Plato’s Symposion (3) #269 (P)

Diotima's Ladder and the nature of love

Dear friends and supporters of Daily Philosophy,

Today we continue our premium mini-series on Plato’s Symposion, still one of the fundamental texts in the philosophy of love. In the first part, we talked about the general structure of the text. If you haven’t read it, you can find it here:

Plato’s Symposion #264

In the second part, we read the highlights of the first three speeches:

Plato’s Symposion (2) #266 (P)

In the second part, Phaedrus the romantic spoke about how love betters people; Pausanias the lawyer made a distinction between good, heavenly love and bad, cheap love; and, finally, Eryximachus the doctor found love everywhere in nature, and particularly in the balance of opposites.

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Aristophanes the comedian: Love is searching for our other half

Things are starting to get a bit more fun now. The participants in the party have had a few drinks and everyone is in the mood for something lighter. It’s a good thing that Aristophanes the comedy writer is the next one in line to speak about love. We can imagine the host calling to the slaves for more wine, as Aristophanes gets up and begins...

For our original nature was by no means the same as it is now. In the first place, there were three kinds of human beings, not merely the two sexes, male and female, as at present: there was a third kind as well, which had equal shares of the other two, and whose name survives though, the thing itself has vanished. For ‘man-woman’ was then a unity in form no less than name, composed of both sexes and sharing equally in male and female ... Secondly, the form of each person was round all over, with back and sides encompassing it every way; each had four arms, and legs to match these, and two faces perfectly alike on a cylindrical neck.

Everyone can see now that this is going to be fun. So humans were originally double — four arms, four legs, and a cylindrical body. But the gods didn’t like this state of affairs. The humans were just too powerful. So

Zeus and the other gods debated what they should do ... Then Zeus, putting all his wits together, spoke at length and said: ‘Methinks I can contrive that men, without ceasing to exist, shall give over their iniquity through a lessening of their strength. I propose now to slice every one of them in two, so that while making them weaker we shall find them more useful by reason of their multiplication; and they shall walk erect upon two legs. If they continue turbulent and do not choose to keep quiet, I will do it again,’ said he; ‘I will slice every person in two, and then they must go their ways on one leg, hopping.’

This ends up creating three kinds of half-men: Those who originally were male-male, those who had been part of a female-female double being, and those who were one half of an original male-female being.

Now when our first form had been cut in two, each half in longing for its fellow would come to it again; and then would they fling their arms about each other and in mutual embraces yearn to be grafted together...

To make things easier for the half-humans, Zeus then moves their genitals to the front of the body, so that they can make small ones while embracing each other, instead of having to be stuck together back-to-back.