The World as Will and
Idea, is a world dominated by strife, by the struggle between the two terms
that inhabit that world. Will and Idea are borrowed from Plato, though . . .
For Schopenhauer, life is a matter of strife, of constant
struggle between will and idea. The tragedy of this struggle, as Schopenhauer
describes it is that it is a zero sum game. He tells us that “They,” a group that includes his reader, “wish, they
know what they wish, and they strive after it, with sufficient success to keep
them from despair, and sufficient failure to keep them from ennui and its
consequences” (422). In this struggle, neither success nor failure offers any
escape, which is the eventual goal of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.
While I am willing to accept Schopenhauer’s description of
life as ongoing strife between will and idea, I would suggest a different
interpretation of his scheme that would change a single word. I suggest we
replace strife, which occurs often
enough in Schopenhauer that it becomes a pivotal, or following Burke’s
terminology, a “God term” with the word balance a simple enough change that
immediately rewrites the world Schopenhauer describes by changing the
relationships between without changing the elements at all.
I wish to make a minor change to
Schopenhauer’s terminology; actually, I cannot resist making this change. The
urge comes so naturally to me that I do not pretend it comes from any
philosophical or critical impulse. It is simply impulsive, irresistibly impulsive.
Admitting the pathos that fuels that impulse does not place it outside the
philosophical. At least I have William James to assist me in doing so.
James makes a sideways
critique of philosophy’s claim to objectivity when he writes that a philosopher
“trusts his temperament. Wanting a
universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that
does suit it” (Pragmatism 8). So,
yes, I want a universe that suits my temperament. And consequently, I reject a
universe that suits Schopenhauer’s. Let him live in his universe and I live in [mind].
(Okay, the bracket word
above is a result of spellcheck helping my clumsy fingers create a real word on
the screen rather than the near-word it actually created. But, the typo works
as well or better than what I wanted to write there. So, it stays.)
What does this change do to Schopenhauer’s philosophy?
