Schopenhauer - What he has to teach us about love

According to Arthur Schopenhauer, we are biologically driven to seek out unsuitable partners. So if you are unlucky in love, don't take it to heart - happiness was never part of the bigger plan!

It is a warm spring day. A man is attempting to work on his book on a train between London and Birmingham. But the man has been unable to think even a coherent sentence since a woman entered the carriage and seated herself opposite him. This woman has short brown hair and wears jeans, trainers and a canary-yellow sweater. He notices she has little freckles around her nose. He imagines caressing the back of her neck, sliding his hand inside the sleeve of her pullover, watching her fall asleep beside him...

He speculates that she may be a teacher or a graphic designer, or a doctor specialising in genetic research. He considers asking her for the time, for directions to the loo... He longs for a train crash - he would guide her safely outside, where they would be given lukewarm tea and stare into each other's eyes. But because the train seems disinclined to derail, the man cannot help leaning over to ask the angel if she might have a spare ballpoint pen as his dastardly fountain pen has decided to run out of ink...

Philosophers have not traditionally been interested by the tribulations of love. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was puzzled by this indifference:

'We should be surprised that a matter that generally plays such an important part in the life of man has hitherto been almost entirely ignored by philosophers, and lies before us as raw and untreated material'

The neglect seemed strange to Schopenhauer. He wondered how it was that Philosophers had not thought about love. Because love:

'...interrupts at every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes perplexes for a while even the greatest minds... It knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts...'

Like Michel de Montaigne, Schopenhauer was concerned with what made man less than reasonable. He concurred that our minds were subservient to our bodies, despite our arrogant faith to the contrary. But Schopenhauer went further. He gave a name to a force within us which he felt invariably had precedence over reason: the will-to-life (Wille zum Leben) - defined as an inherent drive within human beings to stay alive and reproduce. It ensured that the most cerebral, career-minded individuals would be seduced by the sight of gurgling infants, or if they remained unmoved, that they were likely to conceive a child anyway, and love it fiercely on arrival. And it was this will-to-life that drove people to lose their reason over pretty passengers on long-distance train journeys from Birmingham to London...

Schopenhauer refused to think of love as something trifle:

'It is no trifle that is in question here... The ultimate aim of all love affairs ...is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it.'

And what is the aim of love? Neither communion nor sexual release, nor understanding or entertainment. Love dominates life because:

'What is decided by love it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation...'

The fact that the continuation of the species is seldom in our minds when we ask for the phone number of a girl we've met in a club is irrelevent. The intellect understands only so much as is necessary to promote reproduction - which may mean understanding very little: an exclusion, which explains how we may consciously feel nothing more than an intense desire to see someone again. Why should such deception even be necessary? Because, for Schopenhauer, we would not reliably agree to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds. And when we fall in love, we do invariably lose our minds! Think about it. It is total madness to think that this one person, that you have just happened to fall in love with, is out of the 2 billion or so other suitable inhabitants on earth, the only person right for you. Such exclusivity! It's irrational. But as Schopenhauer said Love is not meant to be rational.

	One of the most profound mysteries of love is "Why him?" and "Why her?" And why, despite good intentions, were we unable to develop a sexual interest in certain other people, who were just as attractive and might even have been more convenient to live with?
	This choosiness did not surprise Schopenhauer. Our will-to-life drives us towards people who will raise our chances of producing beautiful and intelligent offspring, and repels us from those who lower these same chances. So we're NOT selecting people we can live happily with. We're selecting people who will give us healthy offspring.
	Since our parents inevitably made errors in their courtships, we are unlikely to be ideally balanced ourselves. We have typically come out too tall or too short, too masculine or too feminine; our noses are large, our chins small. The will-to-life must therefore push us towards people who can, on account of their imperfections, cancel out our own (a large nose combined with a button nose promises a perfect nose). Schopenhauer liked predicting pathways of attraction. Short women will fall in love with tall men, but rarely will you see tall men go for tall women (they unconsciously fear the production of giants). Feminine men will often be drawn to boyish women with short hair:

'The neutralisation of the two individualities... requires that the particular degree of his manliness shall correspond exactly to the particular degree of her womanliness, so that the one-sidedness of each exactly cancels that of the other.'

