The Schopenhauer Cure(98)
Tony worked at an astonishing pace—as though Julius’s depleting strength were seeping directly into him. With Pam’s encouragement, strongly reinforced by everyone else in the group, he decided to stop complaining of being ignorant and, instead, do something about it—get an education—and enrolled in three night courses at the local community college.
However thrilling and gratifying these widespread changes, Julius’s central attention remained riveted on Philip and Pam. Why their relationship had taken on such importance for him was unclear, though Julius was convinced the reasons transcended the particular. Sometimes when thinking about Pam and Philip, he was visited by the Talmudic phrase “to redeem one person is to save the whole world.” The importance of redeeming their relationship soon loomed large. Indeed it became his raison d’être: it was as though he could save his own life by salvaging something human from the wreckage of that horrific encounter years before. As he mused about the meaning of the Talmudic phrase, Carlos entered his mind. He had worked with Carlos, a young man, a few years ago. No, it must have been longer, at least ten years, since he remembered talking to Miriam about Carlos. Carlos was a particularly unlikable man, crass, self-centered, shallow, sexually driven, who sought his help when he was diagnosed with a fatal lymphoma. Julius helped Carlos make some remarkable changes, especially in the realm of connectivity, and those changes allowed him to flood his entire life retrospectively with meaning. Hours before he died he told Julius, “Thank you for saving my life.” Julius had thought about Carlos many times, but now at this moment his story assumed a new and momentous meaning—not only for Philip and Pam, but for saving his own life, as well.
In most ways Philip appeared less pompous and more approachable in the group, even making occasional eye contact with most members, save Pam. The six-month mark came and went without Philip raising the subject of dropping because he had fulfilled his six-month contract. When Julius raised the issue, Philip responded, “To my surprise group therapy is a far more complex phenomenon than I had originally thought. I’d prefer you supervise my work with clients while I was also attending the group, but you’ve rejected that idea because of the problems of ‘dual relationships.’ My choice is to remain in the group for the entire year and to request supervision after that.”
“I’m fine with that plan,” Julius agreed, “but it depends, of course, on the state of my health. The group has four more months before we end, and after that we’ll have to see. My health guarantee was only for one year.”
Philip’s change of mind about group participation was not uncommon. Members often enter a group with one circumscribed goal in mind, for example, to sleep better, to stop having nightmares, to overcome a phobia. Then, in a few months, they often formulate different, more far-reaching goals, for example, to learn how to love, to recapture zest for life, to overcome loneliness, to develop self-worth.
From time to time the group pressed Philip to describe more precisely how Schopenhauer had helped so much when Julius’s psychotherapy had so utterly failed. Because he had difficulty answering questions about Schopenhauer without providing the necessary philosophical background, he requested the group’s permission to give a thirty-minute lecture on the topic. The group groaned, and Julius urged him to present the relevant material more succinctly and conversationally.
The following session Philip embarked upon a brief lecturette which, he promised, would succinctly answer the question of how Schopenhauer had helped him.
Though he had notes in his hand, he spoke without referring to them. Staring at the ceiling, he began, “It’s not possible to discuss Schopenhauer without starting with Kant, the philosopher whom, along with Plato, he respected above all others. Kant, who died in 1804 when Schopenhauer was sixteen, revolutionized philosophy with his insight that it is impossible for us to experience reality in any veritable sense because all of our perceptions, our sense data, are filtered and processed through our inbuilt neuroanatomical apparatus. All data are conceptualized through such arbitrary constructs as space and time and—”
“Come on, Philip, get to the point,” interrupted Tony. “How did this dude help you?”
“Wait, I’m getting there. I’ve spoken for all of three minutes. This is not the TV news; I can’t explain the conclusions of one of the world’s greatest thinkers in a sound bite.”
“Hey, hey, right on, Philip. I like that answer,” said Rebecca.
Tony smiled and backed off.
“So Kant’s discovery was that, rather than experience the world as it’s really out there, we experience our own personalized processed version of what’s out there. Such properties as space, time, quantity, causality are in us, not out there—we impose them on reality. But, then, what is pure, unprocessed reality? What’s really out there, that raw entity before we process it? That will always remain unknowable to us, said Kant.”
“Schopenhauer—how he helped you! Remember? Are we getting warm?” asked Tony.
“Coming up in ninety seconds. In his future work Kant and others turned their entire attention to the ways in which we process primal reality.
“But Schopenhauer—and see, here we are already!—took a different route. He reasoned that Kant had overlooked a fundamental and immediate type of data about ourselves: our own bodies and our own feelings. We can know ourselves from the inside, he insisted. We have direct, immediate knowledge, not dependent on our perceptions. Hence, he was the first philosopher to look at impulses and feelings from the inside, and for the rest of his career he wrote extensively about interior human concerns: sex, love, death, dreams, suffering, religion, suicide, relations with others, vanity, self-esteem. More than any other philosopher, he addressed those dark impulses deep within that we cannot bear to know and, hence, must repress.”