent’s practical identity is uncovered in action rather than built by rational construction; the essays stress how this inversion of a Kantian order—where maxims and autonomy occupy the ground floor—produces a very different map of responsibility, motivation, and value.
The second essay in Part I integrates this picture with freedom of the will, responsibility, and character. The method is diagnostic: Janaway identifies the precise point at which Schopenhauer’s necessity doctrine collides with ordinary attributions of moral responsibility and then shows how the philosopher re-describes responsibility without granting contra-causal freedom. Textually secured are two theses: empirical character expresses itself necessarily; intelligible character grounds the unity of that expression across cases. What remains inferential—though made probable by the exegesis—is a two-level account of responsibility in which retrospective ascription of desert piggybacks on the stable revelation of character rather than on a metaphysics of alternative possibilities. The essay’s pressure test is practical: if responsibility is a matter of self-disclosure rather than undetermined choice, the ethical field must shift from adjudicating isolated acts to interpreting enduring manifestations of selfhood. This shift already strains against any picture in which moral valuation is the adjudication of choices taken as free in the relevant sense; it points instead to a hermeneutic of character in which praise and blame track the clarity or confusion of one’s alignment with the world as will.
The third essay, on the aimlessness of the will, sharpens this pressure by reinterpreting teleology. Janaway’s claim—textually attached to Schopenhauer’s repeated insistence that willing has no final aim—is that the will’s structure is strebend ohne Ziel, a striving without ultimate end. The intellect supplies proximate goals; the will’s essence confers an endlessness whose only apparent horizons are suffering in frustration or suffering in satiation’s collapse. The argument does not rely on rhetorical lament but on a systematic contrast between the logical form of desire as longing for determination and the metaphysical status of will as self-perpetuating unrest. By turning the screw on this contrast, the essay uncovers a hidden entailment: if willing is internally non-teleological, then any highest good defined within the order of willing is conceptually unstable. The evidence here involves Schopenhauer’s anticlimactic logic of satisfaction and the textual motif that every attained end immediately regenerates desire. The inferential step is that the will’s non-teleology contaminates evaluative projects that hope to normalize desire through rational arrangement or distributive schemes; these projects cannot annul the structure of unrest because they presuppose it as the living condition of their own efficacy.
The fourth essay draws these strands into the problem of the summum bonum—and hence into the evaluative question of negation and value. The textual thesis is straightforward: Schopenhauer denies that there is a realizable highest good within the world as will and representation. The argumentative pivot is subtler: Janaway reads the philosopher’s advocacy of Verneinung des Willens (negation of the will) as a comparative claim about value-domains rather than as a singular prescription. Art, morality, and ascetic transformation mark heterogeneous ways of shifting out of the circuitry of individual willing. The moral achievement of compassion, the aesthetic state in which cognition is purified of personal interest, and the radical self-alteration that mystic traditions name redemption are presented as sites of genuine value precisely because they interrupt the default economy of egoic desire. The essay tests whether these sites are commensurable. Textually secured are distinctions among cognitive states (aesthetic contemplation), practical attitudes (mitleid), and metaphysical gestures (denial of the will). The pressure comes from their differing modalities: one is a mode of seeing, one is a mode of willing transformed by the suffering of others, one is a mode of being in which willing, as we ordinarily live it, ebbs. Janaway suggests—cautiously—that Schopenhauer holds these together as articulations of a single anti-egoic current, while acknowledging the tensions: the aesthetic state remains episodic; compassion operates within phenomenal life; the negation of will seems to break with life altogether. The constructive convolution of the essay is deliberate: by tracking how these modes congeal and then displace one another, it exposes an evaluative hierarchy without flattening the phenomenology.
