The Schopenhauer Cure (7 page)

Philip scanned his audience for some nod of comprehension and, failing to find it, crooked his forefinger at one of the students sitting nearest him and pointed to the blackboard. He then spelled out and defined three words,
d-e-s-u-l-t-o-r-y, f-o-r-e-b-e-a-r-a-n-c-e,
and
d-eb-u-t,
which the student dutifully copied onto the blackboard. The student started to return to his seat, but Philip pointed to a first-row seat, instructing him to remain there.

Now for great debuts; trust me--my purpose for beginning in such a fashion will, in time, become apparent. Imagine Mozart stunning the Viennese royal court as he performed flawlessly on the harpsichord at the age of nine. Or, if Mozart does not strike a familiar chord
(here the faintest trace of a smile),
imagine something more familiar to you, the Beatles at nineteen playing their own compositions to Liverpool audiences.

Other amazing debuts include the extraordinary debut of Johann Fichte.
(Here a signal to the student to write
F-i-c-h-t-e
on the board.)
Does any one of you remember his name from my last lecture in which I discussed the great German idealist philosophers who followed Kant in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte? Of these, Fichte's life and his debut was the most remarkable for he began life as a poor uneducated goose shepherd in Rammenau, a small German village whose only claim to fame was its clergyman's inspired sermons every Sunday.

Well, one Sunday a wealthy aristocrat arrived at the village too late to hear the sermon. As he stood, obviously disappointed, outside the church, an elderly villager approached him and told him not to despair because the gooseherd, young Johann, could repreach the sermon to him. The villager fetched Johann, who, indeed, repeated the entire lecture verbatim. So impressed was the baron by the gooseherd's astoundingly retentive mind that he financed Johann's education and arranged for him to attend Pforta, a renowned boarding school later attended by many eminent German thinkers, including the subject of our next lecture, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Johann excelled in school and later at the university, but when his patron died, Johann had no means of support and took a tutoring job in a private home in Germany where he was hired to teach a young man the philosophy of Kant, whom he had not yet read himself. Soon he was entranced by the work of the divine Kant...

Philip suddenly looked up from his notes to survey his audience. Seeing no glint of recognition in any eyes, he hissed at his audience:

Hello, anybody home? Kant, Immanuel Kant, Kant, Kant, remember?"
(He motioned to the blackboard scribe to write
K-a-n-t.
)
We spent two hours on him last week?

Kant, the greatest, along with Plato, of all the world's philosophers. I give you my word: Kant will be on the final. Ah ha, there's the ticket...I see stirrings of life, movement, one or two eyes opening. A pen making contact with paper.

So where was I? Ah, yes. The gooseherd. Fichte was next tendered a position as a private tutor in Warsaw and, penniless, walked all the way only to have the job denied him when he arrived. Since he was only a few hundred miles from Konigsberg, the home of Kant, he decided to walk there to meet the master in person.

After two months he arrived at Konigsberg and, audaciously, knocked on Kant's door but was not granted an audience. Kant was a creature of habit and not inclined to receive unknown visitors. Last week I described to you the regularity of his schedule--so exact that the townspeople could set their watches by seeing him on his daily walk.

Fichte assumed he was refused entry because he had no letters of recommendation and decided to write his own in order to gain an audience with Kant.

In an extraordinary burst of creative energy he wrote his first manuscript, the renowned
Critique of All Revelation,
which applied Kant's views on ethics and duty to the interpretation of religion. Kant was so impressed with the work that he not only agreed to meet with Fichte but encouraged its publication.

Because of some curious mishap, probably a marketing ploy of the publisher, the
Critique
appeared anonymously. The work was so brilliant that critics and the reading public mistook it for a new work by Kant himself. Ultimately, Kant was forced to make a public statement that it was not he who was the author of this excellent manuscript but a very talented young man named Fichte. Kant's praise ensured Fichte's future in philosophy, and a year and a half thereafter he was offered a professorship at the University of Jena.

