Plato's Symposium by Plato

Plato's Symposium by Plato

Author:Plato [Plato]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-01-07T05:00:00+00:00


But the longing for the lost other half is not identical with Eros. It was simply the result of separating a whole into two parts, a condition akin to such experiences as losing a limb. In such cases we are no longer wholly ourselves, and we lament. We love the part of ourselves that is missing. We love our own. Of course in Aristophanes’ tale it is half of us, and we can no longer be what we once were in the enjoyment of our old nature. So the first consequence of Zeus’s act was that the two halves were moved to embrace each other as if they were still a whole. But this made it impossible for men to do anything else, and they starved to death. Zeus took pity on them, a pity suitable to Zeus’s selfishness, because men were dying and he was losing worshipers. He moved the sexual organs that had been on the outside—that is, the back—to the front. Apollo had already turned men’s heads from what used to be the outside toward the inside, in order that, looking down at themselves, they would be reminded of what they had suffered. The mere sexual pleasure, which seems to have been like any other bodily function before, now becomes a mode of satisfaction and fulfillment as men and women hopelessly embrace one another. Their encounters produce intense pleasures, and their orgasms release them momentarily from the terrible pain of their loss. Sexual satisfaction is a momentary self-forgetting connected with the permanent remembering that afflicts men.

But man’s condition soon worsened. In the beginning, their real other half was right there, and they could hold on to each other. But soon some of the halves died while others lived on, and in succeeding generations, the offspring of mixed couples reproduced together without necessarily being the true other half. Eventually there are no true other halves. The result is that men continue the quest, but it is hopeless. This justifies both fidelity and promiscuity. Those who are faithful to each other reproduce something of the original indivisibility imitated in bodily union. But they are not really the two halves of a whole. Those who go around continually trying new partners are free of the delusion that they have found the other half, but they are searching for what they cannot find. In both cases, the sexual satisfaction provided by Zeus makes this incurable wound at least tolerable. What is real is man’s permanent separation from his truest nature, along with an unremitting longing somehow to correct the separation. Man now has a second nature, and that second nature is the result of a divine punishment that destroyed his first nature. It is unclear whether man would prefer to have that first nature without Eros or to have suffered his wound and have the pleasure of Eros. It is unclear even whether Aristophanes has thought this through, although his poet’s art clearly belongs to this second stage of humanity. I



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