Women at the Party

The Female Element in 'Platonic' Love

Plato’s Symposium is the earliest, most brilliant, and probably still the most widely read of all philosophical treatments of love. The Symposium, however, reads as an all-male affair. It is the report by a man of an event he claimed to have heard about, from a man, of the proceedings of a drinking party in which the only people present were men - they dismissed the only female presence standardly found in symposia, the piper-woman as illustrated in the vase-painting above. So is there any room for women in the dialogue, and in the Platonic idea of love?

One of the speakers is the poet of comedy, Aristophanes. He paints a comic picture of original human beings as duplicates of ourselves, with two faces looking out in opposite directions, four arms, four legs, and so on. Zeus cut them in half, whereupon each of the original cut halves went around seeking their other half in order to regain their completeness. That desire, says Aristophanes, is what Love continues to arouse in human beings.

Aristophanes’ original humans comprised either two male halves, two female halves, or a male-female double. It therefore allows us to recognise that the love that seeks the “missing half” might be imagined as heterosexual.

I discuss this briefly in my book How to Talk About Love, but in an article just published online I discuss the question more fully. My conclusion is that even if, in the Athens of his day, non-sexual (‘Platonic’) as well as sexual love flourished more easily between men than in heterosexual relationships, Plato intended love of women to be part of the conversation about the meaning of love.

And what does Platonic Love really mean, anyway?

The Symposium is an invitation to think about what love actually means. Welcome to the party…