What is Eros?
What is being defined is Eros, something almost unknown in the philosophies of love.
The Christian tradition from St. Augustine had taught that
Humans are capable of two kinds of love: charity and cupidity.
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He described both of these as "motions of the soul."
Charity is a motion of the soul toward God, while cupidity is a motion of the soul toward one's self or any other created thing.
Cupidity is, of course, the root of all sin; his Latin phrase is "radix malorum est cupiditas."
Charity, on the other hand, means that one should only love another person or anything in
the world for the sake of God, never for its own sake.
Eros is a very important concept and should never be confused with the popular and journalistic use of the word "erotic" in our own times to describe pornography or merely
sexually explicit materials.
Eros is Sigmund Freud's concept of libido or
Carl Jung's psychic energy-for both,
Eros is the energy of the body required to confront and adjust to the external world
And therefore to maintain some happiness.
In this sense it is the energy required to create oneself every day.
The best way to understand Eros, however, is to look back to Plato who, in a dialogue called The Symposium, recounts the story of the creation and fall of man as the story of the origin of Eros.
The Symposium is Plato's dialogue on love.
At the house of Alcibiades, the famous hero of the Peloponnesian War, Socrates and a few others gather to discuss love.
Each takes a turn telling a myth and explaining what love is. Aristophanes tells the story of the golden age when there were no men or women, but rather androgynous beings in whom the sexes were not divided. These beings had two heads, four arms, four legs, and sexual organs of both male and female. They were round in shape and very fast and strong. They were so happy and so much fulfilled within themselves that they had little interest in worshipping or listening to the words of the gods. After much counsel and concern, Zeus devised a plan whereby each human was cut in two, down the middle, and ever after the halves lived in great anxiety looking for their missing other halves.
For Aristophanes, the fall of mankind is a psychic fragmentation.
Beings that were once complete in themselves now needed to company of another in order to feel complete.
But the myth makes it perfectly clear that human wholeness originated in human beings themselves.
When one half finds its other, Aristophanes tells us, it would cling to in memory of an earlier condition and, in that way, recover an earlier state of psychic wholeness and happiness.
Did you find your missing half yet?
By Sang-Bong Lee, Ph.D.
Philosopher & Poet
All rights reserved and copyrighted 2000. Reprinted by permission of Sang-Bong Lee.
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