Young Schopenhauer: The Origin of the Metaphysics of Will and its Aporias undertakes a generic reconstruction of how Schopenhauer’s central metaphysical thesis—will as the inner essence of the world—emerges from earlier, heterogeneous strata of thought and experience, and how this emergence deposits lasting aporias into the mature system. Its governing ambition is to follow the formation of problems across manuscript layers and conceptual reconfigurations, tracking how early dualisms and religious-aesthetic motifs are converted into critical-philosophical constraints and then into metaphysical claims. The book’s distinctive value lies in treating contradiction as a determinate product of development: the tensions are neither mere mistakes nor detachable residues, but pressures generated by Schopenhauer’s own methodological commitments, especially the attempt to reconcile Kantian limits, moral deliverance, and a unified explanation of nature.
The work begins from a methodological decision that already shapes every subsequent interpretive move: it reads “young Schopenhauer” as a field of formation whose unity is retrospective and articulated, rather than given in advance. The guiding premise is that philosophical identity in this case is constituted through successive rebindings of questions, with later conceptual acquisitions changing what earlier notes are able to mean and what they can be taken to have been “trying to say.” This is why the book treats manuscript fragments and transitional doctrines as philosophically serious sites of constraint, rather than as mere juvenilia whose content would be exhausted by their contribution to a later synthesis. The generic approach aims to disclose why certain moves became necessary for Schopenhauer under determinate pressures, and why, once made, they made further pressures unavoidable. The upshot is a kind of internal historiography: development is presented as the transformation of criteria—what counts as truth, what counts as access, what counts as liberation—rather than as the accumulation of theses.
This generic optic is already at work in the opening reconstruction of Schopenhauer’s earliest extant fragment, the translation of Milton’s “On Time.” The book refuses the temptation to treat this as a merely literary episode, because the translation is shown to articulate a pre-philosophical framework that will later be philosophically re-coded: a dualism between time and eternity in which temporality bears an axiological-metaphysical deficit and eternity bears the predicates of truth and goodness. Milton’s poem, as presented, stages time as a devouring power that consumes “what is false and vain,” and culminates in an eschatological reversal where time consumes itself and eternity “greets our bliss,” with “Truth, and Peace, and Love” shining once the perishable is gone. The book’s crucial claim is that Schopenhauer’s earliest “we” is interpreted as twofold—one nature subject to time and destined to perish, another eternal—and that this twofoldness is already normatively charged: what is subject to time is thereby implicated in falsity and vanity, while the true and good “we” belongs to the eternal remainder that time cannot hold.
What matters, for the book’s inner narrative, is the precise role played here by truth as a predicate that is not primarily epistemic. Truth initially names an order of being and worth, positioned against the flux of becoming. Hence the early dualism is not yet a critical distinction between appearance and thing-in-itself; it is a lived metaphysical valuation that precedes any explicit delimitation of cognition. The author explicitly warns against a simple anticipation story that would read the time/eternity opposition as a direct prefiguration of the later appearance/thing-in-itself distinction; yet the same passage argues that this Weltanschauung, broadly Platonic in its allocation of illusion to time and truth to eternity, predisposed Schopenhauer to interpret Kant’s transcendental ideality of time and space as an apodictic demonstration of the non-truth of what is in space and time. The important nuance is that Kant here enters as a legitimating operator for an already established demand: criticism is welcomed insofar as it can be received as confirmation of the illusoriness of the temporal, rather than as a neutral theory of conditions of experience.
This predisposition is not treated as an inert background; it becomes an active constraint, because it pushes Schopenhauer toward a radicalized understanding of the relation between truth and eternity, and thereby toward a volatile assimilation of critical philosophy to salvationist aspiration. The book later returns to this early configuration in order to explain why Schopenhauer can speak, in the context of his reception of Kant, of the “lie” of life and of knowledge within the limits of experience as “error,” and why such formulations tend to exceed Kant’s own careful partition between empirical validity and transcendental ignorance. In other words, the generic narrative makes the early pietist-Platonic dualism function as an interpretive lens through which Kant becomes readable, and through which Kant’s distinctions are liable to be reweighted.
