No time enough for love
It’s Valentine's Day again.
I had two conversations recently where I discussed what I personally believed to be the main focuses of life. If you could break it down into three things. I was hungover both times so please bear with me. The first time I said something like:
“There are three things that matter in life: 1. The acquisition of wisdom, 2. Securing the bag, 3. Creating art.”
That’s all great, but could something be missing?
Normally you would need to drag me into Tartarus, kicking and screaming to ever get me to admit I was wrong on that one.
“It’s a complete and discrete list. Nothing, I mean nothing is missing.”
But it’s Valentine’s Day, so I’m feeling a bit sentimental.
The second time I had the same conversation with someone else weeks later, and realized something was in fact missing. So we have wisdom which can mean knowledge or gnosis, either one, we’re not discriminating here; wealth acquisition which any sensible person pursues aggressively; and art, which is more vague, but on a spiritual level describes the Apollonian will to shape the world via our intent. But there is a substance missing from all three that without renders them meaningless. Why do we pursue any of those things at all? What good is money, knowledge or art without this one thing? What is the missing part? It’s not like the missing part is not a fundamental part of all alchemy, art, science and expression. It’s not like it wasn’t written about at length in Plato’s Symposium, like it isn’t the focus of every single human life as much as we like to pretend it isn’t. Like it or not we are networked social beings. None of us is a total free agent, a mercenary free of obligations or dependencies. No, the thing that makes us human beings is that we desperately need each other. Don’t get me wrong, we can and should be excessively free. Here on Thirst Trap for Annihilation we celebrate the more cavalier lifestyles - when in doubt, live like Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. That said, you can’t live without love. Yes, love is missing from my “Three things”. All you need is love.
Or so we think…
Historically there isn’t a whole lot of agreement over what ‘love’ actually is. There isn’t a lot of agreement over what love is right now either. More on dating sites later. There are the bonds we lay down within families and clans. There is the love one has for a brother on the battlefield, a friend in life. There is the love one has for their mighty steed or their hunting hounds. There is the love a centurion had for his ancient Roman towelboy. There’s the love a lady in waiting had for the knight who travelled south to the Holy Land to love lots of peasants he’d ransack on the way. For our purposes and for Valentine’s Day simplicity, we’re going to focus *only* on eros - and there isn’t a fixed definition of eros either.
Eros as a primordial Greek winged god, son of Ares and Aphrodite, implies a lot. A union of both the love goddess and the martial war god, together manifested as the delirium and madness of erotic love fits the mythopoetic. In the classical Greek tradition, eros is a form of mania. Eros’s arrows wound before they drive the subject into frenzy. The primordial drive is the same that drove Paris to steal away Helen, leading to theater of desire, love, war and death. 1
Physical Love - Aristophanes
Beyond classical myth is Plato’s Symposium, where much of our modern understanding of eros stems. The Symposium’s two main speeches, one by Aristophanes, and a second by Socrates lay a mythological and philosophical marriage of the definition of eros that follows through into the western artistic and esoteric traditions. The Symposium is set during an intellectual debate about eros after a drunken party. After Eryximachus, the physician describes eros as a cure, a divinity, and a god that reconciles discordant elements in the body and the soul; Aristophanes stumbles in drunken stupor. The comedian and sensualist, fond of drink and excess tells a mythic story about the origins of eros as a somatic process. The bodies once were satiated primordial androgynes but were split by the gods forming separate individuals of varying sexes. The search for love is then explicitly the search for one’s physical other half in fulfilled ecstasy. It’s a sort of hylic myth, physical, and low, to which Socrates returns an extensive critique after. Socrates elevates love to something more spiritual. Aristophanes’s myth encourages devotion and sacrifice to the gods for the *hope* that the gods will rejoin the two missing halves. The myth bears a lot of similarity to the alchemical great work of creating the ‘rebis’ or divine hermaphrodite. You can draw conclusions about Masonry from that if you will. The point here is Aristophanes is fixated on the body and sexuality. The myth he describes fits that limited vision.
