Valentine’s Day is all about romantic love, which we tend to think of as having little if anything to do with politics—it’s about a relationship between 2 people, after all. We get a very different view, though, if we consider love through the lenses of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium and in Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” These seemingly unrelated thinkers both suggest that love is a force for good in the world, rather than just a connection between 2 people. As such, love is political in the sense that it can contribute to thinking about the kind of world we all want to create together.
There are some clear ways in which romantic love can have political implications. We are living in a moment in which some elected officials are rolling back protections of various kinds for LGBTQ+ people, and in which it is still notable when a TV show, movie, or even a commercial features a gay couple as perfectly normal. In such a moment, the simple act of loving someone of the same sex, or loving anyone a (or as a) gender variant person, can be seen as a radical act, challenging dominant cultural notions of acceptable and worthy love. The hope is to create a world in which such relationships are accepted as perfectly normal and natural, overcoming the anti-LGBTQ+ forces in the country, so that romantic love can become personal again rather than political.
Even in romantic love, though, Socrates sees a connection to the good: he believes that we are attracted to another because of what we see as good in them. That goodness might be physical beauty, or it might be deeper: we might be attracted to the other’s character, their virtues, their principles, because we see these as also beautiful. We would never, he thinks, be attracted to someone if we thought they were bad in some way—cruelty or selfishness are simply unattractive. Socrates argues that romantic love based on the other’s soul is longer lasting and hence better than love based solely on physical beauty, because one’s virtues and character are stable, while bodily beauty fades with time. A broader notion of love follows from this claim. If, for instance, someone’s kindness attracts me to them, then I find kindness itself attractive, not just as it is manifest in this one person. I might then find kindness attractive wherever I find it, so that any kind person, or even an institution dedicated to kindness, becomes attractive to me. This love is not a romantic or sexual love but one that connects me to parts of myself that I want to develop and to the world itself as it might be if kindness were infused throughout all of society. Similarly with other virtues: I might find Greta Thunberg or Black Lives Matter activists attractive because their fight for climate and racial justice moves me; I find their visions of justice beautiful, which can then inspire me to take up similar work. These experiences suggest that one can indeed love ideals and principles. This kind of love strives for the good in that deeper political sense: we long for a world that itself embodies justice.
This notion of longing is also central to Socrates’ view of love. He roots longing in human nature itself: we are incomplete beings who are constantly longing for completeness. Longing makes us strivers, always looking for something outside ourselves to bring us a sense of completeness, which is itself always and necessarily temporary. We strive to bring about the good as best we can, since it is the good that makes us feel complete. Love is thus a creative force, moving us to either create ourselves in the image of those who inspire us (I want to become kind, too, or I want to become a social justice advocate), or to bring about good in the world more broadly, to alter existing social structures or forms of relation.
Socrates did not explore the potentially world-transformative aspect of this view of love; he was more interested in how individuals can improve themselves through its force. But Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde was interested in both personal empowerment and world transformation in “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” She acknowledges that she is drawing on the ancient Greek notion of eros, but she expands and extends it to consider questions of power and oppression. She makes similar distinctions to Socrates—between the narrowly sexual and the broader erotic, between mere sensation and depth of feeling (akin to Socrates’ distinction between finding bodies and souls beautiful, perhaps)—and she understands the erotic as leading to a sense of satisfaction and completion in ourselves. But she draws attention to the gendered component of the erotic in Western society: women are associated with the erotic but reduced to the lesser, sexual aspect of it, which justifies their lesser status. Her worry is that women may be inclined to repress the erotic in themselves as a way of claiming a higher status, which cuts them off from a rich source of empowerment. So how is the erotic potentially empowering?
For Lorde, empowerment resides in the sense of satisfaction and completion that Socrates takes for granted but that women, she thinks, cannot. She says that the erotic “is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.” This feeling leads us to strive for excellence, which is both about what we do and how we do it: we pursue those activities and endeavors that fulfill us, which leads to genuine joy in the pursuit. Once we have an experience of joy through satisfaction, we cannot settle for less and will demand a world in which joy is possible again and again. We each need to find what brings us joy. We won’t all find satisfaction in the same pursuits; that would be weird. But we can aim for a world in which we all have the chance to experience a deep sense of completion through our own pursuits. Lorde lists building a bookcase, writing a poem, and dancing as activities that bring her that feeling.
Individual empowerment becomes collective power when a satisfying pursuit is shared with others. That sharing becomes the basis for connection even across our differences, allowing us to pursue common goals and to understand each other in ways that might be otherwise difficult. Because we seek satisfaction together, we are less likely to accept a world in which dissatisfaction is the norm: “Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial… Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world.” With others, acting into the world to bring about change is more sustainable—I want to improve the world not just for myself but for others as well. Indeed, I can come to desire a better world for all oppressed people, for anyone who is unlikely to experience that deep feeling of satisfaction and completion that inspires both Socrates and Lorde.
This view of love suggests that any act that seeks to prevent others from finding satisfaction and completion is less than loving. Recent attempts to legislate trans people’s lives, to outlaw drag, to limit access to potentially empowering books and courses of study can all legitimately be considered acts of hate rather than love. Seeking to control others is very different from seeking to affirm one’s own desires and satisfaction, and these moves are best seen as the desire to control (all forms of love are also forms of desire, but not all desires are examples of love). These impulses are destructive rather than creative, and love for Socrates and Lorde is creative by definition and in practice.
So as we celebrate love on Valentine’s Day, let us remember all of its forms, from the romantic to the visionary!
Resources:
bell hooks, All About Love (https://www.harpercollins.com/products/all-about-love-bell-hooks?variant=41228396986402)
Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/608235/sister-outsider-by-audre-lorde/9780143134442)
Plato, Symposium (https://hackettpublishing.com/symposium)
Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (https://www.nyrb.com/products/loves-work?_pos=1&_sid=26ae32cd2&_ss=r)
For Love of the World: 