The Schopenhauer Cure(96)

Arthur longed to be released from the grip of sexuality. He savored his moments of serenity when he was able to observe the world with calm in spite of the lust tormenting his corporeal self. He compared sexual passion to the daylight which obscures the stars. As he aged he welcomed the decline of sexual passion and the accompanying tranquillity.

Since his deepest passion was his work, his strongest and most persistent fear was that he should lose the financial means enabling him to live the life of the intellect. Even into old age he blessed the memory of his father, who had made such a life possible, and he spent much time and energy guarding his money and pondering his investments. Accordingly, he was alarmed by any unrest threatening his investments and became ultraconservative in his politics. The 1848 rebellion, which swept over Germany as well as the rest of Europe, terrified him. When soldiers entered his building to gain a vantage point from which to fire on the rebellious populace in the street, he offered them his opera glasses to increase the accuracy of their rifle fire. In his will, twelve years later, he left almost his entire estate to a fund established for the welfare of Prussian soldiers disabled fighting that rebellion.

His anxiety-driven letters about business matters were often laced with anger and threats. When the banker who handled the Schopenhauer family money suffered a disastrous financial setback and, to escape bankruptcy, offered all his investors only a small fraction of their investment, Schopenhauer threatened him with such draconian legal consequences that the banker returned to him 70 percent of his money while paying other investors (including Schopenhauer’s mother and sister) an even smaller portion than originally proposed. His abusive letters to his publisher eventually resulted in a permanent rupture of their relationship. The publisher wrote: “I shall not accept any letters from you which in their divine rudeness and rusticity suggest a coachman rather than a philosopher…. I only hope that my fears that by printing your work I am printing only waste paper will not come true.”

Schopenhauer’s rage was legendary: rage at financiers who handled his investments, at publishers who could not sell his books, at the dolts who attempted to engage him in conversations, at the bipeds who regarded themselves his equal, at those who coughed at concerts, and at the press for ignoring him. But the real rage, the white-hot rage whose vehemence still astounds us and made Schopenhauer a pariah in his intellectual community was his rage toward contemporary thinkers, particularly the two leading lights of nineteenth-century philosophy: Fichte and Hegel.

In a book published twenty years after Hegel succumbed to cholera during the Berlin epidemic, he referred to Hegel as “a commonplace, inane, loathsome, repulsive, and ignorant charlatan, who with unparalleled effrontery, compiled a system of crazy nonsense that was trumpeted abroad as immortal wisdom by his mercenary followers.”

Such intemperate outbursts about other philosophers cost him heavily. In 1837 he was awarded first prize for an essay on the freedom of the will in a competition sponsored by the Royal Norwegian Society for Learning. Schopenhauer showed a childlike delight in the prize (it was his very first honor) and greatly vexed the Norwegian consul in Frankfurt by impatiently clamoring for his medal. However, the very next year, his essay on the basis of morality submitted to a competition sponsored by the Royal Danish Society for Learning met a different fate. Though the argument of his essay was excellent and though it was the only essay submitted, the judges refused to award him the prize because of his intemperate remarks about Hegel. The judges commented, “We cannot pass over in silence the fact that several outstanding philosophers of the modern age are referred to in so improper a manner as to cause serious and just offense.”

Over the years many have agreed entirely with Schopenhauer’s opinion that Hegel’s prose is unnecessarily obfuscating. In fact, he is so difficult to read that an old joke circulating around philosophy departments is that the most vexing and awesome philosophical question is not “does life have meaning?” or “what is consciousness?” but “who will teach Hegel this year?” Still, the level, the vehemence of Schopenhauer’s rage set him apart from all other critics.

The more his work was neglected, the shriller he became, which, in turn, caused further neglect and, for many, made him an object of mockery. Yet, despite his anxiety and loneliness, Schopenhauer survived and continued to exhibit all the outward signs of personal self-sufficiency. And he persevered in his work, remaining a productive scholar until the end of his life. He never lost faith in himself. He compared himself to a young oak tree who looked as ordinary and unimportant as other plants. “But let him alone: he will not die. Time will come and bring those who know how to value him.” He predicted his genius would ultimately have a great influence upon future generations of thinkers. And he was right; all that he predicted has come to pass.





34




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Seen from the standpoint of youth, life is an endlessly long future; from that of old age it resembles a very brief past. When we sail away, objects on the shore become ever smaller and more difficult to recognize and distinguish; so, too, is it with our past years with all their events and activities.



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As time raced by, Julius looked forward with increasing anticipation to the weekly group meeting. Perhaps his experiences in the group were more poignant because the weeks of his “one good year” were running out. But it was not just the events of the group; everything in his life, large and small, appeared more tender and vivid. Of course, his weeks had always been numbered, but the numbers had seemed so large, so stretched into a forever future, that he had never confronted the end of weeks.