Young Schopenhauer: The Origin of the Metaphysics of Will and its Aporias reconstructs, with exceptional conceptual rigor, the emergence of Schopenhauer’s philosophy from its earliest pietistic, aesthetic, and critical sediments to the fully articulated metaphysics of will, while simultaneously exposing the inner aporetic structure that this metaphysics both produces and inherits. Its distinctive scholarly stake lies in demonstrating that Schopenhauer’s mature system does not simply supersede its youthful failures but remains structurally bound to them through unresolvable tensions between cognition and will, appearance and thing-in-itself, affirmation and negation. The work’s contribution consists in tracing these tensions through manuscript strata, treating contradiction itself as a historical product with determinate philosophical necessity.
From the outset the book situates Schopenhauer’s philosophical birth not in a volatile field of religious, aesthetic, and critical forces that precede formal philosophy. The earliest notebooks do not present philosophical arguments in the proper sense but articulate a lived dualism between temporality and eternity that precedes any explicit epistemology. Eternity appears as the site of truth, goodness, and salvation; time as the domain of decay, deception, and suffering. This ontological bifurcation is not derived from Kantian limits of knowledge but from a pietistic experiential horizon in which the finite world is already judged inadequate to the demands of meaning. The author reconstructs how this dualism structures Schopenhauer’s earliest reactions to poetry, religion, and music, long before systematic philosophy enters his field of vision. The early translation of Milton functions less as a literary exercise than as a metaphysical confession, staging an ontological economy in which time both consumes the world and prepares its own annihilation in eternity. What is decisive here is that truth and salvation are initially located outside the phenomenal order; the later problem of the thing-in-itself is anticipated as an existential pressure before it is thematized as a critical limit.
The early aesthetic orientation toward music deepens this pre-critical metaphysics. Music appears as a rupture in temporal experience, a direct resonance of eternity within empirical life. The book shows how this experience already contains the germ of a later metaphysical privileging of non-representational intuition, but without yet possessing its conceptual articulation. Music suspends the rule of succession and causality without offering cognitive determination of what lies beyond. The opposition between appearance and supersensible ground is therefore not yet epistemologically stabilized; it is raised as a demand of experience that exceeds conceptual mastery. At this stage Schopenhauer’s thought is not yet Kantian, but already post-Kantian in aspiration: it seeks access to what lies beyond the finite without possessing the critical tools to delimit that access.
The encounter with academic philosophy at Göttingen marks the violent collision between this pre-philosophical metaphysics and the discipline of critical reason. Under Schulze’s influence, Schopenhauer confronts the negative core of Kant’s revolution: the unknowability of the thing-in-itself and the reduction of appearances to representations structured by the understanding. The book reconstructs in detail how this confrontation is not merely assimilated but experienced as a metaphysical trauma. Kant shatters the immediate identification of eternity with truth by severing cognition from any direct access to the supersensible. The thing-in-itself becomes the opaque remainder that both grounds and escapes knowledge. This produces a double movement in Schopenhauer: on the one hand, a radicalization of dualism; on the other, an increasing dissatisfaction with the restriction of metaphysics to regulative ideas. The “nightmare” of criticism is not simply skepticism but the experience that truth has been exiled from the world without being relocated elsewhere in a way that permits positive determination.
It is within this fracture that Schopenhauer’s ambivalent engagement with Fichte and Schelling unfolds. The book makes clear that this engagement is neither derivative nor merely polemical. Schopenhauer initially recognizes in both thinkers an attempt to rescue the supersensible from Kant’s prohibitions, yet he simultaneously identifies in their systems a fundamental violation of critical limits through the transcendent use of the understanding. The author tracks with great care how Schopenhauer appropriates individual conceptual moves—absolute self-consciousness, the primacy of activity, the genetic construction of nature—while rejecting the systematic ambitions they serve. What is decisive is the emergence of a new philosophical problem: how the supersensible can be both ground and inaccessible, both necessary and impossible as an object of knowledge.
The early treatment of will in this context functions, as the book insists, as a false precedent of the mature system. Will appears first not as universal metaphysical ground but as moral intensity, as the inner kernel opposed to a world judged null from the standpoint of value. The book demonstrates that the early attribution of timelessness to will is not yet a metaphysical thesis but a moral-metaphysical extrapolation from the experience of obligation. The will stands “beyond time” because it is detached from empirical causality in the realm of responsibility, not yet because it constitutes the inner nature of being as such. This distinction is crucial, for it prevents the retrojection of the mature metaphysics into youthful ethical reflections.
The confrontation with Fichte’s doctrine of absolute self-consciousness introduces the problem of reflexivity in a decisive way. Schopenhauer’s critique of the self-grounding I does not rest on empirical skepticism but on a structural argument concerning the impossibility of the subject becoming identical with its own ground of positing. The book shows how the concept of Besonnenheit—philosophical composure or reflective clarity—emerges here as a limit-concept: it names the aspiration to a knowledge that would grasp the conditions of its own possibility without collapsing into identity. This aspiration generates a permanent tension between metacognition and metaphysical intuition. The subject seeks to see itself as condition while remaining bound to representation.
