The Schopenhauer Cure Page 20

  "My point was that I never heard you talk about being sorry, and no one here got on your case. In fact I saw the opposite--I saw lots of support. Hell, more than support; all the women, even you," Stuart turned to Pam, "got turned on by your...your what? Your lawlessness! I remember Pam and Bonnie dropping off sandwiches for you once when you were doing trash pickup duty on Highway 101. I remember Gill and me talking about not being able to compete with your...your...what was it?"

  "Jungle nature," said Gill.

  "Yeah." Tony smirked. "Jungle creature. Primitive man. That was pretty cool."

  "So, how about giving Philip a break. Jungle man is okay for you but not for him. Let's hear his side of it. I feel awful about what Pam went through, but let's slow down, not rush to lynch. Fifteen years ago--that's a long time."

  "Well," said Tony, "I'm not into fifteen years ago; I'm into now." Tony turned to Philip. "Like last week when you...Philip--damn, it's hard to talk when you won't make eye contact. Drives me fucking crazy! You claimed that it made no difference to you that Rebecca was interested in you--that she was uh...flirting...I can't remember that goddamned word."

  "Preening!" said Bonnie.

  Rebecca clutched her head in both hands. "I can't believe this; I cannot believe we're still talking about this. Isn't there a statute of limitations to the ghastly grisly crime of taking my hair down? How long is this going to go on?"

  "As long as it takes," responded Tony, who turned back to Philip. "But what about my question, Philip? You put yourself forward as a monk, as someone beyond all this, too pure to be interested in women, even very attractive women..."

  "Do you see now," Philip addressed Julius, not Tony, "why I was reluctant to enter the group?"

  "You anticipated this?"

  "It is a true and tested equation," replied Philip, "that the less I have to do with people, the happier I am. When I tried living in life, I was drawn into agitation. To stay out of life, to want nothing and to expect nothing, to keep myself engaged in elevated contemplative pursuits--that is the path, my only path, to peace."

  "Well and good, Philip," responded Julius, "but, if you're going to be in a group or lead groups or try to help clients work on their relationships with others, you absolutely cannot avoid entering into relationships with them."

  Julius noted Pam slowly shaking her head in bewilderment. "What's happening here? This is crazy-making. Philip here? Rebecca flirting with him?

  Philip leading groups, seeing clients? What's going on?"

  "Fair enough; let's fill Pam in," said Julius.

  "Stuart, that's your cue," said Bonnie.

  "I'll give it a crack," said Stuart. "Well, in the two months you were away, Pam--"

  Julius interrupted. "This time, why don't you just get us started, Stuart. It's unfair for us to ask you to do all the work."

  "Right. But, you know, it's not work--I like to give overviews." Seeing Julius about to interrupt, he quickly said, "Okay, I'll just say one thing and stop.

  When you left, Pam, it was a downer to me. I felt we had failed you, that we were not good enough or resourceful enough to help you with your crisis. I didn't like that you had to turn elsewhere--to India--for help. Next."

  Bonnie quickly said, "The giant issue here was Julius's announcement about his illness. You know all about this, Pam?"

  "Yeah." Pam nodded gravely. "Julius told me when I phoned last weekend to tell him I was back."

  "Actually," Gill said, "I want to amend that--no offense, Bonnie--but Julius didn't tell us. What happened was that we went out for coffee after Philip's first meeting, and he told us since Julius had told him in an individual meeting.

  Julius was pretty pissed at Philip's preempting him. Next."

  "Philip's been here about five sessions. He's in training to be a therapist,"

  said Rebecca, "and, as I understand it, Julius was his therapist many years ago."

  Tony said, "We've been talking about Julius's...uh...condition and uh..."

  "You mean cancer . That's a shocking word, I know," said Julius, "but it's best to look it in the face and say it."

  "About Julius's cancer. You're one tough old bird, Julius--I gotta hand it to you." Tony went on, "So we talked about Julius's cancer and how hard it was to talk about other things that were small in comparison."

