Chapter 7: What does the daimon of Socrates reveal about the psyche of Socrates?

The daimon of Socrates and his spiritual life is a devilish problem for rational thinkers. Socrates apparently believed in oracles, gods, deities and supernatural forces. And he had a daimon, his own personal inner divine voice to guide him. It was known in Athens that Socrates had a daimon and that seems to have been accepted as reasonable. Why would anyone think it was strange that someone had an inner divine voice? In our time we might rationalize that as a psychological reality to make it reasonable in our minds. Maybe in the future there will be an explanation we haven’t anticipated yet. But what should be understood of the spiritual life of Socrates?

We see ourselves as rational, in the same general sense that the ancient Athenians saw themselves as rational. After all, the patron deity of Athens, Athena, was born directly out of the head of a male god. How much more rational can you get? Most people think they are rational, but aren’t quite. And others, who actually are more rational, can stray into their own detached world of abstractions, which the ancient Greek comedy playwright Aristophanes mocked. Aristophanes’s mockery of abstract rationalists included Socrates as a well-known figure in Athens right up to the time of his very theatrical trial and execution. A theatrical dialogue of Socrates’s defence at his trial is the beginning of Plato’s lifelong preoccupation with Socrates, with Plato standing intentionally in that shadow.

Here's the problem with the daimon and spirituality of Socrates. How does spirituality fit with rationality? Can spirituality be rationalized? Can secular rationality understand a connection with the divine without rationalizing it? And what happens to the rationality of Socrates if his consciousness extends into a divine sphere of experience?

So, What’s a daimon? The daimon, says Andrea Nightingale, in Philosophy and Religion in Plato’s Dialogues, is not a god but a “intermediary” between gods and human beings. A daimon can, for the Greeks, says Nightingale, be ambiguous, either benefiting or harming human beings. When Diotima refers to the daimon in the Symposium, she sees it as part of the communication in “prophecy and sorcery” coming when human beings are either awake or sleep. There is a wisdom for the human being who has this divine channel of communication called “daimonic.” Walter Burkert in Greek Religion identifies Plato as the source for turning the Greek concept of a daimon into a being in itself which is evil or a demon. Burkert identifies a daimon as an “incomprehensible” “occult power” or type of energy that mortal beings can have but not understand. Since Socrates in general seems to believe that the gods are benevolent, unlike emotional and erratic human beings, presumably his daimon or divine voice would also be benevolent. Errors and evil would then come from human misinterpretations of a daimon, not the daimon itself. In the same way, in Jungian psychology, mental illness does not come from the unconsciousness, but from a psychic imbalance between the unconsciousness and consciousness.

Von Franz has a different interpretation of the daimon. For her, the daimon - explained in the glossary to the collection of von Franz’s dream analysis of historical figures such as Socrates, Themistocles and Descartes - is a connection to the unconscious that helps the individuation process. The glossary of the collection of the dream interpretations of von Franz says: “Daimon: originally value-free, driving force, a spiritual energy which leads to the creative formation of individuality; for Socrates, an inspiring and guiding spirit.” The Jungians thus treat the daimon as real, as Socrates did from a different perspective, although secular rationality might ignore or dismiss the daimon as a fiction not worth considering.

Plato apparently saw no reason for doubting that Socrates had a daimon and that his daimon served him well. It also does not seem to be a literary fiction for Plato useful for making the dialogues seem to be real events in the lives of the citizens of Athens. The daimon appears in the Apology, believed to be the first dialogue that Socrates wrote, and its divine nature is explicit (31c-d). The daimon does not tell Socrates what he should do in Plato’s version of Socrates, though not in Xenophon’s Socrates. The daimon tells Socrates what not to do. Thus, the daimon is guiding Socrates without determining exactly what he should decide to do. That leaves Socrates free to think and free to act, which also makes him free to make mistakes. Socrates decides that he should serve the deity through philosophy, but even Socrates might to agree that he also serves the deity through religious activity beyond the bounds of rationality, if Socrates even made that distinction, a distinction which seems obvious to us for some reason. Diotima might represent that option if she weren’t also absorbed into philosophy or some kind of mystical philosophy in the Symposium. So even the daimon of Socrates creates an opportunity for doubt.

