Lysis

Author(s): Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Stanley Lombardo, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

A short aporetic dialogue on friendship (philia) — a word Socrates deliberately stretches across parental love, elective comradeship, and erotic fixation. Set in a wrestling-school, it opens by correcting Hippothales' love-poetry (the wrong way to court a boy) and then runs, with the boys Lysis and Menexenus, a chain of failed candidate accounts of what a friend is: the one who loves, the one loved, or only the mutually-loving (all fail); like-to-like (the good are self-sufficient, hence needless, hence friendless); opposite-to-opposite (then the enemy would be friend); the neither-good-nor-bad befriending the good "through the presence of the bad"; the prōton philon — a regress-halting "first friend" loved for its own sake, which collapses into "a friend for the sake of an enemy"; and finally the oikeion (what belongs to / is akin to oneself), which dissolves into "the like" or "the good." The inquiry closes in confessed aporia: "what a friend is we have not yet been able to find out" (223b). Its value is precisely that it constructs problems and solves none — an aporetic seedbed two later theories (the Symposium's erotics, Aristotle's philia) mine for materials.

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: The right way to win a beloved is philosophical conversation, not praise-poetry. Because: praising a boy before you have won him "swells his head," makes him "harder to catch," and magnifies the lover's ridicule if he is lost — a premature eulogist is a hunter who scares off his own game. Against: Hippothales' love-odes and ancestral eulogies, and the whole erotic-encomium convention the Symposium will stage. Location: 204e–206c (hunter analogy 206a–b); enacted at 210e.

  2. Claim (preliminary, framing the whole): one is loved only insofar as one is useful, and usefulness tracks knowledge. Because: Lysis' parents love him yet forbid him everything and set slave-tutors over him because he does not yet understand; wherever we have understanding everyone trusts us and we are free; "nobody loves anyone … so far as that person is useless"; "if you become wise … everybody will be your friend." Against: this collapses being loved into being useful — parents love useless infants, and the self-sufficient good person would then be unlovable (a tension the later candidates exploit). Location: 207d–210d.

  3. Claim (Candidate A): The friend is neither simply the one who loves, nor the one loved, nor only the mutually-loving — none survives. Because: friend = lover fails (no horse-lovers unless horses love back, against the poet); friend = loved fails (disciplined children who hate their parents would still be "their very dearest friends," making one "an enemy to one's friend," which is "simply impossible"); friend = only-where-mutual leaves a real but unrequited love that is no friendship. Against: ordinary usage tolerates calling either party "friend"; the trilemma is manufactured by demanding a single bearer of the relation. Location: 212a–213c.

  4. Claim (Candidate B): "Like is friend to like" — refined to "only the good is a friend, and only to the good" — is refuted. Because: the bad are never even alike to themselves, so only the good are alike; yet like "cannot benefit or harm its like" in a way it could not benefit itself, and the good person is self-sufficient, "has no need of anything," hence prizes nothing, hence is no friend. Against: friends manifestly do benefit one another; the move assumes likeness entails self-sufficiency and that love requires need. Location: 213d–215c.

  5. Claim (Candidate C): "Opposite is friend to opposite" is refuted. Because: Hesiod's "potter angry with potter" suggests everything desires its opposite — "the opposite is food for its opposite"; but then enmity, the opposite of friendship, would be friend to the friend, the just to the unjust — absurd. Against: the desire-of-opposites picture (need seeks what it lacks) is dismissed only by this counter-instance, not on its merits — and is then resurrected as true (arg. 7). Location: 215c–216b.

  6. Claim (Candidate D): The neither-good-nor-bad is friend to the good, through the presence of the bad — provisionally "discovered." Because: of the three kinds (good, bad, neither), good-good, bad-bad, and good-bad are excluded, so only the intermediate can befriend the good; the sick body (neither good nor bad in itself) befriends medicine "because of the presence of something bad," refined by the white-lead-on-hair analogy — the bad must be present without yet making the thing bad. This models philosophia: those "conscious of not knowing what they don't know" love wisdom. Against: the next move shows the account makes the good loved "for the sake of an enemy," undoing it. Location: 216c–218c.

