Eros (ἔρως) — Love as desire, the longing for something one lacks. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Eros appears among the primordial powers; in philosophy, its foundational text is Plato’s Symposium. There, after Aristophanes’ speech about split beings seeking their lost half (189c–193d), Socrates reports the teaching of the priestess Diotima (201d–212c): Eros is not a beautiful and perfect god but a daimon, an intermediary between mortals and immortals, the child of Poros (resource) and Penia (poverty) (203b–c). As desire for the beautiful and the good, he seeks to possess them forever and therefore drives toward generation and immortality. Diotima describes a ladder of love: from beauty in one body to beauty in all bodies, then to souls, laws and the sciences, up to the contemplation of Beauty itself, single, unchanging and eternal (210a–212a). In the Phaedrus (244a–257b), love is a form of divine madness that revives in the soul the memory of the Forms. In later thought, Platonism and Neoplatonism, in Plotinus, retain the image of love as ascent. Theologians such as Anders Nygren, in Agape and Eros, took eros as the type of acquisitive, ascending love, in contrast with Christian agape. Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), called Eros the life drive, which tends toward union and preservation. See also beauty, daimon and philia; Plato, Plotinus and Freud.
← Glossary