Unethical Love<\/p>\n
Plato\u2019s Symposium is one of the most polyprismatic texts on Eros. Indeed, in view of the Symposium, one can say \u2013 paraphrasing Italo Calvino\u2019s description of Aglaura, one of his \u2018Invisible Cities\u2019 \u2013 that \u201ceverything which has previously been said of Eros imprisons the words and forces you to retell rather than to tell\u201d. This \u2018retelling\u2019, however, if we do not submit ourselves to the needs of a mechanical rhetoric, is also an opportunity for us to appropriate its meaning, to understand ourselves, and to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world. It is a call to self-knowledge.<\/p>\n
Let us, then, try to think \u2013 with Plato\u2019s help \u2013 and feel what Eros is. What is this passion that is cursed as irrational and destructive, and praised as the origin of just about everything? What is this passion that, on the one hand, possesses cosmogonic powers, and, on the other hand, we hold responsible for the demise of Adam and Eve (though for some this is the original \u2018arranged marriage\u2019, based \u2013 of course \u2013 on the wisdom of the arranger, and not Eros), Abelard and Heloise (or should I write Hell-oise?), Romeo and Juliet, and King Kong?<\/p>\n
Once we endeavor to understand Eros, it \u2013 trying to honor its pronouncement as irrational and destructive \u2013 evades coherence and tears us apart between bestiality and divinity, between considerations of dependence and autonomy, security and the dubious freedom to remain \u2018uncommitted\u2019.<\/p>\n
For Plato, Eros is a relational being; it is an intermediary, a mediator between gods and humans. Eros is the communicative space between being god and being human. Eros is the middle; it is \u2018betweenness\u2019. It should be noted, however, that Eros is not a \u2018god of the gaps\u2019; this is Hermes\u2019s job. Hermes, the merriest Olympian, usually represented with an erected phallus (hermae), is the one who inhabits a realm between Zeus and Hades and between Hades and mortals. He mediates between waking and dreaming, day and night. He is the \u2018marshal of dreams\u2019 and the \u2018master of sleep\u2019. Liminality or marginality is his very essence. Hermes is also linked with Aphrodite: he is erotic but his eroticism is stealthy, sly and amoral, a love gained by theft without moral concern for consequences. Hermes, for some, was the father of Eros, though, for others, Eros\u2019 father was Ares. Perhaps this is why Eros \u2013 in search of a father figure \u2013 wavered between love (uniting people, bridging the gap between them and offering mutual \u2018hermenies\u2019 [understanding]) and hate (separating people, inciting war between them) in the company of aunt Eris, cousin Strife, and their \u2018behated\u2019 friends Panic, Terror, and Trembling.<\/p>\n
It seems that today people think that Eros is certainly related to Ares, for it is clear that Eros is not considered a virtue. For Plato, on the contrary, Eros was virtuous and everyone in the Symposium (but the rest of his fellow citizens) agreed with him. Plato, in fact, was on a campaign to turn the concept of Eros from a vulgar description of sexual desire (which was the common view among his contemporaries) into an ethereal and transcendent notion.<\/p>\n
Eryximachus\u2019 speech in the Symposium offers one of the finest and most beautiful definitions of medicine (and therapy one might add) as \u201cepisteme ton tou somatos erotikon\u2026\u2019 (= \u201cmedicine may be regarded as the knowledge of the loves and desires of the body, and how to satisfy them or not; and the best physician [read: therapist] is he who is able to separate fair love from foul, or to convert one into the other; and he who knows how to eradicate and how to implant love, whichever is required, and can reconcile the most hostile elements in the constitution and make them loving friends, is skillful practitioner [agathos demiourgos]\u201d, Symposium, 186c5 \u2013 186d6).<\/p>\n
For some, this speech portrays Eros as a medical phenomenon, but I believe that it is medicine that follows Eros according to Eryximachus. Imagine, in addition to this, what the potential is if one adopts Plotinus\u2019 idea that it is not the soul that is inside the body, rather it is the body that is inside the Soul (it is like the difference between \u2018somatopsychic\u2019 and \u2018psychosomatic\u2019).<\/p>\n
In Socrates\u2019 speech, Eros is raised to a status of excessive idealization: Eros is impersonal, indifferent to any particular person, \u2018above\u2019 bodily desire and sexual passion. On the other hand, we can say that Socrates celebrated Eros as a \u2018grasping\u2019 sensuality (not sexuality), perhaps of the mind rather than the body, but erotic nonetheless. Eros is a virtue just because it is, in part, a passion, filled with desire.<\/p>\n
To Aristophanes\u2019 suggestion that Eros is sexual desire and that what one really desires when sexually desires another person is not sex but permanent re-unification with the other, Socrates counters that one really wants the heavenly Forms (could we find a parallel in today\u2019s \u201cI like your Style, babe?\u201d and \u201cCould Forms be thought of as perfect heavenly particulars?\u201d).<\/p>\n
