On Love
By: George Popovic
Tags: Relationships, Love, Life Lessons, Philosophy, Self Improvement

The speech of Aristophanes: love as longing

The speech of Diotima contrasts sharply with the speech of Aristophanes which precedes it (189c — 193e), and the speech of Alcibiades which follows it (216c — 223d); both are concerned with love as it is in our world, the love that exists between us human beings.

Aristophanes couches his views in mythic terms not unlike what we find in Socrates’ speech, but there is no philosophical departure — it is purely poetic, and what follows is the briefest account. We, as human beings, so the story goes, are in actuality half of what was once a uniform whole — we were each originally a being composed, as it were, of two. Zeus, in order to thwart human ambitions, split us in half, and ever since each half has longed for the other, and this longing we term love, and this love longs for something it doesn’t quite understand, but needs nonetheless. This love only finds its actualization in every wayward and futile attempt at recreating our former union.

Aristophanes imagines the god Hephaestus as addressing a pair of lovers:

“It’s obvious that the soul of every lover longs for something else; his soul cannot say what it is, but like an oracle it has a sense of what it wants, and like an oracle it hides behind a riddle. Suppose two lovers are lying together and Hephaestus stands over them with his mending tools, asking, “What is it you human beings really want from each other?”And suppose they’re perplexed, and he asks them again: “Is this your heart’s desire, then — for the two of you to become parts of the same whole, as near as can be, and never to separate, day or night?” (192d1–8) (Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff)

This passage highlights, I think, one of the more paradoxical aspects of love, paradoxical in so far as it seems to negate that observation I made just a moment ago, that love involves a kind of science of the beloved.

Recall what Aristophanes said just a moment ago,

“[H]is soul cannot say what it is, but like an oracle it has a sense of what it wants, and like an oracle it hides behind a riddle” (192d1–2).

Love expresses itself as a kind of unintelligible longing, that is, a longing which we ourselves find unintelligible when interrogated thoroughly.

Think back on every love you’ve entertained. If you were asked to subtract every quality from your beloved that could be found in another person(e.g., having a musical disposition, or a beautiful voice), what would you be left with? What, in the absence of all those ‘common’ characteristics (i.e., capable of being possessed by another) would you be left with?

Nothing, I’d say. But of course there must be something — love must necessarily have an object. And so to answer my own inquiry: love possesses a kind of unintelligible longing which, though it manifests as a particular love of individuals, ultimately has some end external to our humanity. This longing is more or less concerned with possession and communion, though there are, I’m sure, several other characteristics which are not essentially a matter of possession— appreciation, namely.

As to why we love certain individuals and not others (think of how few lovers you’ve had with respect to how many there might have been), this too is the expression of that unintelligible longing, and that’s as much as I can speak to with any confidence (though I think that there is some importance to the particularity of individuals).