"The Schopenhauer Cure"
Feb. 16th, 2026 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeIrvin D. Yalom
//However, we continue our life with great interest and much solicitude as long as possible, just as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.
Epicurus, who reasoned, “Where I am, death is not and where death is, I am not. Hence why fear death?”
It was code for potential melanoma, and now, in retrospect, Julius identified that phrase, that singular moment, as the point when carefree life ended and death, his heretofore invisible enemy, materialized in all its awful reality. Death had come to stay, it never again left his side, and all the horrors that followed were predictable postscripts.
How startling it was to realize that suddenly he was no longer the supreme life form. Instead he was a host; he was nourishment, food for a fitter organism whose gobbling cells divided at a dizzying pace, an organism that blitzkrieged and annexed adjacent protoplasm and was now undoubtedly outfitting clusters of cells for cruises into the bloodstream and colonization of distant organs, perhaps the sweet friable feeding grounds of his liver or the spongy grassy meadows of his lungs.
* his fellow humans who are victims of that freakish twist of evolution that grants self-awareness but not the requisite psychological equipment to deal with the pain of transient existence. And so throughout the years, the centuries, the millennia, we have relentlessly constructed makeshift denials of finiteness.
Maybe it was simply imposed ritual he disliked. Perhaps a good word could be found for a little personal creative ceremony.
* What else do we have? What else other than this miraculous blessed interval of being and self-awareness? If anything is to be honored and blessed, it should simply be this—the priceless gift of sheer existence. To live in despair because life is finite or because life has no higher purpose or embedded design is crass ingratitude. To dream up an omniscient creator and devote our life to endless genuflection seems pointless. And wasteful, too:... Better to embrace Spinoza’s and Einstein’s solution: simply bow one’s head, tip one’s hat to the elegant laws and mystery of nature, and go about the business of living.
It was not that he had grown wiser: it was only that the removal of distractions—ambition, sexual passion, money, prestige, applause, popularity—offered a purer vision. Wasn’t such detachment the Buddha’s truth? Perhaps so, but he preferred the path of the Greeks: everything in moderation.
* Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally.
doubts from within: the extraordinary molecular neurobiological discoveries reported with ever-increasing frequency caused even the most experienced therapists to wonder about the relevance of their work.
* Julius had known patients so competitive that they hid their improvement just because they didn’t want to give the therapist the satisfaction (and the power) of having helped them.
Freud, Living and Dying, by Max Schur, Freud’s doctor—a graphic account of how Freud’s cigar-spawned cancer gradually devoured his palate, his jaw, and, finally, his life... when Freud finally told him that the pain was so great that it no longer made sense to continue, Schur proved a man of his word and injected a fatal dose of morphine.
* For centuries Heinrich’s ancestors had guided the Schopenhauer business with great diligence and success. Heinrich’s grandfather once hosted Catherine the Great of Russia and, to ensure her comfort, ordered brandy to be poured over the floors of the guest quarters and then set afire to leave the rooms dry and aromatic.
Danzig, that venerable Hanseatic city which had long dominated the Baltic trade. But bad times had come for the grand free city. With Prussia menacing in the west and Russia in the east, and with a weakened Poland no longer able to continue guaranteeing Danzig’s sovereignty, Heinrich Schopenhauer had no doubt that Danzig’s days of freedom and trading stability were coming to an end. All of Europe was awash in political and financial turmoil—save England.
he abruptly left London, carting his protesting wife, now almost six months pregnant, back to Danzig during one of the century’s most severe winters. Years later Johanna described her feelings at being yanked from London: “No one helped me, I had to overcome my grief alone. The man dragged me, in order to cope with his anxiety, halfway across Europe.” <> This, then, was the stormy setting of the genius’s gestation: a loveless marriage, a frightened, protesting mother, an anxious, jealous father, and two arduous trips across a wintry Europe.
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.
// If we 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.
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... 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
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.
Mann... wrote a magnificent essay which stated that Arthur Schopenhauer was the author of the volume. Mann then proceeds to describe how, at the age of twenty-three, he first experienced the great joy of reading Schopenhauer. He was not only entranced by the ring of Schopenhauer’s words, which he describes as “so perfectly consistently clear, so rounded, its presentation and language so powerful, so elegant, so unerringly apposite, so passionately brilliant, so magnificently and blithely severe—like never any other in the history of German philosophy,”
* Johanna Schopenhauer: There she became the dear friend of Goethe and other outstanding men of letters, and authored a dozen best-selling romantic novels, many about women who were forced into unwanted marriages but refused to bear children and continued to long for love.
// Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners condemned not to death but to life and as yet all too unconscious of what their sentence means.
// In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered with a cold hard crust on which a mouldy film has produced living and knowing beings—this is…the real, the world.
That election was the turning point of Julius’s life. So much reinforcement did he receive for his brazenness that he rebuilt his whole identity on the foundation of raw chutzpah.
Julius, not happy with the pressure the group was applying (he had seen too many members drop out of too many therapy groups because they were ashamed of disappointing the group), made his first intervention, “Strong feedback you’re getting, Gill.
Bonnie: “That’s fascinating, Philip. I know I keep yearning for my childhood, but I never understood it that way, that childhood feels free and golden because there’s no past to weigh you down.
Imagine a fifteen-year-old facing such a life-altering decision. Perhaps the ever-pedantic Heinrich was offering existential instruction. Perhaps he was teaching his son that alternatives exclude, that for every yes there must be a no. (Indeed, years later Arthur was to write, “He who would be everything cannot be anything.”) <> Or was Heinrich exposing his son to a foretaste of renunciation, that is, if Arthur could not renounce the pleasure of the journey, how could he expect himself to renounce worldly pleasures and live the impecunious life of a scholar?
Arthur recorded many impressions in his travel journals written, as his parents required, in the language of the country visited. His linguistic aptitude was prodigious;
perhaps the verse was a grim reminder of how, all his life, he had embraced the wrong myth: namely, that everything about Julius Hertzfeld—his fortune, stature, glory—was spiraling upward, and that life would always get better and better. Of course, now he realized that the reverse was true—that the couplet had it right—that the golden age came first, that his innocent, kittenly beginnings,
* The group was more than a clump of people; it had a life of its own, an enduring personality. Though none of the original members (except, of course, he himself) was still in the group, it had a stable persisting self, a core culture (in the jargon, a unique set of “norms”—unwritten rules) that seemed immortal.
* Philip took that as his cue. “Spinoza was fond of using a Latin phrase, sub specie aeternitatis, meaning ‘from the aspect of eternity.’ He suggested that disturbing quotidian events become less unsettling if they are viewed from the aspect of eternity. I believe that concept may be an underappreciated tool in psychotherapy. ... “I can see you’re trying to offer me something, Philip, and I appreciate that. But right now the idea of taking a cosmic-eye view of life is the wrong flavor of medicine... I was bathing myself in nostalgia. What I’ve not done enough of is to treasure each moment, and that’s the problem with your solution of detachment. I think it faces life through the wrong end of the telescope.” <> “I gotta come in here, Julius,” said Gill, “with an observation: I don’t think there’s much chance you’re going to accept anything that Philip says.”
