Complete Works (155 page)

“True, Socrates, I think you’re right.”

“Then if this is impossible, that would make the lover the friend of the loved.”

“Apparently so.”

“And the hater the enemy of the hated.”

“That must be.”

“Then we are going to be forced to agree to our previous statement, [c] that one is frequently a friend of a nonfriend, and even of an enemy. This is the case when you love someone who does not love you, or even hates you. And frequently one is an enemy to a nonenemy, or even to a friend, as happens when you hate someone who does not hate you, or even loves you.”

“Perhaps,” he said.

“Then what are we going to do,” I said, “if friends are not those who love, nor those who are loved, nor those who love and are loved? Are there any other besides these of whom we can say that they become each other’s friends?”

“By Zeus,” he said, “I certainly can’t think of any, Socrates.”

“Do you think, Menexenus,” I said, “that we may have been going about [d] our inquiry in entirely the wrong way?”

“I certainly think so, Socrates,” said Lysis. And as he said it, he blushed. I had the impression that the words just slipped out unintentionally because he was paying such close attention to what was being said, which he clearly had been all along.

Well, I wanted to give Menexenus a break anyway, and I was pleased with the other’s fondness for philosophy, so I turned the conversation [e] towards Lysis, and said: “I think you’re right, Lysis, to say that if we were looking at things in the right way, we wouldn’t be so far off course. Let’s not go in that direction any longer. That line of inquiry looks like a rough road to me. I think we’d better go back to where we turned off, and look
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for guidance to the poets, the ancestral voices of human wisdom. What they say about who friends are is by no means trivial: that God himself makes people friends, by drawing them together. What they say goes something like this:

God always draws the like unto the like
²

[b] and makes them acquainted. Or haven’t you come across these lines?”

He said he had.

“And haven’t you also come across writings of very wise men saying the same thing, that the like must always be friend to the like? You know, the authors who reason and write about Nature and the Universe?”

“Yes, I have,” he said.

“And do you think what they say is right?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe half of it,” I said, “maybe even all of it, but we don’t understand [c] it. To our way of thinking, the closer a wicked man comes to a wicked man and the more he associates with him, the more he becomes his enemy. Because he does him an injustice. And it’s impossible for those who do an injustice and those who suffer it to be friends. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then that would make half the saying untrue, if we assume the wicked are like each other.”

“You’re right,” he said.

“But what I think they’re saying is that the good are like each other and [d] are friends, while the bad—as another saying goes—are never alike, not even to themselves. They are out of kilter and unstable. And when something is not even like itself and is inconsistent with itself, it can hardly be like something else and be a friend to it. Don’t you agree?”

“Oh, I do,” he said.

“Well, my friend, it seems to me that the hidden meaning of those who say ‘like is a friend to like’ is that only the good is a friend, and only to the good, while the bad never enters into true friendship with either the good or the bad. Do you agree?”

He nodded yes.

[e] “So now we’ve got it. We know what friends are. Our discussion indicates to us that whoever are good are friends.”

“That seems altogether true to me.”

“To me also,” I said. “But I’m still a little uneasy with it. By Zeus, let’s see why I’m still suspicious. Is like friend to like insofar as he is like, and as such is he useful to his counterpart? I can put it better this way: When something, anything at all, is like something else, how can it benefit or harm its like in a way that it could not benefit or harm itself? Or what could be done to it by its like that could not be done to it by itself? Can
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such things be prized by each other when they cannot give each other assistance? Is there any way?”

“No, there isn’t.”

“And how can anything be a friend if it is not prized?”

“It can’t.”

“All right, then, like is not friend to like. But couldn’t the good still be friend to the good insofar as he is good, not insofar as he is like?”

“Maybe.”

“What about this, though? Isn’t a good person, insofar as he is good, sufficient to himself?”

“Yes.”

“And a self-sufficient person has no need of anything, just because of [b] his self-sufficiency?”

“How could he?”

“And the person who needs nothing wouldn’t prize anything.”

“No, he wouldn’t.”

“What he didn’t prize he wouldn’t love.”

“Definitely not.”

“And whoever doesn’t love is not a friend.”

“It appears not.”

“Then how in the world are the good going to be friends to the good? They don’t yearn for one another when apart, because even then they are sufficient to themselves, and when together they have no need of one another. Is there any way people like that can possibly value each other?”

“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,
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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
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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
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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.