That time when ancient Greeks got drunk and argued about love
A white tent sags in the parking lot outside your local supermarket, while the aisles inside bristle with buckets of roses and boxes of chocolates. Yes, Valentine’s Day is nigh. We will soon be called upon to find not just the real price on our love — “Does a $19.95 box of assorted chocolates signify a lesser love than a $39.95 bouquet of roses?” — but also find the right words among the thousands of prefabricated expressions of love in the greeting card aisle. But before we enter the card aisle at the store, we should first explore the philosophy aisle at the library. There we will find, among his many dialogues, Plato’s Symposium,
which grapples with the idea of love. If the history of western philosophy, as Alfred North Whitehead quipped, is little more than a series of footnotes to Plato, the Symposium has no doubt led to the profoundest footnotes of all. A symposium in ancient Athens was not the sort held in the drab conference rooms where panelists sip bottled water while speakers drone on from prepared texts. Instead, it was a cross between a toga party and debating society, with the symposiasts discoursing on a chosen subject while downing wine and dallying with flute girls. The symposiasts assembled by Plato soon make clear that love is not just a many-splendored thing, but also a many-splintered thing. This fictional gathering includes the handsome and wealthy Alcibiades, the comic yet conservative playwright Aristophanes and the freethinking and allegedly corrupting Socrates. As each holds forth, we soon discover that eros, the Greek word for romantic love, is anything but a second-hand emotion.
Just ask Socrates. If his lover asked Tina Turner’s famous question, what’s love got to do with it, he would reply that it’s got nothing to do with you, lover. The true philosopher is not drawn to the beauty of a body — leave such behavior to slaves — but instead to the beau
ty of the soul. If “we could see the beautiful itself, unalloyed, unmixed and not stuffed with human flesh and mortal rubbish,” Socrates marvels, we would be free from the fears and sorrows that come with love for another mortal and flawed human being. In a word, what we call Platonic love fastens on a beauty which transcends time, place and — please sit down — you. Or, for that matter, the beautiful but blotto Alcibiades, who crashes the symposium with a flute girl in tow just as Socrates finishes his account of love. Then and there the golden boy of Athens challenges this account of eros by declaring his desperate love for … you guessed it, Socrates. And yet, time and again the wise and wondrous but also much older and much plainer philosopher has spurned his advances, leaving Alcibiades “at my wit’s end.” Leave it to the comedian, Aristophanes, to say something serious about Alcibiades’ predicament. Our distant ancestors, he tells his increasingly inebriated companions, were a race of spherical beings endowed with two heads, four arms and four legs. Powerful and ambitious, they decided to overthrow the Olympian gods. But Zeus strikes first, severing, like a “hair slicing a hard-boiled egg,” our bagel-shaped forbearers.
The consequences are comic, but as with the best jokes, they also make us think. Our ancestors, once filled with hubris, are now filled with hunger. From their original perfection as globular creatures — the Greeks believed that the circle, with neither beginning nor end, was the perfect shape — we are reduced to imperfection and incompleteness, spending our lives searching for our other half. This is a dicey enterprise: If you are a half of a garlic bagel, a cinnamon raisin half, though sweet, will never make you feel complete. Here we confront the greatest mystery of our lives: why it is that another person — this person and no other — can make us whole. As Aristophanes observes, and though they “pass their whole lives together … they cannot explain what they desire of one another.” But even if they cannot explain why, they know they cannot exist without the other. Years ago, my wife gave me for Valentine’s Day an audio card with the Modern
English song “I’ll Stop the World to Melt With You.” If you are fortunate enough to be like us, you are still melting with your other half. But if you cannot find that card, you can always turn to the ancient Greek who loved being a card. Love is what happens, Aristophanes reminds us, when, “lost in an amazement and friendship and intimacy,” we discover the other half who makes us whole.