Complete Works

by Plato, Cooper, John M. , Hutchinson, D. S.

  “No.”

  “But people who don’t place much value on each other couldn’t be friends.”

  “True.”

  “Now, Lysis, consider how we have been knocked off course. Are we [c] somehow completely mistaken here?”

  “How?” he asked.

  “Once I heard someone say—I just now remembered this—that like is most hostile to like, and good men to good men. And he cited Hesiod as evidence:

  Potter is angry with potter, poet with poet

  And beggar with beggar.3

  And he said that it had to be the same with everything else: things that [d] are most like are filled with envy, contentiousness, and hatred for each other, and things most unlike with friendship. The poor man is forced to be friends with the rich, and the weak with the strong—for the sake of assistance—and the sick man with the doctor, and in general every ignorant person has to prize the man who knows and love him. Then he went on [e] to make a very impressive point indeed, saying that the like is totally unqualified to be friend to the like; that just the opposite is true; that things that are completely in opposition to each other are friends in the highest degree, since everything desires its opposite and not its like. Dry desires wet, cold hot, bitter sweet, sharp blunt, empty full, full empty, and so forth on the same principle. For the opposite, he said, is food for its opposite, whereas the like has no enjoyment of its like. Well, my friend, [216] I thought he was quite clever as he said this, for he put it all so well. But you two, what do you think of what he said?”

  “It sounds fine,” said Menexenus, “at least when you hear it put like that.”

  “Then should we say that the opposite is its opposite’s best friend?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But Menexenus,” I said, “this is absurd. In no time at all those virtuosos, [b] the contradiction mongers, are going to jump on us gleefully and ask us whether enmity is not the thing most opposite to friendship. How are we going to answer them? Won’t we have to admit that what they say is true?”

  “Yes, we will.”

  “So then, they will continue, is the enemy a friend to the friend, or the friend a friend to the enemy?”

  “Neither,” he answered.

  “Is the just a friend to the unjust, or the temperate to the licentious, or the good to the bad?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But if,” I said, “something is a friend to something because it is its opposite, then these things must be friends.”

  “You’re right, they must.”

  “So like is not friend to like, nor is opposite friend to opposite.”

  “Apparently not.”

  [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.”

  “Well, then, boys, are we on the right track with our present statement? Suppose we consider a healthy body. It has no need of a doctor’s help. It’s fine just as it is. So no one in good health is friend to a doctor, on account of his good health. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “But a sick man is, I imagine, on account of his disease.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Now, disease is a bad thing, and medicine is beneficial and good.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the body, as body, is neither good nor bad.”

  “True.” [b]

  “And because of disease, a body is forced to welcome and love medicine.”

  “I think so.”

  “So what is neither good nor bad becomes a friend of the good because of the presence of something bad.”

  “It looks like it.”

  “But clearly this is before it becomes bad itself by the bad it is in contact with. Because once it has become bad, it can no longer desire the good or be its friend. Remember we said it was impossible for the bad to befriend [c] the good.”

  “It is impossible.”

  “Now consider what I’m going to say. I say that some things are of the same sort as what is present with them, and some are not. For example, if you paint something a certain color, the paint is somehow present with the thing painted.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Then is the thing painted of the same sort, as far as color goes, as the applied paint?”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  [d] “Look at it this way,” I said. “If someone smeared your blond hair with white lead, would your hair then be white or appear white?”

  “Appear white,” he said.

  “And yet whiteness would surely be present with it.”

  “Yes.”

  “But all the same your hair would not yet be white. Though whiteness would be present, your hair would not be white any more than it is black.”

  “True.”

  [e] “But when, my friend, old age introduces this same color to your hair, then it will become of the same sort as what is present, white by the presence of white.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Here at last is my question, then. When a thing has something present with it, will it be of the same sort as what is present? Or only when that thing is present in a certain way?”

  “Only then,” he said.

  “And what is neither good nor bad sometimes has not yet become bad by the presence with it of bad, but sometimes it has.”

  “Certainly.”

  “And when it is not yet bad although bad is present, that presence makes it desire the good. But the presence that makes it be bad deprives [218] it of its desire as well as its love for the good. For it is no longer neither good nor bad, but bad. And the bad can’t be friend to the good.”