"That," Philip looked up from his notes with an ecstatic look on his face and then jabbed the air with an awkward show of enthusiasm, "that is what I call a debut!" No students looked up or gave a sign of registering Philip's brief awkward display of enthusiasm. If he felt discouraged by his audience's unresponsiveness, Philip did not show it and, unperturbed, continued:

And now consider something closer to your hearts--athletic debuts. Who can forget the debut of Chris Evert, Tracy Austin, or Michael Chang, who won grand-slam professional tennis tournaments at fifteen or sixteen? Or the teenaged chess prodigies Bobby Fischer or Paul Morphy? Or think of Jose Raoul Capablanca, who won the chess championship of Cuba at the age of eleven.

Finally, I want to turn to a literary debut--the most brilliant literary debut of all time, a man in his midtwenties who blazed onto the literary landscape with a magnificent novel...

Here, Philip stopped in order to build the suspense and looked up, his countenance shining with confidence. He felt assured of what he was doing--that was apparent. Julius watched in disbelief. What was Philip expecting to find? The students on the edge of their seats, trembling with curiosity, each murmuring, "Who was this literary prodigy?"

Julius, in his fifth-row seat, swiveled his head to survey the auditorium: glazed eyes everywhere, students slumped in chairs, doo-dling, poring over newspapers, crossword puzzles. To the left, a student stretched out asleep over two chairs. To the right, two students at the end of his row embraced in a long kiss. In the row directly in front of him, two boys elbowed each other as they leered upward, toward the back of the room. Despite his curiosity, Julius did not turn to follow their gaze--probably they were staring up some woman's skirt--and turned his attention back to Philip.

And who was the prodigy?
(Philip droned on.)
His name was Thomas Mann. When he was your age, yes, your age, he began writing a masterpiece, a glorious novel called
Buddenbrooks
published when he was only twenty-six years old. Thomas Mann, as I hope and pray you know, went on to become a towering figure in the twentieth-century world of letters and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature."
(Here Philip spelled
M-a-n-n
and
B-u-d-d-e-n-b-r-o-o-k-s
to his blackboard scribe.) Buddenbrooks,
published in 1901, traced the life of one family, a German burgher family, through four generations and all the associated vicissitudes of the life cycle.

Now what does this have to do with philosophy and with the real subject of today's lecture? As I promised, I have strayed a bit but only in the service of returning to the core with greater vigor.

Julius heard rustling in the auditorium and the sound of footsteps. The two elbowing voyeurs directly in front of Julius noisily collected their belongings and left the hall. The embracing students at the end of the row had departed, and even the student assigned to the blackboard had vanished.

Philip continued:

To me, the most remarkable passages in
Buddenbrooks
come late in the novel as the protagonist, the paterfamilias, old Thomas Buddenbrooks, approaches death. One is astounded by a writer in his early twenties having such insight and such sensibility to issues concerned with the end of life.
(A faint smile played on his lips as Philip held up the dog-eared book.)
I recommend these pages to anyone intending to die.

Julius heard the strike of matches as two students lit cigarettes while exiting the auditorium.

When death came to claim him, Thomas Buddenbrooks was bewildered and overcome by despair. None of his belief systems offered him comfort--neither his religious views which had long before failed to satisfy his metaphysical needs, nor his worldly skepticism and materialistic Darwinian leaning. Nothing, in Mann's words, was able to offer the dying man "in the near and penetrating eye of death a single hour of calm."

Here, Philip looked up. "What happened next is of great importance and it is here that I begin to close in on the designated subject of our lecture tonight."

In the midst of his desperation Thomas Buddenbrooks chanced to draw from his bookcase an inexpensive, poorly sewn volume of philosophy bought at a used book stand years before. He began to read and was immediately soothed. He marveled by how, as Mann put it, "a master-mind could lay hold of this cruel mocking thing called life."

The extraordinary clarity of vision in the volume of philosophy enthralled the dying man, and hours passed without his looking up from his reading. Then he came upon a chapter titled "On Death, and Its Relation to Our Personal Immortality" and, intoxicated by the words, read on as though he were reading for his very life. When he finished, Thomas Buddenbrooks was a man transformed, a man who had found the comfort and peace that had eluded him.

