The Schopenhauer Cure

by Irvin Yalom

  After dinner Pam strolled to her bookshelves and examined her Schopenhauer section. For a time she had been a philosophy major and had planned a dissertation on Schopenhauer’s influence on Becket and Gide. She had loved Schopenhauer’s prose—the best stylist of any philosopher, save Nietzsche. And she had admired his intellect, his range, and his courage to challenge all supernatural beliefs, but the more she learned about Schopenhauer the person, the more revulsion she had felt. She opened an old volume of his complete essays from her bookshelf and began reading aloud some of her highlighted passages in his essay titled “Our Relation to Others.”

  “The only way to attain superiority in dealing with men is to let it be seen you are independent of them.”

  “To disregard is to win regard.”

  “By being polite and friendly, you can make people pliable and obliging: hence politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.”

  Now she remembered why she had hated Schopenhauer. And Philip a counselor? And Schopenhauer his model? And Julius teaching him? It was all beyond belief.

  She reread the last aphorism: “Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.” Hmm, so he thinks he can work me like wax, undo what he did to my life with a gratuitous compliment on my comments about Buber, or allowing me to pass through a door first. Well, fuck him!

  Later she tried to find peace by soaking in her Jacuzzi and playing a tape of Goenka’s chanting, which often soothed her with its hypnotic lilting melody, its sudden stops and starts and changes of tempo and timbre. She even tried Vipassana meditation for a few minutes, but she could not retrieve the equanimity it had once offered. Stepping out of the tub, she inspected herself in the mirror. She sucked in her abdomen, elevated her breasts, considered her profile, patted her pubic hair, crossed her legs in an alluring pose. Damn good for a woman of thirty-three.

  Images of her first view of Philip fifteen years ago swiveled into her mind. Sitting on his desk, casually handing out the class syllabus to students entering the room, flashing a big smile her way. He was a dashing man then, gorgeous, intelligent, otherworldly, impervious to distractions. What the fuck happened to that man? And that sex, that force, doing what he wanted, ripping off my underwear, smothering me with his body. Don’t kid yourself, Pam—you loved it. A scholar with a fabulous grasp of Western intellectual history, and a great teacher, too, perhaps the best she ever had. That’s why she first thought of a major in philosophy. But these were things he was never going to know.

  After she was done with all these distracting and unsettling angry thoughts, her mind turned to a softer, sadder realm: Julius’s dying. There was a man to be loved. Dying, but business as usual. How does he do it? How does he keep his focus? How does Julius keep caring? And Philip, that prick, challenging him to reveal himself. And Julius’s patience with him, and his attempts to teach Philip. Doesn’t Julius see he is an empty vessel?

  She entertained a fantasy of nursing Julius as he grew weaker; she’d bring in his meals, wash him with a warm towel, powder him, change his sheets, and crawl into his bed and hold him through the night. There’s something surreal about the group now—all these little dramas being played out against the darkening horizon of Julius’s end. How unfair that he should be the one who is dying. A surge of anger rose within—but at whom could she direct it?

  As Pam turned off her bedside reading light and waited for her sleeping pill to kick in, she took note of the one advantage to the new tumult in her life: the obsession with John, which had vanished during her Vipassana training and returned immediately after leaving India, was gone again—perhaps for good.

  28

  Pessimism as a Way of Life

  * * *

  No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose.

  * * *

  Schopenhauer’s major work, The World as Will and Representation, written during his twenties, was published in 1818, and a second supplementary volume in 1844. It is a work of astonishing breadth and depth, offering penetrating observations about logic, ethics, epistemology, perception, science, mathematics, beauty, art, poetry, music, the need for metaphysics, and man’s relationship to others and to himself. The human condition is presented in all its bleakest aspects: death, isolation, the meaninglessness of life, and the suffering inherent in existence. Many scholars believe that, with the single exception of Plato, there are more good ideas in Schopenhauer’s work than in that of any other philosopher.

