There are six speeches in the symposium. There is Phaedrus, who proposes that love is a goad towards virtue, Pausanias who proposes that there are two loves, and that love is only as good as it makes us[1], Eryximachus, who proposes that love is central to everything, and that good love must triumph over bad love, Aristophanes, who says that love is a desire for oneness because we have been split in half, Agathon, who proposes that love is the best and most beautiful god, and Socrates, who says love isn’t a god but rather a search for the true form of beauty. The first three speeches share a focus on love being linked to virtue, which is beneficial to the city. The last two focus on the attributes of love and the focus of love, which seems neutral in its effect on the city. Aristophanes speech, however, is different. He teaches that love is a force that is intrinsic, unstoppable, and should never be resisted. That is deeply dangerous.
If Love is nothing but the longing of two halves to become a whole, and becoming whole is the ultimate good, then everything else is going to go out the window. If ‘becoming one’ is all that people do in a city, and all that they are interested in, the city will fall to pieces. Literally. The city needs people to do things like building things, growing food, keeping things in order, and defending the city against invasion. Those aren’t going to happen unless there is a higher moral good than becoming a whole. Virtue is necessary.
Aristophanes’ speech is all the more deeply dangerous because it is very difficult to defeat. The idea of allowing love to rule is very appealing, and throws out all need of logic. There is no good evidence that he is wrong in his history of human kind, and it actually does sound like the kind of thing that the gods would do. There is nothing but the ruin that it will cause that I can think of that is a good argument against it, and even that is on shaky ground.
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