Return to Eros
* Book: A Return to Eros (Gafni & Kincaid, 2017)
URL =
Contextual Quote
"Today in the context of resurgent patriarchy and fundamentalism, as well as the new puritanism of revived anti-sexuality rhetoric, the hopeful thinking of a generation dedicated to “free love” seems like a sentimental memory. As I later explore here (and as Gafni and Kincaid discuss), explanations exist for why cultures engage in shaming, scapegoating, and distorted displays of emotional energy. The misdirection of Eros leads to distortions of cognitive framing and political action (Bhaskar, 1993; Reich, 1969). The structure of emotion is prior to the structure of thought. Emotion is thus prior to (and a foundation for) the domains of the political and epistemological. This has been shown by neuroscience and educational research for decades (Apple, 2001; Damasio, 1994). It is one of the major claims implicit within A Return to Eros, where it is shown that errors in thought and ethics can be traced back to failures of relationship, failures of intimacy, and distortions of Eros."
- Zachary Stein [1]
Description
Zachary Stein:
"At the heart of A Return to Eros (Gafni & Kincaid, 2017) is a new metaphysical narrative about love and sex. The book seeks to salvage the reality of love in a time when love is being trivialized and forgotten. It argues that love is not merely a human construct. What humans experience as love and sexual desire are but facets of Eros, a construct nearly identical with Peirce’s evolutionary love – the force that drives reality itself towards greater contact and larger wholes. A Return to Eros offers a metaphysically grounded Tantric praxis that is refreshingly different from the contemporary Western neo-Tantras that focus almost exclusively in the realm of sexual techniques. Like the original Tantric schools of thought in Kashmir Shaivism, A Return to Eros focuses on the fundamental frameworks of reality that shape human narratives of identity, power, and community which must be derived from a larger Universe Story – a new metaphysics. Only in the light of this broadest context can a coherent narrative about love and sex be read. Thus, Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid are not writing about sex and love; they are writing about Eros, which is ontologically prior to sex and love. There was a billion years of Eros before sex. Eros is built into the dynamics of reality itself. The love life of humanity is but an expression of evolutionary love, which pulses through all forms of life. "
(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)
Review
Zachary Stein:
"Worldviews do many things, but they especially make sense of human desires and their relationship to truth, goodness, and community. As A Return to Eros teaches, if you can clarify desire and in so doing attune your desire with reality, you will not be trapped in the pseudo-desires that are multiplied by the political economy of enjoyment. This is why the nexus of sex, reality, and politics is the linchpin of culture. Today sex, reality, and politics are incoherent aspects of a post-truth culture where narrative trumps truth (Wilber, 2017). Cultural warfare is spilling from our screens into the boardroom, bedroom, and dining room as the domain of the political is expanding to encompass all that was once personal. Throughout the US people are taking to social media and to the streets in displays of emotion escalating towards violence.
To understand the arguments, frameworks, and practices in A Return to Eros, one must understand the major traditions from which it stems: Hebrew wisdom, the mystical traditions of Tantra, modern evolutionary science and systems theory, Reichian praxis, and integral theory. We move towards a path out of the contemporary culture’s “emotional plagues” (Reich, 1953) and “mimetic violence” (Girard, 1989). Gafni and Kincaid make clear it that the problems that face us at our current historical juncture stem from profound distortions of Eros – distortions of the basic emotional energies of humanity. Yet there is a possible future in which humanity gains clarity about what is valuable and certainty about the reality of love.
Implicit within the participatory metaphysics of A Return to Eros is a framework for cultural diagnostics that is directly relevant to our current cultural “dis-ease.” The book pulls together fragments of a new psycho-sexual-spiritual critical theory of self and society. I am writing within the framework of academic critical theory, metaphysics, and metatheory. But A Return to Eros is not written or intended to be received in this way; it is not a book of academic critical theory or a formal work of metaphysics. It is a book of inspired and poetic text intending to evolve the very source code of love itself with new possibilities and emergent worldviews. And while it is laced with academic references, it is not written to merely convince the reader, it is written to provoke and transform the reader. As guerrilla ontology targeting the core of emotional life, A Return to Eros is about the source codes of erotic emotional structures and how these relate to reality, and in turn to relationships, ethics, and the political. This potent combination of sex, reality, and politics makes for a dangerous book of metamodern metaphysics.
...
