Erotic Ascent and Ethical Descent: The Straining of the Mortal for the Immortal

One of my professors recently encouraged me to read the speech on love in Plato’s Symposium. The speech is given by Diotema and explains that Eros (Love) was the child of Poros (Plenty) and Penuria (Poverty). The Greek noun eros comes from the verb erao – to be feathered or in the case of Eros to grow wings. Eros is the winged god of love that aggressively flies toward the object of his desire. This aggressive desire is due to his parentage: Plenty and Poverty. We only desire what we do not have (Poverty) and we seek to overcome this deficit with its opposite (Plenty). This dialectic of Plenty and Poverty is the catalyst for desire. Diotema says that all human beings are pregnant with love. We are either physically pregnant or soulfully pregnant. The soulfully pregnant are the creative beings who give birth to works of art. Their art is their love child born of their plenty and poverty. Diotema goes on to say that Eros represents the love of the mortal for the immortal. The desire to reproduce physically is the desire to continually replicate ourselves and thereby achieve immortality. We are straining in our bodies to ascend to the divine.

Aristotle later takes up this notion in his Physics and On the Soul as the framework of Nature. Nature is phusis which means a “straining to emerge”. Living beings are always straining to emerge from non-being towards immortality. Because all living beings are born, decay and die, reproduction is the only option for immortality. Immortality is achieved in a perpetuation of the species. If this notion is beginning to sound a little too much like a reductionist materialism, it should. Baruch Spinoza will eventually make the implications of this notion starkly clear in his sixth proposition of Book III of his Ethics where he says: “all beings strive to persist in their own being.” Although Spinoza clearly rejects teleology his persistence of being becomes his telos. Unfortunately, he did not realize the ferocity of a Nature in perpetual persistence without a telos to guide it. If all beings are striving to persist in their own being what becomes of the Other? Where does personal sacrifice, substitution and giving-oneself-for-the-other fit in? How is ethics even remotely possible if my greatest concern is personal immortality and self-perpetuation? Is all of nature locked into a system “red in tooth and claw (Tennyson)?”