  Everyone had spoken but Philip, who now said, "Julius, it would be okay if you were to tell the group about why I first came to see you."

  "I'll help, Philip, but it would be better, when you're ready, to describe that yourself."

  Philip nodded.

  When it became clear that Philip was not going to continue, Stuart said, "Okay, back to me--a second round?"

  Looking around at nodding heads, Stuart continued, "In one meeting Bonnie had some reactions to Rebecca's coming on to Philip." Stuart stopped, looked at Rebecca, and inserted, "Rebecca's allegedly coming on to him. Bonnie did some work on her feelings about her self-image, her sense of being unattractive."

  "And clumsiness and inability to compete with women like you, Pam, and Rebecca," said Bonnie.

  Rebecca said, "While you were away Philip made a lot of constructive comments."

  "But revealed nothing about himself," said Tony.

  "One last thing: Gill had a serious confrontation with his wife--even considered walking out," said Stuart.

  "Don't give me too much credit--I waffled. That resolve lasted about four hours," said Gill.

  "A good review," said Julius, looking at his watch. "Before we quit, let me ask you, Pam, how are you handling this--you feel more on board?"

  "Still unreal. I'm trying to hang in, but I'm glad to stop. This is all I can deal with today," said Pam, gathering up her things.

  "I've got to say something," said Bonnie. "I'm frightened. You all know I love this group, and I feel it's ready to detonate and blow apart. Will we all be back? You, Pam? You, Philip? You guys coming back?"

  "A straight question," Philip quickly responded. "I'll respond in kind.

  Julius invited me come to the group for six months, and I agreed. I also have his commitment for supervisory credit. I plan to pay my bill and honor my contract.

  I'm not leaving."

  "And you, Pam?" said Bonnie.

  Pam stood. "This is all I can deal with today."

  As the members left, Julius heard some comments about going out for coffee. How would that work? he wondered. Would Philip be invited? He had often told the members that extragroup meetings could be divisive unless everyone was included. Then he noticed that Philip and Pam were heading toward the door on a collision trajectory. This should be interesting, he thought. Philip suddenly took note of it and, realizing that the doorway was too small for two, stopped and softly muttered "please" and stepped back to allow Pam to go through first. She strode out as if he were invisible.

  22

  Women,

  Passion,

  Sex

  _________________________

  Sexdoes not hesitate to

  intrude with its trash,

  and to interfere with the

  negotiations of statesmen

  and the investigations of

  the learned. Every day it

  destroys

  the

  most

  valuable

  relationships.

  Indeed it robs of all

  conscience those who were

  previously honorable and

  upright.

  _________________________

  After his mother, the next most pervasive female presence in Arthur's life was a querulous seamstress named Caroline Marquet. Few biographical accounts of Schopenhauer fail to spotlight their 1823 midday encounter, which took place on a dimly lit Berlin stairway outside Arthur's flat when he was thirty-five and Caroline forty-five.

  On that day Caroline Marquet, living in the adjoining flat, entertained three friends. Irritated by the noisy chattering, Arthur flung open his door, accused the four women of vio
lating his privacy since the anteroom where they stood talking was technically a part of his flat, and sternly ordered them to leave. When Caroline refused, Arthur physically forced her, kicking and screaming, from the anteroom and down the stairs. When she impertinently climbed back up the stairs in defiance, he again removed her, this time more forcefully.

  Caroline sued him, claiming that she was pushed down the stairs and suffered grievous injury resulting in trembling and partial paralysis. Arthur was highly threatened by the lawsuit: he knew that he was unlikely ever to earn money from his scholarly pursuits and had always fiercely guarded the capital inherited from his father. When his money was imperiled he became, in the words of his publisher, "a chained dog."