  7. Claim (the prōton philon and its collapse): every instrumental friend is loved "for the sake of" a further friend, so there must be a "first friend" loved for nothing else — but it self-destructs. Because: the sick man befriends the doctor on account of disease and for the sake of health, which, if a friend, is for something further — a regress that must terminate in some "first principle which will no longer bring us back," of which all intermediate friends are mere "phantoms" (eidōla). Yet "the good is a drug against the bad": abolish the bad and the good "has no use at all," so the supposed terminal friend is "a friend for the sake of an enemy" — the exact opposite of a first friend. Against: Socrates blocks total collapse — even with the bad gone, hunger, thirst, and desire (themselves neither good nor bad) remain, reopening desire, not the bad, as the cause of friendship (221d). Location: 218d–221d.

  8. Claim (Candidate E, the oikeion): love, desire, and friendship are directed toward what belongs to (is akin to) oneself — but every branch collapses. Because: "a thing desires what it is deficient in," and the deficient has had its own taken from it, so love seeks "what belongs to oneself" and friends "naturally belong to each other." On review, though: if belonging is being-like, the old "like is useless to like" refutation returns; if they differ, then either the good belongs to all (good befriends bad — excluded), or like belongs to like (the rejected result), or belonging = good (good befriends only good — already refuted). Against: Aristotle and the Symposium will treat the oikeion as true; Socrates collapses it only by refusing to let it be a third, distinct relation. Location: 221d–222e.

  9. Claim (meta-conclusion): after the loved, the loving, the like, the unlike, the good, and the belonging have all failed, philia is defined nowhere. Because: each candidate was constructed and dismantled in turn; the guardians drag the boys home and Socrates confesses "we have made fools of ourselves" and "what a friend is we have not yet been able to find out." Against: a reader who takes the recurrences (desire-as-lack, the oikeion, the prōton philon, the intermediate) as positive deposits will call the aporia productive — exactly what the Symposium and Aristotle's Ethics presuppose. Location: 222e–223b.

Key Findings

  • An aporetic seedbed, by design. The dialogue constructs problems and solves none; per Cooper, its very materials recur in the Symposium (Socrates to Agathon, Diotima's remarks) and "Aristotle's celebrated theory of friendship in the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics is visibly constructed in part out of solutions proposed on these issues."
  • Love is grounded in lack, not likeness. The covert answer the inquiry circles: the good are self-sufficient and so cannot be friends (215a–b); what grounds philia is deficiency — the lover seeking what belongs to it and was taken from it (221d–222a).
  • The prōton philon is a proto-ascent terminus. The "first friend" loved for its own sake (219c–d), with all instrumental friends demoted to "phantoms," prefigures the terminus of the Symposium's ladder — but here it is left aporetic and "contaminated by the bad."
  • Aporia without person-testing. Per Cooper, Socrates does not elicit and examine the boys' own opinions (as he does with Charmides); he confronts them with constructed puzzles and dismantles them himself — a boundary case for the elenchus.
  • Pre-Forms. Like the Euthyphro and Meno, the Lysis sits before the theory-of-forms: the prōton philon is a teleological-structural terminus ("that for the sake of which"), not a separated Form of philia.

Concepts Developed

  • philia — the dialogue is primary on friendship/philia and its apparatus: the wide philia spanning parental, comradely, and erotic love under one word; the prōton philon (the regress-halting beloved-for-its-own-sake); the oikeion (what belongs to / is akin to oneself); the neither-good-nor-bad intermediate that alone loves the good; and desire-as-deficiency (love as lack of one's own). The original framing is relational — "who is a friend to whom, and on what ground" — not a flat "what is friendship."

Concepts Referenced

  • eros — philia is deliberately run together with erotic love (philein); the Lysis already has desire-as-lack (221d–e) and the in-between lover that the Symposium's erotics will rework.
  • to-kalon — "the beautiful is a friend … the good is beautiful" (216d), gestured at as the proverbial friend, then folded into "the good"; not pursued (the Symposium will pursue it).
  • aporia — the dialogue's terminus: "what a friend is we have not yet been able to find out" (223b).
  • elenchus — invoked as a near-edge: Socrates supplies both the candidate accounts and their refutations, while the boys mostly assent.
  • socratic-definition — a ti esti philos demand drives the whole inquiry, though pitched at a relation rather than a single common quality.
  • theory-of-forms — not operative; named as a guard-rail (the prōton philon is not a separated Form).