The Ladder of Love - Socratic Love
For Socrates, true eros is not mere arousal to the sexual body, but love aimed at the interior soul of the other, and by extension, love for beauty, form, and philosophy itself. Socrates’s response to Aristophanes elevates eros including love’s physical component - but builds on it to includes the union of souls. Having learned his wisdom from Diotima, the woman philosopher from Mantinea, Socrates defines eros as the communion of two souls to create something eternal and divine, a form of love mediated between man and the gods. “Love is the yearning for eternity, the longing for immortality.” But Socrates does not end there. In defining the ladder of love, he expands out from the union of individuals to union of divine eternal ideas of beauty and form.
Socrates states:
“It is necessary for the one proceeding in the right way towards his goal to begin, when he is young, with physical beauty; and first of all, if his guide directs him properly, to love one person, and in his company to beget beautiful ideas and then to observe that beauty in one person is related to the beauty in another. If he must pursue physical beauty, he would be very foolish not to realize that the beauty in all persons is one and the same. When he has come to this conclusion, he will become the lover of all beautiful bodies and relax the intensity of his love for one and think the less of it as something of little account. Next he will realize that beauty in the soul is more precious than that in the body, so that if he meets with a person who is beautiful in his soul, even if he has little of the physical bloom of beauty, this will be enough and he will love and cherish him and beget beautiful ideas that make the young better, so that he will in turn be forced to see the beauty in morals and laws and that beauty in all is related.”
But wait a minute, that doesn’t sound ideal either. What of the eternal beloved? Is such a thing even possible? Socrates is not denigrating physical, monogamous, or any form of intimacy shared here by reducing the value of individual characteristics; but is instead attempting to define a process of love’s growth. You ascend the ladder. Sure it can start with the physical, with passion and the flesh, but if it is to go anywhere. If knowledge, wealth, and art are to be or mean anything, they can only grow with the abutment of eros into ever more spiritual forms. Here this approaches the Platonic ideal of eros - that through loving the other starting with even the lower physical, the erotic, or the romantic, eros can guide the self to communing with the beauty of all things. A helpful way to think of Socrates’s ladder of love is to think of eros as separate from the immediate and the corporeal. How it is possible to love someone who has died? Someone from the past? Someone as symbolic idea? These are each experiences we’ve all had.
The Impossibility of the Other
If you’re like me, Plato’s Symposium is beautiful, lays some interesting foundations, but isn’t good enough on that first read. In fact we modern lovers are pretty cynical are we not? The “ladder of love” is certainly not what comes to mind while doom-swiping a dating app. In fact all modern dating is so anchored deeply into the hylic only, body only expression of eros that it can hardly even be called eros. Dating sites are part of the pornification of everything. All human interaction has become and are becoming increasingly more transactional. Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard both covered it well. When the representations of things and not the things themselves become the only way interactions between subject - object relationships occur, then there is no true interaction at all.
I’ve had the privilege of attending and speaking in several of Ana Mostarac’s Twitter spaces discussing love and dating in the tech adjacent, rationalist adjacent space. Without citing facts and figures and going into the gritty details, we are entering a crisis stage where fewer people are getting married, fewer people are having children, and worse people are more isolated, lonely and depressed than they have ever been. Ana rightly identifies dating sites and optimization metrics as one of the causes of this despair. Her posts and romance advocacy for young Bay Area singles evoke the thought of Byung-Chul Han.
In The Agony of Eros Han describes eros as:
“a relationship to the Other situated beyond achievement, performance and ability. Being NOT ABLE (Nicht-Konnen-Konnen) represents its negative counterpart. The negativity of Otherness - that is the atopia of the Other which eludes all ability - is constitutive of erotic experience.” 2
For Han, the problem with modern eros is not necessarily that it is too physical, but rather that it is too optimized, separated from pain, separated from true spirit in the Hegelian sense. This is what is truly the matter with Tinder, Onlyfans, etc. The negative must be bound in eros and cannot be separated. Negation is part of the very act of falling in love itself.
