Schopenhauer’s Nagging Mother
There’s a difference between being ahead of your time, and just being annoying
I feel like most of the stuff I come across on the Internet is intentionally designed to annoy, aggravate or provoke me. I hardly ever put my phone down feeling better than when I picked it up. However, in a rare occurrence, I recently read something online that made me cackle with absolute delight. It’s a letter Johanna Schopenhauer, mother of 19th century German pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote to her son when he was 19 years old. I’m pasting it in full here (Or, at least, as full of a version as I could find) because the whole thing is simply too good to excerpt. Johanna tells her son:
“You are not an evil human; you are not without intellect and education; you have everything that could make you a credit to human society. Moreover, I am acquainted with your heart and know that few are better, but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.
All of your good qualities become obscured by your super-cleverness and are made useless to the world merely because of your rage at wanting to know everything better than others; of wanting to improve and master what you cannot command. With this you embitter the people around you, since no one wants to be improved or enlightened in such a forceful way, least of all by such an insignificant individual as you still are; no one can tolerate being reproved by you, who also still show so many weaknesses yourself, least of all in your adverse manner, which in oracular tones, proclaims this is so and so, without ever supposing an objection.
If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.”
What made this letter so entertaining to me is the two different timeframes you can read it from. Reading it now, we know Johanna was wrong about her son. Or, at least, wrong about the value of his temperament. His “rage at wanting to know everything better than others” that she criticizes is probably what eventually made him so successful. The hindsight we get from being in the future allows us to look back and sneer at Johanna for doubting and disparaging this great man of history, whose work still resonates hundreds of years later.
But we can also look at it from the time it was written, on November 6th, 1807. In that moment, when Johanna was putting quill to paper, she was most likely right to share these thoughts with her teenage son. In fact, it might have even been her duty as a mother to tell him, “Hey man, chill out. You’re annoying everybody around you.”
It’s not as if he grew up to be the most affable guy either. Here’s a brief sample of Schopenhauer’s philosophy as an adult.
“There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. It is filled with misery and pain. If a man escapes these, boredom lies in wait for him at every corner.”
This was written when he was 63 years old. Can you imagine how insufferable he was at 19?
That’s what I think is so great about this letter. It was wrong eventually, but it was completely correct at the time.
To bring it back to the movie Whiplash (Something I’ve done before on this Substack and will certainly do again in the future), this letter is like that family dinner scene where Miles Teller is disparaging his Division III football playing cousins for never having a shot at making it in the NFL. His dad, played by Paul Reiser, cuts him off and asks “Heard from Lincoln Center?” He has to step in and remind his drum playing son, “You’re still an amateur too.”
Sometimes, a talented but hotheaded individual needs to be told, “Maybe, but not yet.” Johanna says something similar in her letter, telling her son “No one wants to be improved or enlightened in such a forceful way, least of all by such an insignificant individual as you still are.” (Emphasis mine.)
There is an acknowledgement that he could become someone that other people want to listen to, but he’s not quite there. Until that time comes, he needs to humble himself and act accordingly. Also, only other people can deem him as someone worthy of listening to. He can’t bestow that upon himself.
But, being where we are in history and knowing who Schopenhauer became, we’re more likely to disregard what Johanna said and simply proclaim that Schopenhauer was misunderstood. It’s easy to say that this letter was a product of his mother, and other people around him, failing to recognize his greatness. But I think that approach is misguided. It only accounts for people’s actions in relation to their achievements, instead of considering them in a vacuum.
That’s really the entire crux of the argument about separating the art from the artist when it comes to bad behavior, behavior that can range from the criminal all the way down to the simply antisocial. If you were to look at this person’s actions outside of the context of their success and notoriety, would they be so easy to excuse? If your neighbor, some guy who works at an insurance company, acted this way instead of a famous philosopher, artist, or athlete, how mad would you be?
My favorite example of this kind of story is when Michael Jordan spent Thanksgiving break with North Carolina teammate Buzz Peterson’s family. As the (possibly apocryphal) story goes, Michael was playing cards with Buzz’s grandmother, with nothing on the line, and cheated so he could beat her. If anyone else you knew did this, you’d call them an asshole and never invite them over again. But because it’s Michael Jordan, the man who went on to win six NBA titles, the story retroactively becomes meaningful and positive. It functions as a showcase of Michael’s drive and competitive nature. Without those titles though, standing on its own, the story is downright sad. What could be so broken inside somebody that they feel the need to cheat to beat an old lady at cards? But the world we live in is the world where Michael was a champion many times over, so we’re willing to forgive all kinds of behavior if it feeds into his legend.
Arthur Schopenhauer did eventually become one of the most influential philosophers of all time, so the letter from his mother seems quaint now. But if he failed, if he never produced his great works and instead languished in obscurity, he wouldn’t be Schopenhauer. He’d just be some guy named Arthur that was a dick to his mom. We don’t hear about the assholes who never made it. Nobody talks about them, nor would they have anything positive to say if they wanted to.
A lot of artists try to backdoor their way into success through pathological behavior. They think, “Kurt Cobain was depressed, so if I’m depressed I’ll be as good as Kurt Cobain.” Or “Richard Pryor was a broken mess, if I act like that and talk about it on stage I’m basically Richard Pryor.” Maybe these people should just focus on trying to be good without all of the negative habits. Odds are, you’re not Kurt Cobain. Hell, you’re probably not even the lead singer of the Gin Blossoms.
When it comes to the Schopenhauer example, I think it’s good have some level of delusion and ego when getting into your chosen field, whether it’s philosophy, the arts, or business. Life is too brutal to survive otherwise. But keep your opinions about yourself to yourself, and you’ll find that path forward much easier to traverse. I know I wish I could take back some of the things I said about other comedians, or the way I regarded my own comedy when I was younger. But I can’t, I can only modify my behavior moving forward. I do have a certain level of faith in my writing abilities, but for now I’ll just say that I’m the writer of an obscenely small Substack with a low double digit subscriber count, and I get enjoyment whenever I put something out there for (a very small amount of) people to read. That outlook should be enough to prevent anyone I love from writing to tell me what an absolute asshole I’m being.
