QuestionsWhat is love?Finding one's other half
What is love?Finding one's other half

Finding one's other half

Aristophanes' myth; the soulmate; the lost half

Aristophane c. 446 BC · c. 386 BCComic poet of Athens; in Plato's Symposium he tells of double humans cut in two, and of love as the desire to find one's other half.
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What it claims

Love is the desire to find our other half and to become one again, to heal human nature.

Why

We were once whole beings, cut in two by Zeus; love is the search for our lost other half.

The same idea through history
Aristophane385 BCIn Plato's Symposium, the comic poet Aristophanes tells that humans were double, that Zeus cut them in two, and that love is the desire to find one's other half. Plato wrote this speech: we do not know what Aristophanes really said.
Sigmund Freud1920Freud cites the myth in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He calls it a myth rather than a scientific explanation, but finds it has one merit: it derives an instinct from the need to restore an earlier state.
In short

"Finding one's other half" is an argument by Aristophane (Plato, Symposium, 189c-193d (c. 380 BC), 385 BC) on the question "What is love?" (answer: finding one's other half). Its claim: Love is the desire to find our other half and to become one again, to heal human nature. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 2 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Plato, Symposium, 189c-193d (c. 380 BC)
Valid with an implicit premise

In the Symposium, Aristophanes, a comic poet, tells a story that is both funny and moving. Long ago, humans were double: four arms, four legs, two faces. They were strong and bold enough to challenge the gods. Zeus then cut them in two to weaken them. Ever since, each half looks for the other, and when they find each other they do not want to part. Love is the name of this desire to become one again. The idea survives in everyday language, with words like "soulmate" or "my other half". In his tale there were three kinds of double beings, which explains why some seek a person of the other sex and others of the same sex. What is presented here is a myth told by a character in the dialogue, not a thesis Plato defends in his own name.

P1Long ago our nature was one: we were whole beings, double, strong and proud.
P2To punish our boldness, Zeus cut each of these beings in two, so that we would be weaker.
P3Ever since, each of us is only a half, who searches ceaselessly for the other half, his own.
P4If a god offered to fuse two lovers into one being, neither would refuse: they would recognize what they had always wanted, without being able to say it.
P5 · implicit premiseThe attraction we call love has no other origin than this lack of unity: it is the search for the lost half.
Therefore love is the desire to find our other half and to become one again, to heal human nature.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where we were cut, each seeks his half and lovers would want to be one, yet love is not that search: the tale of origins does not say that what we feel in loving is that desire. P5 links the myth to experience.
The argument is valid with the hidden premise P5. P1 to P3 tell the origin of the lack; P4 says what lovers would truly want (to be one). But the conclusion follows only if P5 is added: what we call love is this search. Without P5, the tale could be true without love being anything more than one desire among others. The myth does not prove P5: it tells it.
Analogy. Two pieces of a broken vase find each other: they fit perfectly, and no one can say why, except that they were always together. For Aristophanes, love is this shock of recognition. His critics ask: is the other really a piece made for us, or do we choose him for what he is?

Objections

2

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Diotima (reported by Socrates) 380 BC · attacks premise 5

She answers, in the same dialogue, that one does not seek one's half for itself: love is neither for the half nor for the whole unless that half or whole is good. The proof: people accept having a foot or hand cut off when it is bad, although it is theirs. What we love is therefore not "what is ours", but the good.

a defender replies
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in -380, after the author's death (-386).
Sigmund Freud defender of the argument · 1920
Freud takes up the myth and moves it. He asks whether we should follow "the poet-philosopher" and suppose that living substance was originally rent into small particles, which have since strived to reunite through the sexual instincts. Love then aims not at the good, as Diotima says, but at a return to an earlier state. He offers this idea with caution, as a myth rather than a scientific explanation.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Disputed. Diotima holds that love goes toward what is good, not toward what is one's own; Aristophanes and, from afar, Freud see in it the search for a lost unity. Freud himself does not treat his hypothesis as established. The basic disagreement is whether love answers to the other's value or to a lack in us (our summary).
Arthur Schopenhauer 1844 · attacks the conclusion

The feeling of being made for each other is real, but it deceives. Nature can reach its end, the birth of a child, only by creating an illusion in the individual: he thinks he works for himself when he works for the species. It is therefore not a lost half that one finds, but an instrument of life pushing us toward the partner who suits the child to come.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1844, after the author's death (-386).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Disputed. Schopenhauer does not refute the myth: he explains differently the feeling it describes. For him the object of love is the child to be born; for Aristophanes it is the other person. Evolutionary biology today discusses the role of reproduction in attraction, but does not say that it exhausts what lovers live (our summary).
What today's voices say
Criticize it
Alain de BottonHe mocks the romantic promise that the soulmate will end all loneliness and understand us perfectly, and says romanticism is "the single greatest enemy" of love.