In the previous chapter, we examined Plato's conception of god in the Timaeus as the teleological agent par excellence, and showed how that agency relies on bodily conditions, so that god turns out to be immanent to the universe. Now, why should this matter from an ethical perspective? What, if anything, are we to learn from this god, both through its mythical description and through the more rigorous study of astronomy?

I shall argue that Plato thinks we have indeed much to learn. In the course of my treatment, it will also become clear in what ways the Timaeus can be seen as a response to the Republic (and in that regard it may be no accident that the dialogue should start with an account reminiscent of that work). However, rather than claiming, as has been done recently, that the Timaeus keeps “the basic ethical and political ideology of the Republic”, I set out to show how the Timaeus can, to a large extent, be seen as an attempt by Plato not just to resume but also to move beyond some important Republic conclusions.

In particular, I shall emphasise how Plato's ethics in the Timaeus takes us away from the elitism of the Republic, presenting instead an independent way to happiness that is available to everyone. How is that possible? It is possible, I argue, precisely because everyone can share the universe as a common paradigm, and internalise its order.

The dialogue ends with a concrete illustration of the theme of the first conversation between Socrates and Lysis in 207–10 – about the way Lysis' parents refuse to allow him to do what he wants, even handing him over to a slave for the slave to do whatever he wants with him. The slave-guardian in charge of him (see 208c) comes to get him (and Menexenus' to get him), so cutting the conversation short. But this, given the content of the conversation, begins to look like a genuine case of stopping him from doing what he wants, insofar as it brings to an end an opportunity to philosophize (to express his own philosophia, his ‘love of wisdom’: 213d), that activity which alone promises to get him the wisdom that he and everyone else desires. And these guardians are the very ones whose job it is to take the boys to the teacher's (208c again):

In this, the final part of the main argument, Socrates draws some threads together before reaching a conclusion (though in the immediate sequel, 222b3–e7, he will make the conclusion seem to be in doubt): that ‘[i]t's necessary … for the genuine lover, one who's not pretended, to be loved by his darling’ (222a6–7). Quite what this amounts to, and how it relates to the argument so far, may be as opaque, at first reading, as it evidently is to Menexenus, and to Lysis. But on our analysis, it is a natural outcome of the argument of the Lysis up to the present point.

The short passage in question may for convenience be divided up into two movements, though the division is more than usually artificial. The passage has some markedly strange features, which are accounted for by a partial change of register, from full seriousness to a certain mixture of the serious and the playful – largely caused by the fact that Socrates will simultaneously (a) reach his conclusion, (b) appear to give Hippothales what he wants, and (c) leave Lysis and Menexenus in differing degrees of uncertainty as to what, precisely, they have agreed to, even while they have plainly come some of the way with him.

221d6–e5: IS THE OBJECT OF PHILIA WHAT BELONGS (TO OIKEION)?

SOCRATES TALKS TO HIPPOTHALES, THEN LYSIS AND MENEXENUS, THEN LYSIS BY HIMSELF (203a–210d)

The Lysis begins when Socrates is brought together with a group of young men, one of whom, Hippothales, is in love with one of a number of beautiful boys who are also present, namely Lysis. This introduces a first subject-matter of the Lysis: erōs (being in love, erotic love, sexual passion). Socrates quickly turns one of the questions he addresses to the lover Hippothales, namely ‘Who is the favoured beauty?’ (204b1–2) into the question ‘How should a lover speak to his darling?’ Socrates' answer to this question, as it soon emerges (206a1–c7, 210e1–5), is in effect ‘Don't sing his praises, and so puff him up. Instead, take him down a peg.’ Socrates is subtle enough not to carry the banter on the lover's strategy so far as to make it explicit that Kni. the only way in which one should take the darling down a peg is by showing the darling that he needs knowledge.

Nevertheless, we take this to be the clear purport of the opening section of the dialogue (203a1–206d6), when this is taken together with the questioning of Lysis at 207d5–210d8 that serves as an illustration of the strategy Socrates recommends for a lover.

Lysis and Menexenus, another beautiful boy, now appear on the scene.

[Preliminary note:

We found the part of the Lysis covered in this chapter, together with that covered in chapter 3, the hardest in the whole dialogue. In the case of the material of the present chapter, our difficulties were increased by the cavalier treatment Socrates appears to hand out to the poets and the cosmologists whose views he is supposedly canvassing. The reader may well feel that Socrates is not in fact taking their views seriously at all, but rather using them as an excuse to drag in a bunch of claims he wants to discuss in any case: that the y in ‘x loves y’ can only be the good; that the x in ‘x loves y’ cannot be either the good or the bad, but is rather the neither-good-nor-bad; and that the object of love is a certain self-sufficient, teleological and hierarchical good that is the ultimate object of love for all desirers – all of whom stand in need of something, namely, that self-sufficient ultimate good. (It will turn out that the self-sufficiency involved is of a special, particular kind: a maximal, or practicable self-sufficiency. But that is to anticipate a specific issue that will bulk large in the present chapter.)

An obvious parallel the reader might adduce, for the whole style of the passage, is Socrates' treatment of Simonides at Protagoras 338e6–347a5: the passage which – extraordinarily, one might say, even mischievously?

