The Plight of Homo Hemisphaericus in Aristophanes’s Myth of the Missing Half
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 (or only that) of a mythologist or folklorist. In Plato’s Symposium¹ 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”. In what follows, I will 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.
The Myth of the Missing Half
According to the myth, humans were originally spherical beings with two faces, four arms, and four legs, descended from the sun (male), earth (female), or moon (hermaphrodite). They walked both forward and backward and ran by turning cartwheels on their eight limbs, moving in circles like their parents the planets. They were powerful and unruly, so to curb their threat to the heavens, Zeus cut each one in two like a sorb-apple halved for making preserves. These severed halves desperately searched for their missing part, and when they found it they clung to it so tightly and relentlessly that they began to die from hunger and neglect. Zeus took pity and repositioned their genitals so as to allow procreation for those split from hermaphrodites and same-sex satisfaction for those split from males or females. Thus, our desire stems from seeking the missing half of our original whole: opposite-sex lovers came from hermaphrodites, same-sex lovers from the original males or females. This deep longing for reunion, beyond mere lust, is a wish to be melded back into one being sharing a single soul and fate.²
There is a problem inherent in this tale. The problem I mean concerns not the nature of love or the psychological need of human beings to seek wholeness in striving for unification with their missing halves and the proverbial “meeting of true minds”. I will set aside for the nonce such salutary and edifying concerns, as well as Aristophanes’s interesting portrayal of sex and gender. Instead I will address and attempt to make sense of a consequence of the initial severance itself and a conundrum it creates regarding the enduring existence of individual human beings over time.
A Simple Case of Identity Over Time
Let us begin by looking at how things pan out in a simple case of enduring existence over time despite changes, e.g. in a case in which Zeus has not (yet) intervened with an act of severance, and let us call one of the original homo sphaericus human beings prior to Zeus’s act of severance “Alexios”. The “principle of the indiscernibility of identicals”³ tells us that if “two” things are the same, then every property of the one must also be a property of the other (or less paradoxically sounding, whenever two names name the same thing, every property of what the one name names must also be a property of what the other name names). Hence, if the teenaged Alexios is the same individual as the toddler in the portrait in the family album, then every property of Alexios the toddler must also be a property of Alexios the teenager and vice versa. So should we conclude that Alexios the toddler and Alexios the teenager are different human beings because the latter has a moustache whereas the former does not? No, because one can maintain that properties in such cases should be regarded as temporally indexed. Alexios the toddler will acquire the property of being moustached. Viewing Alexios’s historical timeline tenselessly (under the aspect of eternity, as it were) we can say without contradiction that Alexios has both the property of being-unmoustached-at-t¹ and the property of being-moustached-at-t², as well as both the property of being-a-toddler-at-t¹ and the property of not-being-a-toddler-at-t². Mutatis mutandis for all other changes of properties over time.
There are of course folks who say things like “I am not the person I used to be”, but such idioms might betray a confusion between strict sameness (a.k.a. numerical identity) and mere similarity (a.k.a. qualitative identity). For starters, note the role of the pronoun “I” in the sentence, which presumes one and the same referent throughout. This just reflects the garden-variety phenomenon of enduring identity throughout or despite changes. “He has become a different person” typically means something on the order of “his personality has changed”⁴ and couldn’t be used to deny someone his inheritance on the grounds that he is merely a namesake of the individual mentioned in a will.
