This writing will explore the two faces of Eros and Logos. These two faces or aspects indicate that the eros and logos are “Janus-faced”, and their aspects involve some duplicity when involved in the day-to-day lives of human beings. The duplicity is the manner in which both Psyche and Eros deal with truth as revealing and the bringing into the light and the hiding or concealment of truth in our experience of the reality of world.
The soul, Psyche, is wed to Eros and is composed, according to Plato, of the logistikon (head), the thymoeides (heart), and the epithymetikon (appetites, gut). Eros may be said to be concerned with the ontical or the material and the concrete, that which is physical and accessible or revealed through the senses. Logos is concerned with the ontological or the manner of being of human beings within language, either as word or number i.e. the “knowledge” that gives rise to the politics and the ethics that come-to-be as a result of the challenging Eros upon human beings so that our lives are ones of ordering that which is revealed through the various parts of the soul and how that which is revealed comes to its essence. This ordering revealing stance gives the world to us as “data” and is what we call “information”. “Information” is that which is responsible for the ‘form’ (ordering, gathering) so that it may ‘inform’. The data must report in a way that makes whatever is revealed compatible with the ‘form’ for the ‘form’ rules in the ordering of the data. The ‘informing’ is possible through the form in which the data is brought to light and revealed as a ‘resource’. This ordering gathering is what we call technology.
Though Eros and Psyche are wed to each other, they are not Identical. We can say that they are the Same and their relationship distinguishes what we mean by the Identical and the Same. Also, in saying that Logos and Eros have two faces, we are nevertheless insisting that both are one just as the tripartite soul is a one or individual. If we count up the parts, they will total 7. Plato’s drama Symposium has seven speakers and the drama itself reflects the nature of the human soul.
The tripartite soul of Plato can be held in contrast to the tripartite theory of the “person” of Sigmund Freud. For Freud the id, ego, and superego compose the concrete reality of the human psyche, the persona, the “personality”. In Freud, there are no souls. Love, for Freud, is blind and is a matter of contingency and chance. For Plato, Love and the Intelligence are connected in the essential human activity of revealing truth and of living well in communities, how we participate in justice, and what we are “fitted” for as human beings. The dialectical or ‘conversational friendship’ that is the essence of the Platonic relationship of the soul with the presence-at-hand of ‘the other’ that leads to the perfection that is its proper end is mirrored in Freudian psychotherapy by the relationship between the therapist/analyst and the patient which, hopefully, leads to “good mental health”. For both, the end is eudaemonia or “happiness”, “good spirits”. Whereas Freud sees human beings as “persons” (“masks”) and ids or “its”, Plato sees human beings as “souls”. Where Freud sees the essence of sacred love as profane, Diotima in Symposium sees that what we understand as profane love is, in its essence, sacred. This is what is meant here when we say that through our natural desire or urge for procreation or giving birth to children, we are showing our desire for the Incarnation, for immortality.
Plato’s tripartite soul consists of the logistikon (reason, thought, nous which has to do with the head), the thymoeides (spiritedness, that which houses anger, hate, care, concern and love as well as the other “spirited” emotions which has to do with the heart), and the epithymetikon (appetite or desire, which houses the desire for physical pleasures, the desire for “possession” and “consumption” which has to do with the gut and genitalia).
While for Plato the ’embodied soul’ of the human being is a three, it is also a ‘one’. Since each part of the soul is ‘two-faced’, the three parts combine with the one to produce a seven. Human society, our culture and politics, are the institutions and conventions that mirror the three parts of the soul, each type of regime or institution from which they originate highlighting an aspect of the human soul the development of which through education will bring about what is conceived as human “excellence” or “virtue”, what the Greeks called arete, within that society. It is the political regime which the community has chosen or which rules in the community that creates the character of the human beings who live within that regime and the “culture” of the worlds in which those human beings will be immersed. It is the political regime that is ultimately the determiner of the ethics or the actions of the members of that regime. For the ancients, religion and the state, the ethics and the politics, were not distinct. This must be kept in mind when trying to understand what is currently occurring in regimes throughout the world. “Human excellence” is not a matter of taste or fashion.
The sub-title of Symposium by Plato is “On the Good”. The coming to be of technology as a way of being-in-the-world has required changes in what we think is good, what we think the good is, how we conceive sanity and madness, justice and injustice, rationality and irrationality, beauty and ugliness. The word “technology” in its unique combining of the Greek words technē and logos illustrates the “two-faced” character of its etymological roots: “knowing”(logos) and “making” (technē).
“Making” is a kind of “procreation”, but unlike Nature’s “procreation” which is from within itself, technology’s “procreation” is “in another and for another”. Nature’s procreation is presence-at-hand and we apprehend it through our viewing of the beauty of the world in the flight of a butterfly or the awe we feel in the presence of some natural phenomenon such as Niagara Falls. Technology’s procreation is the ready-to-hand world that gives and views the “other” as “resource”, as “data”.
