The Schopenhauer Cure

by Irvin D. Yalom

Would we, would any of us, ever be done with our search for a higher power with whom we can merge and exist forever, for God-given instruction manuals, for some sign of a larger established design, for ritual and ceremony?

He had always despised the tools by which religions strip their followers of reason and freedom: the ceremonial robes, incense, holy books, mesmerizing Gregorian chants, prayer wheels, prayer rugs, shawls and skullcaps, bishop’s miters and crosiers, holy wafers and wines, last rites, heads bobbing and bodies swaying to ancient chants—all of which he considered the paraphernalia of the most powerful and longest-running con game in history, a game which empowered the leaders and satisfied the congregation’s lust for submission.

To live in despair because life is finite or because life has no higher purpose or embedded design is crass ingratitude. To dream up an omniscient creator and devote our life to endless genuflection seems pointless. And wasteful, too: why squander all that love on a phantasm when there seems too little love to go around on Earth as it is? Better to embrace Spinoza’s and Einstein’s solution: simply bow one’s head, tip one’s hat to the elegant laws and mystery of nature, and go about the business of living.

everything in moderation. Too much of life’s show is missed if we never take off our coats and join in the fun. Why rush to the exit door before closing time?

But today nothing seemed important. He suspected that nothing had ever been important, that his mind had arbitrarily imbued projects with importance and then cunningly covered its traces. Today he saw through the ruse of a lifetime.

If we look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems. It is like a drop of water seen through a micro-scope, a single drop teeming with protozoa. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly and struggle with one another. Whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect.

Julius thought of the group therapy folklore about seating; that the most dependent person sits to the leader’s right, whereas the most paranoid members sit directly opposite; but, in his experience, the reluctance to sit next to the leader was the only rule that could be counted on with regularity.

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence…and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.

First, I want to caution you against the error of assuming that your view of reality is the real thing—the res naturalis—and that your mission is to impose this vision on others. You crave and value relationships, and you make the erroneous assumption that I, indeed everyone, must do the same and that if I claim otherwise, I’ve repressed my relationship-craving.

The truth is—you and I are fundamentally different. I have never drawn pleasure from the company of others—their drivel, their demands, their ephemeral petty strivings, their pointless lives—are a nuisance and an obstacle to my communion with the handful of great world spirits who have something of significance to say.”

As a consequence of this episode, the latter-day Julius had an exquisite sensitivity to the phenomenon of “role-lock”: how often had he seen group therapy patients change dramatically but continue to be perceived as the same person by the other group members. Happens also in families.

“A small amount of anxiety will expand to fill our whole anxiety cavity. Your anxiety feels just as awful as anxiety in others that comes from more obviously calamitous sources.”

A person of high, rare mental gifts who is forced into a job which is merely useful is like a valuable vase decorated with the most beautiful painting and then used as a kitchen pot.

Slipping into a double life, Arthur fulfilled all the quotidian tasks of his apprenticeship but surreptitiously spent every spare moment studying the great ideas of intellectual history. He had so internalized his father, however, that these stolen moments filled him with remorse.

But just don’t imagine life as a complete learned man to be too delightful. I now see it around me, dear Arthur. It is a tiring, troublesome life full of work; only the delight in doing it gives it its charm. One doesn’t get rich with it; as a writer, one acquires with difficulty what one needs for survival…. To make your life as a writer you have to be able to produce something excellent…. now, more than ever, there is a need of brilliant heads.

Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams…. I have not had a single unpleasant moment I did not owe to you.

The most important woman, by far, in Arthur’s life was his mother, Johanna, with whom he had a tormented and ambivalent relationship which ended in cataclysm. Johanna’s letter liberating Arthur from his apprenticeship contained admirable motherly sentiments: her concern, her love, her hopes for him. Yet all these required a proviso: namely, that he remain at a convenient distance from her.

“Schopenhauer said that a highly attractive women, like a highly intelligent man, was absolutely destined to living an isolated life. He pointed out that others are blind with envy and resent the superior person. For that reason, such people never have close friends of their same sex.”

the wise person will not spend his life or her life pursuing popularity. It is a will-o’-the-wisp. Popularity does not define what is true or what is good; quite the contrary, it’s a leveler, a dumbing down. Far better to search within for one’s values and goals.”

his mother wrote, “…little though I care for stiff etiquette, I like even less a rough, self-pleasing, nature and action…. You have more than a slight inclination that way.” His father wrote, “I only wish you had learned to make yourself agreeable to people.”

