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Love, Death, and Creation

Love, Death, and Creation 190 Love, Death, and Creation MARTIN C. DILLON SUNY-Binghamton The threat of death engenders a desire for immortality which manifests itself in the efforts toward self-perpetuation we call creation. In this way, Plato establishes an essential correlation between love, death and creation. Love, or Eros, is conceived as desire for perpetual possession of the good. The good is not explicity defined, but it is implicitly associated with happiness, a state of being in accord with a cosmic nomos (law) or moral order of things. Love is thus essentially oriented toward immortality (i.e., perpetual happiness) and stands in essential opposition to death. Creation is love in praxis. The paradigm is procreation: it is love acting in accordance with the cosmic order and resulting in the progeny which ensure self-perpetuation or immortality. Platonic Eros grounds a unitary human teleology which directs us away from the Heraclitean flux of becoming toward the immutable sphere of Parmenidean being. The process of becoming-coming into being from non-being and passing out of being into non-being-is essentially correlated with death, nothingness, non-being. Insofar as happiness is to be the destiny of man, it requires striving toward the end of immortality, immutability, being. This schema allows http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Research in Phenomenology Brill

Love, Death, and Creation

Dillon, Martin C.
Research in Phenomenology , Volume 11 (1): 190 – Jan 1, 1981
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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 1981 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0085-5553
eISSN
1569-1640
DOI
10.1163/156916481X00117
Publisher site
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Abstract

190 Love, Death, and Creation MARTIN C. DILLON SUNY-Binghamton The threat of death engenders a desire for immortality which manifests itself in the efforts toward self-perpetuation we call creation. In this way, Plato establishes an essential correlation between love, death and creation. Love, or Eros, is conceived as desire for perpetual possession of the good. The good is not explicity defined, but it is implicitly associated with happiness, a state of being in accord with a cosmic nomos (law) or moral order of things. Love is thus essentially oriented toward immortality (i.e., perpetual happiness) and stands in essential opposition to death. Creation is love in praxis. The paradigm is procreation: it is love acting in accordance with the cosmic order and resulting in the progeny which ensure self-perpetuation or immortality. Platonic Eros grounds a unitary human teleology which directs us away from the Heraclitean flux of becoming toward the immutable sphere of Parmenidean being. The process of becoming-coming into being from non-being and passing out of being into non-being-is essentially correlated with death, nothingness, non-being. Insofar as happiness is to be the destiny of man, it requires striving toward the end of immortality, immutability, being. This schema allows

Journal

Research in Phenomenology – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 1981

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