LOVE AND CULTURE 

by W. B. Macomber

Putting things in a paragraph as thinking for yourself; a deistic world as the ideal of pedagogy; getting students independent and initiatory; the "double-bind" and the wedding pledge; the quality of life in the 20^th century; the C.Q. in human relations; the Christian assumption of human aloneness (the doctrine that all good derives from Christ) continued in the Cartesian model of man, res cogitans encapsulated in res extensa (a “ghost in a machine”); social contract theory and existentialism; the demands of a Platonic  relationship; women and the Greek disease; from small-talk to high metaphysics; the movement from Phaedrus to Pausanias to Eryximachus: Act I of the drama; Aristophanes' diagnosis of the perversion of the West: the Christian illness, proclaimed by existentialists; Aristophanes' “tally half” and Sartre's “crescent moon.”

. . . especially everything you have heard in Church, which has perhaps soured you on the spiritual life. Yes, and questions are still welcomed, invited. You get credit, remember, for any questions you have accepted on the final. You get credit for a question on the exam, plus having at least one question you should get. So it's economically advantageous to hand in questions to the T.A., as well as paragraphs in which you defend an answer which was counted "wrong." That, I think, is the most valuable part of the course.

You should be able to put everything in a single paragraph. Because everywhere you turn there will be things at issue, and you will be called upon to put a brief case. Why should we go to the mountains rather than to the beach? Why do you want to see this movie rather than that? Why do you want to make love? Why do you have long hair? You should be able to put everything nicely in a paragraph. It's not just a way of getting your way, because no matter how good a case you present, it won’t ordinarily make any difference—but it's a way of making yourself intelligible or plausible, ultimately to yourself. This is what you're learning in defending those so-called “wrong” answers: that there are no right answers and wrong answers. There are well argued cases and badly argued cases, well put things (Oscar Wilde) and badly put things (Lyndon B. Johnson).

The last exam I still haven't looked at. The mechanics of the course are now proceeding vigorously as a deistic system. A deistic system is one in which God does not have to be involved all the time, seeing that things go properly. It's a watch, and the watchmaker can go away and be confident that it'll go on keeping time.

C.G. Lichtenberg, the Nietzsche of the 18^th century, goes even beyond this when he refers to the "God who winds our sun-dials." That's the Christian God, who gets everything going and keeps it going. For Sir Isaac Newton, nobody needs to keep it going—gravity and his three laws of motion will see to that—but somebody needs to get it going in the first place, the old Cosmic Watchmaker. A century later Lichtenberg pensions Him off, and we're ready for an organic and utterly self-contained universe—in effect, for ecology.

Eighteenth century mechanism is a half-way house from the medieval view of God, Who is constantly interfering in the universe and the affairs of men, to ecology, as it has broken into our lives in the last decade, with everything totally in relation to everything else. It's not a watch; it's a sun-dial. That's what the brilliant C.G. Lichtenberg says, a century before anyone else suspected, and “in five words or less.”

Charles Darwin has another look and says: “My God, it's alive! We're not on something; we're in something!” Darwin is taken to be a threat to Christianity, though for absurd reasons. As William Jennings Bryan says, "Darwin leads to Nietzsche, and Nietzsche leads to murder." He means: subverts our traditional Christian value-system. But that's crumbling anyway—in the last ten years, faster than we can appreciate, and really since 1926, with the appearance of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). That's the beginning of the modern existentialist movement, which lashes away at all our time-hallowed truths—far worse than I. Why one thing rather than another, Heidegger asks, why this rather than that? Why anything at all, instead of simply nothing? Warum uberhaupt etwas, und nicht vielmehr Nichts?

For half a century that was a question which swept European intellectuals along in its wake, the topic most discussed in the cafes of the Left Bank. Only in the last decade we have witnessed existentialism come to the American college campus. The question took on new meaning for me, one morning four years ago, when I woke up and found smoldering ruins where the Bank of America had been. American college students, in alarming numbers, were beginning to ask Prof. Heidegger's question in earnest, and to settle for the answer, vielmehr Nichts!

Our recent troubles have been brewing for half a century among European intellectuals. They're just now beginning to filter down from the brain to the central nervous system, and the specter of anarchy is fairly clearly before the door, along with the danger of our corrupting the environment, which we have never learned properly to respect (myself as little as anyone).

