The saddest of love stories in the Schopenhauer chronicles took place when
he was forty–three and attempted to court Flora Weiss, a beautiful seventeen–year–old girl. One evening at a boating party he approached Flora with a bunch of
grapes and informed her of his attraction to her and his intention of speaking to
her parents about marriage. Later, Flora`s father was taken aback by
Schopenhauer`s proposal and responded, «But she is a mere child.» Ultimately, he
agreed to leave the decision to Flora. The business came to an end when Flora
made it clear to all concerned that she vehemently disliked Schopenhauer.
Decades later, Flora Weiss`s niece questioned her aunt about that encounter
with the famous philosopher and, in her diary, quoted her aunt as saying, «Oh,
leave me in peace about this old Schopenhauer.» When pressed for more
information, Flora Weiss described Arthur`s gift of the grapes and said, «But I
didn`t want them, you see. I felt revolted because old Schopenhauer had touched
them. And so I let them slide, quite gently, into the water behind me.»
There is no evidence that Arthur ever had a love affair with a woman whom
he respected. His sister, Adele, after receiving a letter in which Arthur reported
«two love affairs without love,” responded, in one of their few interchanges about
his personal life, «May you not totally lose the ability to esteem a woman while
dealing with the common and base ones of our sex and may Heaven one day lead
you to a woman to whom you can feel something deeper than these infatuations.»
At thirty–three Arthur entered into an intermittent ten–year liaison with a
young Berlin chorus girl named Caroline Richter–Medon, who often carried on
affairs with several men simultaneously. Arthur had no objections to that
arrangement and said, «For a woman, limitation to one man during the short time
of her flowering is an unnatural state. She is expected to save for one what he
cannot use and what many others desire from her.» He was opposed to monogamy
for men as well: «Man at one time has too much and in the long run too little....
half their lives men are whoremongers, half cuckolds.»
When Arthur moved from Berlin to Frankfurt, he offered to take Caroline
with him but not her illegitimate son, whom he insisted was not his. Caroline
refused to abandon her child, and after a short correspondence their relationship
ended for good. Even so, Arthur, almost thirty years later, at the age of seventy–one, added a codicil to his will leaving Caroline Richter–Medon five thousand
talers.
Though he often scorned women and the entire institution of matrimony,
Arthur vacillated about marriage. He cautioned himself by reflecting, «All great
poets were unhappily married and all great philosophers stayed unmarried:
Democritus, Descartes, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant. The only exception
was Socrates—and he had to pay for it, for his wife was the shrewish
Xanthippe.... most men are tempted by the outward appearance of women, that
hides their vices. They marry young and pay a high price when they get older for
their wives become hysterical and stubborn.»
As he aged he gradually relinquished the hope of marriage and gave up the
idea completely at the age of forty. To marry at a late age, he said, was
comparable to a man traveling three–fourths of the journey by foot and then
deciding to buy the costly ticket for the whole journey.
All of life`s most fundamental issues come under Schopenhauer`s bold
philosophical scrutiny, and sexual passion, a topic avoided by his philosophic
predecessors, was no exception.
He launched this discussion with an extraordinary statement about the
power and omnipresence of the sexual drive.
Next to the love of life it [sex] shows itself here as the strongest and most
active of all motives, and incessantly lays claim to half the powers and
thoughts of the younger portion of mankind. It is the ultimate goal of almost
all human effort. It has an unfavorable influence on the most important affairs,
interrupts every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes perplexes
for a while the greatest human minds.... Sex is really the invisible point of all
action and conduct, and peeps up everywhere in spite of all the veils thrown
over it. It is the cause of war and the aim and object of peace,...the
inexhaustible source of wit, the key to all allusions, and the meaning of all
mysterious hints, of all unspoken offers and all stolen glances; it is the
meditation of the young and often the old as well, the hourly thought of the
unchaste and, even against their will, the constantly recurring imagination of
the chaste.
The ultimate goal of almost all human effort? The invisible point of all
action and conduct? The cause of war and the aim and object of peace? Why so
overstated? How much does he draw from his own personal sexual
preoccupation? Or is his hyperbole simply a device to rivet the reader`s attention
on what is to follow?
If we consider all this, we are induced to exclaim: why all the noise and fuss?
Why all the urgency, uproar, anguish and exertion? It is merely a question of
every Jack finding his Jill. Why should such a trifle play such an important
role, and constantly introduce disturbance and confusion in the life of man?
Arthur`s answer to his question anticipates by 150 years much of what is to
follow in the fields of evolutionary psychology and psychoanalysis. He states that
what is really guiding us is notour need butthe need of our species. «The true end
of the whole love story, though the parties concerned are unaware of it, is that a
particular child may be begotten,” he continues. «Therefore what here guides man
is really an instinct directed to what is best in the species, whereas man himself
imagines he is seeking merely a heightening of his own pleasure.»
He discusses in great detail the principles governing the choice of sexual
partner («everyone loves what they lack») but repeatedly emphasizes that the
choice is actually being made by the genius of the species. «The man is taken
possession of by the spirit of the species, is now ruled by it, and no longer belongs
to himself...for ultimately he seeks not his interests but that of a third person who
has yet to come into existence.»
Repeatedly, he emphasizes that the force of sex is irresistible. «For he is
under the influence of an impulse akin to the instinct of insects, which compels
him to pursue his purposes unconditionally, in spite of all the arguments of his
faculty of reason.... He cannot give it up.» And reason has little to do with it.
Often the individual desires someone whom reason tells him to avoid, but the
voice of reason is impotent against the force of sexual passion. He cites the Latin
dramatist Terence: «What is not endowed with reason cannot possibly be ruled
with reason.»
It has often been noted that three major revolutions in thought have
threatened the idea of human centrality. First, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth
was not the center about which all celestial bodies revolved. Next, Darwin
showed us that we were not central in the chain of life but, like all other creatures,
had evolved from other life–forms. Third, Freud demonstrated that we are not
masters in our own house—that much of our behavior is governed by forces
outside of our consciousness. There is no doubt that Freud`s unacknowledged co–revolutionary was Arthur Schopenhauer, who, long before Freud`s birth, had