What about the daimon of Socrates as a divine inner voice? is it a kind of waking dream or similar to a dream world? Is the daimon of Socrates connected to his dream world? Is the daimon an ability to enter a trance state or to dream during the day?

The Greek playwright Aeschylus said that dreams are what we can’t see during the day, but maybe the daimon of Socrates fills that gap. Plato does not explain much about the daimon of Socrates, but he does observe its existence, which then implies some kind of relevance. It is significant enough for Plato to mention in the first dialogue, the Apology, and then repeatedly in other dialogues. In the Apology, Socrates says that he has had his daimon since childhood. The divine message is a reason why he did not purse a political life, a divine reason that helps confirm his spiritual nature, despite the charge against him that led to his trial. The gods did not want a political Socrates, although his fellow citizens may have resented his attitude of avoiding public life and his public trial on accusations of causing public harm might then be punishment for his open defiance of the required public role of a citizen.

Perhaps that is the obscure tragic irony of the warning of his daimon. Socrates had become a well-known public figure while avoiding a public life in politics and in that way maybe have been influential enough to be a threat to the city in the minds of others. There may be elements of anger and awkwardness in Socrates’s defence in the Apology that he is forced into a speech that violates his principles of interaction in a dialogue. A sign of that may be that Socrates’ defence imagines that he is interacting with his accusers, a fiction which emphasizes that he is not allowed to do that in the actual trial. In any event, the daimon of Socrates was also mentioned by his accuser Meletus at his trial, according to the Apology,[ix] and the Euthyphro also makes the connection between the charge of creating new gods at Socrates’ trial and his daimon.

When Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz psychoanalyzed the dreams of Socrates, she referred to Socrates’ comparison of his process of daimon and inquiry to the divine role of his mother as a midwife helping women give birth to children. Aside from the remark that the wife of Socrates was used like a goose in giving him children, there is a sense of reverence to the role of his mother as a midwife. Von Franz quotes Socrates in the Theaetetus that “both I and my mother received this midwife function from God.” It should be noted that the midwife analogy probably contains the sense that Socrates’s process of inquiry only assists the individual in giving birth to what the individual’s mind can produce itself, rather than putting ideas into the mind of the person.

For von Franz, Socrates is totally absorbed by the “mother-anima figure, manifested by the dream of the radiant woman and Diotima in the Symposium. Von Franz says, applying Jung’s theories, that these figures of the anima signify in the case of Socrates “the world beyond, paradise, the memory of the archetypal images, from which he who is born into the world should tear himself free.” Von Franz continues, that Jung says it is “dangerous” for a man to be trapped in this idealized existence. He is estranged “from nature and reality.” Von Franz’s version of the message of the dream to Socrates is “to develop his feeling function, and to work, in order that he might reach and actually enter the reality of the earth… instead of spending all his time philosophizing in the Agora, the marketplace.” Socrates thus did not work and “was kept out of politics by his daimonion… [which] his opponents considered a scandal.” The daimon of Socrates would then be allied with his anima figures to prevent Socrates from developing a balanced psyche.

If this is true, then would his process of inquiry have any validity? Is this process of inquiry the result of psychic imbalance or does it some way transcend the problems of the psyche of Socrates?

It seems that this Socrates was too feminine for von Franz in her time, although there is apparently no similar judgement against Socrates in his own time. Plato and Xenophon do not seem to agree with this judgement of femininity in Socrates. The dialogues of Plato, if they can be believed to be accurate, do not portray this kind of Socrates. Socrates the solider is accepted in the company of men, including the situation in the Symposium where the banter of Socrates and Alcibiades in the company of men is conformation of their relationship where they will share the same tent.

Is it possible that von Franz could be correct about the connection of Socrates to his anima but err in the application of the connection with the anima? Or could the judgement of von Franz about Socrates be correct without that contaminating the value of his process of inquiry? And whatever the truth of the character of Socrates, how is our image of him, the archetypal value we create out of him, valid for us now?

During her analysis of the dream of Socrates in Crito, von Franz says that the daimon of Socrates was apparently allied with his anima figures to prevent Socrates from developing a balanced psyche. The daimon, says von Franz “plays an important role in Socrates’ relationship with his friends.” The daimon of Socrates is not “commanding” him what to do, but will only “restrain and warn” him. The daimon is “part of his unconscious personality” and somehow part of the eros missing from his conscious life. In this interpretation, Socrates would have an unresolved emptiness at his core.

