Seven People at Dinner

Plato's Symposium is a drinking party at which each guest, in turn, makes a speech in praise of love. It is among the most influential things ever written on the subject, and most of its influence comes from the speech Plato appears to take least seriously.

Aristophanes, a comic playwright, tells a myth. Human beings were originally round, with four arms, four legs and two faces. They were powerful enough to alarm the gods, so Zeus cut them in half, and ever since each half has wandered looking for the other. Love is the name for that search, the pursuit of a lost wholeness.

It is a beautiful idea, it is put in the mouth of a comedian, and it is the only part of the dialogue most people can repeat. Every story about soulmates and other halves descends from it.

Socrates then reports a very different account, which he attributes to a woman named Diotima.

Love, on this account, is desire, and you desire only what you lack. So love is not itself beautiful or good; it is the pursuit of beauty and goodness by somebody who does not possess them. From there Diotima builds an ascent. You begin loving one beautiful body. You come to see that beauty is present in bodies generally. You move to the beauty of minds, then of laws and institutions, then of knowledge, and finally to beauty itself, unchanging and not attached to any particular thing.

Two incompatible theories, in one book, and popular culture kept the joke.

Take the serious one seriously for a moment, because it has a consequence people usually miss. If love is desire for what you lack, then nothing complete can love anything. A fully satisfied being would have no reason to love, which means love is a permanent sign of insufficiency rather than a sign of abundance. That has bothered readers for two thousand years, and it is the reason later Christian thinkers needed agape, a love that gives rather than seeks, to describe a God who lacks nothing.

The ladder also faces an obvious objection, and it was made early: it uses people.

If a particular beautiful person is a rung, then the better you climb, the less that person matters as themselves. A philosophy of love has somehow arrived at a position where nobody is loved for who they are. Defenders answer that the ascent does not discard the lower rungs; it stops mistaking them for the summit, and a person loved as a person can also be the beginning of something larger.

That reply is worth weighing rather than accepting, because the same argument returns repeatedly in this course. In the books, García Márquez gives us a man devoted for fifty-one years to an image he formed in adolescence, and the question is whether he ever loved the woman or only what she started in him. In the science, the finding that attachment runs through general reward machinery raises the same worry in laboratory form: whether the person is loved, or whether they are the thing that produces the reward.

The Symposium asked it first, and the honest answer is that Plato did not settle it either.