When Nietzsche cries, "God is dead!" he insists he is not committing a murder but performing an autopsy. The old Christian conception of God is already dead as a doornail. He is no longer an efficacious force in human affairs as He once was, "when the cathedrals were white." Nietzsche (and Lichtenberg before him) simply announces that fact, which we are all loathe to face up to. We must start forging new values, for the old ones are assuredly crumbling.

First there is the God who tells us what to be and do, and orders everything for the best; then He constructs and winds the watch; and finally He's no longer needed, since the watch is seen to be a sun-dial. Descartes still falls prey to Christian nonsense. His God, in Step II of his argument, is a beast of burden. Everything (which follows) hinges on Him, and the trouble is we don't understand what "He" means. If we don't understand that, and everything depends on Him, we don't understand what anything means. We don't say God doesn't exist, as Wittgenstein suggests of the Last Judgment. We say we don't understand what the term means. That's the case with Descartes' philosophy and with our present approach to life; we simply don't understand what it all means. And Lichtenberg brings this out in his stylish epigram: "God, Who winds our sun-dials."

That's all Lichtenberg wrote, just "God, Who winds our sun-dials." Gott, der unsre Sonnenuhren aufzieht. You have to do the rest—and I've shown you how do it. You might do something quite different with it, and that wouldn't mean that I was wrong. The point is you don't get anything by just comprehending what the man says. If you don't respond, if the words don't set you thinking, it's just a waste of time reading them. You can't get this sort of thing reading 300-400 words a minute, which would  mean one second with Lichtenberg's aphorism—and speed-reading claims to increase that rate by three to five times.

So the exam transpires without my direct involvement. And then I take three questions; a student fires three questions at me. All three I got wrong! (Laughter.) I said: Oh yes, I can fail my own exam in this course—at least the first time around. But I'll bet I can come up with a paragraph that would justify my view the second time around! (Laughter.) It's that "second time around" that’s important, when you make a case for something. There are not rights and wrongs in philosophy, and in the appeal system you have a chance to make a case for yourself, which is really what philosophy is all about.

Now there are announcements. Let's not waste the whole day with announcements because I'm going to do all of Aristophanes today, I hope—a brief sketch of Aristophanes. The managing director of Culture Associates told me (or his girl-friend told me) that he might be out in the foyer today with the latest publication of mine, called “Bringing It All Back Home,” which is on sale for 25 cents—if Culture Associates is out there this morning, which is questionable. Oh, that's an important part of the course, too, working the incentive motive in too. Lots of people were shocked, I think, that there would be an attempt at making money in this course. But that too, that too, is very important. It’s made America great and I want to work even Ronald Reagan into my thing.

I said to Terry Dalton, who stands for Soren Kierkegaard in my mind: You want two things from your parents: you want to have a real relationship with them, and you want money from them. Oh, those disquieting "double-thoughts" in The Idiot. But doesn't that sum it up? Terry doesn't want money from them. He ought to want money from them. They have it, plenty of it, and he hasn't, but he thinks it's degrading to want money from his own parents. I’d like to baptize money too! Baptize everything. Convince everyone that they have a "right" to be what they are—black, lesbian, homosexual, little old lady, sorority girl, and the cat who's “just in it for the money.” If there's a young buck tramping around Europe and a lonely contessa with a villa and an Alfa-Romeo and a big bank account, it's just tragic if they think they're degrading themselves getting together. If they think that, of course, that's the way it will be. But it's still a tragedy—a Christian tragedy. I revel in the aphorism of the French aristocrat who married Anna Gould: "Anna will never know how much I have loved her for her money."

Until I talked to the girls at Alpha Delta Pi, I'd never talked to a sorority girl before, and they said, "Oh, we're just like everyone else—just like other people." "Oh," I said, "yes"—and I was a bit embarrassed. But then I thought again and said: Yes and no! You're distinctive. You're not "just like everyone else"; you're sorority girls! You've got to believe in yourselves, in your faith. It’s called the "great faith." So I think (laughs)—yes, it is, it is; and I explained to them why. If you want to find out why, you must consult the girls at Alpha Delta Pi.

