The Schopenhauer Cure(79)
But these thoughts about all the others were incidental. The person who compelled her attention was Philip, that pompous Schopenhauer clone, that dolt sitting there, mouthing absurdities, pretending to be human.
After dinner Pam strolled to her bookshelves and examined her Schopenhauer section. For a time she had been a philosophy major and had planned a dissertation on Schopenhauer’s influence on Becket and Gide. She had loved Schopenhauer’s prose—the best stylist of any philosopher, save Nietzsche. And she had admired his intellect, his range, and his courage to challenge all supernatural beliefs, but the more she learned about Schopenhauer the person, the more revulsion she had felt. She opened an old volume of his complete essays from her bookshelf and began reading aloud some of her highlighted passages in his essay titled “Our Relation to Others.”
“The only way to attain superiority in dealing with men is to let it be seen you are independent of them.”
“To disregard is to win regard.”
“By being polite and friendly, you can make people pliable and obliging: hence politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.”
Now she remembered why she had hated Schopenhauer. And Philip a counselor? And Schopenhauer his model? And Julius teaching him? It was all beyond belief.
She reread the last aphorism: “Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.” Hmm, so he thinks he can work me like wax, undo what he did to my life with a gratuitous compliment on my comments about Buber, or allowing me to pass through a door first. Well, fuck him!
Later she tried to find peace by soaking in her Jacuzzi and playing a tape of Goenka’s chanting, which often soothed her with its hypnotic lilting melody, its sudden stops and starts and changes of tempo and timbre. She even tried Vipassana meditation for a few minutes, but she could not retrieve the equanimity it had once offered. Stepping out of the tub, she inspected herself in the mirror. She sucked in her abdomen, elevated her breasts, considered her profile, patted her pubic hair, crossed her legs in an alluring pose. Damn good for a woman of thirty-three.
Images of her first view of Philip fifteen years ago swiveled into her mind. Sitting on his desk, casually handing out the class syllabus to students entering the room, flashing a big smile her way. He was a dashing man then, gorgeous, intelligent, otherworldly, impervious to distractions. What the fuck happened to that man? And that sex, that force, doing what he wanted, ripping off my underwear, smothering me with his body. Don’t kid yourself, Pam—you loved it. A scholar with a fabulous grasp of Western intellectual history, and a great teacher, too, perhaps the best she ever had. That’s why she first thought of a major in philosophy. But these were things he was never going to know.
After she was done with all these distracting and unsettling angry thoughts, her mind turned to a softer, sadder realm: Julius’s dying. There was a man to be loved. Dying, but business as usual. How does he do it? How does he keep his focus? How does Julius keep caring? And Philip, that prick, challenging him to reveal himself. And Julius’s patience with him, and his attempts to teach Philip. Doesn’t Julius see he is an empty vessel?
She entertained a fantasy of nursing Julius as he grew weaker; she’d bring in his meals, wash him with a warm towel, powder him, change his sheets, and crawl into his bed and hold him through the night. There’s something surreal about the group now—all these little dramas being played out against the darkening horizon of Julius’s end. How unfair that he should be the one who is dying. A surge of anger rose within—but at whom could she direct it?
As Pam turned off her bedside reading light and waited for her sleeping pill to kick in, she took note of the one advantage to the new tumult in her life: the obsession with John, which had vanished during her Vipassana training and returned immediately after leaving India, was gone again—perhaps for good.
28
Pessimism as a Way of Life
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No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose.
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Schopenhauer’s major work, The World as Will and Representation, written during his twenties, was published in 1818, and a second supplementary volume in 1844. It is a work of astonishing breadth and depth, offering penetrating observations about logic, ethics, epistemology, perception, science, mathematics, beauty, art, poetry, music, the need for metaphysics, and man’s relationship to others and to himself. The human condition is presented in all its bleakest aspects: death, isolation, the meaninglessness of life, and the suffering inherent in existence. Many scholars believe that, with the single exception of Plato, there are more good ideas in Schopenhauer’s work than in that of any other philosopher.
Schopenhauer frequently expressed the wish, and the expectation, that he would always be remembered for this grand opus. Late in life he published his other significant work, a two-volume set of philosophical essays and aphorisms, whose book title, Parerga and Paralipomena, means (in translation from the Greek) “leftover and complementary works.”
Psychotherapy had not yet been born during Arthur’s lifetime, yet there is much in his writing that is germane to therapy. His major work began with a critique and extension of Kant, who revolutionized philosophy through his insight that we constitute rather than perceive reality. Kant realized that all of our sense data are filtered through our neural apparatus and reassembled therein to provide us with a picture that we call reality but which in fact is only a chimera, a fiction that emerges from our conceptualizing and categorizing mind. Indeed, even cause and effect, sequence, quantity, space, and time are conceptualizations, constructs, not entities “out there” in nature.