Hillman is dismantling something you probably absorbed before you were old enough to argue with it: the idea that good character is achieved, built up through right habit, chosen as one chooses a dietary discipline. Aristotle handed down the template, and every self-improvement tradition since has been running the same firmware — virtue as accumulation, ethics as reliable practice, the good life as the reward for consistency. The daimon will not sit inside that frame. It is not a faculty you cultivate; it already has its own agenda, and the agenda is not legible in advance.

What sharpens here is Hillman's insistence on the irrational necessity. Canetti going for his sister with an ax for the sake of language, Bergman's childhood fury in service of some fascination he could not yet name — these are not admissions of failure that were later redeemed. They are the shape the daimon took, the calling pressing through whatever gap the moment offered. Eudaimonia does not mean psychological health in the modern clinical sense; it means the daemon is faring well, which may look nothing like stability. The ethics involved are inscrutable because they answer to something prior to the codes we have agreed to honor, something that was already formed before the self was formed, already summoning before there was a life into which the summons could arrive.