The Schopenhauer Cure(123)

“Not to pleasure but to painlessness…”: Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, p. 517 / “,”—Maxims and Favourite Passages.”

“everyone must act in life’s great puppet play…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 420 / § 206

“The really proper address…”: Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 304, 305 / § 156, 156a.

“We should treat with indulgence…Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol.2, p. 305 / chap. 11, § 156a.

“all the literary gossips…”: Magee, Philosophy of Schopenhauer, p. 26

“If a cat is stroked it purrs…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 1, p. 353 / chap. 4, “What a Man Represents.”

“the morning sun of my fame…”: Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, p. 516 / “,” § 36

“She works all day at my place…”: Safranski, Schopenhauer, p. 348.

“At the end of his life, no man…”: Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 1, p. 324 / § 59.

“A carpenter does not come up to me…”: Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

“In the first place a man…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 284 / § 144

“I can bear the thought…”: Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, p. 393, “Senilia,” § 102.

“The life of our bodies…”: Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 1, p. 311 / § 57.

“What a difference there is…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 288 / § 147.

Schopenhauer’s final thoughts on death…: Safranski, Schopenhauer, p. 348.

“It is absurd to consider nonexistence…”: Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 2, p. 467 / chap. 41, “On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature.”

“We should welcome it…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 322 / § 172a.

“If we knocked on the graves…”: Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 2, p. 465 / chap. 41, “On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature.”

The dialogue between two Hellenic philosophers: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 279 / § 141

“When you say I, I, I…”: Ibid., vol. 2, p. 281 / § 141

“I have always hoped to die easily…”: Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, p. 517 / “,” § 38

“I now stand weary at the end of the road…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 658 / “Finale.”

“I am deeply glad to see…”: Magee, Philosophy of Schopenhauer, p. 25.

“This man who lived among us a lifetime…”: Karl Pisa, Schopenhauer (Berlin: Paul Neff Verlag, 1977), p. 386

“Mankind has learned…”: Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, p.328, “Spicegia,” § 122.





Acknowledgments


This book has had a long gestation and I am indebted to many who helped along the way. To editors who assisted me in this odd amalgam of fiction, psychobiography and psychotherapy pedagogy: Marjorie Braman (a tower of support and guidance at HarperCollins), Kent Carroll, and my extraordinary in-house editors—my son, Ben, and my wife, Marilyn. To many friends and colleagues who read parts or all of the manuscript and offered suggestions: Van and Margaret Harvey, Walter Sokel, Ruthellen Josselson, Carolyn Zaroff, Murray Bilmes, Julius Kaplan, Scott Wood, Herb Kotz, Roger Walsh, Saul Spiro, Jean Rose, Helen Blau, David Spiegel. To my support group of fellow therapists who, throughout this project, offered unwavering friendship and sustenance. To my amazing and multitalented agent, Sandy Dijkstra, who among other contributions suggested the title (as she did for my preceding book, The Gift of Therapy). To my research assistant, Geri Doran.

Much of the Schopenhauer correspondence that exists either remains untranslated or has been clumsily rendered into English. I am indebted to my German research assistants, Markus Buergin and Felix Reuter, for their translation services and their prodigious library research. Walter Sokel offered exceptional intellectual guidance and helped translate many of the Schopenhauer epigrams preceding each chapter into English that more reflects Schopenhauer’s powerful and lucid prose.

In this work, as in all others, my wife, Marilyn, served as a pillar of support and love.

Many fine books guided me in my writing. By far, I am most heavily indebted to Rudiger Safranski’s magnificent biography, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1989) and grateful to him for his generous consultation in our long conversation in a Berlin café. The idea of bibliotherapy—curing oneself through reading the entire corpus of philosophy—comes from Bryan Magee’s excellent book, Confessions of a Philosopher (New York: Modern Library, 1999). Other works that informed me were Bryan Magee’s The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983; revised 1997; John E. Atwell’s Schopenhauer: The Human Character (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Christopher Janeway’s Schopenhauer (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994); Ben-Ami Scharfstein’s The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of their Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Patrick Gardiner’s Schopenhauer (Saint Augustine’s Press, 1997); Edgar Saltus’s The Philosophy of Disenchantment (New York: Peter Eckler Publishing Co., 1885); Christopher Janeway’s The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Michael Tanner’s Schopenhauer (New York: Routledge, 1999); Frederick Copleston’s Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism (Andover, UK: Chapel River Press, 1946); Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 2001); Peter Raabe’s Philosophical Counseling (Westport, Conn.: Praeger); Shlomit C. Schuster’s Philosophy Practice: An Alternative to Counseling and Psychotherapy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999); Lou Marinoff’s Plato Not Prozac (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); Pierre Hadot and Arnold I. Davidson, eds., Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Michael Chase, trans., New Haven: Blackwell, 1995); Martha Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994); Alex Howard’s Philosophy for Counseling and Psychotherapy: Pythagoras to Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 2000).