The Schopenhauer Cure(16)

Julius, in his fifth-row seat, swiveled his head to survey the auditorium: glazed eyes everywhere, students slumped in chairs, doo-dling, poring over newspapers, crossword puzzles. To the left, a student stretched out asleep over two chairs. To the right, two students at the end of his row embraced in a long kiss. In the row directly in front of him, two boys elbowed each other as they leered upward, toward the back of the room. Despite his curiosity, Julius did not turn to follow their gaze—probably they were staring up some woman’s skirt—and turned his attention back to Philip.

And who was the prodigy? (Philip droned on.) His name was Thomas Mann. When he was your age, yes, your age, he began writing a masterpiece, a glorious novel called Buddenbrooks published when he was only twenty-six years old. Thomas Mann, as I hope and pray you know, went on to become a towering figure in the twentieth-century world of letters and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.” (Here Philip spelled M-a-n-n and B-u-d-d-e-n-

b-r-o-o-k-s to his blackboard scribe.) Buddenbrooks, published in 1901, traced the life of one family, a German burgher family, through four generations and all the associated vicissitudes of the life cycle.

Now what does this have to do with philosophy and with the real subject of today’s lecture? As I promised, I have strayed a bit but only in the service of returning to the core with greater vigor.



Julius heard rustling in the auditorium and the sound of footsteps. The two elbowing voyeurs directly in front of Julius noisily collected their belongings and left the hall. The embracing students at the end of the row had departed, and even the student assigned to the blackboard had vanished.

Philip continued:

To me, the most remarkable passages in Buddenbrooks come late in the novel as the protagonist, the paterfamilias, old Thomas Buddenbrooks, approaches death. One is astounded by a writer in his early twenties having such insight and such sensibility to issues concerned with the end of life. (A faint smile played on his lips as Philip held up the dog-eared book.) I recommend these pages to anyone intending to die.



Julius heard the strike of matches as two students lit cigarettes while exiting the auditorium.

When death came to claim him, Thomas Buddenbrooks was bewildered and overcome by despair. None of his belief systems offered him comfort—neither his religious views which had long before failed to satisfy his metaphysical needs, nor his worldly skepticism and materialistic Darwinian leaning. Nothing, in Mann’s words, was able to offer the dying man “in the near and penetrating eye of death a single hour of calm.”



Here, Philip looked up. “What happened next is of great importance and it is here that I begin to close in on the designated subject of our lecture tonight.”

In the midst of his desperation Thomas Buddenbrooks chanced to draw from his bookcase an inexpensive, poorly sewn volume of philosophy bought at a used book stand years before. He began to read and was immediately soothed. He marveled by how, as Mann put it, “a master-mind could lay hold of this cruel mocking thing called life.”

The extraordinary clarity of vision in the volume of philosophy enthralled the dying man, and hours passed without his looking up from his reading. Then he came upon a chapter titled “On Death, and Its Relation to Our Personal Immortality” and, intoxicated by the words, read on as though he were reading for his very life. When he finished, Thomas Buddenbrooks was a man transformed, a man who had found the comfort and peace that had eluded him.

What was it that the dying man discovered? (At this point Philip suddenly adopted an oracular voice.) Now listen well, Julius Hertzfeld, because this may be useful for life’s final examination….



Shocked at being directly addressed in a public lecture, Julius bolted upright in his seat. He glanced nervously about him and saw, to his astonishment, that the auditorium was empty: everyone, even the two homeless men, had left.

But Philip, unperturbed by his vanished audience, calmly continued:

I’ll read a passage from Buddenbrooks. (He opened a tattered paperback copy of the book.) “Your assignment is to read the novel, especially part nine, with great care. It will prove invaluable to you—far more valuable than attempting to extract meaning from patients’ reminiscences of long ago.

Have I hoped to live on in my son? In a personality yet more feeble, flickering, and timorous than my own? Blind, childish folly! What can my son do for me? Where shall I be when I am dead? Ah, it is so brilliantly clear. I shall be in all those who have ever, do ever, or ever shall say “I”—especially, however, in all those who say it most fully, potently, and gladly!…Have I ever hated life—pure, strong, relentless life? Folly and misconception! I have but hated myself because I could not bear it. I love you all, you blessed, and soon, soon, I shall cease to be cut off from you by all the narrow bonds of myself; soon that in me which loves you will be free and be in and with you—in and with you all.



Philip closed the novel and returned to his notes.

Now who was the author of the volume which so transformed Thomas Buddenbrooks? Mann does not reveal his name in the novel, but forty years later he wrote a magnificent essay which stated that Arthur Schopenhauer was the author of the volume. Mann then proceeds to describe how, at the age of twenty-three, he first experienced the great joy of reading Schopenhauer. He was not only entranced by the ring of Schopenhauer’s words, which he describes as “so perfectly consistently clear, so rounded, its presentation and language so powerful, so elegant, so unerringly apposite, so passionately brilliant, so magnificently and blithely severe—like never any other in the history of German philosophy,” but by the essence of Schopenhauerian thought, which he describes as “emotional, breathtaking, playing between violent contrasts, between instinct and mind, passion and redemption.” Then and there Mann resolved that discovering Schopenhauer was too precious an experience to keep to himself and straightaway used it creatively by offering the philosopher to his suffering hero.