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Symposium
Symposium
Plato’s dialogue on Eros, set at a drinking party in the house of the tragedian Agathon. Each guest in turn delivers a speech in praise of Eros; the climactic teaching is delivered by Socrates, who attributes it to the priestess diotima of Mantineia. Eros is not a god but a great daimōn, born of Poros and Penia, neither mortal nor immortal, neither rich nor poor, the eternal intermediary between worlds. The lover, ascending Diotima’s ladder, moves from the love of one beautiful body, to all beautiful bodies, to beautiful souls, to beautiful institutions and laws, to the beauty of the sciences, and finally to the Beautiful itself — the Form (eidos) of which all earthly beauties are participants.
The dialogue is interrupted by the arrival of the drunken Alcibiades, who delivers an unforgettable encomium of Socrates himself — the satyr-faced philosopher who is, on Alcibiades’ testimony, the one human being whose erotic mastery proves the teaching. Alcibiades’ speech is the dialogue’s hinge between the abstract ascent and the concrete love of one impossible person; Plato refuses to let the ascent dissolve the particular.
The Symposium is the foundational text for the depth tradition’s theory of eros-as-daimon. karl-kerenyi treats Diotima’s Eros as a “genuine mythologem” and places him beside Hermes as a figure of intermediation (Kerényi 1944). james-hillman reads the dialogue as the classical source of his own theory of the daimon as the soul’s vocational companion. The dialogue also stands behind every later treatment of erōs in the Jungian literature, from carl-jung on the transference to edward-edinger on individuation as a form of erotic ascent.