While you’re busy making other plans

Renewed from December 15, 2009

By Moristotle

Was John Lennon quoting Schopenhauer when he said:

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.¹

Ask Wednesday: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Who's asking?

By Morris Dean

As far as I can remember, I didn't wonder as a child why there was something rather than nothing, and I don't remember hearing anyone voice the question. I believe I came upon it for the first time at age 19, in a book by German philosopher Martin Heidegger –Introduction to Metaphysics (from a 1935 lecture).

Death, too, is what happens....

Death, too, is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

In memoriam Professor Stephen Gardner

Yesterday I asked a professional colleague whether she were looking forward to our association's next annual meeting. "Have you talked with Stephen yet whether he'll accompany you again?" And she replied:

Stephen died November 10th. He had a fall at home while he was alone and it caused a brain bleed that was left unchecked until I got home at 6 p.m. He never regained consciousness. Although he received brain surgery, his brain stem was damaged. Brain stems cannot be repaired. We removed life support and he moved on to the next phase of existence at 2 a.m.
    I still find it unbelievable. I’m spending Christmas with his mother, who is 95 years old and devastated to lose her only son. He was 61.
    You can see his obit (I guess you still can) at shellhousefuneralhome.com. [Yes, you still can: go there and search obituaries on "gardner."]
    So, I’m not really looking forward to much or anything right now.
    But, I’ll be there.

I, too, am planning to be there.

In memoriam Professor John E. Smith

A few minutes later yesterday I received an email from the assistant to the Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Yale University:

Hi Morris,
    Just thought you should know the sad news that John Smith passed away on December 7. He was 88, visiting his daughter in Washington, and it happened very quickly. We are planning a small funeral tomorrow [i.e., today] with a burial in the Grove Street Cemetery, but a large memorial service probably in March. Sorry to be the bearer of this news.
    Love from both to both,
    Pat

Pat became John Smith's secretary during my junior year at Yale, while I was his bursary student in the department. The first "both" refers to her and her husband Alan, who were very kind to me, sort of my big siblings away from my childhood home in California, the second "both" to me and my wife, who took Pat and Alan to lunch in New Haven in the summer of 1976.
    The last time I saw her or Professor Smith was at another lunch in New Haven, in June 1989, when I bought meals for them and a classmate (another of John Smith's bursary students), on the occasion of our 25th Yale Class Reunion.
    As I recorded on November 1, my last correspondence with Dr. Smith was to bear to him the news (unwittingly) of the death of his good friend, Professor Errol E. Harris.
    Professor Smith's obituary appears in The New York Times. I have walked by the Grove Street Cemetery many times.
    John Edwin Smith may have been making other plans when he died. I had certainly been making other plans, considering whether to ask him about something I was reading in Yalom's novel, The Schopenhauer Cure:

JES, do you agree with the opinion that Schopenhauer was a greater philosopher than Fichte and Hegel?

In memoriam a young person

And yesterday, too, as reported in The Durham Herald-Sun this morning:

Chapel Hill—...a UNC Chapel Hill freshman hospitalized at UNC Hospitals since November 20 with swine flu, has died.
    Hospital spokesman..., contacted late Wednesday night, could provide no further details, except to confirm the death.
    [The] 18-year-old dramatic arts major from Rhode Island had been on life support before she died, apparently from complications of the H1N1 virus.
    [Her] illness had garnered national attention, and thousands of well wishers had been following her ordeal on a Facebook page titled "Prayers for Lillian."

Who's busier making other plans than a college freshman?

Missing the bus stop....

But it was this morning that this codicil to Lennon came to me. It came to me on my quarter-mile walk back from getting off the bus to the stop that I'd missed because I'd been...busy making other plans.

...while you're busy making other plans

Was John Lennon quoting Schopenhauer when he said:

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans¹.

According to the character Philip, a "philosophical therapist" in Irvin D. Yalom's novel, The Schopenhauer Cure, quite a few others have "quoted" Schopenhauer:

And not only Thomas Mann but many other great minds acknowledged their debt to Arthur Schopenhauer. Tolstoy called Schopenhauer the "genius par excellence among men." To Richard Wagner he was a "gift from Heaven." Nietzsche said his life was never the same after purchasing a tattered volume of Schopenhauer in a used-book store in Leipzig and, as he put it, "letting the dynamic, dismal genius work on my mind." Schopenhauer forever changed the intellectual map of the Western World, and without him we would have had a very different and weaker Freud, Nietzsche, Hardy, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Ibsen, Conrad. [p. 50]

The Schopenhauer quotation [on p. 91 of The Schopenhauer Cure] that reminded me of John Lennon's famous statement was:

When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim [for the intervening time, temporarily]. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.

    Lennon's is easier to take and more memorable, isn't it? Without that final sentence.

