Euthydemus

Euthydemus is a work by Plato (-384).

Core claims

• The Euthydemus is not a comedy about bad logic but Plato’s most sustained phenomenology of the complex—demonstrating how language itself, when severed from soul, becomes a possession state indistinguishable from psychic inflation.
• Socrates’ refusal to defeat the sophists on their own terms enacts the Socratic daimonion in real time: the dialogue models a form of consciousness that holds contradiction without collapsing into either identification or dismissal, prefiguring Jung’s transcendent function.
• The eristic brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus function as a mythic doublet of the trickster archetype—their verbal chaos is the ananke principle that Hillman identified in the Timaeus now operating at the level of discourse, revealing that the “errant cause” inhabits logos itself.

Related questions

• How does the eristic method in Plato’s Euthydemus instantiate Hillman’s concept of the “Errant Cause” from Re-Visioning Psychology, and what does this imply about the relationship between ananke and logos?
• In what ways does Socrates’ restraint in the Euthydemus parallel the function of the Socratic daimonion as Edinger describes it in The Psyche in Antiquity, and how does this compare to Jung’s concept of the transcendent function?
• Could Peterson’s thesis in his work on the Homeric thumos explain why the eristic brothers in the Euthydemus are structurally incapable of engaging questions of value—and does this connect to Hillman’s critique of Plato’s demotion of feeling in the Republic?

See also

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

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