Part II, which moves from will to the status of the individual, reopens the earlier results from a different side. The essay on being beyond the individual and the value of love—where Wagner’s adoption and transformation of Schopenhauerian motifs become a testing ground—investigates whether eros can be redeemed from the will’s economy, or whether it is always the will reproducing itself under the sign of ideality. The textual scaffolding is Schopenhauer’s double portrait of love as metaphysically reproductive (the species uses the individual) and as on occasion lifting the subject out of self-concern when love is purified of sexual appetite. Janaway’s treatment of Wagner is precise: he delineates how the composer tries to transform sexual love into a redemptive Durchbruch, a breakthrough in which separateness dissolves, while noting that the musical dramaturgy remains in tension with Schopenhauer’s strictures about the will’s aimlessness and the illusory character of the lover’s idealizations. The pressure point is whether pure love is intelligible on Schopenhauer’s own terms, or whether it is a strategically necessary fiction for art. The essay refuses an easy verdict; it places the phenomenon on the edge where Schopenhauer’s suspicion of the species’ cunning meets the hope that, in rare cases, love’s self-transcendence resembles the aesthetic and moral suspensions of self.
The companion essay on death and consolation reframes the same edge. It catalogues the philosopher’s meditations on mortality as a diagnostic of what kind of relief, if any, the system can sustain. Textually secured are remarks presenting life as a continuous dying and exposing the fear of death as the will’s recoil from its own limits; yet the analysis recognizes that Schopenhauer offers a consolatory rhetoric as well—continuity beyond individual death, the partial effacement of individuality in the species, and the prospect of quietus where willing abates. Janaway’s procedure is to ask what counts as consolation on a theory that depreciates the individual. If consolation means the promise that I, as this individual, persist, then the system yields little. If consolation means the loosening of the grip with which the individual I holds itself, then meditation on death can aid the same anti-egoic trajectory traced in Part I. The essay’s constructive convolution consists in letting the horror of dissolution and the value of release coexist without resolution. That coexistence indicates a deeper feature of the book’s method: apparent contradictions are sustained long enough to disclose a reclassification of values rather than being solved by tidy distinctions.
The long, intricate essay on Olga Plümacher’s critique returns to pessimism with a new instrument. Plümacher, historically attentive and philosophically exacting, probes Schopenhauer’s pessimism for overreach and under-argued transitions. Janaway reconstructs her position with sympathy: if pessimism claims universal jurisdiction over the human condition, it must show that the misalignment of desire and satisfaction is not merely frequent but necessary, and that the alleged redemptive modes are compatible with the strongest account of the will’s aimlessness. The text secures her challenges to Schopenhauer’s tendency to move from recurring dissatisfaction to metaphysical necessity and to trade on a rhetoric of extremity that outpaces strict demonstration. Janaway does not merely defend Schopenhauer; he uses Plümacher’s critique to refine the structure of the argument, drawing a line between phenomenological prevalence and metaphysical claim. The inferential upshot—carefully signaled as an extension rather than a textual deliverance—is that pessimism remains powerful when construed as a systematic phenomenology of ordinary willing, whereas its metaphysical absolutizations invite circumspection. The essay carries forward a compositional lesson: the value of negation of will is clarified, not weakened, when severed from totalizing, declarative pessimism.
Part III turns to Nietzsche’s responses. The first essay here, on Schopenhauer’s Christian perspectives, isolates a thread often ignored in caricatures of Schopenhauer as a purely secular pessimist. By attending to explicit evaluative alignments—humility over pride, compassion over vengeance, the primacy of self-denial—Janaway argues that Schopenhauer’s evaluative texture bears recognizably Christian features, even if the metaphysics avowedly does not. The textual case is cumulative: choice of moral exemplars, vocabulary of ascetic transformation, and the pattern of devaluation of worldly success in favor of a reoriented inner life. This sets Nietzsche’s critique into sharper relief: a critique that treats such evaluative features as symptoms of décadence rather than as insights, and that seeks to detoxify European culture from a psychological inheritance it no longer needs and that harms it. The essay’s methodological contribution is to separate the metaphysical thesis about will from the evaluative atmosphere it carries, so that Nietzsche’s resistance can be measured without conflation.