But we need that sentence, to be reminded not to let our lives just slip by unappreciated while we're busy making other plans.
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1. He might have said this in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine about 1970. At any rate, a citation in a Google hit list included both the part of the quotation I searched on and a reference to Rolling Stone.

God, The Main True Thing

As I stepped off the bus this morning to walk to my office, I had what felt like an epiphany, an answer to a conundrum: The God Conundrum.
    I think it was provoked by the memory of an interchange I had over a period of months a few years ago with a devout Muslim named Maliha. For the last minute on the bus I had been regretting that I seemed to have cut myself off from Maliha by virtue of my having vigorously denied the truth of Islam.
    And I was likely thinking of being cut off because of just having read in Irvin D. Yalom's The Schopenhauer Cure how psychotherapy group member Philip has explicitly followed Schopenhauer in willing (like a porcupine) to cut himself off from others, but has been unsettled by recent interchanges into wondering whether he is right to follow Schopenhauer in this.
    Maliha had usually ended her emails by saying, "Take care of you." This reminded me that I care about Maliha too, as she seemed to care about me. She'd also a few times said that we were each of us on our own path to God, we had that in common. As I stepped off the bus, I must have been asking myself what was "God" that both a devout Muslim and an atheist could be on the path to it?

The answer came back at me so quickly and easily, it had that well-oiled feeling characteristic of epiphanies, the feeling that it's so clear and easy it has to be right. I'll try to express it, so you can judge for yourself.
    It came to me that God is The Main True Thing. Like Paul Tillich's "ultimate concern," which everyone has, "the main true thing" too is common to everyone; that is, to all "bipeds" (as Schopenhauer usually referred disdainfully to humans), to everyone with a human brain. We all want to (must) settle on what we regard as the main true thing.
    Many children just adopt as the main true thing whatever their parents have laid on them by virtue of the First Amendment, whether explicitly granted (as to U.S. citizens) or just assumed by cultural default (as in the Near East, if not in most countries). Others go on a quest for it, like Maliha and me; we're on a path, we don't think we're at the destination yet, we're still wending our way.

But there are two main branches of this path. Maliha has taken one, I the other. Her branch is roughly that there is a supernatural order that is more real (infinitely more real) than the natural order that we experience here on Earth during our eye-blink of a corporeal lifetime. And we can get in touch with this order, or at least align ourselves with it through moral and meditative practice. I understand that Maliha's path is to discipline herself in those practices.
    The other branch of The One True Thing path, the one that I have taken, is that there is no supernatural order, nothing "out there" or "above here" to get in touch with. Our eye-blink of a lifetime is all there is for each of us. Death is final. As Schopenhauer put it (from Epicurus apparently, according to Yalom in Staring at the Sun), "After our death we will be what we were before our birth." [quoted on p. 210 in Yalom's The Schopenhauer Cure]

Take care of you too, Maliha, on your path to The One True Thing. We are on it together, in our divergent senses of what The One True Thing is.

A sad irony of the First Amendment

Irvin D. Yalom is one of my favorite authors. Not only have two of his collections of "tales of psychotherapy" richly rewarded my reading¹, but also two and now a recently started third of his three novels², The Schopenhauer Cure, with dozens of quotations from the works of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) sprinkled throughout.
    The theme of the book might be phrased, "how to face death," same as Yalom's most recent non-fiction book, which I read a few weeks ago: Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. In The Schopenhauer Cure, Yalom fictionalizes himself as of course also having to face death. Sounds grim? Well, know this: it's a compelling read for discriminating readers.

Anyway, what's this about the First Amendment? And just what is the First Amendment?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [emphasis mine]; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

    In both of Yalom's books cited above, religion is acknowledged as having a use for people in facing death—even though Yalom will have nothing to do with it personally. So, on the first page of Chapter 8, Yalom places this quotation from Schopenhauer:

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection [emphasis mine], the highest dignity and eminence...and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas. [p. 55]

Therein lies the irony, that the United States Constitution, in protecting "religious freedom," practically denies religious freedom (including the ability to say "no" to religion) to children!
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1. I have read these collections: Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989) and Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy (1999).
2. His other novels are: When Nietzsche Wept (1992) and Lying on the Couch (1996). The first has been made into a movie (2007), with Armand Assante in the title role.

Theologically speaking, that is

For her light piece, "Dinner Companions," inside the back cover of the March 8, 2009 New York Times Book Review, Leanne Shapton asked some writers what authors they would take to dinner. Daniel Kehlmann replied:

Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation is the most enjoyable, and the funniest, of all the major works of philosophy, perhaps because it's the bleakest—a reminder that a world in which living beings have to survive by eating each other can hardly be called a good place [theological emphasis mine].