  Schopenhauer frequently expressed the wish, and the expectation, that he would always be remembered for this grand opus. Late in life he published his other significant work, a two-volume set of philosophical essays and aphorisms, whose book title, Parerga and Paralipomena, means (in translation from the Greek) “leftover and complementary works.”

  Psychotherapy had not yet been born during Arthur’s lifetime, yet there is much in his writing that is germane to therapy. His major work began with a critique and extension of Kant, who revolutionized philosophy through his insight that we constitute rather than perceive reality. Kant realized that all of our sense data are filtered through our neural apparatus and reassembled therein to provide us with a picture that we call reality but which in fact is only a chimera, a fiction that emerges from our conceptualizing and categorizing mind. Indeed, even cause and effect, sequence, quantity, space, and time are conceptualizations, constructs, not entities “out there” in nature.

  Furthermore, we cannot “see” past our processed version of what’s out there; we have no way of knowing what is “really” there—that is, the entity that exists prior to our perceptual and intellectual processing. That primary entity, which Kant called ding an sich (the thing in itself), will and must remain forever unknowable to us.

  Though Schopenhauer agreed that we can never know the “thing in itself,” he believed we can get closer to it than Kant had thought. In his opinion, Kant had overlooked a major source of available information about the perceived (the phenomenal) world: our own bodies! Bodies are material objects. They exist in time and space. And each of us has an extraordinarily rich knowledge of our bodies—knowledge stemming not from our perceptual and conceptual apparatus but direct knowledge from inside, knowledge stemming from feelings.

  From our bodies we gain knowledge that we cannot conceptualize and communicate because the greater part of our inner lives is unknown to us. It is repressed and not permitted to break into consciousness, because knowing our deeper natures (our cruelty, fear, envy, sexual lust, aggression, self-seeking) would cause us more disturbance than we could bear.

  Sound familiar? Sound like that old Freudian stuff—the unconscious, primitive process, the id, repression, self-deception? Are these not the vital germs, the primordial origins, of the psychoanalytic endeavor? Keep in mind that Arthur’s major work was published forty years before Freud’s birth. When Freud (and Nietzsche as well) were schoolboys in the middle of the nineteenth century, Arthur Schopenhauer was Germany’s most widely read philosopher.

  How do we understand these unconscious forces? How do we communicate them to others? Though they cannot be conceptualized, they can be experienced and, in Schopenhauer’s opinion, conveyed directly, without words, through the arts. Hence he was to devote more attention to the arts, and particularly to music, than any other philosopher.

  And sex? He left no doubt about his belief that sexual feelings played a crucial role in human behavior. Here, again, he was an intrepid pioneer: no prior philosopher had the insight (or the courage) to write about the seminal importance of sex to our internal life.

  And religion? Schopenhauer was the first major philosopher to construct his thought upon an atheistic foundation. He explicitly and vehemently denied the supernatural, arguing instead that we live entirely in space and time and that all nonmaterial entities are false and unnecessary constructs. Though many others, Hobbes, Hume, even Kant, may have had agnostic leanings, none dared to be explicit about their nonbelief. For one thing, they were dependent for their li
velihood upon the states and universities employing them and, hence, forbidden to express any antireligious sentiments. Arthur was never employed nor needed to be and was free to write as he wished. For precisely the same reason, Spinoza, a century and a half earlier, refused offers of exalted university positions, remaining instead a grinder of lenses.

  And the conclusions that Schopenhauer reached from his inside knowledge of the body? That there is in us, and in all of nature, a relentless, insatiable, primal life force which he termed will. “Every place we look in life,” he wrote, “we see striving that represents the kernel and ‘in-itself’ of everything.” What is suffering? It is “hindrance to this striving by an obstacle placed in the path between the will and its goal.” What is happiness, well-being? It is “attainment of the goal.”

  We want, we want, we want, we want. There are ten needs waiting in the wings of the unconscious for every one that reaches awareness. The will drives us relentlessly because, once a need is satisfied, it is soon replaced by another need and another and another throughout our life.