Unfortunately, the theory of attraction led Schopenhauer to a conclusion so bleak, perhaps readers about to be married should leave the next few paragraphs unread; namely, that a person who is highly suitable for our future child is almost never very suitable for us (though we cannot realise it at the time because we have been blindfolded by the will-to-life). Happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically different projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years.

'Love... casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be hateful, contemptible and even abhorrent to the lover. But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him... Only from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial fiends...'

So back to the train. She has offered you her ballpoint pen. You decide to take a risk and ask her out for a coffee once the train arrives in London. She say's yes! Over coffee you discuss everything under the sun: life, the universe, and everything. She talks about her family. You talk about yours. She tells you what she does and you tell her what you do. You talk music, books, movies, food and even a little philosophy. Wow! You think. She's perfect. Then she says she has to leave. You give her your number and email address and she promises to phone you. But ten days later she still hasn't rung. Nor has she sent an email. It seems you were duped. You may have found her perfect but not she you. The philosopher offers consolation if we are rejected by the pretty lady on the train: our pain is normal he says! A force powerful enough to push us towards child-rearing could not vanish without devastation. What is more, we are not inherently unlovable. Our characters are not repellent, nor our faces abhorrent. The union collapsed because we were unfit to produce a balanced child with that particular person. One day we will meet someone who will find us wonderful (because our chin and their chin make a desirable combination!).

We should in time learn to forgive our rejectors. They may have appreciated our qualities; but their will-to-life did not. We should respect the edict from nature against procreation that every rejection contains. We should draw consolation from the thought that a lack of love might only produce:

'a badly organised, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself.'

There were many works of natural science in Schopenhauer's library. He felt particular sympathy for the mole, a stunted monstrosity dwelling in damp narrow corridors, but doing everything in its power to perpetuate itself. The philosopher did not have to spell out the parallels. We pursue love affairs, chat in cafés with prospective partners and have children, with as much choice in the matter as moles or ants - and are rarely any happier. He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

'Much would have been gained if through timely advice young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.'

We do have one advantage over moles. We can go to the theatre, the opera and the concert hall, and we can read novels and philosophy - here is a supreme source of relief from the demands of the will-to-life. Schopenhauer admired Goethe because he had turned so many of the pains of love into knowledge, most famously in The Sorrows of Young Werther, a story of unrequited love suffered by a young man. It simultaneously described the love affairs of 1000s of its readers. There is consolation in realising that our case is only one of thousands. Of a person who can achieve such objectivity, Schopenhauer remarks:

'He accordingly will conduct himself... more as a knower than as a sufferer.'

We must, between periods of grappling in the dark and turning down blind alleyways, endeavour always to transform our tears into self-knowledge. The art of living and the art of love, much has the sage Schopenhauer to teach us on these things!

Read Schopenhauer. Live. Love. Learn. Explore.

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The many-coloured puppet show

He who has given it a modicum of thought knows the truth of what I am about to say: All the movement in this world. The throbbing, bobbing, and heaving. The running, jumping and squirming. The swerving black clouds of locusts. The roaring of lions. The show of shoals of fish. The skittering of antelopes. The scuttling of crabs. The muteness of a caterpillar being eaten alive from within by a parasite. The oceanic depth charges of a whale call. The multiplying of bacteria. The cry of a baby. The blooming of flowers. The growth of grass. The teeming industry of soil worms. The kissing of lovers. The rigorous screams of sex. The braying of donkeys. The beating of billions of hearts. The opening of pores. The chatter of lovers. The growth of nails. The screams of death. The scream of Eureeeka! The gift of genius. All this and more. This motion of life is produced and kept up by hunger and the sexual impulse - aided a little by boredom. These are the three prongs, nay the engines that drive the industry of the motion of life on earth. All this is finite existence. Restlessness. Constant striving. Ceaseless wanting. Unquenchable desiring but never fulfilling. Ti's all an endless trouble you know. Platos: always becoming never being.

