Perpetual Thinking

February 21, 2022 2:39 PM

The old story is that eros induces self-destruction by way of emotion: it controls, redirects, and poisons one’s feelings. But eros commits crimes of passion because, first and foremost, it commits crimes of thought. It attacks the heart by way of the mind. Eros is an intellectual monster. from The Eros Monster by Agnes Callard [Harper's; Archive]
posted by chavenet (14 comments total)

This was fascinating. Thank you for posting!
posted by congen at 3:20 PM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Here are some sentences from this text:

Sex without romance, romance without dating, dating without marriage, polyamory, a loosening of gender roles: our world is becoming a Wild West of romantic entanglements. Familial and religious oversight over coupling is dwindling, and the internet makes it possible to be constantly and privately available to those far beyond our immediate community. We live during a time of great romantic freedom, though we have not yet reckoned with the price. As we eliminate the social norms that guide our expectations of romance, we also liberate a monster within us.

This is a professor of ethics who chose to get with a married man, for all that she wants to call her actions a romance. As far as I can tell, aromantic, asexual, polyam, and genderqueer people were in no way, shape, or form involved, and yet she feels the need to suggest it's our actions and/or non-closeted existence that have liberated a "monster."

The author implies this "monster" would be less potent if only it were reined in by what she blithely calls "familial and religious oversight."

This argument - that the existence of out and proud queers will "confuse" or "liberate" people into abandoning all principles about what we owe to each other - is one of the nastier forms that homophobia and transphobia take.

And they let this person teach ethics! Wow.
posted by All Might Be Well at 4:04 PM on February 21, 2022 [21 favorites]

Sex without romance, - I was a male escort for a while....
romance without dating, - What is this date thing? Are we in high school?
dating without marriage, - How about marriage without dating? Meet my ex-wife-not-wife, what's your problem...
polyamory, - See Above.
a loosening of gender roles: - LOL.
our world is becoming a Wild West of romantic entanglements. - Yay!
Familial and religious oversight over coupling is dwindling ... - Good riddance.
posted by zengargoyle at 6:12 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

You’re right about the terrible precedents, and I don’t think she framed it well, but the literary precedents she eventually cites describe the same disaster happening to people under strict historical standards*. There’s a better point that the rigid conventions weren’t enough either.

I kept reading because it reminded me of many Asks. Here’s the ending I thought interesting:

When I envisioned the possibility that Hugolof’s wife might refuse to help me, I imagined that she would either reply with furious prohibitions, insults, and anger—or not reply at all. That is not what happened. Her note was short, clichéd, and vacuous; it read like someone trying to sound how they thought a dignified person in their situation would sound. I suppose I was her monster, and she was deciding not to feed me. She didn’t fight me, and she didn’t ignore me; instead, she was coldly polite. Gradually, I came to realize: the opposite of eros is civility.

If eros drives lovers to construct a private world with its own bespoke set of rules, then conventional decorum offers a public alternative, ready-made. Throughout my life, I have tended to chafe at pressures to conform to societal expectations. But if you find yourself stuck in an enclosed space with someone uncooperative and uncontrollable, you start to see the upside of mindlessly following a set of external rules. When you can’t be yourself—when your self isn’t anyone worth being—it is a relief to discover the option of being no one in particular. If you stick to doing the done thing, then you can avoid drama, arguments, and breakups. Because breaking up is definitively uncivil. The beauty of civility is that it doesn’t matter whether he cooperates, because it is a game you can play solo. My responses to him grew shorter, and I started to build a cocoon of politesse around myself. Inside it, my taste for life started to return. As more of the outside world came back into view, it got easier and easier to back farther and farther away.

Even after he knew I had met someone else, he continued to contact me periodically. And I continued to respond politely.

* possibly all of them thought of their own times as loosening though
posted by clew at 6:13 PM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yeah I felt the beginning and end didn't mesh well. Once she stepped away from the big picture to talk about what fruitless obsession feels like, she was on steadier ground.

(I think her bringing in other sexualities was a clumsy attempt to say that love hasn't gotten easier, not that her problems were caused by a permissive society.)
posted by emjaybee at 9:03 PM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

When you can’t be yourself—when your self isn’t anyone worth being—it is a relief to discover the option of being no one in particular

That's an odd way of phrasing it. I'm coldly polite, when my whole - very worthwhile, for the record - self is none of the other person's business, because they lost their right to any sort of intimacy/never earned it in the first place.
posted by sohalt at 8:07 AM on February 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

I appreciate this essay and its insights, its literacy and the care taken with its underpinnings, which does not lessen the fact that the two of them sound fucking exhausting. I remember what it was like to love hard and bad, to count the kisses and the trips that you took to get them, but the thing was that we'd had fun sometimes. We watched movies and all. Good Lord, what must her poor friends have thought.

