--- slug: jung-eros-2163b3e9 title: "Jung on Eros" author: "C. G. Jung" work: "Letters Volume 2, 1951-1961" section: "" year: "1975" tradition: jungian-core themes: - eros fragment: | Your dilemma Agape-Eros1 is a most interesting problem. There is indeed a big gap between the concept of Agape and the one of Eros. The former has a definitely intellectual and ethical character, while the latter, as I apply it, has very much more the quality of an □ L.'s letterhead reads: "Religion in Life. A Christian Quarterly. Editorial Offices, New York." 1 "Agape," charity, love, meaning love for God, spiritual love. In the NT it also signifies "love feast," the common meal taken by the early followers of Christ and sometimes connected with the Eucharist. Cf. Jude 12, "feasts of charity." 464 BERNTSEN / LANTERO empirical concept formulating certain observable psychological facts. Of course, I did not invent the term Eros. I learnt it from Plato. But I never would have applied this term if I hadn't observed facts that gave me a hint of how to use this Platonic notion. With Plato Eros is still a daimonion or daemonium in that characteristic twi¬ light in which the gods began to change into philosophical concepts during the course of centuries. As I am thoroughly empirical I never took a philosophical concept for its own sake. It was a word to me, which designated something tangible and observable, or it meant nothing. Thus when I tried to formulate the keynote of the general masculine attitude I fell upon the term Logos which looked to me to be the right word for the observed facts. The same when I tried to formulate a woman's general attitude I came upon the word Eros. Logos, being an intellectual something, naturally has the character of discrimination which is the essential basis of any intellectual judg¬ ment. Eros, on the other hand, is a principle of relatedness,2 and since I wanted to apply a characteristic term for relatedness it was naturally the word Eros which presented itself. I didn't take this word3 from anybody. I took it from my vocabulary and I said in so many words what I meant by it, namely a principle of relatedness. lead_in: "" reflection: | Jung is being careful here in a way worth pausing over. He is not defending a metaphysics of Eros — he is defending a method. The term arrived because observed facts demanded a container, not because Plato handed him a doctrine. That distinction matters more than it might first appear, because it separates Jung from the very tradition he is drawing on. Plato's Eros is still twilight-daimonic, still hovering between the mortal and divine, still unresolved — and Jung finds that ambiguity generative precisely because it resists the clarifying pressure that Agape has already undergone. Agape by Jung's account has been intellectualized and ethicized into something manageable, spiritual, elevated. Eros has not. It remained sticky with observable fact. The word "relatedness" does the quiet work of the letter. Not love, not spirit, not ascent — relatedness, which is a condition of entanglement and mutual shaping, not of transcendence. To call that Eros rather than Agape is to insist that what actually happens between people cannot be fully laundered through the ethical-intellectual frame. It belongs to a register where the daimonic still has a foothold, where what you feel toward another is not yet doctrine, and where the soul's life is still shaped by something it did not author and cannot quite administer. reflection_v0_3: | The claim worth defending here is the one Jung doesn't bother defending: that a philosophical term can be emptied of its history and refilled with observable fact. He takes Eros from Plato, strips it of its cosmogonic and erotic charge, and reissues it as clinical shorthand — "a principle of relatedness." Plato's Eros was precisely not neutral; it was a daimonion, a force that moves the soul toward the Beautiful and beyond it. Hillman, who would spend a career restoring that turbulence to the concept, would read Jung's move here as a taming — the daemon domesticated into a diagnostic category. And yet Jung's self-defense is honest in its own way: he is telling us that words, for him, are handles on things already seen, not philosophical inheritances to be honored. The question the reader might sit with is whether the seeing ever comes before the word, or whether the word always, quietly, shapes what gets seen. parent_id: Jung_1975_Letters_Volume_2,_1951-1961__par0160 source: oracle-v3-retrieve generated: 2026-04-17 regenerated: 2026-04-18 prompt_version: v2.7 status: draft --- Jung writes: > Your dilemma Agape-Eros1 is a most interesting problem. There is indeed a big gap between the concept of Agape and the one of Eros. The former has a definitely intellectual and ethical character, while the latter, as I apply it, has very much more the quality of an □ L.'s letterhead reads: "Religion in Life. A Christian Quarterly. Editorial Offices, New York." 1 "Agape," charity, love, meaning love for God, spiritual love. In the NT it also signifies "love feast," the common meal taken by the early followers of Christ and sometimes connected with the Eucharist. Cf. Jude 12, "feasts of charity." 464 BERNTSEN / LANTERO empirical concept formulating certain observable psychological facts. Of course, I did not invent the term Eros. I learnt it from Plato. But I never would have applied this term if I hadn't observed facts that gave me a hint of how to use this Platonic notion. With Plato Eros is still a daimonion or daemonium in that characteristic twi¬ light in which the gods began to change into philosophical concepts during the course of centuries. As I am thoroughly empirical I never took a philosophical concept for its own sake. It was a word to me, which designated something tangible and observable, or it meant nothing. Thus when I tried to formulate the keynote of the general masculine attitude I fell upon the term Logos which looked to me to be the right word for the observed facts. The same when I tried to formulate a woman's general attitude I came upon the word Eros. Logos, being an intellectual something, naturally has the character of discrimination which is the essential basis of any intellectual judg¬ ment. Eros, on the other hand, is a principle of relatedness,2 and since I wanted to apply a characteristic term for relatedness it was naturally the word Eros which presented itself. I didn't take this word3 from anybody. I took it from my vocabulary and I said in so many words what I meant by it, namely a principle of relatedness. — C. G. Jung Jung is being careful here in a way worth pausing over. He is not defending a metaphysics of Eros — he is defending a method. The term arrived because observed facts demanded a container, not because Plato handed him a doctrine. That distinction matters more than it might first appear, because it separates Jung from the very tradition he is drawing on. Plato's Eros is still twilight-daimonic, still hovering between the mortal and divine, still unresolved — and Jung finds that ambiguity generative precisely because it resists the clarifying pressure that Agape has already undergone. Agape by Jung's account has been intellectualized and ethicized into something manageable, spiritual, elevated. Eros has not. It remained sticky with observable fact. The word "relatedness" does the quiet work of the letter. Not love, not spirit, not ascent — relatedness, which is a condition of entanglement and mutual shaping, not of transcendence. To call that Eros rather than Agape is to insist that what actually happens between people cannot be fully laundered through the ethical-intellectual frame. It belongs to a register where the daimonic still has a foothold, where what you feel toward another is not yet doctrine, and where the soul's life is still shaped by something it did not author and cannot quite administer. --- C. G. Jung · *Letters Volume 2, 1951-1961* · 1975