* I might even have taken a strong stand against it and insisted that her search for another form of enlightenment was just resistance to change. I’ve changed. Now I feel I need all the help I can get. And I’ve found that participation in some other mode of growth, even flaky stuff, can often open up new areas for our therapeutic work. And I sure hope that will be true for Pam.” <> “It may have been not a flaky but an excellent choice for her,” said Philip. “Schopenhauer felt positive about Eastern meditative practice and its emphasis on mind clearing, on seeing through illusion, and its approach to relieving suffering by teaching the art of letting go of attachments. In fact, he was the first to introduce Eastern thought into Western philosophy.”
“Remember my version of Boyle’s law,” said Julius. “A small amount of anxiety will expand to fill our whole anxiety cavity. Your anxiety feels just as awful as anxiety in others that comes from more obviously calamitous sources.”
Others, Kierkegaard and Kafka, for example, were not so fortunate: all their lives they were oppressed by the weight of their fathers’ judgment.
She was one of the first truly liberated women and was Germany’s first woman to earn her living as a writer. For the next decade Johanna Schopenhauer became a renowned novelist, the Danielle Steel of nineteenth-century Germany, and for decades Arthur Schopenhauer was known only as “Johanna Schopenhauer’s son.”
Mother's letter: The serious and calm tone of your March 28th letter, flowing from your mind into my mind, woke me up and revealed that you might be on your way to totally missing your vocation! That is why I have to do each and every thing to save you, however possible; I know what it means to live a life repugnant to one’s soul;
* “Please note that every feature on Ganesha has a serious meaning, a life instruction. Consider the large elephant head: it tells us to think big. And the large ears? To listen more. The small eyes remind us to focus and to concentrate and the small mouth to talk less.
Vijay meditated on the image of a flowing river and listened to his mind’s soundless words, anitya, anitya—impermanence. Everything is impermanent, he reminded himself; all of life and all experience glide by as surely and irrevocably as the passing landscape seen through the train window.
Her letters to him following his expulsion are among the most shocking letters ever written by a mother to a son. <> …I am acquainted with your disposition…you are irritating and unbearable and I consider it most difficult to live with you. All your good qualities are darkened by your super-cleverness and thus rendered useless to the world…you find fault everywhere except in yourself…
It first surfaced when Arthur, at nineteen, accused his mother of lavish spending, which imperiled the inheritance he was to receive at the age of twenty-one. Johanna bristled, insisted it was well known that she served only bread-and-butter sandwiches at her salons and then excoriated Arthur for living far beyond his means with expensive dining and horseback-riding lessons.
_Go your way, I have nothing more to do with you…. Leave your address here, but do not write to me, I shall henceforth neither read nor answer any letter from you…. So this is the end…. You have hurt me too much. Live and be as happy as you can be. <> And the end it was. Johanna lived for another twenty-five years, but mother and son were never again to meet.
// nature conceals the many evils [women] entail, such as endless expenses, the cares of children, refractoriness, obstinacy, growing old and ugly after a few years, deception, cuckolding, whims, crotchets, attacks of hysteria, hell, and the devil. I therefore call marriage a debt that is contracted in youth and paid in old age
* Bonnie took a deep breath and said, “Preening. You preen. That’s the way it seems to me. I don’t know how many times in the last meeting you had your barrettes out, your hair down, flouncing your hair, running your fingers through it, but it was more times than I can ever remember before. It’s got to be related to Philip’s entrance into the group.”
“No, not quite right, Stuart. Right facts, wrong tone. You’re making it sound flippant. Like I just want to tell a story for the fun of it. There are a lot of painful memories from my childhood that are now coming up and haunting me. Get the difference?”
* “Then there was Tony’s feeling that we were using a more complex vocabulary in order to impress Philip. And then Tony commented that Philip was a show-off. And Philip’s sharp response to Tony. And then there was my comment to Gill that he avoided displeasing women so much that he lost his sense of self.
Well, I wonder if that wasn’t recreated in the group today? She opened the meeting, and pretty quickly the group left her for Rebecca. In other words, the very issue she wanted to talk about may have been portrayed here in living color with all of us playing a part in the pageant.”
Earl had been her gynecologist ... No man ever knew her so well, comforted her so much, was so exquisitely familiar with her every nook and cranny, nor afforded her more sexual pleasure.
(No sofas were to be found in English professors’ offices; the department had been so racked by charges of professors preying on their female students that sofas had been banned.)
* Of all the literary aphorisms that she and John shared and loved, one of her favorites was Nietzsche’s phrase from Zarathustra: “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”... Now she understood the source of her ambivalence about Vipassana. Goenka was true to his word. He delivered exactly what he had promised: equanimity, tranquility, or, as he often put it, equipoise. But at what price? If Shakespeare had taken up Vipassana, would Lear or Hamlet have been born?
Chapman’s couplets: No pen can anything eternal write that is not steeped in the humour of the night
Had the Buddha gotten it right? Was the price of the remedy not worse than the disease?.. Everywhere she looked, there was renunciation, sacrifice, limitation, and resignation. Whatever happened to life? To joy, expansion, passion, carpe diem? <> Was life so anguished that it should be sacrificed for the sake of equanimity? Perhaps the four noble truths were culture-bound. Perhaps they were truths for 2,500 years ago in a land with overwhelming poverty,
* In his view the work in therapy consisted of two phases: first interaction, often emotional, and second, understanding that interaction. That’s the way therapy should proceed—an alternating sequence of evocation of emotions and then understanding. So he now attempted to switch the group into the second phase by saying, “Let’s back up and take a dispassionate look at what’s just transpired.”
Tony said, “Yeah, I agree. Bonnie, you do get emotional when you get a lot of attention. Are you embarrassed by the spotlight?”
“That’s an observation and an opinion, Stuart,” said Julius. “Can you go to the feelings?” <> “Well, I guess I have some envy about Rebecca’s interest in Philip. I felt that it was odd no one asked Philip how he felt about that—well, that’s not quite a feeling, is it?”
* “I believe your point, “said Philip with eyes closed in deep concentration, “is that my motivation in voicing observations is not what it seems to be: that it is instead self-serving, a form of preening in which, if I understand you, I attempt to evoke Rebecca’s and others’ interest and admiration. Is that correct?” <> Julius felt on edge. No matter what he did, the focus kept going back to Philip. At least three conflicting desires fought for his attention: first, to protect Philip against too much confrontation, second, to prevent Philip’s impersonality from derailing the intimate discourse, and, third, to cheer Tony on in his efforts to knock Philip on his ass.
Of a Jewish service: “Two little boys standing next to me made me lose my countenance because at the wide-mouthed roulade with their heads flung back, they always seemed to be yelling at me.” A group of English aristocrats “looked like peasant wenches in disguise.” .. This mocking, irreverent young lad would develop into the bitter, angry man who habitually referred to all humans as “bipeds,” and would agree with Thomas à Kempis, “Every time I went out among men I came back less human.”