“Love is not a possibility, is not due to our initiative, it is without reason, it invades us and wounds us”
Negativity and Hegelian ‘pain’ is a feature not a bug of true erotic love. Negation of the self is the possibility of injury, tragedy, crashing, falling up, falling down in love. Like George Bataille would observe; to fall in love is to succumb or to be succumbed to by desire - it is an act of discontinuity that destroys the self and allows it to be consumed by the image of the other.
If love is a mere marketplace where we swipe and seek the easy fix of optimized list characteristics, then we are engaging with only that, a marketplace. Byung-Chul Han calls this:
“society as search engine - a machine for consumption… today love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to now generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama - only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from negativity… to fall in love would already be too negative.”
To truly connect with the other means to court the possibility of erasure, the possibility of pain, the drama of tragedy, death, and as Socrates would certainly agree with - the non presence of the body itself. Contrast that with the way we, millennials and younger date now. Everything is categorized, every sex act, kink, fetish, gender, subcultural form, music taste, film taste, political taste. Is she a femcel? Is he based and redpilled? Is he a spiritual post-rat founder with Jesus hair and a love of rock climbing? If you want an an Ionian, neo-pagan tradwife with hazel eyes, or a Levantine gothic, EDM fan who enjoys the poetry of John Donne, you can select for it and optimize for it. None of that means that any of these relationships will last or matter, because the real tragedy is, everyone is optimizing the same. The drama has been completely extracted, we flirt with, fuck, and love, shadows of people and not the people themselves. We’re stuck at the bottom rung of Socrates’s ladder of love.
Han says the positivized only marketplace of love “means nothing more than need, satisfaction and enjoyment. It is incompatible with the withdrawal and delay of the Other.” When the other is transformed into an optimized “achievement subject” - we select among many options pulled for their perceived “uniqueness”.
We so seldom look on love
So what does this all mean? What do we do about this?
I wasn’t just wrong about what matters most in life in my first conversation, it goes beyond that. The fact that I gave that answer - “money, knowledge, art” - without pausing for a second to consider love, is why any approach to love I could’ve conceived at the time would’ve been tainted by a pornified, additive optimization. But we all suffer from this, especially those of us who fall into the online upwardly mobile high rizz based techset. We think we can have something because we fit eros into the same commodified models we fit everything else into.
Love isn’t something you buy or optimize for. It is not a perfect set of characteristics you swipe on. It is something that happens to you. It is immanent. If you’re too weighed down by ‘money, knowledge, art’, when it does happen it will shatter your sensibilities and leave you adrift like all those Trojan War sailors returning from yet another lovesick campaign, hearing seductive sirens and ocean wave crashes - never knowing how to parse any of the sound. You will be wholly unprepared for it.
My answer assessment of life wasn’t part of the problem it is the problem. It is not enough to “get off the apps”, I did that a long time ago and preach it every day to as many people I can get to listen. We get it, the dating apps are evil, get off of them. No, the problem is deeper, one of outlook. I didn’t misperceive the cause and effect chain, I didn’t see the chain at all. What good is money without love? What good is knowledge without love? What good is art without love? It is the very substance that fires the creation and pursuit of all three, in all beauty and tragedy. It’s not supposed to be easy or just fun, it’s not a shopping list, and it’s not a fantasy projection.
Take a risk, meet someone in the world, and know it can go horrifically, but that’s the point, there’s beauty in the risk. It can go wonderfully too, and it will always end in separation or death even when it works. That’s the whole point of Socrates’s ladder of love. When you finally understand that, you can accept eros for all that it is.
Morford, Mark; Lenardon, Robert “Classical Mythology”, Chapter 7 Aphrodite and Eros pp133
“The Agony of Eros” Byung-Chul Han