This immediately raises a number of questions within the context of Plato’s
dialogues:daimonion was the voice which Socrates habitually heard telling him
when not to do something (Apology40,Euthyphro3); it is thus something intimately
linked with the soul, whether it be interpreted as a forerunner of the concept of
conscience or as a nervous, hallucinatory hypersensitivity on Socrates’ part. Eros in
theSymposium, on the other hand, as between ugly and beautiful, between ignorant
and wise, is the desire for the beautiful and for wisdom. Eros thedaimo ̄nis the great
philosopher. But this is just an image for the striving for the beautiful and for
knowledge on the part of the philosophical (i.e. the thinking) human being that
has already been seen in theLysis. The desire of Eros is an allegory of the human soul.
(One is reminded of Democritus’ saying that ‘‘the soul is the dwelling place of the
daimo ̄n,’’ D-K 68 B 171.) And Eros’ position between god and mortal in that way
stands for the position of the soul in between ignorance, which is connected with
what is mortal, changing, and perishable, and knowledge, which is stable, unchan-
ging, and in that sense divine (208): the culmination of the ascent described by the
priestess and recounted by Socrates is the vision of ‘‘the beautiful itself by itself with
itself, always being of one form’’ (211). Thedaimo ̄nEros is thus introduced to
illuminate the conceptually difficult position of the human soul as somehow being
part of the perishable human being, but somehow sharing in what does not change,
just as in thePhaedothe human soul was said to be more similar,homoioteron, to what
is always the same as itself and unchanging than to what changes, what comes to be
and perishes (79–80). Here too the notion of assimilation to the unchanging is in the
background, but here too it is not literally a god to whom one’s soul assimilates itself.
While Eros the greatdaimo ̄nin theSymposiumgave rise to literal interpretation, not
least in the demonology of late antiquity, he should thus better be understood as one
of the images Plato uses in describing aspects of human psychology which are difficult
or impossible to convey without recourse to imagery at any time and in the context of
any philosophy.
The importance of theLysisas the starting point of much of Plato’s ontology,
cosmology, and theology does not end here. The dialogue introduces two more
concepts which became influential in the history of metaphysics and theology alike.
The first of these is found in the passage just discussed in connection with themetaxy
(218–20). Taking the example of the patient whose disease is curable and who loves
the science of medicine because of his illness and for the sake of health, Socrates
explains that the neither-good-nor-bad loves the good and dear because of the bad
and inimical, for the sake of something good and dear. Because of the identical
description of the object of love and that for the sake of which that object is loved,
an infinite regress looms. If there were such an infinite regress, we would be bound to
give up, i.e., we would not be able to finish the investigation. The alternative is that
we reach a beginning,arche ̄(219).Arche ̄had been the word for the ultimate physical
constituent of the world since Anaximander, the first Presocratic philosopher of
whom any word has survived. Subsequently,arche ̄became the object of research for
virtually all the Presocratics in Aristotle’s accounts of early philosophy. In theLysis,
Plato is adopting this term and applying it to something which is in principle non-
physical, the object of desire. But he does more than change the nature of whatarche ̄,
beginning, is. Once he has equatedarche ̄with something desired by a human being,
regardless of the physical or ontological status of that object of desire, he points out
Greek Religion and Philosophy 393