But there is another existence. Infinite. Unchanging. Requiring no help from outside. Eternally at rest and calm. Never coming into being nor passing away. Without change. Without time. Such an existence should be the aim of every mortal. It is an existence that can be had. The denial of the Will-to-life opens the way to it. Deny the Will and such an existence is yours. Now how to deny the Will? Now that is the question...

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Views from an every-day mystic

I am what they call an every-day mystic. Every day for me is special, for I know, in the very depths of my being, that every evening, I am poorer by a day.

What has been, no longer is; it as little exists as that which has never been. When you die it will be as if you had never been born. But everything that is, is the next moment, regarded as having been. Thus, the only thing that marks out the present as special is its immediate reality. To his astonishment, a man all of a sudden finds himself existing after countless thousands of years of nonexistence and, after an all too brief time, must again pass into nonexistence just as long. The heart of man says that this can't be right. But it is.

Of every event in our life, only for one moment can it be said that it is; for ever afterwards we must say that it was. As I said earlier: every evening we are poorer by a day. On the consideration of the foregoing it is clear, that to enjoy the present moment and to make this the object of our life is the greatest wisdom because the present alone is real, everything else being the play of thought.

But we could just as well call the enjoyment of the present as an aim of life a great folly. Why? Because that which in the next moment no longer exists, and vanishes as completely as a fart in the wind, is never worth a serious effort.

The fact that time always shifts us from state to state, from the present to another present, and then ultimately to our deaths, is indication, if any were needed, that when we strive - we are striving towards something that will never be ours. Our fortune will one day leave us. Yet we strive for it as if we will take it with us to the after-life. Love will one day depart us. Health will eventually forsake us. What then do we struggle for? Phantoms?

But it is not all doom and gloom! To be alive - here, now, is inevitable. To be alive and know it, is ineffable. To be you or me, is magical.

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder - 'Peasant Wedding'

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-69) was the greatest of the Flemish sixteenth century masters. His 'kind' of paintings were scenes from peasant life. He painted peasants going about their daily lives: peasants merrymaking, peasants feasting, peasants working and peasants frolicking. It was a custom at the time to regard the country yokel as a figure of fun. I don't think Bruegel did this because of any inherent snobbery but more because in the rustic peasant; in the country bumpkin, man and nature is less disguised and covered up. There is no veneer of artificiality and convention that you see in the affected manners of gentlemen and gentlewomen of the cities. Thus, when they wanted to show up the folly of humankind artists like Bruegel often took low life as their subject. And in those days you didn't get as low-life as peasant life!

One of the most perfect (and one of my favourite) of Bruegel's human comedy pictures is his famous painting of a country wedding (see above). Like most pictures it loses a great deal in reproduction, so I've endeavoured to show close-up details of it below to illustrate my points. The feast takes place in a barn and you can see the straw stacked up high in background. The bride sits in front of a piece of blue cloth, with a kind of crown suspended over her head. She sits quietly, with folded hands and a grin of utter contentment on her stupid face (see below).

[close-up detail No.1]

Look at her face in the close-up. Her cheeks are flushed pink, her face is covered in scabs and her hands and nails are filthy, yet look how happy and content she looks! Presumably the women to her right and the old man next to her are her parents. And to her left, the man farther back, who is so busy gobbling his food with his spoon jammed to his face, may be the bridegroom. Look at him. What a comic figure he cuts! Most of the people at the table are concentrated in eating and drinking. In the left hand corner of the main picture you can see a man pouring beer into jugs - while the two men with white aprons are carrying ten more platefuls of pie or porridge on an improvised tray. One of the guests below the bride passes the plates to the table. But there is so much more going on.