  Certain that Caroline Marquet was an opportunistic malingerer, he fought her lawsuit with all his might, employing every possible legal appeal. The bitter court proceedings continued for the next six years before the court ruled against him and ordered him to pay Caroline Marquet sixty talers a year for as long as her injury persisted. (In that era a house servant or cook would have been paid twenty talers annually plus food and board.) Arthur's prediction that she was shrewd enough to tremble as long as the money rolled in proved accurate; he continued to pay for her support until she died twenty-six years later. When he was sent a copy of her death certificate he scrawled across it: "Obit anus, abit onus" (the old woman dies, the burden is lifted).

  And other women in Arthur's life? Arthur never married but was far from chaste: for the first half of his life he was highly sexually active, perhaps even sexually driven. When Anthime, his childhood friend from Le Havre, visited Hamburg during Arthur's apprenticeship, the two young men spent their evenings searching for amorous adventures, always with women from lower social strata--

  maids, actresses, chorus girls. If they were unsuccessful in their search, they ended their evening by consoling themselves in the arms of an "industrious whore."

  Arthur, lacking in tact, charm, and joie de vivre, was an inept seducer and needed much advice from Anthime. His many rejections ultimately caused him to link sexual desire with humiliation. He hated being dominated by the sexual drive and in subsequent years had much to say about the degradation of sinking to animalistic life. It was not that Arthur didn't want women; he was clear about that: "I was very fond of them--if only they would have had me."

  The saddest of love stories in the Schopenhauer chronicles took place when he was forty-three and attempted to court Flora Weiss, a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl. One evening at a boating party he approached Flora with a bunch of grapes and informed her of his attraction to her and his intention of speaking to her parents about marriage. Later, Flora's father was taken aback by Schopenhauer's proposal and responded, "But she is a mere child." Ultimately, he agreed to leave the decision to Flora. The business came to an end when Flora made it clear to all concerned that she vehemently disliked Schopenhauer.

  Decades later, Flora Weiss's niece questioned her aunt about that encounter with the famous philosopher and, in her diary, quoted her aunt as saying, "Oh, leave me in peace about this old Schopenhauer." When pressed for more information, Flora Weiss described Arthur's gift of the grapes and said, "But I didn't want them, you see. I felt revolted because old Schopenhauer had touched them. And so I let them slide, quite gently, into the water behind me."

  There is no evidence that Arthur ever had a love affair with a woman whom he respected. His sister, Adele, after receiving a letter in which Arthur reported "two love affairs without love," responded, in one of their few interchanges about his personal life, "May you not totally lose the ability to esteem a woman while dealing with the common and base ones of our sex and may Heaven one day lead you to a woman to whom you can feel something deeper than these infatuations."

  At thirty-three Arthur entered into an intermittent ten-year liaison with a young Berlin chorus girl named Caroline Richter-Medon, who often carried on affairs with several men simultaneously. Arthur had no objections to that arrangement and said, "For a woman, limitation to one man during the short time of her flowering is an unnatural state. She is expected to save for one what he cannot use and what many others desire from her." He was opposed to monogamy for men as well: "Man at one time has too much and in the long run too little....

  half their lives men are whoremongers, half cuckolds."

  When Arthur moved from Berlin to Frankfurt, he offered to take Caroline with him but not her illegitimate son, whom he insisted was not his. Caroline refused to abandon her child, and after a short correspondence their relationship ended for good. Even so, Arthur, almost thirty years later, at the age of seventy-one, added a codicil to his will leaving Caroline Richter-Medon five thousand talers.

  Though he often scorned women and the entire institution of matrimony, Arthur vacillated about marriage. He cautioned himself by reflecting, "All great poets were unhappily married and all great philosophers stayed unmarried: Democritus, Descartes, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant. The only exception was Socrates--and he had to pay for it, for his wife was the shrewish Xanthippe.... most men are tempted by the outward appearance of women, that hides their vices. They marry young and pay a high price when they get older for their wives become hysterical and stubborn."

