Eros and Reality (9) 

I think sexual love, Eros, provides a challenge to the thesis that reality can be disclosed through our deepest responses to it (circular since emotions are deep precisely because they disclose). But Eros seems so connected to the sex drive and is notorious for creating an Ideal out of the beloved that life over time cannot hold up to - it makes promises it cannot keep, as Lewis put it. And of course there are massive sentimental forms of Eros, and sometimes it does seem to be a veneer disguising lust. It seems concealing. Examples of Eros abiding over time are few. And most people know what it is like to “see the lover through rosy colored glasses” only to take off those glasses at some point and be confronted with a sobering reality. In spite of this, is there a sense in which Eros can be revealing? Perhaps offering a vision of the beloved that transcends her empirical reality but nevertheless has some reality as potential?

  

. . .

Being in love is very different from the desire for sex. Most people in love will tell you that chastity and fidelity are never easier than when you are in love. Being with, being loved by, the beloved sublimates any desire for sexual gratification. That is a sure text of whether it is love or love-as-a-mask-for-sex: the pressure of one partner on the other for sex. Of course, the love is sexual root and trunk – but the branches and the blossoms are where being in love happens.

. . .

Eros is certainly not “safe.” It is a powerful energy that can overwhelm us. It is a form of madness. It has to power to generate life. The fools that invented that PR campaign about condoms making sex safe accurately express the capitalist view of sex as a form of energy to be mined for pleasure and profit. But they don’t know shit about Eros. There is nothing less safe than sex.

. . .

Eros is a complex case, perhaps the most ambiguous of all emotional responses in relation to truth. It is often concealing rather than revealing, creating illusions about the beloved, making promises it cannot keep, and sometimes degenerating into mere sentimentality or even self-deception. I rather think this is the norm. Yet Eros does seem to reveal something, even if what it reveals is not always the same as what it first appears to promise.

 

  Eros idealizes the beloved, seeing not just who she is, but who she could be, perhaps even who she is meant to be, who she is in essence. It is a vision but the vision can either be a projection of the lover’s own psychic programs or a response to an independent reality of the beloved that only love illuminates. This idealization is normally unsustainable but does that make it false? Or does it disclose a real potential that ordinary perception might miss? Thus Eros reveals something possible, something latent in the beloved, even if time, habit, and imperfection often blur that vision.

     The intensity of Eros, its almost religious character in some cases, suggests that it reveals something more than just biological desire. Many cultures and philosophies have linked sexual love to a longing for transcendence. One of my favorite books (although I am critical of Socrates in it), Plato’s Symposium, is the obvious example where physical love is a step toward the love of the Good itself. Even if most eros fades, the experience it provides – of beauty, of Sehnsucht, of the yearning to unite with another, of a weird kind of self-transcendence – suggests something real about human nature: that we are not self-contained, that we long for completion, that love (when real) is an openness to something beyond the self. (Aristophanes myth in the Symposium).

  But Eros is also deceptive. It can mask base desires, can make us blind to faults, can create illusions about the beloved. It often idealizes the beloved in a way that time cannot sustain. But even this disillusionment can be revealing. When the illusion fades, what remains? If love still abides in some deeper form, was Eros just a passing dream, or was it a necessary gateway to something enduring? If it endures, it is because the lovers are good people, probably supported by a community that nourishes this sort of transformation.

    If Eros gives a glimpse of the beloved’s potential being, does that potential have ontological status? Does the vision of the beloved in the intensity of Eros show something true about her essence, even if it is rarely fully realized? Or does Eros only show us our own projection, a fantasy imposed on another? Usually the latter in our world but the former is possible. If that is wrong, if all eros of nothing but projection in the service or biology + psychic programs, then Eros is merely a trick of evolution, a sentimental lie, a veil that must be lifted (I think of Schopenhauer here). If I am right, true love can be, however rarely, a kind of truth that exceeds empirical facts.

