On Plato's understanding of daimons

There are three substantial mentions of daimons in the Nomoi. We learn from them that

1. daimons ruled the people of the Golden Age,
2. daimons oppose wild ideas and
3. daimons have to consent to murder.

Obviously, Socrates' daimon is simply his conscience. But no such assertion can be made in general. Still, it is clear from the above that daimons are always considered to be a part of a man's will.

Literally, daimon means distinguisher. One might be tempted then to consider personality or individuality to be modern equivalents. But that is in a way an insult to the Greek way of thinking.

I've stated that

preference + conviction + conscience = life*,

*John 1:4

where

• preference is regarding participation,
• conviction the order believed to be true and
• conscience is regarding responsibility.

Likewise life* could also be decomposed in the following way:

character + daimon = life*,

where

• character consists of the traits a man shares with his male line ancestors of the last 10,000 (according to Phaidros) years and
• daimon consists of those traits of his will and hence conduct that distinguish him even from his closest male relatives.

Thus the following equation gives a substantial idea of what Plato considered daimons:

preference + conviction + conscience = character + daimon.

It is of course nowhere near what the Bible considers demons, but then again this shift in meaning has to be expected when one considers the idea that baptism will give a man a new will.

The latter is not completely impossible. A man's will has some variability. But I do not think that we need to be rewritten. We are born with our connection to God and only need to develop it. Hence I use the term daimon for certain acquired attitudes which are not part of our divine core, not as such evil, but pragmatically motivated, sometimes useful, other times harmful, as is always the case with adaptations.

Plato could have called such a behavioural variation simply a delayed daimonic expression and wouldn't have been worse off for it, but he is worse off for not accepting that the distinguishing features of men's wills are rooted in the one God, since his refusal to do so burdens him with the necessity to be lenient towards unruly men, something he abhors, but since daimons are immutable, neither subject to purification nor spoiling, any attempt to demand a justification from a man for his conduct, derived from the attributes of the one God, is precluded. It is obvious that Plato would have liked to demand it and for that reason would have been quite envious of the Christian outlook.