For von Franz, Socrates as the person in a dialogue who asks questions but doesn’t provide answers, shows his “passivity” and “lack of determination to risk himself in a creative act,” an interpretation that depends upon the concept that von Franz has for what questions should be doing in a rational context. The passivity that von Franz sees is Socrates is associated with his sense of doubt, uncertainty and perplexity and his fear of submitting to instincts and urges as his ego clings to rationality. That, again, may be an interpretation based on von Franz’s concept of rationality.

Von Franz does credit Socrates with not inflating his ego consciousness to believe that he, with the divine voice of a daimon in him, was a god. The people that Socrates encounters in the dialogues often have inflated egos, who Socrates deflates to bring them down to earth, to understand their limitations, since only the gods have wisdom. Socrates, says von Franz, had “restraint over against the creative urge of the unconscious images.” The sense of irony of Socrates is genuine and defends him from inflation of the ego.

Socrates believed his daimon was a divine voice instructing him what not to do, not prompting him to take some kind of grand action, and the Delphic oracle had singled him out against others in making a comment that he is the wisest person. Who in Athens could resist the sense of importance of being worthy of discussion by the gods? That sentiment does creep somewhat into Socrates’ defence of himself in Plato’s dialogue The Apology, a sentiment that must have only irritated the jury more at his trial, but Socrates still seems to maintain some sincere humility. Socrates says that he wanted to prove that he was not the wisest person, which could be ironical or literally true. So, assume for a moment that Socrates didn’t find that idea tempting. In essence, Socrates says that no human being is wise because human understanding is too limited. Human beings don’t have the wisdom of the gods, although in their arrogance they might think that they do. That is a crucial distinction Socrates made in the Apology. It would be easy for those embarrassed by how Socrates exposed their ignorance with his questions to defend themselves by projecting arrogance onto Socrates and promoting a need to punish Socrates for arrogance. But von Franz does not cite arrogance in her analysis of Socrates and it does not seem to be in the characterization of Socrates by Plato and Xenophon. Because of the strength of his “Apollonian spirit,” Socrates resisted the temptation of being absorbed into the “instinctive urges and wild emotions” of the Dionysian mysteries. Socrates resisted the inflation of ego in refusing to take a political role in Athens because, says von Franz, of the influence of his daimon.

Socrates sense of irony, says von Franz, was a factor in the balance of his psyche. “[Irony] acts as a constant defence mechanism in its owner and others against the danger of inflation.” Other later commentators sometimes find a hypocritical irony and false humility in Socrates and thus a stronger arrogance and ego inflation in him, but that may be the result of their own projections onto Socrates, their own ego inflation. For von Franz, Socrates was making good progress in terms of Jungian psychology in advancing the individuation process. Individuation is the healthy integration of the whole, individual psyche, in what Jungians call the self, of the unconscious into the conscious. A conflict or disruption of this integration causes problems in the psyche. Von Franz does find an unresolve element or difficulty of interpretation in Socrates’ dream in the Crito dialogue of … The personality of Socrates, von Franz concludes, is “significant and at the same time so difficult to understand.” The difficulty suggests a reality that exceeds the limitations of human rationality.

But aside from these qualifications, for von Franz, Socrates is in the thrall of an idealistic feminine influence from the unconscious.

But what if that is inverted? What if the openness to the daimon, to doubt, uncertainty and perplexity, is a better version of integration of parts of the psyche and of inner world with outer world? Von Franz also says that Jung’s process of dream analysis began with doubt, a “precious gift” that “does not violate the virginity of things beyond our ken,” with the refusal of Jung to answer the implied question of a dream? Didn’t Jung locate the moment of his break with Freud with Freud’s insistence on “dogma” in psychoanalytic theory, “for a dogma,” in Jung’s words, “that is to say, an indisputable confession of faith, is set up only when the aim is to suppress doubts once and for all?”

