School of thought

Philosophies of the Will

Intellectual current

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Classification

Period
c. 1818-1900 CE
Regions
Europe (origin)
Domains
Ethics, Metaphysics

Overview

Philosophies of the Will is a comparative historical grouping for Schopenhauer's metaphysics of will and the divergent systems that refashioned it later in the nineteenth century. It does not name a doctrine shared in full: Hartmann combined unconscious will with purposive idea, while Nietzsche first worked within and then sharply criticized Schopenhauer's metaphysical and ethical commitments.

Key ideas

  • Will as Thing-in-Itself (Schopenhauer): The inner nature of everything is Will — not rational purpose but blind, irrational striving. Everything in nature, from gravity to human desire, is a manifestation of this Will. Liberation comes through aesthetic contemplation, compassion, and ultimately denial of the will to live.
  • Will to Power (Nietzsche): Nietzsche recast willing in terms of competing drives and will to power while rejecting Schopenhauer's unitary metaphysical Will and ideal of its denial.
  • The Unconscious Will (Hartmann): Eduard von Hartmann synthesised Schopenhauer's Will with Hegel's Idea, proposing an unconscious absolute that strives blindly but unfolds with logical structure — a bridge between pessimist metaphysics and systematic philosophy.

Key figures

Arthur Schopenhauer · Friedrich Nietzsche · Eduard von Hartmann

Questions engaged

  • Free Will

    Schopenhauer denies the liberty of indifference: every act follows necessarily from the character meeting a motive, and freedom belongs not to acting but to being, to the intelligible character that the will is as thing-in-itself.

Influenced by

  • Kantian Critical Philosophy

    Schopenhauer builds directly on Kant's distinction between appearance and thing-in-itself, keeping the distinction and identifying the thing-in-itself as Will. He set out the debt and the disagreement together in the Appendix to the first volume.

Later connections

  • Existentialism Influenced by this tradition

    The twentieth-century existentialists took from Nietzsche an ideal of authenticity as self-creation: the overman who breaks with the herd, creates his own values, and gives his life a style of its own. Camus read that affirmation of life as a form of rebellion against conformity.

References