The Schopenhauer Cure

A Novel

Irvin D. Yalom

To my community of older buddies who grace me with their friendship, share life`s

inexorable diminishments and losses, and continue to sustain me with their wisdom and

dedication to the life of the mind: Robert Berger, Murray Bilmes, Martel Bryant, Dagfinn

Føllesdahl, Joseph Frank, Van Harvey, Julius Kaplan, Herbert Kotz, Morton Lieberman,

Walter Sokel, Saul Spiro, and Larry Zaroff.

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 calledding

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 stemmingnot 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 livelihood 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

termedwill. «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.