What was it that the dying man discovered?
(At this point Philip suddenly adopted an oracular voice.)
Now listen well, Julius Hertzfeld, because this may be useful for life's final examination....

Shocked at being directly addressed in a public lecture, Julius bolted upright in his seat. He glanced nervously about him and saw, to his astonishment, that the auditorium was empty: everyone, even the two homeless men, had left.

But Philip, unperturbed by his vanished audience, calmly continued: I'll read a passage from
Buddenbrooks. (He opened a tattered paperback copy of the book.)
"Your assignment is to read the novel, especially part nine, with great care. It will prove invaluable to you--far more valuable than attempting to extract meaning from patients' reminiscences of long ago.

Have I hoped to live on in my son? In a personality yet more feeble, flickering, and timorous than my own? Blind, childish folly! What can my son do for me? Where shall I be when I am dead? Ah, it is so brilliantly clear. I shall be in all those who have ever, do ever, or ever shall say "I"--especially, however, in all those who say it most fully, potently, and gladly!...Have I ever hated life--pure, strong, relentless life? Folly and misconception! I have but hated myself because I could not bear it. I love you all, you blessed, and soon, soon, I shall cease to be cut off from you by all the narrow bonds of myself; soon that in me which loves you will be free and be in and with you--in and with you all.

Philip closed the novel and returned to his notes.

Now who was the author of the volume which so transformed Thomas Buddenbrooks? Mann does not reveal his name in the novel, but forty years later he wrote a magnificent essay which stated that Arthur Schopenhauer was the author of the volume. Mann then proceeds to describe how, at the age of twenty-three, he first experienced the great joy of reading Schopenhauer. He was not only entranced by the ring of Schopenhauer's words, which he describes as "so perfectly consistently clear, so rounded, its presentation and language so powerful, so elegant, so unerringly apposite, so passionately brilliant, so magnificently and blithely severe--like never any other in the history of German philosophy," but by the essence of Schopenhauerian thought, which he describes as "emotional, breathtaking, playing between violent contrasts, between instinct and mind, passion and redemption." Then and there Mann resolved that discovering Schopenhauer was too precious an experience to keep to himself and straightaway used it creatively by offering the philosopher to his suffering hero.

And not only Thomas Mann but many other great minds acknowledged their debt to Arthur Schopenhauer. Tolstoy called Schopenhauer the "genius par excellence among men." To Richard Wagner he was a "gift from Heaven." Nietzsche said his life was never the same after purchasing a tattered volume of Schopenhauer in a used-book store in Leipzig and, as he put it, "letting that dynamic, dismal genius work on my mind." Schopenhauer forever changed the intellectual map of the Western world, and without him we would have had a very different and weaker Freud, Nietzsche, Hardy, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Ibsen, Conrad.

Philip pulled out a pocketwatch, studied it for a moment, and then, with great solemnity:

Here concludes my introduction to Schopenhauer. His philosophy has such breadth and depth it defies a short summary. Hence I have chosen to pique your curiosity in the hope that you will read the sixty-page chapter in your text carefully. I prefer to devote the last twenty minutes of this lecture to audience questions and discussion.

Are there questions from the audience, Dr. Hertzfeld?

Unnerved by Philip's tone, Julius once again scanned the empty auditorium and then softly said, "Philip, I wonder if you're aware that your audience has departed?"

"What audience? Them? Those so-called students?" Philip flicked his wrist in a disparaging manner to convey that they were beneath his notice, that neither their arrival nor their departure made the slightest difference to him. "You, Dr. Hertzfeld, are my audience today. I intended my lecture for you alone," said Philip, who in no way seemed discomfited by holding a conversation with someone thirty feet away in a cavernous deserted auditorium.

"All right, I'll bite. Why am I your audience today?"

"Think about it, Dr. Hertzfeld..."

"I'd prefer you'd call me Julius. If I refer to you as Philip, and I'm assuming that's okay with you, then it's only right that you call me Julius. Ah, deja vu all over again--

how clearly I recall saying so very very long ago, 'Call me Julius, please--we're not strangers.'"