Certain that Caroline Marquet was an opportunistic malingerer, he fought her lawsuit with all his might, employing every possible legal appeal. The bitter court proceedings continued for the next six years before the court ruled against him and ordered him to pay Caroline Marquet sixty talers a year for as long as her injury persisted. (In that era a house servant or cook would have been paid twenty talers annually plus food and board.)
* Arthur’s answer to his question anticipates by 150 years much of what is to follow in the fields of evolutionary psychology and psychoanalysis. He states that what is really guiding us is not our need but the need of our species. “The true end of the whole love story, though the parties concerned are unaware of it, is that a particular child may be begotten,”
“An important Nazi, too,” Pam interjected. <> Philip ignored Pam’s comment. “Heidegger spoke of confronting the limiting of possibility. In fact he linked it to the fear of death. Death, he suggested, was the impossibility of further possibility.”
“Good,” said Stuart. “You know, Philip, I’m beginning to change my mind—I used to think of you as arrogant, but now I’m beginning to think that you’re just not house-broken or people-broken. And that does not require an answer—it’s optional.”
But Philip? What can one say about a man who models himself after Heidegger and Schopenhauer? Of all philosophers who ever lived, those were the two who were the most abject failures as human beings. What Philip did was unforgivable, predatory, without remorse—”
Bonnie interrupted, “Hold on, Pam, did you notice that when Julius tried to stop Philip, he absolutely insisted on one more sentence about sex robbing the person of conscience and destroying relationships. I wonder, wasn’t that something about remorse? And wasn’t that directed to you?”
“He has something to say? Let him say it to me. I don’t want to hear it from Schopenhauer.”
Thus, one aspect of the porcupine parable is that men of true worth, particularly men of genius, do not require warmth from others. But there is another, darker aspect to the porcupine parable: that our fellow creatures are unpleasant and repulsive and, hence, to be avoided. This misanthropic stance is to be found everywhere in Schopenhauer’s writings
// “To forget at any time the bad traits of a man’s character is like throwing away hard-earned money. We must protect ourselves from foolish familiarity and foolish friendship.”
// “The only way to attain superiority in dealing with men is to let it be seen you are independent of them.”
// “If we really think highly of a person we should conceal it from him like a crime.”
Pam said, “I’ve got a response, Gill. Maybe not what you’re expecting but something I’ve been holding back, something I wanted to say to you even before I left on my trip. I don’t know how to put it tactfully, Gill, so I’m not going to try—just going to cut loose. Bottom line is that your story doesn’t move me one bit, and, in most ways, you just don’t move me. Even though you say you’re revealing yourself like Rebecca and Stuart did, I don’t experience you as being personal... It’s a trick because it’s not your story, it’s your Aunt Val’s story, and of course everyone is going to jump in and say, ‘But you were just a child, you were thirteen, you were the victim.’.. I hate to say this, but I just didn’t think about you.
* “If I were to ratchet up a notch or two,” Gill replied without hesitation, “I’d tell the group I was an alcoholic and that I drink myself to unconsciousness every night.”... He was one of those optimistic souls who was greatly destabilized by duplicity; he felt wobbly and needed time to formulate a new vision of Gill. As he mused silently about his own naïveté and the tenuousness of reality, the mood of the group darkened and progressed from incredulousness to stridency.
Julius always taught students the difference between vertical and horizontal self-disclosure. The group was pressing, as expected, for vertical disclosure—details about the past, including such queries as the scope and duration of his drinking—whereas horizontal disclosure, that is, disclosure about the disclosure, was always far more productive.
* Philip: I work very differently from you: I don’t offer an emotional relationship—I’m not there to love my client. Instead I am an intellectual guide. I offer my clients instruction in thinking more clearly and living in accord with reason. Now, perhaps belatedly, I’m beginning to understand what you’re aiming for—a Buber-like I-thou encounter…”
* Pam jumped in: “Buber’s a German Jewish philosopher, died about fifty years ago, whose work explores the true encounter between two beings—the ‘I-thou,’ fully present, caring relationship—as opposed to the ‘I-it’ encounter that neglects the ‘I-ness’ of the other and uses rather than relates. The idea has come up a lot here—what Philip did to me years ago was to use me as an it.”
Schopenhauer cites a poem of Lucretius”—“first century B.C. Roman poet,” Philip said in an aside to Tony—“in which one takes pleasure from standing on the seashore and watching others at sea struggle with a terrible storm. ‘It is a joy for us,’ he says, ‘to observe evils from which we are free.’ Is this not one of the powerful forces taking place in a therapy group?”
You supply all the answers. You’re a counselor yourself, ... “So here comes good ole Pam back, and what does she do? Pulls your cover! Turns out you’ve got a messy past. Real messy. You’re not Mister Clean after all... You come in here today and say to Julius: what’s your secret life? You want to knock him off his pedestal, level the playing ground.
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... 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?
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:... And religion? Schopenhauer was the first major philosopher to construct his thought upon an atheistic foundation. He explicitly and vehemently denied the supernatural
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:
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.
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.
* “I am so tired of your pseudodementia game here!” Pam, slapping her thigh in exasperation, spit out her words to Philip. “And I’m pissed at your refusing to give me a name! This referring to me as ‘someone in the group’ is insulting and imbecilic.”... “Let’s try gratitude for taking you and your thoughtless and insensitive question seriously. Let’s try respect for keeping his I-thou promise to you. Or how about sorrow for what he went through in the past. Or fascination or even identification with his unruly sexual feelings. Or admiration for his willingness to work with you, with all of us, despite his cancer. And that’s just for starters.” Pam raised her voice: “How could you not have feelings?”
Julius waited and wondered in which direction to guide the group. There were many possibilities. Pam’s rage and judgmentalism were on the table. And what about the other men, Tony and Stuart? Where were they? And the competitiveness between Pam and Rebecca was still on the table. Or should the group deal with the unfinished business with Bonnie and her mocking statement? Or perhaps focus more on the outburst from Pam to Philip? He knew it was best to be patient; it would be a mistake to push too fast.
* // Life can be compared to a piece of embroidered material of which, everyone in the first half of his time, comes to see the top side, but in the second half, the reverse side. The latter is not so beautiful, but is more instructive because it enables one to see how the threads are connected together.
He had no particular purpose other than simply to bask for a few minutes more in the embers of the group session.
Two hundred eager students crammed into Hegel’s course, whereas only five came to hear Schopenhauer describe himself as an avenger who had come to liberate post-Kantian philosophy from the empty paradoxes and the corrupting and obscure language of contemporary philosophy. It was no secret that Schopenhauer’s target was Hegel and Hegel’s predecessor, Fichte
* “that it falls into place better if you think of the ship and the journey not as representing death but what we might call the authentic life. In other words, we live more authentically if we keep focused on the fundamental fact of sheer being, the miracle of existence itself. If we focus on “being,” then we won’t get so caught up in the diversions of life, that is, the material objects on the island, that we lose sight of existence itself.”... Heidegger called it falling or being absorbed in the everydayness of life... “Like Pam,” Philip continued, “I believe the parable warns us against attachment and urges us to stay attuned to the miracle of being—not to worry about how things are but to be in a state of wonderment that things are—that things exist at all.”
