Tuesday 9/3
Lysis
Readings
Texts
Discussion Questions
First Question: Aporia
Lysis is our primary example of what are called the 'aporetic (ἀπορητικός) dialogues'. Quoting Gary Matthews' "Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy”, p. 30,
Plato in this and other early dialogues tends to use aporia and its cognates for a state of mental confusion, bewilderment, or helplessness--the condition, to use Wittgentstein's phrase, of 'not knowing one's way about'. ('A philosophical problem has the form: "I don't know my way about (Ich kenne mich nicht aus"' Philosophical Investigations 123.)
The word aporia has an interesting history in classical Greek. It is derived from aporos, which means 'without a means of passing a river', or, more generally, 'having no way in, out, or through'. Thus the first meaning of aporia in Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon is 'difficulty of passing'. The word then comes to mean 'being at a loss, embarrassment, perplexity'... Later on, as Liddell and Scott point out, the word comes to mean 'question for discussion, difficulty, puzzle'. This is the sense Aristotle usually gives it in his writings.
The aporetic dialogues are so-called because they seem, like Euthyphro, Laches, and Lysis, to only serve to perplex, offering no discernible solutions whatsoever to the very important puzzles they raise--what determines right action, what is virtue, and what is friendship, respectively.
In the case of Lysis, we find ourselves perplexed by the nature of friendship through a successive series of proposals and refutations. How can something as basic as philia prove to be so difficult to grasp, when philia is something all but the feral or the hermitic experience and take quite for granted? What does this oddity say about philosophy and the unexamined life? What advantage has someone who finally manages to understand friendship over those who experience it without understanding it?
Second Question: The Value of Friendship
In Lysis, Socrates prefaces his inquiry into the nature of friendship with Menexenus by saying,
“That’s just what I’m going to do,” I said. “So, Menexenus, tell me something. Ever since I was a boy there’s a certain thing I’ve always wanted to possess. You know how it is, everybody is different: one person wants to own horses, another dogs, another wants money, and another fame. [e] Well, I’m pretty lukewarm about those things, but when it comes to having friends I’m absolutely passionate, and I would rather have a good friend than the best quail or gamecock known to man, and, I swear by Zeus above, more than any horse or dog. There’s no doubt in my mind, by the God, that I would rather possess a friend than all Darius’ gold, or even than Darius himself. That’s how much I value friends and companions. [212] And that’s why, when I see you and Lysis together, I’m really amazed; I think it’s wonderful that you two have been able to acquire this possession so quickly and easily while you’re still so young. Because you have in fact, each of you, gotten the other as a true friend—and quickly too. And here I am, so far from having this possession that I don’t even know how one person becomes the friend of another, which is exactly what I want to question you about, since you have experience of it.
So it is not the essential nature of friendship Socrates seeks so much as just how friendship is had. To be sure, the essential nature of friendship, if it can be said to have such, is part of the exploration. Nevertheless, Socrates goes on in the elenchus to investigate just how friends are friends of friends, where to be a friend is rather broadly construed to include also love and becoming enamored of another. In the course of the discussion Socrates has with Lysis and Menexenus, a number of proposals are made and rejected for understanding the relationship.
Since the value of friendship motivates Socrates investigation with the boys, it is presumably well worth asking, what is the value of friendship? What do we learn of its value during the course of the dialogue?
Third Question: A Dizzying Number of Arguments
At 216c-217a (Lysis), Socrates pauses in his discussion with Menexenus on the nature of the relationship of friendship (broadly construed) to summarize their progress. Thus,
[c] “But there’s this too we still ought to consider. We may have overlooked something else, the possibility that the friend is none of these things, but something that is neither bad nor good but becomes the friend of the good just for that reason.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“By Zeus,” I said, “I hardly know myself. I’m getting downright dizzy with the perplexities of our argument. Maybe the old proverb is right, and the beautiful is a friend. It bears a resemblance, at any rate, to something [d] soft and smooth and sleek, and maybe that’s why it slides and sinks into us so easily, because it’s something like that. Now I maintain that the good is beautiful. What do you think?”
“I agree.”
“All right, now, I’m going to wax prophetic and say that what is neither good nor bad is a friend of the beautiful and the good. Listen to the motive for my mantic utterance. It seems to me that there are three kinds of things: the good, the bad, and the neither good nor bad. What about you?”
“It seems so to me too,” he said.
“And the good is not a friend to the good, nor the bad to the bad, [e] nor the good to the bad. Our previous argument disallows it. Only one possibility remains. If anything is a friend to anything, what is neither good nor bad is a friend either to the good or to something like itself. For I don’t suppose anything could be a friend to the bad.”
