Bahnsen had always harbored an interest in psychology, specifically the method of examination of individual characters and temperaments. He viewed each person as unique and as a result of this view, could not entirely accept Schopenhauer's preference for monism (the idea that every person and every thing is merely a modus of a singular metaphysical entity). Similar to fellow german pessimist Philipp Mainländer, Bahnsen leaned towards ontological pluralism and asserted that there is no unified will, but only "individual wills", with their own specific cravings, aims and wishes. However, these individual wills ("will henades") suffer from contradictory desires due to their irrational nature. This is the result of Bahnsen's combination of Schopenhauer's voluntaristic metaphysic and his own ideas of the "Realdialektik". A crucial difference between Schopenhauer's worldview, which offers salvation for some via the freed Intellect's silencing of the will, and that of Bahnsen is that, in Bahnsen's philosophical system — there is no salvation. For Bahnsen, without the will the intellect is impotent. It cannot "will" nothingness, for a will-to-nothingness is still a form of willing, and willing non-willing is a contradiction. Yet it is not impossible for the intellect to have such ideas as, according to Bahnsen, all ideas bred by the intellect are contradictory as the will's desires are irrational and eternally in conflict with themselves. This extremely pessimistic worldview, which offers no escape for the subject, differentiates Bahnsen not only from Schopenhauer, but also from the rest of his pessimistic contemporaries (Frauenstädt, Mainländer, Hartmann). His ideas are arguably more unsettling than Mainländer's notion of a will-to-die, yet strangely similar to Friedrich Nietszche's idea of the eternal return.