Both rational thought and erotic desire negate established reality in classical philosophy

Evidence

This discovery is the work of Logos and Eros. The two key terms designate two modes of negation; erotic as well as logical cognition break the hold of the established, contingent reality and strive for a truth incompatible with it. Logos and Eros are subjective and objective in one. The ascent from the “lower” to the “higher” forms of reality is movement of matter as well as mind. According to Aristotle, the perfect reality, the god, attracts the world below ; he is the final cause of all being. Logos and Eros are in themselves the unity of the positive and the negative, creation and destruction. In the exigencies of thought and in the madness of love is the destructive refusal of the established ways of life. Truth transforms the modes of thought and existence. Reason and Freedom converge. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 498

Categorization

• XREF: The pairing of Logos and Eros as twin modes of negation is precisely what Marcuse will later drop into his famous one-dimensionality diagnosis — and it feeds directly into the reader’s interest in how desire itself gets co-opted by consumer culture. — connects to: Desire radically alters both the body’s lived being and the correlated world — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 980

Broader Connections

• Desire radically alters both the body’s lived being and the correlated world #expands (0.76) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 980