The Schopenhauer Cure

12

1799—Arthur

Learns about

Choice and

Other Worldly

Horrors

_________________________

Thekings left their crowns and

scepters behind here, and the

heroes their weapons. Yet the

great spirits among them all,

whose splendor flowed out of

themselves, who did not

receive it from outward

things, they take their

greatness across with them.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, age sixteen at

Westminster Abbey

_________________________

When the nine–year–old Arthur returned from Le Havre, his father placed him in a private

school whose specific mandate was to educate future merchants. There he learned what

good merchants of the time had to know: to calculate in different currencies, to write

business letters in all the major European languages, to study transport routes, trade

centers, yields of the soil, and other such fascinating topics. But Arthur was not

fascinated; he had no interest in such knowledge, formed no close friendships at school,

and dreaded more each day his father`s plan for his future—a seven–year apprenticeship

with a local business magnate.

What did Arthur want? Not the life of a merchant—he loathed the very idea. He

craved the life of a scholar. Though many of his classmates also disliked the thought of a

long apprenticeship, Arthur`s protests ran far deeper. Despite his parents` strong

admonitions—a letter from his mother instructed him to «put aside all these authors for a

while...you are now fifteen and have already read and studied the best German, French

and, in part, also English authors»—he spent all his available free time studying literature

and philosophy.

Arthur`s father, Heinrich, was tormented by his son`s interests. The headmaster of

Arthur`s school had informed him that his son had a passion for philosophy, was

exceptionally suited for the life of a scholar, and would do well to transfer to a

gymnasium which would prepare him for the university. In his heart, Heinrich may have

sensed the correctness of the schoolmaster`s advice; his son`s voracious consumption and

comprehension of all works of philosophy, history, and literature in the extensive

Schopenhauer library was readily apparent.

What was Heinrich to do? At stake was his successor, as well as the future of the

entire firm and his filial obligation to all his ancestors to maintain the Schopenhauer

lineage. Moreover, he shuddered at the prospect of a male Schopenhauer subsisting on

the limited income of a scholar.

First, Heinrich considered setting up a lifelong annuity through his church for his

son, but the cost was prohibitive; business was bad, and Heinrich also had obligations to

guarantee the financial future of a wife and daughter.

Then gradually a solution, a somewhat diabolical solution, began to form in his

mind. For some time he had resisted Johanna`s pleas for a lengthy tour of Europe. These

were difficult times; the international political climate was so unstable that the safety of

the Hanseatic cities was threatened and his constant attention to business was required.

Yet because of weariness and his yearning to shed the weight of business responsibilities,

his resistance to Johanna`s request was wavering. Slowly there swiveled into mind an

inspired plan that would serve two purposes; his wife would be pleased, and the dilemma

of Arthur`s future would be resolved.

His decision was to offer his fifteen–year–old son a choice. «You must choose,” he

told him. «Either accompany your parents on a year`s grand tour of all of Europe or

pursue a career as a scholar. Either you give me a pledge that on the day you return from

the journey you will begin your business apprenticeshipor forego this journey, remain in

Hamburg, and immediately transfer to a classical educational curriculum which will

prepare you for the academic life.»

Imagine a fifteen–year–old facing such a life–altering decision. Perhaps the ever–pedantic Heinrich was offering existential instruction. Perhaps he was teaching his son

that alternatives exclude, that for every yes there must be a no. (Indeed, years later Arthur

was to write, «He who would be everything cannot be anything.»)

Or was Heinrich exposing his son to a foretaste of renunciation, that is, if Arthur

could not renounce the pleasure of the journey, how could he expect himself to renounce

worldly pleasures and live the impecunious life of a scholar?

Perhaps we are being too charitable to Heinrich. Most likely his offer was

disingenuous because he knew that Arthur would not, could not, refuse the trip. No

fifteen–year–old could do that in 1803. At that time such a journey was a priceless once–in–a–lifetime event granted only to a privileged few. Before the days of photography,

foreign places were known only through sketches, paintings, and published travel

journals (a genre, incidentally, that Johanna Schopenhauer was later to exploit

brilliantly).

Did Arthur feel he was selling his soul? Was he tormented by his decision? Of

these matters history is silent. We know only that in 1803, in his fifteenth year, he set off

with his father, mother, and a servant on a journey of fifteen months throughout all of

western Europe and Great Britain. Adele, his six–year–old sister, was deposited with a

relative in Hamburg.

Arthur recorded many impressions in his travel journals written, as his parents

required, in the language of the country visited. His linguistic aptitude was prodigious;

the fifteen–year–old Arthur was fluent in German, French, and English and had working

knowledge of Italian and Spanish. Ultimately, he was to master a dozen modern and

ancient languages, and it was his habit, as visitors to his memorial library have noted, to

write his marginal notes in the language of each text.

Arthur`s travel journals offer a subtle prefiguring of interests and traits which were

aggregating into a persistent character structure. A powerful subtext in the journals is his

fascination with the horrors of humanity. In exquisite detail Arthur describes such

arresting sights as starving beggars in Westphalia, the masses running in panic from the

impending war (the Napoleonic campaigns were incubating), thieves, pickpockets, and

drunken crowds in London, marauding gangs in Poitiers, the public guillotine on display

in Paris, the six thousand galley slaves, on view as in a zoo, in Toulon doomed to be

chained together for life in landlocked naval hulks too decrepit to put out to sea ever

again. And he described the fortress in Marseilles, which once housed the Man in the Iron

Mask, and the black death museum, where letters from quarantined sections of the city

were once required to be dipped into vats of hot vinegar before being passed on. And, in

Lyon, he remarked on the sight of people walking indifferently over the very spot where

their fathers and brothers were killed during the French Revolution.

At a boarding school in Wimbledon where Lord Nelson had once been a student in

England, Arthur perfected his English and attended public executions and naval

floggings, visited hospitals and asylums, and walked by himself through the massive

teeming slums of London.

The Buddha as a young man lived in his father`s palace, where the common lot of

mankind had been veiled from him. It was only when he first journeyed outside of his

father`s palace that he saw the three primal horrors of life: a diseased person, a decrepit

old man, and a corpse. His discovery of the tragic and terrible nature of existence led the

Buddha to his renunciation of the world and the search for a relief from universal

suffering.

For Arthur Schopenhauer, too, early views of suffering profoundly influenced his

life and work. The similarity of his experience to that of the Buddha was not lost on him,

and years later, when writing about his journey, he said, «In my seventeenth year, without

any learned school education, I was gripped by the misery of life, just like Buddha in his

youth, when he saw sickness, pain, aging, and death.»

Arthur never had a religious phase; he had no faith but, when young, had a will to

faith, a wish to escape the terror of a totally unobserved existence. Had he a belief in the

existence of God, though, it would have been sorely tested by his teenaged tour of the

horrors of European civilization. At the age of eighteen he wrote, «This world is

supposed to have been made by a God? No, much better by a devil!»