“Eros invincible in battles,” writes the great tragic poet Sophocles in the tragedy “Antigone“, emphasizing the greatness of this invincible vital force. Love, this word as a broader concept or as a natural desire and impulsive feeling, has occupied and will continue to occupy, both philosophy and sciences, as well as the arts. Love belongs to each person in a familiar and unique way, since as an idea, but also as a fact, it is inherent to human existence.
Since ancient times, love occupies a prominent position in the course and evolution of human existence. Eros, as the god of love, stars in many works of lyrical and tragic poets, in different mythical variants, but is always associated with the goddess Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love.
Love was one of the main issues, with which Plato dealt extensively and in depth in his dialogues, “Phaedrus“[1] and “Symposium“. In the “Symposium”, Eros appears allegorically as the son of Porus (resource) and Penia (poverty), in order to highlight the duality of Eros moving between life and transience.[2] In Platonic ontology love is coextensive with death.
Eros and death in Platonic thought emerge as two modalities of exaltation of the soul, as both within the condition of love and death, the soul is freed from the transitory sensibility of the flesh, as seen through the Platonic dialogue “Phaedo“.[3] Something similar happens to every human entity, which is between life and death, giving a daily struggle to conquer life, despite its mortal nature. In this way Eros is situated between vitality and death, languor and wilting, hope and disappointment.
Eros and death coexist in love disappointment and separation. In fact, the well- known psychiatrist Eduardo Calixto[4]refers to the stages of experiencing separation, which could be paralleled to the stages of mourning. The person after a separation experiences the stages of pain, anger, denial, depression, abandonment, vulnerability. After the breakup, the person often finds it difficult to accept the fact. Human existence, after separation, experiences love, which now extends as a modality of mortality. “Love is the greatest of dreams, yet the worst of nightmares”, as the great Shakespeare said. [5]
The ambiguity of the nature of love is strongly expressed through Giacomo Leopardi’s work “Operette Morali“[6] in the dialogue between Farfarello and Malambruno, in a setting reminiscent of Dante’s “Divine Comedy“. The contradiction of Eros, which is the offspring of Penia and Poros, can be seen through this dialogue, in which the main issues are love and pleasure. Pleasure is governed by the same finitude/eternity ambivalence that love is governed by, expressed by the alternation/discontinuity contradiction. It is, therefore, a natural desire for happiness, which desire, however, is coextensive with absolute unhappiness, even when the element of pain or misfortune is absent. The natural desire for love, therefore for happiness, goes hand in hand with the absolute misery of failure, because man is aware of his limitation, realizing within the condition of love, his exalting, but also vulnerable side.
Eros, like the man in whom eros is embodied, balances between the duality of his nature, on the one hand divine, on the other human and vulnerable. In this way, the tendency of human nature to exceed its transience is highlighted, especially when it enters the condition of love.
As Plato also points out, through his dialogues, Eros is the inclination of the soul towards the good, more specifically described as “Interest in the Good” « τόκος εν τω καλώ» (literally means desire creation, spiritual and corporal, within the good beauty), because the purpose of love is the supreme, eternal beauty, which constitutes the basis of all beauty and of course immortality.
Plato believed that the soul transcends the limitation of the body and ascends to the world of ideas. The soul in the world of ideas faces the good through the knowledge of the truth, through death. With the advent of death, the soul is freed from the prison of the body, as it also happens in love, in which the physicality of man exceeds its limitations thanks to the psychic tension of the persons in love. [7]
The individual appropriates beauty, the only visible idea in the world of sensibility. The visual mitSein is governed by intracosmic vibrations of a transcendental character, since the persons in love, as biological and experiential presences, transcend their obsession, through erotic openness. Eros arises from sight, (εκ του ορᾶν το ερᾶν),[8] as they believed in ancient times. The visual mitsein turns into a visual mitDasein[9], since the photons,[10] according to quantum physics, that are emitted and absorbed by the eyes of the persons, interact through the electromagnetic radiation of light, which mobilizes the eye and subsequently the entire corporality.
