1
Like-Mindedness

In an early episode of the television tragi-comedy series Enlightened, the protagonist, Amy Jellicoe (played by Laura Dern), greets her friend Sandy (Robin Wright) with ecstatic joy. As they walk and talk together, Amy feels that in her friend she has found her soul-mate, her other self. She can tell her friend everything, and her friend immediately understands. In fact, she need not say a word, yet her friend will know her thoughts and feelings. In the end, sadly, Amy learns otherwise, as her friend has her own agenda, and it is not the same as Amy’s.1

Dashed hopes, hurt feelings. Amy’s desire to find “another self” did not have its roots in Sandy, who was simply a cipher, a relative unknown on whom Amy projected her hopes. Nor was it “hard wired” in Amy, as if an innate quality of the human (or female) psyche were to seek a soul-mate. Yet, even so, Amy’s fantasy of finding another self was not invented by the series’ script writers. Rather, those writers were building upon the shards of a seductive, consoling, and yet sometimes disappointing fantasy long embedded in the Western love tradition. The ideal of finding a soul-mate was constructed over time, in fits and starts, with ruptures, variants, luxuriant growths, and odd denials.

Partnerships

The idea is already in Homer’s Odyssey, where like-mindedness signals absolute agreement. Homer (perhaps one person, perhaps a committee charged with reconciling various oral traditions, in any event writing around the eighth century BCE) recounted Odysseus’ prolonged homecoming to Ithaca after defeating Troy. His story is essentially about flux and movement – ships sail, stall, and drift; waves crash; storms rage; men run, hide, and turn into pigs – until the hero at last returns to his one fixed center: the immovable nuptial bed at Ithaca that he built around the trunk of a deep-rooted olive tree. On that bed, after twenty years’ absence and his wife’s (Penelope’s) twenty years of weeping, the two have “their fill of passionate lovemaking (philótes)” (23:300).2

Philótes, philos, and philia are ancient Greek words that suggest strong affection. Although some commentators say that in Homer there is only “obligation” and no possibility for the voluntary bonds of love and friendship, their theory breaks down precisely with the idea of “like-mindedness,” where someone is “another self.” Nestor, king of Pylos, speaks of one sort of like-mindedness when Telemachus (the son of Penelope and Odysseus) visits Pylos to seek news of his long-absent father. The old king tells Telemachus,

Nestor insists on offering every hospitality to Telemachus, showing him both respect and affection. Nevertheless, his being “of one mind” with Odysseus was clearly very different from Amy’s sense that all her hopes and dreams were shared by her friend. Nestor was referring to political agreement: he and Odysseus had the same plans, the same good counsel for their armies. This was limited like-mindedness. Even so, it engendered an affection that extended to the next generation.

Homer described a more profound like-mindedness in the counsel that Odysseus gave to the young and beautiful Nausicaa, a princess who offered hospitality to the hero when he was shipwrecked on her shores. She was attracted to him and wanted to marry him. But he was determined to return home. Instead of himself, he offered her a blessing:

“Two like-minded people keeping house together” was the foundation of Odysseus’ own marriage, and the relationship of Nestor and Odysseus paled in its shadow. Only a man and a woman could keep house together with like mind. Odysseus and Penelope were ekluon – “they listened and heard and paid attention to each other.”3 Yet their like-mindedness, too, was not quite like Amy’s because theirs was of the flesh, with love-making at its core. At the same time, it was practical, involving the pursuit of common goals by two people in utter harmony and agreement. And so, after Odysseus returned home, after the two had made love, Odysseus told Penelope:

For those of us harboring the fantasy (we shall look closely at it in chapter 4) of obsessive love, this seems like an anti-climax: this man has been away from his wife for twenty years, and nevertheless he tells her that he will soon take off again to go raiding. But it makes perfect sense in the context of Homeric like-mindedness, the joint pursuit of what is best for “keeping house” – the economic and political as well as the erotic unit.

In this ancient fantasy of love and like-mindedness, the man calls the shots. He tells Penelope to “care for the possessions in the halls.” Is she really of like mind? He tells Nausicaa what marriage is about. Does she see it that way? The male prerogative is here so built in that Homer would not have been conscious of it.

*

But, four centuries later, Plato was very aware of the disparity of power between people in love, especially in erotic love. In Plato’s Athens, Eros was associated above all with pederasty – not the same thing as pedophilia, with which it is often confused. Pederasty was a relationship justified by an adolescent boy’s need to be educated – intellectually, militarily, and morally – by an older man. The idea was to instruct the boy in virtue, in the qualities and knowledge needed for a citizen of the city-state, and, yes, to engage in sex, though generally non-penetrative. The boy was expected to be a bit shy, even rather unwilling; the older man was to be the wooer and the lover. Plato was well aware of the unequal power involved in this set-up. That helps explain why, when he wrote the Laws (one of his last dialogues), he made chaste friendships rather than sexual liaisons the foundation of social and political harmony.4 When sex is involved, one or the other partner will dominate, and that will destroy the equality needed for a flourishing citizenry. In the Laws, Plato looked to non-erotic friendships to supply the like-mindedness that would give the state its own rock-solid foundation. He had in mind people who were equals politically, who cared for one another’s well-being, and who were like-minded above all in their mutual and life-long pursuit of virtue. He made no room for like-minded husbands and wives. The marital unit was useful only for procreation and to channel sexual passion.

But in other dialogues Plato outlined different solutions to the inequality that seemed built into erotic relationships. His most compelling argument came in his Symposium. Named for the stag parties (symposia) common in classical Greek city-states, these get-togethers featured flute girls, lots of wine, and good conversation. Plato’s Symposium brought together (fictively) a number of luminaries from an earlier generation, including Socrates. Dismissing the flute girls, the men decide not to get drunk but, rather, to offer improvised speeches in praise of Eros, god of love. The speech that Plato gives to the comic playwright Aristophanes solves the problem of inequality in sexual relations by making love the search for one’s “other half.”

Originally, says Aristophanes, humans were perfectly round in shape and utterly self-sufficient, needing no one else. They were (in a way) two in one: some two men, others two women, still others a man and a woman. Each had two faces, two genitals, four legs, four arms. They could move very fast by cartwheeling, and they were so proud of themselves that they “made an attempt on the gods” (190b).5 For this intolerable hubris, Zeus cut them in half and had Apollo sew them up and turn their heads around, so that they would face their cut half, which Apollo smoothed out, except for “a few wrinkles around the stomach and the navel” (191a). That cut was a most miserable solution, for each of the halves spent all their days seeking their other half and trying to regrow together. They thought of nothing else, and so everyone was dying, no one was reproducing, and the gods were not getting their due worship and sacrifice from humans.

Then Zeus hit on another...