The Schopenhauer Cure(117)
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