From here, the book’s reconstruction thickens by showing how aesthetic experience supplies a second formative axis that does not simply coincide with the time/eternity dualism, yet tends to be recruited into it. The discussion of music is exemplary, because it is not presented as a self-contained aesthetic doctrine; it is presented as a mode of access whose very indeterminacy generates future theoretical demands. The author situates Schopenhauer’s early aesthetic education amid intensive reading and the encounter with Wackenroder’s writings, emphasizing Wackenroder’s depiction of music as harboring something “dark” and “indescribable,” a fusion of profundity, sensual power, and visionary significance that resists conceptual capture. This “darkness” is not a deficiency in the book’s analysis; it is an operator. Music becomes a figure for a kind of immediacy whose cognitive status is undecided: it intimates a beyond of the temporal order, yet it does so without providing determinate knowledge. The book’s method is to treat such undecidedness as the seed of later aporias. Where a later system will need to say what music “knows” (if it knows at all), the early experience yields only a demand for a register of access that is neither discursive cognition nor mere sensuous pleasure.
At this stage of the reconstruction, the “outer” framing elements of the work—its apparatus, its disciplinary orientation, its decision to work through fragments and manuscript collections—begin to function as interpretive constraints in their own right. The book’s choice to work from the earliest fragment onward, and to keep returning to how later doctrines retroactively reshape the intelligibility of early materials, establishes a rule of reading: statements are tracked less as isolated claims than as nodes whose function changes across contexts. The bibliographic and editorial scaffolding (references to manuscript collections, to the history of scholarship on Schopenhauer’s early writings, to the dating of fragments) is therefore not mere metadata; it underwrites the generic claim that conceptual roles can only be fixed relative to a developmental sequence.
The encounter with academic philosophy is then narrated as a conversion of these early demands into the language of epistemological legitimacy and its failure. Particularly decisive is the Göttingen context and Schopenhauer’s exposure to Schulze’s presentation of Kant. The book reconstructs this not as a simple “learning Kant,” but as an encounter with a specific interpretive configuration of Kantianism that tends toward skepticism by collapsing Kant’s distinction between appearance and subjective representation, and by correlatively loading “reality” onto the thing-in-itself understood as unknowable. Schulze’s exposition, as presented here, equates Vorstellung, Sinnenobjekt, and Erscheinung on one side, and opposes them to things-in-themselves as “real things” outside our representations. The author’s analysis is careful: it does not merely report Schulze’s terminology; it shows how this “terminological uniformization” obscures Kant’s empirical/transcendental partition, thereby generating an “inevitably skeptical” picture in which what is real is defined as unknowable.
A crucial consequence follows for the generic narrative: Schopenhauer’s early disposition to equate truth with eternity and to depreciate the temporal world as illusion now receives an epistemological grammar that is at once seductive and catastrophic. Under the skeptical interpretation, the thing-in-itself can be named “truth,” as Schopenhauer’s fragmentary formulations do, yet the same thing is barred from knowledge by definition. The book treats this as a formative aporetic matrix: the demand for absolute truth is legitimated at the very moment when cognition is declared structurally incompetent to attain it. This produces a pressure that cannot be discharged by simply accepting critical limits, because the early demand was never merely to delimit knowledge, but to find a standpoint from which the world’s temporal nullity could be seen and overcome.
The work’s ensuing analysis follows this pressure into Schopenhauer’s early post-Kantian experiments, in which the aspiration to transcend the subject-object form is repeatedly posited and repeatedly destabilized by the need to speak of it as consciousness. The book’s reconstruction of the theory of the “better consciousness” is central here, and it is methodologically exemplary: the doctrine is not treated as a curious metaphysical episode; it is treated as a necessary attempt to concentrate incompatible demands into a single figure.
On the one hand, the “better consciousness” is introduced as a sphere that stands above the empirical consciousness bound to representation and time; it answers to the early demand for eternity, now rearticulated in the idiom of transcendence beyond phenomenal forms. On the other hand, the doctrine tries to secure a kind of awareness that remains experientially accessible, because without some accessibility it could not perform the roles Schopenhauer assigns to it (moral deliverance, aesthetic elevation, possibly a superior cognition). The book brings this tension to a sharp formulation by citing Schopenhauer’s own insistence that the better consciousness “does not think and cognize, precisely because it lies beyond subject and object.” This is treated as structurally revelatory: it asserts a transcendence of the subject-object relation and simultaneously retains the term “consciousness,” thereby generating a latent contradiction between the transcendence required and the phenomenality implied by the very concept of consciousness.
The generic narrative now begins to display one of its recurrent patterns: a concept is introduced to resolve a pressure, and in the act of resolution it inherits and recombines heterogeneous functions that render it unstable. The “better consciousness” must do too much. It functions as the point at which the world can be negated (thus satisfying the salvationist and ascetic demand), and it also functions as the point at which something like Ideas can be “given” (thus satisfying an epistemic-aesthetic demand for access to an eternal order). The text explicitly connects the early religious element—references to Paul, the claim that God conveys eternal Ideas directly—to Schopenhauer’s assimilation of Kantian themes, and it registers that such claims contradict Kant’s insistence that even inner sense is subject to time. The better consciousness is thus a device for keeping together what criticism tends to separate: the yearning for the unconditioned, the rejection of temporal appearance as non-truth, and the requirement that the unconditioned remain, in some manner, present.