DIOTIMA AND EROS

Beyond the dream of Socrates of the woman in radiant white there is another woman, a rare woman, Diotima, in the dialogues with Socrates. Diotima appears in The Symposium, in a conversation that Socrates reports to the group of men. Why a woman? Is Diotima a version of the woman in the dream of Socrates or a daimon? The rarity of the event of a woman allowed a voice in a dialogue of Plato suggests it has unusual importance, although some commentators don’t even think Diotima is worth a mention. In the dialogues, Socrates mentions his wife and his mother, but they don’t appear directly to speak for themselves, which would be an intriguing conversation to hear and would allow another perspective of the life of Socrates. Diotima is not physically present in the manly gathering in The Symposium and yet Socrates and Plato make her prominent mentally by including her in the culmination of the discussion in an important way. Plato includes women in his fiction of the ideal city in The Republic in a way that is at odds with the culture of Athens at the time. Women couldn’t be part of the political decisions of the city and yet women were still prominent in Greek tragedy, even if their roles were played by boys. Women were also priestesses. So, women are important and yet not important in ancient Athens. They could have private divine connections but not public political ones. It seems odd in a way difficult to fathom. Plato has a purpose in mentioning the dream of Socrates and in giving Diotima a voice, even if it is not certain what that purpose was.

Socrates identifies Diotima as a woman who is wise, speaks the truth, and has initiated him into the wisdom of eros. Diotima helped the Athenians with a ten-year delay of a plague with their sacrifices, says Socrates. That sounds like a priestess and radiant robes seem to confirm that. She is not explicitly identified in the dialogue as a priestess and commentators believe that she is a fiction of Plato. Diotima is wise in the knowledge of Eros as a divinity, the eros that von Franz believes is a weak or distorted connection for the Apollonian, ever-sober Socrates and, in the Symposium, Socrates defers to Diotima and her wisdom.

For Von Franz, eros is a daimon in the Symposium that links human beings with the divine, a connection Socrates makes for himself in some translations of the dialogues. Socrates’s usual primacy in a dialogue is uncharacteristically inverted in the Symposium as Socrates is instructed by Diotima as a novice in eros, a matter of religion. Diotima says perhaps slyly that Socrates may have deeper knowledge or can have deeper knowledge: “perhaps even you may be initiated.” The inversion of roles gives Socrates an almost filial passivity towards Diotima. It feels painful to watch after the typical heroic strength of mind of Socrates is diluted in this episode in the dialogue. In the Protagoras, there is another inversion of roles when Protagoras asks the questions and Socrates provides the answers, but after that, the prominence of Socrates is restored, and Socrates asks Protagoras the questions more efficiently.

After the episode with Diotima in the Symposium will come Alcibiades, the supplicant for the love of a Socrates who is not a novice at that point. Socrates is not passive to Alcibiades. So that status as a novice in eros may have an ironic inflection for Plato’s audience or it may be intended literally, particularly since Plato seems to want to counter the charge against Socrates of being irreligious by introducing new gods, or maybe both. In the dialogue, Diotima becomes the Socratic examiner of Socrates. Then, after that, Socrates becomes the male lover who disciplines Alcibiades in word and in deed. Plato’s audience knows that the future Alcibiades can’t discipline himself. He will be the focus of political and martial disasters and may have been assassinated in 404 BC. If only he had paid better heed to what Socrates said in the Symposium when Alcibiades was young and might have avoided the fate that the audience of the Symposium knew would happen. Eros didn’t save Alcibiades from the flames.

This Diotima, like an anima, advises an eros that leads away from earthy women, to a love of wisdom, to fit the interpretation of Von Franz. That would also answer the question of why a female figure would be used in a dialogue restricted to men without earthly passions. It is, as Von Franz says of the anima, “the neglect of Eros.”

In the end, von Franz concludes her analysis of Socrates and his dreams by diagnosing significant progress in this particular patient in the development of his psyche and his individuation process. And the daimon and the spiritual life of Socrates may be a part of that mental healthiness, as hard as it may be for rationalists to accept.

What then are the prospects for spiritual questions?

Socratic Zen email: socraticzen88@gmail.com

Socratic Zen forum on Meta (Facebook): https://www.facebook.com/SocraticZen/

Socrates as an enigma for psychotherapy. Original idea for image by Shawn Thompson.