Love thou thy dream
All base love scorning,
Love thou the wind
And here take warning
That dreams alone can truly be,
For ’tis in dream I come to thee.
Ezra Pound, Song
Eros is a form of fate; therefore, it is essentially tragic—even when it thrives in plenitude. Its tragic condition lies in harboring a contradiction: it is a call to perpetuate being-with-the-other as a fundamental attunement in the ephemerality of time, and at once a call to eternize a communion between two beings who exist essentially on their own, in unamendable ontological separateness. The consummation of eros is the consummation of a radical impossibility: the becoming-other—in and for the other—of the lover, while preserving their selfhood—in and for themselves—anchored in substantial self-consciousness. Eros calls for a becoming that is self-centered alterity: a substance mediated in being-with, yet recovered in the most singular individuality. The tragic essence of eros lies in its peculiar impossibility within the order of worldly facticity. Its only possibility resides in the transcendence of that facticity—whether through the sterilized contemplation of the Idea of the Good, as Plato proposes, or through the realm of oneiric imagination, whose essence is representation: the imago amoris, as Pound suggests. Eros is fate—and thus a summons to freedom and mystery. Yet our epoch despises freedom for being absolute, and therefore beyond instrumental control, just as it despises mystery as the factual limit of its epistemological greed.
Modern scientific rationality has become the surgeon of the spirit, cutting it open with the cold scalpel of analysis, measuring only what is already dead. It seeks to capture the essence of human existence with tools forged for dissection, not for understanding. But the living, breathing reality of eros is not a cadaver to be studied; it is a blazing, uncontainable force, an Ereignis —a foundational event in which the meaning of Being itself discloses. In Heidegger’s thought, Ereignis is not just any event, but the coming-to-presence of Being itself, the moment in which what truly ‘is’ comes into its own. It is the opening of a clearing (Lichtung) where beings can appear as they truly are, where the essence of existence reveals itself without distortion. This is not a neutral happening but an intense, transformative occurrence that grants significance, allowing what was concealed to become manifest. In this sense, eros is an Ereignis because it shatters the everydayness of being, exposing us to the raw truth of our existence as beings-toward-death, as beings who find themselves in the ecstatic openness of being-with others.
The true challenge is not epistemological or psychological but ontological. It is to remain, in the presence of love, as the “shepherd of Being,” as Heidegger might say, when an-other appears in the paradox of being both a wholeness of being-with and care, and at the same time a thrownness toward death through time. This means allowing the other to reveal themselves as a radiant, extraordinary Ereignis, without reducing them to a mere object or psychological projection. It demands a vigilant openness to the clearing where the other shines forth, without attempting to possess or fix them in time, for such grasping obscures the very essence of Ereignis and betrays the radical freedom that love demands. We are drawn to “engender in beauty,” as Plato puts it, to create and leave traces of our being in the presence of the beloved. Yet, in this drive to possess, to fix the fleeting moment of encounter, to rip time off its power to take away, we risk obscuring the clearing and reifying the beloved, reducing them to a mere object, a shadow of their true, radiant presence. In doing so, we betray the very essence of Ereignis, which demands the preservation of an-other’s irreducible, uncontainable otherness, their unique unfolding in the world.
This ontological understanding of eros finds a powerful, though ultimately limited, precursor in Plato’s philosophy. In his dialogues, particularly the Symposium and the Phaedrus, Plato captures the transcendental dimension of eros as a force that propels the soul beyond mere physical desire toward the eternal, formless Idea of the Good. For Plato, eros is a divine madness, a divine force that drives the soul toward the ultimate truth, awakening the deepest potential for self-transcendence. Yet, in the end, Plato reduces this fiery event to a mere stepping stone toward an abstract, formless ideal, stripping the beloved of their concrete, radiant presence. While it is commendable that Plato recognized the ontological and transcendental nature of eros, he failed to grasp the full depth of the encounter with the other as an Ereignis: a moment in which the fullness of the other is not merely a symbol or shadow, but the very manifestation of Being itself.