The second essay in the Nietzsche-response sequence asks what it could mean to justify suffering. Janaway begins with the observation—anchored in both thinkers’ texts—that suffering is central; but the question shifts from description to normativity. The Schopenhauerian stance recognizes value in the diminishment of suffering via compassion and in the radical quieting of willing; the Nietzschean stance, at least in certain texts, treats suffering as integral to growth, as a condition for intensification and heightened forms of life. The essay’s strategy is dialectical. It shows how attempts to justify suffering with a ready-made teleology misunderstand Nietzsche’s use of suffering as a diagnostic of health and strength rather than as a means subordinated to an antecedent end. The textual warrants are the aphoristic discussions where Nietzsche rejects utilitarian and theodical treatments and insists on the tragic need for illusion, artistry, and organization of drives. The inferential suggestion, carefully framed, is that one must shift from justification to transfiguration: suffering does not become good because it serves an external goal; rather, certain configurations of life incorporate suffering into a pattern whose internal measure is fecundity, not moral providence. In this way, Janaway reassigns the grammar of the problem: when Nietzsche speaks of saying Yes to life, the act does not vindicate suffering; it refuses to let the demand for vindication set the terms of evaluation.
The third essay in Part III, on affect and cognition, binds the two trajectories together by asking how feelings and thoughts are entwined in perception, valuation, and agency. The textual anchor is Schopenhauer’s account of intellect in the service of will versus Nietzsche’s intensifying sense that cognition is penetrated by affective orientation. Janaway’s contribution is to move beyond the abstractions: he shows how, for Schopenhauer, aesthetic cognition is a privileged case of relative freedom from the will, and how, for Nietzsche, even such cognition remains thoroughly organized by drives. What is secured in the texts is the mutual rejection of a purified, disinterested reason that simply mirrors the world; what is developed inferentially is a graded map of how affect participates in cognition without rendering truth-talk meaningless. This is where the volume’s earlier work on art, compassion, and redemption begins to congeal into a different question: if cognition is always already a modulation of drive or a service to will, what would count as objectivity worth pursuing, and what would count as a valuable transformation of ourselves through the ways we know?
Part IV delivers Nietzsche’s positive elaborations on art, suffering, morality, greatness, and affirmation. The essay with the provocation “beauty is false, truth ugly” takes as textual points of departure the late remarks in The Gay Science and On the Genealogy of Morality where Nietzsche declares that we need art in order not to perish of the truth, and that art is the sanctification of lying. Janaway resists treating these as mere epigrams; he reconstructs a view on which truth, stripped of its life-serving illusions, would disgust, disorient, and incapacitate. The role of art, then, is not decorative but constitutive of human flourishing; it forms a space in which illusion is not opposed to knowledge but reorganizes the conditions under which truth can be borne. The essay’s internal tension is deliberate: Nietzsche wants to retain a high standard for intellectual honesty while affirming the indispensability of illusion. Janaway steers through this by distinguishing the content of propositions from the conditions of uptake in a living creature. The textual security lies in Nietzsche’s repeated insistence that valuation precedes cognition in the order of life; the inferential edge is a quasi-pragmatic account of why a rigorous culture requires artistic mediation to keep its truths livable.
The essay pairing Nietzsche with Derek Parfit on attitudes to suffering intensifies the work of the previous analysis by inviting a cross-grained comparison. Parfit’s ethical rationalism foregrounds reasons whose impersonality aspires to strict normativity; Nietzsche’s reflections embed reasons in the fabric of drives and great-organizing projects. Janaway does not trivialize the comparison; instead he teases out competing logics of aggregation and distribution of pain and benefit, and competing conceptions of what counts as a reason to preserve or alter a life. Textually anchored in Nietzsche’s remarks on cruelty, strength, and the pathos of distance, the essay asks whether there exists a reason-sensitive standpoint that can endorse the increase of suffering in a life that also increases power, unity, and aesthetic expressiveness. The inferential consequence—presented cautiously—is that Nietzsche presses an evaluative reclassification where the measure of a life is not hedonic balance but the shape it achieves. This does not make suffering good; it alters the criterion by which the presence of suffering figures as a cost. The point of the pairing is to make the reader feel the weight of Nietzsche’s transvaluation by placing it against a lucid contemporary rationalism whose clarity makes the Nietzschean deflection more visible.
