In Praise of the god, Eros

A Valentine's Day post.

Around Valentine’s day last year, I ended up at an actual “symposium.”

becca rothfeld

, the non-fiction book critic at the Washington Post, and I have built our entire friendship on mutual love of Plato — particularly his so-called “erotic” dialogues. In that spirit, Becca orchestrated a reading of the greatest of the erotic dialogues, the Symposium. We began by assembling a large number of appropriately fermented drinks in the center of the room, going on to read aloud the successively weirder and successively more profound speeches that make up the dialogue. I think the initial intention for our symposium was to conclude the evening with our own lesser speeches in praise of the god. Unfortunately, the bottles undertook their work too well, and so we concluded by stumbling not into inspired orations, but Ubers.

We need a new generation of robust, vigorous, hard minded defenses of love. This is admittedly a counter-intuitive diagnosis. For my entire adult life, love—or romance rather—seems to have occupied roughly 98% of pop-music, and basically every Netflix show apart from the ones about frumpy British cakes and revenge (and probably even those).

But I am skeptical that this sense of ubiquity isn’t sitting on top of a quiet and growing cynicism. I still think a lot about David Foster Wallace’s story, “A Radically Condensed History of Post Industrial Life.” In its entirety it reads:

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

The man who’d introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

This story, first published in 1999, seems prophetic in retrospect. In successive studies over the past decades, we’ve seen increasing decline in sexual activity. Rates for teens have dropped from roughly 50% in the early 90s to 30% in the post-Covid environment with a number of studies seeing similar downward trends for adults. In a landmark essay on “heteropessimism,” Ana Seresin writes: “heterosexuality’s normalization allowed it to endlessly repeat, immune from any substantial change … [the rise of] heteropessimism reveals something about the way we can remain secretly attached to the continuity of the very things we (sincerely) decry as toxic, boring, broken. Faced with the possibility of disappointment, anesthesia can feel like a balm.”

The issue is not merely whether at an aggregate level we are dating or screwing or marrying, but rather what kind of people we are becoming in relation to the drives and urges that sit pounding just below the level of rational consciousness.

The ancient convention of giving speeches not just about love but about Eros the god is a strange one. It shows up multiple places in Plato, not only at drunken dinner parties, but also in the main Athenian forum. But it’s a much older genre, with beautiful speeches appearing throughout the great Greek plays, including these incredible lines from Euripides’ Hippolytus:

Eros, Eros, distilling liquid desire upon the eyes,

bringing sweet pleasure to the souls

of those you make war against,

never may you show yourself to me for my hurt

nor ever come but in harmony

The breadth of the genre is startling — it’s there in the epics and the tragedies, in the historians and the philosophers. What’s puzzling about all of these texts is their obsession with the independent agency of love. It’s not enough to puzzle about the dizzying human confusion around sex and romance; the Greeks are convinced that love above all else must be a site of divine orchestration — and meddling.

I think our trouble with love is deeper than what is showing up in the surveys. It is not simply that economic factors are crowding it out, or that we are too distracted by our phones, or that, as one student remarked to a survey: “sex is not going to be something people ask you for on your résumé.” All of these factors contribute, but beneath the surface I think there is real, and perhaps growing gap between our idea of what should be present, and what we actually encounter in our relationships.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a clearer depiction of our entrancing complexity of love than in the great Mexican intellectual, Octavio Paz. As he writes in his beautiful book, The Double Flame: “at the beginning of love there is surprise, the discovery of another person to whom we are bound by no tie other than an indefinable physical and spiritual attraction.”

The trouble with love is a problem of ontology. What it means to be, is to be specific, definable. To be this, which also excludes being that. This shows up at the general level — being a tree rather than a planet; and also at the specific — this oak that lost two branches last year.

Perhaps there is a theory of humanity in which we are not specific in this sense —we are infinitely plastic things, malleable until death. But it doesn’t seem true to experience. If anything, in comparison to the tree, it just feels like there is layer upon layer of specificity in human beings. Like the oak, we have the physical structure of having a body. But then we also have proclivities, instincts, and histories carried just beneath the level of consciousness. And this exasperating tangle of frustrations, desires, and impulses that drive us into life. And beneath everything there is something more essential and also vulnerable that seems to say: “I am this, and not that.”

But this is also where the trouble with love begins. Assume a strong version of this thesis — I am independent and specific. And so is each other human being. Then why the hell should I expect to be able to go out into the world and find some other person in all their equally entrenched specificity that — what? —magically matches me?

Conversation is easy. Sitting in a cafe somewhere in DC we watch as your interest in Hegel and my interest in climbing weave together — simple enough. But love’s just so much more intransigent, more devilish than that. Even as I’m talking about how mountains emphasize finitude, what I’m actually wondering is whether this cafe presents a place — with this person, you — in which those stranger interiorities can surface, in which I can be. And I wonder if you are asking the same thing. Whether discussion of dialectics might actually be a quiet request to be free, to be there?

But the goal is not just to be able to appear before each other and then remain separate. The goal is to find those two distinct independent structures somehow opening up into … what? A kind of harmony.

The task of love seems so high, but it must be so. One of my very most emphatic intuitions is that I don’t think anything worthy of the name love can possibly permit either person being suppressed for the other. Though that is far too common — that one person or the other accepts diminishment just to keep some vague sense of togetherness intact.

To heighten the problem, it is worth making clear in sequence why nothing else rises to the word love. There are lots of other kinds of human relationships. Relationships where we are involved with one another because it’s very hard to paint the outside of a house on one’s own. Or relationships where we end up serving someone else’s goals for a project or institution (what the theorists call “labor”). Or relationships where we argue and laugh and banter but then head home fundamentally unseen. Each one of these (corresponding to Aristotle’s categories of “friendships for use” and “friendships for pleasure”) is perfectly legitimate in its own right, and perhaps can even be the basis of adequate romantic partnerships or marriages.

But I constantly think back to Wallace’s phrase, “the very same twist in their faces.” Somehow I, at least, am looking for something that is simply not satisfied by what I want to call “acquaintances at a distance.”

There is a certain point at which I’m desperate for something more than evasion and politeness. More than gentle disharmonies or full on dissimulation. There is a certain point at which the word love simply has to involve a completely exacting kind of honesty. For two people each to be this and to be this. To look at one another with clear and unfabricated eyes.

Building on our usual premises about the world, this desire is entirely mad. Why should I go out into the world and find myself in any such harmony with another being?

This is another form of what philosophers call “the problem of the one and the many” — if disunity is basic, then why do things come together at all?

And at this point, the attempts to escape seem to come with dizzying speed—maybe I don’t want that kind of harmony after all? Or maybe I can make myself content? Or perhaps we can trick one another into it? Or deaden the desire enough?

But, at least for me, when I’m most honest, each of these is an evasion. It is simply not true that I am content with having some other person abandon their distinctive independence for me, or having me abandon mine for them — nor, on the other end, with eternal disharmony and dissimulation.

And so, in the end, this has turned out to be a speech in praise of Eros, after all. I’m not sure that any of us has chosen this strange stubborn specificity, but it’s there. I am also not sure any of would decide to have such relentless hunger for deep un-dissimulated harmony, but we do so hunger.

Part of being human seems to be this palpitating sense that love — both loving and being loved — is perhaps more important than breathing itself. But also that if it is to be fulfilled, it must, somehow, have an agency entirely of its own.

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