Cutting at the Joints
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Socrates — τὸ παρανοίας εἶδος… τὼ λόγω… ἀριστερὰ τεμνόμενος μέρος… σκαιόν ἔρωτα ἐλοιδόρησεν… δεξιᾷ τῆς μανίας… ὁμώνυμον θεῖον ἔρωτα.
Now Socrates names the second procedure, and he illustrates it with the image that has come to define his whole method. A living body, he observes, has parts that grow 'double and same-named' from a single trunk — a left side and a right, each the mirror of the other. In just this way, taking 'derangement,' paranoia, as one form naturally present in us, the two speeches cut it in two. The first speech, 'cutting the left-hand part,' to ep' aristera meros, went on dividing until it found within it a 'left-handed love,' skaion erōta — and skaios means not just 'left' but, because the left was the unlucky side, 'sinister, base, ill-omened' — and this love it 'reviled, quite justly.' The second speech led us instead into 'the right-hand parts of madness,' ta en dexia, and there found a love 'of the same name,' homōnymon — also called 'love' — but this time 'divine.' The two loves are namesakes: one word, erōs, stretched over two utterly different things, a base madness on the left and a divine madness on the right. Dividing the one form at its natural seam is what let the speeches praise the one and blame the other, each rightly.
Socrates names the second procedure: division. As a body has paired, same-named parts branching from one trunk — a left side and a right — so the two speeches took madness as a single form and cut it in two. The first speech cut down the left-hand side and found there a base, 'left-handed' love, which it justly reviled; the palinode cut down the right-hand side and found a love of the very same name, but divine.
This is division, diairesis, the downward partner of the collection just described, and Socrates's body-image for it became one of the most famous methodological pictures in philosophy. He develops it fully a line later, where he says the good divider cuts a form into its natural kinds 'like a good butcher,' following the joints that are really there and not hacking through any part, the way a clumsy carver would. That phrase — cutting reality at its joints — has become the standard metaphor for carving up the world according to its true divisions rather than arbitrary ones. The point is that a form has a real internal structure, natural seams where it genuinely divides, and the philosopher's task is to find those seams and cut along them, so that each resulting kind is a real kind and not a mangled fragment. Here the form is madness, and its natural joint runs between the diseased and the divine; cut there, and you get two true species, each nameable and definable. Cut carelessly — lump all madness together, as the first speech and Lysias did before the correction — and you get a monster, a false unity that forces you to praise or blame as one thing two things that are opposite in nature. And notice the deep observation packed into the word homōnymon, 'same-named.' The whole trouble with love, the reason it was a disputed word about which minds wandered, was that a single name covered two different realities: the base, grasping madness and the divine, uplifting one are both called erōs. This is not a mere verbal accident; it is the trap that language sets, the source of most of the confusion the dialogue has diagnosed. One name over two things is exactly what lets a clever speaker slide you from one to the other, praising love and meaning the divine kind, or condemning it and meaning the base — or, worse, running them together so that the divine is smeared with the base's disrepute, which is what the first speeches did. Division is the cure for homonymy. By cutting the one form at its joint and giving each half its due — the left-handed love justly reviled, the right-handed love revered as divine — Socrates untangles the single word into its two real referents, and only then can the truth about each be told. So the two procedures now stand complete before us. Collection gathers the scattered many into one form; division cuts that form into its true kinds. Together they are dialectic, the method Socrates is about to say he loves above all things, and they are the disciplined, waking form of the very ascent the palinode described in the dream-language of wings and recollection. To love rightly and to think rightly turn out to be the same double motion: gather the many beautiful things toward the one Beauty, and tell the divine madness from the diseased.
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