Ирвин Ялом - The Schopenhauer Cure

Julius looked at his watch. «We`ve got to stop—we`re running over.

Philip, I won`t forget my contract with you. You fulfilled your part. I`ll

honor mine next meeting.»

_________________________

Weshould set a limit

to our wishes, curb

our desires, and

subdue our anger,

always mindful of

the fact that the

individual can

attain only an

infinitely small

share of the things

that are worth

having…

_________________________

After the session the group gathered for about forty–five minutes at their

usual Union Street coffee shop. Because Philip was not present, the group

did not talk about him. Nor did they continue to discuss the issues raised

in the meeting. Instead they listened with interest to Pam`s lively

description of her trip to India. Both Bonnie and Rebecca were intrigued

by Vijay, her gorgeous, mysterious, cinnamon–scented train companion,

and encouraged her to respond to his frequent e–mails. Gill was upbeat,

thanked everyone for their support, and said that he was going to meet

with Julius, get serious about abstinence, and begin AA. He thanked Pam

for her good work with him.

«Go Pam,” said Tony. «The tough–love lady strikes again.»

Pam returned to her condo in the Berkeley hills just above the

university. She often congratulated herself for having the good sense to

hold on to this property when she married Earl. Perhaps, unconsciously,

she knew she might need it again. She loved the blond wood in every

room, her Tibetan scatter rugs, and the warm sunlight streaming into the

living room in the late afternoon. Sipping a glass of Prosecco, she sat on

her deck and watched the sun sink behind San Francisco.

Thoughts about the group swirled in her mind. She thought about

Tony doffing the costume of the group jerk and, with surgical precision,

showing Philip how clueless he was about his own behavior. That was

priceless. She wished she had it on tape. Tony was an uncut gem—bit by

bit, more of his real sparkle was becoming visible. And his comment about

her dispensing «tough love»? Did he or anyone else sense how much the

«tough» outweighed the «love» in her response to Gill? Unloading on Gill

was a great pleasure, only slightly diminished by its having been helpful to

him. «Chief justice,” he had called her. Well, at least he had the guts to say

that—but then he tried to undo it by unctuously complimenting her.

She recalled her first sight of Gill—how she was momentarily

attracted to his physical presence, those muscles bulging out of his vest

and jacket, and how quickly he had disappointed her by his pusillanimous

contortions to please everyone and his whining, his endless whining, about

Rose—his frigid, strong–willed, ninety–five–pound Rose—who had the

good sense, it now turns out, not to be impregnated by a drunk.

After only a few meetings Gill had assumed his place in the long

line of male losers in her life, beginning with her father, who wasted his

law degree because he couldn`t stand the competitive life of an attorney

and settled for a safe civil service position of teaching secretaries how to

write business letters and then lacked the fortitude to fight the pneumonia

that killed him before he could start drawing his pension. Behind him in

line there was Aaron, her acne–faced high school gutless boyfriend who

passed up Swarthmore to live at home and commute to the University of

Maryland, the school nearest home; and Vladimir, who wanted to marry

her even though he had never gotten tenure and would be a journeyman

English composition lecturer forever; and Earl, her soon–to–be ex, who

was phony all the way from his Grecian formula hair dye to his Cliff note

mastery of the classics and whose stable of women patients, including

herself, offered easy pickings; and John, who was too much of a coward to

leave a dead marriage and join her. And the latest addition, Vijay? Well,

Bonnie and Rebecca could have him! She couldn`t rouse much enthusiasm

for a man who would need an all–day equanimity retreat to recover from

the stress of ordering breakfast.

But these thoughts about all the others were incidental. The person

who compelled her attention was Philip, that pompous Schopenhauer

clone, that dolt sitting there, mouthing absurdities, pretending to be

human.

After dinner Pam strolled to her bookshelves and examined her

Schopenhauer section. For a time she had been a philosophy major and

had planned a dissertation on Schopenhauer`s influence on Becket and

Gide. She had loved Schopenhauer`s prose—the best stylist of any

philosopher, save Nietzsche. And she had admired his intellect, his range,

and his courage to challenge all supernatural beliefs, but the more she

learned about Schopenhauer the person, the more revulsion she had felt.

She opened an old volume of his complete essays from her bookshelf and

began reading aloud some of her highlighted passages in his essay titled

«Our Relation to Others.»

• «The only way to attain superiority in dealing with men is to let it

be seen you are independent of them.»

• «To disregard is to win regard.»

• «By being polite and friendly, you can make people pliable and

obliging: hence politeness is to human nature what warmth is to

wax.»

Nowshe remembered why she had hated Schopenhauer. And

Philip a counselor? And Schopenhauer his model? And Julius

teaching him? It was all beyond belief.

She reread the last aphorism:«Politeness is to human nature

what warmth is to wax.» Hmm, so he thinks he can work me like

wax, undo what he did to my life with a gratuitous compliment on

my comments about Buber, or allowing me to pass through a door

first. Well, fuck him!

Later she tried to find peace by soaking in her Jacuzzi and

playing a tape of Goenka`s chanting, which often soothed her with

its hypnotic lilting melody, its sudden stops and starts and changes

of tempo and timbre. She even tried Vipassana meditation for a

few minutes, but she could not retrieve the equanimity it had once

offered. Stepping out of the tub, she inspected herself in the mirror.

She sucked in her abdomen, elevated her breasts, considered her

profile, patted her pubic hair, crossed her legs in an alluring pose.

Damn good for a woman of thirty–three.

Images of her first view of Philip fifteen years ago swiveled

into her mind. Sitting on his desk, casually handing out the class

syllabus to students entering the room, flashing a big smile her

way. He was a dashing man then, gorgeous, intelligent,

otherworldly, impervious to distractions. What the fuck happened

tothat man? And that sex, that force, doing what he wanted,

ripping off my underwear, smothering me with his body. Don`t kid

yourself, Pam—you loved it. A scholar with a fabulous grasp of

Western intellectual history, and a great teacher, too, perhaps the

best she ever had. That`s why she first thought of a major in

philosophy. But these were things he was never going to know.

After she was done with all these distracting and unsettling

angry thoughts, her mind turned to a softer, sadder realm: Julius`s

dying. There was a man to be loved. Dying, but business as usual.

How does he do it? How does he keep his focus? How does Julius

keep caring? And Philip, that prick, challenging him to reveal

himself. And Julius`s patience with him, and his attempts to teach

Philip. Doesn`t Julius see he is an empty vessel?

She entertained a fantasy of nursing Julius as he grew

weaker; she`d bring in his meals, wash him with a warm towel,

powder him, change his sheets, and crawl into his bed and hold

him through the night. There`s something surreal about the group

now—all these little dramas being played out against the darkening

horizon of Julius`s end. How unfair that he should be the one who

is dying. A surge of anger rose within—but at whom could she

direct it?

As Pam turned off her bedside reading light and waited for

her sleeping pill to kick in, she took note of the one advantage to

the new tumult in her life: the obsession with John, which had

vanished during her Vipassana training and returned immediately

after leaving India, was gone again—perhaps for good.

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