On first reading, and even twentieth reading, the next section (we shall call it ‘the Menexenus discussion’) is one of the most baffling passages in the Lysis. It is baffling because it is difficult to see what it accomplishes philosophically, and so also because it is difficult to see how it accomplishes anything that is of the slightest use to the forward motion of the dialogue. At any rate, this represents an accurate description of our (Penner's and Rowe's) history with the passage; it probably also covers the experience of most previous interpreters, the majority of whom appear to have given up on the Menexenus discussion completely, concluding that it plays either wittingly or unwittingly on ambiguities (readings which, again, will affect the global interpretation of the Lysis: if there is dishonesty or confusion here, why not elsewhere?). We ourselves, indeed, came close to the same sort of judgement, being strongly tempted by the view that the best we could say of it was that it showed Socrates giving Menexenus the eristic a dose of his own medicine (see chapter 2 above, text to n. 6).

We have, however, finally come to a clear view of the philosophical importance of the passage, within the economy of the whole. The key difficulty turned out to be our resistance to having Socrates anticipate assumptions that he will justify only later: even though, as we suppose, the argument will work sufficiently well without those assumptions to carry the immediate interlocutors, Lysis and Menexenus, along with it, and to secure their agreement with Socrates, the full defence of at least one crucial claim will require the deployment of resources which have yet to be introduced, that is, in this particular context, and in this particular conversation.

We now turn to some difficulties for, and objections to, the accounts of philia, erōs and desire for good which we have attributed to Socrates in the Lysis. The chief difficulty, and the only one which we will get to discuss in any detail at all, is the Vlastosian, Kantian idea of love which claims that if one does not seek the good of the beloved independently of one's own good, what one has called love isn't really love at all, but at best a refined form of selfishness (see especially Chapter 10, §3 above). We then note very briefly some remaining questions which we cannot here treat fully, but with at any rate some indication of how we might try to answer these questions.

THE VLASTOSIAN, KANTIAN REQUIREMENT THAT LOVE BE FOR THE GOOD OF OTHERS INDEPENDENTLY OF ONE'S OWN GOOD

We begin with a doubt that may strike readers when they try to take in our suggestion that love is possible for a psychological egoist. For psychological egoists do seem to have to restrict themselves to a rather bloodless theory of the desires that bring us to action – of those desires that constitute the desire-half of belief-desire explanations of actions. True, we have suggested that we are not repudiating the existence of such other desires as thirst or hunger or sexual desire in the explanation of action.

This book has had relatively little to say about rival modern interpretations of the Lysis. This is for two reasons. The first reason is that it is one of the general and stated aims of the series to which the book belongs to engage first and foremost with Plato, and with his text. The second, and more important, reason is that for the most part other modern interpreters have – in our view – tended to give up too easily on Plato and his argument; and not to do that was the second, and crucial, part of our brief in approaching the Lysis. We quote a recent writer, who seems to us accurately to catch the spirit of the generality of modern interpretations:

‘They say, too, that when Socrates heard Plato reading the Lysis, he said “Heracles! How many lies the young man tells about me!” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophersiii.35) This apocryphal story – apocryphal, if only because Socrates was surely dead before the Lysis was written – might perhaps be taken as an ancient counterpart of one typical modern reaction to the Lysis: that it misrepresents Socrates. In particular, so the modern story goes, it misrepresents him by making him into a kind of sophist, the sort that uses any means down to and including mere trickery in order to defeat his opponents (in this case a pair of teenagers; a particularly pointless and silly exercise, then). Sometimes the dialogue has been declared not to be by Plato at all, so bad the arguments seemed to be; and even if the twentieth century tended to back off from that view, the general view was, and still remains, that the Lysis is not a philosophical success. Its ancient subtitle was ‘On friendship’ – or rather ‘On philia’, which already has wider connotations; on that subject, says the standard modern reading, what little the Lysis has to tell us, and so far as we can make it out, is mostly false.

The outcome of the present book is an absolute and complete rejection of that standard verdict – which, despite what may or may not be implied by any whisperings recorded by Diogenes, was certainly not standard in antiquity (a thesis for which we provide some evidence in our Epilogue).

207b8–d4: A FEW PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

So, at 207b8, Socrates is addressing Menexenus, but his question is really directed at both boys, who are soon answering together:

We begin with a largely uninterrupted translation of the opening few pages of the Lysis, which serve to introduce and set the scene for the main argument. (For subsequent sections of the dialogue, our method will have some resemblance to a running commentary.) We shall provide, in footnotes to the translation, some preliminary comments on details of this first section of the dialogue, but for the most part we shall delay discussion of major points until after our analysis of the argument of the rest of the Lysis (see chapter 9). We begin with the expectation, though the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, that the design of the opening scene will have at least something to do with the concerns of that argument.

SOME METHODOLOGICAL PROLEGOMENA; AND A MAJOR OBJECTION FROM PROPONENTS OF THE ‘ANALYTICAL–ELENCTIC’ APPROACH

In this second part of the book, we propose a second trip through the Lysis – this time with some philosophically more adventurous, and so more controversial, explanations (which will also be more pointed and more single focus) of the course of its argument as a whole. These explanations are more adventurous, first, by virtue of the extent to which they elaborate on what the claims are that we regard as clear enough allusions, in the text of the Lysis, to Socratic claims made explicitly only in other dialogues of Plato – as explicitly, at any rate, as Plato's Socrates ever claims anything. Then, beyond that, in a second degree of adventurousness, we also make use of other Socratic claims – claims not alluded to in the Lysis, though required in order to see just how we are to take those claims that are alluded to. What this gives us is an entire web of interlocking claims about knowledge, desire, love and the good. All of these claims – we propose – are involved in the argument of the dialogue, and if we are fully to understand that argument, we need to take cognizance of all of them. It is true that the Lysis itself presents just one perspective on this complex web, placing some of its aspects (claims, beliefs) more to the fore, others more in the background.