This is why, says Schopenhauer, the sexual urge is so strong in all beings. The latter is only the process of ensuring the existence of the former in the future, too. The intellect has no power over this instinct. He concludes that sexual love brings misery to the individual because its aim is not the pleasure or the good of the individual but the continuation of the species, for which Nature shrewdly covers the reason of the individual and induces it to lay faith in the illusion that this is for its own pleasure and good. Thus the attempt of the Will to immortalise itself ends in its defeat, for what is here immortalised is not the individual but the species.
Pleasure has no place in the process of the preservation of the species.
Its metaphysical implications are to be discovered in the dialectical process of Hegel and the satisfaction of actual entities in the philosophy of Whitehead. The neutralisation of the thesis and the antithesis in the synthesis, which is the way in which all things create and recreate themselves and which Hegel employed to describe the integrating process of the higher evolution of the individuals towards the realisation of Self-consciousness in the Absolute applies distortedly in relative individuals, ignorant of any such higher purpose, to the reproduction of individualities. The actual entities of Whitehead supply the data which are sought to be unified into the satisfaction of the innate urge to create. An actual entity is said to enjoy the process of creating itself out of its data, feel a satisfaction in its self-emergence. An actual entity becomes a subject when it emerges out of the pre-existing world of actual entities.