Eryxias

Eryxias is a work by Plato (-370).

Core claims

• The Eryxias stages a philosophical demolition of wealth-as-possession that anticipates depth psychology’s central insight: what the ego believes it owns is precisely what owns it, and the question “what is truly valuable?” is always already a question about the soul’s relationship to its own projections.
• By stripping the concept of wealth down to its contradictions—useful, useless, good, harmful, relative, absolute—the dialogue performs a Socratic coagulatio, forcing abstract economic certainties back into the messy, embodied reality of psychic need, prefiguring Jung’s insistence that transformation requires descent rather than accumulation.
• The Eryxias occupies a unique position among the Platonic and pseudo-Platonic dialogues as a text that refuses resolution, making its apparent philosophical failure its deepest psychological achievement: the inability to define wealth mirrors the soul’s incapacity to possess itself through concepts alone.

Related questions

• How does the aporetic structure of the Eryxias relate to Hillman’s concept of the “Errant Cause” in Re-Visioning Psychology, and does Hillman’s reading of Ananke in the Timaeus provide a more adequate framework for understanding Socratic aporia than the standard philosophical one?
• Edinger traces sublimatio from Plato’s Symposium through Plotinus to Christianity and argues it must be followed by coagulatio; can the Eryxias be read as Plato’s own coagulatio operation on the concept of wealth, and how does this compare to Edinger’s account of the fourth function in The Mystery of the Coniunctio?
• Lacan reads the Symposium as staging the emergence of desire through transference and the irruption of Alcibiades; what would a Lacanian reading of the Eryxias reveal about the relationship between desire and the impossibility of possessing the object one believes one lacks?

See also

• Library page: /library/ancient-roots/plato-eryxias/

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