ABSTRACT
Eros Under Suspicion The ‘death of God’ as we have decoded it signifies the repudiating loss of the ‘ontic logos’ (Charles Taylor’s term),1 which gave the pre-twentieth-century psyche its confidently assumed hold upon the world. Eros ceases to be able to count on its pre known or intuited correspondence with the being of things. The nineteenth century had believed ‘transcendentally’ in Eros - and suffered in consequence transcending traumas of disenchantment. Twentieth-century rebeginnings start at the other end - - ‘from below’, often in a spirit of vengeful demystification. Deprived of an objective correlate in the non-self, and finding no sanction in any purposive ordering of things, the promise of metaphysical transcendence previously intuited through love, and posited as a basis for love, slips away. The arrow of infinite longing then turns back upon itself in reactive - and often hyperbolic - self-suspicion.