  “No, it can’t.”

  “From this we may infer that those who are already wise no longer love wisdom,4 whether they are gods or men. Nor do those love it who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid man loves wisdom. There remain only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant and stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing [b] what they don’t know. The upshot is that those who are as yet neither good nor bad love wisdom, while all those who are bad do not, and neither do those who are good. For our earlier discussion made it clear that the opposite is not friend to the opposite, nor is like friend to like. Remember?”

  “Of course,�
� they both answered.

  “So now, Lysis and Menexenus, we have discovered for sure what is a [c] friend and what it is friend to. For we maintain that in the soul and in the body and everywhere, that which is neither good nor bad itself is, by the presence of evil, a friend of the good.”

  The two of them heartily agreed that this was the case, and I was pretty happy myself. I had the satisfied feeling of a successful hunter and was basking in it, when a very strange suspicion, from where I don’t know, came over me. Maybe what we had all agreed to wasn’t true after all. What an awful thought. “Oh, no!” I screamed out. “Lysis and Menexenus, our wealth has all been a dream!”

  “But why?” said Menexenus. [d]

  “I’m afraid we’ve fallen in with arguments about friendship that are no better than con artists.”

  “How?” he asked.

  “Let’s look at it this way,” I said. “Whoever is a friend, is he a friend to someone or not?”

  “He has to be a friend to someone,” he said.

  “For the sake of nothing and on account of nothing, or for the sake of something and on account of something?”

  “For the sake of something and on account of something.”

  “And that something for the sake of which he is a friend, is it a friend, or is it neither friend nor foe?”

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “Naturally enough,” I said. “But perhaps you will if we try it this way—and [e] I think I might better understand what I am saying myself. A sick man, we were just now saying, is a friend to the doctor. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And isn’t he a friend on account of disease and for the sake of health?”

  “Yes.”

  “And disease is a bad thing?”

  “Of course.”

  “And what about health?” I asked. “Is it a good thing or a bad thing or neither?”

  “A good thing,” he said.

  “I believe we also said that the body, which is neither good nor bad, is [219] a friend of medicine on account of disease, that is, on account of something bad. And medicine is a good thing. It is for the sake of health that medicine has received the friendship. And health is a good thing. All right so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is health a friend or not a friend?”

  “A friend.”

  “And disease is an enemy?”

  “Certainly.”

  “So what is neither good nor bad is friend of the good on account of [b] what is bad and an enemy, for the sake of what is good and a friend.”

  “It appears so.”

  “So the friend is friend of its friend for the sake of a friend, on account of its enemy.”

  “It looks like it.”

  “Well, then,” I said, “since we have come this far, boys, let’s pay close attention so that we won’t be deceived. The fact that the friend has become friend of the friend, and so like has become friend of like, which we said was impossible—I’m going to let that pass by. But there is another point that we must examine, so that what is now being said won’t deceive us. [c] Medicine, we say, is a friend for the sake of health.”

  “Yes.”

  “Health, then, is also a friend?”

  “Very much a friend.”

  “If, therefore, it is a friend, it is for the sake of something.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that something is a friend, if it is going to accord with our previous agreement.”

  “Very much so.”

  “Will that too, then, also be a friend for the sake of a friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t we going to have to give up going on like this? Don’t we have [d] to arrive at some first principle which will no longer bring us back to another friend, something that goes back to the first friend, something for the sake of which we say that all the rest are friends too?”

  “We have to.”

  “This is what I am talking about, the possibility that all the other things that we have called friends for the sake of that thing may be deceiving us, like so many phantoms of it, and that it is that first thing which is truly a friend. Let’s think of it in this way. Suppose a man places great value on something, say, a father who values his son more highly than all his other possessions. Would such a man, for the sake of his supreme [e] regard for his son, also value something else? If, for example, he learned that his son had drunk hemlock, would he value wine if he thought it could save his son?”

  “Why, certainly,” he said.

  “And also the container the wine was in?”

  “Very much.”