  Schopenhauer sometimes invokes the myth of the wheel of Ixion or the myth of Tantalus to describe the dilemma of human existence. Ixion was a king who was disloyal to Zeus and punished by being bound to a fiery wheel which revolved in perpetuity. Tantalus, who dared to defy Zeus, was punished for his hubris by being eternally tempted but never satisfied. Human life, Schopenhauer thought, eternally revolves around an axle of need followed by satiation. Are we contented by the satiation? Alas, only briefly. Almost immediately boredom sets in, and once again we are propelled into motion, this time to escape from the terrors of boredom.

  Work, worry, toil and trouble are certainly the lot of almost all throughout their lives. But if all desires were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how then would people occupy their lives and spend their time? Suppose the human race were removed to Utopia where everything grew automatically and pigeons flew about ready-roasted; where everyone at once found his sweetheart and had no difficulty in keeping her; then people would die of boredom or hang themselves; or else they would fight, throttle, and murder one another and so cause themselves more suffering than is now laid upon them by nature.

  And what is the most terrible thing about boredom? Why do we rush to dispel it? Because it is a distraction-free state which soon enough reveals underlying unpalatable truths about existence—our insignificance, our meaningless existence, our inexorable progression to deterioration and death.

  Hence, what is human life other than an endless cycle of wanting, satisfaction, boredom, and then wanting again? Is that true for all life-forms? Worse for humans, says Schopenhauer, because as intelligence increases, so does the intensity of suffering.

  So is anyone ever happy? Can anyone ever be happy? Arthur does not think so.

  In the first place a man never is happy but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal and, when he does it is only to be disappointed: he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with masts and riggings gone. And then it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment, always vanishing; and now it is over.

  Life, consisting of an inevitable tragic downward slope, is not only brutal but entirely capricious.

  We are like lambs playing in the field, while the butcher eyes them and selects first one then another; for in our good days we do not know what calamity fate at this very moment has in store for us, sickness, persecution, impoverishment, mutilation, loss of sight, madness, and death.

  Are Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic conclusions about the human condition so unbearable that he was plunged into despair? Or was it the other way around? Was it his unhappiness that caused him to conclude that human life was a sorry affair best not to have arisen in the first place? Aware of this conundrum, Arthur often reminded us (and himself) that emotion has the power to obscure and falsify knowledge: that the whole world assumes a smiling aspect when we have reason to rejoice, and a dark and gloomy one when sorrow weighs upon us.

  29

  * * *

  I have not written for the crowd…. I hand down my work to the thinking individuals who in the course of time will appear as rare exceptions. They will feel as I felt, or as a shipwrecked sailor feels on a desert island for whom the trace of a former fellow sufferer affords more consolation than do all the cockatoos and apes in the trees.

  * * *

  “I’d like to continue where we left off,” said Julius, opening the next meeting. Speaking stiffly, as though from a prepared text, he rushed on, “Like most therapists I know, I’m pretty open about myself to close friends. It’s not easy for me to come up with a revelation as raw and pristine and right out there on the edge as those some of you have shared recently. But there is an incident I’ve revealed only once in my life—and that was years ago to a very close friend.”

  Pam, sitting next to Julius, interrupted. Putting her hand on his arm, she said, “Whoa, whoa, Julius. You don’t need to do this. You’ve been bullied into this by Philip, and now, after Tony exposed his bullshit motives, even Philip has apologized for requesting it. I, for one, don’t want you to put yourself through this.”

  Others agreed, pointing out that Julius shared his feelings all the time in the group and that Philip’s I-thou contract was a setup.

  Gill added, “Things are getting blurred here. All of us are here for help. My life’s a mess—you saw that last week. But so far as I know, Julius, you’re not having problems with intimacy. So what’s the point?”