The following essay, on morality, drives, and human greatness, makes explicit the pattern that has been emerging. Janaway reconstructs Nietzsche’s later ideal of greatness as a function of drive-organization, self-legislation in a non-Kantian key, and capacity for long-range self-binding. The textual pillars are the attacks on herd morality and the repeated expressions of esteem for unity of style, rarity, and the capacity to risk oneself in projects that exceed the demands of comfort. The argument is not that morality is worthless; it is that the morality we have is a symptom of leveling instincts, useful for taming and social coordination, but hostile to the conditions under which singular excellence can appear. The essay’s method involves teasing apart morality as a late-achieved cultural synthesis and valuation as a more basic function of living systems; on this basis, Janaway shows why Nietzsche can both admire certain ascetic practices (when they serve enhancement) and despise moral codifications (when they serve ressentiment or mediocrity). The textually secured core is the reevaluation of values; the inferential upshot is a picture of ethical life in which the central question is what one can become, not merely how one can conform.
The culminating essay, “Who—or What—Says Yes to Life?”, returns to the problem that catalyzed the volume: the shape of affirmation after the collapse of providential meaning and the displacement of a moral metaphysics of salvation. Janaway reads “saying Yes” across Nietzsche’s corpus as a multi-level act or achievement. First, there is a subject-level stance—someone says Yes. Second, there is a drive-ensemble-level stance—a configuration of forces finds itself integrated and expansive, and, in that state, it says Yes. Third, there is a culture-level stance—practices and artworks that authorize and sustain a form of life implicitly say Yes. The textual supports include explicit invocations of Ja-sagen, the discussion of health and sickness in the Genealogy, and the frequent insistence that affirmation is not merely an attitude toward facts but a reorganization of one’s drives. Janaway recognizes the temptation to treat affirmation as a simple mirror-image of Schopenhauer’s negation; yet he takes pains to display the asymmetry. In Schopenhauer the interruption of willing is the site of value because it loosens the grip of egoic striving; in Nietzsche the incorporation of suffering within a higher-order unity is the site of value because it exhibits the strength to transfigure raw necessity into form. The compositional arc of the book comes into view at this point: the Schopenhauerian sections build an exacting account of why the ordinary economy of willing cannot ground a highest good; the Nietzschean sections do not refute that diagnosis so much as redirect it toward a vision in which value emerges from the artistry of drive-organization rather than from escape from willing. In that sense, the later parts of the book displace the earlier parts: they retain the problem but relocate the solution-space.
Running through the whole volume is a sustained attention to art as the privileged laboratory for these transformations. In Schopenhauer, art detaches cognition from interest and so models a value that does not feed the will’s aimlessness; in Nietzsche, art offers the means by which truth’s ugliness becomes bearable and life’s cruelty becomes form. The book’s distinctive achievement is to keep these pictures close enough that their deep kinship is manifest while maintaining the difference that becomes decisive when one asks how to live. The matter is not whether art consoles or intensifies; it is whether one wants consolation at the price of intensity or intensity at the price of comfort. Janaway’s essays neither preach nor adjudicate from above; they work within each thinker’s grammar, build the strongest case for what the texts can secure, and then expose the tensions that press beyond those securities.
It is important that the collection tracks a composition sequence that is not merely chronological but problem-driven. The first part lays down a metaphysics-cum-psychology of willing and a correlative value-theory of negation, compassion, and aesthetic detachment. The second part tests that framework at its margins—love and death—where individual identity strains and the practical upshot of pessimism is most exposed. The third part pivots to reception and response, first by uncovering the Christian evaluative atmosphere in Schopenhauer that invites Nietzsche’s critique, then by reframing suffering so that justification gives way to transfiguration, and finally by theorizing affect and cognition as the medium in which any revaluation must occur. The fourth part harvests the Nietzschean positive proposals on art, suffering, morality, greatness, and affirmation. The outer frame in the Introduction states this trajectory in simpler terms—two philosophers in a shared crisis over meaning and value—but the essays display a subtler motion: each returns to the same set of phenomena with a new grammar until the initial conceptual apparatus can no longer contain them.
