otherworldly, impervious to distractions. What the fuck happened
tothat man? And that sex, that force, doing what he wanted,
ripping off my underwear, smothering me with his body. Don`t kid
yourself, Pam—you loved it. A scholar with a fabulous grasp of
Western intellectual history, and a great teacher, too, perhaps the
best she ever had. That`s why she first thought of a major in
philosophy. But these were things he was never going to know.
After she was done with all these distracting and unsettling
angry thoughts, her mind turned to a softer, sadder realm: Julius`s
dying. There was a man to be loved. Dying, but business as usual.
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