It is from within this tension that the theory of the “better consciousness” arises as Schopenhauer’s first systematic attempt at a post-Kantian metaphysics. The book reconstructs this theory not as an eccentric detour but as a necessary transitional formation. The better consciousness is defined as the locus of a non-representational awareness that negates the world of appearance without reifying a second world of objects. It neither cognizes nor intuits in the ordinary sense; it is the negation of empirical subject-object structure. The author demonstrates with great conceptual care that this figure is structurally overdetermined: it functions simultaneously as moral authority, aesthetic intuition, ascetic negation, and supra-personal identity. This multiplicity is not accidental but arises from the attempt to concentrate heterogeneous post-Kantian demands into a single point of transcendence.
The unity of this figure is therefore unstable from the beginning. On the one hand, the better consciousness is invoked as the site of absolute negation of the empirical will, grounding ascetic liberation. On the other hand, it is treated as a form of higher intuition, as the cognitive access to Platonic Ideas through aesthetic contemplation. The book traces how this double determination produces a fundamental aporia: the better consciousness must lie beyond subject and object in order to ground redemption, yet it must remain a form of consciousness in order to ground cognition. This internal contradiction is not an accidental ambiguity of language but the structural outcome of attempting to preserve both moral transcendence and aesthetic knowledge within a single post-critical position.
The extension of this theory into 1813 intensifies rather than resolves its contradictions. The author shows how the concepts of negation, nothingness, freedom, individuality, genius, asceticism, and sublimity are systematically coordinated around the axis of the better consciousness without reaching genuine unification. The more Schopenhauer elaborates this figure, the more he is forced to attribute to it mutually incompatible predicates: it must be absolutely opposed to the world yet practically operative within it; beyond time yet accessible within temporal acts; unconditional negation yet the highest form of affirmation in art. The better consciousness thus becomes the conceptual site where the early dualism between time and eternity is translated into the post-Kantian language of subjectivity and negation, without losing its original religious charge.
The decisive rupture occurs with the encounter with Indian thought and the conceptual transformation of will into a universal metaphysical principle. The book carefully avoids any romanticized narrative of sudden conversion. Instead it reconstructs how the doctrine of intelligible character and the analogical extension of willing from self-consciousness to world-objectivity together dissolve the framework in which the better consciousness was operative. Once will becomes the inner essence of all appearance, there is no longer a structural place for a second transcendental consciousness that would stand outside the will. Negation must now occur within the will itself as a form of self-denial rather than as a higher cognitive standpoint.
At this point the book’s genetic method reveals its full power. The doctrine of intelligible character initially functions as the hinge between moral freedom and metaphysical necessity. It allows Schopenhauer to assert that the empirical individual is determined in time while the essence of that individual remains a free, timeless act of will. Yet as this doctrine is generalized into the universal will-to-life, the distinction between individual and world collapses. The will is no longer merely the inner essence of the person but the inner essence of nature as such. What was formerly grounded in personal moral experience becomes the metaphysical structure of all reality.
This transformation simultaneously abolishes the better consciousness and internalizes its function within the will itself. Redemption is no longer the awakening of a higher consciousness opposed to empirical life but the self-negation of the will that constitutes life. The book shows in detail how this shift displaces the aporias of the earlier system without eliminating them. The contradiction between cognition and will is not resolved; it is reconfigured. Cognition now appears both as a product of the will and as the only possible means of its negation. This generates the core aporia of the mature system: the will must use its own phenomenal manifestation—cognition—to deny itself as noumenal ground.
In the final and most substantial genetic analysis, the book traces how this contradiction becomes structurally sedimented in The World as Will and Representation. The analogical argument that moves from one’s own willing to the inner essence of all appearances inherits the same instability that marked the doctrine of intelligible character. The will is said to be identical with the thing-in-itself, yet the thing-in-itself is simultaneously declared unknowable. Platonic Ideas oscillate between appearances and noumenal determinations. Aesthetic cognition is described as both knowledge of the will’s objectifications and liberation from the will’s servitude. None of these tensions are treated as accidental inconsistencies of exposition; they are shown to be direct consequences of the genetic path through which the system arose.
The book’s decisive philosophical claim is that Schopenhauer’s aporias are not removable defects but the structural inscriptions of an unresolved conflict between two demands that shape the entire trajectory of his thought: the demand for an absolute negation of the world grounded in salvation, and the demand for a universal metaphysical explanation grounded in immanent intelligibility. The better consciousness attempted to preserve the first demand against the second; the metaphysics of will attempts to preserve the second without abandoning the first. The contradiction thus shifts its location without losing its force.
By following this movement from pietistic dualism through critical pessimism, post-Kantian experimentation, ascetic metaphysics, and finally genetic aporetics, the book constructs not a linear development but a dialectical displacement of problems. Each conceptual formation resolves a subset of previous tensions only to generate new ones at a deeper structural level. The will absorbs the functions of eternity; negation becomes immanent; salvation becomes self-denial; truth becomes suffering’s mirror. Yet the original question—how meaning is possible in a world governed by time, causality, and death—never disappears. It is merely translated.
The work concludes by clarifying that Schopenhauer’s philosophy does not culminate in doctrinal closure but in a terminal tension between metaphysical universality and ethical negation, between the full affirmation of will as world-ground and the full denial of will as the only path to redemption. This tension, genetically reconstructed rather than formally resolved, defines both the power and the irresolvable fragility of his system.
Simon Gros 
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