The Schopenhauer Cure (15 page)

"And why select Philip?" asked Tony.

"That's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question--or maybe that's dated--is it the sixty-four-million-dollar question these days? Short answer: I'm not sure. I've wondered about it a lot. It wasn't smart of me because if I wanted reassurance of my worth, there are a lot of better candidates. Try as hard as I did for a full three years, I didn't help Philip. Maybe I was hoping that he would report some delayed effect of therapy--some patients report such a thing. But it didn't turn out that way for him. Maybe I was being masochistic--wanted to rub my nose in it. Maybe I chose my biggest failure in order to give myself a second chance. I admit it--I frankly don't know my motives. And then during the course of our discussion Philip told me of his career change and asked if I would be willing to be his supervisor. Philip," Julius turned to face Philip, "I assume you filled the group in on this?"

"I provided the necessary details."

"Can you be a little more cryptic?"

Philip looked away, the rest of the group looked uncomfortable, and after a long silence Julius said, "I apologize for the sarcasm, Philip, but can you see where your answer left me?"

"As I said, I provided the necessary details to the others," Philip said.

Bonnie turned to face Julius: "I'll be upfront. This feels unpleasant, and I'm rescuing you. I don't think you need to be hassled today--I think you need to be taken care of. Please, what can we do for you, today?"

"Thanks, Bonnie, you're right, I am shaky today--your question's a lovely one, but I'm not sure I can answer it. I'll tell you all a big secret: there have been times I've entered this room feeling bad because of some personal issues and left feeling better just as a result of being a part of this terrific group. So maybe that's the answer to your question. The best thing for me is simply for all of you to use the group and not let my situation bring us to a total stop."

After a short silence Tony said, "Tough assignment with what's gone down today."

"Right," said Gill. "It'll feel awkward to talk about anything else."

"These are the times I miss Pam," said Bonnie. "She was the one who always knew what to do--no matter how awkward the situation."

"Funny, I was thinking about her earlier too," said Julius.

"It must be telepathy," said Rebecca. "Just a minute ago Pam went through my mind also. It was when Julius talked about successes and failures." She turned to Julius: "I know she was your favorite child in our family here--and that's not a question--it's so obvious. What I'm wondering is whether you feel like you failed with her--you know, her taking a couple of months off to seek another kind of therapy because we couldn't help her. That can't be great for your self-esteem."

Julius gestured toward Philip. "Maybe you should fill him in."

"Pam's a real force here," Rebecca said to Philip, who did not meet her eyes. "Both her marriage and a relationship with a lover fell apart. She decided to leave her marriage but then the lover opted not to leave his wife. She got upset with both men and obsessed about them day and night. Try as we could, we never found a way to help her. In desperation she took off for India to seek help from a famous guru at a Buddhist meditation retreat."

Philip made no response.

Rebecca turned back to face Julius. "So how did you feel about her taking off?"

"You know, up to about fifteen years ago I would have been very uptight--more than that, 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."

Philip's comment was made to no one in particular, and no one responded. Julius felt irritated about hearing Schopenhauer's name so often but kept it to himself as he noted several members nodding in appreciation of Philip's remarks.

After a brief silence Stuart commented, "Shouldn't we go back to where we were a few minutes ago when Julius said that what would be best for him would be for us to get to work in the group?"

"I agree," said Bonnie, "but where to start? How about a follow-up on you and your wife, Stuart? Last we heard she e-mailed you that she was thinking of leaving the marriage."

"It's settled down and we're back to status quo. She's keeping her distance, but at least things are no worse. Let's see what else is pending in the group." Stuart looked around the room. "I can think of two items. Gill, how about you and Rose--what's been happening there? And, Bonnie, you said earlier today you had something to work on, but it felt too trivial."

"I want to pass today," said Gill, looking downward. "I took too much time last week. But the bottom line is defeat and capitulation. I'm ashamed to be back home in the same situation. All that good advice from Philip, from all of you, was wasted on me. How about you, Bonnie?"

"My stuff feels like small potatoes today."

"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." He looked at his watch.

"We're just about out of time, but do you want to open it up? Get it on the agenda?"

"To stop me from chickening out next week, you mean?" asked Bonnie. "Well, that's not a bad idea. What I was going to bring up has to do with my being homely and fat and clumsy and Rebecca--and also Pam--being beautiful and...and stylish. But, Rebecca, you, especially, open up a lot of painful old feelings for me--feelings I've always had about being klutzy, homely, unchosen." Bonnie stopped and looked at Julius.

"There, it's out."

"And on the agenda for next week," said Julius, rising to signal the end of the meeting.

14

1807--How

Arthur

Schopenhauer

Almost Became

a Merchant

_________________________

A
person of high, rare mental

gifts who is forced into a job

which is merely useful is like

a valuable vase decorated with

the most beautiful painting

and then used as a kitchen

pot.

_________________________

The Schopenhauer family's grand tour ended in 1804, and the sixteen-year-old Arthur, with a heavy heart, honored his pledge to his father by commencing his seven-year apprenticeship with Senator Jenisch, an eminent Hamburg merchant. Slipping into a double life, Arthur fulfilled all the quotidian tasks of his apprenticeship but surreptitiously spent every spare moment studying the great ideas of intellectual history.

He had so internalized his father, however, that these stolen moments filled him with remorse.

