Eros as Law

Esther Harding’s claim, developed across the-way-of-all-women and especially in its chapter on extramarital relationships, that Eros — the feminine principle of relatedness — functions in the conscious woman not as a feeling-state but as a law: a binding, unwritten morality more demanding than the conventional code it supersedes.

Harding takes the Eros/Logos polarity from Jung — Eros as “the old Greek philosophic concept of relatedness… the feminine principle, in contrast to the Logos which is the masculine principle dealing with factual knowledge and wisdom” (Harding 1970, p. 25) — and pushes it past description into ethics. The woman who undertakes a serious love relation outside of conventional marriage submits not to her own pleasure but to a discipline: “the discipline of the voluntary sacrifice of personal desires — whether for security or children or social approval — and the submission of these most human wishes to the exigencies of love and to the feeling realities based on love” (Harding 1970, p. 236).

The new morality is harder than the old, not easier. “If it allows of, indeed compels, individual interpretation appropriate to the individual case, it is binding in a way that the old was not. Under the old law many people found that they could, by observing the letter, evade its more fundamental implications, but never can a woman who has given her allegiance to the new morality avoid the utmost implication of its dictates; the outer written law has been replaced by an inner spiritual one” (Harding 1970, p. 237).

This anticipates by decades the move that edward-edinger would later name the ego-self-axis — the displacement of moral authority from collective code to inner relation — and supplies a feminine grounding for it that Edinger’s work does not develop. It is also the conceptual root of what later writers would call conscious-feminine as an ethical, not aesthetic, achievement.

Relationships

Primary sources

the-way-of-all-women (Harding 1970, Ch. 5 “Off the Beaten Track”)