The Schopenhauer Cure(15)

Philip scanned his audience for some nod of comprehension and, failing to find it, crooked his forefinger at one of the students sitting nearest him and pointed to the blackboard. He then spelled out and defined three words, d-e-s-u-l-t-o-r-y, f-o-r-e-b-e-a-r-a-

n-c-e, and d-eb-u-t, which the student dutifully copied onto the blackboard. The student started to return to his seat, but Philip pointed to a first-row seat, instructing him to remain there.

Now for great debuts; trust me—my purpose for beginning in such a fashion will, in time, become apparent. Imagine Mozart stunning the Viennese royal court as he performed flawlessly on the harpsichord at the age of nine. Or, if Mozart does not strike a familiar chord (here the faintest trace of a smile), imagine something more familiar to you, the Beatles at nineteen playing their own compositions to Liverpool audiences.

Other amazing debuts include the extraordinary debut of Johann Fichte. (Here a signal to the student to write F-i-c-h-t-e on the board.) Does any one of you remember his name from my last lecture in which I discussed the great German idealist philosophers who followed Kant in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte? Of these, Fichte’s life and his debut was the most remarkable for he began life as a poor uneducated goose shepherd in Rammenau, a small German village whose only claim to fame was its clergyman’s inspired sermons every Sunday.

Well, one Sunday a wealthy aristocrat arrived at the village too late to hear the sermon. As he stood, obviously disappointed, outside the church, an elderly villager approached him and told him not to despair because the gooseherd, young Johann, could repreach the sermon to him. The villager fetched Johann, who, indeed, repeated the entire lecture verbatim. So impressed was the baron by the gooseherd’s astoundingly retentive mind that he financed Johann’s education and arranged for him to attend Pforta, a renowned boarding school later attended by many eminent German thinkers, including the subject of our next lecture, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Johann excelled in school and later at the university, but when his patron died, Johann had no means of support and took a tutoring job in a private home in Germany where he was hired to teach a young man the philosophy of Kant, whom he had not yet read himself. Soon he was entranced by the work of the divine Kant…



Philip suddenly looked up from his notes to survey his audience. Seeing no glint of recognition in any eyes, he hissed at his audience:

Hello, anybody home? Kant, Immanuel Kant, Kant, Kant, remember?” (He motioned to the blackboard scribe to write K-a-n-t. ) We spent two hours on him last week? Kant, the greatest, along with Plato, of all the world’s philosophers. I give you my word: Kant will be on the final. Ah ha, there’s the ticket…I see stirrings of life, movement, one or two eyes opening. A pen making contact with paper.

So where was I? Ah, yes. The gooseherd. Fichte was next tendered a position as a private tutor in Warsaw and, penniless, walked all the way only to have the job denied him when he arrived. Since he was only a few hundred miles from K?nigsberg, the home of Kant, he decided to walk there to meet the master in person. After two months he arrived at K?nigsberg and, audaciously, knocked on Kant’s door but was not granted an audience. Kant was a creature of habit and not inclined to receive unknown visitors. Last week I described to you the regularity of his schedule—so exact that the townspeople could set their watches by seeing him on his daily walk.

Fichte assumed he was refused entry because he had no letters of recommendation and decided to write his own in order to gain an audience with Kant. In an extraordinary burst of creative energy he wrote his first manuscript, the renowned Critique of All Revelation, which applied Kant’s views on ethics and duty to the interpretation of religion. Kant was so impressed with the work that he not only agreed to meet with Fichte but encouraged its publication.

Because of some curious mishap, probably a marketing ploy of the publisher, the Critique appeared anonymously. The work was so brilliant that critics and the reading public mistook it for a new work by Kant himself. Ultimately, Kant was forced to make a public statement that it was not he who was the author of this excellent manuscript but a very talented young man named Fichte. Kant’s praise ensured Fichte’s future in philosophy, and a year and a half thereafter he was offered a professorship at the University of Jena.



“That,” Philip looked up from his notes with an ecstatic look on his face and then jabbed the air with an awkward show of enthusiasm, “that is what I call a debut!” No students looked up or gave a sign of registering Philip’s brief awkward display of enthusiasm. If he felt discouraged by his audience’s unresponsiveness, Philip did not show it and, unperturbed, continued:

And now consider something closer to your hearts—athletic debuts. Who can forget the debut of Chris Evert, Tracy Austin, or Michael Chang, who won grand-slam professional tennis tournaments at fifteen or sixteen? Or the teenaged chess prodigies Bobby Fischer or Paul Morphy? Or think of José Raoul Capablanca, who won the chess championship of Cuba at the age of eleven.

Finally, I want to turn to a literary debut—the most brilliant literary debut of all time, a man in his midtwenties who blazed onto the literary landscape with a magnificent novel…



Here, Philip stopped in order to build the suspense and looked up, his countenance shining with confidence. He felt assured of what he was doing—that was apparent. Julius watched in disbelief. What was Philip expecting to find? The students on the edge of their seats, trembling with curiosity, each murmuring, “Who was this literary prodigy?”