Sex, Eros, and Love
Whiteheadian Reflections
"The Primordial Nature of God, here also
termed the Eros of the Universe."
- Alfred North Whitehead
Sexual love is a joy of life, but not a selfish joy. To be sure, it is pleasurable. But the pleasure is not exactly the aim of sexual love. The aim is ecstatic and mutual self-giving, in which the givers receive pleasure in the giving. This love can be playful, intimate, trusting, adventurous, loving, and mysterious. Indeed, it has a metaphysical side; it can be a window into two ultimate truths: the mutual immanence of all things as present in one another and a subtle but intense Love that permeates the cosmos. Both of these are immanent within sexual love.
Of course, the aim of sexual love is not to engage in metaphysics. It is to enjoy the pleasure of mutual self-giving. It is in retrospection, not immediacy, that the metaphysical truths are discerned. In this sense, it is like music or nature or a simple act of kindness: it reveals a Beauty within itself yet beyond us that is first tasted and only, in retrospect, reflected upon. Whitehead speaks of this Beauty, tasted in sexual intimacy, music, and many other ways, as a Harmony of Harmonies. It is what the world would look like if it were perfect, if things were truly together in a harmonious way.
However, when sex has lost its soul, when the shades of its windows are closed within the isolated self, sex can be possessive, self-absorbed, narcissistic, abusive, dominating, demeaning, and violent. This is what so often happens when sex occurs within the confines of patriarchy and is employed rather than enjoyed. Its positive energies are diverted into control. It is no longer love but power.
This diminution of sex to violence also reveals something about the universe. The quiet but intense love that permeates the cosmos is all loving but not all powerful. There are many things that happen in our world - rape, injustice, domination, hatred - that violate the harmony perceived in sexual love, Sex must transcend narcissism, and an impulse to control, to become love.
Fortunately, this transcendence can and does happen in our world. The physical and emotional attraction of two people to one another, filled the possibilities of sexual fulfilment, can lead them to mutual commitment, trust in one another, a love of life, and service to the world. When this happens, sexual pleasure has fulfilled its potential. It has found its connection with love.
What is love? In The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence and in many other works, Thomas Oord has defined love in simple and clear words. He defines it as "acting intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being." In this definition, the phrase relational response is key. Sexual intimacy is a relational response to another person, in which their well-being is intentionally fostered through bodily touch, exploration, intimacy, and play, leaning toward the ecstasy of self-forgetfulness. In the moment of self-forgetfulness, the Harmony of Harmonies becomes a felt reality. There is no self; there is only the Harmony. In this self-forgetful activity, there is rarely an intention for overall well-being. The intention is for the well-being of a single person, the beloved. But the well-being of that person can become, in retrospect, the well-being of each and all. This is how sexual intimacy connects with love.
Of course, sex is not the only portal to love. Its pleasures - ecstatic self-giving, playfulness, intimacy, trust, mutuality, and mystery - are not limited to bodily pleasures, beautiful as they are. If we think of sex in terms of its creative energies, then sex is more than "sex." It is what the philosopher Whitehead calls Eros.
Whitehead believes that God is the Eros of the universe as well as the Harmony of Harmonies. "Eros" is the fundamental creative and harmonizing force in the universe: the driving force behind the process of "concrescence," where various elements come together to form a new actual occasion. Eros, in this sense, is the attractive force that draws diverse elements toward each other, resulting in novel and complex wholes. Eros is Beauty. Eros can be understood as a form of love, but not in the conventional human emotional sense. It is a cosmic love that underlies all existence, guiding the ongoing process of creative becoming and unification. Human love, including human sexuality can participate in Eros, but Eros is always more than human. It is seen in other creatures, too, including those that are not sexual. Eros can also be expressed by human beings who are a-sexual or celibate. Eros includes, but is more than, sex.
Back, then, to sex. It is easy to rest in abstractions about Eros and Love, but neglect sexual intimacy as one of the portals into Love. I offer, in what follows, twenty ideas from Whitehead that might help us appreciate sex when rooted in Eros and Harmony, when rooted in Love.
Whitehead believed that philosophy should help us understand and interpret lived experience, and also that lived experience provides evidence for philosophy. What kinds of experience? His answer was all kinds.
"Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience care-free, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal." (Adventures of Ideas)
To his list, we can rightly add sexual love, including pleasure, play, intimacy, mutuality, and ecstatic self-giving. Make no mistake: as noted above sexual energies can also have a darker side. They can be possessive, self-centered, demanding of immediate gratification, and heedless of self-denial. They can be violent. However, I want to focus on the positive side of those energies: sexual love.
To offer a highly tentative Whiteheadian (process) approach to positive sexual intimacy, it is crucial to strike a balance and avoid exaggerating or downplaying its importance in human experience. Whitehead's philosophy can help find that balance. Here are some key concepts in Whitehead's philosophy that can contribute to understanding positive, life-giving sexual love.
