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"Bourget’s definition may be satisfactory: “There exists a mental and physical state during which everything is annulled in us, in our thoughts, in our hearts, and in our senses. . . . I call that state love.” Physical love in Stendhal’s sense may appear as a separate variety of love only if we assume a process of dissociation and a change to a primitive state. It is normally an integrating part of passion-love. Taken on its own, it forms the lower limit of passion-love, but it always retains that intrinsic quality.
In general it is important here to establish the fundamental difference between our concept and that of the positivists. The difference lies not in the physical or biological interpretation, but in the root meaning of sexual union; for otherwise we both see in that union the essential end and conclusion of every experience based on mutual attraction between the sexes, the center of gravity of all love."
-Eros and the mysteries of love by Julius Evola.
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"Psychoanalysis only sees mechanical and interchangeable processes wherein pleasure is apparently derived from the termination of any state of tension, from the discharge of a concurrent “charge” (Besetzungsenergie) of the libido. Indeed the term in German that signifies sexual satisfaction or pleasure—Befriedigung—connotes a sense of perturbation because it also means the pacification, almost the cessation, of a disagreeable state of tension, agitation, or excitement. We should ponder whether this theory is not merely symptomatic of our times, for to perceive sexuality and “pleasure” in these simple terms proceeds from an eros that has become primitive and physical."
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@sim that's a lot of words to say "Freud was full of shit"
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"Let us take the theory that sets the tendency toward pleasure at the very base of sexual instinct. It is certainly evident that in most cases, when a man feels attracted by a woman and desires her, he seeks to imagine the “pleasure” she may give him and to foresee the expression on her face and her behavior in general during the crisis of coitus, rather than to determine whether she can ensure the birth of offspring best fitted to the end purposes of the species. In natural erotic development, every experience of deep passion and strong inclination doubtless follows the path of that which is called “pleasure,” but it does not have pleasure as a principal and preset objective; if it does, we may well speak of lust and debauchery, which are trends corresponding to dissociations, degradations, and “rationalizations” of physical love. The idea of “pleasure” as a ruling motive does not exist in the “normal state of eros,” but the impulse aroused by sexual polarity causes a state of intoxication reaching its apogee in the “pleasure” of physical union and orgasm. Any man who is truly in love, in possessing a woman, entertains the idea of “pleasure” as little as that of children. The teachings of Freud, therefore, were mistaken in his earliest phase when he established the pleasure principle, the Lustprinzip, as the basis not only of eros but of the whole human psychic life. In this the theories of Freud were just the products of his time. In periods of decadence such as the present one, sensuality develops in the dissociated form of simple pleasure. As a result, sex becomes a kind of drug, and the addiction to it is no less profane than actual drug addiction. Freudianism soon abandoned its initial position, however, and in fact Beyond the Pleasure Principle was the title of a successive work of Freud’s."
We're debunking pleasure as the very base of sexual instinct now. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
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"Thus, Havelock Ellis, after various attempts to explain sensual pleasure, again concluded that the impulse which leads to pleasure is, in a certain way, independent of the seminal glands and their condition. From a physio-anatomical point of view, the existence of sexual centers in the brain (already presumed by Gall) as well as in the spine and in the sympathetic nervous system is now generally accepted; this is the counterpart of the essential role played by the imagination not only in love generally but in sexuality itself, for the imagination accompanies and sometimes even starts and activates the whole process of copulation, whereas at other times it can stop it irreversibly."
I wonder where we are at with this now?
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"“The birth of a given baby,” said Schopenhauer, “is the true objective
of all the romance of love, even though the protagonists are not aware of that objective; the way in which this objective is reached is purely secondary.” To be more correct, the objective would be then the procreation of a new being as close as possible to the pure, perfect type of the species, able to survive. Thus the “species” should induce every man to choose the woman best fitted for such biological purposes and make her seem ideal, clothing her in such an aura of beauty and seduction that the possession of her and the pleasure she can give seem the essence of all happiness and the real meaning of life. “The best for the species lies where the individual believes he will find the greatest pleasure.” And so feminine beauty and pleasure are made out to be illusions, mere baits with which the “genius of the species” cheats and makes a fool of the individual. Schopenhauer adds, “This is the reason why every lover feels disappointed after he has finally attained his purpose, sexual satisfaction, for the illusion with which the species has deceived and aroused him has vanished by then.” Essentially, these are mere speculations on the borders of Darwinism, and their one-sided and abstract nature is obvious."
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I have no idea where he is taking eros right now because he is basically debunking other theories during the first chapter. I'm like, wait... it's not that? Or that either?
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"The best known exponent of this school was D. H. Lawrence. His point of view was summarized in the words of Campion in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. Campion states that the natural appetites and desires of men are not what make them so bestial: “No, bestial is not the right word because it implies an offense to animals—let us say: too humanly wicked and vicious. . . . It is the imagination, the intellect, the principles, the education, the tradition. Leave the instincts to themselves and they will do very little evil.” And so the majority of men are considered to be like perverts, far from the central norm of humanity both when they excite the “flesh” and deny it for the soul. Lawrence added the following: “My religion is belief in the blood and the flesh, which are wiser than the intellect.” It is strange that Lawrence also wrote words that are not trivial, such as these: “God the Father, the inscrutable, the unknowable, we bear Him in our flesh, we find Him in woman. She is the door by which we come in and go forth. In her we return to the Father, just like those who, blind and unconscious, were present at the transfiguration.” Moreover, he had certain correct intuitions regarding the union that is fulfilled through the blood. However, in spite of this view, he fell into an avoidable ambiguity and made an ideal of salvation out of a mutilation."
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"Some comments made by Solovieff are also relevant in this context. He showed the error in thinking that the reason for sexual love is the multiplication of the species. Many organisms in both the vegetable and the animal realms reproduce asexually; the sexual fact occurs in the reproduction not of the organisms in general but of the higher organisms. Therefore “the meaning of sexual differentiation (and of sexual love) is to be sought not at all in the idea of the survival of the species and its multiplication, but only in the idea of the higher organism.” Furthermore, “The higher we climb up the ladder of organisms, the more the power of multiplication decreases, whereas the force of mutual attraction increases. . . . Although sexual love reaches its greatest importance and strength in man, he reproduces at a lower rate than the animal species.” It seems, therefore, that sexual love and multiplication of the species are in an inverted ratio to each other: The stronger the one, the weaker the other. When we consider the two extremes of animal life, if multiplication without sexual love is at the lower end, then at the upper end, the summit, there will be sexual love that can exist with an almost complete lack of reproduction, but with the fullest expression of passion. It has only recently been affirmed that “sexual passion almost always involves a deviation of instinct . . . in other words, reproduction of the species is almost always avoided in the presence of sexual passion.” This indicates that we are dealing here with two different facts, the first of which cannot be presented as the means or tool of the other. In its higher forms, eros has an independent and not deducible character, which is not impaired by anything that may be materially required for its arousal in the sphere of physical love."
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"Schiller wrote: “Passion disappears; love must remain.” In that we can only see a last resource to one of the dramas of the human condition; for only passion can lead to that “dazzling moment of unity.”
sim
Dad
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