Within this chaotic multiplicity, in which we live and evolve, love is embodied in the individuality of human existence. Each singularity diagnoses familiar ontological features in the idiosyncrasy of another being, which it idealizes, falls in love with, and with which it becomes one without each losing its singularity.
Eros is embodied in the existential individual, which is transformed from the flesh of contingency into a work of art (Ponty).[11] The beauty of love is activated through physical sensibility, which, although variable, radiates through love, in a transcendent dimension, within which death is negated.
A great, revolutionary love, which inscribed the philosophical thought of the 20th century, and even at the last moment of his death remained unscathed, was the love between Jean – Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. This magnificent love is synonymous with freedom, self-disposition, but also sympathy, unconditional love. Simone de Beauvoir stayed by Sartre’s side until the end of his life, holding his hand in his last moments.[12] In those moments time seemed relentless, impenetrable, even for these two lovers, for whom time, precision and planning were decisive factors. Sartre and de Beauvoir had realized that they no longer had the time at their disposal. A few hours before he died, lying in his hospital bed, Sartre asked Simone for a kiss, whispering to her: “My darling Beaver, I love you enormously” ( “ Je vous aime beaucoup, mon petit Castor”).[13]
The soul faces the supreme beauty and conquers it by breaking through the veil of death. The immortal soul when faced with love experiences more than ever the contradiction of end/eternity, death/immortality. The visible/invisible chiasm[14] governs love itself, which is enigmatic, promising everything, yet at the same time that it promises everything, it claims everything. Eros symbolizes the ideal, but also the impossible. In the myth of Eros and the Psyche, love as an ideal, but invisible lover, swears the Soul not to reveal his secret, and of course never to dare to face his face. When the Psyche came face to face with the visible side of Eros, which it became familiar with. The visual proprioception of her presence caused the tension of her physicality towards the face of Eros. Eros, from the beginning, had conquered the physicality of the Psyche, but the face and the look are decisive for the intimacy of the love impulse. As the French writer Michel Tournier put it: “the face as the focus of desire”. [15]
The facial expression played a key role in another great myth, in which love confronts death, in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The exalting love, which goes beyond even the catalytic death, is expressed through Orpheus, who does not hesitate to descend to the Underworld, in order to take back his beloved, Eurydice. Of course, Eurydice would return to the world of the living, provided that during the return Orpheus would not turn to face her face. Orpheus accepted the condition of Hades and Persephone, however, on the way, as he was advancing, he could not bear it and turned to face the face of his beloved, who was once again lost in the Underworld. The flash of love is followed by the flash of death and vice versa.
Eros balances between the perfect and the imperfect, the end and the infinite, giving and greed, the together and the Ego. In love, the following paradox occurs: Together is strengthened at the same time as the hypertrophic Ego of selfishness. Envy is the result of the empowerment of egoism.
Envy magnifies the possessiveness and selfishness, not only of the lover who extends his existence within the erotic mitDasein, but also of the persons around him. As seen in the myth of Eros and Psyche, both the possessive Aphrodite and the envious sisters of the Soul conspired to place the Soul next to Eros. In fact, her sisters tried to trick her away from love. So they urged the Psyche to kill Eros, after they misled it by telling it that Eros is the monster, which according to an older oracle, would amorously claim the Psyche. [16]
Gilles Deleuze points out the inseparable but conflicting relationship between love and envy, interpreting Proust’s masterpiece “In Search of Lost Time“, in his work “Proust and the Signs“. Envy presents itself as a shadow of love that recedes when the other person responds to the desire to belong. After all, does the pain of envy intensify the desire for romantic belonging? [17]
Deleuze, while interpreting and delving into Proust’s work, attempts to dialectically approach even the painful relationship of suffering – love through the feeling of envy. Deleuze finds that envy intensifies the desire for the loved one, as well as that man is mobilized in various ways by the feeling of pain and frustration. Thus, the insightful Deleuze emphasizes, through rhetorical questions, that man was motivated to seek the truth because he felt the pain caused by the lie of a loved one.[18] Continuing, in fact, he points out that many ideas of the intellect replace sadness. Sorrow and suffering force man to investigate and seek answers to the question “Why me?”, while claiming the perfect and ideal.