The More Complicated Case of Identity in the Myth
Now for the advent of homo hemisphaericus. After Zeus splits Alexios there are two halves, a left-side half and a right-side half, call them “Alexios-L” and “Alexios-R” respectively (their spatiotemporal timelines result in a Y-shaped history as per Fig. 2). Both are relatively autonomous beings, except for their yearning for one another, which we will ignore for present purposes. As they go on to live their separate lives, we can say of each of them that they have various memories of their prior condition of wholeness. For example Alexios-L can remember some of his happy days as a toddler in pre-agōgē school and many of his adolescent hijinx, as well of course of a number of more recent disrespectful actions that provoked Zeus; likewise for Alexios-R. Thus each of Alexios-L and Alexios-R is in a position to recall something of the form “I am the person who did or experienced such-and-such at time t” where t is prior to Zeus’s intervention. Thus, each of Alexios-L and Alexios-R has psychological continuity with pre-severance Alexios.⁵
Alexios-L can claim that he is identical to Alexios despite changes at and subsequent to severance time t. Unfortunately Alexios-R can also claim that for himself and for the same reason of psychological continuity as vouchsafed by memories. So the problem now is that it is ostensibly the case that (i) Alexios-L is numerically the same individual as pre-severance Alexios, (ii) Alexios-R is numerically the same individual as pre-severance Alexios, but (iii) Alexios-L and Alexios-R are not the same individual, they are two separate individuals living separate lives. Hence (i), (ii), and (iii) taken together are an inconsistent set of statements; they cannot all be true.⁶
One might try to dodge the ostensible inconsistency by denying that Alexios survives the split, that with the severance Zeus magically brought two new beings in existence who merely bear some very strong similarities to Alexios. That is indeed an option, but one that should be considered only as an option of last resort, given not only the shared memories characteristic of psychological continuity but also the spatiotemporal continuity of the flesh and blood body and subsequently detached body parts (viz. detached halves) that are hosts for psychological continuity. The situation for each being is not like that of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt, nor like that of a confidence trick where an article is deftly replaced by one or more of inferior quality: rather, for each of Alexios-L and Alexios-R it’s more like having survived a drastic amputation.
Granted, whether by hemispherectomy or mishap, a detachment of half a brain, inasmuch as brains are the locus of consciousness, is a radical change, but it is not one that necessarily destroys personhood. There are many non-fairytale real-life cases in which a person survives the loss of half their brain and at least sometimes does so fairly unimpaired. A particularly newsworthy case was that of Ahad Israfil (Fig. 3), who lost most of his right cerebral hemisphere from a gunshot accident at work: “Israfil retained sufficient mental faculties to speak, walk, and live a relatively normal life, and even graduated from his local university with an honours degree”.⁷ Nor does survival in such cases depend on which hemisphere is lost, although functional impairments may differ and admittedly be quite grave; not everyone survives as well off as Israfil.⁸
How then might we conceive Alexios’s history in a manner compatible with post-severance survival? Our previous approach to simple cases of endurance in the face of changes over time (i.e. cases without a Y-shaped branching history) will not work, since we will be stuck with seemingly incompatible simultaneous properties. If Alexios has the property of being-located-at-the-agora at post-severance time t³ then he cannot also have the property of being-located-at-the-amphitheatre at the same time t³. Alexios cannot be in different places at the same time, yet there is (prima facie) no similar problem as regards Alexios-L’s having the property of being-located-at-the-agora at t³ and Alexios-R’s having the property of being-located-at-the-amphitheatre at the same time t³.
Might there be another approach? There are numerous myths and legends in which a being loses a part of itself for which it has a special regard. The indigenous North American folktale of how Bear lost his tail is one such.⁹ In that just-so story, Bear is tricked by Fox into using his tail for some wintertime fishing through a hole in the ice, but the hole freezes over and his tail becomes stuck and breaks off. Bear does not embark on a quest for reunion with his severed tail; he and his tail go their separate ways, Bear to eke out a living in his habitat and his tail eventually carried far off by currents under the melting ice in springtime. Then we can also imagine a Y-shaped history for Bear as in Fig. 4:
In this scenario we can reasonably say that Bear who is without a tail is one and the same bear as Bear who was with a tail. Resorting again to tenseless indexical form, we can say that Bear has both the property of having-a-tail-at-t¹ and the property of not-having-a-tail-at-t². Moreover, Bear’s Tail has both the property of being-attached-to-Bear-at-t¹ and the property of not-being-attached-to-Bear-at-t². (Both Bear and Bear’s Tail will of course have undergone infinitely many other changes subsequent to severance; e.g. Bear has become angry over the loss of his tail, Bear’s Tail has lost a few hairs in the ice, some of each of their atoms will have come and gone, etc. etc.) But it would be silly to also identify post-severance Bear’s Tail as being one and the same entity as pre-severance Bear, whereas it was not silly but seemingly plausible that each of Alexios-L and Alexios-R could be considered one and the same person as pre-severance Alexios.
