Time for Eros?
Ah, my first blog post!
I recently finished Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet. She writes about Lysias' speech of the non-lover in Plato's Phaedrus, and how that speech derives its power by looking at the love affair not from the moment of inception, but from the moment of or after its dissolution. As she says, "Lysias looks at a love affair from the point of view of the end," but "[n]o one in love really believes love will end."
Today, I was reading the comic strip Luann, which had Luann telling an Australian foreign exchange student she likes, "There's no point in starting something if you're just going to go back to Australia." Ah, the sober prudence of the American teenage girl, who will not sacrifice her precious adolescent years in pursuit of something that can only be fleeting and temporary, however otherwise pleasant and enjoyable it may otherwise be, when there is not even the possibility of a happily ever after to the story.
Or is the experience itself, regardless of its temporal possibilities or impossibilities, somehow a necessary part of the story? "There's no point in starting something if you're just going to go back to Australia." Does eros or love have a point? If so, what is it? Does the answer to that question also answer the question whether we have time for eros/love? I can imagine it now: a boy or girl impatiently asking, "Is it time for love yet?", the way you would ask, "Is it time to go yet?" Do we ever have time for eros?
But let's be real here. Most love affairs, especially between young people, are stories of failure. If eros is, as a Platonic character will suggest, desire for sempiternal possession of the good, then why doom your story from the beginning? Why engage in something that forecloses the possibility of everlasting and permanent union?
And yet--although eros is self-directed toward eternity--isn't there something fundamentally unerotic about turning away from the simple experience of love, regardless of its temporal possibilities or impossibilities? What exactly is the relationship between time and eros? Perhaps the question can be sharpened as follows: does eros desire its own fulfillment, or its own continuation? Are those alternatives mutually exclusive, and thereby a genuine Either-Or, or is a conjunction possible? Can eros subsist in its own fulfillment? Married readers: answer with care (which brings us, in a double fashion, to Heidegger--who is either a great authority or a great fraud when it comes to matters erotic, depending on whom you ask....).
I recently finished Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet. She writes about Lysias' speech of the non-lover in Plato's Phaedrus, and how that speech derives its power by looking at the love affair not from the moment of inception, but from the moment of or after its dissolution. As she says, "Lysias looks at a love affair from the point of view of the end," but "[n]o one in love really believes love will end."
Today, I was reading the comic strip Luann, which had Luann telling an Australian foreign exchange student she likes, "There's no point in starting something if you're just going to go back to Australia." Ah, the sober prudence of the American teenage girl, who will not sacrifice her precious adolescent years in pursuit of something that can only be fleeting and temporary, however otherwise pleasant and enjoyable it may otherwise be, when there is not even the possibility of a happily ever after to the story.
Or is the experience itself, regardless of its temporal possibilities or impossibilities, somehow a necessary part of the story? "There's no point in starting something if you're just going to go back to Australia." Does eros or love have a point? If so, what is it? Does the answer to that question also answer the question whether we have time for eros/love? I can imagine it now: a boy or girl impatiently asking, "Is it time for love yet?", the way you would ask, "Is it time to go yet?" Do we ever have time for eros?
But let's be real here. Most love affairs, especially between young people, are stories of failure. If eros is, as a Platonic character will suggest, desire for sempiternal possession of the good, then why doom your story from the beginning? Why engage in something that forecloses the possibility of everlasting and permanent union?
And yet--although eros is self-directed toward eternity--isn't there something fundamentally unerotic about turning away from the simple experience of love, regardless of its temporal possibilities or impossibilities? What exactly is the relationship between time and eros? Perhaps the question can be sharpened as follows: does eros desire its own fulfillment, or its own continuation? Are those alternatives mutually exclusive, and thereby a genuine Either-Or, or is a conjunction possible? Can eros subsist in its own fulfillment? Married readers: answer with care (which brings us, in a double fashion, to Heidegger--who is either a great authority or a great fraud when it comes to matters erotic, depending on whom you ask....).
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteCan eros subsist in its own fulfillment? I’m not sure what you mean. Platonic eros transcends sexual love in an impersonal form of noesis. This is love of the good, which is, strictly speaking, beyond being and therefore not to be found in marriage or any kind of relationship. Rather, the Platonic ladder of love culminates in a system of identity in noetic contemplation. Friendship and, presumably, sexual eros can transcend itself in noetic contemplation, but the passions must be purified before this can occur. This is very much contrary to the modern notion of love as “romance.”