Often the erotic idealized perfect person is presented, according to Deleuze, as the most perceptive and broad spirit, even though the reality may differ from the idealization. This fact is due on the one hand to idealization, on the other hand to erotic delegacy, which as an echo of erotic vitality sculpts any shortcomings of the desired person.
Delegacy is a result of the reciprocity of love, when love overwhelms both subjects psychosomatically, who, within the condition of erotic mitDasein, embody Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase: “In love one and one are one”. [19]
The vitality felt by the being in love (physically and mentally) is so strong that it feels stronger against everything that confines it, even death itself. Within this complex spatio-temporality each singularity diagnoses familiar ontological features in the idiosyncrasy of another existence. The enamored existence even appropriates the disadvantages of the lustful person, which are sculpted through the amorous vitality.
The human subject experiencing the love feeling tends to be led to self- transcendence at the very moment when he is confronted with its obsession. The mental stimulation caused by the love feeling is expressed through the corporality and the changes it brings about. The individual himself feels that his mortal body is intended for the person whom he desires romantically. It is not a body-object (kӧrper) of desire, as love is an intersubjective state, in which persons transcend their mortality, while experiencing the love feeling through the carnal experience.
The body within the erotic experience emerges as a leib, as a lived body of empathy, whose proprioception, at the moment of the erotic tension, also governs the physicality of the other person in love. Love is expressed as the essence of the vital drive of human existence affecting the psychosomatic whole of the individual. The lover experiences and becomes familiar with the Being of his physicality within a transcendent spatio-temporality, which is not limited to the spatio-temporal limits of trivial reality.
Eros manifests itself as a psychophysical drive, as the individual’s innate need to transcend the Zero of his impermanence, as well as the stagnation of his biological condition. Man “throws himself” into his Being within the world. At the same time, however, he also realizes Zero. Love extends as a need to transcend Zero and radiate the Dasein of human Being.
Love is synonymous with idealization and eternity, especially when it includes the wonderful feeling of love, then it happens beyond good and evil,[20] if we remember Nietzsche’s words. But what happens when man experiences the perversions of love? When, at the same moment that he experiences a manifestation of eternity, that of love, his Daseincompetes with the universal infinite Being of the erotic ideal?
Man ardently desires perfection, but when he realizes that he is never going to conquer it, only to become familiar with certain aspects of it, then he feels more than ever the need for the limitation of time. Man inwardly desires his limitedness against the eternal and ideal love, so that he may be motivated to strive constantly to conquer it. It is an emotional state from which emerges the Heraclitian dialectic, the constant alternation of good/bad. As we read in the Cosmic Analects of Heraclitus:[21] “Famine made satiety sweet…”.
The need to constantly intensify the existential struggle of the individual for the conquest of the infinite and the eternal, pushes him to the internal paradoxical desire for the relegation of his own personal love, in front of the universal, idealized love. Man aspires to conquer everywhere and everything, but on an intracosmic level, as he particularizes the universal everywhere, in his here, and the eternal always, in his certain, temporary now.
Human existence is governed by the tragically absurd contradiction: the burning desire to conquer eternity, and on the other hand the irrevocable repeatability of failure. This absurd contradiction peaks, when through the impossible, from the unconquered, the desire to return to this constant battle is rekindled.
Denial and deprivation regenerate one’s desire and hope. Man’s desire is coextensive with the tendency to frustrate. In this point lies the contradiction of human existence. As Freud argued, at the same time that man is driven by his nature to vital love, at the same time he is driven to death, to self-destruction. This paradox of the person in love externalizes the tragic paradox of the human being, which has a tendency to rush into life through anxiety, to tend to affirmation through denial.
