**5. Can Eros survive?**

'Eros' is not consensually understood. In at least some readings, Plato is said to have endowed Eros with a non-erotic character; this idea is still with us in the notation of a 'platonic friendship.' In eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, Eros was about romance; this idealization of dyadic union is still with us too. In most recent theoretical accounts, Eros is distinguished from what Freud termed libido, from an erotic definition. Differentiating matters further, Jung considered Eros a 'feminine principle' and contrasted this energy with logos, the 'masculine principle.' Taking Eros into a different register, Marcuse stated in *Eros and Civilization* that '(t)oday the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the *political* fight' [5]. On even the most basic plane of interpretation it is clear Eros can have different faces.

A working sense of Eros can be convened if three themes are clustered: life force; will to live; the desire for wholeness – for psychic relatedness. This clustering allows the question to be asked: can the life force, the will to live and the desire for wholeness survive the cart-wheeling impacts of climate collapse?

In one scenario, there is hope. In this scenario, if we can hold against emotional contagion there will continue to be a viable space for the life force, the will to live and the desire for wholeness. This 'holding against' stance is not the same as denying, or raging at, the tumult; nor is it about bowing down and surrendering. It involves the 'emotional literacy' [19] to name, and look directly at, fear and loss, guilt and anger, in order to make the place for what is positive and unwritten, for what is bright and fruitful.

In this approach loss needs to be honored. It will be ongoing, progressive and profound. Collective rituals of grieving, of propitiation, of gratitude, are part of a loving relationship with the earth as our mother. Although it will long remain unclear how much we have lost, mourning cannot be permanently deferred by putting this distressing emotion into an 'in-abeyance' status [20].

In this formulation psychic wholeness is not only about the integration of divergent intra-psychic energies. What profound wholeness requires is that the anthropogenic world view is de-centered. That is, psychic relatedness is a holistic aspiration linked to the motif of eco-feminism [13] more than the narrower images of Eros put forward by Plato, Freud, Marcuse and, in a somewhat differing way, to Jung. In this sense, the 'will to live' is re-formulated as the will to holistically connect and be at-one.

In the other scenario there is only a scant hope for Eros. In this misogynist worldview we will continue to beat our mother – to befoul, to strip mine, to vandalize. Disavowed programs of revenge, along with spontaneously erupting individual acts of revenge, will be enacted against mother earth because we are angry that she is wounded *and* that she will not continue to allow us to hurt her without sanction. This is not about the will to live but it's opposite [16]. Misogyny cannot understand that everything that lives exists interdependently. Nothing stands, or falls, on its own.

Eros' existential condition is relationality, as is yours and mine. The us and the we, if the understanding goes beyond the anthropogenic, are part of, not separate to, a

larger ecology. Adonis may have a seasonal lifecycle, a rhythm that climate collapse has disrupted, but he, like all beings, has a life that is in-relation. The grand seasonal tides may be disturbed but, however tragic this is, there will remain a larger living matrix.
