The Schopenhauer Cure

by Irvin D. Yalom

  "You have e-mail," greeted him, and, to his surprise, there was a message from Philip. He read it eagerly:

  At the end of our discussion today you asked about Schopenhauer and how I was helped by his philosophy. You also indicated that you might want to learn more about him. It occurs to me that you might be interested in my lecture at Coastal College next Monday evening at 7P.M. (Toyon Hall, 340 Fulton St.). I am teaching a survey course on European philosophy, and on Monday I will give a brief overview of Schopenhauer (I must cover two thousand years in twelve weeks). Perhaps we can chat a bit after the lecture. Philip Slate

  Without hesitation Julius e-mailed Philip: Thanks. I'll be there. He opened his

  appointment book to the following Monday and penciled in "Toyon Hall, 340 Fulton 7P.M. "

  On Mondays Julius led a therapy group from four-thirty till six. Earlier in the day he had pondered whether to tell the group about his diagnosis. Though he had decided to postpone telling his individual patients until he regained his equilibrium, the group posed a different problem: group members often focused upon him, and the chances of someone spotting some change in his mood and commenting upon it were much greater.

  But his concerns were unfounded. The members had readily accepted his excuse of the flu for having canceled the two previous meetings and then moved on to catch up on the last two weeks of each other's lives. Stuart, a short, pudgy pediatrician who perpetually seemed distracted, as though he were in a rush to get to his next patient, seemed pressured and asked for time from the group. This was a most unusual occurrence; in Stuart's year in the group he had rarely asked for help. He had originally entered the group under duress: his wife informed him by e-mail that unless he entered therapy and made some significant changes she was going to leave him. She added that she had conveyed this via e-mail because he paid more attention to electronic communication than anything said to him directly. During the past week his wife had upped the ante by moving out of their bedroom, and much of the meeting was spent on helping Stuart explore his feelings about her withdrawal.

  Julius loved this group. Often the courage of the members took his breath away as they regularly broke new ground and took great risks. Today's meeting was no exception.

  Everyone supported Stuart for his willingness to show his vulnerability, and the time whizzed by. By the end of the meeting Julius felt much better. So caught up was he by the drama of the meeting that for an hour and a half he forgot his own despair. That was not unusual. All group therapists know about the wonderfully healing qualities inherent in the atmosphere of the working group. Time and again Julius had entered a meeting disquieted and left considerably better even though he had not, of course, explicitly addressed any of his personal issues.

  He had barely time for a quick dinner at We Be Sushi a short distance from his office. He was a regular there and was greeted loudly by Mark, the sushi chef, as he took his seat. When alone, he always preferred sitting at the counter--like all of his patients, he was uncomfortable eating by himself at a restaurant table.

  Julius ordered his usual: California rolls, broiled eel, and a variety of vegetarian maki. He loved sushi but carefully avoided raw fish because of his fear of parasites. That whole battle against outside marauders--now, what a joke it seemed! How ironic that, in the end, it would be an inside job. To hell with it; Julius threw caution to the wind and ordered some ahi sushi from the astonished chef. He ate with great relish before rushing out to Toyon Hall and to his first meeting with Arthur Schopenhauer.

  6

  Mom and Pop

  Schopenhauer

  --

  Zu Hause

  _________________________

  Thesolid foundations of our

  view of the world and thus its

  depth

  or

  shallowness

  are

  formed

  in

  the

  years

  of

  childhood. Such a view is

  subsequently

  elaborated

  and

  perfected, yet essentially it

  is not altered.

  _________________________

  What kind of a man was Heinrich Schopenhauer? Tough, dour, repressed, unyielding, proud. The story is told that in 1783, five years before Arthur's birth, Danzig was blockaded by the Prussians and food and fodder were scarce. The Schopenhauer family was forced to accept the billeting of an enemy general at their country estate. As a reward, the Prussian officer offered to grant Heinrich the privilege of forage for his horses. Heinrich's reply? "My stable is well stocked, sir, and when the food supply runs out I will have my horses put down."

