learned about Schopenhauer the person, the more revulsion she had felt.

She opened an old volume of his complete essays from her bookshelf and

began reading aloud some of her highlighted passages in his essay titled

«Our Relation to Others.»

• «The only way to attain superiority in dealing with men is to let it

be seen you are independent of them.»

• «To disregard is to win regard.»

• «By being polite and friendly, you can make people pliable and

obliging: hence politeness is to human nature what warmth is to

wax.»

Nowshe remembered why she had hated Schopenhauer. And

Philip a counselor? And Schopenhauer his model? And Julius

teaching him? It was all beyond belief.

She reread the last aphorism:«Politeness is to human nature

what warmth is to wax.» Hmm, so he thinks he can work me like

wax, undo what he did to my life with a gratuitous compliment on

my comments about Buber, or allowing me to pass through a door

first. Well, fuck him!

Later she tried to find peace by soaking in her Jacuzzi and

playing a tape of Goenka`s chanting, which often soothed her with

its hypnotic lilting melody, its sudden stops and starts and changes

of tempo and timbre. She even tried Vipassana meditation for a

few minutes, but she could not retrieve the equanimity it had once

offered. Stepping out of the tub, she inspected herself in the mirror.

She sucked in her abdomen, elevated her breasts, considered her

profile, patted her pubic hair, crossed her legs in an alluring pose.

Damn good for a woman of thirty–three.

Images of her first view of Philip fifteen years ago swiveled

into her mind. Sitting on his desk, casually handing out the class

syllabus to students entering the room, flashing a big smile her

way. He was a dashing man then, gorgeous, intelligent,

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.

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

conceptualized, they can be experienced and, in Schopenhauer`s

opinion, conveyed directly, without words, through the arts. Hence