Philia (Friendship)

Plato's inquiry into friendship/love (philia) in the Lysis — an aporetic dialogue that defines nothing yet deposits the conceptual materials two later theories will mine: Plato's own erotics in the Symposium and Aristotle's philia in the Ethics. The Greek philein is deliberately wide — it covers parental love, elective comradeship, and erotic fixation under one word — so the organizing question, "who is a friend to whom, and on what ground?", is relational, not the flat "what is friendship?" of a definition-hunt. Socrates constructs and dismantles a series of candidate accounts (the lover vs. the loved; like-to-like; opposite-to-opposite; the neither-good-nor-bad befriending the good through the presence of the bad; the oikeion or "what belongs"), halts a threatened regress with a first friend (prōton philon) "for whose sake" all else is dear, and re-grounds love on lack/desire — only to leave every candidate refuted: "what a friend is we have not yet been able to find out" (223b).

Key Points

  • The wide philia: philein spans parental love, comradeship, and erotic fixation; the inquiry deliberately runs them together (the opening "your father and mother love you very much?", 207d–208a).
  • A relational question: "is the friend the one who loves, the one loved, or only where love is mutual?" (212a–c) — Socrates seeks the structure of the love-relation, not one common quality, mildly unlike the ti esti single-eidos demand.
  • The failed candidates: like-to-like / good-to-good fails on the self-sufficiency of the good (the good "has no need of anything," hence loves nothing, 215a–b); opposite-to-opposite fails on the enmity counter-instance (216a–b); the neither-good-nor-bad befriends the good "by the presence of something bad" (217b) but that collapses into loving the good "for the sake of an enemy" (220e).
  • The prōton philon (first friend): every instrumental friend is loved for the sake of (heneka) a further friend, so there must be a regress-halting "first friend" loved for its own sake; all the intermediates are mere "phantoms" (eidōla) of it (219c–d).
  • Love is lack: "a thing desires what it is deficient in" (221d–e) — friendship is the relation of the deficient to that in which it is deficient.
  • The oikeion (what belongs / the akin): the final candidate — one loves "what belongs to oneself" (221e) — but it collapses, threatening to reduce either to "the like" (already refuted) or to "the good."
  • Aporetic close: after the loved, the loving, the like, the unlike, the good, and the belonging have all failed, "I have nothing left to say" (223a).

What the Concept Does

  • Reframes friendship as a structure, not a quality — the question becomes "who is friend to whom, on what ground," exposing that ordinary usage equivocates over which party is "the friend."
  • Grounds love in lack rather than likeness — by killing like-to-like (via self-sufficiency) and resurrecting desire-as-deficiency, it makes need, not similarity, the basis of philia.
  • Constructs a regress-and-terminus — the prōton philon gives love a teleological spine: a single beloved-for-its-own-sake for whose sake everything else is dear.

What It Rejects

  • Friendship as goodwill among the already-good and alike — the comfortable "God draws like to like" picture (214a); the good are self-sufficient, hence needless, hence (on this logic) friendless.
  • Wholly instrumental love — the regress argument refuses to let philia be only "for the sake of" further things without a terminus.
  • The reified "presence of the bad" as love's cause — once the bad is abolished, hunger, thirst, and desire (themselves neither good nor bad) remain, so desire, not the bad, is the cause of friendship (220e–221d).

Stakes

The Lysis's value is precisely that it constructs problems and solves none — an aporetic seedbed. Three of its deposits reappear, resolved, in the Symposium: love-as-lack (221d–e, before Diotima's 200a), the lover as a neither-good-nor-bad intermediate who loves the good he is conscious of lacking (216c–218b ≈ the metaxu/daimōn), and the prōton philon as a regress-halting beloved-for-its-own-sake (≈ the ladder's terminus, Beauty itself). The inheritance is partly by rejection: the oikeion (one's own) is exactly Aristophanes' "lost other half," which Diotima refutes ("a lover does not seek the half … unless it is good," 205e). See claims#plato-lysis-seeds-symposium-erotics (live claim). (Confidence medium: developmental dating is contested, and the deposits are aporetic, not doctrinal.)

Problem-Space

The ground-of-love problem: is philia grounded in similarity (like loves like), in lack (the deficient seeks what completes it), or in belonging (the oikeion, one's own)? The Lysis runs all three and lets none stand; the Symposium adjudicates by subordinating love to the good (one loves the oikeion only if it is good, 205e). The problem recurs under shifting vocabularies — erōs, the metaxu, Aristotle's "another self" — a candidate problem-space awaiting a third tradition.

Connections

  • contrasts with eros — the Lysis leaves love-as-lack, the intermediate lover, and the regress-terminus aporetic; the Symposium resolves them by subordinating love to the good. The prōton philon ≈ the ladder's terminus; the neither-good-nor-bad ≈ the metaxu. See claims#plato-lysis-seeds-symposium-erotics (live claim).
  • is a case of aporia — definitional aporia, but a boundary case: Socrates poses and dismantles the candidates himself rather than testing the boys' own convictions, so it is aporia without the standard person-testing elenchus.
  • requires socratic-definition — it runs a ti esti philos demand ("what a friend is we have not yet been able to find out," 223b), though relationally ("who is friend to whom") rather than as a single-eidos hunt.
  • contrasts with theory-of-forms — pre-Forms: the prōton philon is a teleological-structural terminus ("that for the sake of which"), not a separated Form of philia (auto kath' hauto); guard against reading the Republic/Symposium apparatus back in.

Open Questions

  • Does the oikeion reduce to "the like" or to "the good," or is it a genuine third relation? The Lysis suspects collapse (222b–e); the Symposium makes it the good's own.
  • Aristotle's celebrated philia theory (Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics) is "visibly constructed in part out of solutions proposed on these issues" (the useful / pleasant / good friendships; the friend as "another self" ≈ the oikeion). No Aristotle source is yet in the corpus — a deferred genealogical link awaiting an Ethics ingest.

Sources

  • plato-lysis — the entire aporetic inquiry: the wide philia (207d–210d); the lover/loved/mutual trilemma (212a–213c); like-to-like and the self-sufficiency objection (213d–215c); opposite-to-opposite (215c–216b); the neither-good-nor-bad and the presence of the bad (216c–218c); the prōton philon and the regress (218d–220b); desire-as-lack (221d–e); the oikeion (221e–222e); the aporetic close (223a–b).
  • plato-symposium — the resolution the Lysis lacks: love-as-lack (200a), the metaxu/daimōn (202d–204c), and Diotima's refutation of the oikeion-as-other-half (205e).