Something the Soul Cannot Say
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Aristophanes — οἰκειότητι καὶ ἔρωτι, οὐκ ἐθέλοντες ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν χωρίζεσθαι ἀλλήλων οὐδὲ σμικρὸν χρόνον. καὶ οἱ διατελοῦντες μετʼ ἀλλήλων διὰ βίου οὗτοί εἰσιν, οἳ οὐδʼ ἂν ἔχοιεν εἰπεῖν ὅτι βούλονται σφίσι παρʼ ἀλλήλων γίγνεσθαι. οὐδενὶ γὰρ ἂν δόξειεν τοῦτʼ εἶναι ἡ τῶν ἀφροδισίων συνουσία, ὡς ἄρα τούτου ἕνεκα ἕτερος ἑτέρῳ χαίρει συνὼν οὕτως ἐπὶ μεγάλης σπουδῆς— ἀλλʼ ἄλλο τι βουλομένη ἑκατέρου ἡ ψυχὴ
...through intimacy and love, not willing, so to speak, to be separated from each other not even a moment. And those who continue together with each other through life, these are the ones who could not even say what they want to get for themselves from each other. For no one would suppose this to be the intercourse of Aphrodite's pleasures— that, after all, it is for this reason each delights in the other's company, so intensely, with such great earnestness— but, wanting something else, the soul of each—
Continuing directly from 192b's description of reunited halves overwhelmed by friendship, kinship, and love: Aristophanes now names these devoted pairs — the ones who spend their whole lives together — and observes that even they cannot say what they want from one another. He rules out the obvious answer, sexual pleasure, and declares that the soul of each is after something it cannot name; the sentence runs on into 192d, where Hephaestus and his tools arrive to press the question.
Aristophanes names the obvious answer only to strike it down: τῶν ἀφροδισίων συνουσία, ‘the intercourse of the things of Aphrodite,’ is the plainest Greek phrase for sex, and he puts it in the sentence only to deny it. The word he reaches for instead, oikeiotēs, ordinarily names kinship — the tie between blood relatives, or the language cities used for an alliance sealed by marriage. The myth has already told us why it fits so exactly here: these pairs are οἰκεῖοι in its most literal sense, torn tissue of a single original animal, and calling their bond oikeiotēs quietly folds a family word into an erotic one — the same collapsing of categories Pausanias performed a few speeches earlier with his two Aphrodites (180d–181a), though to a very different effect.
The claim that no one can say what they want from a lover, only that they want it desperately, is doing real philosophical work: Aristophanes is building the case, word by word, for a desire that outruns its object — bodies are involved, but bodies are not the point. Diotima's speech, still several set-speeches away, will make exactly this separation of erōs from its apparent target, though she will send desire toward the good and toward beauty rather than toward a lost half. Plato lets Aristophanes get there first, in the register of comic myth rather than dialectic, which is why the scene that follows needs Hephaestus and his tools rather than an argument: some claims about what people actually want are easier to stage than to prove.
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