Summary
Arthur Schopenhauer: On the Life of the Species
From the contents of the book:
On the Life of the Species
Inheritance of Traits
Metaphysics of Sexual Love
On Pederasty
On Women
Dictionary of Things and Names In the previous chapter 1 I reminded that (Platonic) ideas of different levels of being, which are an adequate objectification of the will to live, in the knowledge of the individual, are related to the form of time, shown as a species, i.e., as a bond of birth, it is united, successively and of the same type of individual, and it is, therefore, a species stretched and stretched in time (ειδος, species). Therefore, the essence of every living being lies primarily in its species: it exists only in individuals. Although, therefore, the will becomes aware of itself only in the individual, it nevertheless reveals a deep awareness, namely that it is actually the species in which its essence is objectified, that individuals are a matter of the species as such - that is, sexual relations, birth and feeding of a child - incomparably more important and more important than everything else. Hence, mating in animals (about whose timidity we find an excellent account in Burdach's »Physiology«), and in humans the careful and whimsical selection of another individual to satisfy the sexual drive, a selection that can rise to passionate love, to the closer examination of which I will devote a separate chapter: it is precisely here, finally, that excessive love of parents for their child is born.
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