Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“For love is the desire of the whole, and the pursuit of the whole is called love.”
- Source
- Symposium
- Date
- c. 385–370 BCE
- Local voice
- Dialogue speaker · Aristophanes
- English wording
- Benjamin Jowett — Translator · from Ancient Greek
Meaning of “For love is the desire of the whole,…”
Aristophanes presents love as a longing to recover wholeness, but the claim belongs to his deliberately mythic account of divided human beings rather than to a literal theory of human origins.
Where does it come from?
Symposium, Aristophanes’s speech, Benjamin Jowett translation, Project Gutenberg #1600. The sentence concludes the comic myth of humans split into halves; it is a speaker position inside Plato’s dialogue, not direct autobiography or anthropology by Plato.
Why the local voice matters
Aristophanes gives the mythic speech in Symposium.
