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.Stones and all sorts of things might beincomplete, but that of itself does not yet make them erotic, for they must alsoexperience and recognize their incompleteness.Third and decisively, Eros is ourdesire to overcome our experienced incompleteness, to achieve our longed-forwholeness.So understood, Eros obviously extends way beyond sexual or evenpersonal love, though for his own reasons, Aristophanes will not want to callattention to the wider expressions of Eros.For this is just as well an account ofthe erotic basis of all human aspiration of the desire for wealth or politicalpower or, crucially, of philosophy itself understood precisely in the Socraticsense of aporia.(Aporia is not being wise, recognizing that lack, and striving forwisdom.) It is no wonder, in this light, that Aristophanes does not want toexplicitly indicate these other manifestations of Eros about which, in his plays,he is so skeptical but confines it to the relatively safe one of personal love.Even so confined, however, it should be noted that Aristophanes account ofhuman Eros has a remarkable feature: it is reciprocal! Apparently the eroticdesire of a given pair to join together is entirely reciprocal: both desire this.16But also, this account quietly indicates that Eros is not a god at all! Eros isour human situation, once we are rendered split or incomplete.At the beginningand end of his speech, Aristophanes asks us to worship Eros as the god who loveshumans the most.But the core of his speech teaches something quite di"erent,what we may call a certain humanism: that Eros is our human nature in ourpresent condition.But this means that in fact, none of the gods love humans.Aristophanes now discusses the three sexual orientations (191d 192c).Be-fore his audience composed largely of homosexual men, he seems to somewhatdenigrate lesbianism and especially heterosexuality (he mentions adulterers andadulteresses among this class, but not the good heterosexual couples of whom heapproves in his plays and whom he has just described as the saviors of the 40 plato and the question of beautyhuman race), and to praise what we now call homosexuals.But there are atleast two jokes here.First, with Agathon sitting near him, whose notoriouse"eminacy he himself has mocked in the Thesmophoriazusae, he emphasizesrepeatedly how most manly (andreiotatoi ) the homosexuals are.Second, the great proof of this, says Aristophanes (192b), is that when these homosexualyouths grow up they enter into politics (eis ta politika).But of course, Aristopha-nes makes it clear in his plays that he detests politicians almost as much asphilosophers! The joke here, of course, is that Plato has Aristophanes behavetrue to form: he ironically praises the homosexual men present whose real values the conservative poet detests.17Aristophanes now turns to a most serious consequence of our erotic condi-tion as split, incomplete beings (192c 192e): we do not know ourselves.Com-menting on those original halves that come together, immediately fall in love,and want to spend their lives together, and denying that this could be explainedmerely by sexual passion, Aristophanes says: On the contrary, it is clear thatthere is something else that the soul of each wants but it cannot say what it is, soit prophesizes (manteueai ) and speaks in riddles (ainitetai ) (192d).Humanbeings, for Aristophanes, do not know what they want.We need religion to makesense of our deepest desires (in this case, Hephaestus, who volunteers to meld ustogether into one forever).Our fallen human condition, then, is this: we do notunderstand the real meaning of our deepest desires, and in fact, we desire whatwe cannot have.After the first generation we are born split and do not truly haveanother original half, as Aristophanes will quietly make clear in his perora-tion.Human life is thus a striving after something at which we are fated bynature to fail.But this is the classic tragic situation.The comic poet is presentinga tragic view of the human situation.Aristophanes is thus profoundly pessimistic about the possibility of self-knowledge much more so, as we shall see, than is Socrates.For Aristophanes,we cannot know ourselves in particular the nature of our erotic desires andwe need religion as a substitute.For Socrates, a certain self-knowledge knowingwhat I know and what I do not know is at least possible or worth striving for.This Aristophanic pessimism about the human erotic situation will prove adecisive di"erence between him and Socrates.In his peroration (193a e), Aristophanes returns to what we now recognizeas the lip service he is paying to religion the notion that Eros is a god whom weshould revere.It is clear by now that his reasons for doing so are not that hebelieves what he is saying the interior of his speech indicates quite the reversebut that he thinks it best that humans believe this.In doing so, however, he indicates once again the basis of his pessimistic andtragic position. This is how the human race can become happy: we mustperfect love and every man must find his own beloved, thereby returning to ouroriginal nature.If this is what is best, then the nearest thing to that is necessarilythe best in the present circumstances, and that is to happen upon a beloved who is the question of beauty in the symposium 41suited by nature to one s mind (193c; my emphasis).Our present circum-stances are that we are now born split and have no natural other half.Wecannot attain what we desire most deeply, the real object of our eros.We mustfail.Our consolation, at least in Aristophanes eyes, should be to find a com-patible mate whom we happen upon (tuchoi ), and live peacefully and re-ligiously with them.As we shall see, Socrates will in a decisive way accept the core of Aristopha-nes position as part of the truth about eros that he will teach.But only a part!Aristophanes, as we shall see, is literally half right as Agathon will be.Hisexcessive pessimism will have to be moderated by the truth of what we shall nowsee is the excessive optimism of Agathon s speech, to which we shall turn next.The problem with Aristophanes position is perhaps symbolized by a strik-ing fact that I hope has quietly emerged in the course of this discussion of hisspeech: it is devoid of the issue of beauty! Aristophanes is the only speech in theSymposium that does not so much as mention to kalon or its derivatives evenonce.Quite literally, there is nothing beautiful (or noble) about Aristophanesposition.His view of the human situation, far from being beautiful in any way, isthat we are sad fools.This defect will be overcome in spades by Agathon, towhom we can now turn.And, as Socrates later speech will show (and as will beexhibited even more powerfully in his palinode in the Phaedrus), it is Agathonwho will be right on this point at least.There is, or can be, something beautifulabout the human situation, and its beauty will be intimately tied to our eros.Aristophanes profound pessimism leads him to miss this, but Agathon willcorrect this fault.Aristophanes the comic poet has presented a tragic account of eros, de-veloping it in terms of eros s inevitable incompleteness
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