Facets of Eros: Phenomenological Essays

175 Pages·1973·7.291 MB·English

by  Enzo Paci (auth.), F. J. Smith, Erling Eng (eds.)

FACETS OF EROS
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ESSAYS
FACETS OF EROS
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ESSAYS
Edited by
F. J. SMITH
and
ERLING ENG
MARTINUS NIJHOFF 1 THE HAGUE 11972
© 1972 by Martinus NijhojJ. The Hague, Netherlands
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st Edition 1972
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-\3: 978-90-247-\337-0 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-2387-0
001: 10.1007/978-94-010-2387-0
Table of Contents
Introduction VII-XIII
1. Enzo Paci (Milano), "A Phenomenology of Eros"
2. Wolfgang Blankenburg (Heidelberg), "The Cognitive Aspects
of Love" 23
3. Manfred S. Frings (Chicago), "The 'Ordo Amoris' in Max
Scheler" 40
4. Don Ihde (Stony Brook), "Sense and Sensuality" 61
5. Erling Eng (Lexington), "Psyche in Longing, Mourning, and
Anger" 75
6. Henri van Lier (Brussels), "Signs and Symbol in the Sexual
Act" 91
7. Maurice-Jean Lefebve (Brussels), "The Nude as Symbol" 101
8. F.J. Smith (Chicago), "DonJuan: Idealist and Sensualist" 116
Introduction
In an age which is supposedly experiencing a sexual revolution, a
volume of thoughtful essays on eros is not only not out of place but
perhaps is a positive contribution to the understanding of contempor
ary man. It was the conviction of the editors that the scientific view
of sexuality, as promoted in such valuable studies as those conducted
by Masters and Johnson, needed considerable supplement and per
spective. The perspective is here furnished by writers from both
Europe and America, authors from various fields, such as philosophy,
psychology, and even musicology, all of whom are united, in that
their approach to the problem of eros is phenomenologically oriented.
At first it might well seem strange that musicology would have much
to say about eros. It is true, musicology has been the "science" of
music, at least in intent. Yet in a larger view of the discipline, philo
sophical and aesthetic problems are also important to it, and this
particularly if we agree with Enzo Paci, that our very culture depends
on eros. Surely musical culture, as pointed out by Kierkegaard, is the
embodiment of what western civilization has known as sensuality; and
Mozart's Don Giovanni is its incarnation. On the surface it is easier for
us to grasp the work of the philosopher in this area; and, of course, one
expects the psychologist to deal with sexuality more explicitly than
anyone else.
Enzo Paci gives us the Husserlian base for any discussion of eros in
terms of phenomenology. His insightful article opens up the horizons
of eros for us, in that subjectivity and bodily intersubjectivity are
thoroughly analyzed to and including the act of coupling as the sup
reme expression of intersubjectivity. This fleshly union is a felt need
of man, but he feels it, phenomenologically speaking, only from the
depths of absolute solipsism. For man as utterly alone feels that lone-
VIII Introduction
liness and dire isolation that literally impels him toward the embrace
of the other. And thus he is said to have a sexual "impulse." Yet this
impulse is not just physical; it is bodily in the sense of Merleau-Ponty.
I tend toward and am impelled out of myself toward the other, in
order to overcome the abyss of solipsism and discover a mutual world
of love. Eros is thus "intentional," and it is this teleologically signifi
cant intentionality which gives meaning to and constitutes meaning
ful intercourse. The logos is already incarnate in the sexual impulse, as
the ingathering principle of unity, which causes two people to come
together in eros. They literally gather one another together in the
embrace ofloving union.
Paci stresses that sexuality is not the obvious matter we commonly
think it to be, but rather that, making use of the reductive method of
phenomenology, we have to discover the sense of this enigma, and
thus the sense of intersubjectivity itself. And there is a profound bond
between signification and the bodiliness of "corporeity." For "inter
subjectivity" is not just an abstraction or something arrived at in in
tellectualistic manner alone; it is the bodily bond between two lovers.
The tendency to postulate a bodiless logos is the error of a typically
abstract intellectualism. But it is precisely the strong bond between
meaning and body that characterizes genuine sexual life. In this life
the world, as it were, surges and wells up in my being, and to embroi
der the thought of the author, it is this surgissement which is the best
description of eros. For eros is the welling up and the surging forth of
one human subject in the direction of the other, of one bodily being
toward an other, as the lovers fall into one another's embrace and in
gather one another in the act of love in "living presence" to one
another. Here intersubjectivity is intercorporeity, the intertwining of
two bodily beings, the inter-course of two lives and loves. Of this fruit
ful union results not only a shared world but new life. And it is brought
about in the rhythmical, i.e., as it were, the musical, composition
being effected by the lovers.
