--- slug: jung-eros-f9e39421 title: "Jung on Eros" author: "C.G. Jung" work: "Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950" section: "" year: "1973" 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. 1 took this term and not the term Agape, because relatedness is a natural feature of human psychology, but Agape is not. It is a very specified ethical concept. Eros is nothing of the kind. That is the reason why you find, as you say, Eros not only in the ancient Chinese religion but in many primitive religions as well. As my whole psychology derives from immediate experience with living people, it is a matter of course that my concept of Eros also originated in immediate experiences. My experience is a medical one in the first place, and only in the course of many years I began to study comparative religion and I also studied primitive psychology, partially in the field. But all that came afterwards and it merely substantiated what I had found with modern individuals. There is not one single thing in my psychology which is not substantiated essentially by actual experiences. To my knowledge this idea of Eros has not been anticipated in modern literature, simply because nobody else has based it upon im¬ mediate observation. lead_in: "" reflection: | Jung is drawing a line here that his interpreters have repeatedly blurred. Agapē is a theological achievement — love purified of appetite, refined upward into a principle the ego can aspire to hold. Eros, as Jung recovers it from Plato and reroutes through consulting rooms, is something found rather than constructed: a fact of relatedness that precedes any ethical evaluation of it. The distinction is not trivial. When Agapē becomes the template for psychological health — loving rightly, loving spiritually, loving without the mess of need and pull and entanglement — what has happened is that a particular project of purification has been smuggled into the language of soul. The soul does not love agapically by nature. It reaches, clings, wants, departs, returns. Jung's insistence that Eros is "empirical" and that Agapē is "not" is his way of saying: the observable interior is not already ethical, not already sanctified, not already oriented toward the good. It is first of all a principle of contact. Plato is the pivot Jung acknowledges but does not linger on. He took the term from Plato, but Plato was already in the process of lifting Eros out of its daimonic ambiguity toward something philosophically manageable. Jung pulls it back down. The daemonium in its "characteristic twilight" is what Jung actually means — not Eros sublimated, but Eros as the observable pressure of relatedness before it has been organized into virtue. reflection_v0_3: | The claim worth pausing on is the one Jung states flatly and then moves past: that Agape "is not" a natural feature of human psychology, while Eros is. He doesn't argue this — he asserts it and proceeds. But the assertion carries the whole weight of what follows, because if Agape is a normative ethical achievement rather than an observable phenomenon, then Jung's Eros isn't a competitor to it — it belongs to a different register entirely, the way a blood-pressure reading doesn't compete with a vow. What Jung is really defending here is the epistemic discipline of staying inside experience: he won't inherit a concept, however ancient or august, unless it names something he has actually watched move through a human life. Hillman would later press this further than Jung intended, finding in Eros a cosmological force, not merely a clinical observation — but Jung's more modest insistence, that the word must designate "something tangible," is still the stricter position, and the harder one to hold. A concept without an experience behind it is a word waiting to mean something. parent_id: Jung_1973_Letters_Volume_1_1906-1950__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. 1 took this term and not the term Agape, because relatedness is a natural feature of human psychology, but Agape is not. It is a very specified ethical concept. Eros is nothing of the kind. That is the reason why you find, as you say, Eros not only in the ancient Chinese religion but in many primitive religions as well. As my whole psychology derives from immediate experience with living people, it is a matter of course that my concept of Eros also originated in immediate experiences. My experience is a medical one in the first place, and only in the course of many years I began to study comparative religion and I also studied primitive psychology, partially in the field. But all that came afterwards and it merely substantiated what I had found with modern individuals. There is not one single thing in my psychology which is not substantiated essentially by actual experiences. To my knowledge this idea of Eros has not been anticipated in modern literature, simply because nobody else has based it upon im¬ mediate observation. — C.G. Jung Jung is drawing a line here that his interpreters have repeatedly blurred. Agapē is a theological achievement — love purified of appetite, refined upward into a principle the ego can aspire to hold. Eros, as Jung recovers it from Plato and reroutes through consulting rooms, is something found rather than constructed: a fact of relatedness that precedes any ethical evaluation of it. The distinction is not trivial. When Agapē becomes the template for psychological health — loving rightly, loving spiritually, loving without the mess of need and pull and entanglement — what has happened is that a particular project of purification has been smuggled into the language of soul. The soul does not love agapically by nature. It reaches, clings, wants, departs, returns. Jung's insistence that Eros is "empirical" and that Agapē is "not" is his way of saying: the observable interior is not already ethical, not already sanctified, not already oriented toward the good. It is first of all a principle of contact. Plato is the pivot Jung acknowledges but does not linger on. He took the term from Plato, but Plato was already in the process of lifting Eros out of its daimonic ambiguity toward something philosophically manageable. Jung pulls it back down. The daemonium in its "characteristic twilight" is what Jung actually means — not Eros sublimated, but Eros as the observable pressure of relatedness before it has been organized into virtue. --- C.G. Jung · *Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950* · 1973