How To Be An Agnostic
sit down when he is about to stand up, usually so as not to miss
an encounter with others who are about to pass by. Sometimes
it offers similarly negative advice for others: it once told Socrates
to tell Charmides, Plato’s handsome but tyrannical uncle, not
to train for a race at Nemea, an ancient Olympic contest that
involved running 200 km in just over a day. Much more seri-
ously, Socrates believed he was obeying his daemon when he
stayed in Athens to drink the hemlock. He could have easily got
away.
What are we to make of Socrates’ daemon? There is a medical
theory that Socrates suffered from a form of epilepsy, but what-
ever the truth of that, it does not explain the signifi cance the
experiences had for the sage: if it was an affl iction, it was one
he valued. It is probably wrong to think of it as a voice too, as if
it were a guardian angel or some kind of internal conversation
with himself. Rather, the daimonion experience itself expresses
uncertainty – Socrates does not know whence it comes or
whither it goes – and strangeness, as if it were a force or urge
that, if familiar, he fails to understand.
In the Symposium, there are two incidents that enlarge on this.
The fi rst occurs when Socrates meets a priestess, called Diotima.
They had a conversation in which Diotima explained who or
what Eros (Love) is. Socrates had assumed up to that point that
Eros was divine. But no, says Diotima. Eros is a daemon, an
entity that exists in between the heavenly realms and human
society. The gods ‘mingle and converse’ with humans by these
daemons, she says, mostly when people sleep, or for some when
they are awake – a process that Plato elsewhere alludes to as
‘yearning after and perceiving something, it knows not what’.
Eros is a particularly interesting daemon because of his
origins. When Aphrodite was born, the gods held a party. Poros
(meaning ‘way’), son of Metis (meaning ‘cunning’) was there,
got drunk and fell asleep in the garden. Meanwhile, Penia
(meaning ‘poverty’) passed by, and discerning a cunning way
out of her poverty, slept with Poros and became pregnant. Eros
was the result.