At this point I may be allowed to refer to what Don Ihde in his
essay calls the "field state" of sensation and sensing, which is achieved
in the mutual embrace. In ordinary terms this "field state" is pure
sensation, and in the erotic embrace prior to the act of love the har
monic atmosphere of the love-symphony is set. The feeling of pure
sensation is experienced by the infant held against its mother's breast,
by the little child that runs to its parents for warmth and to be "held."
It is felt by any human being or animal that luxuriates in the scent
Introduction IX
and feel of a meadow in the spring. Here, of course, the telos is not love
making. But this same pure sensation is the necessary prelude also to
the act of love, if it is to have atmosphere and significance. For in the
preliminary "play" the scene is set for the contrapuntal and rhythmic
action that ensues. The emerging themes and counter-themes can be
convincing only if the harmonic atmosphere of pure sensation is
present: the feeling of "melting," of "floating," of being "carried
away." And in the subsequent act of love the rhythmic undulations
are not merely aesthetic, in the sense that we speak of the art of love;
phenomenologically, it is a question of achieving pure rhylhm, as the
shared life-movement of the other.
Max Scheler strikes this writer as the most human of the major
figures in phenomenology. He has the warmth and emotion in his
writing that both HusserI and Heidegger seem to lack. It is hardly
surprising we would find that for Scheler the "order oflove" is prior to
the order of being and of thinking. M. S. Frings, the general editor of
the collected works of Max Scheler, presents the colorful thinker's
views on love and its fascinating relationship with resentment. For
Scheler the act oflove is an act in which we discover basic value, basic
attraction and repulsion, a whole world of value. In such a world love
and resentment seem to go together. In this dialectic, however, there
is ample room for confusion and for aberrant love, as in the case of
Faust and Don Juan. Everything seems to depend on the direction of
the act oflove, and one can speak of a "topology of the heart." In the
world of love and hatred we seem to partake of the echos of a deeper
experience of world. The expression, Echos der Welterfahrung, appeals to
a musician, especially one who, as a phenomenologist, looks for the
sound metaphors in the major writers. The echos of Scheler is a "sound
ing of world-experience," in the sense that we sound a river to plumb
its depths. Sound seems crucial to phenomenology, but the use of
visual metaphor in the tradition has masked out attempts to treat of
sound systematically. Scheler's position, as presented by Frings, seems
to speak to our decade as to no other, perhaps not even the one in
which he wrote. The essay is so timely that it even deals with the use
of narcotics as one of man's attempts to do something about the joy
lessness of his existence. Treatment of the problem of being, of an
xiety, of resentment, identify Scheler as a writer close to Heidegger.
But he is more than a thinker who mediates between Husserl and
Heidegger. He stands in his own right as one who has formulated basic
phenomenological problems in a wholly original way. As a man he is
x Introduction
said to have been most impressive. Apparently he lived the ordo amoris
and did not merely write about it.
As to Don Juan, the idealist turned sensualist, the unacknowledged
child of the ascetic, the present writer has contributed a lengthy essay,
which deals with the intriguing subject of the Don in a manner more
literary than systematically phenomenological. It is this musician's
view that Kierkegaard's essay on Mozart's Don Giovanni is perhaps the
single most important essay on the matter, unless we want to substitute
mere musical analysis for a thorough understanding of what lies be
hind the character of the Don. In treating of Don Juan it was also
deemed necessary to deal with allied matters, such as being and an
xiety, Wittgenstein and Heidegger (on "world"), and many other
matters that seem to influence our understanding of eros. But the
essay speaks for itself and little more need be added in an introduction
such as this.
F.J. S.
II
These essays are "evidences of Eros" in the sense that, as elucidations
of the interplay of knowing and loving, they also give evidence of a
transcendental plane through which knowing is discovered as grounded
in a prior gift of self, an initiating gift, in and through which presence is
effected. Descendant of the historical doctrine of divine creation, in
which this bestowal was understood as a divine self-sacrifice enacting
creation, it is now the Lebenswelt of Husserl which calls on us to re
cognize the reality of the sinngehende Akte (Scheler) of an apriori Love,
a return of the repressed "cosmogonic eros" of the early Greeks. Here
the choice of eros emphasizes the bodily (hence physis), even if the
bodily dimension is transcendentally grounded, i.e., re-cognized
through consciousness as evidence of an earlier self-bestowal already
constituted, as Paci shows in his Husserl essay. In the Husserlian
enterprise, analysis of what is revealed within consciousness as con
stituted leads back, through mediate intentionalities, to the possib
ility of an image of transcendental unity in which self and world al
ready coalesce, often symbolically represented as a divine sexual
couple or as a divine Androgyne. The "evidences" of the following
studies are literally "outlooks" of that divinely poietic "inlook" (cf.