Julius turned to face Philip. “Your mode of offering me counsel in the course of a lecture was off-putting—so indirect and so public. And so unexpected because we had just spent an hour in private face-to-face talk in which you seemed utterly indifferent to my condition.
* Pam. “I had a bellyful of talk about the relinquishment of all attachments including the inane idea that we can sever our attachment to our personal ego. I ended up with strong feelings that it was all so life-negating. And that parable Philip handed out—what’s the message? I mean, what kind of voyage, what kind of life, is it if you are so focused on the departure that you can’t enjoy your surroundings and can’t enjoy other people? And that’s what I see in you, Philip.” Pam turned to address him directly. “Your solution to your problems is a pseudosolution; it’s no solution at all—it’s something else—it’s a relinquishment of life.
* 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.
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.”
Sometimes when thinking about Pam and Philip, he was visited by the Talmudic phrase “to redeem one person is to save the whole world.” The importance of redeeming their relationship soon loomed large.
he was the first philosopher to look at impulses and feelings from the inside, and for the rest of his career he wrote extensively about interior human concerns: sex, love, death, dreams, suffering, religion, suicide, relations with others, vanity, self-esteem. More than any other philosopher, he addressed those dark impulses deep within that we cannot bear to know and, hence, must repress.”
Schopenhauer two centuries ago understood the underlying reality: the sheer awesome power of the sex drive. It’s the most fundamental force within us—the will to live, to reproduce
Schopenhauer made me aware that we are doomed to turn endlessly on the wheel of will: we desire something, we acquire it, we enjoy a brief moment of satiation, which rapidly fades into boredom, which then, without fail, is followed by the next ‘I want.’ There is no exit by way of appeasing desire—one has to leap off the wheel completely.
And Philip’s comment that when he read Schopenhauer he felt entirely understood for the first time felt like a slap in the face. What am I, thought Julius, chopped liver?
Schopenhauer’s belief in his genius served also to provide him with a perduring sense of life meaning: throughout his life he regarded himself as a missionary of truth to the human race.
He urged us to live and experience life now rather than live for the “hope” of some future good. Two generations later Nietzsche would take up this call. He considered hope our greatest scourge and pilloried Plato, Socrates, and Christianity for focusing our attention away from the only life that we have and toward some future illusory world.
“Groups,” said Julius, “are like people: they don’t want to die. Perhaps your relationship with Tony was a convoluted way to keep it alive. All therapy groups try to continue, to have regular reunions—but they rarely do so. Like I’ve said many times here, the group is not life; it’s a dress rehearsal for life. We’ve all got to find a way to transfer what we learn here to our life in the real world.
Philip, showing uncharacteristic signs of agitation. “You honor them when it suits you. When I discuss honoring my past social contract with you, you revile me. Yet you break the rules of the group, you play secret games, you use Tony capriciously.” <> “Who are you to speak of contracts?” Pam shot back loudly. “What about the contract between teacher and student?”
“Unforgivable,” said Philip, “keeps the responsibility outside of oneself, whereas unforgiving places the responsibility on one’s own refusal to forgive.”
Tony nodded. “The difference between taking the responsibility for what you do or blaming it on someone else?”
“Precisely,” said Philip, “and, as I’ve heard Julius say, therapy begins when blame ends and responsibility emerges.”
Gill persisted, “There’s something else, though: do you forgive yourself for using Tony?”
“Using Tony?” said Pam. “I used Tony? What are you talking about?”
“Seems like your whole relationship was one thing—and a far more important thing—to him than to you. Seems like you weren’t relating so much to Tony but to others, perhaps even to Philip, through Tony.”
//The really proper address between one man and another should be, instead of Sir, Monsieur,…my fellow sufferer. However strange this may sound, it accords with the facts, puts the other man in the most correct light, and reminds us of that most necessary thing, tolerance, patience, forbearance, and love of one’s neighbor, which everyone needs and each of us therefore owes to another... We should not be indignant with others for these vices simply because they do not appear in us at the moment.
After Parerga and Paralipomena: townspeople greeted him on his walks, and pet stores had a run on poodles similar to Schopenhauer’s.
* When the eminent sculptress Elisabeth Ney visited Frankfurt for four weeks to do a bust of him, Arthur purred, “She works all day at my place.
“Good stuff,” said Tony. “They were really duking it out. But with padded gloves.” <> “Right, better than silent glares and hidden daggers,” said Gill.
“I mean,” said Tony, “you said that insulting Pam was the last thing in the world you wanted to do. Yet that was exactly what you did, wasn’t it?”... “So,” Tony continued, sounding like a triumphant attorney in cross-examination, “you need to get your intentions and your behavior on the same page. You need to get them congruent—do I have the word right?” Tony looked at Julius who nodded his head. “And that’s why you should be in therapy. Congruence is what therapy is all about.”
you’ve been in seclusion for years, and I toss you into this high-powered group. Of course that’s going to feel uncomfortable. But what I’m really referring to is the overt problem, the sexual compulsion—and perhaps that’s gone. You’re older, been through a lot, maybe you’ve entered the land of gonadal tranquillity. Nice place, good sunny climate. I’ve dwelled there comfortably for many years.” <> “I would say,” Tony added, “that Schopenhauer has cured you, but now you need to be saved from the Schopenhauer cure.”
an amazing passage in Erik Erikson’s biography of Martin Luther. It goes something like this: ‘Luther elevated his own neurosis to that of a universal patient-hood and then tried to solve for the world what he could not solve for himself.’ I believe that Schopenhauer, like Luther, seriously fell into this error and that you’ve followed his lead.” <> “Perhaps,” responded Philip in a conciliatory fashion, “neurosis is a social construct, and we may need a different kind of therapy and a different kind of philosophy for different temperaments—one approach for those who are replenished by closeness to others and another approach for those who choose the life of the mind.
“I think your view of Buddhism misses something. I’ve attended Buddhist retreats where the focus has been directed outwards—on loving kindness and connectivity—not on solitude. A good Buddhist can be active, in the world, even politically active—all in the service of loving others.” <> “So it’s becoming clearer,” said Julius, “that your selectivity error involves human relationships.
Philip’s voice grew deadly serious. “Remember what I did for a job when we first met? I was an exterminator—a clever chemist who invented ways to kill insects, or to render them infertile, by using their own hormones. How’s that for irony? The killer with the hormone gun.”
“I’m a philosopher,” said Philip, “with a doctorate from Columbia, and Tony, my coleader, is a counseling student.”
“A student? I don’t get it. How will you two operate here?” shot back Jason.
“Well,” answered Tony, “Philip will bring in helpful ideas from his knowledge of philosophy, and me, well, I’m here to learn and to pitch in any way I can—I’m more of an expert in emotional accessibility. Right, partner?”