Here the book’s “tension-sensitive” procedure becomes especially fine-grained. It tracks how the better consciousness, in order to remain a site of salvation, must be located beyond time and beyond the causal order; yet in order to remain a site of any sort of “awareness,” it must be able to appear within the very consciousness it transcends. The result is an aporia of access: if it is truly beyond subject and object, then any appearing of it within subject-object consciousness risks reintroducing what it was meant to overcome. If it truly appears, then its transcendence becomes questionable; if it truly transcends, then the phenomenality needed for its role becomes questionable. The book’s method is to show that these are not optional interpretive worries imposed from outside; they are generated by Schopenhauer’s own attempt to keep together transcendence and experience within a single conceptual formation.
One can see how the work’s generic approach makes earlier strata return with altered valence. The Miltonic dualism between time and eternity reappears, transposed into the dualism between empirical consciousness bound to representation and a higher sphere that is “eternal.” The aesthetic experience of music reappears, transposed into the idea that there is a mode of access that suspends ordinary cognition. The Kant-Schulze skepticism reappears, transposed into the need for a standpoint that bypasses the impossibility of knowing the thing-in-itself by ordinary means. Yet the transpositions are not simple translations; each transposition imposes new constraints, because the post-Kantian idiom demands that transcendence be articulated without dogmatic metaphysics, while the early demand for salvation presses toward an absolute beyond.
The decisive transformation in the book’s narrative is the shift by which “will” becomes the candidate for what the better consciousness was trying to secure: an inner essence that can be accessed without violating the critical strictures in the same manner as speculative intellectual intuition. Here the work’s attention to conceptual transposition becomes crucial. Early “will” is not immediately the universal metaphysical principle; it emerges through ethical and practical concerns, through the problem of freedom and responsibility, and through the doctrine of intelligible character. The generic claim is that the pathway to the metaphysics of will runs through a hinge-concept that is already structurally ambivalent: intelligible character allows Schopenhauer to claim a timeless act that grounds empirical necessity, thereby preserving a sense of freedom without granting empirical contingency. Yet this same structure invites generalization: if the human being has an inner essence whose manifestation appears under forms of time and causality, then the thought suggests itself that the inner essence of appearances as such might be something accessible by analogy.
The book makes this analogical extension a focal point because it is precisely where a new aporetic configuration is generated. When will is identified with the thing-in-itself, the earlier problem of access returns in a different form. On the one side, Schopenhauer can now claim a privileged access to the thing-in-itself through inner awareness of willing, thereby breaking the skeptical closure of Schulze’s reading in which the real is unknowable. On the other side, the critical prohibition remains as a constraint: the thing-in-itself, insofar as it is defined as beyond the forms of representation, resists objectification and discursive knowledge. The book’s account is that Schopenhauer resolves the earlier aporia of a better consciousness by internalizing transcendence into the subject’s own essence as will, yet in doing so he sets up a new aporia: the will must be knowable enough to ground metaphysics and unknowable enough to remain thing-in-itself.
This new aporia becomes visible, in the book’s reconstruction, through the shifting role of the Platonic Idea and the shifting status of aesthetic contemplation. The work tracks a long phase in which Schopenhauer identifies the will as thing-in-itself with the overall Idea of the world, and then later drops this identification in the final year of drafting The World as Will and Representation. The significance of this for the generic narrative is that the “Idea” serves as a mediating term: it allows an eternal structure to be articulated as an object of some kind of cognition, thereby preserving the cognitive aspect of the better consciousness within the emerging will-metaphysics. Yet this mediation is unstable, because once will is fully identified as the thing-in-itself, the Idea must either be placed on the side of appearance (as objectification) or on the side of the noumenal (as eternal determination). Each placement has costs. If Ideas are appearances, then the eternal object of aesthetic cognition seems to lose the very eternity that initially made it salvifically significant. If Ideas are noumenal, then the critical barrier returns: how can they be cognized?