  And Arthur's mother, Johanna? Romantic, lovely, imaginative, vivacious, flirtatious. Though all of Danzig in 1787 considered the union of Heinrich and Johanna a brilliant event, it proved to be a tragic mismatch. The Troiseners, Johanna's family, came from a modest background and had long regarded the lofty Schopenhauers with awe.

  Hence, when Heinrich, at the age of thirty-eight, came to court the seventeen-year-old Johanna, the Troiseners were jubilant and Johanna acquiesced to her parents' choice.

  Did Johanna regard her marriage as a mistake? Read her words written years later as she warned other young women facing a matrimonial decision: "Splendor, rank, and title exercise an all too seductive power over a young girl's heart luring women into tying a marriage knot...a false step for which they must suffer the hardest punishment the rest of their lives."

  "Suffer the hardest punishment the rest of their lives"--strong words from Arthur's mother. In her journals she confided that before Heinrich courted her she had had a young love, which fate took from her, and it was in a state of resignation that she had accepted Heinrich Schopenhauer's marriage proposal. Did she have a choice? Most likely not. This typical eighteenth-century marriage of convenience was arranged by her family for reasons of property and status. Was there love? There was no question of love between Heinrich and Johanna Schopenhauer. Never. Later, in her memoirs, she wrote, "I no more pretended ardent love than he demanded it." Nor was there abundant love for others in their household--not for the young Arthur Schopenhauer, nor for his younger sister, Adele, born nine years later.

  Love between parents begets love for the children. Occasionally, one hears tales of parents whose great love for each other consumes all the love available in the household, leaving only love-cinders for the children. But this zero-sum economic model of love makes little sense. The opposite seems true: the more one loves, the more that one responds to children, to everyone, in a loving manner.

  Arthur's love-bereft childhood had serious implications for his future. Children deprived of a maternal love bond fail to develop the basic trust necessary to love themselves, to believe that others will love them, or to love being alive. In adulthood they become estranged, withdraw into themselves, and often live in an adversarial relationship with others. Such was the psychological landscape that would ultimately inform Arthur's worldview.

  7

  _________________________

  Ifwe look at life in its small

  details, how ridiculous it all

  seems. It is like a drop of

  water seen through a micro—

  scope, a single drop teeming

  with protozoa. How we laugh as

  they bustle about so eagerly

  and struggle with one another.

  Whether here, or in the little

  span

  of

  human

  life,

  this

  terrible activity produces a

  comic effect.

  _________________________

  At five minutes to seven Julius knocked out the ashes from his meerschaum pipe and entered the auditorium in Toyon Hall. He took a seat in the fourth row on the side aisle and looked about the amphitheater: Twenty rows rose sharply from the entry level where the lecture podium stood. Most of the two hundred seat
s were vacant; roughly thirty were broken and wrapped with yellow plastic ribbon. Two homeless men and their collections of newspapers sprawled across seats in the last row. Approximately thirty seats were occupied by unkempt students randomly sprinkled throughout the auditorium with the exception of the first three rows which remained vacant.

  Just like a therapy group, Julius thought, no one wants to sit near to the leader.

  Even in his group meeting earlier that day the seats on either side of him had been left vacant for the late members, and he had joked that a seat next to him seemed to be the penalty for tardiness. Julius thought of the group therapy folklore about seating; that the most dependent person sits to the leader's right, whereas the most paranoid members sit directly opposite; but, in his experience, the reluctance to sit next to the leader was the only rule that could be counted on with regularity.

  The shabbiness and dilapidation of Toyon Hall was typical of the entire campus of California Coastal College, which had begun life as an evening business school, then expanded and flowered briefly as an undergraduate college, and was now obviously in a phase of entropy. On his walk to the lecture through the unsavory tenderloin, Julius had found it difficult to distinguish unkempt students from homeless denizens of the neighborhood. What teacher could avoid demoralization in this setting? Julius began to understand why Philip wanted to switch careers by moving into clinical work.