There is the crowd in the background to the left trying to get in. There seems to be a rush to grab some food before it runs out. I have seen such scenes myself at village weddings before. There are the musicians, one of them with a pathetic, forlorn and hungry look in his eyes, as he watches the food being carried past: there are the outsiders at the corner of the table, a friar and the magistrate, engrossed in their own conversation; and then my favourite detail is shown below:

[close-up detail No.2]

The child in the foreground, who has got hold of a plate, and a feathered cap much too large for its little head, and who is completely absorbed in licking the delicious food - wiping the plate clean with its little finger - a picture of innocent greed. I love this picture. To me it represents our true natures. Yes we're greedy. Yes we're filthy. Yes we're ignorant. But encapsulated within that image of the innocent greedy child and the wedding guests so absorbed in their food is the human condition of simple rustic folk. This painting makes me want to embrace mankind. It makes me want to give mankind a big wet kiss on the cheeks and say: 'I love you all. Be you filthy. Be you greedy. Be you bone-idle. Be you stupid. Be you ignorant. Be you whatever you may be - I love you all!'

The World Is My Representation

The World Is My Representation. Never was a more profound thought brought into existence by the human mind. Never did the tongue speak the truth with such grace. Never did five words, strung together as they are in nine syllables, spell out the human condition with such ease. The world is my representation - and he who understands this understands much. A man achieves a sort of awakening from the deep slumber of life when he suddenly realises that The World is his Representation.

This is a profound truth that many never get a sniff or inkling of - destined, as they are, to live their lives in deep slothful sleep on earth. The heavy footprints of sleep walkers trample the road of history. The vast majority of those that have ever lived, and who do currently live, and will live - are destined to be ignorant of the greatest feat of armchair philosophy. A few though wake up from the turgid sleep of life; the cycle of everyday circadian rhythms; the morose trudge to work; the stupid and pointless chat-chat with brain-numbed folk; the evenings spent in front of a screen watching images run around, and look abouts themselves anew and say: "Wow! Look at the world. What a marvelous thing it is. I think I shall try and gets-a-grips with it!'.

And a lucky few do get a-grips with it. And it is they who then utter the immortal wisdom laced words: the world is my representation. What does it mean to say that the world is my representation? - what is this profundity of which I speak? What is this sentence I continuously jabber about like a demented ape? Well let me explain:

What are you doing right now?

You are reading this.

Through what are you reading it?

Through your skull.

What are you using to view this?

Your eyes.

What do your eyes do?

They absorb electromagnetic radiation of particular limited frequencies and channel the data to the brain.

What does the brain do?

The brain sorts the data so that different frequencies appear different to us.

How do they appear different to us?

In the form of colours.

Do you think colours actually exist out there in the world outside of our bodies? Get real! Leaves are not really green. The sky is not really blue. Those flowers are not really pink. The sun is not really yellow. Summer is not really hot and there is no such thing as winter cold. None of these things in the form of the sensations in which we experience them actually exist out there independently of us. The sensations of colour, heat, cold, time, space, causality, are all formed, nay constructed, within our heads by our brain. In short what we see and experience of life doesn't actually exist out there independently of us.

Take heat for example - what is it? When we say something is hot what do we mean? We mean it feels hot. Yes, but the feeling of hotness is created by the brain. What is heat? When is one thing hotter than another? When its molecules are moving about faster. For example the water molecules in a glass of boiling water are moving about faster then those at room temperature. Our skin detects this change or difference in rate of movement, passes the data to the brain, which then 'creates' the sensation of hotness which we all experience and are familiar with. The only thing that distinguishes summertime from wintertime is that in the former the molecules in the air are moving about faster. They are moving about faster because they have more energy. They have more energy because more infra-red radiation reaches them. More infra-red radiation reaches them because the earth is tilted towards the sun in summer and away from the sun in winter. In short: everything you love about summer doesn't actually exist out there!

So what does exist out there in itself? What is the reality - the thing in itself - independent of our subjective sensation, that exists out there? There is no way to know. To know means to pass it through our senses and our brains - and as I've just said, our senses and brains interpret the data, put a spin on it (like spin doctors). The truth is that independently of our brains and senses there simply is no way of knowing what lies out there as a thing in itself. Hence, why I began this blog entry with: the world is my representation.