//However, we continue our life with great interest and much solicitude as long as possible, just as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.
Epicurus, who reasoned, “Where I am, death is not and where death is, I am not. Hence why fear death?”
It was code for potential melanoma, and now, in retrospect, Julius identified that phrase, that singular moment, as the point when carefree life ended and death, his heretofore invisible enemy, materialized in all its awful reality. Death had come to stay, it never again left his side, and all the horrors that followed were predictable postscripts.
How startling it was to realize that suddenly he was no longer the supreme life form. Instead he was a host; he was nourishment, food for a fitter organism whose gobbling cells divided at a dizzying pace, an organism that blitzkrieged and annexed adjacent protoplasm and was now undoubtedly outfitting clusters of cells for cruises into the bloodstream and colonization of distant organs, perhaps the sweet friable feeding grounds of his liver or the spongy grassy meadows of his lungs.
* his fellow humans who are victims of that freakish twist of evolution that grants self-awareness but not the requisite psychological equipment to deal with the pain of transient existence. And so throughout the years, the centuries, the millennia, we have relentlessly constructed makeshift denials of finiteness.
Maybe it was simply imposed ritual he disliked. Perhaps a good word could be found for a little personal creative ceremony.
* What else do we have? What else other than this miraculous blessed interval of being and self-awareness? If anything is to be honored and blessed, it should simply be this—the priceless gift of sheer existence. To live in despair because life is finite or because life has no higher purpose or embedded design is crass ingratitude. To dream up an omniscient creator and devote our life to endless genuflection seems pointless. And wasteful, too:... Better to embrace Spinoza’s and Einstein’s solution: simply bow one’s head, tip one’s hat to the elegant laws and mystery of nature, and go about the business of living.
It was not that he had grown wiser: it was only that the removal of distractions—ambition, sexual passion, money, prestige, applause, popularity—offered a purer vision. Wasn’t such detachment the Buddha’s truth? Perhaps so, but he preferred the path of the Greeks: everything in moderation.
* Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally.
doubts from within: the extraordinary molecular neurobiological discoveries reported with ever-increasing frequency caused even the most experienced therapists to wonder about the relevance of their work.
* Julius had known patients so competitive that they hid their improvement just because they didn’t want to give the therapist the satisfaction (and the power) of having helped them.
Freud, Living and Dying, by Max Schur, Freud’s doctor—a graphic account of how Freud’s cigar-spawned cancer gradually devoured his palate, his jaw, and, finally, his life... when Freud finally told him that the pain was so great that it no longer made sense to continue, Schur proved a man of his word and injected a fatal dose of morphine.
* For centuries Heinrich’s ancestors had guided the Schopenhauer business with great diligence and success. Heinrich’s grandfather once hosted Catherine the Great of Russia and, to ensure her comfort, ordered brandy to be poured over the floors of the guest quarters and then set afire to leave the rooms dry and aromatic.
Danzig, that venerable Hanseatic city which had long dominated the Baltic trade. But bad times had come for the grand free city. With Prussia menacing in the west and Russia in the east, and with a weakened Poland no longer able to continue guaranteeing Danzig’s sovereignty, Heinrich Schopenhauer had no doubt that Danzig’s days of freedom and trading stability were coming to an end. All of Europe was awash in political and financial turmoil—save England.
he abruptly left London, carting his protesting wife, now almost six months pregnant, back to Danzig during one of the century’s most severe winters. Years later Johanna described her feelings at being yanked from London: “No one helped me, I had to overcome my grief alone. The man dragged me, in order to cope with his anxiety, halfway across Europe.” <> This, then, was the stormy setting of the genius’s gestation: a loveless marriage, a frightened, protesting mother, an anxious, jealous father, and two arduous trips across a wintry Europe.
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.
// If we 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.
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... 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
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.
Mann... wrote a magnificent essay which stated that Arthur Schopenhauer was the author of the volume. Mann then proceeds to describe how, at the age of twenty-three, he first experienced the great joy of reading Schopenhauer. He was not only entranced by the ring of Schopenhauer’s words, which he describes as “so perfectly consistently clear, so rounded, its presentation and language so powerful, so elegant, so unerringly apposite, so passionately brilliant, so magnificently and blithely severe—like never any other in the history of German philosophy,”
* Johanna Schopenhauer: There she became the dear friend of Goethe and other outstanding men of letters, and authored a dozen best-selling romantic novels, many about women who were forced into unwanted marriages but refused to bear children and continued to long for love.
// Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners condemned not to death but to life and as yet all too unconscious of what their sentence means.
// In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered with a cold hard crust on which a mouldy film has produced living and knowing beings—this is…the real, the world.
That election was the turning point of Julius’s life. So much reinforcement did he receive for his brazenness that he rebuilt his whole identity on the foundation of raw chutzpah.
Julius, not happy with the pressure the group was applying (he had seen too many members drop out of too many therapy groups because they were ashamed of disappointing the group), made his first intervention, “Strong feedback you’re getting, Gill.
Bonnie: “That’s fascinating, Philip. I know I keep yearning for my childhood, but I never understood it that way, that childhood feels free and golden because there’s no past to weigh you down.
Imagine a fifteen-year-old facing such a life-altering decision. Perhaps the ever-pedantic Heinrich was offering existential instruction. Perhaps he was teaching his son that alternatives exclude, that for every yes there must be a no. (Indeed, years later Arthur was to write, “He who would be everything cannot be anything.”) <> Or was Heinrich exposing his son to a foretaste of renunciation, that is, if Arthur could not renounce the pleasure of the journey, how could he expect himself to renounce worldly pleasures and live the impecunious life of a scholar?
Arthur recorded many impressions in his travel journals written, as his parents required, in the language of the country visited. His linguistic aptitude was prodigious;
perhaps the verse was a grim reminder of how, all his life, he had embraced the wrong myth: namely, that everything about Julius Hertzfeld—his fortune, stature, glory—was spiraling upward, and that life would always get better and better. Of course, now he realized that the reverse was true—that the couplet had it right—that the golden age came first, that his innocent, kittenly beginnings,
* The group was more than a clump of people; it had a life of its own, an enduring personality. Though none of the original members (except, of course, he himself) was still in the group, it had a stable persisting self, a core culture (in the jargon, a unique set of “norms”—unwritten rules) that seemed immortal.
* Philip took that as his cue. “Spinoza was fond of using a Latin phrase, sub specie aeternitatis, meaning ‘from the aspect of eternity.’ He suggested that disturbing quotidian events become less unsettling if they are viewed from the aspect of eternity. I believe that concept may be an underappreciated tool in psychotherapy. ... “I can see you’re trying to offer me something, Philip, and I appreciate that. But right now the idea of taking a cosmic-eye view of life is the wrong flavor of medicine... I was bathing myself in nostalgia. What I’ve not done enough of is to treasure each moment, and that’s the problem with your solution of detachment. I think it faces life through the wrong end of the telescope.” <> “I gotta come in here, Julius,” said Gill, “with an observation: I don’t think there’s much chance you’re going to accept anything that Philip says.”
