Jung Writes

Eros, which would be, then, a principle of relatedness, seeing things together, gathering things together, establishing relations be-tween things-not judging things, not looking at them properly, but rather attracting or repelling them. That is Eros. You see, it has neither legs nor feet nor hands nor a head nor anything: it is a helpless thing. It is an intuitive point of view which cannot be brought down to earth. It is a bird on the wing, a pigeon on the roof; and your scientific or intellectual concept is the sparrow in the hand.

— C.G. Jung

Jung's Eros here is not the winged Cupid of valentine iconography — it is something closer to a field condition, the invisible grammar by which things find each other or flee. It cannot be made to stand still. The moment you pin it with a definition, you have the sparrow in the hand — which is a real sparrow, catchable, describable, dead to its own nature. The pigeon on the roof is not a lesser sparrow. It is what the sparrow was before you needed it to stay put.

What resists the intellectual is not irrationality but a different mode of coherence. Eros gathers without grasping; it notices kinship before it can explain kinship. The soul moves by attraction and repulsion long before it can give reasons — and the reasons, when they arrive, are usually retrospective accounts of a movement already completed. Jung's point is not that Eros should be preferred to logos, or that feeling should overthrow thinking. His point is taxonomic, and it cuts: the concept you hold in your hand is not the whole bird, and the concept-holder who thinks it is has already stopped listening to what the roof knows.


C.G. Jung·Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939·1988