The world is my representation. And the world is your representation. Indeed the world is our representation. The world as I (and you see it) is constructed within our heads. The representation is not what's really out there. Nor is everything out there represented. The representation is different for every species. Dogs, for example, have a much more sensitive 'smell' gamut then we do. We can't smell emotions like fear, trepidation, happiness. But dogs can. Bats 'see' through ultrasound. Bees see ultraviolet. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Time, matter, causality, space - all are constructs of the brain. Yes there is something out there. There must be something out there because raw data from this something passes into our eyes, ears, noses, tongues and skin. But what this something is - this thing in itself - we can never know. Because to know, to think, to interpret, is to pass it through our subjective selves. Objectively we can never know the world as it is. Because 'as it is' is a meaningless concept outside of our subjective selves as sensing beings. As sensing - seeing beings we bring the world we experience into existence. It doesn't exist 'ready made' out there waiting for us to just come along and view it.

The world is my representation. Welcome to the real world! Welcome to my world!

[To be continued...in small little doses the brain can swallow]

Coming soon...Adventures in Transcendental Idealism!

The life that really matters is the internal one lived inside your head. This includes, for example, the sort of stuff you think about on the train to work, or the ideas that come your way whenever you have a spare moment. Your inner life is populated by what you think about when practical questions of food, toilet, roof, sex and girlfriend have been dealt with. Your internal world is a much richer, deeper, magical and altogether much more exciting and satisfying place then the external world of people and their banal conversations, their instant-coffee niceties, and their pay-as-you-go pieties (misanthrope? what me? always!).

Do you know how to tell whether the internal life you are living is extraordinary? Let me tell you how: you can tell if your internal life is extraordinary if you continue to assimilate new ideas as you journey through life. If on this journey you are not afraid to jettison old ideas for new one's. If you are constantly surprised by life (by the good and the bad). If the world appears to you as a mystery itching to be understood and solved. If you have a voracious appetite for new experiences. IF YOU ARE NEVER BORED.

If you are never bored then your inner life is indeed extraordinary. If you are never bored and spend a lot of time thinking - then you can count yourself amongst the most fortunate people on the earth. Forget the rich! Forget the famous! Forget the gorgeous and the plastic fantastic! For if you are never bored then; and only then, can you say, that your entire subject of study, nay your entire occupation and raison d'etre, is life itself. There is one final essential item that will guarantee a deep inner and extraordinary life, and that is if you discover the doctrine of 'Transcendental Idealism' - and get it. And by get it I mean understand it truly. For there are many charlatans who think they get it, but they don't really get it. Some of these include university professors at philosophy faculties in prestigious institutions. I'm certainly not a university professor and nor do I hold a chair in philosophy, but nonetheless I certainly do get it, and you should count yourself lucky, for you have a wonderful teacher to teach you; what is perhaps, the hardest thing to wrap your mind around in all philosophy: Transcendental Idealism.

Transcendental Idealism is not some higher state of mind attainable through the consumption of hallucinogenic drugs and magic mushrooms! Oh no! Baby I don't do drugs. Not in the conventional sense anyway (not unless I'm on Freak Street in Kathmandu and wanna go all Eastern and Karma Sutra). Transcendental Idealism (as I shall show you later) is the greatest gift that Philosophy has bestowed upon mankind. It may even be one of the crowning achievements of the human mind. Once you understand it fully (but be warned that it does take time, patience and hard mental graft to fully assimilate the ideas mainly because they are so counter intuitive to the human brain) you will suddenly appear into the world, as if from a dark cave into the light (like Mohammed and his vision of the Arch Angel Gabriel), and once you emerge into the light - your entire life having been spent in darkness before, you will view the world as if for the first time; as if a cataract has been removed from your eyes.

Transcendental Idealism was not developed by one person. Rather it is the combined effort of some of the greatest thinkers that have ever lived from the Greeks to German Enlightenment thinkers (though it is arguable that one man did make the biggest contribution to it). Xenophane, Plato, Berkeley, Hume, Immanuel Kant and Schopenhauer are the luminous drugs you take to get you there. And when you get there? Boy! Will the wool be pulled from your eyes and the world - the reality you think you live in - the world you think you inhabit, will wash away in the sand and what will remain will be a truth that will haunt you and energise you and inspire you and never fail to surprise you, till your last dying breath. I mean it. Watch this space. Unreality or rather Uberreality is about to bite you up the ass.