A DISQUIETING DISGUISE: Love, Biology and Schopenhauer
for Brooke Dubbert
I. Fragments (towards a theory of love that philosophy desperately needs)… (not to necessarily be read in order) …
Humans once discovered that this world itself was not the creation of an all-loving being. 200 years later, we are yet to realize that love itself is not the creation of an all-loving being. Such desire is not a desire for happiness, but instead, the desire for something much larger.
Like the loss of our human-centered beliefs, this theory too contains the opaque texture of physiology, of bodies mourning without words, and the quiet lunging-forward of desiring bodies in space.
Rather, this world appears to be the creation of a quixotic-devil, Milton’s “intellectual athlete,” tangling webs of deceit, leaving paths of suffering, and giving excuse / legitimation to the worst horrors. Love too, it would appear to most of us, is this same beastly-contortionist: tangling our lives, leaving a mess … leaving us asking for help.
Philosophy, born about the same time as civilized-technologies, once had a distance from it (albeit a connection) and prided itself also on offering help not just to the physical body, but to the injured soul. Not just plows, but ideas are needed. Things, philosophers said, can be understood using reason, thought, observation, argument. By and by, ‘love’ lost its centrifugal force in philosophy. Technology came to dominate philosophical thinking.
Hardened from the inside out, clouded by its own interception, blinded by its own design, philosophy erects a crusty necklace with a heart on the end, while a silent heart beats silently within the body cage.
So, then, what can be offered to those suffering under the weight of this burden we call love? What consolation can given the heart-stricken? What anecdote can counterpoint an unhappy story?
To posit such a theory of love is no mere intellectual exercise – it address (and perhaps redresses) the authors own contorted-longings, those cryptic memories, those frozen fears lodged into the meat of ones own brain.
When not inured by sexual impulse, perhaps our deeper-longings might find expression in this thing called love? Or, the body animated by love, perhaps this body is an expression of that higher desire? Perhaps this groping impulse can find articulation in these words?
II. Reduction or Seduction – The possibility of a thesis …
Falling love is precisely that: the sensation of falling from, perhaps from a great height. Now, from that we have two options: either reduce it to the atomistic frenzy of our evolutionary-sociological conditioning, or we embrace that sensation and ride it all the way to the crashing bottom.
III. Thank You, Schopenhauer. – (These are fragments for a better thesis than the last. I take biological reductivism to an aesthetic placement) …
Along with the denial of much of the life and the physical world, philosophers have traditionally avoided speaking of love. Such speculation, it has been thought, is not the business of philosophers. Yet, as Schopenhauer pointed out – how can we ignore something that is so central to most peoples life? If not the ‘meaning of life,’ it is the search for love that constitutes the warp and woof of most peoples lives.
It is partially a denial of the aspect of our life which occludes our self-image of being ‘rational’ beings. It is partially a simple self-denial of ones own real longings. Whatever it is, philosophers have avoided the inclusion of our desire for love. Strangely, this is one of the most universal aspects of being human.
Love, thus, is an funky shape not fit to match the precise geography of the philosophers mind. I’ve heard that I think about sex / love more than 15 times a minute – which means not only right now, but every time I write, throughout my writing. This makes it quite strange to imagine the majority of philosophers (mostly men) deliberately / unconsciously avoiding this persistent desire pressing itself into our mental-life.
Such a denial is only a small part of the larger philosophical project, which it seems, consists in completely denying the non-systematic, non-rational aspect of the human being. Subjectivity is squashed, and human longings are recycled again and again.
Could it be that less than something merely avoided, accidentally left out, love itself poses a threat to the entirety of the philosophical project? I hear stress an attention paid to this awkward desire which is central to all of us.
The desire for life is a thrust which is a direct challenge to the supposedly triumphant posture of ‘rational man.’ When attention is paid, we see again and again the thrust of love: we see empires collapsing in a frantic slow motion, and we see disciplined men driven crazy by the love-buzz, the wild temptation. Yet, again and again, we see a warning against this sensation. The prescriptions against the fever of love is a perpetual issue in our Canon. I’m not speaking of Jesus’ love, of course, but the ‘love’ catalogued by Milton’s Satan, by Gargantua … that embellished ornament.
I am concerned with the secret logic of the human. What constellation navigates this dark lunging-forward? Like Odysseus, I shall follow its seismographic.
When did we stop knowing that the body is subservient to the delicate longing within it, and not the minds ostensible triumph? Why construct such a smug faith in the reified minds’ illusionary control?
Schopenhauer gave a word to this thrusting force within us that had the power to oust reason in the role of navigating the body: the will-to-life. It is not so simple as desire that competes with reason. Instead, it’s a desire that masks itself as reason. Reason, for Schopenhauer, is a sublimation of our internal desires for the continuation of our being.
The will to life is, for Schopenhaur, the most dominant and central drive to all human beings. This makes sense. What are if not driven by our will to live, to survive, to beat succumbing to death? This is manifest in a multitude of ways, from our love for babies and the interest in their preservation, to our natural tendency to prevent others from dying. Love, therefore, is no different even if its logic is a little more insidious.
Thus, the desire for life (and love) is not something peripheral or arbitrary: it is supreme and dominant.
The thesis here is that love and this will to life are intrinsically connected. Lovers themselves, love and the will to life work to construct the architecture of your everyday life. How so? Love is the impetus in getting us to propagate our species. We are, of course, fundamentally biological. Biological unites strive to reproduce themselves. Love manifest is such a desire.