Key Passages

"the more swell-headed they get, the harder they are to catch" (206a) — arg. 1, the hunt/courtship motif. "nor does anyone love anyone else, so far as that person is useless" (210c); "if you become wise, my boy, then everybody will be your friend" (210d) — arg. 2, the usefulness thesis. "even though they hate their parents then, their very dearest friends" (213a); "it is simply impossible to be an enemy to one's friend" (213a) — arg. 3, the loved-is-friend reductio. "God always draws the like unto the like" (214a); "only the good is a friend, and only to the good" (214d); "a self-sufficient person has no need of anything" (215a) — arg. 4, like-to-like and the autarkeia objection. "everything desires its opposite and not its like" (215e); "is the enemy a friend to the friend" (216b) — arg. 5, opposites and the contradiction-monger's reductio. "neither bad nor good but becomes the friend of the good" (216c); "a friend of the good because of the presence of something bad" (217b); "be white or appear white?" (217d) — arg. 6, the intermediate and qualified presence (parousia). "arrive at some first principle which will no longer bring us back" (219c); "like so many phantoms of it" (219d); "the good is a drug against the bad" (220c); "it was a friend for the sake of an enemy" (220e) — arg. 7, the prōton philon and its collapse. "desire is the cause of friendship" (221d); "a thing desires what it is deficient in" (221d); "you naturally belong to each other" (222a); "if belonging and being like turn out to be the same thing" (222b) — arg. 8, desire-as-lack and the oikeion. "made fools of ourselves, I, an old man, and you" (223b); "what a friend is we have not yet been able to find out" (223b) — arg. 9, the aporetic close.

What's Not Obvious

  • The dialogue's covert thesis is that love is lack, not likeness. It dismantles the comfortable picture (friendship as mutual goodwill among like-minded good people, "God draws like to like") precisely to expose that the good are self-sufficient and therefore needless and friendless (215a–b); what grounds philia is the deficient seeking what belongs to it (221d–222a). This is exactly the thesis the Symposium makes explicit and then subordinates to the good — so the Lysis contains love-as-lack in aporetic form before Diotima's doctrinal version.
  • The regress-terminus self-destructs. The "first friend" (the good, loved for its own sake) turns out loved only on account of the bad — "a friend for the sake of an enemy" (220e); "take away the enemy and it is no longer a friend." The very device meant to halt the instrumental chain is shown to be instrumental — the most counterintuitive move in the dialogue.
  • Socrates refutes a view and then re-adopts it. "Opposite desires opposite" is dismissed at 215d–216b by a cheap counter-instance (enmity is the opposite of friendship), yet the desire-of-the-deficient picture it carried is reinstated as the cause of friendship at 221d. The dialogue's own commitments are unstable — which is the aporetic point, not a slip.

Critique / Limitations

Several refutations are manufactured rather than earned. The lover/loved/mutual trilemma (arg. 3) is generated by insisting on a single bearer of the relation, which ordinary usage does not require; the dismissal of "opposite desires opposite" (arg. 5) rests on a single counter-instance, after which the same picture is reinstated. The load-bearing premise — that desire is always of what one lacks or what belongs — is assumed without argument and silently rules out loving what one already securely has. The method itself is unusual: Socrates poses constructed puzzles rather than testing the boys' own beliefs, so the dialogue reaches definitional aporia without the standard person-testing elenchus. (The OCR garbles a few Stephanus letter-markers around 219–221; argument anchors were placed at the nearest reliable marker.)

Connections

  • is a case of aporia — constructs and dismantles six candidate accounts of friendship and ends in confessed aporia: "what a friend is we have not yet been able to find out" (223b).
  • contrasts with plato-symposium — poses as unresolved aporiai the very materials (love-as-lack, the prōton philon, the neither-good-nor-bad intermediate, the oikeion) the Symposium resolves by subordinating love to the good; Diotima even refutes the oikeion/"other half" (205e).
  • requires socratic-definition — runs the ti esti demand on friendship, though in relational form ("who is a friend to whom, and on what ground").
  • contrasts with elenchus — reaches definitional aporia without the standard person-testing of the interlocutor's beliefs: Socrates constructs and dismantles the candidate accounts himself while the boys merely assent.
  • shares mechanism with plato-charmides — its closest sibling (Cooper pairs them as aporetic portraits of Socrates conversing with cultivated teenage boys); the same construct-and-dismantle definition-hunt also drives plato-laches and plato-euthyphro.

Sources

  • Lysis, trans. Stanley Lombardo, in Plato: Complete Works (Hackett, 1997), Stephanus 203a–223b; raw file lines 19708–20469. (The OCR carries no inline translator-credit line for this dialogue; attributed to Lombardo per the Hackett edition.)
  • Depth layer: wiki/sources/.extraction-plato-lysis.md.