Jack Haven

"Aristophanes on Love"

The account of Eros described by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium has reached many people since its first iteration some 2,500 years ago. In many ways, Aristophanes describes such a real experience of love to which, though not without its failings, we can all in some way relate. Aristophanes describes a world in which the gods have punished humanity for our pretensions by cutting us apart from our other half, for whom we are forever doomed to search. Those of us who have experienced the pain of loss can relate to Aristophanes' explanatory myth, but in order to understand why, it is imperative that we understand both sides of the myth: the tragedy and the comedy of love.

Comedy is just as important in love as tragedy. That humans continue to strive after the same desire that time after time leaves us writhing in agony must be colored with a pinch of ridiculousness. We may be forever doomed to search for our other half, but we are also forever doomed to be the butt of laughter as we squirm and salivate in the presence of a favorite. This is not lost on Aristophanes, whose job it is to poke fun at man's unquenchable thirst for the absurdly ephemeral pleasure that Eros provides. That our desire to achieve "wholeness" through love can be described as simultaneously tragic and comic is one of the reasons that this very desire is such a peculiar human experience of which Aristophanes' speech is an excellent account.

The Tragic Comedy of Love

The tragedy and comedy of love are so embedded into Aristophanes' account that one cannot be considered without also considering the other. Aristophanes begins his account by arguing that our nature was once not the same as it is now. We were free creatures, "awesome in [our] strength and robustness," and we had "great and proud thoughts" (Plato, 1986, 190b). Aristophanes says that there were three races, all of them globular in their form and in the way they moved. They each had four arms, four legs, and two sets of genitals, one on each side, and we reproduced in the ground like cicadas. It is difficult to imagine a more ridiculously funny picture than that of a huge, globular, four-armed and four-legged human being rolling around on outstretched limbs in order to get around. If that were not enough, Aristophanes compares these humans' style of reproduction to that of cicadas, insects with broad heads and membranous wings, the males with organs that produce a high-pitched drone to attract their mates. Rolling and squirting reproductive juices everywhere while making strange, high-pitched noises, we cannot help but laugh at this ludicrously gross picture of humanity before the gods decided to punish us for being so licentious.

Aristophanes describes three races that existed back when humans were of this nature. One race, the male, came from the sun and had two penises and two pairs of testicles, each on either side. Another race, the female, came from the earth and had two vaginas protected by labia on either side of her globular form. Finally, the third race was a race of androgynes that came from the moon and had the male genitalia on one side and the female on the other. In the time during which the events of the Symposium took place, androgyny was looked down upon and ridiculed. Consequently, a race of natural androgynes would have been considered especially ridiculous to the Greeks.

These human beings rebelled against the gods and incurred their wrath. As punishment for their insurrection, Zeus decided to cut each of them in half down the middle. "And whenever he cut someone, he had Apollo turn the face and half the neck to face the cut, so that in beholding his own cutting the human being might be more orderly" (190e). In a humorous picture, Apollo is asked by Zeus to heal all the rest of us by "drawing together the skin from everywhere toward what is now called the belly [...] just like drawstring bags" (ibid.). He tied off the skin "in the middle of the belly, and that is what they call the navel" (ibid.). This process of cutting and reshaping humans into two-armed, two-legged creatures with one set of genitals coming out of our backsides is described in humorously base terms. Apollo smoothes out the wrinkles in our skin with a similar sort of tool as that used by shoemakers, continuing this base image of humanity's cutting.

As funny as it seems, however, this image quickly turns tragic. Humans cannot bear to be apart from the half that had just been cut from them. Each cut human being, "desiring its own half [...] came together; and throwing their arms around one another and entangling themselves with one another in the desire to grow together, they began to die off due to hunger and the rest of their inactivity, because they were unwilling to do anything apart from one another" (191a-191b). It was futile, of course, since simply rubbing up against each other would not allow the humans to become again what they had been. The separation, unless the gods chose to intervene, would be permanent. Worse yet, as each half died off due to hunger, the remaining half would wander the world until it found another to which it could entangle itself in the fruitless attempt to join together. Seeing the humans begin die off in such large numbers, "Zeus took pity on them" and "rearrange[d] their genitals toward the front [...] so that in embracing [...] there might at least be satiety in their being together and they might pause and turn to work and attend to the rest of their livelihood" (191b-191c). Aristophanes makes very clear the nature of this "being together" by what he calls it: a "device" (191b), a tool for the temporary satiation of our desire to rejoin with our separated half.

