Among the participants are both Socrates and the comic poet Aristophanes, whose play The Clouds had viciously satirized Socrates as a manipulative, impractical teacher who taught students to circumvent the law. Given Plato's dislike and suspicion of Aristophanes—in Apology he calls The Clouds one of the primary reasons that the people of Athens mistrusted Socrates—we might expect the character of Aristophanes in Symposium to appear foolish or cruel. However, Plato assigns him the most memorable and beautiful speech in the entire volume. Aristophanes's speech takes the form of a creation myth—the story of an ancestral race of human beings who were neither male nor female but a combination of both, who grew so strong that they challenged the gods and were each split into two incomplete halves.
Plato does not cast Aristophanes's story as a serious attempt to explain human history. Rather, he is trying to create a metaphor for something that he sees as a crucial element of human nature: the deep and aching need we have to find a person who can complete what is lacking in ourselves. This need forms the basis of erotic love, which, for Plato, was not entirely sexual, as the term generally implies today. An erotic relationship in the Platonic sense is a total and all-consuming connection with another person that—whether or not it has a sexual component—is primarily a meeting of minds and a mingling of intellects.
The central rhetorical device that Plato uses in "The Speech of Aristophanes" is an extended analogy between the creatures that Aristophanes describes and real human beings, who feel the same sense of loss and emptiness because we have been designed to be fulfilled by other people.
First you must learn what Human Nature was in the beginning and what has happened to it since, because long ago our nature was not what it is now, but very different. There were three kinds of human beings, that's my first point—not two as there are now, male and female. In addition to these, there was a third, a combination of those two; its name survives, though the kind itself has vanished. At that time, you see, the word "androgynous" really meant something: a form made up of male and female elements, though now there's nothing but the word, and that's used as an insult. My second point is that 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. There were two sets of sexual organs, and everything else was the way you'd imagine it from what I've told you. They walked upright, as we do now, whatever direction they wanted. And whenever they set out to run fast, they thrust out all their eight limbs, the ones they had then, and spun rapidly, the way gymnasts do cartwheels, by bringing their legs around straight.
Now here is why there were three kinds, and why they were as I described them: The male kind was originally an offspring of the sun, the female of the earth, and the one that combined both genders was an offspring of the moon, because the moon shares in both. They were spherical, and so was their motion, because they were like their parents in the sky.
In strength and power, therefore, they were terrible, and they had great ambitions. They made an attempt on the gods, and Homer's story about Ephialtes and Otos[30] was originally about them: how they tried to make an ascent to heaven so as to attack the gods. Then Zeus and the other gods met in council to discuss what to do, and they were sore perplexed. They couldn't wipe out the human race with thunderbolts and kill them all off, as they had the giants, because that would wipe out the worship they receive, along with the sacrifices we humans give them. On the other hand, they couldn't let them run riot. At last, after great effort, Zeus had an idea.
"I think I have a plan," he said, "that would allow human beings to exist and stop their misbehaving: they will give up being wicked when they lose their strength. So I shall now cut each of them in two. At one stroke they will lose their strength and also become more profitable to us, owing to the increase in their number. They shall walk upright on two legs. But if I find they still run riot and do not keep the peace," he said, "I will cut them in two again, and they'll have to make their way on one leg, hopping."
So saying, he cut those human beings in two, the way people cut sorb-apples2 5 before they dry them or the way they cut eggs with hairs. As he cut each one, he commanded Apollo to turn its face and half its neck towards the wound, so that each person would see that he'd been cut and keep better order. Then Zeus commanded Apollo to heal the rest of the wound, and Apollo did turn the face around, and he drew skin from all sides over what is now called the stomach, and there he made one mouth, as in a pouch with a drawstring, and fastened it at the center of the stomach. This is now called the navel. Then he smoothed out the other wrinkles, of which there were many, and he shaped the breasts, using some such tool as shoemakers have for smoothing wrinkles out of leather on the form. But he left a few wrinkles around the stomach and the navel, to be a reminder of what happened long ago.
Now, since their natural form had been cut in two, each one longed for its own other half, and so they would throw their arms about each other, weaving themselves together, wanting to grow together. In that condition they would die from hunger and general idleness, because they would not do anything apart from each other. Whenever one of the halves died and one was left, the one that was left still sought another and wove itself together with that. Sometimes the half he met came from a woman, as we'd call her now, sometimes it came from a man; either way, they kept on dying.
Then, however, Zeus took pity on them, and came up with another plan: he moved their genitals around to the front! Before then, you see, they used to have their genitals outside, like their faces, and they cast seed and made children, not in one another, but in the ground, like cicadas. So Zeus brought about this relocation of genitals, and in doing so he invented interior reproduction, by the man in the woman. The purpose of this was so that, when a man embraced a woman, he would cast his seed and they would have children; but when male embraced male, they would at least have the satisfaction of intercourse, after which they could stop embracing, return to their jobs, and look after their other needs in life. This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other. Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
How does knowing that Aristophanes's speech was one of a series of speeches devoted to the same topic in a friendly competition affect your understanding of his words? How might he have framed the argument differently if he were writing a philosophical essay on the topic?
Why do you think that Plato chose to put this speech in the mouth of somebody whom, on other occasions, he strongly disagreed with? Do you think that Plato intended for us to read Aristophanes's speech as his own words?
2. Sorb-apples: small, berry-sized fruit.
Why does Aristophanes choose to make his point with a purely fictional story? Is the story meant to be humorous? What element of human nature does he hope to dramatize with this story?
How does Aristophanes understand the term androgynous? What does he suggest about the nature of masculinity and femininity?
What role does divine intervention play in Aristophanes's allegory? What might he intend to symbolize by depicting Zeus as the creator of fragmented beings?
What does the allegory ultimately suggest about human nature?