THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
stances occur, grow up as a plant." Living toads found in limestone lead
to the conclusion that even animal life is capable of suspension for
thousands of years/ 3 The will is a will to live; and its ecernal enemy is
death.
But perhaps it can defeat even death?
2. THE WELL TO REPRODUCE
It can, by the strategy and martyrdom of reproduction.
Every normal organism hastens, at maturity, to sacrifice itself to the
task of reproduction: from the spider who is eaten tip by the female he
has just fertilized, or the wasp that devotes itself to gathering food for
offspring
effort to feed and clothe and educate his children. Reproduction is the
ultimate purpose of every organism, and its strongest instinct; for only
so can the will conquer death. And to ensure this conquest of death, the
it will never see, to the man who wears himself to ruin in the
will to reproduce is placed almost entirely beyond control of knowledge
or reflection: even a philosopher^ occasionally, has children.
The will shows itself here as independent of knowledge, and works blindly,
as in unconscious nature. . . . Accordingly, the reproductive organs are
properly the focus of will, and form the opposite pole to the brain, which
is the representative of knowledge. . . * The former are the life-sustaining
principle, they ensure endless life; "for this reason they were worshipped
by the Greeks in the phallus and by the Hindus in the lingam. . . . Hesiod
and Parmenides said very significantly that Eros is the first, the creator,
the principle from which all things proceed. The relation of the sexes . . .
is really the invisible central point of all action and conduct, and peeps out
of all veils thrown over it. It is the cause of war and
everywhere in spite
the end of peace; the basis of what is serious, and the aim of the jest; the
inexhaustible source of wit, the key of all illusions, and the meaning of all
mysterious hints.54 . . . We see it at every moment seat itself, as the true
and hereditary lord of the world, out of the fullness of its own strength, upon
the ancestral throne; and looking down thence with scornful glance, laugh
at the preparations made to bind it, or imprison it, or at least limit it and,
wherever possible, keep it concealed and even so to master it that it shall
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life.
only appear as a subordinate, secondary
The "metaphysics of love" revolves about this subordination of the
father to the mother, of the parent to the child, of the individual to the
species. And first, the law of sexual attraction is that the choice of mate
*% i7$.
**A source of Freud's theory of **wit and the unconscious."
"I, 426, 525,* III, 314. Schopenhauer, like all who have suffered from sex,
exaggerates its role; the parental relation probably outweighs the sexual in the minds
of normal adult*.