The Schopenhauer Cure(14)

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What kind of a man was Heinrich Schopenhauer? Tough, dour, repressed, unyielding, proud. The story is told that in 1783, five years before Arthur’s birth, Danzig was blockaded by the Prussians and food and fodder were scarce. The Schopenhauer family was forced to accept the billeting of an enemy general at their country estate. As a reward, the Prussian officer offered to grant Heinrich the privilege of forage for his horses. Heinrich’s reply? “My stable is well stocked, sir, and when the food supply runs out I will have my horses put down.”

And Arthur’s mother, Johanna? Romantic, lovely, imaginative, vivacious, flirtatious. Though all of Danzig in 1787 considered the union of Heinrich and Johanna a brilliant event, it proved to be a tragic mismatch. The Troiseners, Johanna’s family, came from a modest background and had long regarded the lofty Schopenhauers with awe. Hence, when Heinrich, at the age of thirty-eight, came to court the seventeen-year-old Johanna, the Troiseners were jubilant and Johanna acquiesced to her parents’ choice.

Did Johanna regard her marriage as a mistake? Read her words written years later as she warned other young women facing a matrimonial decision: “Splendor, rank, and title exercise an all too seductive power over a young girl’s heart luring women into tying a marriage knot…a false step for which they must suffer the hardest punishment the rest of their lives.”

“Suffer the hardest punishment the rest of their lives”—strong words from Arthur’s mother. In her journals she confided that before Heinrich courted her she had had a young love, which fate took from her, and it was in a state of resignation that she had accepted Heinrich Schopenhauer’s marriage proposal. Did she have a choice? Most likely not. This typical eighteenth-century marriage of convenience was arranged by her family for reasons of property and status. Was there love? There was no question of love between Heinrich and Johanna Schopenhauer. Never. Later, in her memoirs, she wrote, “I no more pretended ardent love than he demanded it.” Nor was there abundant love for others in their household—not for the young Arthur Schopenhauer, nor for his younger sister, Adele, born nine years later.

Love between parents begets love for the children. Occasionally, one hears tales of parents whose great love for each other consumes all the love available in the household, leaving only love-cinders for the children. But this zero-sum economic model of love makes little sense. The opposite seems true: the more one loves, the more that one responds to children, to everyone, in a loving manner.

Arthur’s love-bereft childhood had serious implications for his future. Children deprived of a maternal love bond fail to develop the basic trust necessary to love themselves, to believe that others will love them, or to love being alive. In adulthood they become estranged, withdraw into themselves, and often live in an adversarial relationship with others. Such was the psychological landscape that would ultimately inform Arthur’s worldview.





7




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If we look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems. It is like a drop of water seen through a micro-scope, a single drop teeming with protozoa. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly and struggle with one another. Whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect.



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At five minutes to seven Julius knocked out the ashes from his meerschaum pipe and entered the auditorium in Toyon Hall. He took a seat in the fourth row on the side aisle and looked about the amphitheater: Twenty rows rose sharply from the entry level where the lecture podium stood. Most of the two hundred seats were vacant; roughly thirty were broken and wrapped with yellow plastic ribbon. Two homeless men and their collections of newspapers sprawled across seats in the last row. Approximately thirty seats were occupied by unkempt students randomly sprinkled throughout the auditorium with the exception of the first three rows which remained vacant.

Just like a therapy group, Julius thought, no one wants to sit near to the leader. Even in his group meeting earlier that day the seats on either side of him had been left vacant for the late members, and he had joked that a seat next to him seemed to be the penalty for tardiness. Julius thought of the group therapy folklore about seating; that the most dependent person sits to the leader’s right, whereas the most paranoid members sit directly opposite; but, in his experience, the reluctance to sit next to the leader was the only rule that could be counted on with regularity.

The shabbiness and dilapidation of Toyon Hall was typical of the entire campus of California Coastal College, which had begun life as an evening business school, then expanded and flowered briefly as an undergraduate college, and was now obviously in a phase of entropy. On his walk to the lecture through the unsavory tenderloin, Julius had found it difficult to distinguish unkempt students from homeless denizens of the neighborhood. What teacher could avoid demoralization in this setting? Julius began to understand why Philip wanted to switch careers by moving into clinical work.

He checked his watch. Seven o’clock exactly and right on cue Philip entered the auditorium, dressed in the professorial uniform of checkered khaki pants, shirt, and a tan corduroy jacket with sewed-on elbow patches. Extracting his lecture notes from a properly scuffed briefcase and, without so much as a glance at his audience, he began:

This is the survey of Western philosophy—lecture eighteen—Arthur Schopenhauer. Tonight I shall proceed differently and stalk my prey more indirectly. If I appear desultory, I ask your forbearance—I promise I shall soon enough return to the matter at hand. Let us begin by turning our attention to the great debuts in history.