This non-negation is so decisive for the vitality of human existence that it is expressed both through love, and through another condition that encloses one of the manifestations of love, love for wisdom, philosophy. The non-negation mobilized and shaped an entire philosophical thought, the thought of the great Pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides. We could say that this paradox that governs the vitality of love, as well as human nature, also governs Parmenidean thought. As it can be seen, the necessity of denial for the affirmation of eternity emerges in and from the philosophical thought of Parmenides. Parmenides, possibly, needed the non-being, in order to confirm in himself the actual being. This non-negation negated by the existence of the potential being was decisive, a fact that Heidegger foresaw centuries later, highlighting Being through the competitive relationship of existence with Zero (nothingness).
Like Parmenides, so does the lover, he needs to experience the overcoming of his limitation by the eternal, so that he is constantly motivated to sculpt the seemingly contradictory relationship between the eternal and the eternal. One such form of love is one-sided love. Unrequited love, although accompanied by pain and despair, is the love that has been praised the most, by poets, writers and artists. “The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned”, as Somerset Maugham said.[22] The unfulfilled love is the manifestation of the love of greatness, but also of pain, of the eternal, but also of the end, of exaltation through the crash.
Unrequited love entails the crushing of human wholeness, both physically and mentally. Unrequited love unfolds as the predominance of Poverty over Resource, pain over joy. The perfection of love and its exalting dimension is expressed through its fulfillment, through two-way love. Balzac graphically pointed out the perfection and vital necessity of mutual love, likening love to the vital function of breathing. Synchronization of inhalation and exhalation is necessary, because if the inhalation stops, the reciprocation stops, the breath is lost, the love is lost. [23]
But is love lost? Love for something presupposes its deprivation, i.e. Poverty. But the value and the lust do not stop after the loved one is acquired. In the “Symposium”, in the dialogue between Agathon and Socrates, Socrates introduces the concept of love’s duration and immortality. Love is a vital movement, a psychophysical movement towards the exalting form of human existence. [24] Love is not confined to the limits of mortality and the limitations of material space-time. It is a desire to belong, a desire to inhabit and be inhabited among the corporealities that coexist within the erotic mitDasein. Thus love is transitory in terms of its starting point, but eternal in terms of its momentum and end.
Exceeding time limits within the love relationship is due to the ambiguity of love. Love is driven to transcendence through the constant aggravation of poverty due to oversatiation. As can be seen from the speeches of Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor in the Peripatetic School, love manifests itself as a thoughtless desire that tends to exaggeration, it develops at a dizzying pace, but reaching the end slowly. [25]
The person in love who experiences an unfulfilled love as an ample and timely presence within the hic et nunc experiences the absence of the body of the desiring subject. This absence constitutes the absence of a leib. The leib of the subject of desire is absent from the intercosmic spatio-temporality of the lover, but it is not absent from the intrasubjective spatio-time of his imagination. The imaginary form (kӧrperform) of the subject affects the leib of the lover who sculpts with his imagination the form of his beloved person. The experienced body of the lover lives as a biological presence in the contemporary hic et nunc, as an experiential presence, however, it is located in the space and time of his inner, imaginative consciousness.
The lover who experiences an unfulfilled love experiences a spatio-temporal duality. The spatio-temporality of the present hic et nunc within which his physicality as leib experiences the absence of the existence of the desired person, while simultaneously experiencing an imaginary hic et nunc, within which the desired person is present as kӧrperform. Imaginations forms, as well as memory-images, awaken the past modalities of the erotic mitDasein that shaped the specific space-time, where the lover feels the immutability of absence that was once presence.
