Karl Pfeifer

Sometimes it can be intellectually appealing to fixate on an element of a myth, fable, fairy tale, or similar cultural lore as if it were a puzzle to be solved rather than as something to be taken for granted that moves the story along. By not simply taking the narrator’s say-so on faith, one might don the mantle of a philosopher, instead of that of a mythologist or folklorist. In Plato’s Symposium a speech is given by Aristophanes in which he recounts the mythic origin of our desire to love another human being, where this desire is conceived as a search for our “missing half”. I interrogate the “inciting incident” that is the catalyst for this quest. I contend that Aristophanes has thereby inadvertently presented us with a type of conundrum, familiar enough to philosophers nowadays, but not recognized until the 20th Century, no doubt after having been inspired by teleportation in science fiction and half-brain and commissurotomy cases in real life. I offer the conundrum as a brain-teaser for mythologists, folklorists, and other scholars and aficionados of cultural lore. My aim here is not to solve the puzzle inherent in Aristophanes’s myth, but to provide enough insight into the issue to give mythologists and folklorists some tasty new food for thought.