This technological bringing forth was called poiesis by the Greeks, and our word “poetry” is derived from this word. Poiesis is a “bringing forth”; technology is also a bringing forth, but they are not the same. The “bringing-forth” that is technology is the eros that is present in both the arts and the sciences, and this bringing-forth, this pro-duction, is what we call ‘knowledge’. The poiesis of technology is distinct from that of poetry, and this distinction is indicated in its use of “imagination” or eikasia as illustrated by Plato in his Divided Line in Bk VI of his Republic. The eikasia or imagination is shown in that which is present in the bringing-forth that is the technology of the technicians and it is distinguished from that bringing-forth that is the work of the true poets.
How does technology become the anti-Eros and the anti-Logos that it is in the modern age? Or perhaps we may question: how does technology show itself as one of the faces of the Janus-faced entities that we call eros and logos? The writer J. R. R. Tolkien once referred to technology as “black magic”. “Magic” is the attempt to control human beings’ relation to the divine as well as to Necessity, and the colour black is indicative of the lack of revealing light. “Magic” is a form of hubris and is condemned as such. While technology is able to reveal Necessity with great affect, it cannot do so with the divine. It is the mastering, commandeering urge or desire of technology in its ordering (which is but one face of eros) that distinguishes it from the Eros that leads upward. The other face of eros leads in the other direction towards the material and virtual worlds that technology creates.
The nearing and the withdrawal of the gods is related to humanity’s relation to being, and this is indicative of our relationship to Eros. The ‘bringing forth’ and ‘revealing’ that is manifested in technology’s relation to the world requires an indifference towards the things that are in their reality. The gods make themselves known through their “revelatory” relations to human beings which are dependent on the Logos (the Ten Commandments, as an example). It is not up to human beings to decide whether the divine will reveal itself. The role of human beings is simply to be prepared for the possibilities of such revelations through the calling and the hearing. The attempts by human beings to control and commandeer the gods causes the gods to withdraw into concealment. An example can be shown in the discoveries of the James Webb Telescope: as the furthest extents of the universe are revealed, the god simultaneously withdraws from that revealing.
Both Eros and the Logos contain within themselves the potential for the complete destruction of human beings but also the potential for their redemption and salvation. Both the Logos and Eros are present in the human soul simultaneously. If the essence of human being is in our capacity to reveal truth, if we are the being that reveals (eros) through language (logos), the zoon logon echon: the living being that perdures in language, then we as human beings may potentially lose our essence and become less human, more inhumane, if we do not do so. When we do not do so, the world about us becomes ‘soulless’ and Eros takes flight because that which he loves, the most Beautiful of mortals Psyche, has ceased to respond to him. The world becomes, essentially, ‘unerotic’ and we ourselves are in danger of becoming somnambulistic zombies.
Our challenging demand that the world reveal itself in such a way that it can be placed within “the form that informs” as ‘resource’ are both aspects of one face of eros and the logos. This challenging demanding arises from our desire to possess and consume, a desire that arises from within the epithymetikon part of the soul. In the story of The Garden of Eden, it is Eve’s eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that brings about the fall of human beings. It is a ‘grasping’ and ‘consumption’. Due to this fall, human beings must survive by the sweat of their brows, by their work. It is this knowledge that our very survival depends on our procuring efforts that brings about the anxiety of insecurity, and the procurement of goods allays this anxiety. The coming to presence that is technology gives to human beings a way which allows the revealing of eros to the Otherness which human beings can neither invent nor make so that human beings come to perceive this Otherness as ‘resource’ so that human beings will feel “secure” and more “at home” in this Otherness.
With the coming-to-be of Artificial Intelligence, there is the danger that all the revealing of eros will be consumed in the ‘form’ that ‘informs’ so that all that is present must reveal itself as data that must be transformed into usable “information”, to ‘resource’. The data that resists such transformation will be overlooked as meaningless and ignored. There is much in this writing, for example, which AI will ignore as the data cannot be transformed into a useable resource.
With this situation, Eros takes flight. We as human beings become lost in our attempts to master and control technology because we see technology (and Artificial Intelligence) as an instrument or tool that we can commandeer in our modes of revealing. How our understanding of technology as instrument has come to pass through our understanding of the world as guided by the principle of reason is illustrative of our essence as human beings which is to reveal truth through the logos. This ambiguity lets us see the mystery of all revealing, of truth, as our participation in the presence of eros and the logos in every waking moment of our everyday lives.
The challenging forth that is the manner of revealing of one side of the face of Eros is counter-balanced by the revealing as bringing forth that the Greeks understood as poiesis. The distinction between the two is indicated by Plato in his Divided Line in Bk VI of Republic. The two exist side-by-side, but the challenging forth manner of revealing that is to be found in technology blocks the Eros who shows himself in the revealing as poiesis.
The revealing of the world as resource blocks the revealing of the world through poiesis because the revealing of the world as resource demands that nature respond to the form that it has imposed so that what is revealed may inform. The logos and the eros perdure in their standing side-by-side just as the revealing of the world that is done through the logistikon can manifest itself in either the logos that is the commandeering calculation of the form that informs or through the logos that poetically reveals that world to us. The role of the logistikon in the thinking involved in commandeering calculation (the principle of reason), the thinking that reveals itself to us in our sciences, and the thinking involved in our revealing of the beauty of the world that is found in our poetry (or all true language) exist together simultaneously in our being-in-the-world. Our fondness for acronyms indicates that language is eroded, decayed and deadened in the world that is dominated by the logos of commandeering calculation.