My suggestion, then, is that concepts such as these can contribute to a Whiteheadian understanding of sexuality and sexual experience, understanding it as a powerful and valuable dimension of human life when in service to Love. They can also help us understand sexuality in the larger context of an evolving planet and creative universe since most of these ideas are applicable to all forms of experience, not sexual forms alone. Other forms of life, too, yearn for harmony and intensity of experience; and they, too, seek to be richly connected with their worlds. There is a way of looking at the entire universe, and also of God, as rooted in the energies that are present in sexuality in service to love. Sexual love needs to be liberated from patriarchy in order to realize its full potential. When we are in touch with the Eros of the universe, with God, we rightly seek that liberation, for life's sake and for love's sake.
- Jay McDaniel
Of course, the aim of sexual love is not to engage in metaphysics. It is to enjoy the pleasure of mutual self-giving. It is in retrospection, not immediacy, that the metaphysical truths are discerned. In this sense, it is like music or nature or a simple act of kindness: it reveals a Beauty within itself yet beyond us that is first tasted and only, in retrospect, reflected upon. Whitehead speaks of this Beauty, tasted in sexual intimacy, music, and many other ways, as a Harmony of Harmonies. It is what the world would look like if it were perfect, if things were truly together in a harmonious way.
However, when sex has lost its soul, when the shades of its windows are closed within the isolated self, sex can be possessive, self-absorbed, narcissistic, abusive, dominating, demeaning, and violent. This is what so often happens when sex occurs within the confines of patriarchy and is employed rather than enjoyed. Its positive energies are diverted into control. It is no longer love but power.
This diminution of sex to violence also reveals something about the universe. The quiet but intense love that permeates the cosmos is all loving but not all powerful. There are many things that happen in our world - rape, injustice, domination, hatred - that violate the harmony perceived in sexual love, Sex must transcend narcissism, and an impulse to control, to become love.
Fortunately, this transcendence can and does happen in our world. The physical and emotional attraction of two people to one another, filled the possibilities of sexual fulfilment, can lead them to mutual commitment, trust in one another, a love of life, and service to the world. When this happens, sexual pleasure has fulfilled its potential. It has found its connection with love.
What is love? In The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence and in many other works, Thomas Oord has defined love in simple and clear words. He defines it as "acting intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being." In this definition, the phrase relational response is key. Sexual intimacy is a relational response to another person, in which their well-being is intentionally fostered through bodily touch, exploration, intimacy, and play, leaning toward the ecstasy of self-forgetfulness. In the moment of self-forgetfulness, the Harmony of Harmonies becomes a felt reality. There is no self; there is only the Harmony. In this self-forgetful activity, there is rarely an intention for overall well-being. The intention is for the well-being of a single person, the beloved. But the well-being of that person can become, in retrospect, the well-being of each and all. This is how sexual intimacy connects with love.
Of course, sex is not the only portal to love. Its pleasures - ecstatic self-giving, playfulness, intimacy, trust, mutuality, and mystery - are not limited to bodily pleasures, beautiful as they are. If we think of sex in terms of its creative energies, then sex is more than "sex." It is what the philosopher Whitehead calls Eros.
Whitehead believes that God is the Eros of the universe as well as the Harmony of Harmonies. "Eros" is the fundamental creative and harmonizing force in the universe: the driving force behind the process of "concrescence," where various elements come together to form a new actual occasion. Eros, in this sense, is the attractive force that draws diverse elements toward each other, resulting in novel and complex wholes. Eros is Beauty. Eros can be understood as a form of love, but not in the conventional human emotional sense. It is a cosmic love that underlies all existence, guiding the ongoing process of creative becoming and unification. Human love, including human sexuality can participate in Eros, but Eros is always more than human. It is seen in other creatures, too, including those that are not sexual. Eros can also be expressed by human beings who are a-sexual or celibate. Eros includes, but is more than, sex.
Back, then, to sex. It is easy to rest in abstractions about Eros and Love, but neglect sexual intimacy as one of the portals into Love. I offer, in what follows, twenty ideas from Whitehead that might help us appreciate sex when rooted in Eros and Harmony, when rooted in Love.
Whitehead believed that philosophy should help us understand and interpret lived experience, and also that lived experience provides evidence for philosophy. What kinds of experience? His answer was all kinds.
"Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience care-free, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal." (Adventures of Ideas)
To his list, we can rightly add sexual love, including pleasure, play, intimacy, mutuality, and ecstatic self-giving. Make no mistake: as noted above sexual energies can also have a darker side. They can be possessive, self-centered, demanding of immediate gratification, and heedless of self-denial. They can be violent. However, I want to focus on the positive side of those energies: sexual love.
To offer a highly tentative Whiteheadian (process) approach to positive sexual intimacy, it is crucial to strike a balance and avoid exaggerating or downplaying its importance in human experience. Whitehead's philosophy can help find that balance. Here are some key concepts in Whitehead's philosophy that can contribute to understanding positive, life-giving sexual love.
