The Schopenhauer Cure

by Irvin Yalom

  “Don’t make too much of it,” said Pam. “Julius hit the nail on the head: if anything, his being a good teacher made what he did even more egregious.”

  Tony, taking to heart Gill’s comments about his relationship with Pam, opened the next meeting by addressing Pam directly. “This is…like awkward, but I been holding something back. I want to say that I’m feeling more bummed out about us than I’ve admitted. I haven’t done anything wrong to you—you and I were…uh together…mutual about the sex, and yet now I’m the person non grata—”

  “Persona non grata,” whispered Philip gently.

  “Persona non grata.” Tony continued, “And I feel I’m being punished. We’re not close anymore, and I guess I miss that. It seems like we were once friends, then lovers, and now…it’s like…in limbo…nothing…you avoid me. And Gill’s right: getting dumped in public was humiliating as hell. Right now I get nothing from you—not getting laid, not being friends.”

  “Oh Tony, I am so so sorry. I know. I made a mistake—I—we—should never have done this. It’s awkward for me, too.”

  “So how about our going back to where we were before?”

  “Back to?”

  “Just friends, that’s all. Just hanging out after the group, like all the others do here, except for my buddy, Philip, who’s coming around.” Tony reached over and gave Philip’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze. “You know, talking about the group, your telling me about books, all that stuff.”

  “That sounds adult,” answered Pam. “And…it would be a first for me—usually after an affair I make a clean tumultuous break.”

  Bonnie volunteered, “I wonder, Pam, if you keep your distance from Tony because you fear he will interpret a friendly overture as a sexual invitation.”

  “Yeah, exactly—there is that—that’s an important part of it. Tony does get a bit single-minded.”

  “Well,” said Gill, “there’s an obvious remedy: just clear the air. Be straight with him. Ambiguity makes things worse. Couple of weeks ago I heard you raise the possibility that maybe the two of you can get together later after the group ends—is that real or just a phony way of softening the let-down? It just muddies the waters. Keeps Tony hanging.”

  “Yep, right on!” said Tony. “That statement a couple weeks ago about our possibly continuing sometime in the future was big for me. I’m trying to keep everything on an even keel so I can keep that possibility open.”

  “And,” said Julius, “in so doing, you forfeit the opportunity of doing some work on yourself while this group and I are still available to you.”

  “You know, Tony,” said Rebecca, “getting laid is not the most important thing, not the only thing, in the world.”

  “I know, I know, that’s why I’m bringing this up today. Give me a break.”

  After a short silence Julius said, “So, Tony, keep working on this.”

  Tony faced Pam. “Let’s do what Gill said—clear the air—as adults. What do you want?”

  “What I want is to go back to where we were before. I want you to forgive me for embarrassing you by springing the confession. You’re a dear man, Tony, and I care for you. The other day I overheard my undergraduate students using this new term, fuck-buddies—perhaps that’s what we were and it was fun then but it’s a bad idea now or in the future—the group takes precedence. Let’s concentrate on working on our stuff.”

  “Okay by me. I’m up for it.”

  “So, Tony,” said Julius, “you’re liberated—you’re now free to talk about all the thoughts you’ve been holding back lately—about yourself, Pam, or the group.”

  In the remaining meetings the liberated Tony returned to his instrumental role in the group. He urged Pam to deal with her feelings about Philip. When the potential breakthrough following her praise of Philip as a teacher never materialized, he pressed her to work harder on why she kept her resentment of Philip red-hot yet could find forgiveness for others in the group.

  “I’ve already said,” Pam answered, “that obviously it’s much easier to forgive others, like Rebecca, or Stuart, or Gill, because I was not a personal victim of their offense. My life wasn’t altered by what they did. But there’s more. I can forgive others here because they’ve shown remorse and, above all, because they’ve changed.