Anyway, one reason that I appreciate her writing about the monstrosity of Eros is that it can be monstrous, and that pointing out this simple fact is ground largely ceded to the religious and the TERFs. This is for good reasons -- there's a siege mentality because there is a siege -- but it's still a very touchy subject.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:22 AM on February 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

Immediately early in the article, I see that pedophilia is a much nicer name than it deserves; sbould be pederotic rapist, as opposed to any drift making it a willing association.
posted by Oyéah at 11:56 AM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

"A friend said, “It’s like a supervillain shot you with a stupidity ray.”" This was priceless.
posted by Oyéah at 12:13 PM on February 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

I don't think there's even textual evidence that she meant to refer to other sexualities, unless the New Woman of eighteen -ninety counts as other. Which is a badly controlled bit of rhetoric, especially for a philosopher, and I don't think the ?diagetic? bad control gets tied into the problem of Eros-damaging-your-thoughts as well as it maybe could.

There's a whole nother recognizable nightmare of how all these meetings, including the first one, were probably piggybacked on academic conferences and lecture tours and didn't help her work.
posted by clew at 12:25 PM on February 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

In Virgil on Dido, Goethe on Werther, Flaubert on Emma Bovary, Proust on Swann, and Brontë on Heathcliff, we have tales of love as a sickness of the soul.

Another canonical example is "Romeo and Juliet"... a story about the insanity of obsession which modern audiences often mistake for a story about the beauty of love.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:43 PM on February 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

My favorite performance of R&J made it clear that everyone except the Duke was functionally pretty dumb, and the teenagers were teenagers, and therefore tragedy. The Duke was smart enough to see the disaster coming but not the Vetinari-level player it would take to save people from themselves. There was a lot of live instrumental music in it, I think most of the actors doubled, which somehow made it possible to be sympathetic to all the character's better feelings while having no sympathy for their actions.

"Saving people from themselves", or not, being the hook to the OP. Can't save anyone from the stupidity ray.
posted by clew at 2:59 PM on February 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

Anyway, one reason that I appreciate her writing about the monstrosity of Eros is that it can be monstrous, and that pointing out this simple fact is ground largely ceded to the religious and the TERFs. This is for good reasons -- there's a siege mentality because there is a siege -- but it's still a very touchy subject.

[ emphasis changed, for clarity ]

And whenever someone says "religious" and means "conservative Christian" I see crimson. Queer-inclusive and non-Christian religious traditions are religions, thank you very fucking much. "More serious about religion" and "more bigoted" aren't the same thing.

I have incredibly rigid values - about the use of honorifics and pronouns*, about the use of polyam,** about how to refer to Gd, about how to exist in relationships, including sexual ones, in ethical ways.

It is accurate to say I do not share this author's morals, which leave a great deal to be desired.

* By which I mean: how to politely, ethically, and respectfully refer to other people.

** Shortening "polyamorous" in this way is a thing that spread through my communities in the late 2010's as a way of deliberately ceding the term "poly" and especially the "poly" tags on social media to Polynesian indigenous people.
posted by All Might Be Well at 5:53 PM on February 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

I heard a great podcast with the psychologist Esther Perel on On Being. One thing she mentions is that in the modern age, marriage is treated as the source of all one's happiness and emotional fulfillment, and we forget that it was invented for strictly legal and financial reasons, or to start a family...no romance involved. She also mentions unconditional love does not exist in her opinion. Our modern assumptions about love, romance and marriage really do live in the realm of fantasy...which is why I do find it compelling that this author refers to Eros as a monster. It just brings home the point that the trappings of our modern liberal democracies and the prosperous lives they enable don't really have the ability to save us from the suffering inhérent in being human, the psychological terror inherent in our inner lives as humans.

This also reminds me of an essay on love by Arthur Stendhal where he states that love only exists when it's constantly evolving. Once it stops transforming itself, it's no longer love. I am sure he must be referring to eros becuase that constant power dance she describes sounds exactly like the phenomenon of crystallization he describes.

I also think of the research into attachment styles. As cliched as they may have become, I do think the scientific research into successful relationships provides the most grounded and demystified view of love. Her story about the constantly shifting dance of power, about abandoning ones ability to create meaning to the other person, seems like something a lot of us experience in early adulthood, and the psychologists who study attachment styles could probably explain her suffering in a few easy sentences (it would be far more mundane and pedantic than her bracingly refreshing philosophical voice, but comfortingly demystifying).

I took her referring to Eros as a monster to mean that it's (intellectually) dangerous for the person experiencing it, not that it's a societal evil. Also might be interesting to note that the Greeks were super into homosexuality. Plato's symposium refers to many homosexual relationships between older teachers and their male students, as was custom back then.

While I'm rambling I also wanted to mention Irvin Yalom and his book Love's Executioner. His existential perspective seems to me a deeply comforting bridge between the philosophy and the psychology of love. The profound imaginativeness of those philosophical perspectives doesnt mean they provide good advice...and vice versa the demystified psychological takes are an insult to beauty and art. But Yalom is a great storyteller and weaves his scientific knowledge into philosophically compelling real narratives in a way that feels at once grounded and intellectual.
posted by winterportage at 9:08 PM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]