Agathon

Within the depth-psychology and classical scholarship corpus, ‘Agathon’ operates on two distinct registers that the literature treats in productive tension. First, Agathon names the historical Athenian tragedian whose symposium victory forms the dramatic occasion of Plato’s Symposium; in this register, Lacan’s Seminar VIII exploits his identity as tragic poet to read his encomium of Eros as deliberately and self-consciously frivolous — a discourse marked by its own derisory connotation, which Lacan then deploys as an oblique route into the structure of transference and analytic desire. Second, and philosophically more consequential, agathon functions as the supreme evaluative term in Greek ethics — ‘the good’ — whose semantic range and contested content drives the argument of Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s ethics. Adkins systematically traces how agathon accretes meaning from competitive arete through Socratic moralism; Hobbs demonstrates that the Symposium’s dialectical sequence from 199C to 201C depends upon the coextensiveness of agathon and kalon; and both Nussbaum and the Platonic text itself show Socrates dismantling Agathon’s rhetorical account of Eros precisely by turning agathon against him. The Agathos Daimon, attested in Harrison and Rohde, extends the term into the sphere of chthonic beneficence and household cult. These registers — ethical, dramatic, daemonic — rarely communicate in the secondary literature but together reveal the term’s foundational weight.

In the library 17 passages

Socrates first persuades Agathon to agree that eros is directed towards things it lacks, and that these things must be kala. Then, at 201C2, he asks whether it does not seem to Agathon that good things are beautiful, and Agathon concurs.

This passage argues that Plato’s dialectic in the Symposium depends on the coextensiveness of agathon and kalon, so that Socrates can demonstrate Eros necessarily lacks good things as well as beautiful ones.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis

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Socrates highlights what is in question, he is going to speak about Agathon… Agathon was being aimed at throughout all the circumlocutions of Alcibiades’ discourse.

Lacan argues that Agathon functions as the concealed object throughout Alcibiades’ speech, and that Socrates’ interpretive intervention reveals this hidden aim, making Agathon structurally central to the analytic dynamic of transference.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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it is none other than Agathon as such, namely as the one whose triumph at the competition for tragedy is being celebrated — let us not forget it, we are on the day following his success — who has the right to speak about love.

Lacan contends that Agathon’s identity as victorious tragic poet is constitutive of his encomium’s openly derisory character, linking the dramatic and philosophical registers of the figure.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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Callicles for the moment continues to assert that eudaimonia is ‘obtaining pleasure in any way whatsoever’, that the agathon is the pleasant… Callicles has insisted that the agathos is the phronimos, and that the agathon, the end of life, is the pleasant.

Adkins argues that in the Gorgias the identification of agathon with pleasure is the central ethical error Socrates targets, revealing the semantic conflict between competitive and moral valuations of the term.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis

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Love is the love of beauty and not of deformity? He assented. And the admission has been already made that Love is of something which a man wants and has not? True, he said. Then Love wants and has not beauty?

The primary Platonic text enacts the dialectical unravelling of Agathon’s encomium, with Socrates extracting from Agathon the admission that Eros lacks both beauty and, by implication, the agathon.

Plato, Symposium, -385thesis

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The question at once arises: if agathon means ‘good for’ — good for whom? And as soon as the question is asked, it becomes clear that, though the word may be useful for the moralist, its use will not be easy.

Adkins identifies the relational ambiguity built into agathon — ‘good for whom?’ — as the crux of Greek moral philosophy’s difficulty in converting competitive virtue into a universal ethical standard.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis

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Socrates constructs an argument to prove to Callicles that the sophron psuche is the agathe psuche. If it is necessary to prove this, the words evidently belong to different groups of terms.

Adkins demonstrates that the need to prove the sophron psuche is the agathe psuche reveals these terms to belong to historically distinct evaluative registers in Greek thought.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting

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Actions of the type X are kala, or are agatha, or are conducive to my eudaimonia (these formulations, for Aristotle, of course being synonymous); but this action is an action of the type X: therefore — the man performs the action.

Adkins shows that Aristotle’s practical syllogism treats agatha, kala, and eudaimonia as synonymous major premises, folding the term into a unified teleological ethics.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting

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Agathon for his own part excuses himself. He also announces some hesitation, some fear, some intimidation at speaking before what we could call such an emphrones public.

Lacan reads Agathon’s staging of intellectual humility before an enlightened audience as establishing the social dynamics of recognition that structure the entire Symposium’s drama of desire.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting

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I was reminded of Gorgias, and at the end of his speech I fancied that Agathon was shaking at me the Gorginian or Gorgonian head of the great master of rhetoric, which was simply to turn me and my speech into stone.

Plato presents Socrates’ ironic response to Agathon’s encomium as a confrontation between rhetorical spectacle and philosophical argument, with Agathon figured as an avatar of Gorgianic rhetoric.

Plato, Symposium, -385supporting

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In this instance the ay. 6. is evidently a good spirit who protects the house. Only with this in mind can we understand how anyone could consecrate his house agathō daimoni.

Rohde argues that the Agathos Daimon as protective household spirit must be understood as a beneficent soul of the dead, providing the cultic-religious substrate from which the philosophical concept of agathon partly derives.

Rohde, Erwin, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting

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He continues to hold out when Socrates reformulates his question and asks whether pleasure itself is not agathon. This, says Protagoras firmly, is a matter that requires further discussion.

Hobbs shows that the question of whether pleasure itself is agathon is the contested hinge of Socrates’ argument with Protagoras, establishing agathon’s identification with pleasure as a position requiring philosophical scrutiny.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting

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a story of passion for a unique individual as eloquent as any in literature — a story that says that the theory omits something, is blind to something - then we might want to hesitate before calling the author blind.

Nussbaum uses Alcibiades’ speech — directed at Agathon and Socrates in the Symposium’s final movement — to argue that Plato deliberately stages what Diotima’s ascent theory excludes.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986aside

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Agathon won the prize with his first tragedy, on the day after that on which he and his chorus offered the sacrifice of victory.

The text establishes the historical and dramatic frame of Agathon’s tragic victory as the occasion and background for the Symposium’s philosophical proceedings.

Plato, Symposium, -385aside

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