Eros allows for this device. But if sex only a contrivance, then there does not seem to be a reason to praise Eros for providing it. The tragedy of our situation is what makes Eros praiseworthy. Sex is the only means by which we can temporarily satiate our desire to be whole again. Without it, we would again be doomed to die slowly and starving as we spent every waking hour in entangled despair with whomever we could get our arms around. Sex allows the great wound inflicted on us by the gods to be momentarily healed, and it allows us to "pause and [...] attend to the rest of [our] livelihood." Sex is only the physical expression of a desire that is wholly inarticulable, but it relates to our longing to rejoin with our other half. Aristophanes describes a situation in which two lovers are confronted by Hephaestus, who offers to bind the two lovers together if that is what they want. Aristophanes claims that these two lovers would not hesitate to take Hephaestus up on his offer because to be bound together for eternity is what lovers want above everything else. But Hephaestus, without whom no such binding would be possible, is not coming. Lovers will never rejoin in the same way in which they were once joined. Sex, tragically, is the closest thing we have to the binding together that Hephaestus will never offer us. Aristophanes, in the end, assures us that it is better to praise the little we have rather than end up having nothing at all.

Eros in the World

The tragic comedy of Aristophanes' account of love lend it an honesty that is unique among the eulogies of Eros given by the other speakers of the Symposium. The experience of love in the real world is both comic and tragic. The physical expression of love that is so important to the human experience, sex, is comical when taken by itself. Two bodies must entangle each other in awkward, uncomfortable positions in order to fit one person's priapic protuberance into the other's socket. As they bob up and down, colliding into one another, one person's skin smacking slimily upon the other's, their countenances take on bizarre and misshapen forms, and they are each driven to bleat and wail like injured wild fauna. Sex is ridiculous, and therein lies its hilarity.

But sex is also tragic in its evanescence. Sex ends, the orgasm passes, and the experience is over. The tranquility that follows is profound, but not much time will have elapsed before the desire to return to that experience takes hold of us again. We cannot be happy, or whole, without the experience of love, and the experience of love cannot be culminated without its physical expression via sex. But the sex is soon over, and we will want it again. Erotic relationships, too, come to an end. There are very few of us who are lucky enough to make life partnerships, but even those lucky few must work hard to maintain them. All of this stems from our initial separation, but also from a separate problem, which Aristophanes touches on before ending his account.

I am referring to all men and women: our race would be happy if we were to bring our love to a consummate end, and each of us were to get his own favorite on his return to his ancient nature. And if this is the best, it must necessarily be the case that, in present circumstances, that which is closest to it is the best; and that is to get a favorite whose nature is to one's taste. (193c, emphasis added)

Our present circumstances, as Aristophanes implies, are different from those we had as globular human beings. Many of the halves died out due to the starvation that humanity endured after the cutting, before Zeus had rearranged our genitalia. Some of the halves have since died out as well. The legal institution of marriage has forced halves of the race of men and halves of the race of women to intermarry and breed along with the heterosexual halves of the race of androgynes. For these reasons and a myriad more, none of us alive today can ever hope to meet our other half. Even if Hephaestus did offer to bind us together with another, we would be forced to wonder whether such a thing would be wise. How can we be certain that we have found our other half? Do we really want to risk spending eternity with the wrong person?

All that we can do, given our current, sad state, is to find "that which is closest" to our "own favorite": to love and share our lives with someone "whose nature is closest to one's taste." Because this sort of union is not as natural as that we shared before with our own half, we must work continuously to maintain it. Love between two people who have chosen to monogamously share a life together must be maintained over time through hard work. Otherwise, we would be doomed again to our futile search for a long-lost half that no longer exists. Moreover, we are asked to obey the gods so as to avoid the far worse fate that Zeus promised should we again prove licentious: "'But if they are thought to behave licentiously still, and are unwilling to keep quiet, then I shall cut them again in two,' he said, 'so that they will go hopping on one leg'" (190d).

In spite of this tragic comedy, our love for one another is worthy of praise. The axiom that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all is commonly known and believed to be true. It is praiseworthy to love because, through the experience of love, we can be whole: we can achieve happiness. This happiness may be ephemeral, but it is important nonetheless. While we cannot maintain our feeling of wholeness, that we can experience it at all is thanks to Eros: this simultaneously tragic and comic medium for the attainment of a temporal wholeness that, at the very least, we can hope we may yet be able to experience again. If Eros was not around to give us at least this, we would again be the miserable creatures dying of starvation as we futilely grasped at one another. Perhaps this is the greatest tragedy: love is needed. Its expression is indispensable to the survival of the human being. Without it, we die. With it, we make fools of ourselves. There is nothing more tragically comic in this world than that.

References

Plato. (1986). Symposium (S. Benardete, Trans.). New York: Bantam Books.