For Aristophanes, Eros was a powerful desire for the other person through sex: it was not a desire for sexual objects, but a desire for sexual subjects; and the whole subjects cannot be wholly sexual. Aristophanic Eros is the desire to be with, the desire to touch, the desire to caress. An Aristophanic reason for Eros has to do with the way two people \u2018fit\u2019 together, that is to say, it is a \u2018relational\u2019 reason in that it explicitly has to do with the relationship rather than just the person loved. Eros is the attitude or emotion the lover has toward the beloved.<\/p>\n
What is our attitude toward the other? Is it the one of a brute colonist asserting our rights of predominance over the territories we have conquered: the other\u2019s body or\/and soul? Eros seeks\/desires equals. Consider, for example, the fact that, historically, romantic love emerges only when women begin to have more of a choice about their lives. John Milton, a representative of the early romantic period, has his Adam, in \u2018Paradise Lost\u2019, requesting from God not a mere playmate or companion or mirror image of himself but an equal, for \u201camong unequals what society\/ can sort, what harmony or true delight?\u201d (Book 8, 11.83-85). Love tends to create equals even where it does not find them.<\/p>\n
One may say that the beloved is defined in terms of his or her properties only insofar as these are identified in terms of their \u2018fit\u2019 (the relationship between the two). Aristophanes\u2019 idea of people \u2018fitting\u2019 together carries with it the idea of choice: critical to erotic love is the sense of choice (we choose those who \u2018fit\u2019 with us). One of the most obvious examples of an Aristophanic reason for love is the one that has to do with the history of the relationship. The very fact of time together is not fungible (Aristophanes\u2019 \u2018creatures\u2019 were together for time immemorial). Any reason for love must be understood contextually and in terms of the particular dynamics of the relationship. Time together, though not sufficient, is a necessary condition for love. Love is a whole process; it is neither a state nor an outcome. Love, as process, takes time.<\/p>\n
Aristophanic Eros is an urge for shared identity, a kind of ontological dependency (which is quite different from the codependency of a symbiotic relation). The problem here is what the meaning of a shared identity (or of identity) is. (Even the Christian God is thought of as having a shared identity; as a group in dialogue: the Holy Trinity. Is it polyphonic? And, what are they talking about, I wonder. The Trinitarian God is the theological version of mathematical infinity, its definition being that the part is equivalent to the whole).<\/p>\n
Shared identity does not point to any mystical union, but a sense of presence, always \u2018in mind\u2019, defining one\u2019s sense of self to one\u2019s self. Identities are created through dialogue on interindividual territory. As D. Kondo suggests \u201crather than universal essences, selves are rhetorical assertions produced by our linguistic conventions, which we narrate and perform for each other\u201d (Crafting Selves, U of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 307). As we piece together identities from the discourses that are made available to us, we simultaneously create possibilities for the identities of those with whom we are in relationship. Conceptualizing the construction of the self as relational means that choosing to author (or narrate) our self-identities in particular ways directly impacts the social identities that can be formed by others. We define ourselves dialogically in terms of each other.<\/p>\n
The interindividual territory may well be the realm of dialogue and Eros. The erotic dialogue with the other is open; it is never finalized. Eros goes hand in hand with the realization that we can never really get to know our beloved, her\/his hidden dreams, fears, and secrets. This Eros\/Dialogue is a continuous journey to the unknown and not-yet-understood; it is about mastering the art of not-knowing, of being curious, being open to being surprised, \u2018being kept away by an enigma\u2019.<\/p>\n
The unhappiness of so many relationships comes from a lack of reciprocity and mutual recognition that has its root in the over-idealization of the erotic other (which means that a decision has already been reached about who we are and who the other is, a goddess, for example, but then \u201cDoes a goddess have needs?\u201d; this is the end, my friend as the song goes). To understand ourselves and the other we should have an open attitude toward the world. Aporia is the soul of intelligibility.<\/p>\n
If the \u2018I\u2019 or the \u2018other\u2019 comes to dominate the interindividual territory wholly, we do not have a relationship, we do not have a dialogue; what we have is an aggressive solipsism. On the other hand, to love is to be intensely conscious of one\u2019s own \u2018worthiness\u2019 and thus greatly concerned with one\u2019s virtues. Being in love is already a definitive step in the teleology of self-realization.<\/p>\n
In a fragmented world, built on \u2018intimate\u2019 privacies, love determines selfhood. Eros is a dialogical process of weaving together two lives into two independent selves who understand themselves through each other. Eros is not selfless, but it is not selfish either. In love, what is desired is not just one\u2019s own satisfaction but mutual satisfaction.<\/p>\n
Love, as an open process, changes and it is not love when it is inattentive and indifferent to change. When love endures it is because love itself changes. Love as a process need not be at all capricious or unintelligible.<\/p>\n