Time doesn’t stop, it doesn’t get trapped, it doesn’t return, it runs, as it intensifies the sense of absence of the desired person. Unrequited love is the ultimate form of time’s envy of love. The person in love lives moments of happiness, which the unpredictability of temporality and the asynchrony of amorous desire eliminate by causing pain. The man who experiences love disappointment alone lives a double bodily identity: his own within the present hic et nunc as leib and the desired person in the hic et nunc of fantasy as kӧrperform. Was Proust right to believe that imagination is responsible for love, and not the other person? After all, is fantasy much better than reality love, as the famous artist, Andy Warhol, had said? [26]
A person’s unfulfilled love is governed by an extreme ambivalence, which the lover experiences, both physically and mentally. On the one hand, he undergoes the uncovering of his psychosomatic life force, on the other hand, this psychosomatic uncovering intensifies his desire and his audacity to claim the face of his desire. This lust that continues to intensify, despite the person’s disappointment, is probably due to the lover’s desire to be loved by the loved one. Indeed, if we also take into account Jacques Lacan’s point of view, according to which, to love is essentially the desire to be loved.[27]
The manifestation of unrequited love scarred one of the greatest philosophers of all time, Friedrich Nietzsche. His unrequited love for Lou Salome scarred him. [28] Nietzsche met Salome in Rome at a literary evening. They were connected by a very close friendship, but for the philosopher it was not just friendship. At the same time, Salome was also claimed by Nietzsche’s loyal friend, Paul Rée, who, in fact, had proposed to her, but she refused, just as she refused Nietzsche’s marriage proposal. Salome enjoyed the lust both men felt for her and, as urban legend has it, flirted with both of them at the same time. As it is said, in fact, on a trip the three of them went on with Salome’s mother, the chemistry between Nietzsche and Salome was evident, to the point that jealousy enraged Rée. Of course, Nietzsche’s love affair with Salome is better known for its philosophical dimension than for the carnal one, since the carnal side of their love affair was never confirmed.[29]
The carnal dimension of love is governed by the entanglement of eros and death, since over the centuries the body, especially in the context of love, is very often treated as something wretched, dirty and sinful and the main reason is that the erotic desire is experienced through it.
However, how is romantic desire experienced in the modern era, in which human existence is unable to embrace the vital drive of its corporeality due to nihilistic complexity, violent absolutes and bio-power that dominates at every level? Nowadays, love is more than ever, confronted with the evils, the ugliness and the gloom of Penia. Modern man lives in a terribly nihilistic and confrontational era, in which cruelty, all forms of violence, the trivialization of human existence in the midst of social hybridizations of evil, trap, alter and instrumentalize the vital impulse of love.
Man’s love impulse confronts Zero and many times the person in love experiences the crash of his Being into Zero. It is, however, reborn and strengthened, constantly returning from never to always.
The perpetual movement of love, although it permeates the Void, is not limited, nor is it trapped within it, since its vital momentum is rekindled every time the person in love becomes aware of the dizzying flow of time. Love, even unfulfilled, unconsummated love, does not stop its movement, as its movement is synchronized with the existential movements and actions of the individual within life. We could talk for hours about love, its manifestations and its dual nature. However, it is better to live love than to talk about it, because the movement of human time is limited. In contrast to love, which is infinite, eternal and immovable, starting its course from mortality to immortality.
[1] Πλάτων, Φαίδρος, μτφρ. Παναγιώτης Δόικος, εκδ. Ζήτρος, Θεσσαλονίκη, 2001.
[2] Πλάτωνος Συμπόσιον, μτφρ. Ι. Συκουτρή, 23η έκδοση , εκδ. Εστία, Αθήνα, 2009, 203b – 204c.
[3] Πλάτωνος Φαίδων, (μτφρ. Ευαγγέλου Παπανούτσου), εκδ. Ιωάννου Ν. Ζαχαρόπουλου, Αθήνα 1957.
[4] Dr. Eduardo Calixto González UAMX, La Neurobiología del Amor, ανακτήθηκε από: Producción Videográfica y Sonorización, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKiVe7Hb-Hc.
