The Schopenhauer Cure (40 page)

philosophers of

Europe:

for

you, a windbag

like Fichte is

the

equal

of

Kant,

the

greatest

thinker of all

time,

and

a

worthless

barefaced

charlatan like

Hegel

is

considered

to

be a profound

thinker. I have

therefore

not

written

for

you.

_________________________

If Arthur Schopenhauer were alive today, would he be a candidate for psychotherapy? Absolutely! He was highly symptomatic. In

"About Me" he laments that nature endowed him with an anxious

disposition and a "suspiciousness, sensitiveness, vehemence, and pride in a measure that is hardly compatible with the equanimity of a philosopher."

In graphic language he describes his symptoms.

Inherited from my father is the anxiety which I myself curse

and combat with all the force of my will.... As a young man I

was tormented by imaginary illnesses.... When I was studying

in Berlin I thought I was a consumptive.... I was haunted by

the fear of being pressed into military service.... From Naples I was driven by the fear of smallpox and from Berlin by the fear of cholera.... In Verona I was seized by the idea I had taken

poisoned snuff...in Manheim I was overcome by an

indescribable feeling of fear without any external cause.... For years I was haunted by the fear of criminal proceedings.... If there was a noise at night I jumped out of bed and seized sword and pistols that I always had ready loaded.... I always have an anxious concern that causes me to look for dangers where none

exist: it magnifies the tiniest vexation and makes association with people most difficult for me.

Hoping to quell his suspiciousness and chronic fear, he

employed a host of precautions and rituals: he hid gold coins and valuable interest-bearing coupons in old letters and other secret places for emergency use, he filed personal notes under false

headings to confuse snoopers, he was fastidiously tidy, he

requested that he always be served by the same bank clerk, he

allowed no one to touch his statue of the Buddha.

His sexual drive was too strong for comfort, and, even as a

young man, he deplored being controlled by his animal passions.

At the age of thirty-six a mysterious course of illness confined him to his room for an entire year. A physician and medical historian suggested in 1906 that his illness had been syphilis, basing the diagnosis only upon the nature of the medication prescribed,

coupled with Schopenhauer's history of unusually great sexual

activity.

Arthur longed to be released from the grip of sexuality. He

savored his moments of serenity when he was able to observe the world with calm in spite of the lust tormenting his corporeal self.

He compared sexual passion to the daylight which obscures the

stars. As he aged he welcomed the decline of sexual passion and the accompanying tranquillity.

Since his deepest passion was his work, his strongest and

most persistent fear was that he should lose the financial means enabling him to live the life of the intellect. Even into old age he blessed the memory of his father, who had made such a life

possible, and he spent much time and energy guarding his money and pondering his investments. Accordingly, he was alarmed by

any unrest threatening his investments and became

ultraconservative in his politics. The 1848 rebellion, which swept over Germany as well as the rest of Europe, terrified him. When soldiers entered his building to gain a vantage point from which to fire on the rebellious populace in the street, he offered them his opera glasses to increase the accuracy of their rifle fire. In his will, twelve years later, he left almost his entire estate to a fund established for the welfare of Prussian soldiers disabled fighting that rebellion.

His anxiety-driven letters about business matters were often

laced with anger and threats. When the banker who handled the

Schopenhauer family money suffered a disastrous financial setback and, to escape bankruptcy, offered all his investors only a small fraction of their investment, Schopenhauer threatened him with such draconian legal consequences that the banker returned to him 70 percent of his money while paying other investors (including Schopenhauer's mother and sister) an even smaller portion than originally proposed. His abusive letters to his publisher eventually resulted in a permanent rupture of their relationship. The publisher wrote: "I shall not accept any letters from you which in their divine rudeness and rusticity suggest a coachman rather than a

philosopher.... I only hope that my fears that by printing your work I am printing only waste paper will not come true."

Schopenhauer's rage was legendary: rage at financiers who

handled his investments, at publishers who could not sell his

books, at the dolts who attempted to engage him in conversations, at the bipeds who regarded themselves his equal, at those who

coughed at concerts, and at the press for ignoring him. But the real rage, the white-hot rage whose vehemence still astounds us and made Schopenhauer a pariah in his intellectual community was his rage toward contemporary thinkers, particularly the two leading lights of nineteenth-century philosophy: Fichte and Hegel.

In a book published twenty years after Hegel succumbed to

cholera during the Berlin epidemic, he referred to Hegel as "a commonplace, inane, loathsome, repulsive, and ignorant charlatan, who with unparalleled effrontery, compiled a system of crazy

nonsense that was trumpeted abroad as immortal wisdom by his

mercenary followers."

Such intemperate outbursts about other philosophers cost

him heavily. In 1837 he was awarded first prize for an essay on the freedom of the will in a competition sponsored by the Royal

Norwegian Society for Learning. Schopenhauer showed a childlike delight in the prize (it was his very first honor) and greatly vexed the Norwegian consul in Frankfurt by impatiently clamoring for his medal. However, the very next year, his essay on the basis of morality submitted to a competition sponsored by the Royal

Danish Society for Learning met a different fate. Though the

argument of his essay was excellent and though it was the only essay submitted, the judges refused to award him the prize because of his intemperate remarks about Hegel. The judges commented,

"We cannot pass over in silence the fact that several outstanding philosophers of the modern age are referred to in so improper a manner as to cause serious and just offense."

