Metamodern Return to a Metaphysics of Eros
* Article: Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern “Return” to a Metaphysics of Eros. By Zachary Stein. Integral Review, Vol. 17 No. 1 December 2021
Description
Jonathan Reams:
"Rounding out our peer reviewed section is Zakary Stein’s Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern “Return” to a Metaphysics of Eros. This theme of deep explorations of an integral view finds its expression here in Stein’s focus on a metaphysics of eros as the eternal struggle in this world between forces of love and death. To enable an adequate metaphysics in today’s postmodern climate, Stein first lays a foundation for how we can practice metaphysics today, delving deeply into post Kantian thinking and taking up this thread after Darwin through Pierce into what he highlights as a “guerilla ontology.” This is a highly educational journey that helps contextualize an array of key threads of thought at the heart of the second part of this article. There, Stein goes into how all of this applies to an understanding of eros as the heart of love and sex, reality and politics. I found it as a kind of meta-thread when Stein shows how errors in thought and ethics are traced back to the priorness of emotions and failures in relationships, linking back to Marman’s understanding of relationships being at the heart of not only biology, but even quantum physics. The end of Stein’s article focuses on how Gafni’s A Return to Eros addresses these and other issues that help us get out of the postmodern swamp and back to a solid foundation in a reality where love can be prioritized and realized."
(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_august_2018_full_issue.pdf)
Abstract
"Modernity is based on a critique and abandonment of premodern forms of metaphysics, while postmodernity has only deepened critiques of metaphysical truth claims further. This has created a novel historical situation in which a planetary society revolves around the absence of a shared metaphysics. The vacuum of meaning at the core of postmodern societies has resulted in a sense of exhaustion and alienation, a state uncomfortable enough to initiate a metamodern “return” to metaphysical speculation. I argue in favor of adopting metamodern metaphysical characterizations of the human based on an understanding of love as a transpersonal universal force akin to gravity. Philosophers have long called this force Eros and have placed it at the center of the human experience. Charles Sanders Peirce marks the beginning of a new method for practicing metaphysics, while at the same time offering profound insights into the cosmic dynamics of evolutionary love, or Eros. A century later, the ideas and practices of metamodern metaphysics remain in flux and on the margins. I explore how computer technologies and hyper-capitalist dynamics have inspired dark transhumanist speculations such as those of Nick Land. To counter the regressive and dystopian possibilities entailed by a “return” to metaphysics, I propose a form of cosmo-erotic humanism and discuss its implications through an exploration of the newly released book, A Return to Eros (Gafni & Kincaid, 2017)."
Excerpts
Book review:
Concepts:
From the Conclusion: Love in the Anthropocene: Life Without Externalities
Zachary Stein:
"I have argued that A Return to Eros contains fragments of a new psycho-sexual-spiritual critical theory of self and society. This is part of a larger project of cosmo-erotic humanism, which is itself part of a broader return to metaphysics that constitutes a metamodern worldview. This paper has only partially pieced some of these themes together. I began by recognizing the unique condition of metamodern metaphysics and arguing that doing metaphysics is now necessary because of essential changes in the human condition. The methods of metaphysical inquiry have changed along with the topics that ought to be the focus of metaphysical speculations. There is no longer any prospect for premodern forms of metaphysics after Kant, Darwin, and planetary-scale computation. Yet the modern and postmodern absence of metaphysics has created its own problems by leaving a vacuum where answers to the most important questions used to be found. The metamodern return to metaphysics seeks to fill this vacuum of meaning by providing a new context for human self-understanding – a new Universe Story that includes a new story of self and community. A Return to Eros offers part of this new story, focusing especially on our most intimate relationships, on love, and only beginning to outline the implications for politics. Gafni and Kincaid argue for the primacy of emotional life and for flipping the typical prioritization in Western culture; here they are pointing to the emotional “tail” that wags the cognitive “dog.” The source of emotional life itself can be understood in terms of the cosmic dimensions of the bio-psychic energy contained within human sexuality. Sex is the great secret that evolution has placed within the core of human emotional life. Tantra is about the clarification and expansion of erotic desire beyond the sexual. This is about repurposing the powder keg of the system, not defusing it. Cultures have historically sought to defuse the cosmo-erotic nature of humanity. Individuals embody the limited forms of Eros enabled and validated by their cultures.
