A seventeen-year period of self-imposed philosophical silence was broken in March 1836, when the Frankfurt publisher Siegmund Schmerber printed a run of 500 copies of Schopenhauer's On the Will in Nature. Its author was so eager to have his voice appear once again in print that he waived the author's honorarium. But without a sense that he would need to cultivate an audience for his philosophy if ever he were to have a second edition of The World as Will and Representation, it is unlikely that he would have published On the Will in Nature. Almost as an act of desperation, he collected his observations on the natural sciences, which he would have nonetheless used to supplement his philosophy of nature, the topic of the second book of his principal work, to try to make himself heard. All he needed to do was to flesh out that notes that he had assiduously developed since the appearance of his principal work, something he accomplished, in part, by making good use of the Senckenberg Library, which figured positively in his decision to locate in Frankfurt. On the Will in Nature was a lure cast to hook readers for his earlier work.

Schopenhauer attempted to demonstrate in On the Will in Nature that “unprejudiced empiricists,” who were unaware of his philosophy, had articulated from a posteriori sources theories that corroborated his fundamental idea: namely, that which we recognize in ourselves as will is that which is expressed in all natural phenomena.