I conceived this formula for success (writes on the blackboard: ADP). There! There's success. Success in life. I asked them whether Alpha Delta Pi meant anything, or whether they were just Greek letters, and as far as they knew it was just Alpha Delta Pi. So I said, "Well, one could make up something, you know," and what popped into my mind was the formula for success (laughter). Ambition—it all starts there, in motivation, and then channeling that motivation into constancy with some object, which is what I call dedication, and because it doesn't pay off right away (learning German or philosophy, or trying to become intelligent or witty or courageous), it requires patience. So what you need (in that order) is: ambition, dedication, patience—Alpha Delta Pi.

That conceit last time was from Shakespeare—only I altered one word. Shakespeare said, "A jewel in a ten times locked up chest / Is a proud spirit in a loyal breast." What he means is that the "proud spirit" (me) wants to manifest itself, but the "loyal breast" is attached to some order of things, to something, or someone, or some code in the outer world, so that it can't manifest itself. Hence the "proud spirit" in a "loyal breast," like a jewel that can't manifest itself in a sealed chest. The same with love, I think. My conceit was: "A jewel in a ten times locked up chest / Is a loving heart in a loyal breast." Let me explain what I mean. Gregory Bateson has given us a marvelous concept called the "double-bind." The double-bind, he thinks, vitiates our vitality, our creativity, our spontaneity. Mable lives with and loves her invalid, widowed mother. She lives with her and takes care of her, and that's the great joy of her life—that's what she enjoys doing more than anything else in the world, living with and taking care of her invalid, widowed mother. Then one day her mother says to her, "Mable, never leave me! Because I can't live without you! I depend on you absolutely. I have no one else to whom I can turn." Now Mable is in what Bateson calls a "double-bind." She wants to do it, but she must do it. And because she must, she no longer knows whether she wants to, or what she wants.

And so it is with love. We pledge ourselves to one another. We have a formal ceremony in which we stand up and pledge to give our love exclusively to one another, every single drop—that's what the pledge amounts to, as far as I can see. I say we want to pledge to love uniquely and immeasurably, but we only pledge to love exclusively and interminably. You see the difference? When we love properly, we love uniquely and unlimitedly, and in our marriage ceremony we pledge to love only exclusively and interminably. For the qualitative we have substituted the quantitative: one and one only, and for all time. That is a come-down in spontaneity.

The ultimate criterion of love is not: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?” In the Phaedrus, Plato will say love has already slipped away by the time we exchange pledges. When we see the decline of the divine love-affair portrayed in the Phaedrus, it's with the “exchange of promises.” Kierkegaard put that a bit more pointedly: "The woman demands a proof of passion"—marriage, a ceremony—"and she gets the proof and loses the passion." She becomes a man's loyal wife, and if there is passion in his life henceforth, it will be for a mistress. Well, that was my conceit, which adapted Shakespeare from a political context to the concern of this course—love.

It would be a conceit, too, if I make that relevant to Eryximachus, because that was the motto of the hour in which I discussed Eryximachus. How can that quotation relate to Eryximachus?

Here is the order of the first three speeches. It has been an order of expanding context. At first we had a great personal love-relationship between two people in utter isolation, almost without background, in the dreamlike mythic imagery of Phaedrus. We saw two participants in a love-relationship and virtually nothing else.

In Pausanias the relationship opens up to include the community. We do not love miraculously, divinely, unintelligibly, Pausanias says; we love for reasons. And these reasons are induced in us by the ethos of the community. Pausanias is the sociologist:  Herbert Marcuse, B.F. Skinner. It's not willy-nilly that Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe come to be love images. You can trace the history of culture in the sort of woman who is portrayed as beautiful in any given epoch—the Rubens type or Twiggy—in the changing ideal of beauty you can see in the history of painting. It changes, our sense of the beautiful, our sense of love, and we can see the entire culture reflected in it. Morton Hunt portrays this brilliantly in his Natural History of Love. (Do have a look at it. It's one of the most entertaining books I've ever read, and a marvelous introduction to the history of culture. It's applied Symposium stuff.)  The form and ideal of love in each epoch is a perfect microcosm of the culture as a whole, from the courtly tradition of the age of chivalry to the marriage contracts and social contract theory of the Enlightenment.

So Pausanias opens up the personal relationship to include the community, the communal influences which are constantly at work on us. And with Eryximachus, we place man in the context of the entire cosmos: not just man against the background of the human community in which he lives, but man against the background of the entire cosmos in which he lives, which he makes an attempt to master and control and dominate, starting with 16^th and 17^th century Europe, but foreseen by Plato, I think very clearly, in the third speech of the Symposium.

