3.5: The Origins of Love, from Plato’s Symposium

The theme of early humanity’s overweening arrogance and the divine need to temper it is a concept again explored in Plato’s Symposium, which follows a fictional retelling of discourse between Aristophanes, the physician Eryximachus, Socrates, the host Agathon, Pausanias and Phaedrus.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): A Dionysian scene and representation of a banquet (or symposion), where participants recline on couches to share philosophical views while an attendant serves and a flutist offers entertainment. 6th century BC. Find from the region of Ancient Asai. Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth. (Photo by Zde, CC BY SA 4.0 Wikimedia)

At a banquet honoring a tragic victory, the men discuss the nature of Love, both as a primitive force and a god who drove the conduct of all early humans. Essentially an etiological myth, Aristophanes’ dialogue claims that mankind has never fully appreciated the nature of Love, nor shown it the praise, temples and altars it deserved. “Since,” he claims, the god “is the best friend of men, the helper and healer of the ills which are the great impediment to the happiness of the race,” he attempts to describe Love’s power so that his audience might enlighten others.

The two sexes, male and female, were not as they are now, but originally three in number, corresponding with the sun, the earth and the moon; “there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word 'Androgynous' is only preserved as a term of reproach.”

Rather than being bi-pedal, these early versions were round, with their backs and sides forming a circle: a projection of the astral bodies from which they descended. Each “had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond.” They walked upright, backwards, forwards, and could also roll over in a version of a speedy cartwheel. Having grown arrogant with their circular completeness and power, these early people attempted to roll across the heavens and attack the gods. But Zeus, reluctant to destroy them for this adolescent folly, resolved to cap their ambition by separating the two halves of each. This, he believed, would “humble their pride and improve their manners;” thus, people would continue to exist, but cut into two which would diminish their strength while also increasing their numbers. “This,” he reasoned, “will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.”

Using the ancient power of commandments, he spoke and divided each in two, “as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility.” The gift of self-reflection, was accompanied by the bidding to Apollo to patch their wounds and fashion their forms. Pulling their loose skin, “like the purses which draw in,” he made a navel, “as a memorial of the primeval state.”

Following the division, each part rushed to the other in an intense longing for their previous state. Their desire to again be one was so great that “they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them.”

Feeling pity for them, Zeus turned their genitalia around to the front of their bodies, allowing them to seek, find and mate with their other halves: men who seek their male half, women who seek their female half, and the formerly androgynous who seek the opposite sex. The adjustments redirected the ambitions of humans away from challenging the authority of the Olympians and toward communing with their mate.

The internal drive to seek partners is not necessarily carnal, as Aristophanes explains, “but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.” Humans’ capacity for love and the sexual desire that accompanies it cannot be fully reasoned, for it is the work of the god of Love and vestigial memories of a more primal state of perfection (Socrates).

For an illustrative video of this story, see Hedwig and the Angry Inch, “The Origins of Love” on YouTube.