The Recalcitrant Silence: On Julius Bahnsen’s Doctrine of the Contradictory Will
In the murky interstice between the conceptions of metaphysical voluntarism and tragic determinism stands Julius Bahnsen (1830–1881), a philosopher whom the history of thought has unjustly relegated to the dimmest alcoves of the 19th century. Though known, if known at all, as a disciple of Schopenhauer and a precursor to Nietzsche, Bahnsen must be accorded his own distinct ontological province. Most notable for his theory of “real-dialectic,” Bahnsen’s astonishing claim that contradiction inheres not merely in thought, but in being itself, places him in radical divergence from both Hegelian idealism and its Schopenhauerian antithesis. Yet amid the cacophony of self-defeating volitions which populate Bahnsen’s metaphysics, one subtle yet exceedingly important detail lurks insufficiently examined: namely, his doctrine of the individuation of the Will through contradiction.
This essay proposes to expound that neglected nuance in Bahnsen’s thought—that is, the mechanism by which the universal Will differentiates itself not through representation or spatial extension, nor even through the suffering that results from striving, but precisely through the irreconcilability of its own purposes within the individual. In Bahnsen’s ontology, each person is not a manifestation of a monistic metaphysical Will (as in Schopenhauer), but rather a locus where disunified volitions grapple without hope of synthesis.1 It is this very inner contradiction that constitutes individuation, and not merely the form of self-consciousness or bodily separation.
Indeed, Bahnsen inverted the Hegelian dialectic; whereas Hegel saw contradiction as a motor of progress, leading inevitably to synthesis and higher unity, Bahnsen refigured contradiction as an ontological impasse, a wound at the heart of being. It is not supralogical harmony but tragical disunity that pervades reality. Unlike Schopenhauer’s monadic Will, expressing itself uniformly and blindly throughout all phenomena, Bahnsen’s Will is plurally fractured; it is not merely divisive across persons, but divided within them. This leads to the peculiar claim that it is *not* the possession of a unified Will that constitutes a self, but the failure of any Will to establish dominion within the fractured manifold of an individual soul.
This insight he articulates most poignantly in his work “Zur Philosophie der Geschichte” (1870), wherein he writes: “Nicht Charakter, sondern die Charaktere bilden das Ich.”2 You are not one character, but a tangled bundle of diverging characters. The metaphysical secret, then, is that identity is not the coherence of desires or aims, but their irreconcilable simultaneity—“a civil war among volitions.” The crucial detail here—easy to overlook amidst the Sturm und Drang of his mournful prose—is that this contradiction is not a psychological issue, nor reducible to cognitive dissonance or neurosis. It is a metaphysical principle, primordial and ontogenetic, as fundamental as gravity or entropy.
Striking, too, is Bahnsen’s assertion that this contradiction does not operate teleologically. There is no superior goal toward which the suffering self may aspire, no reconciliation even in death. Unlike Hegel, who promises via dialectical progression the eventual unity of Spirit, and unlike Schopenhauer, who posits a form of liberation through aesthetic contemplation or ascetic denial, Bahnsen denies redemption altogether. There is no closure to the drama of selfhood, only its indefinite perpetuation under the sign of internally disjointed striving. The individual is tragic not because his aspirations are high, but because his very nature *forbids unification*.
Let us consider the case of moral agency under Bahnsen’s doctrine. In Schopenhauer’s moral metaphysics, compassion arises from the recognition of the shared essence of suffering, and ethical behavior results from overcoming the illusion of individuation. But for Bahnsen, there is no such overcoming: to will at all is to instantiate contradiction. Even the man who performs an act of charity may simultaneously feel the shame of posturing, a resentment at the demand of the other, and a subtle desire for dominance cloaked in benevolence. Thus, morality itself becomes a battleground of incompatible volitions, all equally “real,” yet mutually exclusive. The phenomenon of guilt, then, is not the consequence of a deviation from a moral law, but the ontological signature of existence. To act is always to fail some part of oneself.
Such a reading bears radical implications for the philosophy of time. If contradiction is the soul’s engine, and no synthesis is possible within temporal unfolding, then the future offers no hope of reconciliation. Rather, each future act is a reiteration of the same metaphysical disunity enacted in different guises. Here Bahnsen differs crucially not only from Hegel and Schopenhauer, but also from Nietzsche, who valorizes conflict as a creative force. Bahnsen offers no such consolation. The self is not a forge for the fashioning of greatness, but an inferno in which incompatible flames endlessly consume one another. The doctrine of eternal recurrence—if placed into a Bahnsenian framework—would become the promise of infinite repetition of unresolved inner violence.
It is also worth considering the textual idiosyncrasy of Bahnsen’s style—its gloomy lyricism, heavy with Shakespearean quotations and Romantic melancholy. While his contemporaries strove for systematicity, Bahnsen embraces aphorism and metaphor, as if aware that the very method of elucidation must reflect the contradiction at the heart of his philosophy. To write in a strict Schlachtenordnung of propositions would belie the reality of a world whose ground is irreconcilability. Form, in Bahnsen, is not incidental; it is homologous with content.3 The multiplicity of his expression is not a failure to systematize, but a manifestation of the very impossibility of unifying the Will.
But perhaps the most subtle implication of this entire metaphysical edifice lies in its challenge to the very enterprise of philosophy itself. If contradiction is ontologically basic, then the demand for rational coherence demanded by most philosophical systems becomes itself a species of transcendental delusion. The philosopher who seeks unity seeks in vain, and worse—perpetuates the very illusion he purports to transcend. Bahnsen, then, is a philosopher who negates the raison d’être of his vocation; and thereby, in that great chiasm of futility, betrays the deepest truth of the human condition. As he writes: “We think so that we may cry out against thinking.”4
The critical nuance, therefore, is that in Bahnsen’s view, one is not an individual despite inner contradiction, but because of it. The self is not the coherent subject of Enlightenment reason, nor the monadic abyss of Schopenhauerian pessimism, but a topography of war, an organism whose individuation lies precisely in the impossibility of internal peace. In our age—fetishizing synthesis, resolution, and personal “growth”—Bahnsen’s metaphysics of the contradictory Will returns with urgent relevance, not as a retrograde grimace, but as a clarion of the inescapable tragic.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
identity, will, contradiction, German pessimism, tragic ontology, metaphysics, Bahnsen
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1 Bahnsen, Julius. *Beiträge zur Charakterologie*. Leipzig: Verlag von E. Günther, 1867.
2 Bahnsen, Julius. *Zur Philosophie der Geschichte*. Vol. 1, Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1870, p. 91.
3 Beiser, Frederick C. *Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900*. Oxford University Press, 2016.
4 Bahnsen, op. cit., p. 124.