Eros and Agape
Eros and Agape
Wilber's View
Wilber gives technical, paired definitions to two terms usually left loose. Eros, following Plato/Socrates, is the love of the lower reaching up toward the higher — the motive force of Ascent, self-transcendence, the drive to find ever-wider identity and unity. Agape is the reverse: the love of the higher reaching down to embrace the lower — the motive force of Descent, care, compassion, the drive to integrate rather than merely rise above. Healthy development, on his account, requires both in sequence at every stage: one ascends via Eros and then integrates via Agape, so that growth is always "transcend and include" — negation and preservation together — rather than transcendence alone. This is the psychodynamic engine behind the holonic capacity for self-transcendence described in holons (tenet 2c), and it's this pairing, not Ascent/Descent as bare directions, that Wilber uses to diagnose failure modes of development.
When the pairing breaks down, he names the pathologies precisely. Phobos is Eros without Agape: transcendence that doesn't embrace what it rises above, but flees and represses it out of fear of contamination — "rancid transcendence." Thanatos is Agape without Eros: descent that doesn't just embrace the lower but regresses into it, getting stuck rather than integrating — "reductionism run amok." He reads Freud's own final dualism of Eros and the death instinct as a real but incomplete glimpse of this same axis: Freud saw both forces clearly but, lacking a developmental Ascent all the way to a nondual ground, had no way to reconcile them.
In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
"Eros is the love of the lower reaching up to the higher (Ascent); Agape is the love of the higher reaching down to the lower (Descent)."
In this general conception (which is how I will use the terms from now on), Eros is the love of the lower reaching up to the higher (Ascent); Agape is the love of the higher reaching down to the lower (Descent). In individual development, one ascends via Eros (or expanding to a higher and wider identity), and then integrates via Agape (or reaching down to embrace with care all lower holons), so that balanced development transcends but includes—it is negation and preservation, ascent and descent, Eros and Agape.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 9, "The Way Up Is the Way Down"
"Phobos is Eros without Agape (transcendence without embrace, negation without preservation)."
Unintegrated Eros does not just reach up to the higher levels and transcend the lower; it alienates the lower, represses the lower… and does so out of fear (Phobos), fear that the lower will "drag it down"… Phobos is Eros in flight from the lower instead of embracing the lower. Phobos is Ascent divorced from Descent… Or, to say the same thing, Phobos is Eros without Agape (transcendence without embrace, negation without preservation).
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 9, "The Way Up Is the Way Down"
"Thanatos is Agape without Eros."
Thanatos, on the other hand, is Descent divorced from Ascent. It is the lower in flight from the higher, compassion gone mad: not just embracing the lower but regressing to the lower, not just caressing but remaining stuck in it (fixation, arrest)—cosmic reductionism run amok… Thanatos is Agape in flight from the higher instead of expressing the higher. It preserves the lower but refuses to negate it… In other words, Thanatos is Agape without Eros.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 9, "The Way Up Is the Way Down"
"The two together make a vast circle of love through the universe."
Not only the ascending love of the lower for the higher, Plato's Eros, but also a love of the higher which expressed itself in care for the lower, which could easily be identified with Christian Agape. The two together make a vast circle of love through the universe.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 9, "The Way Up Is the Way Down"
See Also
- ascent-and-descent — the wisdom/compassion axis Eros and Agape supply the motive force for
- holons — self-transcendence (tenet 2c), the capacity Eros names dynamically
- wilber-on-plato — the source of the Eros/Ascent reading Wilber builds on
- involution-and-evolution — the Kosmic-scale version of the same Ascent/Descent pairing
