Complete Works (156 page)

“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.”

“Absolutely,” they said together.

[222]
“And if one person desires another, my boys, or loves him passionately, he would not desire him or love him passionately or as a friend unless he somehow belonged to his beloved either in his soul or in some characteristic, habit, or aspect of his soul.”

“Certainly,” said Menexenus, but Lysis was silent.

“All right,” I said, “what belongs to us by nature has shown itself to us as something we must love.”

“It looks like it,” he said.

[b] “Then the genuine and not the pretended lover must be befriended by his boy.”

Lysis and Menexenus just managed a nod of assent, but Hippothales beamed every color in the rainbow in his delight.

Wanting to review the argument, I said, “It seems to me, Lysis and Menexenus, that if there is some difference between belonging and being like, then we might have something to say about what a friend is. But if belonging and being like turn out to be the same thing, it won’t be easy to toss out our former argument that like is useless to like insofar as they [c] are alike. And to admit that the useless is a friend would strike a sour note. So if it’s all right with you, I said, since we are a little groggy from this discussion, why don’t we agree to say that what belongs is something different from what is like?”

“Certainly.”

“And shall we suppose that the good belongs to everyone, while the bad is alien? Or does the bad belong to the bad, the good to the good, and what is neither good nor bad to what is neither good nor bad?”

They both said they liked this latter correlation.

“Well, here we are again, boys,” I said. “We have fallen into the same [d] arguments about friendship that we rejected at first. For the unjust will be no less a friend to the unjust, and the bad to the bad, as the good will be to the good.”

“So it seems,” he said.

“Then what? If we say that the good is the same as belonging, is there any alternative to the good being a friend only to the good?”

“No.”

“But we thought we had refuted ourselves on this point. Or don’t you remember?”

“We remember.”

“So what can we still do with our argument? Or is it clear that there is [e] nothing left? I do ask, like the able speakers in the law courts, that you think over everything that has been said. If neither the loved nor the loving, nor the like nor the unlike, nor the good, nor the belonging, nor any of the others we have gone through—well, there have been so many
I
certainly don’t remember them all any more, but if none of these is a friend, then I have nothing left to say.”

Having said that, I had a mind to get something going with one of the
[223]
older men there. But just then, like some kind of divine intermediaries, the guardians of Menexenus and Lysis were on the scene. They had the boys’ brothers with them and called out to them that it was time to go home. It actually was late by now. At first our group tried to drive them off, but they didn’t pay any attention to us and just got riled up and went on calling in their foreign accents. We thought they had been drinking too [b] much at the Hermaea and might be difficult to handle, so we capitulated and broke up our party. But just as they were leaving I said, “Now we’ve done it, Lysis and Menexenus—made fools of ourselves, I, an old man, and you as well. These people here will go away saying that we are friends of one another—for I count myself in with you—but what a friend is we have not yet been able to find out.”

1
. Solon frg. 23 Edmonds.

2
.
Odyssey
xvii.218.

3
. Hesiod,
Works and Days
25–26.

4
. I.e., “philosophize,” “engage in philosophy.”

EUTHYDEMUS

Translated by Rosamond Kent Sprague.

Socrates meets his good friend Crito, recounts and discusses with him a public
encounter he had the previous day with a pair of sophists, and urges him to
join him in enrolling—old men though they are!—as the sophists’ pupils. That
is a bare summary of this exquisitely accomplished dialogue. Euthydemus and
his older brother Dionysodorus (real people, though hardly known except here)
have been in Athens previously. But now they have abandoned their former
teaching of lawyer’s oratory and military science for instruction in a different
sort of combat: the combat of words in question-and-answer discussion of the
basic type to which Socrates himself is devoted, and of which we get especially
well defined instances in
Protagoras
. They promise to ‘refute whatever may be
said, no matter whether it is true or false’; by teaching the same ‘eristic’ wisdom
to their pupils (it doesn’t take long, they say), they will make them paragons
of human virtue. Socrates forestalls the formal sophistic ‘exhibition’ of
their skill that they have brought with them (as he similarly avoids or silently
endures Gorgias’ and Hippias’ exhibitions in the dialogues named after them),
and gets them instead to converse with the young boy Clinias, to persuade him
to devote himself to ‘philosophy and the practice of virtue’—under their tutelage,
it goes without saying. Though it is not their prepared exhibition, their
questioning of Clinias (and, later on, Ctesippus and Socrates himself) does give
a clear demonstration of their methods. Thus readers, together with Crito, can
form their own opinion of the value of this new brand of the sophist’s art, so
different from that of Protagoras, or Prodicus, or Hippias. Socrates twice interposes
extended question-and-answer conversations of his own with Clinias, offering
a very different picture of how one might draw a young boy on to devote
himself to philosophy and the practice of virtue.