But because he did not see the true boundaries of logical reason, whose miraculous powers he had discovered, boundaries which it would take millenia to determine with certainty, he was led by this discovery to an intoxication unparalleled in the history of philosophy. Around the Apollonian clarity of cool thought danced the Dionysian joy of this unprecedented victory of the soul in becoming conscious of attaining the essence of things with its conceptual thinking. The birth of scientific thought, which was destined to suppress so much of religion, was greeted with religious consecration. The rational interpretation of love released a supra-rational enthusiasm which to us seems to radiate only from love itself—just because we honor it as a primordial phenomenon. That the most subjective and individual of all passions is led in the direction of rational-metaphysical meaning and that this meaning could be fully enthroned only by overcoming such a huge tension—therein lies the meaning of Eros for Plato's world view.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 585