Relation to others· Bonds
Eros as lack
Axis: Nature of love — What lies at the heart of love: a lack, a gift, or something else?
To love is to desire what we lack: the beauty, the good, the completeness we do not have. Love is a striving toward what might fulfill us, and this very lack is the force that lifts the soul.
Movements 2
Platonismexplicit
Platonic eros is desire born of lack: child of Poros and Penia, it seeks to possess what it wants, the beautiful and the good. From the beauty of bodies the lover ascends by degrees to the , along the ladder of the Symposium.
Plato, Symposium, 201d-212c, speech of Diotima · Plato, Phaedrus, 244a-257b
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Romanticisminferable
Romantic love is wholly aspiration and lack: in the beloved it desires the infinite itself, and it is from this never-filled distance that it draws its intensity. Far from tranquil possession, it is a surge toward a glimpsed absolute, the longing for a union that slips away, which is why it borders so readily on night and on the unreachable.
Novalis, Hymns to the Night · Hölderlin, Hyperion
Philosophers 3
Platoexplicit
In the , Diotima defines erōs as desire born of lack: child of Penia (Poverty) and Poros (Resource), love desires what it does not have and strives to possess it. This upward drive rises from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself, which lends a residual weight to gift.
Symposium, 199c-204c · Phaedrus, 244a-257b
Plotinusexplicit
Plotinus extends the of 's : love is that drive born of lack which carries the soul from sensible beauty toward intelligible Beauty, and thence toward the , source of all beauty. It is an ascending love, a desire to be united with that from which one proceeds. A note of gift nonetheless surfaces, for the One itself lacks nothing and overflows by pure superabundance, which reverses the lack at the summit.
Enneads, III, 5 (On Love) · Enneads, VI, 7, 31-34
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Descartesinferable
In , love is a passion, an emotion of the soul caused by the body's spirits, that inclines the will to join itself to objects which appear suitable to it. Descartes distinguishes two loves: the love of concupiscence, which desires for oneself what one lacks, and the love of benevolence, which wills the good of the beloved. To the passion undergone is added , the firm disposition to make good use of one's free will, to esteem others and to unite with them, which governs and ennobles love instead of merely suffering it.
The Passions of the Soul, arts. 79-83 (love); arts. 153-156 (generosity)