ReplyDeleteTake the 1966 film about love, sex, friendship and politics, “The Professionals.” All of the topics just mentioned may be described in relation to beauty (Plato’s good or to kalon=the beautiful=the good). This film is about the call, the demand that beauty makes upon us as human beings. The greatest good and most beautiful thing a human can hope to attain is a little bit of wisdom. Wisdom is the understanding of what is most important in life. Now, one of the beautiful things represented in this film is friendship. There is an interesting connection between the beautiful nature of both friendship and wisdom.
What kind of wisdom do we learn from the study of literature, politics, and from the study of “The Professionals” in particular? To see and describe the actions of human beings in the past, one must be able to see and describe what is actually going on in relations between human beings. To be able to discern properly and fully, one must be able to see what is right and wrong among things that happened in the past. It is not enough to view past deeds in a “neutral” fashion. One must be able to see whether a past deed was good or bad, sensible or senseless, noble or base. To describe human beings without these vitally human characteristics is to be shallow and to distort and mislead about the most important reasons for studying the nature of human social and political organization. Without consideration of these things we are cut loose from our roots, our past, which results in an impoverished sense of what we are as human beings.
But back to beauty, specifically love as a form of the beautiful, and specifically love as it manifests itself in romantic relationships. It is interesting to note that Plato denied that romantic love viewed as it is in its modern guise as a “relationship” is capable of sustaining any kind of true happiness. Plato described romance as a form of impulse lurking in the lowest realms of the irrational. The most sustainable and most fulfilling human relationship is that of friendship. Now, this was the ancient view of things. In modern times things seem to have been reversed and romance is now usually placed above friendship. This change took place in the early 1800s during the period known as Romanticism.
Why is this? According to Plato, the happy person is the person whose soul is in well-balanced harmony. The actions and agitations of romance are not conducive to a harmonious soul; rather, that which stabilizes the soul (namely knowledge) leads to the greatest contentment. In other words, the key to happiness is not giving in to desire but rather knowing that desire does not need to be fulfilled as much as it needs to be understood. It is this knowledge or understanding of one’s soul that is the greatest good for a human being. This is why Socrates said, “The life which is unexamined is not worth living.”
There is much more to the film in reference to heroism, epic, (specifically The Iliad), religion (Jesus and Maria), but I will leave it at the level of love as modern relationship.
Melville: ""Any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty."
ReplyDeleteWhich is to say, that human meaning is relentlessly open and possible. Perhaps that is eros fulfilled, bringing human openness into possibility?
Michael Roemer begins his provocative book Telling Stories with the fightin' words: "Every story is over before it begins." I.e., qua story, Anna Karenina is already under that train even as we read the famous lines about happy and unhappy families, and Oedipus is blind and and Antigone interred alive even as we hear, "Laius and Jocasta had a son..." According to Carson, Lysias encourages the young beloved to view the affair as a story ("from the point of view of the end"), not as an experience. Sophrosyne is the beginning of alienation. Or as Kierkegaard might say (and as you cunningly suggest w/ yr reference to Either/Or), the beginning of the Aesthetic.
ReplyDeleteA fine opening post occasioned by a great book. I once had occasion to review it. (Carson-- not Plato-- I'm not that hubristic (yet)). Looking forward to the blog.
Thanks too to Harvey for this mention of a film I had not heard of.
Harvey: ah, but the issue is precisely what it means for the good to be beyond being. I believe Aristotle, Hegel, and Rosen in their various ways immanentize the good; it is empty and meaningless to speak of "THE good," the good is always the good of this or that being. If this is true, then the place of human relationships in the order of things rises significantly as a possible topos for actualizing "the good." I know I am glossing over many difficulties here.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the quote, Neil. Loved the review, skholiast; you should copy it to Amazon! I have heard that trope about stories being already-complete before; maybe in Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House; a similar point is made by Eric Voegelin in Order and History vol. 5.
The conundrum:
ReplyDelete“If you don’t love, you’re scarcely alive; but if you do love, you’ll almost certainly be killed.” ~Herbert McCabe