As we opened up the context of our concern, though, we seem to have lost contact with one another. Human relations are not as gripping and dramatic and life-fulfilling in Pausanias as in Phaedrus, and in Eryximachus, they drop away altogether. So genuinely human relationships in our society—to judge by our leading spokesmen: existentialists, sociologists, novelists, dramatists—seem to be at an absolute premium. Most of our relationships are either professional or casual. In human relations we have not yet even begun to scratch the surface of what life can be. Human relations at 15% of their potential I call the C.Q. (or Christian-Quotient). I am always striving to make my closest personal relations 15% (if one can use that crude quantitative notion) of what I think they might be.

We have been taught for a long time that our deepest, real experience is experience we have alone, thinking about life all by ourselves, for ourselves. When we try to approximate this with another person—when we're driven to psychotherapy, to pay $40 an hour to try to make sense of our lives—it's almost like being alone. My three and a half year experience with psychotherapy was the closest thing to being alone I have ever experienced with another person. The therapist never responded to anything, and to this day I don't know what he thinks about anything, much less about me, and all the things I poured out to him.

So in Eryximachus we find a portrait of life in the modern world, in the contemporary world: comfortable, well-adjusted, everything under control—and a great feeling of emptiness and lack of fulfillment, because there are not many personal relations in this impersonal, self-adjusting world we’ve set up. Remember the basis of human relations used to be that we needed one another. Now we don't need one another anymore, and we have not yet discovered the miracle of Platonic love: two souls growing together through constant dialogue and creative encounter.

Growing together, notice, not growing together—that's Aristophanes. Not growing together in the sense of “becoming one,” not that sort of growing together. Not so that we become a four-footed entity called Tomensuzie, Johnenmary, Fredenmable. When two of my best friends were wedded 15 years ago, I sent them a congratulatory telegram and said, "If you two become one, the loss will be irretrievable." It's not that; it's rather the togetherness of two people in conversation, or in a chess game, or in a creative encounter where each retains distinctive individuality. Rilke defined love as "two solitudes standing watch over one another." That's closer, only it despairs of communication, as I have not.

The woman must have her own "thing," in order that Platonic love may flourish. She cannot be dependent on the man economically or socially or intellectually or in any other way. She should be a totally self-dependent, self-reliant being, and it's on this basis that one can then have what is called a "Platonic relationship."

Hitherto, up until this century, such a relationship was for the most part possible only between a man and a man. That is to say, between two beings who were allowed into the "culture game." That is the point of what is called the “Greek disease,” la maladie grecque, die griechische Krankheit. The “Greek disease” in any language is the love of man for a man, the love of a cultured being oriented towards his (or her) cultural growth for another cultural being oriented towards his (or her) cultural growth. For centuries cultural love and male love have been synonymous (like the word “clerical”), for reasons Kate Millett outlines brilliantly in Sexual Politics.

The woman in a Platonic relationship is not there to get a man's meals and tend his children. Earthly love, familial love, conjugal love, as we have known it hitherto, is grounded in nature and Pausanias calls it, a bit condescendingly, “common.” It's the love all men seem to be meant for—but not necessarily. So if you want to be a bachelor, or a little old lady—a little old maiden lady—if you want to live with another man or another woman, you're perfectly free to do so, and there are good reasons why you ought to. You're not sick.

There are reasons for everything and not simply causes for everything. That was what I was into with a group the other night. When I'm inquiring into any life, I want to find the reasons for it, not just the causes for it, because it's a different life from mine. The person might be doing something better than I am—the reason pagan kings of England welcomed Christian missionaries from across the sea and ancient Greeks were bound by the Homeric Code to extend hospitality to the stranger, who might indeed “conceal a god” if things were done better in a neighboring valley. Anyway, even (or especially) if it doesn't apply to me, I'm fascinated. I'm only a fragment or facet of life, after all, and I want to get it all—like Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Faulkner. A kid says to me: "And they started coming at us with chains . . ." Jesus! It's farther from me (by far) than Shakespeare or Tolstoy. It's another world. Of course I do not lecture him. I'm on the edge of my chair, biting my fingernails. You can't get into other worlds with moral principles. It's like eating hamburgers in France. What's he like? What's he after? That's the only question. Of course I’m absolutely committed to the game, and will try to get him to commit himself to it too—but not with moral principles.

