The Schopenhauer Cure(41)

—A letter to Arthur Schopenhauer from his mother



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The most important woman, by far, in Arthur’s life was his mother, Johanna, with whom he had a tormented and ambivalent relationship which ended in cataclysm. Johanna’s letter liberating Arthur from his apprenticeship contained admirable motherly sentiments: her concern, her love, her hopes for him. Yet all these required a proviso: namely, that he remain at a convenient distance from her. Hence her letter of liberation advised him to move from Hamburg to Gotha rather than to her home in Weimar, fifty kilometers away.

The glow of warm feelings between the two following Arthur’s emancipation from servitude evaporated quickly because of the brevity of Arthur’s stay at the preparatory school in Gotha. After only six months the nineteen-year-old Arthur was expelled for writing a clever but cruelly mocking poem about one of the teachers and beseeched his mother for permission to live with her and continue his studies at Weimar.

Johanna was not amused; in fact the prospect of Arthur living with her sent her into a frenzy. He had visited her briefly a few times during his six-month stay at Gotha, and each visit had been the source of much displeasure for her. Her letters to him following his expulsion are among the most shocking letters ever written by a mother to a son.

…I am acquainted with your disposition…you are irritating and unbearable and I consider it most difficult to live with you. All your good qualities are darkened by your super-cleverness and thus rendered useless to the world…you find fault everywhere except in yourself…thereby you embitter the people around you—no one wishes to be improved or illuminated in such a forcible manner, least of all by such an insignificant individual as you still are. No one can tolerate being criticized by someone who displays so many personal weaknesses, especially your derogatory manner which, in oracular tones, proclaims that this is so and so, without even suspecting the possibility of error.

If you were less like you are, you would only be ridiculous but, being as you are, you become most annoying…. You might have, like thousands of other students, lived and studied in Gotha…but you did not want this and so you are expelled…. such a living literary journal as you would like to be is a boring hateful thing because one cannot skip pages or fling the whole rubbishy thing behind the stove, as one can with the printed one.



In time Johanna resigned herself to the fact that she could not avoid accepting Arthur at Weimar while he prepared for the university, but she wrote again, in case he missed the point, and expressed her concerns in even more graphic terms.

I think it wisest to tell you straight out what I desire and what I feel about matters so we understand one another from the outset. That I am very fond of you, I’m sure you will not doubt. I have proven it to you and will prove it to you as long as I live. It is necessary for my happiness to know you are happy but not to be a witness to it. I have always told you that you are very difficult to live with…. The more I get to know you the more strongly I feel this.

I will not hide this from you: as long as you are what you are, I would rather make any sacrifice than consent to be near you…. What repels me does not lie in your heart; it is in your outer, not your inner, being. It is in your ideas, in your judgment, your habits; in a word, there is nothing concerning the outer world in which we agree.

Look, dear Arthur, each time you visited me only for a few days there were violent scenes about nothing and each time I only breathed freely again when you were gone because your presence, your complaints about inevitable things, your scowling face, your ill humor, the bizarre opinions you utter…all this depresses and troubles me, without helping you.



Johanna’s dynamics seem transparent. By the grace of God she had escaped the marriage that she had feared would imprison her forever. Giddy with freedom, she exalted in the idea of never again being answerable to anyone. She would live her own life, meet whomever she wished, enjoy romantic liaisons (but never marry again), and she would explore her own considerable talents.

The prospect of relinquishing her freedom for Arthur’s sake was unbearable. Not only was Arthur a particularly difficult, controlling person in his own right, but he was the son of her former jailer: the living incarnation of too many of Heinrich’s unpleasant features.

And there was the issue of money. It first surfaced when Arthur, at nineteen, accused his mother of lavish spending, which imperiled the inheritance he was to receive at the age of twenty-one. Johanna bristled, insisted it was well known that she served only bread-and-butter sandwiches at her salons and then excoriated Arthur for living far beyond his means with expensive dining and horseback-riding lessons. Eventually, such quarrels about money were to escalate to unbearable levels.

Johanna’s feelings about Arthur and about motherhood are reflected in her novels: a typical Johanna Schopenhauer heroine tragically loses her true love and then resigns herself to an economically sensible, loveless, and sometimes abusive marriage but, in an act of defiance and self-affirmation, refuses to bear children.

Arthur shared his feelings with no one, and his mother later destroyed all his letters. Still, certain trends seem self-evident. The bond between Arthur and his mother was intense, and the pain of its dissolution haunted Arthur his entire life. Johanna was an unusual mother—vivacious, forthright, beautiful, freethinking, enlightened, well read. Surely, she and Arthur discussed his immersion in modern and ancient literature. Indeed it may be that the fifteen-year-old Arthur made his momentous choice in favor of the grand tour rather than university preparation because of his desire to remain in her presence.