Abstract

While William James has often been taken to be critical of, or even hostile to, Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism, it is important to recognize implicitly Schopenhauerian tendencies in James’s philosophy. This paper argues that the uneasiness associated with our metaphysical wonder at the radical contingency of the world—the fact that there is being instead of nothingness—is, for James, irreducibly ethical: the “problem of being”, discussed by James in, e.g., _Some Problems of Philosophy_ (1911), is ultimately the problem of suffering. It is suggested that James’s rejection of naïve optimism and theodicist justifications of suffering (and thus of the world) are grounded in his taking seriously Schopenhauerian pessimism, even though he defended meliorism as the critical middle ground between optimism and pessimism. Therefore, interpretations and further developments of Jamesian pragmatism should not ignore the Schopenhauerian influences that can be perceived throughout James’s key writings from _The Will to Believe_ essays (especially “The Sentiment of Rationality”) via _Pragmatism_ to _Some Problems of Philosophy_.