  “I’ve changed. I do believe, now, it’s possible to forgive the person but not the act. I think I might be capable of forgiving a changed Philip. But he hasn’t changed. You ask why I can forgive Julius—well, look at him: he never stops giving. And, as I’m sure you’ve all figured out, he’s been giving us a final gift of love: he’s teaching us how to die. I knew the old Philip, and I can attest he’s the same man you see sitting here. If anything, he’s colder and more arrogant.”

  After a short pause she added, “And an apology from him wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Philip, not changed?” said Tony. “I think you’re seeing what you want to see. All those women he used to chase—that’s changed.” Tony turned to Philip. “You haven’t really spelled it out, but it’s different. Right?”

  Philip nodded. “My life has been very different—I have been with no woman in twelve years.”

  “You don’t call that change?” Tony asked Pam.

  “Or reform?” said Gill.

  Before Pam could respond, Philip interjected, “Reform? No, that’s inaccurate. The idea of reformation played no role. Let me clarify: I have not changed my life, or, as it’s been put here, my sex addiction, by virtue of some moral resolution. I changed because my life was agony—no longer bearable.”

  “How did you take that final step? Was there a last-straw event?” asked Julius.

  Philip hesitated as he considered whether to answer Julius. Then he inhaled deeply and began, speaking mechanically as though wound up with a key: “One night I was driving home after a long orgy with an exceptionally beautiful woman and thought that now, if ever in my life, I had gotten all I wanted. I had had my surfeit. The aroma of sexual juices in the car was overpowering. Everything reeked of fetid flesh: the air, my hands, my hair, my clothes, my breath. It was as though I had just bathed in a tub of female musk. And then, on the horizon of my mind I could spot it—desire was gathering strength, readying to rear its head again. That was the moment. Suddenly my life made me sick, and I began to vomit. And it was then,” Philip turned to Julius, “when your comment about my epitaph came to mind. And that was when I realized that Schopenhauer was right: life is forever a torment, and desire is unquenchable. The wheel of torment would spin forever; I had to find a way to get off the wheel, and it was then I deliberately set about patterning my life after his.”

  “And it’s worked for you all these years?” said Julius.

  “Until now, until this group.”

  “But you’re so much better now, Philip,” said Bonnie. “You’re so much more in touch, so much more approachable. I’ll tell you the truth—the way you were when you first started here…I mean I could never have imagined me or anyone else consulting you as a counselor.”

  “Unfortunately,” Philip responded, “being ‘in touch’ here means that I must share everyone’s unhappiness. That simply compounds my misery. Tell me, how can this ‘being in touch’ possibly be useful? When I was ‘in life’ I was miserable. For the past twelve years I have been a visitor to life, an observer of the passing show, and”—Philip spread his fingers and raised and lowered his hands for emphasis—“I have lived in tranquillity. And now that this group has compelled me to once again be ‘in life,’ I am once again in anguish. I mentioned to you my agitation after that group meeting a few weeks ago. I have not regained my former equanimity.”

  “I think there’s a flaw in your reasoning, Philip,” said Stuart, “and that has to do with your statement that you were ‘in life.’”

  Bonnie leaped in, “I was going to say the same thing. I don’t believe you were ever in life, not really in life. You’ve never talked about having a real loving relationship. I’ve heard nothing ab
out male friends, and, as for women, you say yourself that you were a predator.”

  “That true, Philip?” asked Gill. “Have there never been any real relationships?”

  Philip shook his head. “Everyone with whom I’ve interacted has caused me pain.”

  “Your parents?” asked Stuart.

  “My father was distant and, I think, chronically depressed. He took his own life when I was thirteen. My mother died a few years ago, but I had been estranged from her for twenty years. I did not attend her funeral.”

  “Brothers? Sisters?” asked Tony.

  Philip shook his head. “An only child.”

  “You know what comes to my mind?” Tony interjected. “When I was a kid, I wouldn’t eat most things my mother cooked. I’d always say ‘I don’t like it,’ and she’d always come back with ‘How do you know you don’t like it if you’ve never tasted it?’ Your take on life reminds me of that.”

