When discussing the historic background of love, it is helpful to go beyond the views of Psychologists and examine love as it was viewed by ancient Philosophers. When doing this, there is one piece of literature that cannot be ignored: Plato's Symposium. The Symposium is the first known work to examine the nature and causes of love. In it, Plato discusses love by having each of the characters in the novel give a speech about it. Their speeches offer a great deal of insight into what it means to love and why we do so.
Click here to see a larger picture of Plato's Symposium.
One speech in Plato's Symposium that illustrates a common historical view of love is the speech of Aristophanes. In it, Aristophanes provides a myth to explain the love that two people feel for one another. He explains that people were once in the shape of circles. Each of these circle-people was composed of two parts: two females, two males, or a male and a female. They were very powerful and the gods felt threatened by them, so Zeus sliced them into two pieces. As a result, they are constantly searching for their other halves, and they long to be reunited.
Here is a quote from Aristophanes' Myth:
| "Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half... I believe that if our loves were perfectly accomplished, and each one returning to his primeval nature had his original true love, then our race would be happy. And if this would be best of all, the best in the next degree and under present circumstances must be the nearest approach to such an union; and that will be the attainment of a congenial love..." |
Aristophanes' Myth, although it is obviously not the true cause of human love, does have a lot to offer. It explains many of the conditions of love in Western culture, such as why love is "exclusive, constant, and reciprocal," by implying that we are driven only toward the one person who was once our other half. It also explains the origin of both heterosexual and homosexual love, citing that our sexual preference depends upon whether we were originally made up of two men, two women, or one man and one woman.
To read Aristophanes' Myth in its entirity, click here.
Although Aristophanes' Myth itself is not known to many people in today's society, its main idea has permeated Western literature and popular culture. Here are some quotes that illustrate its importance to our views of love:
| "Somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body." -Milan Kundera | "Love in all its forms is the drive towards the reunion of the separated." -Paul Tillich |
References:
Soble, A. (1990). The structure of love. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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