[5] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/373396.
[6] Giacomo Leopardi, Operette Morali. Essays and Dialogues, [Leopardi Giacomo, 1798- 1837, Operette Morali], (translated byGiovanni Cecchetti), University of California Press, , Berkeley, Los Angeles, , London, ©1982 University of California, p. 96. Ανακτήθηκε από: https://www.google.gr/books/.
[7] Πλάτων, Φαίδρος, μτφρ. Παναγιώτης Δόικος, εκδ. Ζήτρος, Θεσσαλονίκη, 2001.
[8] https://www.gnomikologikon.gr/authquotes.php?auth=342.
[9] Martin Heidegger, Είναι και Χρόνος ( Sein und Zeit, 1927), (Μεταφρ: Γιάννης Τζαβάρας), εκδ. Δωδώνη, Αθήνα, 1η εκδ. 1978, 2η, 2013.
[10] https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki.
[11]Ponty, M.M. Φαινομενολογία της Αντίληψης, ( Phenomenologie de la perception), (μτφρ. Κική Καψαμπέλη), εκδ. Νήσος, 2016, Αθήνα ( Gallimard, 1945).
[12] Claudine Monteil, Αξεπέραστοι έρωτες, (Les amants de la liberté), (μτφρ. Ελένη Κεχαγιόγλου), εκδ. Καστανιώτη Α.Ε., Αθήνα, 2000, γι’ αυτή την έκδοση ΤΟ ΒΗΜΑ, ΑΛΤΕΡ ΕΓΚΟ, 2017, σ. 340.
[13] https://www.cairn.info/les-couples-illustres-de-l-histoire-de-france–9782262079383-page-361.htm
[14] Σωκράτης Δεληβογιατζής, Ζητήματα Διαλεκτικής , 4η έκδοση, εκδ. Ερωδιός, Θεσσαλονίκη 2010.
[15] https://www.gnomikologikon.gr/authquotes.php?auth=342
[16] https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/.
[17] Ζιλ Ντελέζ, Ο Προυστ και τα σημεία, (Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes, PUF., Paris, 1976. , 4th edition, ©Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1964) (μτφρ. Καίτη Χατζηδήμου – Ιουλιέτα Ράλλη, εκδ. Ράππα, Αθήνα, 1976 .
[18] Gilles Deleuze, Proust & Signs, (translated by Richard Howard), © The Regents of the University of Minessota , 2000. Ανακτήθηκε από: https://www.google.com/books.
[19] https://quotefancy.com/quote/1029841/Jean-Paul-Sartre-In-love-one-and-one-are-one.
[20] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/214565
[21] Ηράκλειτος, Τα Κοσμικά Ανάλεκτα, 46-44, Ν.Ν. Μπουγάς [Π], ΠΑΠΥΡΟΣ BRITANNICA, T. 27, σ.. 150, copyright: 1978, 1980 Librairie Larousse, Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 1984 Πάπυρος Γραφικαί Τέχναι ΑΕ, Αθήνα.
[22] https://www.gnomikologikon.gr/authquotes.php?auth=342
[23] https://www.gnomikologikon.gr/authquotes.php?auth=342
[24] Πλάτωνος Συμπόσιον, μτφρ. Ι. Συκουτρή, 23η έκδοση , εκδ. Εστία, Αθήνα, 2009, 199c – 201c
[25] https://www.gnomikologikon.gr/authquotes.php?auth=342
[26] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/andy_warhol_597864
[27] https://www.gnomikologikon.gr/authquotes.php?auth=342
[28] Πέτρος Γκάτζιας, (2020), «Ερωτευμένος Νίτσε…», Diastixo, https://diastixo.gr/epikaira/storyteller/13497-eroteymenos-nitse.
[29] Πέτρος Γκάτζιας, (2020), «Ερωτευμένος Νίτσε…», Diastixo, https://diastixo.gr/epikaira/storyteller/13497-eroteymenos-nitse.