So we're pursuing an enquiry into Platonic love, and what it means, and we have finally reached a kind of cul-de-sac in the speech of Eryximachus, where human relations—and hence love, in my sense—have dropped away altogether. All love means for me is human relations at their most intense—human relations qua human relations. That qua is a favorite word of philosophers. I see philosophy as discourse qua discourse. We have common talking, and we have careful talking, called discourse, and then we have high-key discourse called teaching (where there is a special emphasis on "up-take"), and the theory of teaching and discourse is called philosophy, or metaphysics. That's the continuum from small-talk to high metaphysics, and it can all be seen as bullshit (laughter). But it can be done better or worse, and better and better, until we become Platos or Shakespeares or James Joyces—that's consummate bullshit (laughter), and I worship it. That's putting words together their way—not the way, their way.

I really want to make you better at discourse, not give you a truer, more valid, more objective view of life. I want to show you my heightened power of discourse and talking, and encourage your power of discourse and talking. You can do it—not all by yourself, but with someone you find inexhaustibly exciting.

Aristophanes, as I said last time, really opens Act II. We have moved from the first order to the second order. The first three speakers give us views of love and life and what they are all about, first-order views of the world and life. From Aristophanes on we are going to think not about life but about human thinking about life, about those first three speeches. Aristophanes turns back upon the first three speakers to examine what's going on in their speeches. This is what Kant calls a transcendental enquiry.

Remember we saw a certain completeness about the first three speeches: a young man, a middle-aged man, an old man; romanticism, rationalism, science and technology; a personal relationship, society, the cosmos; Christianity, Enlightenment, contemporary suburbia. This gives us the pattern of a life, and the pattern of our collective Western history. Now Aristophanes asks: What's going on in history? What's going on in those speeches? By way of an answer, he relates a myth.

Gerhart Kruger distinguishes two forms of consciousness at work in the Symposium which he calls “enlightened” and “mythic.” Mythic consciousness is rooted in the past and tradition, in our tribal being. It's aristocratic, religious, conservative. Phaedrus speaks with a mythic form of consciousness. Enlightened consciousness is individualistic rather than communal, future-oriented rather than past-oriented. It's egalitarian, scientific, materialistic, progressive (ambitious).

Mythic consciousness has its head in the clouds; enlightened consciousness goes in for debunking. In fact, what "rationalism" means, in Stendhal, Kierkegaard, Freud, is "seeing through romanticism," puncturing youthful illusions. In ancient Greece, the Sophists represent the new-fangled enlightened movement—ruthless social-climbers who are tricky with words and can prove anything, replacing traditional aristocratic values, where one wins arguments by quoting Homer—as L.B.J. quotes Sacred Scripture.

In terms of this duality, Phaedrus is mythic consciousness; Pausanias and Eryximachus are enlightened, aiming at the structuring and control of life and the world. Now Aristophanes is an enlightened thinker, but he's so enlightened that he cuts back into the enlightenment of the preceding two speakers. His speech is an attack, primarily an attack on the second and third speakers.

Aristophanes represents radical self-criticism, Western consciousness directed (relentlessly) back on itself, seeing through its own naive view of the world: Hamlet, Faust, Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, Franz Kafka, especially Jean-Paul Sartre. Knowledge, especially self-knowledge, comes to be regarded as key-hole peeking: seeing through everything, catching people out—especially seeing through oneself, catching oneself out. Gnothi seauton becomes the White Man’s Burden, as we come to see ourselves at base as obscene.

What Aristophanes says is: Look, we're out to fulfill our deficiencies in our personal relations. We look upon ourselves as incomplete, as though we could become complete by latching onto a person, the right thing, or the right code in the outer world. In effect, man is in search of his "tally-half," for completion or fulfillment of some specific deficiency.

This is a theme we can see running from Phaedrus through Eryximachus, the sense of personal deficiency and the need to fulfill it in personal relations. Then, when we give up the hope of fulfilling ourselves through personal relations, we throw all our energy into organizing a well-adjusted, harmonious, organized world, like modern suburbia—the dream of Eryximachus. We get the No Change place we prayed for for centuries. Through science, technology, and bureaucracy, change is minimized and we live in a timeless world." But we find we've undermined our personal relations in constructing this "clean, well-lighted place." We no longer need one another, and know no other basis of personal relationships. Our acumen has brought us to the point where we don't need anything, and don't know what to do with ourselves.