  “The other week,” Rebecca said, in her clipped precise speech, “you said I revealed myself in order to give Philip a gift. That was partially correct—but not the whole truth: now I realize I also wanted to shield him from Pam’s rage. However, that said, my point is…what is my point? My point is that confessing what I did in Las Vegas was good therapy for me—I’m relieved to have gotten it out. But you’re here to help me, and it’s not going to help me one bit for you to reveal yourself.”

  Julius was taken aback—such strong consensus was an oddity in this group. But he thought he knew what was happening. “I sense a lot of concern about my illness—a lot of taking care of me, not wanting to stress me. Right?”

  “Maybe,” said Pam, “but for me there’s more—there’s something in me that doesn’t want you to divulge something dark from your past.”

  Julius noted others signaling agreement and said, to no one in particular: “What a paradox. Ever since I’ve been in this field I’ve heard an ongoing chorus of complaints from patients that therapists were too distant and shared too little of their personal lives. So here I am, on the brink of doing just that, and I’m greeted by a united front saying, ‘We don’t want to hear. Don’t do this.’ So what’s going on?”

  Silence.

  “You want to see me as untarnished?” asked Julius.

  No one responded. “We seem stuck, so I’ll be ornery today and just continue and we’ll see what happens. My story goes back ten years ago to the time of my wife’s death. I had married Miriam, my high school sweetheart, while I was in medical school, and ten years ago she was killed in a car crash in Mexico. I was devastated. To tell the truth, I’m not sure I’ve ever recovered from the horror of that event. But to my surprise, my grief took a bizarre turn: I experienced a tremendous surge in sexual energy. At that time I didn’t know that heightened sexuality is a common response to confrontation with death. Since then I’ve seen many people in grief become suffused with sexual energy. I’ve spoken with men who’ve had catastrophic coronaries and tell me that they groped female attendants while careening to the ER in an ambulance. In my grief, I grew obsessed by sex, needed it—a lot of it—and when our friends, both married and unmarried women, sought to comfort me, I exploited the situation and took sexual advantage of some of them, including a relative of Miriam’s.”

  The group was still. Everyone was uneasy, avo
ided locking gazes; some listened to the shrill chirping of a finch sitting in the scarlet Japanese maple outside the window. From time to time over many years of leading groups Julius had wished he had a cotherapist. This was one of those times.

  Finally, Tony forced some words out: “So, what happened to those friendships?”

  “They drifted away, gradually evaporated. I saw some of the women over the years by chance, but none of us ever spoke of it. There was a lot of awkwardness. And a lot of shame.”

  “I’m sorry, Julius,” said Pam, “and sorry about your wife—I never knew that—and of course about…about those…relationships.”

  “I don’t know what to say to you, Julius,” said Bonnie. “This feels really awkward.”

  “Say more about the awkwardness, Bonnie,” said Julius, feeling burdened by the chore of being his own therapist in the group.

  “Well, this is brand new. This is the first time you’ve ever laid yourself out like this in the group.”

  “Go on. Feelings?”

  “I feel very tense. I think it’s because this is so ambiguous. If one of us,” she waved her arm around, “brings something painful to the group, we know what we should do—I mean we get right to work even though we may not know exactly how to do it. But with you, I don’t know…”

  “Right, what’s not clear is why you’re telling us,” said Tony, leaning forward, eyes squinting under his bushy eyebrows. “Let me ask something I learned from you. It came up last week in fact. Why now? Is it because you made a bargain with Philip? Most folks here say no about that—that the bargain makes no sense. Or do you want help with feelings remaining from that incident? I mean, your reasons for sharing aren’t clear. If you want my personal reactions, I got no problem with what you did. I’ll tell you straight out, I feel the same way I felt about Stuart and Gill and Rebecca—I personally don’t see the big deal about what you did. I could see myself doing that. You’re lonely, sexed up, some broads ask to comfort you, you let them, and everybody has a good time. They probably got off on it too. I mean, we’re talking about ladies as though they only get used or exploited. I get riled, really riled, by this picture of men begging for some scrap of sex which women, sitting on their thrones, may or may not decide to toss out as a favor. As though they don’t get off too.”