Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [130]
Seen in this light, it’s no wonder we despise being wrong. It reminds us, however obliquely, of this rift between us and the world: of the limits—all the limits—of being human. And it’s no wonder, either, that most of us work so assiduously to dodge this rift in our daily lives. We go to our jobs, stop by the bar on our way home, hang out with our friends, raise our kids—because these things are the stuff of life, to be sure, but also because they are strategies for keeping the terror of isolation in check. Søren Kierkegaard, that existentialist before there was existentialism, compared us in this respect to those early American pioneers who banged on their pots and pans all night long, hoping to keep the wolves at bay.
Keeping wolves at bay is a start. But of all our ways of dealing with this rift, our favorite by far is the one that promises to eliminate it entirely—to transform our desert island into a tropical paradise, our fundamental separation into ecstatic union. This strategy is our last, best hope for escaping the loneliness of existence and giving despair the slip. I am talking, of course, about love.
What happens in Plato’s Symposium is this: a bunch of guys go to a party, get drunk, and sit around bullshitting about love. (Don’t be fooled by today’s healthcare symposiums and technology symposiums and workplace-safety symposiums. In ancient Greek, the word specifically referred to a drinking bash.) Of the seven soliloquies supposedly delivered that night, two have achieved immortality. The first is the famous “origins of love” speech that Plato attributes to the great comic playwright Aristophanes. Putting words into Aristophanes’ mouth (and tongue into cheek), Plato has him explain that the first human beings were each made up of two men, two women, or a man and a woman—doubled creatures of such extraordinary cleverness and courage that they dared to plot against the gods. Zeus, angered by this hubris, split these original humans in half, leaving them and all their descendents to spend much of their lives searching for their missing counterparts. That is why, Aristophanes tells us, “the precise expression of the [lover’s] desire…[is] that he should melt into his beloved, and that henceforth they should be one being instead of two.” Love, he concludes, “is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.”
If you’ve read The Symposium, you know that Plato plays Aristophanes largely for laughs. As it turns out, though, the playwright’s idea of love was not so different from the philosopher’s—which is to say, from Platonic love, the other enduring legacy of that imaginary dinner party. These days, we mostly use the term “Platonic love” in contradistinction to the carnal kind. But Plato meant something more than that. To him, the highest form of love was intellectual—the love of one mind for another. That love, he claimed, brought us back in touch with cosmic truths, those we understood intuitively before our souls took on their imperfect, incarnate forms and we were wrenched out of oneness with the universe. For Plato as for Aristophanes, love restored us to a lost wholeness.
Fast-forward 2,500 years. The global population has ballooned from 100 million to 7 billion. Untold numbers of ideas, books, boozy dinner parties, love affairs, languages, religions, cities, cultures, and nations have flourished on and faded from the earth. Ancient Greece lies in ruins. No-fault divorce is turning forty. Lesbian wedding announcements appear in the New York Times. And yet, somehow, our understanding of love has changed almost not at all. Across the ages from Plato’s day to our own, up and down the cultural registers from lowbrow to high, the notion of love as the union of souls persists. It was alive and well in that Yorkshire manor named Wuthering Heights, where Catherine declared of Heathcliff that, “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” It wafted out of every radio in America in 1988, when Phil Collins topped the charts singing about “two hearts living in just one