William James and Schopenhauer

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?