Looking to Eros as the source code of human emotional structures means looking into the roots and dynamics of embodied “bio-psychic” emotional energy. Emotion is traced back to its root as the primary force of Eros that suffuses all reality. For Gafni and Kincaid, this is where metaphysics merges with the limits of psychological theorizing. They maintain that the psychological and biological sciences suggest that a principle expression of cosmic energy itself can be found in human sexuality. This is about the evolutionary significance of sex itself, which has been part of cultural common sense since Freud. As Gafni and Kincaid say repeatedly, “It is all about sex. And it is not about sex at all.” Humanity’s lifeline to cosmic evolution – where our personal energy plugs into the Universe – is through the sexual. But sex is not the source; rather, it points towards the source. There were billions of years of self-organizing and Eros well before sexual reproduction began.
Evolution was primarily about sex for millions of years; humanity is in the unique evolutionary position to ask what sex itself is about. The only way for humanity to evolve is to clarify the desire of the universe itself, which has been gifted to us, hidden in the secret of our sexual desire. Sexuality leads beyond sex and into Eros, which permeates all forms of creativity and flowinducing mergers of self, object, and other.
This is what Gafni and Kincaid mean when they write that sex is only a sign pointing towards Eros: the sexual models the erotic. A Return to Eros expresses one of the core teachings of Hebrew Tantra: that the desire of the universe itself is hidden within the nature of human desire. Human yearning – when it is clarified from the dross of grasping and illusion – is the yearning of evolutionary love itself, awakening in us. Gafni elucidated the great Kabbalistic mystic Luria in Radical Kabbalah by focusing on the clarification of desire as a mystical practice. Wisdom is seeking to align desire with reality. Our embodiments of Eros (our emotional structures, and by implication our personalities, thoughts, and actions) are not simply ours. As it reaches expression in and through human emotions, Eros is a force that transcends but includes the “skin-encapsulated ego;” humans participate in the erotic energies that constitute the evolving universe as a whole."
(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)
Discussion
Emotion, Eros, and Evolution
Zachary Stein:
"The 1960s generation read dangerous books by Herbert Marcuse (1955) and Norman O. Brown (1959; 1966) and discussed the many ways that liberating our sexuality and rethinking our relationships would remake the face of society. Today in the context of resurgent patriarchy and fundamentalism, as well as the new puritanism of revived anti-sexuality rhetoric, the hopeful thinking of a generation dedicated to “free love” seems like a sentimental memory. As I later explore here (and as Gafni and Kincaid discuss), explanations exist for why cultures engage in shaming, scapegoating, and distorted displays of emotional energy. The misdirection of Eros leads to distortions of cognitive framing and political action (Bhaskar, 1993; Reich, 1969). The structure of emotion is prior to the structure of thought. Emotion is thus prior to (and a foundation for) the domains of the political and epistemological. This has been shown by neuroscience and educational research for decades (Apple, 2001; Damasio, 1994). It is one of the major claims implicit within A Return to Eros, where it is shown that errors in thought and ethics can be traced back to failures of relationship, failures of intimacy, and distortions of Eros. Looking to Eros as the source code of human emotional structures means looking into the roots and dynamics of embodied “bio-psychic” emotional energy. Emotion is traced back to its root as the primary force of Eros that suffuses all reality. For Gafni and Kincaid, this is where metaphysics merges with the limits of psychological theorizing. They maintain that the psychological and biological sciences suggest that a principle expression of cosmic energy itself can be found in human sexuality. This is about the evolutionary significance of sex itself, which has been part of cultural common sense since Freud. As Gafni and Kincaid say repeatedly, “It is all about sex. And it is not about sex at all.” Humanity’s lifeline to cosmic evolution – where our personal energy plugs into the Universe – is through the sexual. But sex is not the source; rather, it points towards the source. There were billions of years of self-organizing and Eros well before sexual reproduction began.
Evolution was primarily about sex for millions of years; humanity is in the unique evolutionary position to ask what sex itself is about. The only way for humanity to evolve is to clarify the desire of the universe itself, which has been gifted to us, hidden in the secret of our sexual desire. Sexuality leads beyond sex and into Eros, which permeates all forms of creativity and flowinducing mergers of self, object, and other.
