QuestionsWhat is love?The genius of the species
What is love?A useful illusion

The genius of the species

The genius of the species; love as nature's trap; Schopenhauer on love

Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 · 1860Life swings between suffering and boredom.
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What it claims

The lover believes he is pursuing his own happiness, but he is serving the species. Once the great work is done, he finds himself cheated: the illusion that made him the dupe of the species has vanished.

Why

Love is only a refined sexual instinct, which deceives us with an illusion serving the species.

The same idea through history
Lucrèce55 BCIn book IV of De rerum natura, Lucretius describes amorous desire as a chase after images: the lover cannot be satisfied by looking at or touching the loved body. He has no idea of a genius of the species, but he already makes love a lure that promises more than it gives.
Arthur Schopenhauer1844Schopenhauer makes it a metaphysical thesis: passionate love is the sexual instinct that nature puts at the service of the species, giving the individual the illusion of working for his own happiness.
In short

"The genius of the species" is an argument by Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation II, 1844, ch. 44 "The Metaphysics of Sexual Love", 1844) on the question "What is love?" (answer: a useful illusion). Its claim: The lover believes he is pursuing his own happiness, but he is serving the species. Once the great work is done, he finds himself cheated: the illusion that made him the dupe of the species has vanished. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The World as Will and Representation II, 1844, ch. 44 "The Metaphysics of Sexual Love"
Valid with an implicit premise

For Schopenhauer, poets are right to talk about love all the time: it is an immense passion. But they are wrong about its cause. Behind the most ethereal love there is only the sexual instinct, made more precise. And this instinct does not work for you: it works for the next generation. What Schopenhauer calls the "genius of the species" examines, through your eyes, which child two given people could have. To make you go along, it makes you believe that this person, and no other, will make you happy. When the goal is reached, the illusion falls and the lover feels cheated.

P1All love, however ethereal it may look, is rooted in the sexual instinct alone. It is only a sexual instinct that is more precisely determined, specialised, and even individualised in the strict sense.
P2The careful choice of a partner, which we call love, is the reflection of the genius of the species on the coming generation: in all who can procreate, it is the genius that examines which individual could be born of these two.
P3A good that benefits only the species would not move the individual to act. Nature therefore reaches its goal only by planting an illusion in him: what is an advantage only for the species appears to him as a personal advantage, and he thinks he is serving himself when he serves the species.
P4 · implicit premiseIf love is only a specified sexual instinct, and if this instinct works through an illusion that serves the species, then the happiness the lover expects from this particular person is not what he will get: the illusion will fall once the species' goal is reached.
So the lover believes he is pursuing his own happiness, but he is serving the species. Once the great work is done, he finds himself cheated: the illusion that made him the dupe of the species has vanished.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where love is only a specified sexual instinct, aiming at the coming child through an illusion, and yet the lover is not cheated: the promised happiness does come.
Valid with P4. P1 says love is only a specified sexual instinct. P2 says this instinct aims at the coming child. P3 says nature gets this goal through an illusion. P4 is the missing step: if all this is true, the lover is the dupe of the species. Without P4, one can grant everything and still hold that the lover, even if pushed by instinct, is truly happy with the person loved: instinct could be the cause of love without making its happiness an illusion.
Analogy. Think of a fisherman's bait. The fish sees an appetising worm and thinks it is feeding; in truth it serves the fisherman's goal. For Schopenhauer, the lover is the fish, the loved one's beauty is the bait, and the fisherman is the species, which wants children. The difference, which Schopenhauer admits, is that the fish dies, whereas the lover has truly lived a passion: but he comes out of it disenchanted.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Plato 380 BC · attacks premise 1

In the Symposium, Socrates reports Diotima's lesson. Love begins with the attraction of one beautiful body, but it does not stop there: it climbs from the beauty of one body to that of all bodies, then to that of souls, activities and kinds of knowledge, up to beauty itself. Love is therefore not only a more precise sexual instinct: it can become the desire for beauty itself.

Schopenhauer replies
see the argument
Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer knows the Symposium. He cites Plato, with the Phaedrus, as the one who has dealt most with love. But he judges that what Plato says about it stays in the realm of myths, fables and jokes, and for the most part concerns only the Greek love of youths.
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: this passage sets Plato aside without answering Diotima's ladder itself. Plato, for his part, does not set the love of beauty against procreation: for Diotima, love is also the desire to beget upon the beautiful (Symposium, 206e).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: basic disagreement. For Plato, amorous desire can change its object and rise; for Schopenhauer, it stays, in all its forms, the same instinct. Neither has a proof that the other must accept.
D
David Buss 1989 · attacks premise 2

The psychologist David Buss tests, in 37 samples from 33 countries, predictions drawn from evolutionary theory. Result: women place more value on signs of resources in a partner, and men on signs of reproductive capacity. This gives Schopenhauer part of his case: love's choice is not arbitrary, it follows pressures tied to reproduction. But Buss explains it by reproductive strategies specific to each sex, shaped by selection, and not by a genius of the species that thinks of the coming generation.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1989, after the author's death (1860).
The debate goes on (our summary) Schopenhauer died in 1860, long before Buss: he cannot answer. Our summary: the study tests stated preferences, not the experience of love itself, and does not say whether the lover is "cheated".
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: agreement on one point, disagreement on another. Both see in the choice of a lover the mark of reproduction. But for current biology there is no goal of the species: there are individuals whose genes are passed on more or less. And whether lived love is an illusion is a question this study does not settle.
Søren Kierkegaard 1847 · attacks premise 1

In Works of Love, Kierkegaard writes that the love the poets sing is, hidden, a love of self. But he does not conclude that all love is instinct: above this love of inclination he places love of neighbour, which is a duty ("you shall love") and depends on no inclination, hence on no sexual instinct.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1847, after the author's death (1860).
The debate goes on (our summary) Schopenhauer died in 1860 and did not read Kierkegaard: he cannot answer. Our summary: Kierkegaard does not deny that passionate love is tied to inclination. He denies that this is the whole reality of love. Schopenhauer's thesis is about love between the sexes ("Geschlechtsliebe"), not about love of neighbour; it is his phrase "all love" that is too wide.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: both see passionate love as an interested love; they differ on what follows. Schopenhauer sees in it the truth of love; Kierkegaard, the starting point of a love of another kind, which is a commitment and not an inclination.