Willing and Nothingness illuminates Nietzsche's philosophy by examining his relationship with Schopenhauer. Though Nietzsche was influenced by Schopenhauer's work in his early years, in his later writings he often appears dismissive of Schopenhauer. It is a mistake to take either of these facts at face value: a proper assessment demands an independent understanding of Schopenhauer's philosophy, a close look at Nietzsche's development, and an analysis of the detailed continuities and contrasts with Schopenhauerian themes that permeate his work. This allows not only a reassessment of the connection between these two great thinkers, but a notable enrichment of our understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy, which is too often studied in isolation from its intellectual roots.

With these aims, eight leading scholars contribute specially written essays in which Nietzsche's changing conceptions of pessimism, tragedy, art, morality, truth, knowledge, religion, atheism, determinism, the will, and the self are revealed as responses to the work of the thinker he called his 'great teacher'. These essays are accompanied by a short critical piece that Nietzsche wrote about Schopenhauer in 1868, newly translated and appearing here in English for the first time, and by a guide to all Nietzsche's references to Schopenhauer.