Nevertheless, there is a sense in which we can say that Bear with a tail still exists post-severance. All of him is still there, but he has become a “scattered object”¹⁰ whose previously undetached parts (viz. the body considered exclusive of its tail and the tail considered exclusive of its body) have become detached parts. (It’s like when you order a pizza. If upon its arrival you open the box and see that it has already been cut into serving-sized slices, you aren’t missing any pizza; it’s still all there.)
Can we say the same of Alexios, that post-severance he has become a “scattered object” and still exists in his entirety? The two body halves do still exist in detached or scattered form; so yes, none of the body has been destroyed. But a crucial disanalogy between Bear and Alexios is that in Bear’s case, only one of the detached parts is conscious and has a claim to being one and the same bear as the pre-severance bear on the basis not only of spatiotemporal continuity but also psychological continuity, whereas in Alexios’s case each of the two detached parts has a claim, on that same basis, to being one and the same person as the pre-severance person. The problem is not whether all of Alexios has survived but that there is more of him, insofar as there are two separate and autonomous consciousnesses, one more than there was before.
The Upshot
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Might it be the case that there is no solution to the conundrum relative to the terms in which it has been expressed? The philosopher Derek Parfit has suggested, vis-à-vis a thought experiment that envisages a healthy brain being split and transplanted into two healthy bodies, that we
Suppose we admit that they are different people. Could we still claim that I survived as both, using “survive” to imply identity?
We could. For we might suggest that two people could compose a third. We might say, “I do survive Wiggins’ operation as two people. They can be different people, and yet be me, in just the way in which the Pope’s three crowns are one crown.”
This is a possible way of giving sense to the claim that I survive as two different people, using “survive” to imply identity. But it keeps the language of identity only by changing the concept of a person….¹¹
But the possible way that he is suggesting is tantamount to a scattered-object view of the situation. (The analogy of the Pope’s crown doesn’t quite fit since the three crowns of the triregnum are separable but as a rule not seen to be separated; cf. Fig. 5.) The statement “They can be different people, and yet be me” presumably means that the scattered object, which happens to consist of two people, is his “me” but that still leaves unanswered the question of who those two people are individually. And that question is our conundrum.¹²
This is more or less as far as we can get whilst still sticking with a supposedly intuitive and seemingly commonsensical conception of personal identity, a conception which is significantly predicated on an individual’s memory — in our problem case, the memories of Alexios-L and Alexios-R of pre-severance experiences that they each underwent as Alexios. But if Parfit is right, it just may be untenable to assume that there must be a true answer to every describable question about personal identity. Perhaps our current workaday concepts of personhood and personal identity, having arisen under the limitations of real-world conditions, cannot accommodate every possibility we might imagine or even actually encounter in the future. We may have been seeking an answer where none was to be had.
Final Words
Nevertheless, this is not the end of the enterprise by any means. There have been many proposals for how personhood, personal identity, and personal survival, might be understood, qualified, or reconceived and the debates go on.¹³ My aim here has not been 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.
Myths and fairy tales typically rely on transformations that are inherently mysterious, that don’t conform to natural processes. Those can be accepted as miracles or magical violations of laws of nature. We can understand what a frog is and what a prince is, but we can’t understand how a frog is turned into a prince, and vice versa. In Aristophanes’s tale, we can understand what it is to halve a sorb-apple, but that analogy for the before and after states of halving an apple-shaped human being leaves something out, viz. the specific involvement of conscious memory. Even if we accept the halving as a magical act of Zeus, once we look more closely at it we see that the result of the halving, the effect of that transformation, is prima facie incoherent. It’s tantamount to being unable to understand what a prince is after a frog has been turned into a prince.
I hope that my musings hereinabove will spark the interest of aficionados of mythology and folklore and encourage them to look more closely at some of the details of myths and fairy tales in order to make sense of what is presupposed or entailed by the Magick that’s typically left unquestioned.
Recall that at the outset I set aside the salutary and edifying allegoric elements typically associated with Aristophanes’s myth, such as the nature of love, the psychological need of human beings to seek wholeness in striving for unification with their missing halves, or the proverbial quest for a “marriage of true minds”. I don’t have much to say on that subject, but I do have a different picture preference. I ask myself, what might a pessimistic philosopher like Schopenhauer have made of Aristophanes’s allegory? Given what is known about significant functional impairments in most real-life half-brain cases (Ahad Israfil being a rare exception) and also given the bad news about many personal relationships in general,¹⁴ I suspect that Schopenhauer might have inferred that the true nature of the telos of homo hemisphaericus’s autoincestuous yearnings is more aptly conceived of, not as a marriage of true minds, but as a union of half-wits.
