Love • Plato • Symposium
(Love in the Greek philosophy)
Plato's other half:

✍️ Everything you are going to read is from Plato's (the Greek philosopher) Symposium and is about Love and Why people are seeking for their soulmate or their other half:

“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves...
...and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment...”

Plato's other half | Plato's philosophy | Love in Symposium

“Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.”
― Plato, Symposium

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 Otus 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 sorely 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 apples 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 toward 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.

“Each of us, then, is a ‘matching half’ of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him.

That’s why a man who is split from the double sort (which used to be called ‘androgynous’) runs after women.
Many lecherous men have come from this class, and so do the lecherous women who run after men.

Women who are split from a woman, however, pay no attention at all to men; they are oriented more toward women, and lesbians come from this class. People who are split from a male are male-oriented. While they are boys, because they are chips off the male block, they love men and enjoy lying with men and being embraced by men; those are the best of boys and lads, because they are the most manly in their nature.

Of course, some say such boys are shameless, but they’re lying.

It’s not because they have no shame that such boys do this, you see, but because they are bold and brave and masculine, and they tend to cherish what is like themselves.

Do you want me to prove it?

Look, these are the only kind of boys who grow up to be real men in politics.
When they’re grown men, they are lovers of young men, and they naturally pay no attention to marriage or to making babies, except insofar as they are required by local custom.

They, however, are quite satisfied to live their lives with one another unmarried.
In every way, then, this sort of man grows up as a lover of young men and a lover of love, always rejoicing in his own kind.

“And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it’s to young men or not, then something wonderful happens:
The two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.

“These are the people who finish out their lives together and still cannot say what it is they want from one another.

“[When] a person meets the half that is his very own, something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.
These are people who finish out their lives together and still cannot say what it is they want from one another.”

No one would think it is the intimacy of sex—that mere sex is the reason each lover takes so great and deep a joy in being with the other.
It’s obvious that the soul of every lover longs for something else; his soul cannot say what it is, but like an oracle it has a sense of what it wants, and like an oracle it hides behind a riddle.
Suppose two lovers are lying together and Hephaestus stands over them with his mending tools, asking, ‘What is it you human beings really want from each other?’

And suppose they’re perplexed, and he asks them again, ‘Is this your heart’s desire, then—for the two of you to become parts of the same whole, as near as can be, and never to separate, day or night?

Because if that’s your desire, I’d like to weld you together and join you into something that is naturally whole, so that the two of you are made into one.

Then the two of you would share one life, as long as you lived, because you would be one being, and by the same token, when you died, you would be one and not two in Hades, having died a single death.

Look at your love, and see if this is what you desire: Wouldn’t this be all the good fortune you could want?’

“Surely you can see that no one who received such an offer would turn it down; no one would find anything else that he wanted.
Instead, 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.
Why should this be so?
It’s because, as I said, we used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now ‘love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”

• Read here Platos's Symposium (PDF)