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.

41

Death Comes to Arthur Schopenhauer

_________________________

I can bear

the

thought

that in a

short time

worms will

eat away

my body

but the

idea of

philosophy

professors

nibbling

at my

philosophy

makes me

shudder.

_________________________

Schopenhauer faced death as he faced everything

throughout his life—with extreme lucidity. Never flinching

when staring directly at death, never succumbing to the

emollient of supernatural belief, he remained committed to

reason to the very end of his life. It is through reason, he

said, that we first discover our death: we observe the death

of others and, by analogy, realize that death must come to

us. And it is through reason that we reach the self–evident

conclusion that death is the cessation of consciousness and

the irreversible annihilation of the self.

There are two ways to confront death, he said: the

way of reason or the way of illusion and religion with its

hope of persistence of consciousness and cozy afterlife.

Hence, the fact and the fear of death is the progenitor of

deep thought and the mother of both philosophy and

religion.

Throughout his life Schopenhauer struggled with the

omnipresence of death. In his first book, written in his

twenties, he says: «The life of our bodies is only a

constantly prevented dying, an ever deferred death....

Every breath we draw wards off the death that constantly

impinges on us, in this way we struggle with it every

second.»

How did he depict death? Metaphors of death–confrontation abound in his work; we are sheep cavorting

in the pasture, and death is a butcher who capriciously

selects one of us and then another for slaughter. Or we are

like young children in a theater eager for the show to begin

and, fortunately, do not know what is going to happen to

us. Or we are sailors, energetically navigating our ships to

avoid rocks and whirlpools, all the while heading

unerringly to the great final catastrophic shipwreck.

His descriptions of the life cycle always portray an

inexorably despairing voyage.

What a difference there is between our beginning and

our end! The former in the frenzy of desire and the

ecstasy of sensual pleasure; the latter in the destruction

of all the organs and the musty odor of corpses. The

path from birth to death is always downhill as regards

well–being and the enjoyment of life; blissfully

dreaming childhood, lighthearted youth, toilsome

manhood, frail and often pitiable old age, the torture of

the last illness, and finally the agony of death. Does it

not look exactly like existence were a false step whose

consequences gradually become more and more

obvious?

Did he fear his own death? In his later years he

expressed a great calmness about dying. Whence his

tranquillity? If the fear of death is ubiquitous, if it haunts us

all our life, if death is so fearsome that vast numbers of

religions have emerged to contain it, how did the isolated

and secular Schopenhauer quell its terror for himself?

His methods were based on intellectual analysis of

the sources of death–anxiety. Do we dread death because it

is alien and unfamiliar? If so, he insists we are mistaken

because death is far more familiar than we generally think.

Not only have we a taste of death daily in our sleep or in

states of unconsciousness, but we have all passed through

an eternity of nonbeing before we existed.

Do we dread death because it is evil? (Consider the

gruesome iconography commonly depicting death.) Here

too he insists we are mistaken: «It is absurd to consider

nonexistence as an evil: for every evil, like every good,

presupposes existence and consciousness.... to have lost

what cannot be missed is obviously no evil.» And he asks

us to keep in mind that life is suffering, that it is an evil in

itself. That being so, how can losing an evil be an evil?

Death, he says, should be considered a blessing, a release

from the inexorable anguish of biped existence. «We

should welcome it as a desirable and happy event instead

of, as is usually the case, with fear and trembling.» Life

should be reviled for interrupting our blissful nonexistence,

and, in this context, he makes his controversial claim: «If

we knocked on the graves and asked the dead if they would

like to rise again, they would shake their heads.» He cites

similar utterances by Plato, Socrates, and Voltaire.

In addition to his rational arguments, Schopenhauer

proffers one that borders on mysticism. He flirts with (but

does not marry) a form of immortality. In his view, our

inner nature is indestructible because we are but a

manifestation of the life force, the will, the thing–in–itself

which persists eternally. Hence, death is not true

annihilation; when our insignificant life is over, we shall

rejoin the primal life force that lies outside of time.

