The Socrates Express

A few days later, I receive a reply from one Stephen Roeper. He is courteous and cheerful and, I get the distinct impression, more than a little surprised. Not many visitors come calling on Arthur these days.

The next morning, appropriately rainy and dreary, I walk the few blocks to the university. I step into a drab, utilitarian building—and promptly get lost. I approach a young woman behind the counter.

“Schopenhauer?” I say—or, rather, ask, as if the name itself constitutes a metaphysical question. She nods grimly. The mere mention of the philosopher of pessimism has soured her mood, or so I imagine. It’s difficult to distinguish a sullen German from a happy German. There are, I’m sure, subtle changes in facial muscles and ocular motion, but these lie beyond the ken of an outsider like me.

I push a buzzer, and a few seconds later, a slight, pleasant, and shy man materializes. Stephen Roeper is mustached with a receding hairline, clear blue eyes, and a rosy complexion that reminds me of a tipsy cherub.

We step into a large room. It smells of old books and disinfectant. As we walk, Schopenhauer looks down at us from the walls. On every square inch is a portrait, and one or two photographs, of Schopenhauer in different stages of life, from a boyish fifteen-year-old in Hamburg to the septuagenarian sage of Frankfurt.

For a man who boldly declared “the world is my idea,” Arthur Schopenhauer felt oddly ill at ease in it. Like Rousseau, he thought of himself as homeless, even when at home. A philosophical untouchable, he was living proof that the only fate worse than being criticized is being ignored. For most of his life, his books went unread, his ideas unloved. He failed to win a Danish philosophy prize even as the sole entrant. Only in the last few years of his life did he achieve a modicum of recognition.

In one of the many ironies that was his life, Schopenhauer, whose philosophical ideas would influence Freud, had a very Freudian childhood. Mother issues explain a lot. Johanna Schopenhauer had high aspirations—literary and social—and raising a young child didn’t factor in those plans. She soon tired of “playing with my new doll,” as she put it, and spent the rest of Arthur’s childhood alternately ignoring and resenting him. “A very bad mother,” Schopenhauer later wrote.

Schopenhauer’s father, a successful merchant, wasn’t much better. In one letter, he urges his son to improve his handwriting by capitalizing properly and curtailing those fancy flourishes. In another, it’s young Arthur’s posture that draws his father’s ire. “Your mother expects, as I do, that you will not need to be reminded to walk upright like other well-raised people,” he wrote, adding, with a twist of the parental knife, “and she sends her love.”

The elder Schopenhauer groomed his son to take over the family business. He even chose the name “Arthur” because it sounded international. Arthur’s social skills, though, were lacking, much to his father’s frustration. “I wish you learned to make yourself agreeable to people,” he sniffed in one letter.

Arthur never did learn. He alienated nearly everyone he encountered. He could be charming when he wanted, but he rarely wanted. He remained a bachelor throughout his life and, with the exception of a brief friendship with Goethe, had no real companions—other than his beloved poodle, named Atman, the Sanskrit word for soul. Schopenhauer displayed a warmth toward Atman he never could muster for people. “You, sir,” he affectionately chided the poodle whenever he misbehaved.

Schopenhauer enlists another animal—the porcupine—to explain human relations. Imagine a group of porcupines huddled on a cold winter’s day. They stand close to one another, absorbing their neighbor’s body heat, lest they freeze to death. Should they stand too close, though, they’re pricked by a needle. “Tossed between two evils,” says Schopenhauer, the animals approach and retreat, again and again, until they discover “the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another.”

The Porcupine’s Dilemma, as it’s now known, is our dilemma, too. We need others to survive, but others can hurt us. Relationships demand constant course corrections, and even the most skilled navigators get pricked now and then.