  He checked his watch. Seven o'clock exactly and right on cue Philip entered the auditorium, dressed in the professorial uniform of checkered khaki pants, shirt, and a tan corduroy jacket with sewed-on elbow patches. Extracting his lecture notes from a properly scuffed briefcase and, without so much as a glance at his audience, he began: This is the survey of Western philosophy--lecture eighteen--Arthur Schopenhauer.

  Tonight I shall proceed differently and stalk my prey more indirectly. If I appear desultory, I ask your forbearance--I promise I shall soon enough return to the matter at hand. Let us begin by turning our attention to the great debuts in history.

  Philip scanned his audience for some nod of comprehension and, failing to find it, crooked his forefinger at one of the students sitting nearest him and pointed to the blackboard. He then spelled out and defined three words, d-e-s-u-l-t-o-r-y, f-o-r-e-b-e-a-r-a-n-c-e, and d-eb-u-t, which the student dutifully copied onto the blackboard. The student started to return to his seat, but Philip pointed to a first-row seat, instructing him to remain there.

  Now for great debuts; trust me--my purpose for beginning in such a fashion will, in time, become apparent. Imagine Mozart stunning the Viennese royal court as he performed flawlessly on the harpsichord at the age of nine. Or, if Mozart does not strike a familiar chord (here the faintest trace of a smile), imagine something more familiar to you, the Beatles at nineteen playing their own compositions to Liverpool audiences.

  Other amazing debuts include the extraordinary debut of Johann Fichte. (Here a signal to the student to write F-i-c-h-t-e on the board.) Does any one of you remember his name from my last lecture in which I discussed the great German idealist philosophers who followed Kant in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte? Of these, Fichte's life and his debut was the most remarkable for he began life as a poor uneducated goose shepherd in Rammenau, a small German village whose only claim to fame was its clergyman's inspired sermons every Sunday.

  Well, one Sunday a wealthy aristocrat arrived at the village too late to hear the sermon. As he stood, obviously disappointed, outside the church, an elderly villager approached him and told him not to despair because the gooseherd, young Johann, could repreach the sermon to him. The villager fetched Johann, who, indeed, repeated the entire lecture verbatim. So impressed was the baron by the gooseherd's astoundingly retentive mind that he financed Johann's education and arranged for him to attend Pforta, a renowned boarding school later attended by many eminent German thinkers, including the subject of our next lecture, Friedrich Nietzsche.

  Johann excelled in school and later at the university, but when his patron died, Johann had no means of support and took a tutoring job in a private home in Germany where he was hired to teach a young man the philosophy of Kant, whom he had not yet read himself. Soon he was entranced by the work of the divine Kant...

  Philip suddenly looked up from his notes to survey his audience. Seeing no glint of recognition in any eyes, he hissed at his audience:

  Hello, anybody home? Kant, Immanuel Kant, Kant, Kant, remember?" (He motioned to the blackboard scribe to write K-a-n-t. ) We spent two hours on him last week?

  Kant, the greatest, along with Plato, of all the world's philosophers. I give you my word: Kant will be on the final. Ah ha, there's the ticket...I see stirrings of life, movement, one or two eyes opening. A pen making contact with paper.

  So where was I? Ah, yes. The gooseherd. Fichte was next tendered a position as a private tutor in Warsaw and, penniless, walked all the way only to have the job denied him when he arrived. Since he was only a few hundred miles from Konigsberg, the home of Kant, he decided to walk there to meet the master in person.

  After two months he arrived at Konigsberg and, audaciously, knocked on Kant's door but was not granted an audience. Kant was a creature of habit and not inclined to receive unknown visitors. Last week I described to you the regularity of his schedule--so exact that the townspeople could set their watches by seeing him on his daily walk.

  Fichte assumed he was refused entry because he had no letters of recommendation and decided to write his own in order to gain an audience with Kant.