Eros is not merely a biological impulse, nor a psychological projection of unmet desires. It is a fundamental event—an Ereignis—through which the meaning of Being itself is disclosed. In this event, the lover finds themselves thrown into the most fundamental mode of existence: being-with. The beloved becomes a dwelling for the lover, a site where meaning is unconcealed, where the very essence of existence shines forth in all its raw, unrepeatable singularity.
To the lover, the other does not appear as a mere object of fantasy or a figment of sublimated desires, but as a magnificent, beautiful, wonderful, and extraordinary presence. This is not a trick of the mind, nor a fairy-tale projection, but a true encounter with the fullness of the other’s way of being. In this encounter, the beloved is an Ereignis themselves, a revelation of the mystery and majesty of existence in its purest form. They appear as they truly are: radiant, extraordinary, fully present, while also remaining hidden in themselves as possibility and impermanence.
Leonard Cohen’s song “Alexandra Leaving” captures this revelation with remarkable clarity, drawing inspiration from Kavafis’ poem “The God Abandons Antony.” In both works, eros emerges not as a mere emotional reaction but as a radical being-in, a call to authenticity before the abyss of time and mortality. To truly love is to face the fundamental truth of being-toward-death — to embrace the other not as an object to be possessed but as a unique presence that calls forth our own potential for authentic existence. Thus, eros becomes resoluteness and self-attestation.
This is precisely what makes “Alexandra Leaving” and “The God Abandons Antony” so relevant for understanding the singularity of eros. Both works capture the tragic, fleeting nature of love as a radical being-in, a call to authenticity that cannot be reduced to psychological categories or rationalized into comforting myths. In these texts, eros is not merely a feeling or an attachment but an Ereignis, a singular event of ontological unconcealment in which the fullness of the other is revealed.
In Cohen’s lyrics, the beloved’s departure is not just a personal loss but an ontological crisis, a moment when the clearing in which the other once stood begins to close, and the radiant presence of the beloved slips into absence. This is not the loss of a psychological projection but the shattering of a world, the loss of a presence that once gave meaning to the lover’s being. Similarly, Kavafis captures the pathos of such a moment in “The God Abandons Antony”, where the great warrior faces the retreat of his divine protector, his very sense of being slipping into the shadow of what once shone so brightly. And all this tragedy represented in the loss of the city, Alexandria.
Both Cohen and Kavafis, in their own ways, capture the tragic dimension of Ereignis—the moment when the beloved, in all their singularity, slips back into the mystery from which they first emerged, leaving the lover standing alone in the clearing, exposed to the raw truth of their own being-toward-death. This singularity of eros, as a way of being-with that can never be fully understood or contained, resists all attempts at reduction. It is an opening, a moment of pure presence, in which the beloved appears as they truly are: magnificent, ungraspable, and utterly unique.
Love, then, is a call to authenticity, a demand to stand outside the leveling force of the They, to break free from the anonymous, everyday mode of existence that reduces beings to mere functional entities. To love authentically is to be as detached from the generalizing power of the They as possible, to resist the temptation to reify the beloved into a manageable, predictable presence. It means to live through the experience of anxiety, not as a pathological state, but as the purest way of preserving and honoring another’s presence, a vigilance that keeps the clearing open and free from the oppressive weight of idle talk and conventional explanations.
In the ontological preserving of another lies the essence of care and being-with within the experience of love. Authenticity in love requires that we avoid rationalizing explanations and instead accept the beloved as they are, in their facticity, as biōma, ie., the lived, uncontrollable unfolding of being-in-the-world. To reduce the experience of loved to a set of psychological categories or phenomena, or to try to explain away their singularity as a way of escaping the overwhelming experience of thrownness into an-other’s world as dominant circumstance of “being oneself,” is what Cohen calls cowardice in his lyrics. Yet this is more than just cowardice: it is a dwelling in the oblivion of Being, a refusal to be the incarnate presence that preserves and affirms an-other, even as it is itself thrown into time and being-toward-death, therefore totally beyond our possession or controlling as formal structures of being-with. It is an evasion of the foremost calling of love: a self-sacrificial preserving of an-other’s Being.