      I hoffe, daß Eros  den Sex-Instinct aufhebt, wenn sie echt ist, und verwandelt sie dabei in etwas fast Göttliches. It can then be sublime. Perhaps it is even connected to the capacity to see each other as intelligible objects of a more Christ-like love. When real, it transfigures desire into something deeper, something enduring, something that ultimately has nothing to do with mere physical satisfaction and everything to do with seeing the beloved in the light of true love. In its highest form, Eros is not just about union, but about revelation—it shows something about the beloved that goes beyond the moment, beyond mere instinct, beyond even personal happiness. It has a moral and metaphysical depth, a capacity to open the lovers toward something greater than themselves. (I am not thinking primarily of Dante, though I guess that is the point of Beatrice) but Wendell Berry and what he has written in poetry and essays about marriage in general and his marriage in particular.

    It flows into the child, which I see as its fruit and completion, an embodiment in the material world of the Trinity. In a sense, Eros is fulfilled not in its own intensity, but in what it gives birth to: not only literally in the child but in the shared world, the common life, the responsibility, the deepened love that grows over time. If Eros is real, it doesn’t burn out; it roots itself in the world, in a place, a home, a tradition that honors love, children, and the virtues needed to sustain them. The Word has to become Flesh to become fully real. The common task of raising the love-child is then the glue that allows the initial passionate love to deepen, especially when it is connected to a place on earth and a community that honors love, children, the nature of the place, the virtues necessary to make a good life. But this is an ideal and it is rarely ever actualized. Nevertheless, that is our nature, I think, a nature that is stunted by capitalist society. That fact that our natural potential is rarely actualized does not make Eros false. Rather, it means that we live in a world where our nature is often thwarted, where conditions for its fulfillment are fragile, where the fullness of love is something always threatened by loss, by disillusionment, by time, by the world as it is, by the scars on our character and personality left by living in this society. But if it is our nature, then Eros is not a lie. Even if it often fails, burns out, turns to illusion, its true direction is still real. It points toward a kind of completion that the world rarely allows but that remains the deepest truth about human love.

 So the Word must become Flesh to endure. But it is our "nature" or rather second nature to live in a world in which we are alienated from our first nature, which we can only experience as a romantic dream, except on rare occasions when something sublime breaks through, as it sometimes does when we "fall in love." Love must be incarnated in real life, in real relationships, in the world of time, of struggle, of responsibility. Otherwise, it remains just a longing, an unfulfilled ideal, as it invariably must in capitalism. We live in estrangement from what we are meant to be, and so what should be natural to us – love, community, continuity, a life in harmony with meaning – feels out of reach, like a dream rather than reality. It is in our second nature to be alienated from our first nature. [Again, the regime. I do not condemn business as such, which can be benevolent. Even in this regime most businesses are benevolent. I don’t want to get rid of small and medium-sized businesses but root them and see them as part of a community rather than as a parasite preying on community. Like it does to Eros, capitalism as a regime ironically corrupts business, too.]

Still, even in the darkness of the regime of Science-Capitalism-Technology, whether its liberal or autocratic forms (I prefer the liberal form since the thought of disappearing for writings like this does not appeal to me and liberalism preserves something of humanistic values), something sublime can still break through, something that reminds us that this dream is not entirely unreal, like a leak from another realm – something that belongs to the reality we have been cut off from, even if we can only glimpse it in falling in love, in moments of deep joy, in true companionship, in beauty, in the birth of a child. Etc. So falling in true love is not just an illusion but a momentary lifting of the veil, a flash of recognition that this is how things should be, even if life in its brokenness cannot sustain it. It shows us what is possible, even if the world drags it back down. It is a form of madness as the Greeks knew. But as Peter O’Toole’s Cervantes says (in Man of LaMancha):

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness To surrender dreams - -this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness! And maddest of all - to see life as it is and not as it should be!

This certainly applies to people in love.

   Few of us are free enough from damage to our personalities, few of us have known the conditions necessary for the cultivation of the virtues necessary to live in community with other people over a lifetime - and marriage is a very intimate form of community. The real tragedy is not that the ideal of Eros is false, but that we are too cracked, the world is too broken, to sustain it, to let the Word become flesh. Our glimpses of love’s truth are sometimes real, but they cannot last because we are estranged from ourselves and from the world as it should be.