article on Eros
platonic and otherwise
About a year ago, I spent a happy six weeks reading around and pulling together a few threads for what became this recent article for The Hedgehog Review, "Desire in the Cave” —
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/by-theory-possessed/articles/desire-in-the-cave
It has proved, a year later, to accidentally be right within current discourse, because it leads with Agnes Callard’s then-recent essay on Pessoa, Plato, and broken hearts, Eros Monster. Read it if you have not, it is a brilliant tale of backing out of tortured love, one tortured step at a time. (You’ve probably run across the furor over Callard’s profile in The New Yorker this spring; it’s a helpful redirect to the conversation to see what Callard herself has to say, in her own words, about love and its more foolish amors.)
Callard’s piece also illustrates well a problem I saw in a recent novella, the book where the project began, a sort of remarkably convoluted story in letters, Sarastro’s Cave, by one of my teachers from whom I have learned the most, Richard Velkley. And I could not help adding in, to make the stakes more clear, Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
So what was the trouble? Well, the article is framed as a diagnosis and critique of the eros/rationality dichotomy, with a very gentle case for eros being as dangerous as the poets say and yet worth pursuing—the direction of my rhetoric at the time being aimed at dissolving some of the terror at desire that cultural prudence-professionalism manifests, to which loveless philosophies have lent their blessing.
If I had to reframe it now, in light of the difficulties people seem to have parsing Agnes’ own love affairs as seen in the New Yorker, I’d be rather less gentle. I see two threads in Agnes-discourse, inevitably related to the basic and deeply wrong philosophical division we are heirs to between love and thinking.
The first is probably the more common response, where it’s seen as outré to talk about lives beyond the professional, beyond the strictly moral, in a public and philosophical way. People didn’t just want to disagree with Agnes, they wanted to shame her, and that was dumb. America, I can’t help you if this is your trouble. Agnes’ writing at times seems to trigger and even stoke a kind of herd morality response, and lord that conversation gets uninteresting, fast.
On the other hand, the other side of this debate was a sort of smugness in the celebration of any public discussion of desire beyond the conventionally moral at all. Professors and students in love is a conventional tale as old as time, and in our own idiom, thoroughly explored by at least 1951 (one of my favorite versions is Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman). But yet there is still this temptation to see that kind of amor as heroically unconventional, and so Agnes becomes an avatar for the transgressions we professionals wish we had enough time to pursue, an opportunity to display our angst at herd morality but retain our prudential fear of catching its ire ourselves. And so the transgressions she pictures, and we picture, remain carefully within the bounds of what is compatible with a successful professional life at the highest levels of American institutions. That this falls short of the erotic is what Death in Venice so beautifully illustrates: if you haven’t destroyed your life and your career, you might not have been in love.
Note that these two sides to the debate are simply: one is pro-rational-morality, and one is pro-Eros-transgressive, smug goodness and smug badness. Great work western culture, you’ve done it again.
And so once again I’m frustrated with humanity, as I discuss in the article, that we refuse to consider what Eros looks like as neither hero nor villain, but both, and better than both. No one does this better than Plato, if, that is, you are paying attention to the story of what he tells.
This is my idea of Platonic philosophy: Philosophy isn’t the rational pursuit of becoming a slightly better, slightly more successful, and definitely more interesting person. It’s the tortured pursuit of what you can’t help wanting to know, seek, and find, at the very limits of yourself and your rationality. It’s not something you achieve but something that happens to your life, almost in spite of yourself. Likewise, love pulls us out of self-obsession into a dazed contemplation of the other, where you are willing to lose even food and sleep as you are drawn past the limits of yourself and your rationality. It’s only in this way that you might notice what is after all the truth.
I can’t imagine life without both!