“True.”
“But we just said that like is not friend to like.”
“Yes.”
“So what is neither good nor bad cannot be a friend to something like itself.”
“Apparently not.”
“So it turns out that only what is neither good nor bad is friend to the [217] good, and only to the good.”
“It seems it must be so.”
Thus i) the good is not a friend to the good, ii) the bad is not a friend to the bad, and iii) the good is not a friend to the bad. We're left by elimination with the prospect that it is only the neither good nor bad that can be a friend, and that only to the good.
What are the arguments, specifically, that have led us to reject (i), (ii) and (iii)? Spell them out as carefully as you can. Further, what conceptions of good and bad do these arguments presuppose? Are the arguments sound, do you find, or, upon critical consideration, do you find ways in which their arguments might have been rejected even though in the dialogue they were not? In the end, who is friends with whom, and why?
Fourth Question: Seduction
In Lysis, Socrates admonishes Lysis' besotted lover Hippothales:
When I heard that I said, “Hippothales, you deserve to be ridiculed. Do you really compose and sing your own victory-ode before you’ve won?”
“I don’t compose or sing victory-odes for myself, Socrates.”
“You only think you don’t.”
“How is that?” he asked.
[e] “You are really what these songs are all about,” I said. “If you make a conquest of a boy like this, then everything you’ve said and sung turns out to eulogize yourself as victor in having won such a boyfriend. But if he gets away, then the greater your praise of his beauty and goodness, [206] the more you will seem to have lost and the more you will be ridiculed. This is why the skilled lover doesn’t praise his beloved until he has him: he fears how the future may turn out. And besides, these good-looking boys, if anybody praises them, get swelled heads and start to think they’re really somebody. Doesn’t it seem that way to you?”
“It certainly does,” he said.
“And the more swell-headed they get, the harder they are to catch.”
“So it seems.”
“Well, what do you think of a hunter who scares off his game and makes it harder to catch?”
“He’s pretty poor.”
[b] “And isn’t it a gross misuse of language and music to drive things wild rather than to soothe and charm?”
“Well, yes.”
Socrates then sets out to show Hippothales how he ought instead to lure Lysis in conversation:
I asked Lysis then, “Am I right in assuming, Lysis, that your father and mother love you very much?”
“Oh, yes,” he said.
“Then they would like you to be as happy as possible, right?”
“Naturally.”
“Well, do you think a man is happy if he’s a slave and is not permitted [e] to do whatever he likes?”
“No, by Zeus, I don’t think so.”
“Well, then, if your father and mother love you and want you to be happy, it’s clear that they must be extremely concerned to make sure that you are happy.”
“Well, of course,” he said.
“So they allow you to do as you please, and they never scold you or stop you from doing whatever you want to do.”
“Not true, Socrates. There are a whole lot of things they don’t let me do.”
[208] “What do you mean?” I said. “They want you to be happy but they stop you from doing what you want? Well, tell me this. Suppose you have your heart set on driving one of your father’s chariots and holding the reins in a race. You mean they won’t let you?”
“That’s right,” he said. “They won’t let me.”
“Well, whom do they let drive it?”
“There’s a charioteer who gets a salary from my father.”
“What? They trust a hired hand instead of you to do whatever he likes with the horses, and they actually pay him for doing that?”
[b] “Well, yes.”
“But I suppose they trust you to drive the mule-team, and if you wanted to take the whip and lash them, they would let you?”
“Why ever would they?” he said.
“Is anyone allowed to whip them?”
“Sure,” he said, “the muleteer.”
“A slave or free?”
“A slave.”
“It seems, then, that your parents think more even of a slave than their own son and trust him rather than you with their property and let him [c] do what he wants, but prevent you. But tell me one more thing. Do they allow you to be in charge of your own life, or do they not trust you even that far?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Who is in charge of you, then?”
“My guardian here.”
“He’s a slave, isn’t he?”
“What else? He’s ours, anyway.”
“Pretty strange, a free man directed by a slave. How does this guardian direct you; I mean, what does he do?”
“Mostly he takes me to school.”
”And your schoolteachers, they’re not in charge of you too, are they?”
“They sure are!”
[d] “It looks like your father has decided to put quite a few masters and dictators over you. But what about when you come home to your mother, does she let you do whatever it takes to make you happy, like playing with her wool or her loom when she’s weaving? She doesn’t stop you from touching the blade or the comb or any of her other wool-working tools, does she?”
[e] “Stop me?” he laughed. “She would beat me if I laid a finger on them.”
