Eros: body or soul? part 2, Note 5

This topic is potentially huge, because it raises the question, "What are the ends of human life?" or "What is the nature of man?" I have to limit myself to just a few comments.

The biggest challenge to my claim that eros is somehow complementary to (and therefore coordinate with) logos is likely to come from those philosophers who believe, along with Plato and Aristotle, that logos is simply the highest activity of man -- that the purpose of man is to think, or that the final goal of man is rational thought. To these men, let me say simply that their position is impossible. Rationality cannot be the final end of man, because rationality is not an end -- it is a means. Reason is fundamentally instrumental: once you know what your goal is, the best way to make sure you get there is to analyze the conditions logically and make a rational plan of action. For difficult goals, no other method comes close.

But reason doesn't give you the goals in the first place. Those come from somewhere else. Of course, I don't mean that they are unreasonable in the sense of being impossible or crazy. I fully accept that our goals, our final ends, have to be consistent with reason and achievable by rational means. I just claim that we know them prior to (or independently of) rational analysis; that they derive their attraction or force from something besides calculation.

A simple example: suppose someone were to decide (as I am about to suggest) that building and maintianing human community is a primary human goal. Well that's fine, but did you deduce the fact from something? Did you calculate it from some more general principle? What could that more general principle could that possibly be? It would have to be some statement of the form "Man is designed by nature to live in community." But all that does is to restate the same thing in different words. Rather than being an allegedly more general principle from which the goal to build and sustain community can then be derived, that statement about "designed by nature" is nothing more than the very same goal itself, gussied up in a powdered wig and standing on stilts. It's like saying that sleeping pills work because they contain a "dormitive principle" ... i.e., because they put you to sleep. Note that in all this I don't deny the goal itself (in this case, of community). All I insist is that the goal is prior to anyone discovering it: we have always gotten along better in groups than we did alone (other things being equal), and that was true millenia before anybody stopped to question it. Reason can find principles like this inductively, by putting together pieces of evidence and hazarding a guess what kind of picture best explains it all. But that is an instrumental role for reason, not a sovereign role.

So if human rationality is purely instrumental, if Reason is a handmaiden, ... then whose? In service of what? I've already given away my answer -- viz., that reason is in the service of human sociability. Sociability, or community, is as close as never mind to a highest goal for us, because we are so weak and helpless on our own that we require the help of others to survive at all. But the help of others is a force-multiplier beyond the wildest dreams. Adam Smith's famous chapter on the application of the division of labor in pin manufacturing captures in a snapshot what has made all the difference between what could have been our extinction as a particularly weak and weaponless primate, and our actual domination of the globe. And we owe it all to sociability, and the ability to organize. But without words and the capacity for rational planning, organization would have been impossible. So our verbal and rational ability -- logos, writ large -- is in the service of sociability, or community.

I have almost lost sight of sex in this discussion, but not quite. The thing is that sex, too, serves the cause of sociability. Sex binds us together, makes us care for each other more tenderly. In the immediate-return foraging communities studied by Ryan and Jethá in Sex at Dawn, sex frequently served as a kind of social glue holding people together when they recognized no common authority to hold them together by force. Naturally sex also serves the goal of reproduction. But I think it is inescapable (as I suggested in a recent letter) that the bonding function of sex is even more important.

So reason and sex both serve the goal of human community. And human community is the highest human end. Is that it? In the end we are just like ants in an anthill, only bigger? Not quite. Because while reason and sex are both in the service of something higher (namely, human community), they inevitably color the goal that they serve. Human community, therefore, is not merely togetherness; but it must inescapably be, in the crudest terms, a rational type of togetherness and also a sexy type of togetherness. What does this mean?

Human communities have a rational component. This is why Aristotle was right to classify us, not as a herd animal simply, but as a political animal. When we come together, we deliberate about what to do; we make plans, discuss them, and try to persuade others to see the benefits of our suggestions or the faults in the other guy's. All of this is rational, verbal activity. All of it is logos. And it should be clear that we can't really imagine what human society would be like without it. These features are fundamental.

In the same way, human communities have a passionate, erotic component. Partly this is because some of our social bonds are with those with whom we make love. But of course the erotic is far wider an experience than that, and it flavors all the color and sentiment that we find in the world. Can we imagine any human community not knit together by bonds of passion and sentiment? Yes, no doubt there are some ... certain highly dysfunctional business offices, or other equally dysfunctional political tyrannies. But they are terrible places to live ... emotionally starved and communally poor. They are possible, they can be imagined ... but they are still hardly human. Certainly any fully human life, to say nothing of the best human life, would be lived in a richer and fuller community, one where the bonds of eros (both direct and indirect) knit the people together so that their hearts beat as one -- or if not as one, than at least closer to that than in the cold, antiseptic environments where eros is absent.

I want to say one more thing, about how eros shapes our experience and our ability to respond to the world. In the Philebus, Plato calls sex a "mixed pleasure" saying that it contains both pleasure and pain. He adds that the most intense pleasures are always "mixed" and that they derive their very intensity from the admixture of pain in their composition. Let it be so; what is the consequence? Only this -- that somehow we as a species have found a way to mix pleasure with pain, thereby making the pain supportable. Of course we don't do this deliberately; the "mixing" is all below the conscious level. Still, it is a precedent; and with that precedent, at some level, we may -- we must -- be able to derive the courage to face other pains when they come. In this sense, erotic experience looks to be the first precursor to tragedy in the sense of Friedrich Nietzsche ... tragedy whereby the Greeks (so he argued) consciously transmuted the pain and horror of life into immortal beauty. And this, said Nietzsche, allowed the Greeks to face their fears and pains more steadfastly than any other people. If the experience of sex frames our experience (at some level) to prepare us to do the same, surely that is a fundamental feature of our consciousness without which it is hard to imagine calling us human.