Erōs

Greek Erōs was one of the primordial gods — in Hesiod's Theogony (c. 700 BCE) he was present at the beginning, a cosmic force before the Olympian gods existed. He made things come together; he drove the force of attraction that created order from chaos. Later mythology made him a younger god, the winged son of Aphrodite, the divine child who shot his arrows into human hearts.

Plato's Symposium (c. 385 BCE) transformed Eros from a god into a philosophical concept. Diotima, the wise woman whose speech is reported by Socrates, describes Eros as a daimōn — not a god but an intermediary between gods and mortals, the force of longing that drives the human soul upward from physical beauty to the beautiful itself. The erotic ascent — from desire for a beautiful body to desire for the Form of Beauty — was Plato's account of philosophical aspiration.

Sigmund Freud, appropriating the Greek god for psychoanalytic theory, used Eros for the life instinct — the drive toward connection, creativity, and self-preservation, as opposed to Thanatos (the death drive). Freud's Eros was a biological and psychological force, not a divine one, but the Greek origin gave it scope and grandeur. The life instinct needed a name as large as the concept.

Today eros lives in erotic and eroticism — the sexual desire that the Greek god embodied — but also in Plato's broader philosophical sense of longing. The philosopher's desire for truth, the artist's desire for beauty, the lover's desire for union: all are Platonic eros. The god who made things come together still names the force of attraction in all its forms.