Quite recently, I came out with an interesting insight after reading some information about Freudian concepts of eros and thanatos, the drive of life and drive towards death. In a broader sense of these two terms, one can consider eros not just as the drive coming from the pleasure or bliss from the flow of extatic sexual energy or life force, but rather as eros-qua-mode-of-perception. Perceiving life or spirit, it means people (or animals, plants, natural cycles), not artificial cultural things (edifices, shops, signs, ads and other distractions of human civilization). More specifically, it means, when walking on the busy street of modern city, one doesn’t see the street as being filled with some moving objects called „people“ that just create obstacles to getting myself quickly from place A to place B, but rather, one sees it as the sphere of several individual human subjects with their own lifeworld, feelings, needs, bodies, etc., co-existing in a common environment called „city“ or here more specifically, the street. The latter mode of perceiving the environment is subject-oriented, which I call eros-qua-mode-of-perception, and such perception favors life (figure) and sidelines the environment (ground), whereas the former is object-oriented, which I call thanatos-qua-mode-of-perception. Such perception mode favors the opposite (material environment as figure) and sets all the people and life as mere noise in the background, usually disturbing the order of the „perfect“, predictable and linearly learnable rules of such mechanistic „machine“ with the „imperfect“ fuzziness of emotions, desires and „irrational“ decisions (of people), or the aperatic (boundless) savagery of the rest of the living nature.
Pokračování textu Seeing objects or Seeing people