The book demonstrates that these costs are not eliminated when Schopenhauer’s mature terminology stabilizes. Instead, the costs reappear as theoretical residues that can be understood only generically. A striking case is the problem of aesthetic pleasure. The work formulates the difficulty with characteristic precision: in the mature system, pleasure and pain exist only in relation to will; aesthetic contemplation is “pure, will-less cognition”; how, then, can there be aesthetic pleasure at all? The generic explanation offered is that in the manuscripts up to 1814 Schopenhauer posits a twofoldness of human will and consciousness because of a “twofold supreme good,” temporality and eternity; aesthetic pleasure derives from fulfilling a will-to-eternity with a positively determinable object, namely the sphere of eternal better consciousness to which the Platonic Idea is related. When the mature system eliminates this “better will,” converting it into a pure negation of the remaining will-to-temporality (or will-to-life), the structural basis for aesthetic pleasure becomes aporetic, while the theoretical consequence persists.
This passage shows how the book handles “aporia” as a product of developmental retention: Schopenhauer retains consequences of earlier assumptions while disavowing the assumptions themselves. The aporia is therefore neither a superficial inconsistency nor an externally posed objection; it is the structural imprint of a conceptual migration in which functions are preserved while their grounds are altered. The same generic pattern is then extended to Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music, which “betrays” the earlier identification of thing-in-itself with the overall Platonic Idea, even after that identification has been abandoned in the mature architecture. Music thus becomes, within the generic narrative, a symptom: it marks the persistence of an earlier conceptual constellation (eternity, Idea, privileged access) inside the later will-metaphysics.
At this point, the work’s central claim about aporias becomes increasingly determinate. The aporias are presented as the necessary result of two demands that the developing philosophy simultaneously tries to satisfy: a demand for an absolute negation or deliverance that preserves the early orientation toward eternity and salvation, and a demand for an immanent intelligibility that can explain the world as a unified system. The better consciousness doctrine attempts to satisfy the first demand with a transcendence that remains experientially operative; the metaphysics of will attempts to satisfy the second demand with an inner essence accessible in experience. Each attempt, however, internalizes a remainder of the other demand, and this remainder becomes the site of aporia.
One can see this in the way the book reconstructs Schopenhauer’s reception of Kant through Schulze and the resulting skeptical pressure. Schulze’s interpretation tends toward a situation in which the thing-in-itself is true reality and is unknowable, with skepticism as the inevitable outcome of defining what is real as beyond knowledge. Schopenhauer’s later move to identify will as thing-in-itself can be read, within the book’s framework, as an attempt to break this skeptical closure by positing a privileged access that does not rely on external perception or on the conformity of representation to external reality in the empiricist sense. Yet the book simultaneously shows that this move does not escape the structural tension generated by the critical framework: if the will is accessible, it is accessible only in a mode that must be distinguished from ordinary cognition; if it is the thing-in-itself, it must remain beyond the forms that make cognition possible. The doctrine thus risks generating a self-referential tension: cognition is needed to formulate the metaphysics, while cognition is declared a phenomenal product of will.
Here the earlier formulation about the better consciousness becomes retrospectively illuminating. The sentence that the better consciousness does not think and cognize because it lies beyond subject and object anticipates, in generic form, the later tension in which what must ground the world must lie beyond subject-object representation, while any philosophical discourse about that ground must nevertheless proceed through concepts that function within the representational form. The book’s strategy is to show that the mature system does not abolish this tension; it relocates it. The transcendence once attributed to a higher consciousness is now attributed to will; the access once conceived as a superior consciousness is now conceived as inner awareness of willing; the cognitive aspirations once mediated by Ideas are now distributed across objectification, aesthetic contemplation, and the analogy from inner experience to nature.
The work’s insistence on fine-grained tracking of shifts is especially evident in its treatment of “truth” and “reality” across the developmental arc. In the early Miltonic framework, what is in time is false and vain, and truth belongs to eternity. When Kant is received through Schulze, “reality” becomes attached to the thing-in-itself as what lies outside representations, and appearance becomes deprived of reality insofar as it fails to correspond to the thing-in-itself. In Schopenhauer’s own youthful notes, as the book reports, phenomenal knowledge is qualified as non-truth in a way that is not purely theoretical: the illusory nature of what is in time and the necessary relation between truth and eternity are tied to pietist religiosity and to an energetic yearning for the unconditioned, even as Kantian themes are absorbed. When will becomes thing-in-itself, truth must be redistributed: it cannot simply be eternity opposed to time, nor can it be the unknowable thing-in-itself opposed to appearance; it becomes the inner essence that is revealed in a distinctive mode of access, while the phenomenal world remains representation. This redistribution, the book suggests, is never fully stabilized; residues of the earlier allocations of truth continue to press upon the later system, yielding aporetic moments where the criteria of truth shift across contexts.
