On Love

In his book, The Symposium, Plato writes,

“… 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.”

The Symposium is fundamentally a book about love, a series of speeches designed to encourage thought about what love means. The quote is from Aristophanes.

I remember reading The Symposium for the first time during my undergrad. I was astounded by the variety of perspectives on love. I was particularly struck by Aristophanes and Socrates.

In the book, Socrates advances the notion that love draws us closer to the divine. When we love one, we are encouraged to love the whole of humanity, which leads us to the divine circuit of virtues.

He argues that when we love a single individual, we must admit that those qualities are not particular to that individual. Once conceded, we expand our perspective to include others, eventually ending up loving the virtues themselves. There is something gorgeous about his theories, if only because they encourage the reader to think deeply.

The reason why I like Aristophanes take is because he emphasizes the impact of the search. Often enough, I feel as though I am searching for something. I no longer believe it is a person.

Being a believer in God is difficult. It is not the act of believing that is difficult, but rather, the consistent worry that I will deviate from what is moral. To be moral is to live a good life, an Aristotelian idea. Well, it is a feature shared by the ancients. They were preoccupied with the question, What does it mean to live well?

When I think about what it is I am searching for, I would say it is a profound sense of peace. I mean, the peace I saw when I was looking at my mother who passed away.

At her funeral, I leaned over to my uncle and said, “She looks like she knows something we don’t.”

I’ve never forgotten that. Two years and I still feel her breathing beside me.

Maybe the love we search for, the missing half, are really our parents, our friends, the person we saw on the street once.