The Consolations of Philosophy - cont

A broken heart - Schopenhauer

The philosopher might have offered unflattering explanations of why we fall in love, but there was consolation for rejection - the consolation of knowing that our pain is normal.
What is more, we are not inherently unlovable. There is no need to hate ourselves. One day we will come across someone who can find us wonderful and who will feel exceptionally natural and open with us (because our chin and their chin make a desirable combination from the will-to-life's point of view)

We should in time learn to forgive our rejectors. The break0up was not their choice. In every clumsy attempt by one person to inform another that they need more space or time, that they are reluctant to commit or are afraid of intimacy, the rejector is striving to intellectualize an essentially unconscious negative verdict formulated by the will-to-life.

If they were seduced away by people less intelligent that we are, we should not condemn for shallowness. We should remember, as Schopenhauer explains, that: What is looked for in marriage is not intellectual entertainment, but the procreation of children.

We should draw a consolation from the thought that a lack of love: between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself. We might have been happy with our beloved, but nature was not - a greater reason to surrender our grip on love.

We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge.


Difficulties - Nietzsche's answer

What if pleasure and displeasure were so tired together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other...you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief...or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy.