The eros of thinking

There is a specifically philosophical eros. Plato understood this. There is a way in which the demand to think is fundamentally erotic. And there is also a way in which in our time though with a long genealogy, the excitement, beauty, and joy of love is so misunderstood that it is as if sex is love's dirty secret because it is not really about love but a selfish desire. The same eros is in art, and in the love of beauty and of things that are truly interesting. And relationships between people, whether they are friendships or marriages or something else, can partake of that and it of them. Philosophers should remind people of this.

The filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni said that in our time "eros is sick." The enormous concern of governments and those who turn to them for their needs with the mere health and life of bodies is as much a diversion away from this erotic character of Being itself as the capitalist exploitation of bodies and pleasures to make money off the perverse injunction to enjoy. Philosophy is able to give us what no other social practice can, as religion cannot, which is the idea of the good life as something to pursue not according to a given path but as a question, an inquiry, and an experimentation, that depends on calling ourselves and our way of living into question, and the social world we live in along with it.

Thus, properly concerned, eros is political and it is in art and it is an open-ended task and a question. The question that is actually larger than either of the religions that gave it such importance, Judaism which links it to justice and makes it a demand, and Christianity which substituted it for justice and tended to make it everything; the concept is love and it was in Plato and the practice of philosophy long before Hillel or Jesus. The philosophical name for this is ethics, which is not the path of wisdom, which various religions can lay out and make into a business or form of government; it is rather a use of mind by bodies that is inventive, transgressive, contestational, problematizing, and that pursues objects of beauty or desire in ways that tend to be - interesting.

Its opposite is a dully administered life. We see this everywhere, in medicine and therapies, and other things, and people turn to it to solve problems without treating them as problematics, that is, as interesting and as involving unknowns. Science partakes of this, as technology does not; literature partakes of it, as record-keeping does not; love partakes of it, as marriage can but need not; caring for others partakes of it as taking care of them need not.