Events in recent political life and public culture have demonstrated widespread distortions of emotional structure, which are manifesting in patterns of behavior long familiar in the history of capitalist civilization. Reich (1969) demonstrated that people will vote and act against their own material and political interest because of basic distortions within their emotional lives, specifically the truncation and misdirection of erotic energy. Gafni and Kincaid take this argument one step further by stressing the Tantric expansions of the erotic beyond the sexual, which allows for a critique that applies across both the Right and the Left of the political spectrum. The overt repression of sexuality has been the traditional conservative root of emotional dysfunction, and while Western cultures have overcome much of this overt repression, the result has been a different kind of erotic truncation. Where sex is not repressed it is hypertrophied; instead of a culture arranged to avoid sex, the culture is arranged to focus directly on sex.
Advertising and entertainment are only the tip of the iceberg; whole economic sectors are now built around a culture of romance in which we are told to prioritize seeking our soul mate. Culture sanctions the soul mate relationship as the highest form of intimacy. However, there are possibilities within the soul mate relationship that allow lovers to get caught up in a logic of externalities. Building, maintaining, and protecting our shelters of love can lead us to place ourselves outside the world. Commodification is based on this logic of externalization, where the desire to improve the quality of local short-term experiences blinds us to the long-term and distant consequences. We externalize waste, risk, labor, and the rest of the full impact of our lifestyles.
The capitalist world-system has operated according to this logic on a grand scale for nearly 500 years, externalizing the impacts of economic growth by moving waste around the world and its fallout into the future (Wallerstein, 2006). The culture of soul mates, which was brought to fruition by the revolutions of the 1960s, has since been largely co-opted and is now a potentially counterrevolutionary force. A Return to Eros argues that there are forms of intimacy that transcend but include the ideal of the soul mate. These make possible a new kind of culture and new structures of emotion, thought, and action. It is possible to access a universal evolutionary love (i.e., the cosmo-erotic qualities of human emotion) that expand love beyond sexuality and allow the qualities of Eros to suffuse all aspects of life. The soul mate relationship can be transformed into an amplifier of evolutionary love as it evolves into a whole mate relationship. In the process the logic of externalities falls away. The reality of the human situation dawns on us (with huge political consequence): no one individual love story can be played out separately from any others. The experience of Eros lifts the focus of the soul mates beyond themselves and into a total embrace of humanity and the universe. Nothing needs to be bought to prove this love. There is no vacation spot where it might be improved. Evolutionary love expands outward; the love between two soul mates is transformed into an act of theurgist protest, a kind of mystical activism that draws on humanity’s capacities to manifest universal (super)natural forces (White, 2016). The image here is of a world historical revolution of love (Bhaskar, 2012), made possible by the evolution of new forms of relationship and intimacy.
Of course, any attempts to forge new forms of relationship will be seen as dangerous. The nexus of sex, reality, and politics remains a dangerous place to innovate. Living a life without externalities – a life that extends love to all relationships – requires looking into the social realties of the global commodity chains, political networks, and communication infrastructures we live within. Living a life dedicated to evolutionary love instead of romantic love is an utterly simple act of total subversiveness. Romanic love has the power to free individuals temporarily from the suffering of the world, but it does not have the power to free the world from suffering. Therefore we must evolve through and beyond the culture of soul mates and towards forms of relationships in which we can live as unique incarnations of cosmo-erotic love. Whole mates are amplifiers of evolutionary love. This new form of relationship is predicated on seeking to embody the force of Divine Eros itself in all aspects of our lives, not only with those chosen few souls we take as special. This means you can no longer leave Eros at the door when you go to work, go shopping, engage with social media, or join a protest. It means the end of the substitute gratifications and distorted expressions of erotic energies that drive so much of today’s cultural industries. It means that no one or few are taken as special and set apart. Instead, all are taken as unique, and no one is ever placed outside the circle of concern, tolerance, and compassion.
