and so powerfully that the reader cannot be sure where the
author`s sentiments lay. At the end the skeptic,
Thrasymachos, is unconvinced and is given the final words.
Philalethes: «When you say I, I, I want to exist, it is not
you alone that says this. Everything says it, absolutely
everything that has the faintest trace of consciousness.
It is the cry not of the individual but of existence
itself.... only thoroughly recognize what you are and
what your existence really is, namely, the universal will
to live, and the whole question will seem to you
childish and most ridiculous.»
Thrasymachos: You`re childish yourself and most
ridiculous, like all philosophers, and if a man of my age
lets himself in for a quarter hour`s talk with such fools
it is only because it amuses me and passes the time. I`ve
more important business to attend to, so goodbye.
Schopenhauer had one further method of keeping
death–anxiety at bay: death–anxiety is least where self–realization is most. If his position based on universal
oneness appears anemic to some, there is little doubt about
the robustness of this last defense. Clinicians who work
with dying patients have made the observation that death–anxiety is greater in those who feel they have lived an
unfulfilled life. A sense of fulfillment, at «consummating
one`s life,” as Nietzsche put it, diminishes death–anxiety.
And Schopenhauer? Did he live rightly and
meaningfully? Fulfill his mission? He had absolutely no
doubt about that. Consider his final entry in his
autobiographical notes.
I have always hoped to die easily, for whoever has been
lonely all his life will be a better judge than others of
this solitary business. Instead of going out amid the
tomfooleries and buffooneries that are calculated for the
pitiable capacities of human bipeds, I shall end happily
conscious of returning to the place whence I
started...and of having fulfilled my mission.
And the same sentiment—the pride of having
pursued his own creative path—appears in a short verse, his
authorial finale, the very last lines of his final book.
I now stand weary at the end of the road
The jaded brow can hardly bear the laurel
And yet I gladly see what I have done
Ever undaunted by what others say.
When his last book,Parerga and Paralipomena, was
published, he said, «I am deeply glad to see the birth of my
last child. I feel as if a load that I have borne since my
twenty–fourth year has been lifted from my shoulders. No
one can imagine what that means.»
On the morning of the twenty–first of September
1860 Schopenhauer`s housekeeper prepared his breakfast,
tidied up the kitchen, opened the windows, and left to run
errands, leaving Schopenhauer, who had already had his
cold wash, sitting and reading on the sofa in his living
room, a large airy, simply furnished room. On the floor by
the sofa lay a black bearskin rug upon which sat Atman, his
beloved poodle. A large oil painting of Goethe hung
directly over the sofa, and several portraits of dogs,
Shakespeare, Claudius, and daguerreo–types of himself
hung elsewhere in the room. On the writing desk stood a
bust of Kant. In one corner a table held a bust of Christoph
Wieland, the philosopher who had encouraged the young
Schopenhauer to study philosophy, and in another corner
stood his revered gold–plated statue of the Buddha.
A short time later his physician, making regular
rounds, entered the room and found him leaning on his
back in the corner of the sofa. A «lung stroke» (pulmonary
embolus) had taken him painlessly out of this world. His
face was not disfigured and showed no evidence of the
throes of death.
His funeral on a rainy day was more disagreeable
than most due to the odor of rotting flesh in the small
closed mortuary. Ten years earlier Schopenhauer had left
explicit instructions that his body not be buried directly but
left in the mortuary for at least five days until decay
began—perhaps a final gesture of misanthropy or because
of a fear of suspended animation. Soon the mortuary was so
close and the air so foul that several of the assembled
people had to leave the room during a long pompous
obituary by his executor, Wilhelm Gwinner, who began
with the words:
This man who lived among us a lifetime, and who
nevertheless stayed a stranger amongst us, commands
rare feelings. Nobody is standing here who belongs to
him through the bond of blood; isolated as he lived, he
died.
Schopenhauer`s tomb was covered with a heavy
plate of Belgian granite. His will had requested that only
his name, Arthur Schopenhauer, appear on his tombstone—
«nothing more, no date, no year, no syllable.»
The man lying under this modest tombstone wanted
his work to speak for him.
42
