Love and what we find valuable › Aristophanes and the wish to become whole

Aristophanes imagines original human beings as rounded doubles with four arms and four legs. There were male, female, and mixed originals. Their strength threatened the gods, so Zeus cut them apart. The separated halves longed to reunite, and Eros became the search for a lost completeness (189d–193d). The three original kinds allow the story to explain different directions of attraction, including attraction between women and between men. These are elements of a comic myth, not an account of human biological origins.

The myth's strongest moment concerns what lovers cannot articulate. Sexual satisfaction alone does not explain why two people want to remain together. Aristophanes imagines Hephaestus offering to fuse them permanently, making them one through life and death; the lovers would accept what they had wanted without knowing how to say it (192c–e). Love appears as a desire for belonging more comprehensive than any particular shared activity.

The familiar language of finding one's other half captures this speech, but it is not the dialogue's settled conclusion. Diotima later rejects the idea that we love our own half or our own whole merely because it belongs to us: people would relinquish parts of themselves if they judged those parts bad (205d–206a). Her criterion is goodness rather than original ownership. Aristophanes' longing for reunion thus becomes a position the dialogue tests.

Consider a modern hypothetical couple who interpret every difficulty as proof that they have not found their destined match. The myth might give language to their longing for recognition, but it cannot establish that a unique predestined person exists. Nor does the desire for fusion establish that fusion would be desirable. If becoming one eliminated either person's independent judgment, the fulfillment of one longing could destroy something they ought to value. This objection addresses the ideal represented by the myth, without denying the importance of intimacy.