* I might even have taken a strong stand against it and insisted that her search for another form of enlightenment was just resistance to change. I’ve changed. Now I feel I need all the help I can get. And I’ve found that participation in some other mode of growth, even flaky stuff, can often open up new areas for our therapeutic work. And I sure hope that will be true for Pam.” <> “It may have been not a flaky but an excellent choice for her,” said Philip. “Schopenhauer felt positive about Eastern meditative practice and its emphasis on mind clearing, on seeing through illusion, and its approach to relieving suffering by teaching the art of letting go of attachments. In fact, he was the first to introduce Eastern thought into Western philosophy.”
“Remember my version of Boyle’s law,” said Julius. “A small amount of anxiety will expand to fill our whole anxiety cavity. Your anxiety feels just as awful as anxiety in others that comes from more obviously calamitous sources.”
Others, Kierkegaard and Kafka, for example, were not so fortunate: all their lives they were oppressed by the weight of their fathers’ judgment.
She was one of the first truly liberated women and was Germany’s first woman to earn her living as a writer. For the next decade Johanna Schopenhauer became a renowned novelist, the Danielle Steel of nineteenth-century Germany, and for decades Arthur Schopenhauer was known only as “Johanna Schopenhauer’s son.”
Mother's letter: The serious and calm tone of your March 28th letter, flowing from your mind into my mind, woke me up and revealed that you might be on your way to totally missing your vocation! That is why I have to do each and every thing to save you, however possible; I know what it means to live a life repugnant to one’s soul;
* “Please note that every feature on Ganesha has a serious meaning, a life instruction. Consider the large elephant head: it tells us to think big. And the large ears? To listen more. The small eyes remind us to focus and to concentrate and the small mouth to talk less.
Vijay meditated on the image of a flowing river and listened to his mind’s soundless words, anitya, anitya—impermanence. Everything is impermanent, he reminded himself; all of life and all experience glide by as surely and irrevocably as the passing landscape seen through the train window.
Her letters to him following his expulsion are among the most shocking letters ever written by a mother to a son. <> …I am acquainted with your disposition…you are irritating and unbearable and I consider it most difficult to live with you. All your good qualities are darkened by your super-cleverness and thus rendered useless to the world…you find fault everywhere except in yourself…
It first surfaced when Arthur, at nineteen, accused his mother of lavish spending, which imperiled the inheritance he was to receive at the age of twenty-one. Johanna bristled, insisted it was well known that she served only bread-and-butter sandwiches at her salons and then excoriated Arthur for living far beyond his means with expensive dining and horseback-riding lessons.
_Go your way, I have nothing more to do with you…. Leave your address here, but do not write to me, I shall henceforth neither read nor answer any letter from you…. So this is the end…. You have hurt me too much. Live and be as happy as you can be. <> And the end it was. Johanna lived for another twenty-five years, but mother and son were never again to meet.
// nature conceals the many evils [women] entail, such as endless expenses, the cares of children, refractoriness, obstinacy, growing old and ugly after a few years, deception, cuckolding, whims, crotchets, attacks of hysteria, hell, and the devil. I therefore call marriage a debt that is contracted in youth and paid in old age
* Bonnie took a deep breath and said, “Preening. You preen. That’s the way it seems to me. I don’t know how many times in the last meeting you had your barrettes out, your hair down, flouncing your hair, running your fingers through it, but it was more times than I can ever remember before. It’s got to be related to Philip’s entrance into the group.”
“No, not quite right, Stuart. Right facts, wrong tone. You’re making it sound flippant. Like I just want to tell a story for the fun of it. There are a lot of painful memories from my childhood that are now coming up and haunting me. Get the difference?”
* “Then there was Tony’s feeling that we were using a more complex vocabulary in order to impress Philip. And then Tony commented that Philip was a show-off. And Philip’s sharp response to Tony. And then there was my comment to Gill that he avoided displeasing women so much that he lost his sense of self.
Well, I wonder if that wasn’t recreated in the group today? She opened the meeting, and pretty quickly the group left her for Rebecca. In other words, the very issue she wanted to talk about may have been portrayed here in living color with all of us playing a part in the pageant.”
Earl had been her gynecologist ... No man ever knew her so well, comforted her so much, was so exquisitely familiar with her every nook and cranny, nor afforded her more sexual pleasure.
(No sofas were to be found in English professors’ offices; the department had been so racked by charges of professors preying on their female students that sofas had been banned.)
* Of all the literary aphorisms that she and John shared and loved, one of her favorites was Nietzsche’s phrase from Zarathustra: “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”... Now she understood the source of her ambivalence about Vipassana. Goenka was true to his word. He delivered exactly what he had promised: equanimity, tranquility, or, as he often put it, equipoise. But at what price? If Shakespeare had taken up Vipassana, would Lear or Hamlet have been born?
Chapman’s couplets: No pen can anything eternal write that is not steeped in the humour of the night
Had the Buddha gotten it right? Was the price of the remedy not worse than the disease?.. Everywhere she looked, there was renunciation, sacrifice, limitation, and resignation. Whatever happened to life? To joy, expansion, passion, carpe diem? <> Was life so anguished that it should be sacrificed for the sake of equanimity? Perhaps the four noble truths were culture-bound. Perhaps they were truths for 2,500 years ago in a land with overwhelming poverty,
* In his view the work in therapy consisted of two phases: first interaction, often emotional, and second, understanding that interaction. That’s the way therapy should proceed—an alternating sequence of evocation of emotions and then understanding. So he now attempted to switch the group into the second phase by saying, “Let’s back up and take a dispassionate look at what’s just transpired.”
Tony said, “Yeah, I agree. Bonnie, you do get emotional when you get a lot of attention. Are you embarrassed by the spotlight?”
“That’s an observation and an opinion, Stuart,” said Julius. “Can you go to the feelings?” <> “Well, I guess I have some envy about Rebecca’s interest in Philip. I felt that it was odd no one asked Philip how he felt about that—well, that’s not quite a feeling, is it?”
* “I believe your point, “said Philip with eyes closed in deep concentration, “is that my motivation in voicing observations is not what it seems to be: that it is instead self-serving, a form of preening in which, if I understand you, I attempt to evoke Rebecca’s and others’ interest and admiration. Is that correct?” <> Julius felt on edge. No matter what he did, the focus kept going back to Philip. At least three conflicting desires fought for his attention: first, to protect Philip against too much confrontation, second, to prevent Philip’s impersonality from derailing the intimate discourse, and, third, to cheer Tony on in his efforts to knock Philip on his ass.
Of a Jewish service: “Two little boys standing next to me made me lose my countenance because at the wide-mouthed roulade with their heads flung back, they always seemed to be yelling at me.” A group of English aristocrats “looked like peasant wenches in disguise.” .. This mocking, irreverent young lad would develop into the bitter, angry man who habitually referred to all humans as “bipeds,” and would agree with Thomas à Kempis, “Every time I went out among men I came back less human.”
