Gaping of Eros

Nothing would turn without desire. One can be taken by giddiness in front of the mass of the human inventions and productions. A mass of difference when compared with the simple animal kingdom. How can you explain this difference without a specific 'Eros' of man which we call desire? Without it, what would make turn our exponential system of production of abundance, and therefore of 'progress'? More deeply, what would be man without this dynamics? Tell me your desire, I will tell who you are. It is the desire which means and expresses the fundamental personal project of each human being with its own mystery. Without desire only indifference would reign. It is the desire which opens the difference. Primarily the difference between a full and a vacuum. Eros, as says Plato, is son of abundance and of poverty. A shortage which tends towards its abundance.

The desire 'functions' in the manner of an open system. On a potential difference between the hot source of abundance and the cold well of shortage. Its dynamics comes from the energy fall of this potential difference. The larger it is, the more intense is the desire. On the other hand, when difference tends towards indifference desire will die.

Contrary to the animal, the human world, the anthroposphere, is rooted in the biosphere and the noosphere. The potential difference of its Eros, plays thus at the same time on three levels which one can evoke schematically.

The instinctual level. With its specific tendencies and its requirements. Survival (struggle for life, defence, escape…). Vital needs (thirst, hunger, sex…). Blood ties (species, community, group, horde…). Defence of the territory (burrow, nest, brooded, reserves…). Aggressiveness (threat, aggression, fear, freedom…). Competition (force, domination, imitation…). Emotional load and repercussion.

The noological level. On the one hand the 'instinctual' level taken again through the idea, the understanding, the symbolic system, the models, the ideal, the normative requirement, sublimation… On the other hand specifically human values like right, duty, being, possession, honour, power, glory, interest, Fatherland, sense, protest, revolt, challenge, going beyond.

The pneumatological level. This are the precedent 'instinctual' and 'noological' levels as exposed to transcendence. With exposings like God, the Absolute, the sacral, the person, the sense of sense, all what is worth more than the life and larger than every thing else.

Man is an infinite living being with an always infinitely open desire. Its dissatisfaction remains infinite. Because its gaping is abyssal. An essential gaping which digs the desire ad infinitum. Forever impossible to circumvent. Because it is implacably gaping on the Other one.

That starts with Eros in its broadest meaning. A trend-setting dynamism which is identified with the life in its multiple expansion and its prolix differentiation. This Eros is, as says Plato, son of abundance and poverty. The more both embrace each other the larger becomes Eros.

Whit the animal, the shortage is proportioned to its possible satiety. The world suffices for its Eros. By man, disproportion goes increasing. Abundance overflows and gaping grows hollow. The world can never be at the proportion of the disproportion of Eros. A new space opens to human disproportion, in continuity and rupture with nature. Whereas the animal lives these trendy dimensions of its being simply on the indicative mode, for man they get explosive through the infinite open distance of a 'no'. From now on all physical and biological dynamics will take an absolutely new dimension in this distance. In particular their difference will play symbolically.

Value is not child of identity but of difference. Where is coincidence there is no wish. As long as it abounds, water remains without value. Its value is measured by shortage. It grows ad infinitum for the dying of thirst in the desert. Distances alone nourish nostalgias. An object is desirable only in its absence or by its threatening loss. To run after something still makes it more desirable. The conquest multiplies by ten its value. What 'is worth' emerges from a gaping.

Value occurs in the negation of the indifference. It emerges with the difference. Here a stone at the edge of the way. It's there, 'unspecified' and unimportant until the moment when an archeologist discovers it as an important vestige. It takes value only once it looses its indifference and is located in the difference.

Here a word you hear with interest. It leaves the hubbub of indifference. It takes value. It takes value for you. Who is the demiurge of such a transmutation? The human look, the human listening. That is the huge 'differentiator' we can also call spirit.

Emerged 'between the lines' of nature, how can man find his place in the text of nature? This frustrated animal is insatiable. Desire can say 'enough' only in the primary immediacy. There is 'enough' only in short moments or in mind numbing states. The next moment shouts again!

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