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
_________________________
No rose without
a thorn. But
many a thorn
without a rose.
_________________________
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.
Furthermore, we cannot «see» past our processed version of
what`s out there; we have no way of knowing what is «really»
there—that is, the entity that exists prior to our perceptual and
intellectual processing. That primary entity, which Kant calledding
an sich (the thing in itself), will and must remain forever
unknowable to us.
Though Schopenhauer agreed that we can never know the
«thing in itself,” he believed we can get closer to it than Kant had
thought. In his opinion, Kant had overlooked a major source of
available information about the perceived (the phenomenal)
world:our own bodies ! Bodies are material objects. They exist in
time and space. And each of us has an extraordinarily rich
knowledge of our bodies—knowledge stemmingnot from our
perceptual and conceptual apparatus but direct knowledge from
inside, knowledge stemming from feelings.
From our bodies we gain knowledge that we cannot
conceptualize and communicate because the greater part of our
inner lives is unknown to us. It is repressed and not permitted to
break into consciousness, because knowing our deeper natures (our
cruelty, fear, envy, sexual lust, aggression, self–seeking) would
cause us more disturbance than we could bear.
Sound familiar? Sound like that old Freudian stuff—the
unconscious, primitive process, the id, repression, self–deception?
Are these not the vital germs, the primordial origins, of the
psychoanalytic endeavor? Keep in mind that Arthur`s major work
was published forty years before Freud`s birth. When Freud (and
Nietzsche as well) were schoolboys in the middle of the nineteenth
century, Arthur Schopenhauer was Germany`s most widely read
philosopher.
How do we understand these unconscious forces? How do
we communicate them to others? Though they cannot be
conceptualized, they can be experienced and, in Schopenhauer`s
opinion, conveyed directly, without words, through the arts. Hence
he was to devote more attention to the arts, and particularly to
music, than any other philosopher.
And sex? He left no doubt about his belief that sexual
feelings played a crucial role in human behavior. Here, again, he
was an intrepid pioneer: no prior philosopher had the insight (or
the courage) to write about the seminal importance of sex to our
internal life.
And religion? Schopenhauer was the first major philosopher
to construct his thought upon an atheistic foundation. He explicitly
and vehemently denied the supernatural, arguing instead that we
live entirely in space and time and that all nonmaterial entities are
false and unnecessary constructs. Though many others, Hobbes,
Hume, even Kant, may have had agnostic leanings, none dared to
be explicit about their nonbelief. For one thing, they were
dependent for their livelihood upon the states and universities
employing them and, hence, forbidden to express any antireligious
sentiments. Arthur was never employed nor needed to be and was
free to write as he wished. For precisely the same reason, Spinoza,
a century and a half earlier, refused offers of exalted university
positions, remaining instead a grinder of lenses.
And the conclusions that Schopenhauer reached from his
inside knowledge of the body? That there is in us, and in all of
nature, a relentless, insatiable, primal life force which he
termedwill. «Every place we look in life,” he wrote, «we see
striving that represents the kernel and вЂin–itself` of everything.»
What is suffering? It is «hindrance to this striving by an obstacle
placed in the path between the will and its goal.» What is
happiness, well–being? It is «attainment of the goal.»
We want, we want, we want, we want. There are ten needs
waiting in the wings of the unconscious for every one that reaches
awareness. The will drives us relentlessly because, once a need is
satisfied, it is soon replaced by another need and another and
another throughout our life.
Schopenhauer sometimes invokes the myth of the wheel of
Ixion or the myth of Tantalus to describe the dilemma of human
existence. Ixion was a king who was disloyal to Zeus and punished
by being bound to a fiery wheel which revolved in perpetuity.
Tantalus, who dared to defy Zeus, was punished for his hubris by
being eternally tempted but never satisfied. Human life,
Schopenhauer thought, eternally revolves around an axle of need
followed by satiation. Are we contented by the satiation? Alas,
only briefly. Almost immediately boredom sets in, and once again
we are propelled into motion, this time to escape from the terrors