This is what Gafni and Kincaid mean when they write that sex is only a sign pointing towards Eros: the sexual models the erotic. A Return to Eros expresses one of the core teachings of Hebrew Tantra: that the desire of the universe itself is hidden within the nature of human desire. Human yearning – when it is clarified from the dross of grasping and illusion – is the yearning of evolutionary love itself, awakening in us. Gafni elucidated the great Kabbalistic mystic Luria in Radical Kabbalah by focusing on the clarification of desire as a mystical practice. Wisdom is seeking to align desire with reality. Our embodiments of Eros (our emotional structures, and by implication our personalities, thoughts, and actions) are not simply ours. As it reaches expression in and through human emotions, Eros is a force that transcends but includes the “skin-encapsulated ego;” humans participate in the erotic energies that constitute the evolving universe as a whole.
Western stereotypes would have us believe that Eros (as expressed in human emotion in general, but especially sexual attraction and love) drives us to error and should be avoided when trying to use reason. There is a moment of truth in this that has been well documented in research on cognitive bias (Gino, 2013). Indeed, it is clear that some forms of emotion can profoundly distort our ability to think clearly and make good decisions. However, a careful look at this research shows that it is not the lack or absence of emotion in general that is important for reason and clarity of decision-making, but rather the presence of certain positive emotions. Research on how the brain learns also shows that you need a kind of passion to learn, otherwise you forget or simply give up (Immordino-Yang, 2011). It is only when life is rich with emotion, when you are in the flow of Eros, only then are you ever really thinking clearly. Ask a world-class scientist what it is like to really be doing science, and they will describe a kind of rapture, using words like beauty, ecstasy, and satisfaction (erotic emotional highs often following from rigorous preparation; no doubt, foreplay is important). The underappreciated implication of this is not that we should repress emotion and get it out of the way, but rather that if we want to be reasonable we should work hard to cultivate and clarify certain emotions.
The clarification of emotion has long been part of the great Tantric traditions of spiritual practice. A Return to Eros demonstrates that the goal of Tantra, so often misunderstood in popular narratives, is not more and better sex, but rather more erotic energy to be expanded beyond the sexual. As Gafni has been saying since he wrote The Mystery of Love (2003), “the sexual models the erotic, but it does not exhaust it.” In sexual experiences the majority of people can most easily experience the various qualities of Eros. The emotional intensity of sexuality explodes the powder keg known as the system, plugging into billions of years of evolution. Tantra seeks to transform and liberate this energy – which is the basic bio-psychic energy of evolution itself – so that it transcends but includes the domain of sexuality. This is seen as the key to a liberated humanity: clarification of what is hidden in erotic merger, and then expanding this pure erotic energy into the rest of life. Literally a return or turning towards Eros, this is the wellspring from which the actualization of human potential flows.
The many qualities of Eros detailed by Gafni and Kincaid are listed as the “12 faces of Eros.” Each one gets a chapter. Some of these faces are the qualities of flow and self-transcendence, peak experiences, and mystical merger, as were researched in the human potential movement for decades (Murphy, 1992; Wheal, 2017). Other qualities instead challenge the non-dual Eastern orientations of the human potential movement. Just to get a sense (although there is not space to discuss them here), the most essential of the 12 faces of Eros are: interiority, or depth of consciousness; presence, or the fullness of the moment; desire, or yearning; wholeness, or radical intimacy; and uniqueness. These are the results of Gafni and Kincaid’s important work engaging a phenomenology of Eros, which amounts to a metamodern participatory metaphysics of the human understood as a function of cosmic Eros. Their work seeks to reveal the common deep structures of emotion that constitute the domain of the erotic. Is there a common structure to feelings of sexual merger and, for example, the feeling of being “at one with” a landscape that presents a rapturous sunset? Those two emotional structures are similar; both are rooted in Eros, and both are presenting a shade or face of Eros. Human love and sexuality is a sign that points beyond itself towards the Eros and Divinity of life itself. If we ask what the universe must be like for human love to be real, we ought not look only at the sign (you voyeur!), but to where it points. All this echoes Reich (1969) and other theorists who critique the Left for abandoning the “sexual revolution” to those who want to debate gender politics (Thompson, 1981; 1998). The true sexual revolution would be a widespread liberation of Eros beyond the sexual, such that the energies of love, depth, and desire suffuse all aspects of life. This means that understanding the cultural crisis of today requires more than looking at developmental structures of thought and value, as Ken Wilber (2017) does in his analysis of Trump and a Post-Truth World. This developmental-structural approach is essential. But fully understanding and being able to take action requires looking further into the source code of emotional structures, and specifically recognizing the ubiquitous culture of what Gafni and Kincaid call the murder of Eros."
(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)