Book: On the Will in Nature

Overview and Purpose
Published in 1836 as a companion to The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer’s On the Will in Nature gathers empirical findings from the sciences of his time to corroborate his metaphysical thesis that the inner essence of the world is will. Rather than offering new metaphysics, it assembles case studies and observations from physiology, comparative anatomy, plant biology, physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy to show that what we call forces of nature and organic striving are different grades of the same underlying reality. The book also stakes out a polemical position against materialism and teleological natural theology, arguing that both misconstrue the relation between appearance and thing-in-itself.

Core Thesis
Schopenhauer distinguishes representation, the world as perceived and ordered by the intellect under the forms of space, time, and causality, from will, the reality that objectifies itself in those representations. In inorganic nature will appears as blind force: gravity, magnetism, electricity, and chemical affinity. In organic nature it appears as life’s purposive yet unconscious striving: growth, metabolism, self-preservation, and reproduction. The intellect is a late-arriving, derivative function of the organism, fashioned to serve the will’s aims. Human self-consciousness only reveals, it does not create, the primacy of will; and it is only at the level of the thing-in-itself that freedom resides, whereas every phenomenal expression of will unfolds with strict necessity.

Evidence from the Natural Sciences
Physiology and pathology supply many of his examples. Muscular contractility, reflex actions, and the stubborn autonomy of instinct demonstrate for him that willing precedes and commands knowing. Pathological phenomena, obsession, monomania, irresistible impulses, show the intellect’s subordination to a deeper drive. Comparative anatomy traces a graded continuity of forms, each species embodying a stable Idea that translates the same inner striving into different structural solutions. Plant life, lacking a nervous system, displays will as blind growth, tropisms, and reproduction, confirming that purposeful behavior does not require conscious representation.

Turning to inorganic nature, Schopenhauer treats physical forces as the lowest objectifications of will. Gravity expresses an unreasoning tendency toward the center; magnetism and electricity reveal polar striving; chemical affinity shows attraction and repulsion configured by law. Astronomy and geology extend this pattern on a grand scale in the formation of worlds and the ceaseless shaping of the earth. Across these domains, he emphasizes that causality reigns within appearances, while the identical will manifests through diverse lawful regularities.

Animal Magnetism and Extraordinary Cognition
Schopenhauer devotes a chapter to animal magnetism and somnambulism, accepted by many physicians of his day, arguing that clairvoyant perception and thought transmission lend support to his claim that the intellect is an instrument subordinated to will and that cognition can, in exceptional states, bypass the senses and brain’s ordinary mediation. Such cases, for him, further undermine crude materialism by loosening the supposed one-to-one dependence of thought on organic processes.

Causality, Teleology, and Freedom
He criticizes teleological explanations that infer external design from organic purposiveness. What seems built to an end is, he contends, the will of the species objectifying itself in form, guided by immanent necessity rather than a plan. Efficient causation suffices to explain the phenomenal sequence of events, yet it never penetrates to the inner what, which is will. Freedom is reconciled with necessity by confining freedom to the noumenal will, while acknowledging that its appearances are bound by causal law.

Style, Sources, and Significance
The treatise is combative and erudite, rich in citations from contemporary scientists and laced with attacks on Hegelian speculation and materialist reduction. Its synthesis of metaphysics with empirical motifs helped shape later discussions of vital phenomena and influenced receptions of evolutionary thinking, even as some evidential wagers, notably on mesmerism, date it. As an attempt to read nature as the stratified manifestation of a single inner force, it stands as the most concise empirical defense of Schopenhauer’s system.