Alles eros

All is eros The claim ‹all is eros› seems exaggerated, unless it expresses the idea that our human gaze upon reality is profoundly erotic. It is in that sense this article takes the claim seriously, first by explaining that it fits with how the founders of Western thought looked at it. More precisely was it no one less than Plato who defined ‹thinking› as profoundly ‹erotic›. What makes us think — i.e. the ‹drive› of our thought — is eros. The desire for the beloved is basically no other than the one for truth. It is truth itself that makes our desire longing for it, and that desire is at work even in the ‹lowest› erotic feeling. In other words, thinking is sublimated eros. Thus platonic philosophy, including its persistence in contemporary theory. This essay confronts this philosophical eros with the pre-philosophical eros as one finds in antique poetry as well as in the lived ‹erotikè› in Athens, 4th century BC, i.e. in the pederastic courting between a free adult and a paidos, the son of a free citizen. That kind of eros was not thought of as a matter of truth. If there was truth involved, this was subordinated to the erotic play. The article develops how Freud rediscovered precisely that kind of pre-philosophic eros and made it the base for both the practice and the theory of his psychoanalysis.