The Myth of Primitive Persons: (based on Aristophanes’ speech from Plato’s Symposium) Explaining What Love Is

 [The comic playwright Aristophanes, who had satirized Socrates unmercifully in his play The Clouds, has to put off his turn because of an attack of hiccups. The physician Pausanius gives him advice on how to stop them and takes his place with a speech that now looks cynical and sour, a justification of love as making it possible for old men to manipulate young men and making it possible for young men in turn to use old men to their advantage. After he finishes, there is less reaction to his speech than is usual in the dialogue. Aristophanes then begins.]

Aristophanes said he would mine a different vein of accumulated wisdom, and that he would provide a different kind of praise of Love. People have not understood how strong love is, or they would not neglect it as they have; they would make it a serious object of study. If they did understand they would also have built the proper monuments and put more effort into honoring love. Love is indeed the best thing human beings have got, and should be regarded as a friend not to be forgotten. Love heals us and helps us and makes happiness possible by removing the most serious obstacles to happiness we face. These facts about love are what I am trying to get at, and if I am successful you can acquaint others.

The nature of love is the largest part of the nature of human beings. And the origin of love is the origin of human beings in their present form. That’s my topic: to clear up our origin and explain what love is.

                 We did not used to be as we are now. The first humans were different from us. Though now we are two sexes, we used to be three. Now we have only men and women, but it used to be that we had those who were only men and those who were only women but we also had those who were a mixture of the male and female. Even the name for this has been lost, and the word we use now, “androgynous,” carries connotations of reproach the original name did not. And we used to be beautiful, being round like a globe rather than looking like splinters as we do now. Our backs and sides formed a circle, we had four hands and four feet, we had one head but with two faces looking in opposite directions, and we had four ears and two sets of genitals and all the rest. We could walk upright as we do now but we could also move like great wheels as acrobats sometimes attempt (though with less success) with their legs in the air, but we had four legs and four hands to turn on so we could go very fast and far. In our roundness of course we showed our kinship with the natural beings of the universe whose natures we shared, the sun and the moon and the earth, who are also three as we were three in gender and in sex.

                We were ferocious as well, unstoppable in our strength and speed, and we were filled with pride in our hearts. We thought we could contend with the gods, and we mounted a rebellion. We too, like Otys and Ephialtes in Homer, thought we could mount up to heaven and take it and occupy it for ourselves. We can sometimes still see these old haughty impulses.

                The gods were upset, and doubtful about what to do. They had grown accustomed to the praise and sacrifices that had been offered them by human beings, but they considered simply annihilating us with thunderbolts, for the insolence against them was intolerable.

                Zeus gave the matter much thought, and finally came up with a plan. “I will cut them down to size. I will take care of their outsized pride and improve their manners. I shall forbear their existence, but I shall cut each one in two. That way they will be less strong but there will be more of them to make sacrifices and sing praises to us, and so better serve our interests. They will still be able to get about on two legs. --And if this does not stop their pride and make them shut up, I will split them again and they can hop about on one leg.” And so he did. He cut each person in two as one using a wire or hair to cut eggs or cheese, and as he cut each one he had Apollo give the face and neck a turn toward the severed side to remind us of our reasons to be humble. Apollo at Zeus’ request also healed the cuts and polished off the scars, and pulled the skin together over what we call our bellies toward what we call a navel, like a drawstring purse. He smoothed and shaped our breasts and torsos as shoemakers shape leather on a last, leaving some uncomely wrinkles as reminders of our primeval state.

                After this division of each person, though, there was a complication Zeus had not foretold. Each half a person would immediately do nothing except go to find our missing half, and upon finding such the two would fling their limbs about each other and remain there, pining away without eating or caring for themselves. When one half would die, it did not free the other, but rather sent that one seeking again for another to take the place of the corpse, some one, or rather some half, to cling to. They were being utterly destroyed. Zeus took pity on them and worked a further revision, though they certainly were no longer a threat to the gods; out of kindness he moved the genitals around to what we call the front, though before we had sown our seed onto the ground like locusts, and thus made it possible for male to generate in female and so breed by mutual embrace. He gave us the pleasure we now know in this, the satisfaction of orgasm which makes it easier for us then to rest and to separate, to go our ways, and to give attention to our duties, to make the sacrifices the gods deserve and want.

                Thus came about the ancient beginning of the desire we have for each other, a form of our need for each of us to reunite and to be one whole and original self, to be healed of the division which separated us.

                For each of us is separated, as though we only had one side, really, like coins with one side ground off or like sturgeon or other flatfish, pictures only of persons rather than persons, and to be complete we must each seek and find that from which we have been divided, that which can make us healed and with which we can finally be our true self.

                Of course you see the implications which indeed you may observe around us. Those who have origins in a person who had both sets of genitals being male are then looking for a male to complete themselves. Those who have origins in a person who had both sets of genitals being female are then looking for a female to complete themselves. Marring this symmetry are those who originate with a person who had one set of genitals male and the other female, for these seek a half who is unlike them in sex. We can see these preferences in many activities and often indeed it is clear from childhood.

 . . . .

                When one of us meets finally that whom we seek, even when we have been blind to the seeking that we do, even when the other is unlike us in age or in temperament or appearance, both the pair can be seen to be lost in amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and often then they cannot abide to be out of each other’s sight for fear that half their self will again be lost. This can turn into a life-long oneness, even among those who cannot explain why or what they need or want of each other. The intense yearning each feels toward the other is not dependent on the sexual act or even on anything the two of them do--it is a result of our division, a dark and unconscious knowledge which the soul has and of which we often cannot tell.

                If the god Hephaestus himself, that amazing craftsman and welder, were to come to two such lying in bed and ask of them “What is it you want of each other?” it is likely they would stutter and be unable really to explain. But if he were to say, “Do you want to be completely one, completely together day and night? --for I can do this, I can melt the two of you together and you can then grow together all your life and live a life as if you were a single person, and after your death as well your soul in the afterworld shall be one soul--is that what you want in your love?” --All of whom Hephaestus asks this question would be delighted and give ringing affirmation, and be glad to have things made so clear.

                Our desire and pursuit of our whole self is Love. It is something given to us naturally by our origins, the origin indeed of ourselves in our present form. And we must be obedient to our natures or Zeus has threatened to split us again, and what havoc that will wreak if it comes to pass! Do not then fight against this love, and instead know and recognize the profound force it has. For Love it is that leads us back to our former whole and healthy selves, that creature that once we were. It is the greatest benefactor that we have, and source of our greatest possibility of joy.

Based on the account by Plato in the Symposium.                  Mostly using the translation of Jowett (1871). d:\office\wpwin\wpdocs\courses\origlove.u03

The text of the Jowett translation, edited somewhat to update the style, is at

http://plato.evansville.edu/texts/jowett/symposium.htm