Love is All Around
Eryximachos’ views in Plato’s Symposion
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Plato’s Symposion is one of the greatest works ever written about the philosophy of love. In it, Plato presents not only his own ideas about the eternal love for perfection but also a whole collection of other common ways to look at love. Love makes man behave better and more ethically. Love strives towards beauty. Love wants to own the beloved forever. Love is the desire to re-unite with one’s lost, other half. And, among them, a more surprising claim: Love is literally… all around.
The Symposion describes a party, a group of learned men discussing the nature of love. A lawyer is present, a writer, a comedian, an old philosopher, a young and dashing general, and, wisest of all, a mysterious woman from out of town, who never actually appears in the flesh. But perhaps the strangest claim in that dispute comes from a doctor, Eryximachos.
Nature is made of opposites, the good doctor says, hot and cold, wet and dry, high and low. Sun and rain, day and night, forest and desert are the ways in which nature arranges its forces so that the Earth doesn’t become too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. All things in the universe are in a perfect balance, and this balance is what gives birth to all life that we see. Take away the rain, and the trees will die. Take away the sunny days, and they will die too. It’s only the right mixture of the elements, of all the forces of nature, that creates the visible cosmos, the wonder of life. And at its root, the universal force of creation is love, he says: the attraction between these opposites. Without that attraction, one of the opposites would take over and displace the other, and we would have a broken, unbalanced world. Only when sun and rain both kiss the fields of the Earth, we get plants and fruits and life.
There is a wisdom in Eryximachos’ idea that goes beyond love. Traditional medicine in many cultures, in ancient Greece as well as in China, has often been about restoring the balance of different elements in the body. We still talk about a “balanced” diet today, and about a person that is mentally balanced, stable, well-adjusted. Ecosystems are resilient if they are rich in species and interactions, varied in their habitats, dynamic and complex and full of energy. Life and thriving is the result of harmony and balance, not of one-sided imbalance and excess.
Aristotle, Plato’s student, and the second greatest philosopher of ancient Greece, goes even further with that thought: all our virtues, he says, are only good in a well-balanced character. Courage without moderation is recklessness. The absence of courage is cowardice. It’s only in the middle between the extremes, that the character of man can flourish, can be good and beneficial to all, and can lead to a life that is rich in experiences and filled with the light of wisdom.
This is often forgotten in our times. We have an opinion and we think that everyone must have the same opinion. If anyone disagrees with us, we aim to silence them, to de-platform them, to get rid of them. But for Aristotle, as well as for the holistic doctor Eryximachos, this would mean to give up balance in favour of single-minded delusion, to create a one-sided bubble of thought that leads to mental blindness and error, rather than to wisdom and flourishing.
In the myths of creation, all gods create the world in a balance of day and night, hot and cold, water and land, woman and man. And it is only the loving union of the opposites that creates and sustains the universe of life.
Thanks for reading! Photo by Alexander Hörl on Unsplash.