Notes
1. Plato: Symposium or Drinking Party. Translated with Introduction, Glossary, Essay, and Appendices by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company , 2017), 189A-193E.
2. Neel Burton, “Plato’s Myth of Aristophanes”. Neel Burton Blog, 25 Sept. 2024, <https://neelburton.com/2024/09/25/platonic-myths-the-myth-of-aristophanes/> Accessed 2025–12–06.
3. The enunciation of this principle is generally attributed to G.W. Leibniz. See “Indiscernibility of identicals”. Philosopher. <https://thephilosopher.net/dictionary/indiscernibility-of-identicals/> Accessed 2025–12–06.
4. Cf. Roland Puccetti, “Brain Transplantation and Personal Identity”, Analysis 29.3 (1969) 65–77: “These are all weak senses of the term “new person”. In the strong sense they remain the same people nevertheless” (69–70).
5. A similar state of affairs was represented on Star Trek, season 1, episode 5, “The Enemy Within”, directed by Leo Penn, written by Richard Matheson, aired 1966–10–06 on NBC. In that episode a “transporter” (i.e. teleporter) malfunction causes Captain Kirk to be split into two individuals, respectively embodying the good and bad sides of his personality. In a concluding faceoff, the “good Kirk” persuades the “evil Kirk” that they need each other to survive and can both live on as parts of each other after being reunited by a reversal of the process via the repaired transporter. Conceptions of teleportation create additional complications for personal identity that would take us too far afield to consider here.
6. Cf. Derek Parfit, “Personal Identity”, The Philosophical Review 80/1 (1971) 3–27 (5).
7. “Loss of Half His Brain — Ahad Israfil Survives a Freak Shooting Accident”. Stranger than Fiction. 2007–11–14. Archived from the original on 2008–09–26. <https://web.archive.org/web/20080926001450/http://www.mymultiplesclerosis.co.uk/stranger-than-fiction/ahadisrafil.html> Accessed 2025–12–06.
8. “7 People Who Lost Half of Their Brain but Survive”. <https://booboone.com/people-who-survive-with-half-of-their-brain/> Accessed 2025–12–06. In some philosophical thought experiments inspired by such cases, a totally healthy brain is split into two hemispheres, one of which is somehow transplanted into a body whose entire brain has been removed, or perhaps into a brainless clone (one has to imagine a possible future in which the biosciences have advanced to the point where we can have ourselves cloned in order to provide a source of spare parts and neuroscience has advanced to the point where brain transplants become feasible).
9. Erminnie A. Smith, Myths of the Iroquois (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution — Bureau of Ethnology, 1883), 77–78. A number of other indigenous North American groups also lay claim to this tale. One of many child-friendly (i.e. unlike Smith’s ethnographic field note) versions of this tale is Hannah Bok, How Bear Lost His Tail (Heinemann, 2009).
10. Logical and metaphysical issues pertaining to scattered objects were first taken up by Richard Cartwright, “Scattered Objects”, in Analysis and Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of R. M. Chisholm, ed. Keith Lehrer (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1975), 153–71, reprinted in Richard Cartwright, Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 171–86. For an application of Cartwright’s idea to a fairy tale see Karl Pfeifer, “A Note on a Cold Case: Wittgenstein’s Allusion to a Fairy Tale”, Gramarye Issue 24 (2023) 29–34 (33).
11. Parfit, “Personal Identity”, 7–8.
12. Parfit himself opts to give up the language of identity, proposing that “I survive as two different people without implying that I am these people.” (“Personal Identity”, 8)
13. For a general overview see Eric T. Olson, “Personal Identity”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2024 Edition), eds. Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman. <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/identity-personal/>. Accessed 2025–12–06. Also see Konstantin Zarubin, Parfit’s division: On split brains and personal identity. Unpublished manuscript (2018). <https://kostia.me/english-deutsch/patfits-division/> Accessed 2025–12–06.
14. Numerous people on the Dr. Phil and Jerry Springer television talk shows come to mind. ☹
