Why Getting What We Want Is Not Enough: The Myth of Eros

You get what you wanted so much, and a few days later, you realize something is missing. It is an experience nearly all of us have lived through, and the explanation usually given is that we are never content, or that we chose poorly what to desire. Plato has another explanation, in the Symposium, and it is not what you imagine: getting what we want is not enough because desiring was never merely a matter of not yet having achieved it.

First, what desire actually is

The one who asks the question in the Symposium is Socrates, and he does it the way he always does: instead of making a speech, he asks questions. The target is the host, Agathon, who had just delivered the most beautiful speech of the evening. Is love, Socrates asks, love of something or of nothing? Of something, certainly, replies Agathon. And does the one who loves that thing desire to have it? Yes, they do.

With a few questions, Agathon admits what seemed obvious yet no one had stated: we desire what we lack. In passage 200e, Socrates sums it up: it is agreed, then, that what one loves is what one lacks and does not have.

The consequence is greater than it seems. If love desires the beautiful, it is because it does not yet possess it fully. Love is not the beautiful: it is the lack of beauty moving toward it.

The objection of health, and the tomorrow no one possesses

Perhaps you are thinking: "That is not quite true. I have health, and I desire to remain healthy. I love someone who is already with me." The objection is natural, and Socrates himself answers it in the text, with more subtlety than it might seem.

Someone who is healthy and says they desire health actually desires something else: to continue tomorrow what they have today. And tomorrow is what no one possesses. Thus, even those who already have what they love continue to desire what is missing. Time is missing, the guarantee that it will not pass away is missing.

Hence the first answer to the question in the title. Getting what we want does not end desire, because the acquired thing arrives and, along with it, the awareness that it can pass, that it can slip away. The lack that appears after attainment is not a sign that you conquered the wrong thing. It is desire showing that, in reality, it wanted something no single attainment can deliver on its own.

Eros, son of Poros and Penia

This is where Socrates does something rare: he says he learned all of this from a woman, Diotima, a priestess of Mantinea, and begins recounting the conversation he had with her when he was young. Diotima begins by dismantling the idea that love is a god, because the gods lack nothing, and whoever lacks nothing does not desire. But love is not merely mortal either: it is an intermediary, a being that lives in the middle between the divine and the human, between ignorance and knowledge.

And she recounts his origin as a myth. Love is the child of two parents. His mother is Penia, poverty; his father is Poros, resourcefulness, the ingenuity of someone who always finds a way. From his mother, Eros inherited lack: he is never satisfied. From his father, he inherited the hunter instinct: he never ceases to seek. In passage 203e, the text says that whatever he gains always slips away from him, so that Love is never poor and never rich.

Everything Eros attains slips through his fingers. He is never completely destitute, and he is never rich. The portrait explains the experience mentioned at the start: desire is the child of lack and resource, which is why attaining something and continuing to search do not contradict each other. They are his two parents.

The portrait of one who loves, and of one who studies

If you recognized yourself in this portrait, it is no accident. Diotima describes the condition of the lover, but also of the student. The philosopher, for her, is precisely that: someone who knows enough to know what they lack. Eros lives in the middle between ignorance and knowledge, and so does the philosopher.

What we seek is not the half that completes us

Diotima also replies, without naming him, to Aristophanes' story of the halves, the idea that each person seeks their other half. People say that one who loves seeks their own half, but no one loves the half or the whole simply because it is a half or a whole: one loves it if it is good. So much so that people are willing to amputate their own foot or hand when they are diseased. No one loves what is their own merely because it is theirs. (The story of the halves and Diotima's response have their own article: Plato's myth of the soulmate.)

This is the turning point of the lecture. 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.

Giving birth in beauty

And that is where one of the most beautiful things Diotima says about desire comes from. Since we are mortal and do not have forever, we do what all mortals do with the eternal: we give birth, and we give birth in beauty, leaving behind something that endures after us. Some beget children, others works, others poems or virtues that teach. This is the human way of touching eternity for a moment.

From this, Diotima shows the way: desire begins in a beautiful body, moves through the beauty of souls and knowledge, and reaches Beauty itself (this journey is covered in Diotima's ladder of love). The point of interest here is earlier: desire that is not exhausted upon achievement is not a manufacturing defect. It is the engine of the ascent.

So, why is getting what we want not enough?

Putting the pieces together, Plato's answer has four steps. First, to desire is to desire what is lacking, and love is the lack of beauty moving toward it. Second, even those who already possess what they love continue to desire, because they lack tomorrow and the guarantee that it will not pass away. Third, Eros, son of poverty and resource, is never entirely poor nor rich: what he attains slips away from him. Fourth, what we seek is not the half that completes us, but the good, for ourselves and forever, and for that reason we give birth in beauty.

The lack you feel after having acquired what you wanted is not a lack in you, it is not your defect. It is the sign that it was merely a step on the ladder.

Continue reading: Plato's Soulmate Myth and Diotima's Response · The Ladder of Love: What Diotima Teaches Socrates · What Having a Platonic Love Means, According to Plato · What is Baroque?
Source lecture: O Banquete, de Platão | O que é, de verdade, o amor platônico