The Schopenhauer Cure(111)

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Some cannot loosen their own chains yet can nonetheless liberate their friends.

—Nietzsche



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There are few things that Schopenhauer vilified more than the craving for fame. And, yet, oh how he craved it!

Fame plays an important role in his last book, Parerga and Paralipomena, a two-volume compilation of incidental observations, essays, and aphorisms, completed in 1851, nine years before his death. With a profound sense of accomplishment and relief, he finished the book and said; “I will wipe my pen and say, ‘the rest is silence.’”

But finding a publisher was a challenge: none of his previous publishers would touch it, having lost too much money on his other unread works. Even his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, had sold only a few copies and received only a single, lack-luster review. Finally, one of his loyal “evangelists” persuaded a Berlin bookseller to publish a printing of 750 copies in 1853. Schopenhauer was to receive ten free copies but no royalties.

The first volume of Parerga and Paralipomena contains a striking triplet of essays on how to gain and maintain a sense of self-worth. The first essay, “What a Man Is,” describes how creative thinking results in a sense of inner wealth. Such a path provides self-esteem and enables one to overcome the basic vacuity and boredom of life, which results in a ceaseless pursuit of sexual conquests, travel, and games of chance.

The second essay, “What a Man Has,” dissects one of the major techniques used to compensate for inner poverty: the endless accumulation of possessions, which ultimately results in one becoming possessed by one’s possessions.

It is the third essay, “What a Man Represents,” that most clearly expresses his views on fame. A person’s self-worth or inner merit is the essential commodity, whereas fame is something secondary, the mere shadow of merit. “It is not fame but that whereby we merit it that is of true value…. a man’s greatest happiness is not that posterity will know something about him but he himself will develop thoughts that deserve consideration and preservation for centuries.” Self-esteem that is based on inner merit results in personal autonomy which cannot be wrested from us—it is in our power—whereas fame is never in our power.

He knew that ablating the desire for fame was not easy; he likened it to “extracting an obstinate painful thorn from our flesh” and agreed with Tacitus, who wrote, “The thirst for fame is the last thing of all to be laid aside by wise men.” And he, himself, was never able to lay aside the thirst for fame. His writings are permeated with bitterness about his lack of success. He regularly searched newspapers and journals for some mention, any mention, of himself or his work. Whenever he was away on a trip, he assigned this scanning task to Julius Frauenst?dt, his most loyal evangelist. Though he could not stop chaffing at being ignored, he ultimately resigned himself to never knowing fame in his lifetime. In later introductions to his books he explicitly addressed the future generations who would discover him.

And then the unthinkable came. Parerga and Paralipomena, the very book in which he described the folly of pursuing fame, made him famous. In this final work he softened his pessimism, staunched his flow of jeremiads, and offered wise instruction on how to live. Though he never renounced his belief that life is but a “mouldy film on the surface of the earth,” and “a useless disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness,” he took a more pragmatic path in the Parerga and Paralipomena. We have no choice, he said, but to be condemned to life and must therefore attempt to live with as little pain as possible. (Schopenhauer always viewed happiness as a negative state—an absence of suffering—and treasured Aristotle’s maxim “Not to pleasure but to painlessness do the prudent aspire.”)

Accordingly, Parerga and Paralipomena offers lessons on how to think independently, how to retain skepticism and rationality, how to avoid soothing supernatural emollients, how to think well of ourselves, keep our stakes low, and avoid attaching ourselves to what can be lost. Even though “everyone must act in life’s great puppet play and feel the wire which sets us into motion,” there is, nonetheless, comfort in maintaining the philosopher’s lofty perspective that, from the aspect of eternity, nothing really matters—everything passes.

Parerga and Paralipomena introduces a new tone. While it continues to emphasize the tragic and lamentable suffering of existence, it adds the dimension of connectivity—that is, through the commonality of our suffering, we are inexorably connected to one another. In one remarkable passage the great misanthrope displays a softer, more indulgent, view of his fellow bipeds.

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.



A few sentences later he adds a thought that could serve well as an opening paragraph in a contemporary textbook of psychotherapy.

We should treat with indulgence every human folly, failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have before us are simply our own failings, follies, and vices. For they are just the failings of mankind to which we also belong and accordingly we have all the same failings buried within ourselves. We should not be indignant with others for these vices simply because they do not appear in us at the moment.