Rethinking Eros: From Force to Symbolic Cause
A metatheoretical exploration of Eros—not as energy, but as symbolic architecture shaping meaning and emergence.
🪶 Whispers of Eros
I followed a path that called me near—
Not with a push, but a voice unclear.
No force, no chain, no law, no shove—
Just the shape of the things we love.
A curve that formed beneath my stride—
Unfolding just as I arrived.
📬 What if evolution isn’t driven by force—but by meaning itself?
This essay reconsiders an ancient idea—Eros—not as a metaphysical push, but as a symbolic shape we live into. It builds a bridge between process philosophy, developmental theory, and Integral Metatheory.
❓The Question
Eros is one of the most ancient and slippery ideas in the Western tradition.
In Greek mythology, Eros was the god of desire—sometimes a mischievous boy, sometimes a primal cosmic force. For Plato, Eros was the soul’s yearning to ascend toward the Good, beginning in bodily desire and culminating in the contemplation of eternal Forms. For Freud, Eros became the life instinct—driving union, creativity, and vitality. And in contemporary developmental and spiritual models, Eros often serves as shorthand for the force behind evolution itself: what draws atoms into molecules, cells into organisms, and minds into meaning.
Across these interpretations, Eros names something deeper than biological sex or romantic passion. It refers to a pattern of attraction—a movement toward integration, depth, and coherence.
But what kind of “pull” is this?
Is Eros a force like gravity or electromagnetism? Some subtle cosmic energy? Or is it something else?
This essay explores a different hypothesis:
Eros isn’t a force. It’s a symbolic cause.
Not something that pushes or pulls us, but something that frames the very space in which emergence becomes intelligible. Like music following a key, or a story unfolding from a premise, Eros doesn’t compel. It conditions.
It is, in short, a symbolic cause—a structure that shapes what development can become.
🌀 The Core Thesis
We typically think of causes as forces—things that make other things happen through impact or pressure. But not all causes work this way. Some don’t push or pull at all. Instead, they shape the field within which meaningful action becomes possible. These are symbolic causes.
A symbolic cause is not a physical force that directly acts on matter. It is a real, patterned structure—an architecture of meaning—that frames what kinds of development, coherence, or transformation can arise.
While the notion of symbolic cause may resemble Aristotle’s formal cause—the blueprint or essential structure that defines a thing—it differs in key ways. A formal cause explains what a thing is by reference to its defining form or essence (e.g., the shape of a statue or the design of a chair). A symbolic cause, by contrast, does not define what a thing is, but frames what can become intelligible or meaningful within a system. It operates less as a blueprint and more as a semantic field—shaping how emergence, coherence, and development are interpreted rather than instantiated. Symbolic causes are enacted within living or interpretive systems, not imposed from outside. They belong to the realm of intelligibility and invitation, not imposition or design.
Like the syntax of a language or the rules of a game, a symbolic cause doesn’t dictate outcomes but conditions the field of possibility. It guides how systems interpret, respond, and evolve—not through energy, but through intelligibility.
What do I mean by intelligibility?
In this essay, intelligibility refers not to what causes development, but to a system’s capacity to perceive, organize, and participate in meaningful transformation. It is how symbolic causes—like Eros—are taken up and enacted within a particular context.
Specifically:
Symbolic Framing of Reality
Intelligibility names the way meaning becomes structured. It’s not the structure itself (that’s the symbolic cause), but the system’s ability to recognize and respond to it.Field of Possibility
Symbolic causes condition what’s possible. Intelligibility marks what a system can actually see, sense, or interpret as a meaningful potential.Participatory Structure
Intelligibility is enacted. It arises through the relational encounter between a symbolic field and the interpreting subject—through interaction, reflection, and embodiment.Nested and Recursive
At higher orders, intelligibility loops back: systems not only interpret symbols but also reinterpret their own interpretive frameworks. This recursive capacity brings us to the metasymbolic—the symbolic patterns that shape how symbolic meaning itself unfolds.
This brings us to Eros.
In this view, Eros is not a metaphysical force or cosmic energy. It is a symbolic cause. Not something that acts upon systems from the outside, but a patterned architecture that orients them from within. It does not make things grow—it shapes the way growth becomes meaningful.
Just as grammar doesn’t tell you what to say but structures what can be said, Eros is the symbolic cause that patterns development: the shape of longing, coherence, and becoming.
It conditions what counts as growth.
It shapes the paths by which complexity increases.
It orients systems toward coherence—not by pressure, but by framing what it means to evolve.
Eros is not a force behind development.
It is the form that development follows when meaning deepens.
Symbolic causes (such as Eros) can be understood as attractors—not in a mechanistic sense, but in a symbolic one. They do not impose outcomes but define the basin of meaning into which systems tend to settle. Just as an attractor in complexity theory describes a region toward which dynamics gravitate, symbolic causes describe the semantic and developmental configurations that systems find intelligible, desirable, and viable.
