Affirming the Abyss: Nietzsche’s Reversal of Schopenhauer’s Will

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 Introduction

Friedrich Nietzsche once confessed that he was among those readers of Schopenhauer who, “after reading the first page of him, know with certainty that they will read all his works.”¹ This early admiration, however, did not translate into philosophical allegiance. Instead, Nietzsche absorbed and then radically overturned Schopenhauer’s most central idea: the concept of will. For Arthur Schopenhauer, the will—though essential—was a blind, irrational force underlying all reality, the engine of ceaseless striving and inevitable suffering. His response was a philosophy of renunciation, advocating a retreat from the agonies of existence through compassion, asceticism, and the quieting of desire.

Nietzsche, by contrast, reinterpreted this bleak metaphysical insight as a call to affirmation. His aesthetic vision of life, expressed through concepts such as the Dionysian and Apollonian duality, master-slave morality, and the will to power, opposed the ascetic ideal at the heart of Schopenhauer’s ethics. This article explores how Nietzsche both inherits and radically reimagines the Schopenhauerian will, turning a metaphysics of resignation into one of joyous defiance.

Schopenhauer’s Will: The Metaphysical Engine of Suffering

In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer presents a deeply pessimistic metaphysics. Beneath the world of appearances (Vorstellung) lies the will: a fundamental, yet unconscious, impersonal, and aimless force that animates all phenomena. Everything that exists—from gravity to human desire—is an expression of this underlying will. It is not governed by reason or divine purpose but by blind, incessant striving.

For Schopenhauer, to will is to suffer. “All willing arises from want, and hence from suffering,” he writes. “The satisfaction of a desire ends the suffering, but to a limited degree: a new desire, a new suffering soon appears.”² Life, in this schema, is an endless oscillation between unsatisfied longing and fleeting fulfillment. The ethical ideal that follows is one of resignation: the saint, the artist, and the ascetic are those who, through compassion or contemplation, temporarily suspend the will’s grip and find moments of peace.

In his view, aesthetic experience offers temporary liberation by allowing the subject to contemplate the world without desire. Art does not affirm life but momentarily negates the will, granting relief from the torments of existence.

Nietzsche’s Revaluation: From Will to Power to Life-Affirmation

Nietzsche, while influenced by Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, reverses its valuation. He transforms Schopenhauer’s will to live into his own concept of the will to power. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes: “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power.”³ This will is not simply the desire to persist or survive but the drive to expand, to assert, to overcome.

Where Schopenhauer sees suffering as a defect of life, Nietzsche sees it as essential to its greatness. Growth, strength, and creativity are born not in spite of suffering but through it. Nietzsche accuses Schopenhauer’s ethics of being rooted in weakness, calling them a form of ressentiment—a morality of the weak who, unable to affirm life, declare its suffering evil.

Nietzsche’s revaluation can be summarized as follows:

Schopenhauer              Nietzsche

Will to live                   Will to power

Suffering = evil            Suffering = necessary for growth

Denial of will                Affirmation of life

Nietzsche’s response is not a refutation of Schopenhauer’s diagnosis but a radical reorientation of its meaning. He retains the structure—an irrational, though essential, force at the heart of being—but reverses the value assigned to it.

Dionysian Art and the Tragic Worldview

Nietzsche develops this revaluation in his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy. Greek tragedy, he argues, embodies the highest artistic response to the suffering inherent in life. Here, he draws from Schopenhauer’s idea that art offers escape from the will, but he transforms the goal: not relief, but affirmation.

Nietzsche introduces two aesthetic principles: the Apollonian, representing order, form, and individuation; and the Dionysian, representing chaos, ecstasy, and dissolution of boundaries. True tragedy arises from the fusion of these forces. Dionysian art does not console but confronts suffering directly—yet the Apollonian frame allows us to endure it. This fusion reveals the necessity and even the beauty of pain.

Nietzsche famously declares: “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”⁴ This justification is not moral but aesthetic: life is made bearable—and beautiful—when seen through the lens of tragic art. The tragic artist does not flee from pain but transfigures it.

Morality, Religion, and the Wagner Problem

Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer becomes more pointed in his critiques of morality and religion. He sees Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion and denial as expressions of slave morality—a system born from weakness, which values humility, guilt, and pity. Such morality, according to Nietzsche, inverts the values of the strong and creative and teaches shame before life’s instincts.

This critique extends to Richard Wagner, who, in Nietzsche’s view, regressed into a Schopenhauerian religiosity. While Nietzsche initially admired Wagner for channeling Dionysian forces, he later accused him of turning art into “a substitute for religion” and thereby capitulating to the same life-denying moralism.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes: “What is the seal of liberation?... No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.”⁵ True liberation, for Nietzsche, involves affirming one’s instincts, desires, and suffering without guilt.

Conclusion: Nietzsche’s Creative Rebellion

Nietzsche’s philosophical project can be seen as a defiant response to Schopenhauer’s metaphysical despair. He accepts the diagnosis: the world is governed by an irrational force. But rather than renounce life, he calls us to embrace it fully. Through concepts like the will to power, the Dionysian, and the aesthetic justification of existence, Nietzsche reworks Schopenhauer’s pessimism into a philosophy of creative affirmation.

A parallel can be drawn here with Karl Marx’s transformation of Hegel. Marx wrote in the Preface to Capital: “My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain… is the demiurge of the real world… I stand Hegel on his head.”⁶ Nietzsche enacts a similar inversion. He retains the metaphysical structure of Schopenhauer’s will but turns it on its feet: from denial to affirmation, from retreat to creation.

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes: “To say Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems… is the highest reach of the Yes-saying pathos.”⁷ His revaluation is not merely a critique but a transformation—a rebellion that reclaims the abyss as the very ground of creativity.

References

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, §1.
2. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, §56.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §13.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §5.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §275.
6. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Preface to the Second Edition, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1990).
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am a Destiny,” trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967).