The Symposium, written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, presents a fictional discussion on love among intellectuals during a drinking party. The discussion starts with the guest Phaedrus’s proposal to praise the god of love. Following this proposal, each party attendant gives their own speech on love, often disagreeing or elaborating on one another's speeches. This paper is particularly interested in examining the speeches of Aristophanes and Socrates, in which they address the purpose of love in different ways. Since the two stances stand in contrast, and both arguments leave gaps in their reasoning, the Symposium does not present a definitive answer to the purpose of love but leaves room for the audience to conduct their own philosophical inquiries.
Aristophanes claims that the goal of love is to fill the incompleteness in each person, and he explains this view through a myth about the origin of love. Aristophanes elaborates that humans looked very different back in ancient times:
The shape of each human being was completely round, with back and sides in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands, and two faces, exactly alike, on a rounded neck. Between the two faces, which were on opposite sides, was one head with four ears.[1]
Our present shape results from the gods splitting all the humans in half. Therefore, humans are all incomplete. To be complete again, we search for our other halves. Hence, according to Aristophanes’ speech, the object of love is the unity with one’s partner and the completeness of oneself.
On the contrary, Socrates’ explanation of love is oriented towards knowledge and thus transcends the desire for bodily fulfillment. He argues that, in a broad sense, love is the desire for permanent beauty. Love, in a romantic sense, is only the first step in the pursuit of immortal beauty. In the process of pursuing beauty, a person should first love beautiful bodies. Later, they should love the beauty of the soul, realizing that bodily charms are trivial. From there, they appreciate beautiful ideas and theories. Finally, they arrive at the goal of loving, that is, at grasping the form of beauty. The form of beauty, Socrates describes, is absolute and unchanging, because the form of beauty is not attached to any physical entity. The form of beauty is beauty itself, instead of a beautiful face or a beautiful hand. Moreover, it is all beautiful without any aspect that is ugly.
Aristophanes’ and Socrates’ views on the purpose of love contrast with each other. The object of love for Aristophanes is the completeness of self, but the object of love for Socrates is to learn the permanent beauty. As a result, Aristophanes emphasizes intimacy in a romantic relationship. To illustrate the importance of intimacy between lovers, he says that if the god Hephaestus were to offer to join a couple together into one body, the lovers would not possibly turn it down, for “everyone would think he’d found out at last what he had always wanted: to come together and melt together with the one he loves, so that one person emerged from two.”[2] Hence, for Aristophanes, it is important for lovers to physically accompany each other constantly. Socrates, on the other hand, focuses on the aesthetic or intellectual progress of the lovers. Beauty, especially the beauty of the soul, does not require physical interactions, so staying together with one’s lover is not important for Socrates, as stated in his speech, “Whether they are together or apart, he remembers that beauty.” [3]
However, problems emerge from both speeches. Due to the mythical nature of Aristophanes’ speech, his explanation of love is logically vague. First, he does not address why “completeness” is necessarily desirable, as Socrates points out when refuting Aristophanes: “I don’t think an individual takes joy in what belongs to him personally unless by ‘belonging to me’ he means ‘good’ and by ‘belonging to another’ he means ‘bad.’”[4] When a person is severely injured or diseased, for example, they might choose to amputate. Accordingly, the fact that two body parts originally grow together does not mean they should always remain together. By the same token, the fact that one and their partner used to grow together does not necessarily mean they desire to grow together again after separation.
In addition, incompleteness does not necessarily cause love. Even if completeness is necessarily desirable, Aristophanes does not address the possibility of making up for the incompleteness in another way. Specifically, if completeness means having all the expected parts, the body’s incompleteness in the myth can symbolize unmet psychological expectations. Furthermore, when Aristophanes argues we love our partners because we are incomplete, the unmet expectation cannot be the desire for the company of our love interest: love, in Aristophanes’ speech, is wanting to be with one’s partner, so “I love my boyfriend because I want to be with him” is insufficient as an explanation for the end of love. Accordingly, the unfulfilled expectation must be non-romantic. It follows that not only will there be another way to satisfy the desire, but the other way may also be a better solution. For example, if a person feels incomplete because they desire to succeed in their career, cuddling with their romantic partner will not help them truly realize their wish. In this case, the best that love can do is to distract the person from their cravings. Hence, considering these two questions, the myth Aristophanes provides requires more logical explanations.
Likewise, Socrates’ speech leaves some questions unanswered. In the pursuit of immortal beauty, Socrates argues that people first love beautiful bodies and then beautiful souls, but the practicality of this process raises more questions. According to Socrates, after a person realizes that all the beautiful bodies are similar, “he must become a lover of all beautiful bodies, and he must think that this wild gaping after just one body is a small thing and despise it. After this he must think that the beauty of people’s souls is more valuable than the beauty of their bodies.”[5] By the phrases “must become” and “must think,” Socrates necessitates that the transition of focus from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls is plausible. However, he does not explain why it is not possible for a person to continue appreciating beautiful bodies, unable to elevate bodily beauty to that of the soul. For those who happen to find bodies attractive but not souls, it may not be possible for them to climb up the ladder of love and reach the goal.
Another question of Socrates’ argument is the possibility of understanding the form of beauty. Socrates describes the form of beauty as: “It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in that.”[6] It is reasonable to claim that there is some notion of beauty prior to experiences, and that notion is applied to experiences. When we are trying to find the commonalities between a beautiful painting and beautiful music, or looking for beauty itself, we will realize that our sensory experiences of them are completely different: no stroke or color in the painting corresponds to any note in a piece of music. Nevertheless, we say they are both beautiful. Then, our understanding of beauty cannot be completely derived from experience. If a person, hearing a supposedly beautiful piece of music and seeing a supposedly beautiful painting, finds no commonalities in the two, we have no way to teach her the notion of beauty by exposing her to a variety of experiences. Even if she can learn the vocabulary word “beauty,” she will not be able to apply it. Before we can describe an object as “beautiful,” this a priori notion of beauty is embedded in all of us, or it is not attainable if one is not born with it. If this a priori criterion is what Socrates refers to as “beauty in itself,” it requires no additional effort for searching. But if he wants us to grasp the criterion explicitly, it would be impossible, because we can never get it from experience or from processing experience.
In the Symposium, Aristophanes claims that the purpose of love is to complete oneself; in contrast, Socrates believes that the goal of love is to grasp the form of beauty. By offering two different views, the Symposium does not provide a final answer to the question “What is the goal of love?” Instead, by juxtaposing different opinions and leaving questions to be answered in each argument, it encourages readers to reflect on the purpose of love dialectically and to further examine their lives critically.
[1] Plato, “Symposium,” trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and Douglas S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 473.
[2] Plato, “Symposium,” 475-476.
[3] Plato, “Symposium,” 492.
[4] Plato, “Symposium,” 489.
[5] Plato, “Symposium,” 492.
[6] Plato, “Symposium,” 493.
Bibliography
Plato. “Symposium,” translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and Douglas S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.
