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If it be your will
that I speak no more
and my voice be still
as it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
Absolute love defies objectification and cannot so much be disclosed as be revealed. This reflection adds one more voice to an ongoing symposium on the theme of love, which John Tavares (2024) skillfully revives by integrating Plato's classic philosophical text with some of the challenges of contemporary psychoanalytic practice. While Tavares admits that we can never really get a full handle on a topic with such breadth, one is led to wonder if it's all we ever really speak of, sing about, and wage wars over. In the end, Tavares shows how love remains both a necessary analytic theme and one that can be further developed. Regarding lexical translation, I will use the words “love” and “eros” somewhat interchangeably, even if the former signifies the sentiment and phenomena, and the latter came to be the way Freud described the sexual drive. The Greek and Latin etymology of eros is simply “love.”
Returning to the opening assertion that disclosure and revelation are different phenomena, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, 2013), the verb “to disclose” is defined as that which allows (new information; or something hidden or secret) to be seen. It implies that there is already
something objective and present which might then be uncovered and shown. It is based on the Latin claudere, “to close,” and with dis as its prefix, it means to negate closure of something. In everyday discourse, its definition tends to be used in the narrow transitive sense of opening one's eyes to see what already exists.
The verb “to reveal” (OED, 2010) can also be defined as that which makes known what was previously unknown. This transitive use is very similar to that of disclosure, which is the reason why each tends to be the other's closest synonym. On the other hand, “to reveal” can also designate much more broadly.