1. Philosophers have not traditionally been impressed: the tribulations of love have appeared too childish to warrant investigation, the subject better left to poets and hysterics. It is not for philosophers to speculate on hand-holding and scented letters. Schopenhauer was puzzled by the 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 disregarded by philosophers, and lies before us as raw and untreated material.
The neglect seemed the result of a pompous denial of a side of life which violated man’s rational self-image. Schopenhauer insisted on the awkward reality:
Love … interrupts at every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes perplexes for a while even the greatest minds. It does not hesitate … to interfere with the negotiations of statesmen and the investigations of the learned. It knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts … It sometimes demands the sacrifice of … health, sometimes of wealth, position and happiness.
2. Like the Gascon essayist born 255 years before him, Schopenhauer was concerned with what made man – supposedly the most rational of all creatures – less than reasonable. There was a set of Montaigne’s works in the library of the apartment at Schöne Aussicht. Schopenhauer had read how reason could be dethroned by a fart, a big lunch or an ingrowing toenail, and concurred with Montaigne’s view that our minds were subservient to our bodies, despite our arrogant faith in the contrary.
3. But Schopenhauer went further. Rather than alighting on loose examples of the dethronement of reason, he gave a name to a force within us which he felt invariably had precedence over reason, a force powerful enough to distort all of reason’s plans and judgements, and which he termed the will-to-life (
Wille zum
Leben
) – defined as an inherent drive within human beings to stay alive and reproduce. The will-to-life led even committed depressives to fight for survival when they were threatened by a shipwreck or grave illness. 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 the will-to-life that drove people to lose their reason over comely passengers encountered across the aisles of long-distance trains.
4. Schopenhauer might have resented the disruption of love (it isn’t easy to proffer grapes to schoolgirls); but he refused to conceive of it as either disproportionate or accidental. It was entirely commensurate with love’s function:
Why all this noise and fuss? Why all the urgency, uproar, anguish and exertion?… Why should such a trifle play so important a role …? It is no trifle that is here in question; on the contrary, the importance of the matter is perfectly in keeping with the earnestness and ardour of the effort. The ultimate aim of all love-affairs … is actually 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? Neither communion nor sexual release, understanding nor entertainment. The romantic dominates life because:
What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation … the existence and special constitution of the human race in times to come.
It is because love directs us with such force towards the second of the will-to-life’s two great commands that Schopenhauer judged it the most inevitable and understandable of our obsessions.
(Ill. 20.3)
5. The fact that the continuation of the species is seldom in our minds when we ask for a phone number is no objection to the theory. We are, suggested Schopenhauer, split into conscious and unconscious selves, the unconscious governed by the will-to-life, the conscious subservient to it and unable to learn of all its plans. Rather than a sovereign entity, the conscious mind is a partially sighted servant of a dominant, child-obsessed will-to-life:
[The intellect] does not penetrate into the secret workshop of the will’s decisions. It is, of course, a confidant of the will, yet a confidant that does not get to know everything.
The intellect understands only so much as is necessary to promote reproduction – which may mean understanding very little:
[It] remains … much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will.
An exclusion which explains how we may consciously feel nothing more than an intense desire to see someone again, while unconsciously being driven by a force aiming at the reproduction of the next generation.
Why should such deception even be necessary? Because, for Schopenhauer, we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.
6. The analysis surely violates a rational self-image, but at least it counters suggestions that romantic love is an avoidable departure from more serious tasks, that it is forgivable for youngsters with too much time on their hands to swoon by moonlight and
sob beneath bedclothes, but that it is unnecessary and demented for their seniors to neglect their work
because they have glimpsed a face on a train
. By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer’s theory of the will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behaviour to which love so often makes us subject.
The man and woman are seated at a window-table in a Greek restaurant in north London. A bowl of olives lies between them, but neither can think of a way to remove the stones with requisite dignity and so they are left untouched.
(Ill. 20.4)
She had not been carrying a ballpoint on her, but had offered him a pencil. After a pause, she said how much she hated long train-journeys, a superfluous remark which had given him the slender encouragement he needed. She was not a cellist, nor a graphic designer, rather a lawyer specializing in corporate finance in a city firm. She was originally from Newcastle, but had been living in London for the past eight years. By the time the train pulled into Euston, he had obtained a phone number and an assent to a suggestion of dinner.
A waiter arrives to take their order. She asks for a salad and the sword-fish. She has come directly from work, and is wearing a light-grey suit and the same watch as before.
(Ill. 20.5)
They begin to talk. She explains that at weekends, her favourite activity is rock-climbing. She started at school, and has since been on expeditions to France, Spain and Canada. She describes the thrill of hanging hundreds of feet above a valley floor, and camping in the high mountains, where in the morning, icicles have formed inside the tent. Her dinner companion feels dizzy on the second floor of apartment buildings. Her other passion is dancing, she loves the energy and sense of freedom. When she can, she stays up all night. He favours proximity to a bed by eleven thirty. They talk of work. She has been involved in a patent case. A kettle designer from Frankfurt has alleged copyright infringement against a British company. The company is liable under section 60,1,a of the Patents Act of 1977.