Thoughts on Lysis

      Lysis is another definitional dialogue that ends up addressing deeper topics than appear on the surface. The scene begins with Hippothales and Ctesippus meeting up with Socrates on the road. Socrates, just like in Symposium, says he has a “sixth sense” for detecting when someone is in love or not and Hippothales has that glow about him. He confesses to be in love with a guy named Lysis, but after he tells Socrates how he has been expressing his admiration, Socrates upbraids him. Apparently, Hippothales has been writing poems and hymns about Lysis all the time and yet he is so bashful he never gets up the nerve to actually speak to him. Socrates tells him that he is making two mistakes.

“All connoisseurs, therefore, in matters of love, are careful of praising their favorites before they have won them, from their doubts as to the result of the affair. Moreover, your beauties, when lauded and made much of, become gorged with pride and arrogance” (206a).

Only celebrate when you have won, and don’t feed people’s egos. I was quite surprised to see the old philosopher Socrates give young people relevant and helpful dating advice. In fact, Socrates promises to show Hippothales how to talk to Lysis. Socrates was a very good friend.

              Once they begin talking with Lysis, Socrates launches into a discussion that demolishes the concept of libertarian free will. The libertarian vision of freedom is that you are free only as long as you have choices. The huge downfall of this concept is that it takes no account of the rationality of the choice, which leads to absurdity. If you choose to melt yourself into a candle, a libertarian free will theorist would think that was as “free” a choice as the choice to watch an episode of Black Books. To any sane person the former choice would seem to reflect madness and thus imply a slavery to ignorance and so it wouldn’t be considered free. Socrates asks Lysis, “do you think a man happy if he is a slave, and may not do anything he wants” (207e)? Lysis initially says no, but Socrates shows him the plethora of ways in which his parents treat him worse than a slave. He isn’t allowed to drive a chariot or control his daily schedule – tasks which his parents appoint to slaves. This seems odd since his parents love him and want him to be happy. Lysis tries to resolve this contradiction by chalking it up to his young age, but Socrates points out the many responsibilities he does have.

              Socrates shows him the real reason why he is and is not allowed to do various things. It all boils down to knowledge. If his father is sure that Lysis knows what he is doing, then he lets him do it. Socrates informs us of the monumental importance the acquisition of knowledge should have in our lives.

“If, therefore, you acquire knowledge, my son, all men will be friendly to you, all men will be attached to you, for you will be useful and good. If not, you will have no friend in anyone, not even in your father or mother, or any of your own family” (210d)

So how does this little display relate to free will? Socrates is effectively showing that the ability to do whatever you want isn’t what makes you free. What gives you freedom is knowledge. So, if you truly want freedom you should endeavor to acquire not only as much knowledge as possible, but the right kind of knowledge. As the Lord says in John 8:32f “the truth shall set you free.” After this discussion Socrates tells Hippothales that this is how you talk to someone you are interested in. You speak about real substantial topics that you are interested in and speak to the person truthfully and don’t fawn over them and lavish them with flowery little speeches full of insubstantial fluff. Be who you are and humble and check them, do not pamper and puff them up.

              Lysis is so energized by the discussion that he wants to see Socrates stump Menexenus and his master Ctesippus, men deemed to be formidable scholars. Socrates obliges them and chooses to speak about friendship. He begins with a beautiful speech on how important friendship is in life.

“One longs for horses, another for dogs, a third for money, a fourth for office. For my part, I look on these matters with equanimity, but on the acquisition of friends, with all a lover’s passion, and I would choose to obtain a good friend rather than the best quail or cock in the world; I should prefer one to both horse and dog—nay, I fully believe, that I would far sooner acquire a friend and companion, than all the gold of Darius, aye, or than Darius himself. So fond am I of friendship” (211e)

That being said he asks Menexenus how exactly friendship works. Can friendship only work if the feeling is mutual? What if it is only one-sided? Menexenus first answers that it doesn’t matter, but Socrates points out that unrequited love does seem to exist. That being the case he changes his answer to say that one can only be friends if the affection is mutual. Socrates objects and says that he has experienced one-sided love before. When you punish your children, they certainly aren’t feeling loving toward you, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t loving towards them. He even brings up the friendship we can have for immaterial things like someone who is a friend of wisdom or of books or movies, etc. These things can’t love you back, but it does seem like you can be friendly towards them.

