For the individual, love is endless torment and danger. It consumes us, and disturbs our otherwise well-regulated lives. All the while, what we experience as romantic electricity and ardent admiration is really the will to existence of unborn generations. Schopenhauer denies, however, that this is a cynical viewpoint. Because producing the next generation is a far nobler and greater task than chasing the "exuberant sensations and transcendental soap-bubbles" of subjective romance. Schopenhaurian love advice?
If you are unlucky enough to experience love, it could drive you mad. We'd tell you to avoid it, but you haven't got much choice in the matter. That said, knowing that the butterflies in our stomachs are often downright liars might help us keep our wits about us while looking for love.
These three philosophers may be more or less useful for different people or different situations. For those who are looking for a partnership between two independent individuals, Simone de Beauvoir, the most modern of the three, offers the best advice.
She is the only one who is particularly concerned with the equality and freedom of both partners. If you think that relationships are about drawing inspiration from your beloved, then Plato can help guide the way.
However, Plato provides a somewhat one-sided model of love. Schopenhauer gives the soundest account for those whose lives have been most troubled by romance. His cynicism can help you cut through the romantic idealism that can trap people in bad relationships. What all three of them show us is that how you should conduct your romantic life depends a lot on what you think love is, and what kind of relationship you are after. Clifton Mark is a former academic with more interests than make sense in academia.
He writes about philosophy, psychology, politics, and pastimes. If it matters to you, his PhD is in political theory. Wellness Love advice from three of philosophy's deepest thinkers A ladder to the good or a blind desire to procreate?
Working in the Marxist, psychoanalytic, and German Idealist traditions, he has spent his career being a bit unorthodox. He has many excellent interviews here with Big Think. As he explains in this bizarre interview , he also uses these tics to demonstrate that he is mad to students who ask for advice. These tics have evolved, and you can watch him here speaking reasonably clearly without them.
He has also done several minor stunts to make a point about the state of modern academia. In , he famously wrote the text for a series of Abercrombie and Fitch photographs.
When asked why he did this, he explained:. Here you can watch him explain the failures of the modern political left while he makes pasta. He was well known as a mystic, and his philosophy of living was embraced by a cult that was somewhat popular for a short while.
During his lifetime, his school of living, called Pythagoreanism , was what he was best known for. By some accounts, he was killed by an angry mob that pursued him to the edge of a bean field.
Not wanting to touch the beans, he stood at the side of the field until the mob caught up to him and bludgeoned him to death. Kant was one of the most brilliant human beings of all time. His ideas have influenced nearly all subsequent philosophy and are also influential in science. His eccentricity was all the opposites of other thinkers on this list. He was quite normal, too normal. His daily routine was so regular that his neighbors were said to set their clocks by when he went out for his walk, it occurred at precisely the same time each day.
He took the same route each day, with only two exceptions. His breakfast was, invariably, two cups of tea and the smoking of a pipe. The only meal he ate was lunch. He left his hometown once for a tutoring gig, and even his parties were planned out in exact detail with the tone of conversation strictly regulated.
Of course, the clockwork routine worked. He got more done in the latter half of his life than most people could do in three lifetimes and he made it to 79 years of age despite his weak constitution. Our final entry is perhaps the most eccentric philosopher of all time , which as you can see is truly an achievement. He was the greatest of the Cynical philosophers, and he practiced what he preached.
Diogenes took the philosophy of Cynicism to its logical endpoint and strove to send up the culture around him while living as simply as possible. There was a method to this madness though: He wanted to help people see beyond the norms that shaped their lives. How can you get any serious work done, he asked, without servants? The duties of a spouse and parent apparently do not sit well with deep thought and research, unless eased by paid help.
The two often go together, but they need not. Consider the student parlour game of puzzling over who among the major philosophical thinkers had a conventional home life. In the ancient Greek world, Socrates was married with children but never got round to writing anything down. Plato, as far as we know, never married. Aristotle did marry, and one of his major works, The Nicomachean Ethics , is named after his son.
But in later centuries the record is astonishing. Aquinas and the philosophers of the middle ages were all churchmen. In the 17th and 18th centuries, virtually all of the canonical figures were domestically unconventional. Bishop Berkeley married late but had no children. This did not stop him writing a treatise, Emile, on the proper upbringing of children. Closer to our own time, John Stuart Mill married late in life and had no children of his own.
Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre and Wittgenstein were all unmarried and childless.
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