  In an extraordinary burst of creative energy he wrote his first manuscript, the renowned Critique of All Revelation, which applied Kant's views on ethics and duty to the interpretation of religion. Kant was so impressed with the work that he not only agreed to meet with Fichte but encouraged its publication.

  Because of some curious mishap, probably a marketing ploy of the publisher, the Critique appeared anonymously. The work was so brilliant that critics and the reading public mistook it for a new work by Kant himself. Ultimately, Kant was forced to make a public statement that it was not he who was the author of this excellent manuscript but a very talented young man named Fichte. Kant's praise ensured Fichte's future in philosophy, and a year and a half thereafter he was offered a professorship at the University of Jena.

  "That," Philip looked up from his notes with an ecstatic look on his face and then jabbed the air with an awkward show of enthusiasm, "that is what I call a debut!" No students looked up or gave a sign of registering Philip's brief awkward display of enthusiasm. If he felt discouraged by his audience's unresponsiveness, Philip did not show it and, unperturbed, continued:

  And now consider something closer to your hearts--athletic debuts. Who can forget the debut of Chris Evert, Tracy Austin, or Michael Chang, who won grand-slam professional tennis tournaments at fifteen or sixteen? Or the teenaged chess prodigies Bobby Fischer or Paul Morphy? Or think of Jose Raoul Capablanca, who won the chess championship of Cuba at the age of eleven.

  Finally, I want to turn to a literary debut--the most brilliant literary debut of all time, a man in his midtwenties who blazed onto the literary landscape with a magnificent novel...

  Here, Philip stopped in order to build the suspense and looked up, his countenance shining with confidence. He felt assured of what he was doing--that was apparent. Julius watched in disbelief. What was Philip expecting to find? The students on the edge of their seats, trembling with curiosity, each murmuring, "Who was this literary prodigy?"

  Julius, in his fifth-row seat, swiveled his head to survey the auditorium: glazed eyes everywhere, students slumped in chairs, doo-dling, poring over newspapers, crossword puzzles. To the left, a student stretched out asleep over two chairs. To the right, two students at the end of his row embraced in a long kiss. In the row directly in front of him, two boys elbowed each other as they leered upward, toward the back of the room. Despite his curiosity, Julius did not turn to follow their
gaze--probably they were staring up some woman's skirt--and turned his attention back to Philip.

  And who was the prodigy? (Philip droned on.) His name was Thomas Mann. When he was your age, yes, your age, he began writing a masterpiece, a glorious novel called Buddenbrooks published when he was only twenty-six years old. Thomas Mann, as I hope and pray you know, went on to become a towering figure in the twentieth-century world of letters and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature." (Here Philip spelled M-a-n-n and B-u-d-d-e-n-b-r-o-o-k-s to his blackboard scribe.) Buddenbrooks, published in 1901, traced the life of one family, a German burgher family, through four generations and all the associated vicissitudes of the life cycle.

  Now what does this have to do with philosophy and with the real subject of today's lecture? As I promised, I have strayed a bit but only in the service of returning to the core with greater vigor.

  Julius heard rustling in the auditorium and the sound of footsteps. The two elbowing voyeurs directly in front of Julius noisily collected their belongings and left the hall. The embracing students at the end of the row had departed, and even the student assigned to the blackboard had vanished.

  Philip continued:

  To me, the most remarkable passages in Buddenbrooks come late in the novel as the protagonist, the paterfamilias, old Thomas Buddenbrooks, approaches death. One is astounded by a writer in his early twenties having such insight and such sensibility to issues concerned with the end of life. (A faint smile played on his lips as Philip held up the dog-eared book.) I recommend these pages to anyone intending to die.

  Julius heard the strike of matches as two students lit cigarettes while exiting the auditorium.

  When death came to claim him, Thomas Buddenbrooks was bewildered and overcome by despair. None of his belief systems offered him comfort--neither his religious views which had long before failed to satisfy his metaphysical needs, nor his worldly skepticism and materialistic Darwinian leaning. Nothing, in Mann's words, was able to offer the dying man "in the near and penetrating eye of death a single hour of calm."