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Schopenhauer: on porcupines and "boundaries"
For those of you who have come painfully close to intimacy, consider the porcupine (see video above).
According to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, this magnificent animal sets a true example of the prickly things which can happen when humans love each other.
As for women:
"Without them there would be little assistance at birth, little pleasure at midlife, little consolation at death."
Thus wrote this unhappy in love German philosopher. He spelled out his theories that for all its sufferings love is simply the "will to life," the unconscious working out of nature's need for procreation (see video below).
Schopenhauer's analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled.
He favored a lifestyle of negating human desires, similar to the teachings of ancient Greek Stoic philosophers, Buddhism, and Vedanta.
See his The World as Will and Representation.
By emphasizing the importance of love and sex Schopenhauer foreshadowed the theories of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud.
Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental. Instead he understood it to be an immensely powerful force lying unseen within man's psyche and dramatically shaping the world:
"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."
"What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation ..."
Could be. So why does it hang around in older age?
Could it be the "porcupine factor?"
