'Loveless of Villars'

The text below, about Schopenhauer, is is a short extract from an article by Alain de Botton, published in the Sunday Telegraph Magazine on 26th March 2000, and they retain full copyright.

It's true that philosophers have not traditionally been impressed by this kind of thing. But one great philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was puzzled by the indifference - and wanted to correct it. He believed that people get married because they are driven by a biological urge to produce the next generation. We fall in love with people whom biology believes will help us make good children. But Schopenhauer then added a pessimistic idea - which could prove oddly consoling. He claimed that a person suitable for our child is almost never suitable for us (we cannot realise it because we have been blindfolded by biology).

"That convenience and passionate love should go hand in hand is the rarest stroke of good fortune", observed Schopenhauer. The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for some years. We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends. We might well ask why this is helpful to someone who is in a marriage that's gone wrong. Schopenhauer would say that at least their kind of unhappiness is "normal". It's not your fault, it's the fault of the way that we're constructed.

Schopenhauer's library contained many works of natural science and he often read of ants, beetles, bees, flies, grasshoppers, moles and birds, and observed, with compassion and puzzlement, how these creatures displayed an ardent, senseless commitment ot life. He felt particular sympathy for the mole, a stunted monstrosity dwelling in damp, narrow corridors, who rarely saw the light of day and whose offspring looked like gelatinous worms - but who still did everything in its power to survive and perpetuate itself.

Every creature on earth seemed to Schopenhauer to be equally committed to an equally meaningless existence. We pursue love affairs, chat in cafés with propsective partners and have children with as much choice in the matter as moles and 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.

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1. Leter from Renata, 5th May 2000
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