A further dimension of the book’s generic method appears in its careful handling of textual strata and of the difference between what Schopenhauer explicitly states at a given stage and what later structures allow one to infer. For example, when the book speaks of predisposition—early dualism predisposing the reception of Kant—it marks a causal-explanatory claim that is not reducible to a single explicit statement by Schopenhauer. Yet it justifies the inference by pointing to recurring formulations in the fragments and to the explicit thematic continuity between early notes and later retrospective interpretations in the Appendix to The World as Will and Representation, where Schopenhauer himself aligns Kant with Platonic truth about the world as delusion. This is characteristic of the book’s procedure: it permits inferences, but it seeks to anchor them in symptomatic repetitions, explicit methodological remarks, and later self-interpretations that retroactively determine earlier meanings.
In the same way, the book’s discussion of aesthetic pleasure and the “better will” involves an interpretive reconstruction of conceptual dependencies. The text states that the possibility of aesthetic pleasure in the mature system is “very problematic,” and it reconstructs how earlier manuscript assumptions about a twofold supreme good provided a determinate object for a will-to-eternity, thereby grounding aesthetic pleasure in the fulfillment of that will. The inference that the mature system retains consequences of disavowed assumptions is supported by the explicit claim that the aporetic moment can be explained from a generic point of view, and by the observation that Schopenhauer developed his theory based on assumptions he later abandoned while retaining their consequences. The methodological significance is that aporia is not treated as a local puzzle to be solved by reinterpretation; it is treated as the structural trace of a developmental path in which conceptual functions outlive their original grounds.
As the work moves toward its account of the mature metaphysics of will, it returns repeatedly to the theme of the “twofold”—first the twofold “we” of the Miltonic framework, later the twofoldness of human will and consciousness in the manuscripts, and then the attempted unification in the mature system. This recurrence with altered valence is one of the book’s chief means of exhibiting unity as articulated relation. The early twofoldness is ontological and axiological; the later twofoldness becomes structural within the human being (twofold supreme good), and then it is converted into a tension within a single will-to-life that must negate itself. The book’s concluding orientation, as indicated by its repeated return to aporetic residues, suggests that Schopenhauer’s system attains unity less by reconciliation than by a layered stratification in which older structures remain active as constraints within newer architectures.
In that light, the mature metaphysics of will appears, in the book’s reconstruction, as an achievement that stabilizes certain questions by converting them into a single explanatory idiom, while leaving the deepest tensions in a controlled yet irreducible state. The will-metaphysics absorbs the early eternity-demand by translating eternity into an inner essence beyond temporal forms; it absorbs the skeptical pressure by positing privileged access; it absorbs the aesthetic demand by granting aesthetic contemplation a distinctive cognitive status; it absorbs the moral-salvific demand by locating liberation in the negation of will. Yet each absorption brings with it an aporetic remainder: privileged access threatens the unknowability of the thing-in-itself; aesthetic cognition threatens the willlessness required for pleasure; negation requires cognition as an instrument of will’s self-denial; Ideas oscillate between being objects of cognition and being mere forms of objectification.
The book’s own closing tendency, where the evidence permits one to extrapolate, is toward an account of philosophical unity as the stabilization of tensions through developmental sedimentation. Schopenhauer’s system, as reconstructed here, does not abolish its originary dualisms; it reconfigures them under new constraints. The early opposition of time and eternity is transposed into the opposition of representation and will, yet the normative devaluation of temporality continues to shape the valuation of phenomenal life. The early “direct echo” of eternity in music returns as a privileged relation of music to the thing-in-itself, even when the conceptual identification that once made this relation intelligible has been abandoned. The skeptical reading of Kant returns as an ever-present pressure to keep the thing-in-itself beyond objectification, even as metaphysics insists on naming it. The better consciousness returns as a displaced function inside the system: where once a higher consciousness was posited beyond subject and object, the mature system must still account for a standpoint of will-less cognition that can disclose Ideas and enable liberation, thereby reintroducing, in altered form, the very transcendence that the metaphysics of will was meant to internalize.
If one asks, as the book finally invites one to ask, what kind of unity is achieved by the end of this developmental arc, the answer that emerges from its generic method is neither doctrinal closure nor simple antinomy. The unity is closer to a controlled stratification whose coherence consists in the regulated migration of roles: eternity becomes inner essence; salvation becomes self-negation; truth becomes bound to a form of access that is simultaneously privileged and circumscribed; aesthetic elevation becomes will-less cognition that nonetheless bears traces of earlier will-to-eternity. The aporias are thereby stabilized as structural features: they are rendered intelligible as the cost of holding together demands that Schopenhauer’s development never relinquishes, even when it changes the terms under which they can be articulated.
Simon Gros 
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