At an early age he intuitively apprehended the perspective of Spinoza’s “sub species aeteritatis,” to see the world and its events from the perspective of eternity. The human condition, Arthur concluded, could be best understood not from being a part of but apart from it.

This mocking, irreverent young lad would develop into the bitter, angry man who habitually referred to all humans as “bipeds,” and would agree with Thomas à Kempis, “Every time I went out among men I came back less human.”

He is a happy man who can once and for all avoid having to do with a great many of his fellow creatures.

Sex does 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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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?

If I 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.

“Just dismay about how we poor mortals, we fellow sufferers, are such victims of biology that we fill our lives with guilt about natural acts as Stuart and Rebecca have done. And that we all have the goal of extricating ourselves from the thralldom of sex.”

If we do not want to be a plaything in the hands of every rogue and the object of every fool’s ridicule, the first rule is to be reserved and inaccessible.

Most contemporary psychotherapists would unhesitatingly recommend therapy for such extreme socially avoidant stances. In fact the bulk of psychotherapy practice is addressed to such problematic interpersonal stances—not only social avoidance but maladaptive social behavior in all its many colors and hues: autism, social avoidance, social phobia, schizoid personality, antisocial personality, narcissistic personality, inability to love, self-aggrandizement, self-effacement.

“But the genius lights on his age like a comet into the paths of the planets…. he cannot go hand in hand with the regular course of the culture: on the contrary he casts his works far out onto the path in front.”

“If in daily intercourse we are asked by one of the many who would like to know everything but who will learn nothing, about continued existence after death, the most suitable and above all the most correct answer would be: ‘After your death you will be what you were before your birth.’”

But why begin with a gratuitous insult—“one of the many who would like to know everything but who will learn nothing”?—Why contaminate sublime thoughts with petty invective? Such dissonant juxtaposition is commonplace in Schopenhauer’s writings. How disquieting to encounter a thinker so gifted yet so socially challenged, so prescient yet so blinded.

“Almost every contact with men is a contamination, a defilement. We have descended into a world populated with pitiable creatures to whom we do not belong. We should esteem and honor the few who are better; we are born to instruct the rest, not to associate with them.”

“Distrust is the mother of safety”

There are few ways by which you can make more certain of putting people into a good humor than by telling them of some trouble that has recently befallen you, or by disclosing some personal weakness of yours.

Julius always taught students the difference between vertical and horizontal self-disclosure. The group was pressing, as expected, for vertical disclosure—details about the past, including such queries as the scope and duration of his drinking—whereas horizontal disclosure, that is, disclosure about the disclosure, was always far more productive.

We should set a limit to our wishes, curb our desires, and subdue our anger, always mindful of the fact that the individual can attain only an infinitely small share of the things that are worth having…

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.

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.

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.

But if all desires were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how then would people occupy their lives and spend their time? Suppose the human race were removed to Utopia where everything grew automatically and pigeons flew about ready-roasted; where everyone at once found his sweetheart and had no difficulty in keeping her; then people would die of boredom or hang themselves; or else they would fight, throttle, and murder one another and so cause themselves more suffering than is now laid upon them by nature.

what is human life other than an endless cycle of wanting, satisfaction, boredom, and then wanting again? Is that true for all life-forms? Worse for humans, says Schopenhauer, because as intelligence increases, so does the intensity of suffering.

emotion has the power to obscure and falsify knowledge: that the whole world assumes a smiling aspect when we have reason to rejoice, and a dark and gloomy one when sorrow weighs upon us.

“As you just said to Gill, you value no-bullshit feedback. Yet when you get it, ouch, how it smarts.”

Life can be compared to a piece of embroidered material of which, everyone in the first half of his time, comes to see the top side, but in the second half, the reverse side. The latter is not so beautiful, but is more instructive because it enables one to see how the threads are connected together.

“One of Schopenhauer’s formulations that helped me,” said Philip, “was the idea that relative happiness stems from three sources: what one is, what one has, and what one represents in the eyes of others. He urges that we focus only on the first and do not bank on the second and third—on having and our reputation—because we have no control over those two; they can, and will, be taken away from us—just as your inevitable aging is taking away your beauty. In fact, ‘having’ has a reverse factor, he said—what we have often starts to have us.”

If perspective is attuned, attention rapt, and knowledge vast, then one enters everydayness in a perpetual state of wonderment.