To spoof man, Western man—the desire to be master of his own fate, to create his own life—Aristophanes tells a myth. Initially, he says, we were complete, well-rounded, self-contained human beings. “Two paradises were in one—to be in paradise alone. Aristophanes' view of man as primally whole and self-contained is his parody of the ideal underlying the two previous speeches, which I call Man the Island. Symbolically or pictorially this comes out as a spherical being, with four arms and four legs, bounding along like a circus tumbler.

That initial ideal of man from which the speech proceeds is ludicrous. It's the ideal that Aristophanes attributes to the first three speakers—but preeminently, I think, to the second and third speakers: the ludicrous ideal of our being self-contained, whole, and self-sufficient. Such an ideal reflects the desire to control our environment, and to be on top of every situation we're in. Aristophanes sees this as hybris, the moment of over-reaching in Greek tragedy.

Our desire to be whole and self-contained and self-sufficient, "in control" of our own lives—that's hybris, over-reaching, and for this we're cut down, or more specifically cut in half, like an egg by a thread. Then we have to wander about half beings, looking for our "tally-half," looking for completion, exiled from the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Love.

Now it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for us to copulate. We rush off to Dr. Freud by the millions because we can no longer do what ought to be the easiest thing in the world—we can't make love, can't "get it up," as I'm fond of saying, irreverently. It’s a terrible (and incredible) crisis. Consequently in the second phase of our development, in Aristophanes' myth, the face and the genitals have to be "turned around," so that we can face one another.

What Aristophanes is saying, as I understand him, with the remark that our faces and genitals had to be turned around, is that we are perverted both in character and thinking (the head or face) and in our whole sexual orientation (the genitals). We are "perverts" with faces and genitals backwards, opposite their natural position. The word "perverted" literally means "turned around."

Perversion runs through Aristophanes' whole speech. We begin with three types, three "pure types": lesbian, homosexual, and heterosexual. Good heavens, to put those three species of love on an equal basis strikes us as absurd, if only statistically. Yet Aristophanes makes the love we call "natural" simply one of three types, which puts it in the minority, with two immense perversions right up there alongside it.

Aristophanes, the great comic genius, doesn't really believe in sexual perversion, because he doesn't believe in a standard sexuality from which perversion deviates. You can love any way you like, as far as he's concerned. Still he says we are all somehow perverted, turned around in face and genitals. So we have men running around furiously in pursuit of one another, with the desire to latch onto one another, to know fulfillment through one another—two beings "becoming one." Aristophanes believes (or knows) it won't work. It won t work because we don't know what we're after.

It's clear why a man and a woman love, to propagate the species. But why do two men love? Aristophanes asks: What's the point of the homosexual love? His first answer is: Well, it gets rid of excessive tensions. It's like blowing the foam off the beer. Men find no fulfillment at the office, so occasionally it's necessary to pop into bed together and blow the foam off the beer. But they find no satisfaction in bed either—that's why they have to rush back to the office. And so life oscillates between lack of satisfaction in our professional lives and lack of satisfaction in our personal lives. (It's marvelous to be able to say these things in another man's name—isn't that what Aristophanes is saying?—so that people don't come down on you too viciously.)

The question is: what is the point of the "unnatural" love between men? Pausanias has already made such love the exclusive prerogative of superior men, who are totally immersed in the culture-game. Where the point of a man's and woman's love is clear  enough (survival of the species), this “hopeless love,” he says, can only blow the foam off the beer, to know some relief from the White Man's Burden of self-awareness—in Dr. Johnson's phrase, to "get rid of oneself, to send oneself away." That's one answer. And then, several lines further on, he has Hephaestus, the welding god, the smith, maker of tools and weapons, come down and see two lovers locked in embrace—hanging onto one another for dear life—and say, "Now what would you like? Would you like to be welded together? Because, if you do, I can fuse you into one four-legged entity. We don't hear what they answer.

