Love and eroticism

The argument

Eroticism concerns the aesthetics of love, the qualities that cause sexual desire. The claim made here is that these are not an optional accompaniment to love but central to its experience and its construction alike, which is why the argument puts its challenge as a question: what is true, authentic love without accompanying desire? Asking it that way is pointed, because the alternatives are difficult to describe without renaming them. Affection without desire is friendship, or kinship — both valuable, and neither one mistaken for being in love. Whatever separates romantic love from those relations, desire is doing that work, so an account of love that treats desire as inessential has removed the very thing that distinguishes what it set out to explain. Eroticism, so understood, is more than appetite. Being the pursuit of transcendent aesthetic pleasure, "eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest... eroticism is assenting to life even in death". The distinction drawn there is between an act and an orientation: simple sexual activity is something a body does, whereas eroticism is a direction the whole person takes, reaching for something beyond itself. That is why it can be described as assent to life — it is the form desire takes when it is bound up with meaning rather than with release. That is also what makes love a verb rather than a condition one occupies. A psychological quest is something undertaken and sustained, not something fallen into and then possessed. Love is therefore not authentic without accompanying desire and sensuality. Eroticism is the most pivotal part of the human experience of love, and a central part of understanding love as a whole — not one ingredient among several, but the element the rest is organised around.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that eroticism cannot be the core of love, because deep and genuine love plainly exists without sexual desire: the love between parent and child, between close friends, and in long companionate marriages where desire has faded is not thereby inauthentic. Equating authentic love with accompanying eroticism collapses love into romantic-sexual attraction and excludes the many forms of love the concept is meant to cover. Eroticism is at most central to one kind of love, not to love as such — and its being enacted through pursuit does nothing to show that love in general is a verb.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Granting that eroticism is a distinct aesthetic pursuit, it does not follow that it is essential to love, since many undisputed loves involve no eroticism at all. [Rejecting P2] The claim that love is 'not authentic without desire' is contradicted by parental, familial and companionate love, which are authentic yet non-erotic. [Rejecting P3] That eroticism is enacted through pursuit does not show love in general is a verb rather than a felt state. [Rejecting C] Eroticism being central to romantic desire does not make it central to love as a whole, so the conclusion overgeneralizes from one species of love.