PHILOSOPHICAL EGGS

In previous posts we have seen ways in which Eros (erotic love) can imply, lead to, or be thwarted by Thanatos (death). Here is yet another example of a relation between the two.

In his book The Meanings of Love (Praeger Publishing: 1997), Robert E. Wagoner writes:

“Everyone is in pursuit of something or someone he or she does not have. Love is thus the motor of human experience. If we are content with what we are, with what we have, then we do not act. It is precisely because we are never quite satisfied, never quite content with the way things are, that we seek something other. Erotic love is restless, it energizes us, it keeps us on the move. Without love we would come to a dead stop.” (14)

But what is Eros, despite its many manifestations, ultimately after? One plausible answer comes from Plato’s Symposium in which Plato’s character Aristophanes states: “Love is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, our desire to be complete.” And in Socrates’ speech we encounter Diotima’s teaching which claims that all life, not just human life, is moved by this erotic urge for completion.

But if this is true then we can see how Eros and Thanatos are intertwined yet again:

Eros, the desire for completion that prevents life from coming to a dead stop, seeks total completion which would bring life to a dead stop.

This analysis seems to lead to the paradoxical conclusion that the aim of life is death. Freud infamously agreed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Norton and Company: 1961):

“Every modification which is thus imposed upon the course of the organism’s life is accepted by the conservative organic instincts and stored up for further repetition. Those instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. Moreover it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we were to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’” (32).

And Freud goes on to note that, while it is difficult to scientifically verify his claims, we do have support from Plato himself!:

“But we must admit that we are working here at an equation with two unknown quantities. Anything else that science can tell us of the origin of sexuality amounts to so little that this problem may be likened to an obscurity into which not even the ray of an hypothesis has penetrated. In quite another quarter, however, we encounter such an hypothesis, but it is of so fantastic a kind—assuredly a myth rather than a scientific explanation—that I should not venture to bring it forward if it did not exactly fulfill the one condition for the fulfillment of which we are laboring. That is to say, it derives an instinct from the necessity for the reinstatement of an earlier situation. I refer, of course, to the theory that Plato in his Symposium puts into the mouth of Aristophanes and which deals not only with the origin of the sexual instinct but also with its most important variations in relation to the object: “Human nature was once quite other than now. Originally there were three sexes, three and not as to-day two: besides the male and the female there existed a third sex which had an equal share in the two first . . . . In these beings everything was double: thus, they had four hands and four feet, two faces, two genital parts, and so on. Then Zeus allowed himself to be persuaded to cut these beings in two, as one divides pears to stew them. . . . When all nature was divided in this way, to each human being came the longing for his own other half, and the two halves embraced and entwined their bodies and desired to grow together again.” Are we to follow the clue of the poet-philosopher and make the daring assumption that living substance was at the time of its animation rent into small particles, which since that time strive for reunion by means of the sexual instincts? That these instincts—in which the chemical affinity of inanimate matter is continued—passing through the realm of the protozoa gradually overcome all hindrances set to their striving by an environment charged with stimuli dangerous to life, and are impelled by it to form a protecting covering layer? And that these dispersed fragments of living substance thus achieve a multicellular organization, and finally transfer to the germ-cells in a highly concentrated form the instinct for reunion?”

This vision of Eros as longing for Thanatos is, however fascinating and applicable to certain cases, no doubt a difficult view to accept as general theory of love in particular and reality in general. Indeed, the self-defeating aspect of it – striving to die – might be a good reason not to reduce love to Eros. Rather, we might pursue a form of love such as agape which, unlike Eros which selfishly seeks to possess various things perceived to be valuable in order to become whole, altruistically gives by creating value. We might also include visions of philia or friendship in which mutual benefit is the key whether through use value, pleasure, or the development of virtue (to use Aristotle’s three forms explored in his Nicomachean Ethics chapters 8 and 9). And/or we might think about forms of fulfillment which, rather than leading to inanimate states, lead to activities which, far from being defined by an end outside them, have their goals within and are therefore complete while remaining fully active. One model for such activity was offered by Aristotle in his notion of an entelecheia which I explore here.

For part 6 of Eros and Thanatos, go here.