To return to the Symposium, I believe that in it one can also discern Plato\u2019s criticism to Socrates, through the voice of Alcibiades. Alcibiades \u2013 wholly drunk, for he cannot bear the weight of his confessions being sober \u2013 emphasized the very personal, irrational, physical aspect of Eros: the \u2018unreasonable\u2019 Eros for a particular human being, not a desexed universal. For Plato, Socrates perhaps went too far in abandoning the eroticism of the particular (unless, as I hinted above, Forms are perfect heavenly particulars).<\/p>\n
By the 14th century, in the West, Eros had already been cleansed from the views expressed by Alcibiades and Aristophanes. Diotima (which means \u201chonor the God\u201d) took over and love, with the Christian faith in a purely spiritual love, became even more idealized than Socrates had urged. Humanity \u2018gained\u2019 in spirituality but lost the sense of the importance of happy human relationships for their own shake. In fact, humanity lost its way towards an ethics that would be based on Eros\/Love.<\/p>\n
Our modern ethics looks upon Eros with a disapproving eye. Who are we to combine personal love with ethical virtues? The recipe is, at least, it has been since the Enlightenment, that if you are determined to be a person who cherishes all the virtues, you had better omit love and\/or erotic love. Why is our epoch so opposed to Love\/Eros and other feelings as essential ingredients in morality?<\/p>\n
Eros is not considered a virtue for three reasons:<\/p>\n
Eros is reduced to mere sexuality.
Eros\/Love is an emotion, and as such it is irrational, beyond control, and merely episodic.
Eros fulfills personal needs; Eros means desire, self-indulgence, and self-love; in short, it has no utility; it is not useful to others.
Rationality, allegedly, reigns supreme nowadays rendering the differences between Utilitarian and Kantian ethics superfluous: moral philosophy is nothing if not objective, rational, based on principles, and exclusive of particular self-reference and mere personal perspectives. What is shocking, however, is what these conceptions of ethics leave out: most emotions and love in particular, except insofar as these might motivate duty.<\/p>\n
Only what can be \u2018commanded\u2019 is morally obligatory, and love as a passion cannot be controlled or commanded.
It is always the universal that is in question, never the particular (however, we always encounter ethical dilemmas in the form of the exceptions to universal rules). Erotic love is wholly particular and Christian love may be seen as the love of every particular (not just the universal). For Kant the particularity of love would seem to be a form of irrationality.
Morality is a matter of reason; hence, the supposed irrationality of the emotions is a good reason not to accept them as a basis for ethics. Emotions\u2019 apparent tolerance of contradiction \u2013 which Freud made one of the hallmarks of \u2018the Unconscious\u2019 \u2013 make them unsuitable as a basis for ethics.
Emotions do not succumb to rules and canons (though this word makes an implicit reference to war and not to ethics). They are subjective and do not conform to obvious considerations of objectivity. Subjectivity is opposed to and contrasted with rationality. It is a source of unreasonableness.
Emotions are capricious (though love, as already noted above, may well not be).
Most contemporary ethics is framed not as personal but as policy to be applied by some imagined bureaucrat, who treats everyone the same and has no relevant personality of his or her own (it is the sort of person that can operate \u2013 effectively and efficiently \u2013 a concentration camp, burn people in the ovens, and then go home to listen to Mozart\u2019s music. It is a product of the Enlightenment, which Zygmunt Bauman holds responsible for the Holocaust). The emphasis is not on being a \u2018good person\u2019 but rather a just and fair administrator.<\/p>\n
It seems to me that the neglect of personal inclinations in favor of legalistic universal principles leaves out the substance of the ethical, which is not principles but feelings. Thus, love is unethical, for against all principles of ethics, it has the audacity to view one other person as someone very special and does not count \u2018everyone as one and only one\u2019 at all. Love sees people not numbers.<\/p>\n
Love and dialogue could very well be the basis of a bottom up dialogical ethics, and it would also solve the paradox as to why people see the right thing but instead they choose the wrong thing to do.<\/p>\n
Dr. Dionisis Mentzeniotis<\/p>\n
Dean<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Plato\u2019s Symposium is one of the most polyprismatic texts on Eros. Indeed, in view of the Symposium, one can say \u2013 paraphrasing Italo Calvino\u2019s description of Aglaura, one of his \u2018Invisible Cities\u2019 \u2013 that \u201ceverything which has previously been said of Eros imprisons the words and forces you to retell rather than to tell\u201d. This \u2018retelling\u2019, however, if we do not submit ourselves to the needs of a mechanical rhetoric, is also an opportunity for us to appropriate its meaning, to understand ourselves, and to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world. It is a call to self-knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3268,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n