Love is our biology directing us towards the reproduction of our species.
Yes, yes, of course this is never even close to being on our minds when we go out to the next bar, when we struggle to muster the courage to talk to another boy or girl. The ‘continuation of the species’ is the last thing we think about when we think of love.
This is where the notion of conscious / unconscious comes in. (An interesting fact is that Schopenhauer developed our notion of the unconscious as it was used by Freud and later thinkers.) The unconscious mind, it seems, has a ‘mind’ all of its own. The mind knows very little of the secret trajectories of the heart, so said Pascal over 500 years ago. Schopenhauer agrees. The conscious mind is only given enough information to be seduced into acting, into giving the unconscious what it wants.
Thus this poster-boy of the philosophical life – the human mind – is relegated to the position of the ‘hostage driver,’ forced to succumb to the silent commands of the unconscious. This quite undoes the role of the mind as the transparent ‘reasoning machine’ and relegates it to a secondary position.
This is an interesting response to the question of why it is that we feel such an intense rush of adreniline when we are in love, and are not able to ‘rationally explain’ our actions, our desires, our longings. Love is an expression of the unconscious directing us towards an object of ‘love,’ or sex.
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While this theory does force us to reconsider the primacy of other philosophical problems, it does at least give us relief in allowing our natural minds to feel like something healthy. We are not monsters, we are human beings in love.
In other words, we are not the sovereign ‘rational beings’ we took ourselves to be, but on the other hand at least we don’t have to hate ourselves for being so concerned with ‘love.’
The desire for love is not accidental, says Schopenhauer, but something biologically ingrained in us.
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This also approaches the question of why it is that we are so compelled when we fall in love. Why are our bodies taken over by this magical lust? Why do we choose so and so and not someone else who is ‘rationally’ more better suited for us?
In other words, how could a girl who lives in the KC suburban sprawl and loves the comforts of such a life, fall in love with an anarchist who wants to destroy civilization, whom her parents surely hate?
How is it that a cerebella-lopsided thinker could fall for an art-school girl who has no interest in ideas? Surely, these questions should be at the center of our philosophical concern (and not be reduced to mere biological explanation, a reductivism that leaves us stranded). They remain an enigma. Schopenhauer was certainly interested.
But, Schopenhauer’s crude logic in his attempt to explain such a phenomenon fails. I won’t go into the details here. There is a kind of logic that remains, which I should point out: it is our bodies recognition that this particular person – out of all the others we could possibly choose – is best suited for us.
“There is something quite peculiar to be found in the deep, unconscious seriousness with which two young people of the opposite sex regard each other when they meet for the first time, the searching and penetrating glance they cast at each other, the careful inspection all the features and parts of their respective persons have to undergo. This scrutiny and examination is the meditation of the genius of the species concerning the individual possible through these two.”
Equally poignant, Schopenhauer is acutely aware of the process through which one potential mate’s unconscious skewers the presence of another in searching out the pro’s and con’s of this particular person. In other words, while on dates you may talk about such and such superfluous things, but your unconscious mind will be busily at work investigating the other person, trying to decide whether or not it desires the person.
Schopenhaur says that this “searching glance” our unconscious undertakes is purely the attempt to seek out the ideal ‘co-parent.’ Although he got the idea started, such a conclusion seems weak. Why not just admit that the unconscious is simply seeking out an ideal mate, or even more broadly, someone worth the copulation?
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The conclusion, if read out, is rather bleak perhaps, at least for those seeking anything like the normal kinds of conclusions people seek: marriage, story-book love, eternal affliction. The conclusion is this: that the person we fall in love with is not someone necessarily suited to meet our needs, to make us happy.
In other words, despite the myths we copulate, love and happiness should not be held synonymous or conflated. Human beings, we are relieved to see, are designed through and through to fall in love. However, the caveats is that our own particular happiness is not a part of the plan. Love is not meant to be sweet, joyful and beautiful. Love is meant to drive us into the reproduction of a species capable of doing the same.
Blinded by the blight of intense love, we ourselves are unable to think rationally, and can only lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that we will be happy if only we are with this person.
“That convenience and passionate love should go hand in hand is the rarest stroke of good fortune.”
Happiness and the need to reproduce our human species are two very different things we take on, and should not be confused with each other. How many marriages do you know that turn out to be more than the day to day business as usual?
An interesting but unrelated note: When someone says that “love will bring the world together” what might this mean in relation to Schopenhauer’s views of love? The suppression of all differences, the refusal to perceive singular differences, the need to sublimate real desires. Yes, love will bring the world together: but it is only under the guise of illusionary community and the suppression of differences that will make this happen.
A lot of liberals and leftist want to ‘bring the world together,’ as though that might somehow ‘fix things’ when the real problem is not a lack of similarity, but in fact, a lack of differences.
What we need is not love, but the recognition of difference. That is, if we are not to simply reproduce the current present.
But anyways:
Love only functions through the suppression of more pressing-differences. Such suppression has an evolutionary function: illusionary wholeness is necessary for copulation.
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IV. Consolation for our Broken Hearts ..
What we have here – as DeBotton reminds us – is consolation for the complexities of our hurt in the world of post-rejection. Being rejected by another is no sign that you are not interesting or worthy or a relationship. It simply means that you are not biologically suited for her unconscious.
… that’s all I’ve got so far.
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Interesting enough, is the relationship between words, love and life. But that’s for another essay perhaps …
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