Vacuum State: Bucky Group 9

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Bucky Group 9 - Love

Movie
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This week we continue with the documentary movie series on Happinesss - with "Schopenhauer on Love". While love is central to our lives, surprising few philosophers write about the subject leaving it mostly to poets and composers. Schopenhauer born in 1788 in Germany is one of the rare few.

The documentary focused on marriage and romantic love and opine that human beings largely go into marriage for the purpose of propagating the species. During that courtship, subconsciously couples select physical features of their mates that will complement and improve on their dificiencies - such that they will produce healthier babies. For instance, a very tall guy may choose a shorter wife for fear that if he does otherwise, he may end up with children who are too tall to survive. In other words during courtship, biology is stronger than reason, and it all works on us sub-consciously.

Since it is all so subconscious and we get ourselves so engrossed in the selection of mates to produce healthy babies, we forget that this may not bring us lifetime happiness. On the contrary, many couples get into matrimony with expectations that it is a route to their happiness.

Looking at the animal kingdom, they too have their instinct to propagate their species. However, they do not do it merely to produce offsprings and have no expectations of happiness. Should human beings take a lesson from the animal kingdom? Or at least we should go into a marriage with our eyes open that we are strongly guided by our subsconscious need to propagate our species rather than all the fantasies of romance and everlasting happiness. [movie ends here].

Discussions

One of the participants mentioned of an experiment that had photographs of married couples mixed in a pile and had ordinary people who doesn't know any of the couples pair them up based on their looks. Surprisingly, they managed to pair the husbands and wives correctly to a very high score. Evidence, that married couples have complementary facial features. Or is it that they tend to look alike after living together for sometime?

Joo Hock then said that some dogs grow to look like their masters after some time - much to everyone's laughter.

It was said that many Singaporeans marry because they want to buy a HDB flat (public housing), as only married couples are qualified to buy. And so they get married because of the dwelling. If it is any consolation, animals do that too! Birds, for instance, build a beautiful nest to attract their females to live with them. So this mating/courtship rituals are already very much built into our instincts.