💾 The Computer Program Analogy
To make this architecture of meaning more tangible, we can turn to a familiar metaphor from digital life—a computer program.
The program is written in code—abstract symbols arranged in logical structures. When the program is run, the machine displays outputs, performs actions, and manipulates data. But crucially, the code doesn’t push electrons around. The hardware—the physical circuitry—does that. What the code does is define a structure: it establishes what the system is capable of doing, not by exerting energy, but by shaping possible paths. The power of the code lies not in force, but in form. It doesn’t cause action directly; it enables and constrains action by shaping a meaningful field of potential.
This is the nature of symbolic causation. The code doesn’t compel the machine; it frames the logic the machine can interpret. In cognitive science, this logic is described in terms of affordances—the actionable possibilities a structure offers to an agent. The program doesn’t force behavior; it offers a space of intelligible responses, making certain actions viable, relevant, or meaningful.
Likewise, we don’t live like scripted automata, but we do inhabit symbolic architectures—language, law, myth, instinct, ritual. These don’t act on us mechanically. They shape the space of meaning within which behaviors and transformations become possible. Eros, then, functions like a symbolic cause—not a force acting upon the world, but a patterned structure that shapes how intelligibility, coherence, and emergence unfold. Its effects arise not through pressure, but through patterned invitation—by shaping the range of paths that systems can meaningfully enact.
And crucially, the whole symbolic structure—what I’m calling the architecture of unfolding—exists at a deeper level than any individual’s awareness.
This is where a layered ontology becomes useful. Philosopher Roy Bhaskar’s model helps explain how symbolic causes like Eros can be real even when not directly observable—operating as part of the deep structure of intelligibility:
Empirical: What a given organism can observe.
Actual: What happens, whether or not observed.
Real: The structures that generate and shape what happens.
Eros belongs to the real. It is a symbolic architecture embedded in reality itself. We only glimpse fragments. But the pattern is real—and when followed, we see the emergence of beauty, integration, and meaningful complexity.
These ideas don’t just live in abstract philosophy—they also reframe how we understand existing developmental models, including Integral Theory.
🧭 Implications for Integral Theory
Integral Theory, developed by Ken Wilber, is a comprehensive metatheoretical framework that seeks to integrate insights from science, spirituality, psychology, and culture into a unified vision of reality and development. One of its central claims is that evolution—whether of matter, life, mind, or spirit—is not random, but directional. Reality, in Wilber’s view, unfolds along recognizable trajectories toward increasing complexity, depth, and integration.
In The Religion of Tomorrow (2017), Wilber introduces the metaphor of a “morphogenetic gradient”—a kind of inherent tilt in the fabric of the Kosmos. This gradient is described as a universal developmental attractor, a shared path along which various lines of development (e.g., cognitive, moral, spiritual lines of growth) tend to move. He identifies this gradient with Eros, describing it as:
“…the same great morphogenetic developmental gradient... that drives development and evolution itself (that is, Eros)... a ‘tilt’ that Integral Metatheory formally calls ‘altitude.’”
—Wilber, The Religion of Tomorrow, 2017, p. 348
This language can easily be interpreted metaphysically—as though Eros were a literal force or cosmic energy pushing evolution forward. But it need not be read this way.
Indeed, a more charitable—and perhaps more philosophically consistent—interpretation is possible: Wilber’s “tilt” need not imply a metaphysical energy. It can be understood instead as a symbolic cause—a structure in the space of possible development that orients systems toward emergent coherence.
Just as a ball rolls down a tilted plane not because the plane exerts a force, but because of the affordance created by the angle, so too can developmental systems move along this gradient—not by being pushed, but by responding to the affordances of intelligibility, coherence, and meaning.
🛠 Refining the Integral View
Reframing Eros not as a metaphysical force but as a symbolic cause—a patterned field of affordance—brings several clarifications and enhancements to Integral Metatheory:
Preserves Wilber’s directional insight without invoking speculative metaphysics;
Strengthens compatibility with critical realism (Bhaskar), semiotic process philosophy (Peirce), and Whiteheadian cosmology;
Clarifies the nature of Eros: not as energy acting upon systems, but as intelligible orientation enacted within them;
Affirms Integral’s developmental trajectory, while refining its language to better reflect its status as a symbolic and epistemological model of coherence, not a causal cosmology.
This reinterpretation aligns Integral Theory with a more rigorous philosophical framework, offering a way to preserve its spiritual intuitions without overextending its metaphysical claims. Eros, then, becomes the deep pattern of intelligibility that systems enact as they grow—not a push from behind, but a shape they learn to inhabit.
📚 The Philosophical Backup
To ground this symbolic view of Eros in philosophical tradition, this interpretation draws on three major thinkers:
Roy Bhaskar's critical realism reminds us that causation isn’t always observable. There are real generative mechanisms that operate beneath the surface. Eros, as a symbolic cause, fits this model: real, but not always empirically accessible.
