11 The Lysis

There is a danger when reading any imaginative literature (and unima­ginative literature too!) of misunderstanding the purpose of the author. It is, however, important to formulate some idea of the purpose in order to be able to judge the work. For example, if we were to see Aristophanes’ Birds expecting a tragedy, and if while we saw the play we kept asking ourselves, “How is this a tragedy?” we would certainly leave the theatre disappointed. But suppose that Aristophanes had actually written it as a tragedy; say, he simply had failed; wouldn’t our disappointment then be justified? It has been the thesis of this book that Plato did not intend for us to read his dialogues as theses on philosophy, that he wrote them as prose comedies and would have expected his audience to react to them as such. It is, alas, not possible to ask Plato his intention. Indeed, we might only wish that Aristotle or Xenocrates or some other contemporary of his had done so.

The Lysis has been much criticized by Plato’s readers, who ap­proach it expecting philosophy. Guthrie says the dialogue shows that even Plato could nod and write a bad dialogue.^[1] Its arguments seem to go nowhere, he says, and the twelve- or thirteen-year-old boys who are forced to talk to Socrates on his terms don’t deserve the sort of tomfoolery that we watch with approbation hurled on the sophists. When the dialogue is over, we have no positive doctrines on friendship to justify the minutes spent reading. But, I ask, what if the dialogue is a little play the purposes of which are not intended to teach us about friendship? What if we do not look at the dialogue as Plato’s treatise on friendship?

The criticisms Guthrie levelled against this dialogue as a piece of philosophy seem to me entirely justified, and the arguments mustered by Plato’s defenders are not persuasive.^[2] If, however, we are not intended to read the dialogue as a work of serious philosophy but as a drama, we will have to ask a different set of questions: we shall have to ask what dramatic point the play makes. And here it seems to me that the dramatic point makes sense only if we see the philosophical vacuity of the arguments.

Socrates tells us in the first sentence of the dialogue that he was walking from the Academy to the Lyceum when he was waylaid at a palaestra. In other words, Socrates was going from one gathering of young men to another when he stopped at a third. What a Herculean appetite for conversation with young people we observe! At the palaes­tra Socrates chats with Hippothales, who displays symptoms of being in love. Ctessipus mischievously reveals his friend’s secret love to Socrates. Hippothales, it turns out, is passionately in love with young Lysis and spends his time writing to him silly love poetry in the style of Pindar. Socrates admonishes the ardent Hippothales to be careful, for if he writes his poems in the wrong way, he will cause the boy to flee rather than to stay (205D-206A): if you praise the beloved too much, he will become arrogant and think himself too good. Hippoth­ales asks Socrates for lessons in how to appeal more attractively to his beloved. Socrates says he needs to be introduced to the boy so that he can show Hippothales how to act.

Now Lysis is the particular friend of Menexenus, the cousin of Ctessipus, and so, Hippothales says, if Socrates passed time with Ctessipus, Lysis, who is fond of listening, would surely join them.^[3] Socrates sees Lysis and marvels at his beauty (206E-207A). Hippoth­ales hides where he can see Lysis without being seen.

The conversation begins. It is unnecessary for us to review the maze of arguments except in outline so that we may dwell on the most dramatic moments.

Socrates teases the children, asking whether they quarrel about who’s the elder or the more beautiful. They do, but they nevertheless agree that they are friends. Menexenus is called away, and Socrates talks to Lysis alone. In a very simple conversation, one that might even serve as a lesson in dialectic for the primary grades, Socrates and Lysis conclude that the youth’s parents don’t allow him to do certain things not because he is too young but because he lacks understanding. This part of the dialogue ends with Socrates’ eliciting from Lysis a very modest statement of his lack of skill. Socrates says that he was tempted to turn to Hippothales and to explain to him that this is the correct way to talk to a lover. But remembering Hippothales’ shyness, he restrains himself.

Now if the dialogue had ended here or had continued in this fashion, Plato’s critics would surely have had little to fuss about. The argument has been clear as daylight and certainly consistent with usual Socratic teaching about the value of knowledge. A reader might in fact think that this dialogue was for the beginning student or a dialogue Plato wrote when just starting out.^[4] Instead, the dialogue takes a strange turn for the complicatedly obscure. We shall have to ask why.

