The Double Love in the Body
Read the full text in our reader
Eryximachus — τέχνης, ὡς μέγας καὶ θαυμαστὸς καὶ ἐπὶ πᾶν ὁ θεὸς τείνει καὶ κατʼ ἀνθρώπινα καὶ κατὰ θεῖα πράγματα. ἄρξομαι δὲ ἀπὸ τῆς ἰατρικῆς λέγων, ἵνα καὶ πρεσβεύωμεν τήν τέχνην. ἡ γὰρ φύσις τῶν σωμάτων τόν διπλοῦν ἔρωτα τοῦτον ἔχει· τό γὰρ ὑγιὲς τοῦ σώματος καὶ τό νοσοῦν ὁμολογουμένως ἕτερόν τε καὶ ἀνόμοιόν ἐστι, τό δὲ ἀνόμοιον ἀνομοίων ἐπιθυμεῖ καὶ ἐρᾷ. ἄλλος μὲν οὖν ὁ ἐπὶ τῷ ὑγιεινῷ ἔρως, ἄλλος δὲ ὁ ἐπὶ τῷ νοσώδει. ἔστιν δή, ὥσπερ ἄρτι Παυσανίας ἔλεγεν τοῖς μὲν ἀγαθοῖς καλὸν χαρίζεσθαι τῶν ἀνθρώπων,
…our art — how great and wonderful the god is, extending over everything, in both human and divine affairs. I will begin speaking from medicine, so that we may also honor our art. For the nature of bodies has this double love: the healthy state of the body and the diseased state are admittedly different and unlike, and the unlike desires and loves the unlike. So one love belongs to the healthy, another to the diseased. And it is so, just as Pausanias was just now saying, that it is noble to gratify the good among men,
Eryximachus has just told the company (186a) that Pausanias's account of Eros applies not only to human souls but to the bodies of animals, to plants, and to virtually everything that exists — a truth he says he has observed from his own art, medicine. Continuing that same sentence, he now argues that the nature of bodies itself carries this same double Eros: one love belongs to a body's healthy state and another to its diseased one, since, he says, the unlike desires and loves the unlike.
Eryximachus states his medical law flatly, as a textbook would: the unlike desires and loves the unlike, ἀνόμοιον ἀνομοίων ἐπιθυμεῖ καὶ ἐρᾷ. That reverses a proverb his listeners would already know. The ordinary wisdom, hómoios homoíōi — like to like — runs back through Homer and gets tested directly in Plato's own Lysis (214a), where Socrates presses the same question about friendship: do we love what resembles us, or what we lack? Eryximachus answers for bodies without hedging. A diseased body's whole erotic bent, in his account, is toward the health it does not have, not toward more of its own sickness.
The move he makes around that reversal is worth noticing too. Pausanias had split Eros into two kinds by an ethical test, a noble object and a base one. Eryximachus keeps the split but relocates it entirely inside the body: one love for the hygieinón, the healthy state, and another for the nosṓdes, the diseased one — health and disease simply named as two objects a body can want. Each speaker at this table enlarges Eros to the shape of his own trade. Pausanias's Eros governs honorable conduct; Eryximachus's governs correct regimen. The dialogue does not yet ask the reader to choose between them.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Plato, Symposium 186b in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Plato, Symposium — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Plato, Symposium 186b — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/symposium/186b/