Love According To Aristophanes: The Power Of Love

According to Aristophanes, “Love is the desire of the whole, and the pursuit of the whole is called love.” (Page 8). Love is the name that human beings give to the desire for wholeness, the desire to be restored to original human nature. Love is important given the kind of creatures humans are; it is the only thing that can lead to happiness. Human beings innately find themselves as lacking – as incomplete and wounded. Love is important because it presents itself as a chance to heal this incompleteness. Just by existing, human beings feel this lack; it is innate. Love is the desire to fill that lack/incompleteness. Human beings fall in love in an attempt to become whole again.

Moreover, with the aid of a myth of the origin of human nature, Aristophanes attempts to explain the power of love. According to this Ancient Greek myth, there originally were three species of humans who possessed two faces, four arms and four legs - akin to two human beings stuck together. The sexes of the humans were: Male-male, male-female, and female-female. Originally, these four-legged creatures (the original humans) were extremely powerful, and at one point even attempted to attack/overthrow the gods. In response to this attack, Zeus cut the four-legged human-beings in half in an attempt to extinguish their impressive power, without exterminating the entire race –which, ultimately, proved to be effective, except for one minor problem: The newly split in half humans were dying

Aristophanes personifies this with the god Haphaestus asking two lovers what specifically it is they want from love, to which they respond that they cannot articulate what it is that they desire from love. Hephaestus suggests that what they want is to be fused into one being - to which they replied, yes! That is what we desire, but could not articulate