“Good gracious!” I said. “You must have committed some kind of terrible offense against your father or mother.”
“No, I swear!”
“Then why in the world do they so strangely prevent you from being happy and doing what you like? And why are they raising you in a perpetual condition of servitude to someone or other, day in and day out? Why do you hardly ever get to do what you want to do? The upshot is, [209] it seems, that your many and varied possessions do you no good at all. Everybody but you has charge of them, and this extends to your own person, which, well-born though it is, somebody else tends and takes care of—while you, Lysis, control nothing, and get to do nothing you want to do.”
“Well, Socrates, that’s because I haven’t come of age yet.”
“That can’t be it, son of Democrates, since there are some things, I imagine, that your father and mother trust you with without waiting for you to come of age. For instance, when they want someone to read or write for [b] them, I’ll bet that you, of everyone in the household, are their first choice for the job. Right?”
“Right.”
“And nobody tells you which letter to write first and which second, and the same goes for reading. And when you take up your lyre, I’ll bet neither your father nor mother stop you from tightening or loosening whatever string you wish, or from using a plectrum or just your fingers to play.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Then what’s going on? What’s the reason they let you have your way [c] here, but not in all the cases we’ve been talking about?”
“I suppose it’s because I understand these things but not those.”
“Aha!” I said. “So your father isn’t waiting for you to come of age before he trusts you with everything; but come the day when he thinks that you know more than he does, he’ll trust you with himself and everything that belongs to him.”
“I guess so,” he said.
“Well, then,” I said, “what about your neighbor? Would he use the same rule of thumb as your father about you? When he thinks you know more [d] about managing his estate than he does, will he trust you to do it, or will he manage it himself?”
“I suppose he will trust me to do it.”
“And how about the Athenians? Do you think they will trust you with their affairs when they perceive that you know enough?”
“I sure do.”
“Well, by Zeus, let’s not stop here,” I said. “What about the Great King? Would he trust his eldest son, crown prince of Asia, to add whatever he [e] likes to the royal stew, or would he trust us, provided we went before him and gave him a convincing demonstration of our superior culinary acumen?”
“Why, us, of course.”
“And he wouldn’t let his son put the least little bit into the pot, but we could throw in fistfuls of salt if we wanted to.”
“Right.”
[210] “What about if his son had something wrong with his eyes, would he let him treat his own eyes, knowing he wasn’t a doctor, or would he prevent him?”
“Prevent him.”
“But, if he thought we were doctors, he wouldn’t stop us even if we pried his eyes open and smeared ashes in them, because he would think we knew what we were doing.”
“True.”
“So … he would trust us, rather than himself or his son, with all his business, as long as we seemed to him more skilled than either of them.”
“He would have to, Socrates,” he said.
“Then this is the way it is, my dear Lysis: in those areas where we [b] really understand something everybody—Greeks and barbarians, men and women—will trust us, and there we will act just as we choose, and nobody will want to get in our way. There we will be free ourselves, and in control of others. There things will belong to us, because we will derive some advantage from them. But in areas where we haven’t got any understanding, no one will trust us to act as we judge best, but everybody will do [c] their best to stop us, and not only strangers, but also our mother and father and anyone else even more intimate. And there we are going to be subject to the orders of others; there things are not going to be ours because we are not going to derive any advantage from them. Do you agree this is how it is?”
“I agree.”
“Well, then, are we going to be anyone’s friend, or is anyone going to love us as a friend in those areas in which we are good for nothing?”
“Not at all,” he said.
“So it turns out that your father does not love you, nor does anyone love anyone else, so far as that person is useless.”
“It doesn’t look like it.”
[d] “But if you become wise, my boy, then everybody will be your friend, everybody will feel close to you, because you will be useful and good. If you don’t become wise, though, nobody will be your friend, not even your father or mother or your close relatives.”
“Now, tell me, Lysis, is it possible to be high-minded in areas where one hasn’t yet had one’s mind trained?”
“How could anyone?” he said.
“And if you need a teacher, your mind is not yet trained.”
“True.”
“Then you’re not high-minded either—since you don’t have a mind of your own.”
“You’ve got me there, Socrates!”
[e] Hearing his last answer I glanced over at Hippothales and almost made the mistake of saying: “This is how you should talk with your boyfriends, Hippothales, cutting them down to size and putting them in their place, instead of swelling them up and spoiling them, as you do.” But when I saw how anxious and upset he was over what we were saying, I remembered how he had positioned himself so as to escape Lysis’ notice, so I bit my tongue.
In this, Plato is putting forward a view on seduction. Is he right? If so, how so? If not, what has he missed?