On the one hand, we make of love some great, immense thing, without knowing what it is we're after, and, on the other hand, it's simply like—the sexual aspect of it is simply like—blowing foam off beer. Because we have no consistent goal in our relations,  because we don’t know what we are about, Aristophanes suggests we're never going to find satisfaction, having no notion of what  it is we're looking for. And so on the assumption of our having been split once, he poses the further possibility of our being split again, so that we have to hop about on one leg.

What hope is there for Aristophanes, the super-enlightened critic, as he looks back at the enlightened development of the dialogue up to this point? There seems to be no hope at all. The enlightened critic says: All we can do at this point is fall on our knees and pray. And that's virtually impossible—at least it's impossible to get up—if you have only one leg. So here, in effect, is the bankruptcy of enlightenment in existentialism. Aristophanes is the existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the historical analogy of the dialogue continues, as Western consciousness cuts back on itself with radical self-criticism. As Phil Greene puts it, “The existentialist looks back at tradition with the accusation, ‘You lied to me!’” With existentialism we have the sense that we have been lied to for centuries. But that's a typical existentialist exaggeration. We are, after all, the only culture with the power to criticize itself in such a fundamental and radical way. I say if you discover, when you're not quite 20, that everything you believed up until you were 17 is a lie, you'd better have another look.

Well, Aristophanes is the null-point of the dialogue, the "scary moment": the challenge that human life can never know fulfillment in the West, because the project we have set for ourselves is an impossible one. This is the theme of Sartre's Being and Nothingness along with Heidegger's Being and Time, the bible of existentialism. Sartre sees human being as sundered against itself, caught up in inner conflict to which there is no possible solution. On the one hand, we want to be conscious, self-aware, alive, and, on the other hand, reliable, self-identical, secure. And these two aspirations are incompatible, producing irreconcilable inner conflict. This is what I see in Aristophanes.

Even Sartre's primary symbol recalls Aristophanes. It is the crescent moon, with "nothingness" lying "coiled at the heart of being like a worm." Our being curls about some central, absolutely basic deficiency or need, which we are continuously trying to make up. This "nothing" is as much a part of our "being" as the dark disc at the center of the crescent moon (or the hole in the doughnut). Hence: Being and Nothingness. This is the same imagery as Aristophanes’ “tally half,” now seen (as the naïve young Phaedrus never suspects) as a dimension of our own being rather than anything in or about the so-called outer world, like another person.

It’s an isolated, solitary drama we enact in our love-relationships and human relations generally, Aristophanes claims, and that is why they're doomed to failure. We simply use one another for our own needs; and the proof is that we have to bind ourselves to one another with sacrifices, pledges, and demands. We have to be commanded to love, and the hooker is that, when we're commanded, we can’t do it. It's like the command, in front of a camera, “Look natural!”

As Rick Long writes, "We try to run away from, to cover over, our feelings of ultimate ineffectuality. In order to feel that our lives have significance, we entice others with lures of affection, closer and closer, until in the chains of emotional attachment, mutual bondage, we at last seem real to ourselves.” And he comments: "How ludicrous!"

The questionable aspect of the whole analysis, which is absolutely marvelous as a diagnosis of the Western (or Christian) malady, is the model of man it presupposes, of encapsulated, isolated, individual beings (each imprisoned in his own skin, presumably),  the notion of Man the Island. As I keep hammering home, that is the Christian-Cartesian model of man, not the “nature” of man. It's one aspect of human being, which we in the West (primarily under Christian influence) have cultivated inordinately, and now display in a tragic and dangerous degree.

Who ordered that their longing's fire 

Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled? 

Who renders vain their deep desire? 

A God, a God their severance ruled, 

And bade betwixt their shores to be 

The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea!

(Matthew Arnold, "For Marguerite: Continued")

One cannot really imagine men of other cultures having to face up to the stern truth: "Thou hast been, shalt be, art alone." It is only we in the West, as a result of our conception and project of human life, who are lonely, detached, isolated, and empty—in Wordsworth's term, forlorn. That's the Christian-Cartesian model of man at work in Aristophanes, which is marvelous as diagnostic, as I say, because most men do in fact live with a naive Christian-Cartesian model of experience. They believe that they are alone, that they must take care of themselves, and can do this with their knowledge and control of the world, and that their relations with other people are transient and superficial. In Aristophanes' analysis this is the assumption or progressive realization of the first three speeches.

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