The Schopenhauer Cure(42)
It was only after his father’s death that the tone of the mother-son relationship changed. Arthur’s hopes of replacing his father in his mother’s heart must have been crushed by her hasty decision to leave him in Hamburg and move to Weimar. If his hopes were revived when his mother liberated him from his pledge to his dead father, they were again shattered when she sent him to Gotha, despite the vastly superior educational resources available in Weimar. Perhaps, as his mother suggested, Arthur intentionally arranged to be expelled from Gotha. If his actions were based on his wishes to rejoin his mother, he must have been disheartened by her unwillingness to welcome him in her new home and by the presence of other men in her life.
Arthur’s guilt about his father’s suicide had its origins both in his joy of liberation and in his fear that he may have hastened his father’s death by his disinterest in the world of commerce. It was not long before his guilt transformed into a fierce defense of his father’s good name, and to vicious criticism of his mother’s behavior toward his father.
Years later he wrote:
I know women. They regard marriage only as an institution for supply. As my father grew wretchedly sick, he would have been abandoned except for the loving charity of a faithful servant who performed the necessary basic acts of caring. My mother held parties, while he lay down in loneliness; my mother had fun, while he was suffering painfully. That’s the love of women!
When Arthur arrived in Weimar to study with a tutor for university entrance, he was not permitted to live with his mother but in separate lodgings she had found for him. Awaiting him there was her letter laying out, with ruthless clarity, the rules and boundaries of their relationship.
Mark now on what footing I wish to be together with you: you are at home in your lodgings, in mine you are a guest…who does not interfere in any domestic arrangements. Every day you will come at one o’clock and stay until three, then I shall not see you again all day long, except on my salon days which you may attend if you wish, also eating at my house those two evenings, provided you will abstain from tiresome arguing, which makes me angry…. During the midday hours you can tell me everything I need to know about you, the rest of the time you must look after yourself. I cannot provide your entertainment at the expense of mine. Enough, now you know my wishes and I hope you will not repay me for my motherly care and love by giving me opposition.
Arthur accepted these terms during his two-year stay in Weimar and remained strictly an observer at his mother’s social evenings, not once engaging the lofty Goethe in conversation. His mastery of Greek, Latin, the classics, and philosophy progressed at a prodigious rate, and, at the age of twenty-one, he was accepted into the University at G?ttingen. At the same time he received his inheritance of twenty thousand Reichstalers, enough to provide a sufficient but modest income for the remainder of his life. As his father had predicted, he would have great need of this inheritance—Arthur was never to earn a pfennig from his vocation as a scholar.
As time passed, Arthur viewed his father as an angel and his mother a devil. He believed that his father’s jealousy and suspicions about his mother’s fidelity were well founded, and he worried that she would fail to revere his father’s memory. In his father’s name, he demanded that she live a quiet sequestered life. Arthur vehemently attacked those whom he considered his mother’s suitors, judging them lesser, “mass-produced creatures,” unworthy of replacing his father.
Arthur studied at the Universities of G?ttingen and Berlin and then obtained a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena. He lived briefly in Berlin but soon fled because of the impending war against Napoleon and returned to Weimar to live with his mother. Soon, the same domestic battles erupted: not only did he upbraid his mother for misusing the money he had made available for his grand-mother’s care, but he accused her of an improper liaison with her close friend Müller Gerstenbergk. Arthur became so brutally hostile to Gerstenbergk that Johanna was forced to see her friend only when Arthur was absent from the home.
During this period an often-quoted conversation occurred when he gave his mother a copy of his doctoral dissertation, a brilliant treatise on the principles of causation titled “On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.”
Glancing at the title page, Johanna remarked: “Fourfold root? No doubt this is something for the apothecary?”
Arthur: “It will still be read when scarcely a copy of your writings can be found.”
Johanna: “Yes, no doubt the entire printing of your writings will still be in the shops.”
Arthur was uncompromising on his titles, rejecting any considerations of marketability. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason should have been more properly titled A Theory of Explanation. Nonetheless, two hundred years later, it is still in print. Not many other dissertations can claim that distinction.
Ferocious arguments continued about money and about Johanna’s relationships with men until Johanna’s patience was exhausted. She let it be known she would never break off her friendship with Gerstenbergk or anyone else for Arthur’s sake. She ordered him to move out, invited Gerstenbergk to move into his vacated rooms, and wrote Arthur this fateful letter.
The door which you slammed so noisily yesterday after your improper behavior toward your mother is now closed forever between you and me. I am leaving for the country and shall not return until I know you are gone…. You do not know what a mother’s heart is like—the more tenderly it loves, the more painfully it feels every blow from a once loved hand…. You yourself have torn away from me: your mistrust, your criticism of my life, of my choice of friends, your desultory behavior toward me, your contempt for my sex, your unwillingness to contribute to my contentment, your greed—this and a lot more makes you seem vicious to me…. If I were dead and you had to deal with your father, would you have dared to schoolmaster him? Or try to control his life, his friendships? Am I less than he? Did he do more for you than I did? Loved you more than I did?…My duty toward you is at an end. Go your way, I have nothing more to do with you…. Leave your address here, but do not write to me, I shall henceforth neither read nor answer any letter from you…. So this is the end…. You have hurt me too much. Live and be as happy as you can be.