Almost everyone is familiar with the idea that our missing half is out there somewhere, waiting for us. It comes from a beautiful image in Plato's Symposium, and it explains very well the feeling of incompleteness that so many people have felt. What almost no one tells you is that the book does not end there. Further along, a character answers that image without naming its author, and the answer changes the question. It is worth knowing both: the story and what it leaves out.
Aristophanes' Tale
In the middle of the night of the dinner where everyone praises love, it is the turn of Aristophanes, the comic playwright, who writes comedies (the host, Agathon, is the one who writes tragedies). He tells the most famous story in the book. The first human beings were whole, with four arms and four legs. Zeus cuts them in half and, for that reason, they spend their whole lives looking for their other half.
The image works because it names a real experience: the feeling that something is missing, and that the missing piece is in another person. If you thought of "the other half" or of a "soulmate", it is to this story that the expression points, even though the Symposium does not use those words.
What the Story Leaves Out
Now notice what the image does not explain. If loving is only searching for the lost half, then loving is going back to an earlier form, recovering what we already had. But the question the book asks from the start is another one: why, when we get what we wanted, do we still feel that something is missing? If love were only the half that returns, that would be enough. And for almost no one is it enough.
The story of the halves describes the lack, but gives back too small an answer. It does not say what is really sought, nor why the encounter does not end desire. Plato keeps the answer for the last speech, Socrates', who in turn says he heard it from a woman, Diotima of Mantinea.
Diotima's Answer: No One Loves the Half Simply for Being a Half
Diotima answers the story of the halves without naming anyone. She says there is a saying that "those who seek their own half are the ones who love", and adds:
"What I say, however, is that love is neither of the half nor of the whole [...] for people are even willing to have their own feet and hands cut off, if it seems to them that what is theirs is bad." (Symposium, passage 205d-e)
And she goes on: what each person values is not what is theirs just because it is theirs, unless one calls the good "one's own" and "theirs", and the bad "foreign", "for there is nothing else that people love but the good". In other words: no one loves the half or the whole only for being half or whole. One loves it if it is good. The proof she gives is uncomfortable and exact: people accept having a foot or a hand amputated when they are ill. If being "ours" were enough, no one would give anything up.
The Insight: What We Seek Is the Good, and to Have It Always
This is the turn of the Symposium. What we seek is not the piece that completes us: it is the good, and not just any good. We want the good for ourselves, and we want it forever. The lack we feel is not that of a piece someone else has and I lost; it is that of something I do not yet fully possess, including tomorrow, which no one possesses.
From this comes one of the most beautiful things Diotima says about desire. Because we are mortal and do not have the forever, we do what mortals do with the eternal: we beget, and we beget in beauty, and we leave behind something that remains after us. Some beget children, others works, others poems or virtues that teach. It is the human way of touching eternity for an instant.
It is this desire for the good that Diotima's ladder organizes into rungs, from the body to knowledge, the subject of The Ladder of Love. To see how the whole book is built around this, the starting point is the summary of the Symposium. And for the question that opens everything, the lack that appears after getting what one wanted, the article on the myth of Eros tells whose child love is.
None of this undoes the beauty of Aristophanes' story. It remains an excellent image of incompleteness. It is just that, in the Symposium, it is the starting point of the conversation, not the end point.
The quotations are our own English rendering. The reference 205d-e follows Stephanus pagination, which lets you locate the passage in any edition.
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See recommended readingsFrequently asked questions
What is Plato's soulmate myth?
It is the story told by Aristophanes in the Symposium: the first human beings were whole, with four arms and four legs, and Zeus cut them in half. Ever since, each half spends life searching for the other. The term "soulmate" is modern, but this is the image the phrase usually points back to.
Who told the myth of the halves in the Symposium?
Aristophanes, the comic playwright, who writes comedies. Do not confuse him with Agathon, the host, who is the tragic poet. The speech of Aristophanes arrives in the middle of the evening and remains the most famous story in the book.
How does Plato answer the soulmate myth?
Diotima provides the answer in the speech recounted by Socrates, without ever naming Aristophanes. She says that no one loves the half, or the whole, simply for being half or whole: one loves it if it is good. The proof is that people accept having their own foot or hand amputated when they are ill. What we seek is the good, and for ever.
According to Plato, is there a missing half that completes us?
Not in the way the myth suggests. For Diotima, love is not a return to an earlier state or the recovery of what was lost. It is the desire for the good, and because we are mortal, that desire expresses itself in begetting in beauty, leaving behind something that endures after us.
Continue: Plato’s Symposium: Summary and How to Read It · The Ladder of Love: What Diotima Teaches Socrates · Why Getting What We Want Is Not Enough: The Myth of Eros · Why the book is controversial
Source lecture: O Banquete, de Platão | O que é, de verdade, o amor platônico