  “Many things,” Philip replied, “can be known by virtue of pure reason. All of geometry, for example. Or one may have some partial exposure to a painful experience and extrapolate the whole from that. And one may look about, read, observe others.”

  “But your main dude, Schopenhauer,” said Tony, “didn’t you say he made a big deal about listening to your own body, of relying on—what did you say?—your instant experience?”

  “Immediate experience.”

  “Right, immediate experience. So wouldn’t you say you’re making a major decision on second-rate, secondhand info—I mean info that’s not your own immediate experience?”

  “Your point is well taken, Tony, but I had my fill of direct experience after that ‘confession day’ session.”

  “Again you go back to that session, Philip. It seems to have been a turning point,” said Julius. “Maybe it’s time to describe what happened to you that day.”

  As before, Philip paused, inhaled deeply, and then proceeded to relate, in a methodical manner, his experience after the end of that meeting. As he spoke of his agitation and his inability to marshal his mind-quieting techniques, he grew visibly agitated. Then, as he described how his mental flotsam did not drift away but lodged in his mind, drops of perspiration glistened on his forehead. And then, as Philip spoke of the reemergence of his brutish, rapacious self, a pool of wetness appeared in the armpits of his pale red shirt and rivulets of sweat dripped from his chin and nose and down his neck. The room was very still; everyone was transfixed by Philip’s leakage of words and of water.

  He paused, took another deep breath, and continued: “My thoughts lost their coherence; images flooded pell-mell into my mind: memories I had long forgotten. I remembered some things about my two sexual encounters with Pam. And I saw her face, not her face now but her face of fifteen years ago, with a preternatural vividness. It was radiant; I wanted to hold it and…” Philip was prepared to hold nothing back, not his raw jealousy, not the caveman mentality of possessing Pam, not even the image of Tony with the Popeye forearms, but he was now overcome by a massive diaphoresis, which soaked him to the skin. He stood and strode out of the room saying, “I’m drenched; I have to leave.”

  Tony bolted out after him. Three or four minutes later the two of them reentered the room, Philip now wearing Tony’s San Francisco Giants sweater, and Tony stripped to his tight black T-shirt.

  Philip looked at no one but simply collapsed into his seat, obviously exhausted.

  “Bring ‘em back alive,” said Tony.

  “If I weren’t married,” said Rebecca, “I could fall in love with both you guys for what you just did.”

  “I’m available,” said Tony.

  “No comment,” said Philip. “That’s it for me today—I’m drained.”

  “Drained? Your first joke here, Philip. I love it,” said Rebecca.

  39

  Fame, at Last

  * * *

  Some cannot loosen their own chains yet can nonetheless liberate their friends.

  —Nietzsche

  * * *

  There are few things that Schopenhauer vilified more than the craving for fame. And, yet, oh how he craved it!

  Fame plays an important role in his last book, Parerga and Paralipomena, a two-volume compilation of incidental observations, essays, and aphorisms, completed in 1851, nine years before his death. With a profound sense of accomplishment and relief, he finished the book and said; “I will wipe my pen and say, ‘the rest is silence.’”

  But finding a publisher was a challenge: none of his previous publishers would touch it, having lost too much money on his other unread works. Even his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, had sold only a few copies and received only a single, lack-luster review. Finally, one of his loyal “evangelists” persuaded a Berlin bookseller to publish a printing of 750 copies in 1853. Schopenhauer was to receive ten free copies but no royalties.

  The first volume of Parerga and Paralipomena contains a striking triplet of essays on how to gain and maintain a sense of self-worth. The first essay, “What a Man Is,” describes how creative thinking results in a sense of inner wealth. Such a path provides self-esteem and enables one to overcome the basic vacuity and boredom of life, which results in a ceaseless pursuit of sexual conquests, travel, and games of chance.