Then, nine months later came the staggering event that marked Arthur's life forever. Though Heinrich Schopenhauer was only sixty-five, his health had rapidly deteriorated: he appeared jaundiced, fatigued, depressed, and confused, often not recognizing old acquaintances. On the twentieth of April, 1805, he managed, despite his infirmity, to travel to his Hamburg warehouse, slowly climb to the upper loft of the granary, and hurl himself out of the window into the Hamburg Canal. A few hours later his body was found floating in the icy water.

Every suicide leaves a wake of shock, guilt, and anger in the survivors, and Arthur experienced all these sentiments. Imagine the complexity of feelings Arthur must have experienced. His love for his father resulted in intense grief and loss. His resentment of his father--later he often spoke of his suffering from his father's excessive hardness--

evoked remorse. And the wonderful possibility of liberation must have evoked much guilt: Arthur realized that his father would have forever blocked the path to his becoming a philosopher. In this regard one thinks of two other great freethinking moral philosophers, Nietzsche and Sartre, who lost their fathers early in life. Could Nietzsche have become the Antichrist if his father, a Lutheran minister, had not died when Nietzsche was a child? And in his autobiography Sartre expresses his relief that he was not burdened with the search for his father's approbation. Others, Kierkegaard and Kafka, for example, were not so fortunate: all their lives they were oppressed by the weight of their fathers' judgment.

Though Arthur Schopenhauer's work contains an enormous range of ideas, topics, historical and scientific curiosities, notions, and sentiments, there are to be found only a couple of personal tender passages, and each pertains to Heinrich Schopenhauer. In one passage Arthur expresses pride in his father's honest admission that he was in business to make money and compares his father's forthrightness to the duplicity of many of his fellow philosophers (particularly Hegel and Fichte), who grasp for wealth, power, and fame all the while pretending they are working for humanity.

At the age of sixty he planned to dedicate his complete works to the memory of his father. He worked and reworked the wording of his dedication, which ultimately was never published. One version began: "Noble, excellent spirit to whom I owe everything that I am and that I achieve...any one finding in my work any kind of joy, consolation, instruction, let him hear your name and know that, if Heinrich Schopenhauer had not been the man he was, Arthur Schopenhauer would have perished a hundred times."

The strength of Arthur's filial devotion remains puzzling, given Heinrich's lack of any overt affection toward his son. His letters to Arthur are laced with criticism. For example: "Dancing and riding do not make for a livelihood for a merchant whose letters have to be read and must therefore be well written. Now and then I find that the capital letters in your hand are still veritable monstrosities." Or: "Do not acquire a round back, which looks ghastly.... if in the dining room one catches sight of someone stooping, one takes him for a disguised tailor or cobbler." In his very last letter Heinrich instructed his son: "With reference to walking and sitting upright, I advise you request everyone you are with to give you a blow whenever you are caught oblivious of this great matter. This is what children of Princes have done, not minding the pain for a short time, rather than appear as oafs all their lives."

Arthur was his father's son, resembling him not only physically but temperamentally. When he was seventeen, his mother wrote him: "I know too well how little you had of a happy sense of youth, how large the disposition for melancholic brooding you received as a sad share of your inheritance from your father."

Arthur also inherited his father's deep sense of integrity, which played a decisive role in the dilemma that confronted him following his father's death: should he stay in the apprenticeship even though he hated the world of commerce? Eventually, he decided to do what his father would have done: honor his pledge.

He wrote of his decision, "I continued to hold my position with my merchant patron, partly because my excessive grief had broken the energy of my spirit, partly because I would have had a guilty conscience were I to rescind my father's decision so soon after his death."

If Arthur felt immobilized and duty-bound after his father's suicide, his mother had no such inclinations. With the speed of a whirlwind she changed her entire life. In a letter to the seventeen-year-old Arthur she wrote: "Your character is so completely different from mine: you are by nature undecided, I myself am too fast, too resolute." After a few months of widowhood she sold the Schopenhauer mansion, liquidated the venerable family business, and moved away from Hamburg. She boasted to Arthur, "I will always choose the most exciting option. Consider my choice of residence: instead of moving to my hometown, back to my friends and relatives, like every other woman would have done in my stead, I chose Weimar, which was almost unknown to me."

Why Weimar? Johanna was ambitious and yearned to be close to the epicenter of German culture. Supremely confident of her social abilities, she knew she could make good things happen, and, indeed, within months she had created an extraordinary new life for herself: she established the liveliest salon of Weimar and developed a close friendship with Goethe and many other leading writers and artists. Soon she began a career, first as a successful writer of travel journals chronicling the Schopenhauer family's tour and a trip to southern France; then, with Goethe's urging, she turned to fiction and wrote a series of romantic novels. 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." In the late 1820s Johanna's complete works were published in a twenty-volume edition.

Though history (based greatly on Arthur's scathing criticism of his mother) has generally presented Johanna as narcissistic and uncaring, there is no doubt that she, and only she, liberated Arthur from his servitude and started him on his way to philosophy.

The instrument of delivery was a fateful letter she wrote to Arthur in April 1807, two years after his father's suicide.

Dear Arthur,

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; and if it is possible, I will spare you, my dear son, this misery. Oh, dear dear Arthur, why was it that my voice counted so little; what you want now, was in fact then my warmest wish; how hard I strove to make it happen, despite everything one said against me....