Eros as Metaxy

james-hillman reads Eros not primarily as appetite or as cosmic principle but as metaxy — as the in-between, the inserted interval. The decisive passage: “Eros, as intermediary, creates his own psychic space, his own world between, by a peculiar sort of psychic interference or intervention… which interrupts, redirects, symbolizes behavior, sometimes in the midst of its sequence or even before the pattern is released. Time intervenes between impulse and action. Direct action is impeded, becoming indirect and imaginative. Through this development of inner space, time, and imagination, the psychic world comes into actuality” (Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, p. 73).

The argument inherits Plato’s account of Eros as daimon — the metaxy between mortal and immortal in plato-symposium — and converts it into a phenomenology of psychic space-time. Where appetite would close the gap between impulse and action, eros opens the gap. The opened gap is the precondition of imagining at all.

This is the structural ground of ratio-desiderii. Without the inserted interval there is no time in which to read the desire; the impulse simply discharges. With it, desire becomes legible. “Logos appears within eros itself as the inhibiting daimon with which one can speak, which acts as spiritus rector, and which has an upward, pneumatic tendency” (Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, p. xz). The reasoning function is not imposed on eros from outside; it is internal to eros as its own moment of inhibition.

Relationships

Primary sources

hillman-myth-of-analysis (Hillman 1972)
hillman-blue-fire (Hillman 1989)