Over the years many have agreed entirely with

Schopenhauer's opinion that Hegel's prose is unnecessarily

obfuscating. In fact, he is so difficult to read that an old joke circulating around philosophy departments is that the most vexing and awesome philosophical question is not "does life have

meaning?" or "what is consciousness?" but "who will teach Hegel this year?" Still, the level, the vehemence of Schopenhauer's rage set him apart from all other critics.

The more his work was neglected, the shriller he became,

which, in turn, caused further neglect and, for many, made him an object of mockery. Yet, despite his anxiety and loneliness,

Schopenhauer survived and continued to exhibit all the outward signs of personal self-sufficiency. And he persevered in his work, remaining a productive scholar until the end of his life. He never lost faith in himself. He compared himself to a young oak tree who looked as ordinary and unimportant as other plants. "But let him alone: he will not die. Time will come and bring those who know how to value him." He predicted his genius would ultimately have a great influence upon future generations of thinkers. And he was right; all that he predicted has come to pass.

34

_________________________

Seen
from

the

standpoint

of

youth, life is

an

endlessly

long

future;

from

that

of

old

age

it

resembles

a

very

brief

past. When we

sail

away,

objects on the

shore

become

ever

smaller

and

more

difficult

to

recognize

and

distinguish;

so, too, is it

with our past

years with all

their

events

and activities.

_________________________

As time raced by, Julius looked forward with increasing

anticipation to the weekly group meeting. Perhaps his experiences in the group were more poignant because the weeks of his "one

good year" were running out. But it was not just the events of the group; everything in his life, large and small, appeared more tender and vivid. Of course, his weeks had
always
been numbered, but the numbers had seemed so large, so stretched into a forever future, that he had never confronted the end of weeks.

Visible endings always cause us to brake. Readers zip

through the thousand pages of
The Brothers Karamazov
until there are only a dozen remaining pages, and then they suddenly

decelerate, savoring each paragraph slowly, sucking the nectar from each phrase, each word. Scarcity of days caused Julius to treasure time; more and more he fell into astonished contemplation of the miraculous flow of everyday events.

Recently, he had read a piece by an entomologist who

explored the cosmos existing in a roped-off, two-by-two piece of turf. Digging deeply, he described his sense of awe at the dynamic, teeming world of predators and prey, nematodes, millipedes,

springtails, armor-plated beetles, and spiderlings. If perspective is attuned, attention rapt, and knowledge vast, then one enters

everydayness in a perpetual state of wonderment.

So it was for Julius in the group. His fears about the

recurrence of his melanoma had receded, and his panics grew less frequent. Perhaps his greater comfort stemmed from taking his

doctor's estimate of "one good year" too literally, almost as a guarantee. More likely, though, his mode of life was the active emollient. Following Zarathustra's path, he had shared his

ripeness, transcended himself by reaching out to others, and lived in a manner that he would be willing to repeat perpetually

throughout eternity.

He had always remained curious about the direction the

therapy groups would take the following week. Now, with his last good year visibly shrinking, all feelings were intensified: his curiosity had evolved into an eager childlike anticipation of the next meeting. He remembered how, years ago, when he taught

group therapy the beginning students complained of boredom as

they observed ninety minutes of talking heads. Later, when they learned how to listen to the drama of each patient's life and to appreciate the exquisitely complex interaction between members, boredom dissolved and every student was in place early awaiting the next installment.

The looming end of the group propelled members to address

their core issues with increased ardor. A visible end to therapy always has that result; for that reason pioneer practitioners like Otto Rank and Carl Rogers often set a termination date at the very onset of therapy.

Stuart did more work in those months than in three previous

years of therapy. Perhaps Philip had jump-started Stuart by serving as a mirror. He saw parts of himself in Philip's misanthropy and realized that every member of the group, except the two of them, took pleasure in the meetings and considered the group a refuge, a place of support and caring. Only he and Philip attended under duress--Philip in order to obtain supervision from Julius, and he because of his wife's ultimatum.

At one meeting Pam commented that the group never

formed a true circle because Stuart's chair was invariably set back a bit, sometimes only a couple of inches, but big inches. Others agreed; they had all felt the seating asymmetry but never connected it to Stuart's avoidance of closeness.

In another meeting Stuart launched into a familiar grievance

as he described his wife's attachment to her father, a physician who rose from chairman of a surgery department, to medical

school dean, to president of a university. When Stuart continued, as he had in previous meetings, to discuss the impossibility of ever winning his wife's regard because she continually compared him to her father, Julius interrupted to inquire whether he was aware that he had often told this story before.

After Stuart responded, "But surely we should be bringing

up issues that continue to be bothersome. Shouldn't we?" Julius then asked a powerful question: "How did you think we would feel about your repetition?"

"I imagine you'd find it tedious or boring."

"Think about that, Stuart. What's the payoff for you in being

tedious or boring? And then think about why you've never

developed empathy for your listeners."

Stuart did think about that a great deal during the following

week and reported feeling astonished to realize how little he ever considered that question. "I know my wife often finds me tedious; her favorite term for me is
absent,
and I guess the group is telling me the same thing. You know, I think I've put my empathy into

deep storage."

A short time later Stuart opened up a central problem: his

ongoing inexplicable anger toward his twelve-year-old son. Tony opened a Pandora's box by asking, "What were you like when you were your son's age?"