  The second essay, “What a Man Has,” dissects one of the major techniques used to compensate for inner poverty: the endless accumulation of possessions, which ultimately results in one becoming possessed by one’s possessions.

  It is the third essay, “What a Man Represents,” that most clearly expresses his views on fame. A person’s self-worth or inner merit is the essential commodity, whereas fame is something secondary, the mere shadow of merit. “It is not fame but that whereby we merit it that is of true value…. a man’s greatest happiness is not that posterity will know something about him but he himself will develop thoughts that deserve consideration and preservation for centuries.” Self-esteem that is based on inner merit results in personal autonomy which cannot be wrested from us—it is in our power—whereas fame is never in our power.

  He knew that ablating the desire for fame was not easy; he likened it to “extracting an obstinate painful thorn from our flesh” and agreed with Tacitus, who wrote, “The thirst for fame is the last thing of all to be laid aside by wise men.” And he, himself, was never able to lay aside the thirst for fame. His writings are permeated with bitterness about his lack of success. He regularly searched newspapers and journals for some mention, any mention, of himself or his work. Whenever he was away on a trip, he assigned this scanning task to Julius Frauenstädt, his most loyal evangelist. Though he could not stop chaffing at being ignored, he ultimately resigned himself to never knowing fame in his lifetime. In later introductions to his books he explicitly addressed the future generations who would discover him.

  And then the unthinkable came. Parerga and Paralipomena, the very book in which he described the folly of pursuing fame, made him famous. In this final work he softened his pessimism, staunched his flow of jeremiads, and offered wise instruction on how to live. Though he never renounced his belief that life is but a “mouldy film on the surface of the earth,” and “a useless disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness,” he took a more pragmatic path in the Parerga and Paralipomena. We have no choice, he said, but to be condemned to life and must therefore attempt to live with as little pain as possible. (Schopenhauer always viewed happiness as a negative state—an absence of suffering—and treasured Aristotle’s maxim “Not to pleasure but to painlessness do the prudent aspire.”)

  Accordingly, Parerga and Paralipomena offers lessons on how to think independently, how to retain skepticism and rationality, how to avoid soothing supernatural emollients, how to think well of ourselves, keep our stakes low, and avoid attaching ourselves to what can be lost. Even though “everyone must act in life’s great puppet play and feel the wire which sets us into motion,” there is, nonetheless, comfort in maintaining the philosopher’s lofty pe
rspective that, from the aspect of eternity, nothing really matters—everything passes.

  Parerga and Paralipomena introduces a new tone. While it continues to emphasize the tragic and lamentable suffering of existence, it adds the dimension of connectivity—that is, through the commonality of our suffering, we are inexorably connected to one another. In one remarkable passage the great misanthrope displays a softer, more indulgent, view of his fellow bipeds.

  The really proper address between one man and another should be, instead of Sir, Monsieur,…my fellow sufferer. However strange this may sound, it accords with the facts, puts the other man in the most correct light, and reminds us of that most necessary thing, tolerance, patience, forbearance, and love of one’s neighbor, which everyone needs and each of us therefore owes to another.

  A few sentences later he adds a thought that could serve well as an opening paragraph in a contemporary textbook of psychotherapy.

  We should treat with indulgence every human folly, failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have before us are simply our own failings, follies, and vices. For they are just the failings of mankind to which we also belong and accordingly we have all the same failings buried within ourselves. We should not be indignant with others for these vices simply because they do not appear in us at the moment.

  Parerga and Paralipomena was a great success, generating several compilations of selections published separately under more popular titles (Aphorisms on Practical Wisdom, Counsels and Maxims, The Wisdom of Life, Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature, Religion: A Dialogue). Soon Schopenhauer’s words were on the tongue of the entire educated German public. Even in neighboring Denmark, Kierkegaard wrote in his 1854 journal that “all the literary gossips, journalists, and authorlings have begun to busy themselves with S.”