Schopenhauer and Love

Looking at The Metaphysics of Love today, it is easy to cast it aside as out-of-date ruminations from a bygone era. Schopenhauer claims the will to live and the will of the species are linked to biological instincts that instill in us a compulsion to mate. Love is reduced to the biological tendency to find a mate. A man (who is Schopenhauer's subject) and a woman will come together to reform the Platonic Ideal of the human species. Passionate love is more or less humans flouting their individual selves and taking on the heroic role of species-first reproduction. A man will run climb the tallest mountain, dodge bullets and endure cultural ostracism to fulfill his passionate desire to meld with the object of his desire (and compulsion). In popular literature of the times, such a man was honorable in his sacrifices for obtaining this love. Honor is a value that exists for the greater good of the species; the child that results from the strenuous courtship is the ultimate goal.

"The will of a man of this kind has become engulfed in that of the species, or the will of the species has obtained so great an ascendency over the will of the individual that if such a man cannot be effective in the manifestation of the first, he disdains to be so in the last. The individual in this case is too weak a vessel to bear the infinite longing of the will of the species concentrated upon a definite object. When this is the case suicide is the result, and
sometimes suicide of the two lovers; unless nature, to prevent this, causes insanity, which then enshrouds with its veil the consciousness of so hopeless a condition..."

Romeo and Juliet are but weak vessels for the continuity of the species, losing sight of the species in their extreme passion.

All of the talk of will of species and our inherent desire for biological satisfaction really seems to cheapen love, but maintaining its mystery is not Schopenhauer's goal. He does not discuss homosexual love and only mentions pedastry in passing and as a simple deprivation. One must wonder if love can exist outside of reproduction, Schopenhauer doesn't seem to allow it. Even marriage - the ultimate symbol of enduring love seems a bit of a sham.The most successful marriages come out of arrangement or friendship - passionate lovers are doomed to misery and hatred for each other.

Schopenhauer's laws of attraction seem quite absurd. That those who deviate from the Ideal (most of us) mate with our bodily and dispositional opposite in order to reform the Ideal. Two fat people are doomed to have fat children, while a fat person and a boney person are likely to have normal child. A bit too simple, isn't it?

How does Schopenhauer's argument hold up in our increasingly post-modern society?

I couldn't help but agree with some his ideas about the stereotypically most attractive mates. If anything, this shows how little our culture has changed from that of the early 19th century in some regards. Men are to be kind of heart and muscular. Their intelligence is not the most important aspect for women, who are drawn mainly to strength and courage. Indeed, in contemporary American media, the courageous and heavily armed warrior still wins out over the scrawny book learner, no matter how astute he is (much to the dismay of budding scholars such as I). For women, the mainstream ideal seems to be witty and sexy woman. Driving through Los Angeles I can't help but be bombarded with billboards of buxom women every time I go out. Advertisements for breast augmentations and plastic surgery abound. Schopenhauer's take on attraction and the physical characteristics of the female still holds in today's culture, the "upward or downward turn of the nose" can still make or break a female in Hollywood.

For Schopenhauer, men look for in women "a certain plumpness, in other words, a superabundance of the vegetative function, plasticity," adding "excessive thinness strikingly repels us." At first this seems to be a break with the times: in an age of mega-obesity - thin is in. But on further thought, a peculiar breed of fashion models are striking for their attenuated limbs, sunken cheeks, and jarringly inhuman features. In recent years there has been a public outcry to ban bone-thin models for their own health and out of fear that they may spur others to anorexia and bulimia in emulation of their supposedly glamorous identities.
























So it would seem to me that the door isn't shut on all of Schopenhauer's musings. Though many today eschew any sort of intrinsic biological desire for species perpetuation in explanations for human behavior, it does not seem completely absurd to me. This work (like most of its era) is limited by restricting most of love's agency to the heterosexual man and by scientifically obsolete ideas about heredity, biology and sex.