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Delight Springs

Wednesday, February 16, 2022

The Eros Monster

...Sex without romance, romance without dating, dating without marriage, polyamory, a loosening of gender roles: our world is becoming a Wild West of romantic entanglements. Familial and religious oversight over coupling is dwindling, and the internet makes it possible to be constantly and privately available to those far beyond our immediate community. We live during a time of great romantic freedom, though we have not yet reckoned with the price. As we eliminate the social norms that guide our expectations of romance, we also liberate a monster within us. The name of that monster is Eros.

It used to be commonplace to characterize romantic attraction as a destructive passion that takes over a person, making them crazily indifferent to their own well-being:

The unreasoning desire that overpowers a person’s considered impulse to do right and is driven to take pleasure in beauty, its force reinforced by its kindred desires for beauty in human bodies—this desire, all-conquering in its forceful drive, takes its name from the word for force (rhōmē) and is called eros.


This definition of love from Plato’s Phaedrus is several thousand years old; notice how many times the word “force” appears. The Phaedrus offers a few speeches inveighing against love before praising a special, divine version of it, one in which erotic madness is sublimated to the shared, sexless pursuit of virtue and knowledge. Hence “platonic friendship.” The erotic impulse can fuel the elevation of the soul, but Plato is not shy in confronting how damaging it is when that does not happen. In the dialogue’s negative speeches on mundane love, lovers are described as inclined to exploit, demean, and destroy their beloveds, so as to control them more fully.

Plato’s student Aristotle did not inherit his teacher’s obsession with the dangers of the erotic, and instead focused on philia, love expressed through friendship, family, and civic affiliation. Generally, the philosophical tradition has ceded eros to writers of fiction and poetry. In W. Somerset Maugham’s bildungsroman Of Human Bondage, for instance, Philip’s unhappy attraction to Mildred and his willingness to allow her to exploit him is matched only by his contempt for how much she can induce him to debase himself. At one point, she repays his charity by destroying everything he owns. In the final pages of the novel, headed toward marriage with someone he respects and appreciates, Philip thinks he sees Mildred on the street. When it turns out the woman is not Mildred, he is both relieved and horrified:

He felt that a strange, desperate thirst for that vile woman would always linger. That love had caused him so much suffering that he knew he would never, never quite be free of it. Only death could finally assuage his desire.


A century has passed since the publication of this book, and I fear Maugham’s contemporary readers may find his descriptions of Philip’s romantic torments old-fashioned, hyperbolic, and quaintly exaggerated. While Maugham presents a loveless marriage as Philip’s liberation from eros, today we expect marriage to feature—at least at the outset—a great deal of erotic passion. We see such passion as basically salutary, an essential and positive contribution to adulthood. In this sense, we’ve done our best to sanitize eros’s destructive aspects.

“Eros, honored without reservation and obeyed unconditionally, becomes a demon,” warns C. S. Lewis, “mercilessly chaining together two mutual tormentors, each raw all over with the poison of hate-in-love.” Writing in 1960, he voices his worry that the dangers of eros have come to be underappreciated: “Read Anna Karenina, and do not fancy that such things happen only in Russia.” Not only in Russia, and not only in the nineteenth century. In Virgil on Dido, Goethe on Werther, Flaubert on Emma Bovary, Proust on Swann, and Brontë on Heathcliff, we have tales of love as a sickness of the soul.

In these stories, today’s reader is drawn to the opposition lovers encounter from the world around them. We are eager to acknowledge the need for ever more acceptance—of nontraditional family structures, of a diversity of sexual preferences, and of romances that cross cultural boundaries. We have become wary of blaming the “force” of eros for the misdeeds to which it gives rise, as this line of reasoning has a bad history of excusing violence, typically against women, as “crimes of passion.” Instead, we want to lay the blame at the feet of one of the individuals involved, or point to structural flaws such as gender inequality or age gaps.

It is surely true that romance can exploit existing power imbalances, but the old story was that romance also created these imbalances, delivering one soul for another to prey on. That old story got something uncomfortably right... Agnes Callard

https://harpers.org/archive/2022/03/the-eros-monster-agnes-callard/

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