The Schopenhauer Cure(71)
Generally inattentive to food, Philip had routinized his eating habits: breakfast of toast, marmalade, and coffee, a main meal at noon at the school student cafeteria, and a small inexpensive evening repast of soup or salad. All meals, by choice, were taken alone. He took solace, indeed sometimes broke into a full smile, when he thought of Schopenhauer’s habit of paying for two at his eating club to ensure that no one sat next to him.
He turned homeward to his one-bedroom cottage, as sparsely furnished as his office, situated on the grounds of a grand house in Pacific Heights, not far from Julius’s. The widow, who lived alone in the house, rented the cottage to him for a modest sum. She needed the additional income, valued her privacy but wanted an unobtrusive human presence nearby. Philip was the man for the job, and they had lived in isolated proximity for several years.
The enthusiastic greeting of yelps, barks, tail wagging, and acrobatic leaps into the air offered by Rugby, his dog, usually cheered Philip, but not on this evening. Nor did his evening dog walk nor any of his other routine leisure activities bring Philip tranquillity. He lit his pipe, listened to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, read distractedly from Schopenhauer and Epictetus. His full attention was caught once, for only a few moments, by one particular Epictetus passage.
If you have an earnest desire towards philosophy, prepare yourself from the very first to have the multitude laugh and sneer. Remember, if you are persistent, those very persons will afterwards admire you…. Remember if you ever happen to turn your attentions to externals, for the pleasure of anyone, be assured that you have ruined your scheme of life.
Yet his sense of uneasiness remained—an uneasiness that he had not experienced in some time, a state of mind that in years past had sent him out like a sexually crazed beast on the prowl. He strode into his tiny kitchen, cleaned his breakfast dishes from the table, turned on his computer, and submitted to his only addictive vice: he logged in to the Internet chess club and played five-minute blitz games silently and anonymously for the next three hours. Mostly, he won. When he lost it was usually through carelessness, but his irritation was short-lived: immediately he typed in “seeking a game,” and his eyes lit up with childish delight as a brand-new game commenced.
25
Porcupines, Genius, and the Misanthropist’s Guide to Human Relationships
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By the time I was thirty I was heartily sick and tired of having to regard as my equals creatures who were not really so at all. As long as a cat is young it plays with paper pellets because it regards these as alive and as something similar to itself. It has been the same for me with human bipeds.
* * *
The porcupine fable, one of the best-known passages in all of Schopenhauer’s work, conveys his frosty view of human relationships.
One cold winter’s day a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order, through their mutual warmth, to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effects of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now, when the need for warmth once again brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so they were tossed between two evils, until they discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus the needs for society, which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men’s lives, drives them together but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities once more drive them apart.
In other words, tolerate closeness only when necessary for survival and avoid it whenever possible. Most contemporary psychotherapists would unhesitatingly recommend therapy for such extreme socially avoidant stances. In fact the bulk of psychotherapy practice is addressed to such problematic interpersonal stances—not only social avoidance but maladaptive social behavior in all its many colors and hues: autism, social avoidance, social phobia, schizoid personality, antisocial personality, narcissistic personality, inability to love, self-aggrandizement, self-effacement.
Would Schopenhauer agree? Did he consider his feelings toward other people as maladaptive? Hardly. His attitudes were so close to his core, so deeply ingrained that he never viewed them as a liability. On the contrary, he considered his misanthropy and his isolation a virtue. Note, for example the coda of his porcupine parable: “Yet whoever has a great deal of internal warmth of his own will prefer to keep away from society in order to avoid giving or receiving trouble and annoyance.”
Schopenhauer believed that a man of internal strength or virtue will not require supplies of any kind from others; such a man is sufficient unto himself. This thesis, interlocked with his unwavering faith in his own genius, served as a lifelong rationalization for the avoidance of closeness. Schopenhauer often stated that his position in the “highest class of mankind” imposed the imperative not to squander his gifts in idle social intercourse but instead to turn them to the service of humanity. “My intellect,” he wrote, “belonged not to me but to the world.”
Many of Arthur’s writings about his supreme intelligence are so flamboyant that one might consider him grandiose were it not for the fact that his assessment of his intellectual prowess was accurate. Once Arthur applied himself to being a scholar, his prodigious intellectual gifts became evident to all about him. The tutors who prepared him for the university were astounded at his precocious progress.