Socrates’ Ambivalent Erotes

This paper focuses on Socrates's ambivalent view of eros. According to the testimonies of Antisthenes, Aeschines, Plato, and Xenophon, Socrates praises the erotic sunousia that leads to virtue and knowledge, and censures the erotic sunousia that aims at achieving physical pleasure (hedone). The first kind of synousia has a protreptic function, since it improves those who are affected by it; the second kind induces lack of control (hubris), and annihilates virtue. This ambivalence of eros is evident in Antisthenes, where eros may be associated with sophia, and is therefore paideutic, or with hedone, and is therefore a ponos to be shunned; in Aeschines (both in the Alcibiades and in the Aspasia), whose view of the "good" eros is radically protreptic and anepistemic; and in Plato and Xenophon, who distinguish between an eros pandemos (that should be avoided) and an eros ouranos (leading to virtue). My claim is that the common ground of these accounts is Socrates's ambivalent erotic sunousia.