This is not a mere “romantic” notion of love. In fact, the essence of romantic love often contradicts this radical freedom, for it demands possession, reciprocity, and the constant reassurance of mutual affection. It conditions self-sacrifice either on the reward of the beloved or on the impossibility of living without that reward, reducing love to a possessive transaction. Authentic love, by contrast, is an Ereignis, an experience of alētheia, of the unconcealment of truth as the meaning of Being. Its fundamental condition is freedom, for only what dwells in the open, as a peaceful clearing, can reveal the deeper truths of existence. In this sense, the essence of authentic love is not a contract, a mutual exchange of needs, but a radical encounter with the unconcealed, with the uncontrollable self-disclosing of Being itself.
Yet, while this radical freedom is essential to the understanding of eros, it should not be confused with the mystic, universal interpretation of love that loses sight of the moment of radical singularity. What reveals in eros is always a concrete being, a palpable existence, not something merely “ready-to-hand,” but a call to authenticity and truthfulness. There is, without a doubt, a universal love as agapē, which is not essentially at odds with eros, but eros is not the alienated pre-essence of agapē, as Plato and the Neo-Platonic mystic tradition would have it. Eros is not a mere shadow of some formless, eternal principle; it is an imperative to restore and reclaim the haeccitas of Dasein as pure individuality or mineness (Jemeinigkeit), ie., the thisness, the unique presence of an-other that ontologizes—being himself and revealing to himself as being ek-zistenz in a world—of their own and unexchangeable circumstance.
This is poignantly illustrated in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, where Prince Myshkin finds himself in love with two women, Aglaya and Nastasya, yet he must love them in their unique alētheia, in their ownmost way of being. They are not mere objects of his affection, but singular worlds, each a distinct clearing where Being discloses itself, revealing the concrete possibilities of Dasein in its worldliness. To fail to see them in this light would be to obscure their unique presencing, to reduce them to mere psychological projections, and to betray the essence of authentic love as an encounter with the irreducible, radiant presence of another being. In this sense, love is never merely an effect of the presence of the other, but a co-revelation in the presence of an-other.
This reclaiming is not only necessary because Being clears at all through eros, but because through eros, Being clears in the presence of another free singularity, which we are called to preserve in the being-with of care as a manifestation of meaning. This is the radical challenge of love: to dwell in the presence of an-other without reducing them to a concept, a projection, or an ideal, but preserving his haeccitas—his irreducible, singular being—as an unfolding event of truth.
Modern psychology, with its talk of sublimation, repression, and rationalization, has obscured this sacred dimension, reducing eros to a set of mechanical processes, alienated and deferred psychological complexities—essentially reconstructed memories and biology ornamented with spirit—or simply chemical impulses. It fails to grasp the deeper reality that Being is always already a being-with, a reaching out toward the other that transcends mere biological survival or social convenience. In the act of loving, what is revealed is not just the beloved, but being itself in all its fullness: presence, absence, no-thingness, timeliness, and mortality.
To reclaim eros, we must return to the tragic and the poetic, the only modes of expression capable of capturing this elemental disclosure. Tragedy and poetry alone can bear witness to the violent, uncontainable nature of love as the clearing (Lichtung) in which Being manifests, where the haeccitas of the other reveals itself without reserve in its most radical complexity and singularity. In this clearing, we encounter not just another being, but the very ground of existence itself—the primordial, ontological freedom that science can never fully comprehend, for it sees only the surface, never the depths.
In this sense, authentic love, as self-sacrifice and preserving, is a saving power in the dangerous world of calculating thought and the alienating generalizations of “the They.” Yet this saving power can save only in the clearing of freedom. Only freedom preserves the being of the other—and the being of the self—in their physis. Eros without freedom means suffocating the very presence one seeks to preserve. And being free is to dwell in the meeting point of endangering and saving. Transcendental paradox. As it is written, “… whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”
