May 24, 2007

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates relates a story about the origin of Love supposedly told to him by the wise woman, Diotima. The gods had a great feast in celebration of the birth of Aphrodite, and among the guests was Resource, the son of Cunning. Uninvited and alone, Poverty (also called Lack or Want) hung around outside the gates. Drunk on nectar—for the gods had not yet created wine—Resource stumbled into a grove and fell asleep. In the peculiar way of Greek gods and personifications, Poverty lay with Resource as he slept, and the child thus conceived was Love.

Love, Diotima tells Socrates, takes after his mother in that he is in a constant state of need. He is shoeless and homeless, and sleeps on the bare ground or in doorways. He also takes after his father, in that he is always in pursuit of all that is beautiful and good; he is brave, high-strung, a master hunter and strategist. He is neither immortal nor mortal, and in one hour he can be flourishing and alive, the next dying, then revived again by the force of his father’s nature. But any abundance he gets is always ebbing away into want. He is driven by need, and has the skills to fill that need temporarily, but at no time is Love fulfilled or unfulfilled.

The point of this origin story was to illustrate the nature of the pursuit of wisdom, for, according to Plato, we do not truly desire what we have, but only what we lack. This lack is also reflected in the speech describing the origin of love that Aristophanes gave prior to Socrates's own: humans were originally created as creatures of four legs, four arms, and a two-faced head, then split apart at the whim of Zeus. Their component portions—man and woman—are forever trying to return to their original conjoined state.

Throughout the dialogue, love is couched in terms of need and lack. Plato intended to convey that love is the idea of good which lies at the root of all virtue and truth. What seems to have been transmitted to our culture is that love is the constant pursuit of a remedy for a bereft state. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Much the same, I think, can be said for our traditions of love.

The common and accepted expression of romantic love is as a pair, and, once paired, the individuals within it become a unit. Socially, the individuals are transformed from (for example) “George” and “Mary” into “George and Mary.” An entire array of cultural machinery moves into action, supporting this binary unit, their particular attachment to each other, and the exclusion of anyone else from that unit. Everything in our culture—religion, politics, movies, television, even advertisements—voices its support for the idea of love as a need that is met by one person.

This may seem an odd claim to make in this age of promiscuity and pornography. However, I think that the vast majority of people admit that there is a qualitative difference between a relationship that is based on physicality and one that is based on love. There are relationships that are “serious” and relationships that aren’t. Relationships that are “serious” involve love, those that aren’t do not. The boundaries between the two aren’t always clear…in fact, I would suggest that’s more often the case than not. This is one of the functions of the cultural mechanisms that surround those who have “coupled up:” to encourage them to stay coupled up and start families, even if they're not entirely sure they ought to.

This was all well and good when the Church ran society and the average lifespan was 37 years. “‘Till death do us part” was never far off, and it was certainly in society’s best interest to encourage the birth of children and the maintenance of family units that would best enable those children to reach adulthood. All very practical.

After a certain point in the development of Western culture, these practical needs began to recede into the background. But the concept of love as the fulfillment of an individual’s need still girds our ideas of what love relationships are supposed to be, and is expressed everywhere from Shakespeare to daytime soaps. Need, lack, and cunning strategies to fulfill that need. Pursuit and conquest. This country’s divorce rate alone suggests that this model of love has a high rate of failure, and of those who remain married, what percentage spend their time making each other miserable? Or staying together “for the children?” Or being unfaithful--emotionally, sexually, or both--with someone other than their supposed life partner? The number of binary “lifetime commitments” that actually live up to their promises of fulfillment, trust, and loyalty is, it seems, rather small.

I write this as someone who has quite recently run headlong into his own limitations and his own mountain of need. This is my experience, not yours, so if you’ve been happily married for two decades, congratulations to you. My point is simply this: that doesn’t work for everybody. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it doesn’t work for quite a lot of people, but they keep trying anyway, because they are bound by societal conventions, their emotional limitations, their needs, or some combination of the three.

In my case, the realization of exactly what my issues were was, in fact, sparked by re-reading Plato’s Symposium. The repeated theme of love as a salve for need resonated with me in an unpleasantly discordant fashion…there was something that just felt “off” about the concept, particularly because I recognized its ubiquity in my own life. My needs seemed so great, and the notion of having them unmet so terrifying, that they overwhelmed the foundational elements of my character: honesty and openness. I’m really not speaking out of egotism, here (honest). These are qualities that I’ve identified in myself, that others have validated, and they’re important to me. Anything that shuts these defining aspects of my self down is, by my definition, a Bad Thing.

The good news is that the only thing that is actually capable of shutting those aspects down is within me: fear. Fear of pain, fear of loss, fear of rejection, fear of humiliation, the list goes on. Every fear-based decision I have made in my life in general, and within intimate relationships in particular, has been a bad one. Instructive, of course. But bad. The internal conflicts thus created have driven me to drink, and worse. What I have come to realize is that avoidance of fear is not a need.

The defining characteristics of Love as described by Plato are simply these: he is never content, or discontent. He is never fulfilled, or unfulfilled. He is always seeking, then finding, then in need once more. That’s not love to me. That’s tragedy.

In Plato’s world, love was a seeking for the Good and the Beautiful. But these are Ideas, and are thus unobtainable. We may approach them. We may catch glimpses of them. But we will never reach them. Down here in the muck, our real needs are different. Empathy. Understanding. Acceptance. Intimacy, emotional and otherwise. The ideal—that of getting all of this from one person, always—strikes me, like the Good and the Beautiful, as similarly unobtainable. Is there any reason to place boundaries on who meets these needs, or how they do so, as long as this meeting takes place within a framework of trust and honesty among all concerned? Perhaps love should not be like Diotima’s Love, son of Poverty and Resource, shoeless, homeless, and sleeping in the dirt.

Perhaps love should be fearless, and unfettered.