G. M. Hopkins' "inscape") through which creation was conceived as
having originally arisen. Now (as in that strange drawing ascribed to
Bosch where features of the landscape are endowed with eyes) what is
Introduction XI
contemplated - as, for example, the nude, the coital pair, or the ob
scene - "looks out" through its particular form in a reversed perspec
tive as if betraying its constitution as the self-disclosure of a transcend
ental eros. Within the occasion of this awareness, self and other are
revealed to each other as concomitant disclosures of the correspondence
itself.
If phenomenology is a manifestation of the concern to know things
as they are, without injury to the eventual knowledge of who "I"
am and "we" are, then it follows that it must sooner or later take up
the relations of knowing and loving. It is in terms of just this connec
tion, but, to begin with, in terms of the way in which loving particip
ates in knowing, that Wolfgang Blankenburg undertakes to examine
a central focus of the oeuvre of Ludwig Binswanger. In theological
historical terms (which the author eschews) it is apparent that if
creation be understood as the accomplishment of divine ideation
through which its love is embodied, then the human contemplation of
things and persons in their otherness could restore them to terms of
the originating theophany, i.e., to the eide as transcendental, and
therewith, retrofiectively, to the surprising discovery of a moment of
transcendental love as grounding the possibility of our own being, as
human and as individual. In one form of modern parlance this would
be to realize the full sense of eros as "the unconscious." As already
suggested, it can also be seen as the telos of the Husserlian epoche in the
transcendental reduction. Thus it is possible to interpret the meaning
of that "poetic phenomenology" broached by Michel Foucault (after
Vieo) - and interestingly enough in the context of Blankenburg'S dis
cussion - in his lengthy introduction to the French translation of
Binswanger's paper on the dream. Such a "poetic" phenomenology
can now be seen to derive its authority and force from the presence
of the eide grasped not merely as the arch-forms of creation, but as
symbolic evidences of the moment of eros which has guided our re
embodiment of them with immediacy and presence. In accomplishing
this circle we extend originary creation, even while it is the pre-sense
of creation which grounds, wittingly or unwittingly, the constituted
partial autonomy of "myself" and "ourselves," as otherwise expressed
in the "ritualization" of Julian Huxley and Konrad Lorenz, and
especially in Erik Erickson's development of "ritualization" as the
complement of "epigenesis."
The larger circle of creation, sometimes identified with the cosmos,
has been worked out within the microcosm of the sexual partners in
XII Introduction
the lapidary paper of Henri van Lier. Here the zarte Empirie of Goethe
is abundantly exemplified. The ambit of the couple, with its manifold
possibilities of return and exchange, is shown as affording the possib
ility of the most intricate and inclusive knowledge of "actuality" or
"identity as process" (Erickson). Through an attentively articulated
Wesenschau the unity of consciousness and body emerges as bios tran
sparent to the other anthropocosmic cycles. Pursued as it is into the
physio-logical symbolisms of coitus itself, we are here offered a her
meneusis of ph ysis as humanly sexual.
At the heart of the tendency to confine oneself to the most "private,"
i.e., "de-prived" circle, to become the "prisoner of sex," there is the
suffering of a lived aporia, whose sense is illumined as if by a lightning
flash in the myth of Diana and Acteon, the latter torn to bits by the
goddess' hounds for having spied on her while bathing. Eager to
grasp and to possess, he violated the necessity of realizing an initial
gift of himself, his dismemberment an enacted symbol of the insepar
ability of self-bestowal from entrance into the secrets of creation and
the divine. The theme of nudity becomes, in the reflections of Maurice
Jean Lefebve, a riddle about the relations of the private or idios kosmos
with the public of koinos kosmos. Octavio Paz has provided us with the
possible solution to this riddle given through "touch":
1
My hands
Open the curtains of your being
Clothe you in a further nudity
Uncover the bodies of your body
My hands
Invent another body for your body
"Psyche in Longing, Mourning and Anger" probes the opacity of
more encompassing horizons of understanding toward that search for
meaning inherent in loving, as we note in the tendency for "knowing"
to embrace all the distance between the intellectual and the sexual.
Knowing has now shrunk to the level of mere curiosity. The tie of
knowing and loving has foundered in an unstable antinomy of curios
ity and abandon, mysteriously opposed even in their evocation of one
another. That curiosity wishes to see without being seen, that abandon
yields without giving; only the tantalizing repetition and circularity of
the ordeal are a reminder of possibilities beyond the fission of longing,
mourning and anger. In this there has been a virtual reversal of the
1 Hudson Review, XXI (3), 1968 (Autumn), p. 460.