“I Am Both Sides”: Plato, Nietzsche, and the Androgynous Self

Introduction

Identity often emerges from the interplay of seemingly opposed forces—male and female, active and passive, reason and desire. In both Plato’s Symposium and Nietzsche’s later writings, the figure of the androgynous serves not as a literal concept of gender, but as a compelling metaphor for inner unity and the complexity of becoming. Although separated by centuries and grounded in divergent metaphysical assumptions, both philosophers explore the integration of opposites as central to self-understanding. This article argues that Plato and Nietzsche, each in his own idiom, envision the human being as divided yet striving—whether for lost wholeness or creative transformation.

The Androgynous Myth in Plato’s Symposium

In the Symposium, Aristophanes offers a mythic account of love’s origin that locates human desire in an ancient rupture. Originally, he claims, humans came in three types: male-male (from the sun), female-female (from the earth), and androgynous—male and female combined (from the moon). Each was a unified, spherical being with four arms, four legs, and two faces. As punishment for their pride, Zeus split them in half, condemning them to wander the earth longing for their severed counterpart.

This tale, while whimsical on the surface, conveys a profound psychological and philosophical insight. It dramatizes the condition of fragmentation: to be human is to be incomplete, searching for a former unity. Crucially, the myth is not a theory of sexual difference or reproduction, but a symbolic narrative about the divided self.

Plato underscores this in a striking passage: “Each of us is thus the ‘symbol’ of a human being, sliced like a flatfish.” (Symposium, 191D). The term symbolon refers to an ancient Greek practice in which a token—often a piece of clay—was broken and shared between two parties. When the fragments matched, they confirmed identity and connection. In this light, the myth figures each person as a fragment bearing the memory of a lost whole. Love becomes not merely an erotic impulse but a metaphysical yearning: the drive to overcome internal division and achieve a higher unity.

Nietzsche and the Androgyny of Spirit

Nietzsche, writing in a radically different philosophical climate, also reflects on division and synthesis within the self. In Ecce Homo, he muses: “As my father, I have already died; as my mother, I still live and grow old... I know both sides for I am both sides.” (“Why I Am So Wise” §1)

This statement does not invoke literal parentage but rather a metaphorical self-characterization. It suggests a being that contains opposing principles—death and life, masculinity and femininity, dominance and nurture. Nietzsche’s language of duality signals a deeper philosophical gesture: the capacity to sustain contradiction as a creative force.

His notion of Neutralität further illustrates this point:

“Ich bin neutral, nicht zuletzt in der Hinsicht, daß ich keinerlei Interesse mehr habe.”
(“I am neutral, not least in the sense that I no longer have any interest.”)

Here, neutrality is not indifference but a cultivated distance from inherited roles and dichotomies. It marks a refusal to be captured by fixed positions—gendered or otherwise. Much like Plato’s mythic beings who long to be rejoined, Nietzsche’s figure of the self emerges through tension and inner dialogue. Yet where Plato’s love seeks reunion with a missing part, Nietzsche embraces dissonance as the very engine of transformation.

Ambiguity and Power in Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche deepens this engagement with polarity in Beyond Good and Evil §239, where he analyzes shifting gender roles. He writes of women who, in seeking autonomy, adopt traits traditionally coded as masculine:

“She wants more, she learns to demand... By seizing these new rights, [she] aspires to become ‘Master’.”
„Man will mehr, man lernt fordern… Indem es sich dergestalt neuer Rechte bemächtigt, ‚Herr‘ zu werden“.

This passage has often been read as reactionary, but it is more ambivalent than it appears. Nietzsche criticizes not female empowerment per se, but the replication of masculinist paradigms in the name of emancipation. The German word man (one) echoes Mann (man), suggesting that such role reversals may still be operating within the same symbolic economy. Likewise, Herr (master) connotes power not yet reimagined, but simply reversed.

Nietzsche’s concern is that mimicry of dominance does not lead to liberation but to a perpetuation of the master-slave dialectic. True transformation, for Nietzsche, lies in Selbstüberwindung—self-overcoming—which entails breaking the binaries themselves, not merely inverting them. This insight aligns, in a distant register, with Plato’s Symposium, which does not glorify the return to an erotic or social partner but rather gestures toward philosophical ascent—the soul turning from fragmentation toward the contemplation of the Good.

Two Visions of Becoming: Restoration and Struggle

At first glance, Plato’s androgynous myth and Nietzsche’s doubled self may seem incompatible. Plato gestures toward reunion and transcendence, Nietzsche toward struggle and continual self-surpassing. Yet both figures reject the comfort of simple binaries. Plato’s story is not a nostalgic call to rejoin a literal other, but an allegory for the soul’s movement toward a higher form of unity. Nietzsche’s formulation likewise resists synthesis in favor of dynamic interplay—his “knotted and crocheted” image in Beyond Good and Evil §2 is telling:

“It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of those good and honoured things resides precisely in their being artfully related, knotted, and crocheted to these wicked, apparently antithetical things... perhaps even in their being essentially identical with them.”

This image resonates with Aristophanes’ mythic fusion—not because Nietzsche wishes to restore a prior unity, but because both thinkers recognize the creative potential of contradiction. Wholeness, if it exists, is not found in simplicity or resolution, but in the capacity to sustain and work through division.

Conclusion: A Many-Sided Self

Plato and Nietzsche approach the problem of selfhood from different ontological and ethical standpoints. Plato’s myth of the androgynous offers a metaphor for the soul’s ascent through love—from fragmented being toward philosophical insight. Nietzsche, conversely, urges the individual to confront and integrate the tensions within, not to transcend them, but to become more fully themselves. While Plato envisions a ladder of ascent—from bodily desire to the realm of pure Beauty—Nietzsche evokes the Sipo Matador, symbolizing the self’s becoming through persistent struggle and conflict. Androgyny, for both, is less about gender than about the possibility of interior reconciliation or productive tension.

The human self, in their hands, is neither fixed nor pure, but a site of encounter: between desire and reason, ascent and descent, masculine and feminine energies. Whether we seek to restore what was lost or to surpass what is given, the path forward, they suggest, lies not in division or dominance but in an artful embrace of complexity.

References

1. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Hackett Publishing, 1989.
2. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books, 1967.
3. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books, 1966.