Certain that Caroline Marquet was an opportunistic malingerer, he fought her lawsuit with all his might, employing every possible legal appeal. The bitter court proceedings continued for the next six years before the court ruled against him and ordered him to pay Caroline Marquet sixty talers a year for as long as her injury persisted. (In that era a house servant or cook would have been paid twenty talers annually plus food and board.)
* Arthur’s answer to his question anticipates by 150 years much of what is to follow in the fields of evolutionary psychology and psychoanalysis. He states that what is really guiding us is not our need but the need of our species. “The true end of the whole love story, though the parties concerned are unaware of it, is that a particular child may be begotten,”
“An important Nazi, too,” Pam interjected. <> Philip ignored Pam’s comment. “Heidegger spoke of confronting the limiting of possibility. In fact he linked it to the fear of death. Death, he suggested, was the impossibility of further possibility.”
“Good,” said Stuart. “You know, Philip, I’m beginning to change my mind—I used to think of you as arrogant, but now I’m beginning to think that you’re just not house-broken or people-broken. And that does not require an answer—it’s optional.”
But Philip? What can one say about a man who models himself after Heidegger and Schopenhauer? Of all philosophers who ever lived, those were the two who were the most abject failures as human beings. What Philip did was unforgivable, predatory, without remorse—”
Bonnie interrupted, “Hold on, Pam, did you notice that when Julius tried to stop Philip, he absolutely insisted on one more sentence about sex robbing the person of conscience and destroying relationships. I wonder, wasn’t that something about remorse? And wasn’t that directed to you?”
“He has something to say? Let him say it to me. I don’t want to hear it from Schopenhauer.”
Thus, one aspect of the porcupine parable is that men of true worth, particularly men of genius, do not require warmth from others. But there is another, darker aspect to the porcupine parable: that our fellow creatures are unpleasant and repulsive and, hence, to be avoided. This misanthropic stance is to be found everywhere in Schopenhauer’s writings
// “To forget at any time the bad traits of a man’s character is like throwing away hard-earned money. We must protect ourselves from foolish familiarity and foolish friendship.”
// “The only way to attain superiority in dealing with men is to let it be seen you are independent of them.”
// “If we really think highly of a person we should conceal it from him like a crime.”
Pam said, “I’ve got a response, Gill. Maybe not what you’re expecting but something I’ve been holding back, something I wanted to say to you even before I left on my trip. I don’t know how to put it tactfully, Gill, so I’m not going to try—just going to cut loose. Bottom line is that your story doesn’t move me one bit, and, in most ways, you just don’t move me. Even though you say you’re revealing yourself like Rebecca and Stuart did, I don’t experience you as being personal... It’s a trick because it’s not your story, it’s your Aunt Val’s story, and of course everyone is going to jump in and say, ‘But you were just a child, you were thirteen, you were the victim.’.. I hate to say this, but I just didn’t think about you.
* “If I were to ratchet up a notch or two,” Gill replied without hesitation, “I’d tell the group I was an alcoholic and that I drink myself to unconsciousness every night.”... He was one of those optimistic souls who was greatly destabilized by duplicity; he felt wobbly and needed time to formulate a new vision of Gill. As he mused silently about his own naïveté and the tenuousness of reality, the mood of the group darkened and progressed from incredulousness to stridency.
Julius always taught students the difference between vertical and horizontal self-disclosure. The group was pressing, as expected, for vertical disclosure—details about the past, including such queries as the scope and duration of his drinking—whereas horizontal disclosure, that is, disclosure about the disclosure, was always far more productive.
* Philip: I work very differently from you: I don’t offer an emotional relationship—I’m not there to love my client. Instead I am an intellectual guide. I offer my clients instruction in thinking more clearly and living in accord with reason. Now, perhaps belatedly, I’m beginning to understand what you’re aiming for—a Buber-like I-thou encounter…”
* Pam jumped in: “Buber’s a German Jewish philosopher, died about fifty years ago, whose work explores the true encounter between two beings—the ‘I-thou,’ fully present, caring relationship—as opposed to the ‘I-it’ encounter that neglects the ‘I-ness’ of the other and uses rather than relates. The idea has come up a lot here—what Philip did to me years ago was to use me as an it.”
Schopenhauer cites a poem of Lucretius”—“first century B.C. Roman poet,” Philip said in an aside to Tony—“in which one takes pleasure from standing on the seashore and watching others at sea struggle with a terrible storm. ‘It is a joy for us,’ he says, ‘to observe evils from which we are free.’ Is this not one of the powerful forces taking place in a therapy group?”
You supply all the answers. You’re a counselor yourself, ... “So here comes good ole Pam back, and what does she do? Pulls your cover! Turns out you’ve got a messy past. Real messy. You’re not Mister Clean after all... You come in here today and say to Julius: what’s your secret life? You want to knock him off his pedestal, level the playing ground.
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... 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?
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:... And religion? Schopenhauer was the first major philosopher to construct his thought upon an atheistic foundation. He explicitly and vehemently denied the supernatural
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:
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.
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.
* “I am so tired of your pseudodementia game here!” Pam, slapping her thigh in exasperation, spit out her words to Philip. “And I’m pissed at your refusing to give me a name! This referring to me as ‘someone in the group’ is insulting and imbecilic.”... “Let’s try gratitude for taking you and your thoughtless and insensitive question seriously. Let’s try respect for keeping his I-thou promise to you. Or how about sorrow for what he went through in the past. Or fascination or even identification with his unruly sexual feelings. Or admiration for his willingness to work with you, with all of us, despite his cancer. And that’s just for starters.” Pam raised her voice: “How could you not have feelings?”
Julius waited and wondered in which direction to guide the group. There were many possibilities. Pam’s rage and judgmentalism were on the table. And what about the other men, Tony and Stuart? Where were they? And the competitiveness between Pam and Rebecca was still on the table. Or should the group deal with the unfinished business with Bonnie and her mocking statement? Or perhaps focus more on the outburst from Pam to Philip? He knew it was best to be patient; it would be a mistake to push too fast.
* // Life can be compared to a piece of embroidered material of which, everyone in the first half of his time, comes to see the top side, but in the second half, the reverse side. The latter is not so beautiful, but is more instructive because it enables one to see how the threads are connected together.
He had no particular purpose other than simply to bask for a few minutes more in the embers of the group session.
Two hundred eager students crammed into Hegel’s course, whereas only five came to hear Schopenhauer describe himself as an avenger who had come to liberate post-Kantian philosophy from the empty paradoxes and the corrupting and obscure language of contemporary philosophy. It was no secret that Schopenhauer’s target was Hegel and Hegel’s predecessor, Fichte
* “that it falls into place better if you think of the ship and the journey not as representing death but what we might call the authentic life. In other words, we live more authentically if we keep focused on the fundamental fact of sheer being, the miracle of existence itself. If we focus on “being,” then we won’t get so caught up in the diversions of life, that is, the material objects on the island, that we lose sight of existence itself.”... Heidegger called it falling or being absorbed in the everydayness of life... “Like Pam,” Philip continued, “I believe the parable warns us against attachment and urges us to stay attuned to the miracle of being—not to worry about how things are but to be in a state of wonderment that things are—that things exist at all.”
