INDIVIDUALS SACRIFICED TO THE SPECIES
The reason of this curious fact is given in this sentence: “Love-marriages are formed in the interest of the species, not of the individuals. True, the parties concerned imagine that they are providing for their own happiness; but their real [unconscious] aim is something foreign to their own selves—namely, the procreation of an individual whose existence becomes possible only through their marriage.”
What urges a man on to this sacrifice of individual happiness to the welfare of his offspring is, as already intimated, a blind instinct known as Love. The universal Will (Schopenhauer’s fetish, or name for an impersonal deity underlying all phenomena) has implanted this blind instinct in man, for the same reason that it implants so many other instincts in various animals—to induce the parents to undergo any amount of labour, and even danger to life, for the sake of benefiting the offspring, and thus preserving the species. All these animals, like the lovers, are urged on blindly to sacrifice themselves in the belief that they are doing it for their own pleasure and benefit; whereas it is all in the interest of their offspring.
Why was the Will compelled to implant this blind instinct in man? Because man is so selfish wherever guided by reason, that it would have been unwise to entrust so important a matter as the welfare of coming generations to his intellect and prudence. Prudence would tell young people to choose not the most attractive and healthy partners, who would be able to transmit their excellence to the next generation, but the ones who are most liberally supplied with money and useful friends. That is, they would invariably look out first for “Number One,” indifferent to the deluge that might come after them. It was to neutralise this selfishness that the Will created the instinct of Love, which impels a man to marry not the woman who will make him the most happy and comfortable, but whose qualities, combined with his own, will be likely to produce a harmonious, well-made group of children.
Schopenhauer’s Will, it must be understood, is an æsthetic sort of a chap. He has his hobbies, and one of these hobbies is the desire to preserve the species in its typical purity and beauty. There are a thousand accidents of climate, vice, disease, etc., that tend to vitiate the type of each species; but Love strives for ever to restore a harmonious balance, by producing a mutual infatuation in two beings whose combined (and opposite) defects will neutralise one another in the offspring.