  As he aged he gradually relinquished the hope of marriage and gave up the idea completely at the age of forty. To marry at a late age, he said, was comparable to a man traveling three-fourths of the journey by foot and then deciding to buy the costly ticket for the whole journey.

  All of life's most fundamental issues come under Schopenhauer's bold philosophical scrutiny, and sexual passion, a topic avoided by his philosophic predecessors, was no exception.

  He launched this discussion with an extraordinary statement about the power and omnipresence of the sexual drive.

  Next to the love of life it [sex] shows itself here as the strongest and most active of all motives, and incessantly lays claim to half the powers and thoughts of the younger portion of mankind. It is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort. It has an unfavorable influence on the most important affairs, interrupts every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes perplexes for a while the greatest human minds.... Sex is really the invisible point of all action and conduct, and peeps up everywhere in spite of all the veils thrown over it. It is the cause of war and the aim and object of peace,...the inexhaustible source of wit, the key to all allusions, and the meaning of all mysterious hints, of all unspoken offers and all stolen glances; it is the meditation of the young and often the old as well, the hourly thought of the unchaste and, even against their will, the constantly recurring imagination of the chaste.

  The ultimate goal of almost all human effort? The invisible point of all action and conduct? The cause of war and the aim and object of peace? Why so overstated? How much does he draw from his own personal sexual preoccupation? Or is his hyperbole simply a device to rivet the reader's attention on what is to follow?

  If we consider all this, we are induced to exclaim: why all the noise and fuss?

  Why all the urgency, uproar, anguish and exertion? It is merely a question of every Jack finding his Jill. Why should such a trifle play such an important role, and constantly introduce disturbance and confusion in the life of man?

  Arthur's answer to his question anticipates by 150 years much of what is to follow in the fields of evolutionary psychology and psychoanalysis. He states that what is really guiding us is not our need but the need of our species. "The true end of the whole love story, though the parties concerned are unaware of it, is that a particular child may be begotten," he continues. "Therefore what here guides man is really an instinct directed to what is best in the species, whereas man himself imagines he is seeking merely a heightening of his own pleasure."

  He discusses in great detail the principles governing the choice of sexual partner ("everyone loves what they lack") but repeatedly emphasizes that the choice is actually being made by the genius of the species. "The man is tak
en possession of by the spirit of the species, is now ruled by it, and no longer belongs to himself...for ultimately he seeks not his interests but that of a third person who has yet to come into existence."

  Repeatedly, he emphasizes that the force of sex is irresistible. "For he is under the influence of an impulse akin to the instinct of insects, which compels him to pursue his purposes unconditionally, in spite of all the arguments of his faculty of reason.... He cannot give it up." And reason has little to do with it.

  Often the individual desires someone whom reason tells him to avoid, but the voice of reason is impotent against the force of sexual passion. He cites the Latin dramatist Terence: "What is not endowed with reason cannot possibly be ruled with reason."

  It has often been noted that three major revolutions in thought have threatened the idea of human centrality. First, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth was not the center about which all celestial bodies revolved. Next, Darwin showed us that we were not central in the chain of life but, like all other creatures, had evolved from other life-forms. Third, Freud demonstrated that we are not masters in our own house--that much of our behavior is governed by forces outside of our consciousness. There is no doubt that Freud's unacknowledged co-revolutionary was Arthur Schopenhauer, who, long before Freud's birth, had posited that we are governed by deep biological forces and then delude ourselves into thinking that we consciously choose our activities.

  23

  _________________________

  IfI

  maintain

  silence

  about my secret it is my

  prisoner; if I let it

  slip from my tongue, I am

  its prisoner. On the tree

  of

  silence

  hang

  the

  fruits of peace.

  _________________________

  Bonnie's concern about the group proved unfounded: at the next meeting everyone was not only present but early--except for Philip, who strode in briskly and took his seat at exactly four-thirty.