The search for love is the most important thing in life for most people. This was also the case for Arthur Schopenhauer (°1788 Danzig). According to him, it is a good choice to build your life around your great love, because nothing is more important. The mistake he believes most people make is that love has nothing to do with happiness.
Table of contents
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Love is all
- Why we fall in love
- Love and happiness
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer grew up in a prosperous merchant family. He was born in Danzig in 1788, then a Prussian city, now Gdansk in Poland. When he was five the family moved to Hamburg. Ever since he was young, Arthur wanted to study. His father gave young Arthur a choice: either he would travel with his parents through Europe and then become a trader, or he would continue to go to school and then go to university. He chose the first. According to some, he became very pessimistic in his philosophy and worldview because that journey confronted him with a lot of poverty and misery.
Schopenhauer found happiness in the absence of pain, frustration and sighs. He was a hedonist: someone who strives to have as much fun as possible because that makes him happy.
Schopenhauer himself was not married and lived most of his life alone. He was rather misogenistic: a misogynist. He was intelligent and very rich, but that did not bring him success with women . In 1821 he met a young singer. She fell in love with him, and they had a child together. But Schopenhauer never wanted to marry her, after ten years the relationship ended, but Schopenhauer continued to look for love in what he wrote.
Love is all
Despite the fact that he failed to find it himself, love remained central to his philosophy. Love is not an afterthought, it is the strongest emotion that can take over your life. Therefore, according to Schopenhauer, we should not be surprised at the despair and obsession that love can bring. If you do not recognize the pain of rejection, you cannot realize how strong love is in acceptance. Nothing is more important than love, because the survival of humanity depends on it.
Why we fall in love
We all imagine a beautiful image of how the ideal partner will bring us happiness. Schopenhauer thought differently. He believed that we only look for that ideal partner for one reason: to have children. This subconscious biological instinct ensures that, no matter how romantically we imagine love, we look for the ideal partner to have a child with, not to become happy with. This instinct must remain unconscious, because no one wants to consciously take on the burden of creating the next generation. He sees the coming together of two lovers as the birth of a new individual.
According to Schopenhauer, choosing partners does not happen by chance. We choose a partner who we think will be a good parent. According to him, we are therefore looking for someone who makes up for our own shortcomings. In this way, major deviations will be corrected. For example, someone with a big nose will choose someone with a small nose, so the child will have a normal nose.
Love and happiness
Having children without major deviations, with your partner opposite in many respects, does not bring happiness, according to Schopenhauer. Being happy and having and raising children are two completely different things for him. Love blinds us into thinking that love and happiness are one and the same for as long as it takes to raise children. And all in the interest of humanity.
read more
- To be happy according to Epicurus
- Hans Achterhuis – The utopia of the free market
- Solipsism: what is real and what is illusion?
- Theo Jansen and the Strandbeests: art or science?