Meditation 65: Love’s Union

Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium, tells a wonderful tale of love’s union.  Once upon a time we were ‘two-beings-in-one’, and each of us had four legs, four arms and two heads, Janus-faced.  We were strong and united. We rolled along like great big balls, enjoying a non-alienated state of being. Of course, being Greek, we desired more and more power, until we rolled in unison to attack Zeus himself on Mount Olympus. Imagine Zeus’ consternation when he saw us, his own creations, armed and rolling against him. He did not want to destroy us utterly, but we could not be allowed to dispute his authority, so he decided to teach us our weakness by using his lightening bolts to cut us in two. 

Since those times, Aristophanes relates, we have been so busy looking for our other halves that we have had no time or inclination to take on the gods. So strong is our desire to unite with our beloveds that if we had the opportunity to be sewn together in a single body, we would jump at the chance. Each of us would be completed by the other, and the other by us. Anxieties of separation and abandonment would disappear, since not even death can separate lovers who live happily together in the same skin until the time comes to die together. What a lovely dream of love’s union.  Or is it?

We should remember that Aristophanes is a comic poet. It is an irony that his speech on love should make us laugh at the impossibility of the sort of union he describes in the myth. We know this because, in the story, it takes a god of the forge, like Hephaestus, to meld the lovers together. And, in the unlikely event that you actually found your one and only out of six billion people, suppose Hephaestus did meld you together. What then? Who would you be? Would one personality dominate the whole? If there are two of you in one skin, then conflict is always a possibility, just as inner conflict is a possibility for each of us already. So the proposal brings with it conceptual difficulties about personal identity at the same time as it seems to answer some deep need in the human psyche. The humor lies in discrepancy between our desire for a perfect union and our recognition of its impossibility.

Aristophanes’ story of love is essentially tragic. Yet love is possible and a true lover does desire union with the beloved. What kind of union is this? Obviously Aristophanes’ description of love cannot be right. It is not the kind of union that can be accomplished by a radical surgical procedure. We have separate bodies. We can touch, but we can also pull away. We can die together, but each dies a separate death, and each must say his or her own goodbyes. The unavoidable intrusion of the body means that love’s desire for union with the beloved, whatever forms it takes in actuality, must accommodate arrivals and departures, touching and releasing, being together and being apart.  Negotiating this movement is the work of love.

So what sort of union is appropriate to love’s desire? Taking a wide conception of love, it seems to depend on the sort of relationship one envisages. The union desired by romantic lovers, spouses, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and friends differ in many ways. Love desires a union appropriate to the relationship in the changing situations in which those who love each other find themselves. Children grow up, lovers separate, everyone dies, friends move away, and the union desired by love changes accordingly. However, not even death or separation can break love’s desire for union, in spirit if not in physical nearness.