Methodologically, the volume models a style of philosophical writing that treats texts as both constraints and levers. Janaway works with a minimalist apparatus of German technicality; when Verneinung des Willens, Mitleid, or Ja-sagen enters the page, he immediately provides the minimal gloss needed to keep the discussion accessible without diluting the precision. The central claims are always mounted with explicit signals of status: what is textually secured by repeated passages and what is inferentially drawn as a consequence or best explanation. The reader is given a reliable sense of when a conclusion rests on Schopenhauer’s or Nietzsche’s words and when it is an interpretive compression meant to show the system’s demands. This is crucial in chapters that risk conflation—such as the treatment of Christian evaluative motifs in Schopenhauer or the discussion of artistic falsification in Nietzsche—because it prevents the argument from trading on proximity of themes for identity of doctrines. The result is a disciplined constructive reading that acknowledges its own pressure points.
The recurrent problems—aimlessness of will, the absence of a realizable highest good, the allure and danger of love, the fear and promise of death, the temptation of redemptive metaphysics, the question of whether suffering admits of justification, the role of affect in cognition, the necessity and danger of art, the critique of morality, the ideal of greatness, the grammar of affirmation—do not appear as a list to be checked off. They circulate. An early claim about character’s necessity becomes a late-stage premise in arguing for a form of self-overcoming that substitutes unity of style for moral purity. A middle-stage hesitation about the value of pure love becomes grist for understanding why Nietzsche praises certain asceticisms and denounces others. A meditation on death that hovered between horror and release becomes a lens through which to read affirmation as a kind of training in bearing the limits that once paralyzed. In this circulation, the book constructs a single conversation in which Schopenhauer and Nietzsche do not cancel each other; they establish coordinates within which the reader can locate the demands any serious account of value must meet after the collapse of providential teleology.
If one wanted to encapsulate the final state of the argument, one could say this. The will to life designates, in Schopenhauer’s lexicon, the inner essence whose expression condemns us to unrest and so situates value in interruptions of egoic striving—art, compassion, and the radical quieting named negation. Nietzsche’s revaluation does not deny the unrest or the ubiquity of suffering; it relocates value in the capacity to integrate necessity—suffering included—into a higher-order unity that can say Yes without fleeing the worst. Janaway’s essays do not choose between these; they delineate the costs and attractions of each stance with exemplary clarity. The text secures that Schopenhauer can say what is truly valuable only where willing is assuaged or silenced; the text secures that Nietzsche can call art necessary and truth ugly without abandoning intellectual conscience. What is left, marked as inferential but powerfully motivated by the exposition, is the sense that any contemporary philosophy of value will have to negotiate the space opened between these positions: to honor the phenomenology of aimless striving without capitulating to quietism, to honor the austerity of truth without abandoning the illusions that make life livable, to retain the ethical seriousness of compassion without allowing it to calcify into a morality hostile to greatness.
The closing clarification follows from this negotiated space. The volume’s scholarly stake is precise: to show, with textual economy and conceptual patience, how Schopenhauer’s system makes sense of meaning without God by depreciating the individual will, and how Nietzsche’s project makes sense of meaning without God by intensifying the individual and cultural capacity to form life. The distinctive contribution is to keep the two projects in contact long enough for their deepest tensions to surface in shared examples—love, death, art, suffering—and to let those tensions do positive work. The essays merge into a layered account of the will of life and the values it makes possible, yet the very success of that merging displaces the reader into a new stance: one is no longer asking whether pessimism is true or whether affirmation is permissible, but how the configuration of drives, the texture of cognition, and the practices of art and compassion can be arranged so that a human life becomes answerable to what it knows. In that reframed question, Janaway’s book completes the arc it set for itself in the Introduction—by reconstructing two philosophies of the will and value with fidelity sufficient to force a contemporary reader to reconsider what it would mean to live with them.
Simon Gros 
Leave a comment