Cosmo-erotic humanism is not offering an indiscriminate love-fest or a self-contradictory relativism that claims to love everyone only to then put on displays of hate. It instead offers a return to reality. Metamodern metaphysics needs find a way to get beyond the limits of post-truth culture, which means finding ways to embrace non-pathological value hierarchies of truth, goodness, and beauty. We should seek ways reverse the tendencies of love to contract inward and shrink in this age of fracture. As things are going now we are deepening the fractures, retreating into a process of multiplying the “others” and partitioning off our safe spaces. We are shrinking love down to a small circle, while lashing out at an ever-expanding circle of the unloved in the world beyond our screens. This logic of keeping love and respect for “us” and saving none for “them” reflects the truncations of Eros that so often burden and distort human personalities. The emotional structures of humanity will need healing if we are to again take up the quest for mutual understanding and put down the quest for mutual destruction.
The pursuit of mutual understanding between people who disagree is the key to anything like a society worth living in. Not, “you have your truth and I have mine,” but rather, “we live under a common truth that we are seeking together.” The collective pursuit of mutual understanding is not about condoning hate and ignorance by equally valuing all voices. Seeking understanding does not mean reaching an agreement. It is a reciprocally educational process that must be sincerely engaged by all parties. Some may be too full of hate to be open to learn, but we must love even those who are hateful in order to see into the reality and humanity of their lives. Justice requires seeking ever new ways to counter hate with love. The desire to seek mutual understanding is not the result of cognitive insight. It is an embodied emotional disposition and a presupposition of discourse (Habermas, 1998). This makes it something that is not the result of discourse, because discourse is not even possible if we don’t already agree to seek mutual understanding. This means that the task of restoring any semblance of reason to the public sphere is first and foremost about addressing the structure of emotions, specifically the material and cultural conditions that are generating widespread distortions and truncations of Eros.
I began this paper writing about the eternal battle between Eros and Thanatos. I suggested that our historical moment is one in which this battle is raging out in the open. According to everything I’ve discussed so far, it may seem that Thanatos appears as a frightening glitch in the matrix of Eros. How can those who believe in the ultimate reality of love face down the reality of hate? How can a universe fueled by Eros even make sense in the face of what Thanatos creates? Thanatos creates a torrent of malice, spite, and sadism that slaps the face of anyone offering simplistic notions about the basic goodness of human nature. Thanatos is worshiped by the likes of Nick Land and those who are seeking a reality beyond relativistic and irrational world cultures of postmodernism. We must be aware of the tendencies and evidence in favor of holding humanity in the context of a new “dark” metaphysics, which could form the backdrop for a metamodern politics with profoundly negative consequences.
The current cultural impasse cannot be resolved through the unforced force of reasonable words, which is why many believe that it will be resolved by actual force. What is certain is that only large-scale and significantly forceful actions will suffice to change our course. I believe drastic action is needed that focuses specifically on changing the basic conditions in which the human heart is shaped. Practices that demonstrate the full reality of Eros are profoundly transformative for those who would otherwise hold a simplistic and negative picture of human nature. A totalized educational revolution is needed, starting with the schools and media and expanding outward to refashion technology and the economy itself in the interests of healthy human development (Stein, in press). A Return to Eros provides only some of the frameworks necessary for addressing this task of a total educational revolution in the interest of love. There can be no future in which humans are taught and socialized into the narrow confines of national and economic self-interest. The only future possible is one in which love and justice are the cornerstones of global educational systems. Not systems that teach about love and justice while treating children and adults inequitably, but rather educational systems that demonstrate love and justice in their total support for the free development of children and families, up to and including basic income guarantees and health care. This will mean that the priority for global futures is love, not profit and growth or sustainability. Profit, growth, and sustainability mean nothing if they land us in a world without love. Cosmo-erotic humanism argues for a planetary prioritization of love and for securing the necessary and sufficient conditions for the possibility of love. These are some of the most important implications of what I have been discussing here as a metamodern return to a metaphysics of Eros."
(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)