Hi all, An interesting article (not the one on Market Indicators) Hope you don't mind if I put it here. Tara
Sex and Schopenhauer

According to the German philosopher, we are biologically driven to seek out unsuitable partners. So if you are unlucky in love, says Alain de Botton in this extract from his new book, don't take it to heart - happiness was never part of the plan.


IT is a warm spring day. A man is attempting to work on a train between Edinburgh and London. But the man has been unable to hold a coherent thought since a woman entered the carriage and seated herself across the aisle. She reminds the man of a portrait by Christen Kobke of Mrs Hoegh-Guldberg (though he cannot recall either of these names), which he saw, and felt strangely moved and saddened by, in a museum in Denmark a few years before.
But unlike Mrs Hoegh-Guldberg, this woman has short brown hair and wears jeans, trainers and a canary-yellow sweater. He notices a large sports-watch on her pale wrist. 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 cellist 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. It feels like jumping off a very high bridge.

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

1. "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 self-denial. 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 knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts . . . '

2. Like 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.

3. 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 comely passengers on long-distance trains.

4. Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either disproportionate or accidental:

"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? 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 . . ."

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 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: 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 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 avoidable. By conceiving of love as a biological inevitability, Schopenhauer's theory invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behaviour of a lover.

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 dignity and so they are left untouched.

She had not been carrying a ballpoint, but had offered him a pencil. She was not a cellist, but a lawyer specializing in corporate finance. By the time the train pulled into Euston, he had obtained a phone number and an assent to a suggestion of dinner.

A waiter takes their order. She asks for a salad and the swordfish. She is wearing a light-grey suit and the same watch as before.

They begin to talk. She explains that at weekends, her favourite activity is rock-climbing. Her dinner companion feels dizzy on the second floor of apartment buildings. Her other passion is dancing; when she can, she stays up all night. He favours proximity to a bed by 11.30pm. They talk of work. She has been involved in a patent case. He does not follow the lengthy account, but is convinced of her intelligence and their superlative compatibility.

1. 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 others, who were as attractive and might have been more convenient to live with?

2. 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.

3. Since our parents inevitably made errors in their courtships, we are unlikely to be ideally balanced ourselves. We have typically come out too tall, too masculine, 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 tall men with tall women (their unconscious fearing 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."

4. 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 (though we cannot realise it at the time because we have been blindfolded by the will-to-life) very suitable for us. Happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting 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 one day, a boyish woman and a girlish man will approach the altar with motives neither they, nor anyone (save a smattering of Schopenhauerians at the reception), will have fathomed. Only later, when the will's demands are assuaged and a robust boy is kicking a ball around a suburban garden, will the ruse be discovered. The couple will part or pass dinners in hostile silence.

The man pays for dinner and asks, with studied casualness, if it might be an idea to repair to his flat for a drink. She smiles and stares at the floor. "That would be lovely, it really would," she says, "but I have to get up early to catch a flight to Frankfurt. Maybe another time though." Another smile.

Despair is alleviated by a promise that she will call from Germany, perhaps on the very day of her return. But there is no call until late on the appointed day.

She says that the flight has been delayed, that he shouldn't wait. There follows a pause before the worst is confirmed. Things are a little complicated in her life right now; she will phone him again once her head is clearer.

1. The philosopher offers consolation for rejection: our pain is normal. A force powerful enough to push us towards child-rearing could not vanish without devastation.

2. 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).

3. We should in time learn to forgive our rejectors. They may have appreciated our qualities; but their will-to-life did not.

4. 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".

For A time, the man is beset by melancholy. At the weekend, he takes a walk in Battersea Park, and sits on a bench overlooking the Thames. He has with him a paperback edition of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.

There are couples pushing prams and leading young children by the hand. A little girl in a blue dress covered in chocolate points up to a plane descending towards Heathrow. "Daddy, is God in there?" she asks, but Daddy is in a hurry and says he doesn't know. A four-year-old boy drives his tricycle into a shrub and wails for his mother, who has just shut her eyes on a rug spread on a patch of grass. She requests that her husband assist the child. He gruffly replies that it is her turn . . . An elderly couple on an adjacent bench silently share an egg sandwich.

1. Schopenhauer asks us not to be surprised by the misery. We should not, as part of a couple or a parent, ask ourselves what is the point of being alive.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 thousands of its readers (Napoleon was said to have read the novel nine times).

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 digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge.

The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton (Hamish Hamilton £14.99rrp)