The idea of rejoining the life force after death

apparently offered relief to Schopenhauer and to many of

his readers (for example, Thomas Mann and his fictional

protagonist Thomas Buddenbrooks), but because it does not

include a continued personal self, strikes many as offering

only chilly comfort. (Even the comfort experienced by

Thomas Buddenbrooks is short–lived and evaporates a few

pages later.) A dialogue that Schopenhauer composed

between two Hellenic philosophers raises the question of

just how much comfort Schopenhauer drew from these

beliefs. In this conversation, Philalethes attempts to

persuade Thrasymachos (a thoroughgoing skeptic) that

death holds no terror because of the individual`s

indestructible essence. Each philosopher argues so lucidly

and so powerfully that the reader cannot be sure where the

author`s sentiments lay. At the end the skeptic,

Thrasymachos, is unconvinced and is given the final words.

Philalethes: «When you say I, I, I want to exist, it is not

you alone that says this. Everything says it, absolutely

everything that has the faintest trace of consciousness.

It is the cry not of the individual but of existence

itself.... only thoroughly recognize what you are and

what your existence really is, namely, the universal will

to live, and the whole question will seem to you

childish and most ridiculous.»

Thrasymachos: You`re childish yourself and most

ridiculous, like all philosophers, and if a man of my age

lets himself in for a quarter hour`s talk with such fools

it is only because it amuses me and passes the time. I`ve

more important business to attend to, so goodbye.

Schopenhauer had one further method of keeping

death–anxiety at bay: death–anxiety is least where self–realization is most. If his position based on universal

oneness appears anemic to some, there is little doubt about

the robustness of this last defense. Clinicians who work

with dying patients have made the observation that death–anxiety is greater in those who feel they have lived an

unfulfilled life. A sense of fulfillment, at «consummating

one`s life,” as Nietzsche put it, diminishes death–anxiety.

And Schopenhauer? Did he live rightly and

meaningfully? Fulfill his mission? He had absolutely no

doubt about that. Consider his final entry in his

autobiographical notes.

I have always hoped to die easily, for whoever has been

lonely all his life will be a better judge than others of

this solitary business. Instead of going out amid the

tomfooleries and buffooneries that are calculated for the

pitiable capacities of human bipeds, I shall end happily

conscious of returning to the place whence I

started...and of having fulfilled my mission.

And the same sentiment—the pride of having

pursued his own creative path—appears in a short verse, his

authorial finale, the very last lines of his final book.

I now stand weary at the end of the road

The jaded brow can hardly bear the laurel

And yet I gladly see what I have done

Ever undaunted by what others say.

When his last book,Parerga and Paralipomena, was

published, he said, «I am deeply glad to see the birth of my

last child. I feel as if a load that I have borne since my

twenty–fourth year has been lifted from my shoulders. No

one can imagine what that means.»

On the morning of the twenty–first of September

1860 Schopenhauer`s housekeeper prepared his breakfast,

tidied up the kitchen, opened the windows, and left to run

errands, leaving Schopenhauer, who had already had his

cold wash, sitting and reading on the sofa in his living

room, a large airy, simply furnished room. On the floor by

the sofa lay a black bearskin rug upon which sat Atman, his

beloved poodle. A large oil painting of Goethe hung

directly over the sofa, and several portraits of dogs,

Shakespeare, Claudius, and daguerreo–types of himself

hung elsewhere in the room. On the writing desk stood a

bust of Kant. In one corner a table held a bust of Christoph

Wieland, the philosopher who had encouraged the young

Schopenhauer to study philosophy, and in another corner

stood his revered gold–plated statue of the Buddha.

A short time later his physician, making regular

rounds, entered the room and found him leaning on his

back in the corner of the sofa. A «lung stroke» (pulmonary

embolus) had taken him painlessly out of this world. His

face was not disfigured and showed no evidence of the

throes of death.

His funeral on a rainy day was more disagreeable

than most due to the odor of rotting flesh in the small

closed mortuary. Ten years earlier Schopenhauer had left

explicit instructions that his body not be buried directly but

left in the mortuary for at least five days until decay

began—perhaps a final gesture of misanthropy or because

of a fear of suspended animation. Soon the mortuary was so

close and the air so foul that several of the assembled

people had to leave the room during a long pompous

obituary by his executor, Wilhelm Gwinner, who began

with the words:

This man who lived among us a lifetime, and who

nevertheless stayed a stranger amongst us, commands

rare feelings. Nobody is standing here who belongs to

him through the bond of blood; isolated as he lived, he

died.

Schopenhauer`s tomb was covered with a heavy

plate of Belgian granite. His will had requested that only

his name, Arthur Schopenhauer, appear on his tombstone—

«nothing more, no date, no year, no syllable.»

The man lying under this modest tombstone wanted

his work to speak for him.