Julius turned to face Philip. “Your mode of offering me counsel in the course of a lecture was off-putting—so indirect and so public. And so unexpected because we had just spent an hour in private face-to-face talk in which you seemed utterly indifferent to my condition.
* Pam. “I had a bellyful of talk about the relinquishment of all attachments including the inane idea that we can sever our attachment to our personal ego. I ended up with strong feelings that it was all so life-negating. And that parable Philip handed out—what’s the message? I mean, what kind of voyage, what kind of life, is it if you are so focused on the departure that you can’t enjoy your surroundings and can’t enjoy other people? And that’s what I see in you, Philip.” Pam turned to address him directly. “Your solution to your problems is a pseudosolution; it’s no solution at all—it’s something else—it’s a relinquishment of life.
* 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.
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.”
Sometimes when thinking about Pam and Philip, he was visited by the Talmudic phrase “to redeem one person is to save the whole world.” The importance of redeeming their relationship soon loomed large.
he was the first philosopher to look at impulses and feelings from the inside, and for the rest of his career he wrote extensively about interior human concerns: sex, love, death, dreams, suffering, religion, suicide, relations with others, vanity, self-esteem. More than any other philosopher, he addressed those dark impulses deep within that we cannot bear to know and, hence, must repress.”
Schopenhauer two centuries ago understood the underlying reality: the sheer awesome power of the sex drive. It’s the most fundamental force within us—the will to live, to reproduce
Schopenhauer made me aware that we are doomed to turn endlessly on the wheel of will: we desire something, we acquire it, we enjoy a brief moment of satiation, which rapidly fades into boredom, which then, without fail, is followed by the next ‘I want.’ There is no exit by way of appeasing desire—one has to leap off the wheel completely.
And Philip’s comment that when he read Schopenhauer he felt entirely understood for the first time felt like a slap in the face. What am I, thought Julius, chopped liver?
Schopenhauer’s belief in his genius served also to provide him with a perduring sense of life meaning: throughout his life he regarded himself as a missionary of truth to the human race.
He urged us to live and experience life now rather than live for the “hope” of some future good. Two generations later Nietzsche would take up this call. He considered hope our greatest scourge and pilloried Plato, Socrates, and Christianity for focusing our attention away from the only life that we have and toward some future illusory world.
“Groups,” said Julius, “are like people: they don’t want to die. Perhaps your relationship with Tony was a convoluted way to keep it alive. All therapy groups try to continue, to have regular reunions—but they rarely do so. Like I’ve said many times here, the group is not life; it’s a dress rehearsal for life. We’ve all got to find a way to transfer what we learn here to our life in the real world.
Philip, showing uncharacteristic signs of agitation. “You honor them when it suits you. When I discuss honoring my past social contract with you, you revile me. Yet you break the rules of the group, you play secret games, you use Tony capriciously.” <> “Who are you to speak of contracts?” Pam shot back loudly. “What about the contract between teacher and student?”
“Unforgivable,” said Philip, “keeps the responsibility outside of oneself, whereas unforgiving places the responsibility on one’s own refusal to forgive.”
Tony nodded. “The difference between taking the responsibility for what you do or blaming it on someone else?”
“Precisely,” said Philip, “and, as I’ve heard Julius say, therapy begins when blame ends and responsibility emerges.”
Gill persisted, “There’s something else, though: do you forgive yourself for using Tony?”
“Using Tony?” said Pam. “I used Tony? What are you talking about?”
“Seems like your whole relationship was one thing—and a far more important thing—to him than to you. Seems like you weren’t relating so much to Tony but to others, perhaps even to Philip, through Tony.”
//The really proper address between one man and another should be, instead of Sir, Monsieur,…my fellow sufferer. However strange this may sound, it accords with the facts, puts the other man in the most correct light, and reminds us of that most necessary thing, tolerance, patience, forbearance, and love of one’s neighbor, which everyone needs and each of us therefore owes to another... We should not be indignant with others for these vices simply because they do not appear in us at the moment.
After Parerga and Paralipomena: townspeople greeted him on his walks, and pet stores had a run on poodles similar to Schopenhauer’s.
* When the eminent sculptress Elisabeth Ney visited Frankfurt for four weeks to do a bust of him, Arthur purred, “She works all day at my place.
“Good stuff,” said Tony. “They were really duking it out. But with padded gloves.” <> “Right, better than silent glares and hidden daggers,” said Gill.
“I mean,” said Tony, “you said that insulting Pam was the last thing in the world you wanted to do. Yet that was exactly what you did, wasn’t it?”... “So,” Tony continued, sounding like a triumphant attorney in cross-examination, “you need to get your intentions and your behavior on the same page. You need to get them congruent—do I have the word right?” Tony looked at Julius who nodded his head. “And that’s why you should be in therapy. Congruence is what therapy is all about.”
you’ve been in seclusion for years, and I toss you into this high-powered group. Of course that’s going to feel uncomfortable. But what I’m really referring to is the overt problem, the sexual compulsion—and perhaps that’s gone. You’re older, been through a lot, maybe you’ve entered the land of gonadal tranquillity. Nice place, good sunny climate. I’ve dwelled there comfortably for many years.” <> “I would say,” Tony added, “that Schopenhauer has cured you, but now you need to be saved from the Schopenhauer cure.”
an amazing passage in Erik Erikson’s biography of Martin Luther. It goes something like this: ‘Luther elevated his own neurosis to that of a universal patient-hood and then tried to solve for the world what he could not solve for himself.’ I believe that Schopenhauer, like Luther, seriously fell into this error and that you’ve followed his lead.” <> “Perhaps,” responded Philip in a conciliatory fashion, “neurosis is a social construct, and we may need a different kind of therapy and a different kind of philosophy for different temperaments—one approach for those who are replenished by closeness to others and another approach for those who choose the life of the mind.
“I think your view of Buddhism misses something. I’ve attended Buddhist retreats where the focus has been directed outwards—on loving kindness and connectivity—not on solitude. A good Buddhist can be active, in the world, even politically active—all in the service of loving others.” <> “So it’s becoming clearer,” said Julius, “that your selectivity error involves human relationships.
Philip’s voice grew deadly serious. “Remember what I did for a job when we first met? I was an exterminator—a clever chemist who invented ways to kill insects, or to render them infertile, by using their own hormones. How’s that for irony? The killer with the hormone gun.”
“I’m a philosopher,” said Philip, “with a doctorate from Columbia, and Tony, my coleader, is a counseling student.”
“A student? I don’t get it. How will you two operate here?” shot back Jason.
“Well,” answered Tony, “Philip will bring in helpful ideas from his knowledge of philosophy, and me, well, I’m here to learn and to pitch in any way I can—I’m more of an expert in emotional accessibility. Right, partner?”