Charles Sanders Peirce, as interpreted by James J. Liszka (1996), distinguishes symbols from other kinds of signs. A symbol is a sign whose meaning is governed by convention or habit. Eros functions like a symbolic law—not as resemblance (icon) or reaction (index), but as a rule that governs unfolding meaning over time.
Alfred North Whitehead, in Process and Reality (1978), introduces the idea of eternal objects—patterns that condition what can become. These are not forces, but lures: possibilities that shape actual occasions of experience. Eros, in this view, is not a force in time but a form in potential.
🧩 Conclusion: From Force to Form
The question we’ve explored—what if Eros is not a force, but a symbolic cause?—is not just semantic. It reshapes how we understand growth, agency, and the architecture of meaning itself.
If Eros is real—not as energy, but as an intelligible structure—an architecture of unfolding—then evolution isn’t something driven from outside or above. It’s something interpreted into coherence from within. The pattern was never imposed; it was already woven into the symbolic affordances of the Kosmos, waiting to be enacted.
This doesn’t diminish the mystery. It deepens it.
It means that what lures us forward—what draws life toward complexity, mind toward meaning, soul toward spirit—is not a hidden hand pulling strings, but a patterned invitation. Eros, as a symbolic cause, functions both as an attractor and an affordance—drawing systems toward intelligibility, while simultaneously shaping what possibilities are available for emergence. This invitation is not imposed. It is interpreted—misread, rewritten, and enacted through participation.
Integral Theory, and developmental metatheory more broadly, may have more to gain by thinking in these terms: not just mapping stages, but exploring the symbolic landscape through which emergence occurs. The laws of becoming may be less like physics and more like poetry: recursive, formal, and open-ended—a logic of longing we learn as we live it.
Let’s now broaden the lens: if symbolic causes like Eros operate in the real, what deeper symbolic architectures make them possible?
🧩 Metasymbolics and Real Patterns
In my developing framework of metasymbolics, symbols are not merely signs or subjective associations—they are structural conditions of intelligibility. At the most basic level, symbolic causes operate as real patterns that shape the emergence of coherence, meaning, and transformation within systems. Eros, understood in this way, is a symbolic cause: not a force, but a structure that frames what kinds of integration and growth are possible.
Symbolic causes operate within what philosopher Roy Bhaskar calls the real—the generative layer of causation that shapes what happens (the actual), regardless of whether it is perceived (the empirical). These symbolic structures do not act directly; rather, they condition the affordances of emergence. They are real not in the sense of material force, but as deep orientations that shape intelligibility itself.
However, not all symbolic causes are alike. Some are situated, local to a culture, language, or cognitive structure. Others seem to reflect higher-order structures—patterns that organize symbolic meaning across domains, and even govern how symbolic causes themselves come to operate. This is where the metasymbolic comes into view.
The metasymbolic refers to symbolic structures that are about symbolic systems themselves. They shape the intelligibility of intelligibility: the background patterns that allow symbolic causes to arise, take shape, and propagate across time and culture. They are still real in Bhaskar’s sense—but they operate at a higher level of abstraction. They are not just the symbolic causes we enact, but the symbolic architectures that structure how symbolic causation is possible at all.
So while symbolic cause is the more precise term for specific patterns like Eros, the metasymbolic refers to the wider class of generative symbolic conditions that transcend any particular enactment or interpretation. These metasymbolic structures cannot be fully grasped by any single organism or worldview. They are modeled, not observed—just as the grammar of a language can be intuited through usage long before it is formally described.
Think of archetypal motifs like the Hero’s Journey, the mandala, or sacred geometry—not merely symbols, but recurring architectures that shape how meaning unfolds across epochs and cultures. These are instances of the metasymbolic: not tied to one context, but echoing across traditions as generative forms of intelligibility.
These are not metaphysical absolutes. They are formal invitations—real but underdetermined patterns that shape how emergence occurs in complex systems.
And Eros, as a symbolic cause, is among the most generative of these invitations toward integration.
🌒 The Lure Beneath Your Feet
It wasn’t hands that pulled you near,
Nor voices whispering loud and clear.
No force that shoved, no chain, no thread—
Just shapes that shimmered just ahead.
A curve appeared—a quiet line,
A symbol buried in design.
You stepped because the path seemed true,
Not pushed, but pulled by something—
you.
Not power, law, or some command—
But meaning rising from the land.
A pattern deeper than you guessed,
A call to grow, to strive, to rest.
So now you stand, not driven blind,
But shaped by longing redefined:
Not what you feared or tried to flee—
But what you’re slowly meant to be.
✍️ Authorship Note
This post was authored by Joseph Camosy with extensive AI assistance under the author’s creative direction.
Estimated authorship breakdown:
Human author (core thesis, structure, philosophical critique, analogies, revisions): ~75%
AI support (stylistic enhancement, formatting, citation assistance, and generation of original poems): ~25%
All conceptual claims and interpretive frameworks reflect the author’s original thought. The poems were composed by the AI as creative contributions under human guidance. All images were generated with AI under the author's creative direction, using custom prompts designed to align symbolically with the article's themes.