Menexenus returns. Lysis, whispering to Socrates so that his friend Menexenus will not hear, urges Socrates to tell Menexenus what they have been saying. But, says Socrates, Menexenus is fond of dispute and may try to confuse him. Lysis confesses that it is this very love of dispute that stirs him to make the request. He wants Menexenus to be humbled a bit by Socrates. (Unlike Hippothales, he sees the advan­tages in humbling the beloved.) Socrates agrees.

Here we have a key to the play’s meaning. Lysis has been portrayed as Menexenus’s friend, yet he wants him humbled. And Socrates agrees to help humble him! In fact, in the course of the dialogue, we see Socrates humble both of them as well as himself! The boys have asserted that they know they are friends; Socrates (204C) has claimed a special ability to detect lovers and beloved. Each character who claims such knowledge ends the conversation in a state of aporia, of perplexity. And in the last sentence of the dialogue, as Socrates is left standing alone, he calls out to the departing boys that they all have appeared ridiculous, for though conceiving themselves to be friends, they have not been able to define the term. Here we see a visitation by the philosophical nemesis upon those who presume too much.

Socrates’ formulation of the question of friendship does not deal so much with the nature of friendship as with the sort of persons who can be friends. Are friends the good, the evil, or the neither-good-nor-evil. Are friends those who are alike or those who are unalike? Every pure extreme form is rejected: the good are not friends with the good, nor the evil with the evil, nor the good with the evil, nor the good with the neither-good-nor-evil-none of the possible combinations are able to be friends. In a crazy argument about whether the body is a friend of the medical art, it is concluded that it is, because of the presence of illness. Finally (219B), Socrates formulates the problem in what seems to be a deliberately confusing way: that which is neither good nor evil is a friend to the good on account of an evil to which it is a foe, for the sake of a good to which it is a, friend. The argument is ridiculous. Socrates structures the argument in such a way as to force the argument to end in aporia. Every extreme is rejected. Can this be one of those cases where we are to understand the mean as the answer, that friendships are composed of those who are means between being alike and unalike? Of course, even if Plato had in mind some such solution to the question of friendship, it wouldn’t explain the grotesque form of the argument.

A number of possibilities suggest themselves as the dramatic pur­pose of the dialogue. It is, of course, entirely possible that all of these hypotheses are false and that Plato had something else entirely in mind. But—sigh—he’s not here to say. First, it seems possible that Plato is satirizing arcane argumentation. Perhaps his competitor schools were already beginning to teach this kind of sophistic eristic and Plato wanted to attack it. This hypothesis of course assumes that Socrates is not everywhere the philosophical hero, except perhaps by embodying as a devil’s advocate the sort of thing he would have others avoid. Obviously it is not necessary to be able to define a friend in order to have a friend: so much the drama makes clear; after all, Lysis and Menexenus are good friends even though they are unable to define the term.^[5]

Perhaps in the Lysis Plato wished to give an example of what we might call “exploratory dialect,” in which Socrates really didn’t know where he was going but was inventively trying to find his way. We would then have before us an example of a philosophical exercise that didn’t take us very close to a solution, even if it did bring up some serious philosophical questions (like the impossibility of infinite re­gress). Will it be so bad an exercise for Plato to show us an argument that was unsuccessful? After all, his Socrates is not Perry Mason: he can perhaps fail every now and again. Perhaps in fact all Plato wanted to show us is that the process of philosophical investigation is in itself an activity of friendship and that even if one does not reach a conclu­sion the friendship is undiminished; the reward is in the activity even when there is no product.

I wonder too whether Plato might not have had in mind something else. Socrates was executed on the charge of corrupting the youth. In no other dialogue do we actually see him talking to people so youthful as the boys Menexenus and Lysis of this dialogue. If this is all that Socrates says to them, how does he corrupt them? True, he and they may not have reached any conclusions. But hasn’t their shared hum­ bling been useful? If this is all Socrates did with the youth, the play seems to ask, did he deserve to drink hemlock?