  “At that time would he place the same value on the ceramic cup or the three pints of wine as on his son? Or is it the case that all such concern is expended not for things that are provided for the sake of something [220] else, but for that something else for whose sake all the other things are provided? Not that we don’t often talk about how much we value gold and silver. But that’s not so and gets us no closer to the truth, which is that we value above all else that for which gold and all other provisions are provided, whatever it may turn out to be. Shall we put it like that?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “And isn’t the same account true of the friend? When we talk about all [b] the things that are our friends for the sake of another friend, it is clear that we are merely using the word ‘friend’. The real friend is surely that in which all these so-called friendships terminate.”

  “Yes, surely,” he said.

  “Then the real friend is not a friend for the sake of a friend.”

  “True.”

  “So much, then, for the notion that it is for the sake of some friend that the friend is a friend. But then is the good a friend?”

  “It seems so to me,” he said.

  “And it is on account of the bad that the good is loved. Look, this is [c] how it stands. There are three things of which we have just been speaking—good, bad, and what is neither good nor bad. Suppose there remained only two, and bad were eliminated and could affect no one in body or soul or anything else that we say is neither good nor bad in and of itself. Would the good then be of any use to us, or would it have become useless? For if nothing could still harm us, we would have no need of any assistance, [d] and it would be perfectly clear to us that it was on account of the bad that we prized and loved the good—as if the good is a drug against the bad, and the bad is a disease, so that without the disease there is no need for the drug. Isn’t the good by nature loved on account of the bad by those of us who are midway between good and bad, but by itself and for its own sake it has no use at all?”

  “It looks like that’s how it is,” he said.

  “Then that friend of ours, the one which was the terminal point for all [e] the other things that we called ‘friends for the sake of another friend,’ does not resemble them at all. For they are called friends for the sake of a friend, but the real friend appears to have a nature completely the opposite of this. It has become clear to us that it was a friend for the sake of an enemy. Take away the enemy and it seems it is no longer a friend.”

  “It seems it isn’t,” he said, “not, at least, by what we are saying now.”

  “By Zeus,” I said, “I wonder, if the bad is eliminated, whether it will [221] be possible to be hungry or thirsty or anything like that. Or if there will be hunger as long as human beings and other animals exist, but it won’t do harm. Thirst, too, and all the other desires, but they won’t be bad, because the bad will have been abolished. Or is it ridiculous to ask what will be then and what will not? Who knows? But we do know this: that it is possible for hunger to do harm, and also possible for it to help. Right?”

  “Certainly.”

  “And isn’t it true that thirst or any other such desires can be felt sometimes [b] to one’s benefit, sometimes to one’s harm, and sometimes to neither?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And if bad things are abolished, does this
have anything to do with things that aren’t bad being abolished along with them?”

  “No.”

  “So the desires that are neither good nor bad will continue to exist, even if bad things are abolished.”

  “It appears so.”

  “And is it possible to desire and love something passionately without feeling friendly towards it?

  “It doesn’t seem so to me.”

  “So there will still be some friendly things even if the bad is abolished.”

  “Yes.”

  “It is impossible, if bad were the cause of something’s being a friend, [c] that with the bad abolished one thing could be another’s friend. When a cause is abolished, the thing that it was the cause of can no longer exist.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Haven’t we agreed that the friend loves something, and loves it on account of something, and didn’t we think then that it was on account of bad that what was neither good nor bad loved the good?”

  “True.”

  [d] “But now it looks like some other cause of loving and being loved has appeared.”

  “It does look like it.”

  “Then can it really be, as we were just saying, that desire is the cause of friendship, and that what desires is a friend to that which it desires, and is so whenever it does so? And that what we were saying earlier about being a friend was all just chatter, like a poem that trails on too long?”

  “There’s a good chance,” he said.

  [e] “But still,” I said, “a thing desires what it is deficient in. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the deficient is a friend to that in which it is deficient.”

  “I think so.”

  “And it becomes deficient where something is taken away from it.”

  “How couldn’t it?”

  “Then it is what belongs to oneself, it seems, that passionate love and friendship and desire are directed towards, Menexenus and Lysis.”

  They both agreed.

  “And if you two are friends with each other, then in some way you naturally belong to each other.”