In Plato, the essence of what human beings are is the soul, and this is manifested in their actions through their being possessed by the logos and eros. Notice that I did not say that they are ‘possessed of’. The Otherness that is Nature is sempiternal: that which permanently endures in Nature and as Nature is Necessity. Human beings are ’embodied souls’. In being so, they share in that permanence and change that is manifested in Nature. They are subject to Necessity in all their being except for that infinitesimal part of the soul that is beyond Necessity and makes their being in language and longing possible.
The Ideas of Plato give birth to the eidos or the ‘outward appearances of things’. The Ideas and the eidos are not the Same nor are they Identical. The things in their outward appearance do not reveal their essence. In their ‘shining’ as ‘presence’, they reveal the eros that is present in all beings that exist, but they reveal themselves as only ‘shadows’. These ‘shadows’ become replicated in the representations of the thinking of human beings that bring forth the ‘produce’ that technicians and ordinary poets carry out in their day-to-day activities.
The essence of Nature is its manner of perduring as Necessity through all of its apparent changes on the surface. The eidos reveal to us this manner of perduring. The ethical being of human beings, the actions that human beings engage in (what is called their ‘ontology’), reveal their essence through all of the multivarious changes in those actions. Human excellence or arete is revealed through the highest actions of human beings and these become models for those that follow. These ‘highest actions’ are not matters of taste nor subject to the whims of the times.
Logos and Eros are in constant strife with each other, for the logos attempts to put forward those frames of reference that make eros understandable and so provide our ‘understanding’ of the world we experience as we experience it and what its essence is, while the eros constantly urges a moving on from that which wants to find itself permanently settled in the flux that is human existence. While the logos strives for the stable and the settled, the ‘ordered’, eros strives for the ‘novel’ and the ‘new’. Eros is messy. Both of these strivings come to human beings from ‘beyond’ the being that is humanity itself.
Eros and Logos are coupled together in the impenetrable mystery that is Being and Becoming, or as the poet William Blake would say: “The human form Divine”. The poetical brings the true as the revealing that is present in Eros and in the Logos into the splendour of “that which shines forth most purely” (Phaedrus). Eros is present and pervades all bringing-forth or ‘production’ that is the coming to presence into the beautiful. The logos is present as the techne, that ‘know how’ that allows us to be at home in our worlds and provides us with our understanding and meaning of those worlds. It gives us our ‘faith’ and ‘trust’ in those worlds (see Plato’s Divided Line).
However, the logos when understood purely as techne strives to view art as ‘aesthetic’ only, that is as a ‘calculable’ thing in its historicity. This aesthetic-mindedness kills what we may learn from the art; it kills eros. Our faith and trust become ossified in the principle of reason that is one face of the two-faced Logos, so much so that Eros flees and we are left bereft of that revealing that is our essential nature as human beings. We dwell in the condition that is somnambulism, what William Blake refers to as “Newton’s sleep”.
Eros, Logos and World as “Information”: “Information” as the Essence of Technology
In our modern age, the world is given to us as “data” which we then transform into “information”. This “giving” is the work of Eros; the transforming is the work of the Logos. We may understand the meaning of information as ‘that which is responsible for the form so that it may inform’. The ‘form’ is what the Greeks called eidos, the outward appearance of a thing. We have shown that one of the aspects of eros is that of the ‘outward appearance’s’ coming to presence and enduring as the beautiful. This coming to presence and enduring is ‘truth’, and truth as essence is a revealing from hiddenness which is done in the ‘shining’ of Eros as the beautiful.
If the essence of “information” is that which is responsible for the ‘form’ that ‘informs’, that which is as ‘data’ can only respond in the way that the challenging command of the ‘form’ allows that data to come to presence as that which may ‘inform’ as ‘resource’. The essence of the challenging is one of the faces of Eros. The truth that is revealed from the coming to presence of the form itself hides the essence of ‘information’ as the essence of technology. The entrapping of world as data disguises itself in its setting in order everything that presences, all of which we perceive as data, as resource and establishes itself as ‘resource’ and rules all that is regarded as ‘resource’. This is the essence of Artificial Intelligence; and AI may be said to be the apogee of technology.
The danger of AI is not that some day machines may come to think for themselves and, as imagined in the film The Terminator, come to destroy human beings. The very danger of AI lies rather in the construction of this image itself: that as long as we view technology as a means, or as an instrument or piece of equipment, or a tool rather than that form that allows instruments, equipment and tools to come into being makes us unaware that technology is now ordering how the coming to presence of human beings will be conducted and revealed. Some of us may be reminded of the words of T. S. Eliot from his poem “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper”.
It is Eros that must rescue human beings from this danger; for it is Eros, both in its coupling with the Logos in its giving the coming to presence of being itself and in its coupling with the revealing of truth as the beautiful through that light that is his essence, that is responsible for the true ordering of the essence of human beings. This rescue will be carried out through Eros as Love.
Theory of Knowledge: An Alternative Approach 