              Therefore, Menexenus changes his position again to say that this love can be one-sided. Socrates ends up finding this impossible because it would mean that you could be a friend to your enemy and an enemy to your friend (213b). The discussion quickly and subtly changes from a concrete discussion about actual friendship between human beings to a more abstract and metaphysical discussion about attraction in general. Stuck at an impasse, Socrates changes tack and wonders if the saying “like attracts like” has merit to it. At first it seems like it does, and this is how friendship is to be explained. Socrates sees two problems with this, however. The first is that it would seem to imply that the wicked would be friends with other wicked people, but evil never benefits anyone and is never the cause of friendship. He also sees a problem with taking this premise to its logical conclusion. If we take out evil and say that only good people can like other good people, then there is still a problem. If you are truly good, it means you are perfectly self-sufficient and so need nothing – so you wouldn’t even need friends. He looks at the opposite premise: maybe “opposites attract” is really true. It certainly seems like things in nature crave their opposite. Moisture seeks dryness, cold seeks heat, the weak need the strong, the sick need the healthy, etc. The problem is that if taken to its logical extreme it would mean that friendship itself would have to be the friend of enmity and goodness would have to be friends with evil, etc.

              At this point we know like things can’t be the friend of like things, neither can contrary things be the friend of contrary things. We also know that evil is friendly to nothing and that the good is perfectly sufficient and needs nothing. Based on all this, Socrates comes up with a clever solution. What if the good can be the friend of the neutral (i.e., what is neither good nor evil)? He explains why a sick person is the friend of the doctor in a way that wouldn’t violate the idea that no one can be friendly with evil (since sickness is evil). He says that evil can temporarily inhabit a neutral thing. This is like the difference between your hair turning from brown to grey over time due to age naturally and dyeing your hair. One is a real change and the other only apparent. So, when you are sick, evil is present in you, but your body is neutral and so can still be the friend of someone good like the doctor. Once again, Socrates finds a problem with this as well. If you like something only for the sake of something else, you run the risk of generating an infinite regress. He also has a problem with evil being instrumental in friendship.

              He examines what would happen if evil were to disappear completely. If the previous definition is correct that the good is only friends with what is neutral and temporarily inhabited by something evil then if evil were to disappear, the good would be useless. This makes no sense, so the definition is discarded. He asks what desires will still exist in a world where evil has been eradicated. Will we still get hungry or thirsty? These feelings are painful, and pain is evil so he says they either will still exist and won’t be painful (but what would that mean?) or they won’t at all. The only desires that could possibly exist are good desires and ones that are neutral. The dialogue ends in a very hopeful way. I interpret his musing on a world without evil not to be some random philosophical exercise, but a sincerely expressed hope. This is confirmed for me when he says that the good belongs to everyone and that evil is a stranger to everyone (222c), something I firmly believe is ultimately true of us all. He may not be able to explain friendship, but he does know that he has friends. As he says, “though we conceive ourselves to be friends with each other – you see I class myself with you – we have not as yet been able to discover what we mean by a friend” (223a).

              At this point, I’m not sure I would be able to find a way to adequately describe how friendship works. I am fairly certain that this dialogue is only about friendship on the surface. I think, on a deeper level, it is about the relation of good and evil in the world and the seeming contradiction there. The key tip-off here is the idea is the good is utterly self-sufficient and needs nothing, so then why is there anything besides the Good. This takes on great importance in theology when we ask the question “if God didn’t need to create us and indeed doesn’t need us now, then why did he create us?” Some modern process theologians grasp the nettle and say that God does indeed need us, but I find this to be blasphemy of the highest order, not to mention the crudest type of anthropomorphism. I think Plato wrote this dialogue pointing a path forward trying to show how to answer this question. From what I understand, Plotinus later interprets Plato as indicating that the Good is self-diffusive. It is in its very nature to create and love what it creates and so it endlessly does this, even though it doesn’t strictly need to. That’s why the dialogue ends in aporia, because all the other possibilities have been debunked and it is our job to figure this one out. I’m not sure if I’m right and I have a lot to learn, but I’m excited to find out. No matter what, I agree with Socrates that the Good is the beautiful, all evil will one day be eradicated, and we are all ultimately strangers to evil with goodness as our universal birthright. Time will tell.