Symposium - AIC

Annie Larrivée
toward a (irrecoverably) lost perfection, or its conception of the self as a deficient entity whose
integrity depends on a (precarious) relationship with another (equally deficient) human being, but also
because Aristophanes’ story evokes those aspects of love that are potentially asocial (the lovers are so
absorbed in one another that they care for nothing else), self-destructive (they let themselves die) and
self-impoverishing (it motivates an intense search for a lost half that absorbs time and energy that
could be better spent). 21 Let us not forget that the whole situation is the result of a divine punishment
according to the story.
That said, what makes the Aristophanic narrative relevant here is precisely the radical
incompatibility between the conception of the self implicitly contained in that story and the Socratic
ideal of care for the self. Socrates himself ironically –though unambiguously– underlines that
incompatibility when he later attacks the Aristophanic conception of love by making the following
statement:
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Now there is a certain story [...] according to which lovers are those people who seek their other
halves. But according to my story, a lover does not seek the half or the whole, unless, my
friend, it turns out to be good as well. I say this because people are willing to cut off their own
arms and legs if they think they are diseased. 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’. That’s because what everyone loves is really nothing other than the
good. (205e-206a) 22
Of course, despite Socrates’ edifying words, many people seem to ‘love’ and search the company of
someone who is not ‘good’ to/for them. 23 Aristophanes’ fanciful narrative transposes, in striking
images, the intense, painful and often self-destructive experience that love too often is – and from an
empirical point of view it is probably better equipped than Socratima’s to make sense of most
people’s experience of erotic attachment. 24 Whereas Socratima describes eros as it can or could be at
its best, Aristophanes shows it as it usually is. Not only does he show it as it is, but the lost-half story
has no power to transform that pitiful experience. It does not enrich it, it does not make use of its
intensity to bring us somewhere else, and it does not aim to. This story does not make us better and is
not trying to. In brief, Aristophane’s speech is unapologetically a-therapeutic and a-protreptic. (Unless
we suppose that a plain description of this pathetic experience could trigger, in some people, an
intense desire to avoid it!)
Another way to shed light on the difference between the two, without jumping ahead, would
be to say that Aristophanes’ and Socratima’s different conceptions of love find their source in a
different understanding of the temporal and normative nature of the self. Whereas Aristophanes’ self
is essentially a-normative and defined by its past (the self is and wishes to be what it once was –no
matter what that was), Socratima’s self, as we will soon see, is a self in progress, turned toward its
future, which is the temporal condition of its own improvement. That self is future-oriented and
fundamentally normative, hence the central importance of self-care. It is a ‘becoming self’ whose
process of becoming is based on the capacity to let go of the parts of itself that are not worth keeping
and to perpetuate those that are worthy of “intra- or interpersonal propagation”. In other words, it does
not confuse what it was (what it inherited from its past) with what it ‘is’ (that is: what it can become
by reproducing and ‘propagating’ what is good in itself and by purging what is worthless from itself).
21 191a-b.
22 The only aspect of this story that is remotely linked to a protreptic motion (in the literal sense of the word: ‘to turn
toward’) is its attempt to make sense of one’s sexual orientation. That said, the story helps to understand why people are
sexually ‘turned’ in a specific direction and makes no attempt to change that direction determined by the past and apparently
unchangeable.
23 To the extent that this story depicts the situation of one half searching for another half, we must suppose that the original
unity was in some way differentiated, i.e., composed of two halves at least partially identifiable in their individuality,
something like the unity of conjoint twins. The story does not mention the possibility that one of these twins (or both) feels
liberated after the separation and that they could have experienced their union as, say, being joined to a gangrenous limb, as
Socrates’ objection supposes. All that we know is that the original spheres or ‘wheels’ felt complete while the half-wheels
feel incomplete without their lost half and that the wheels originally had powers that even two reunited halves would lack.
24 It is also compatible with the psychoanalytic axiom now largely accepted according to which the erotic tendencies and
needs of adults are essentially determined by their past (more precisely by the infant’s primary relationship with the mother
and other care-givers).