- Enjoyment: Whitehead views the momentary satisfaction of any experiencing subject as an act of self-enjoyment in being related to other subjects. Enjoyment is regarded as a positive aspect of human experience, not something evil.
- Desire for Satisfaction: The desire for rich relations and intimacy includes a yearning for satisfaction, the coming together of many into one, subjectively felt. Every moment of experience begins with a desire for satisfaction, whether consciously or unconsciously.
- Harmony and Intensity: In Whitehead's "Process and Reality," he proposes that each and every actuality in the universe has a subjective aim for "intensity" of experience in the immediacy of the moment. The intensity is maximal when it includes "harmony" with the felt world, thus leading some interpreters to say that the aim is for harmonious intensity and intense harmony.
- Physical and Mental Poles of Experience: Whitehead identifies two poles of experience - physical and mental. The physical pole involves direct feelings of being affected or caused by others, including physical and simple mental feelings. The mental pole involves imagination and the weaving of possibilities for the future.
- Beauty: Beauty plays a significant role in Whitehead's philosophy and can be experienced in various forms, including sexual beauty. It is the palpable sense of being connected with others in harmony and intensity.
- Withness of the Body: Whitehead recognizes the importance of the body's witness in human life, including physical experiences related to sexuality.
- Moods: Whitehead's philosophy highlights the importance of subjective forms, such as emotions and purposes, in all experiences, helping us understand the complexities of sexual life and its different emotional states.
- Yearning for Connection: The desire for satisfaction is also a desire for connection, for being with others in ways that are alive. Much human sexuality is a yearning for connection, and the yearning itself is part of its beauty.
- Unconscious Desires: In Whitehead's philosophy, ordinary waking consciousness is but the tip of the experiential iceberg. Most of our experience is dim, vague, and unconscious. A yearning for connection can be deep within the psyche, even if absent from consciousness. Sexual desire begins at the unconscious level, as does all experience.
- Fallacy of Simple Location: Human beings are not "simply located" inside their bodies; our bodies are creative, flexible sites where physicality and identity interact with the world. Sexual intimacy can awaken an awareness of this interconnectedness.
- Prehending: Prehension refers to feeling the presence of others and being influenced by them. Sexual intimacy involves prehension in both physical and mental dimensions.
- Adventure: Whitehead's philosophy emphasizes adventure as the venturing forth into new and unexplored domains of body and mind, making sexual touch a vivid example of adventure.
- God as the Eros of the Universe: Whitehead describes the Primordial Nature of God as the Eros of the universe, representing the desire for novelty and rich relations with others experienced by each creature. This desire lies at the heart of sexual intimacy.
- God as Feeling the World through Physical Feelings: In Whitehead's philosophy, God is the Eros of the universe and experiences the feelings of all living beings through simple physical feelings, in the mode of causal efficacy. God's physical feelings are not grounded in a locatable body; they are everywhere at once. God "feels the feelings" of the world and is affected by them.
- Energy: In Whitehead's philosophy, energy is feeling, and feeling is energy. This means that people can feel and enjoy sexual energy in themselves and others.
- Persuasion, not Coercion: Whitehead speaks of God's power in the universe as persuasive, not coercive, working with the creativity and experience of creatures in the world.
- Perishing: In Whitehead's philosophy, every moment of experience is a life and a death; a coming into existence and a passing away. This is true of sexual experience, too. It entails loss as well as pleasure; the intimacy enjoyed recedes into the past as an object of memory.
- Hope: Even as subjective immediacy passes away, there is always "the next moment." The sexual side of life carries within it the hope that the desire for harmony and intensity, the pleasures of the sexual act, can be foretastes of a deeper and wider joy, vividly tasted in the present, but with fulfillments to be known in the future, not only for lovers but for the world.
- Tenderness: One of Whitehead's favorite words was "tenderness." He speaks of God as loving the world "with tender care that nothing be lost." In many forms of sexual experience, tenderness is present.
- Love: In Whitehead's philosophy, love is more than sex, but sex can be part of love. Sexual energies can be channeled in various ways, including discipline. The discipline of sex is not to deny its goodness but to add it to a greater good, and marriage can serve this purpose.
My suggestion, then, is that concepts such as these can contribute to a Whiteheadian understanding of sexuality and sexual experience, understanding it as a powerful and valuable dimension of human life when in service to Love. They can also help us understand sexuality in the larger context of an evolving planet and creative universe since most of these ideas are applicable to all forms of experience, not sexual forms alone. Other forms of life, too, yearn for harmony and intensity of experience; and they, too, seek to be richly connected with their worlds. There is a way of looking at the entire universe, and also of God, as rooted in the energies that are present in sexuality in service to love. Sexual love needs to be liberated from patriarchy in order to realize its full potential. When we are in touch with the Eros of the universe, with God, we rightly seek that liberation, for life's sake and for love's sake.
- Jay McDaniel