Metaphysical Love as a Socratic Question
ACADEMIC PAPER
In this Paper, I examine the question of love seen from a Socratic perspective, that is, as treated by those followers of Socrates who used their teacher a literary figure in their writings. The focus will be metaphysical love, i.e., that form of love whose object or purpose transcends the carnal.
I. Introduction: The methodological implications of the Socratic problem on the search for a Socratic ‘metaphysical love’
Considered as a Socratic issue, the question of metaphysical love should, in principle, be treated in light of all the complexities attributed to the ‘archaeological’ problem bearing the same name. In other words, once all philosophical views on metaphysical love attributed to Socrates have been located in the works of the so-called Socratics, the proper strategy for judging the varying degrees of legitimacy of one in relation to the other ought theoretically to be devised for its ability to pick out that among them which is highest in ‘Socraticity’, or a faithful correspondence to the views of the historical figure of Socrates himself. Given the idiosyncrasies of this very figure, his life and his legacy, one would, at first glance, furthermore do well to factor into one’s search the obvious historical anomalies that might serve as an obstacle to it.
For instance, it is a fact widely known that Socrates didn’t leave behind any written work of his own. All we can know about him and his philosophical views must therefore necessarily be drawn from what others wrote about him. This first ‘historical anomaly’, though on its own already remarkable, may have in theory proven superable had it not been for the surging of a second, equally problematic one, which, in any case, it originated: that most who wrote about Socrates never knew him personally, and those who knew him and wrote about him – chiefly Plato, Xenophon, Aeschines of Sphettus and Aristophanes – can be argued to be historically unreliable testimonialists for different reasons; Xenophon, because, as a mere politician and military man, he could not have possessed the sensibilities required to capture the nuances of his elder’s philosophical position[1]; Plato, unnervingly, for the opposite reason, i.e., because he was too brilliant a philosopher to have bothered himself with the menial work of a mere scribe, and – as is universally agreed[2] – chose instead to use the figure of Socrates as the mouthpiece of his own views; Aeschines, because no more than fragmentary excerpts of his work survive; and finally Aristophanes, because, in his dramaturgical representations of Socrates, he shamelessly distorts the latter’s identity for comedic effect.
These two, let’s say, foundational aspects of the ancient Socratic problem have, over the centuries, generated a dizzying number of challenges for the scholar. Those setting out to faithfully reproduce the historical figure of Socrates have had to grapple with questions whose answers have proved all too deft at eluding them. These include: Which – if any – of the ancient ‘representors’ of Socrates can really be trusted for their fidelity to the original, especially if they penned their Socratic works after their protagonist’s death? Can any one of these be argued to be any more reliable than the other? What was, really, their literary or philosophical agenda in conjuring up the figure of Socrates? Might it have been something other than straightforward historical reproduction? Scholars have, at one time or another, maintained every conceivable position in relation to these questions, bringing about what Waterfield has called a “quagmire of more or less complete lack of consensus” (p. 4). Following decades of to-and-fro, during which, now Xenophon was recognised as the ultimate authority on Socrates, and, upon his complete discrediting, now Plato[3], it was finally suggested that neither, in fact, was to be trusted, nor for that matter anyone else. The Socrates – or better, ‘Socrateses’ – we find in the works of Plato, Xenophon and Aeschines, are but literary fictions, or logoi sokratikoi[4]. They were never intended as accurate recreations of the man that inspired them, but rather as vehicles for the embodiment of certain philosophically commendable ideas more or less ascribable to him. Socrates is here, not so much a flesh-and-blood figure as an archetype, the ideal figure of the wise, balanced and ever-rational philosopher. The ideas of which he was chosen to be the mouthpiece may have originated in him, or they may not; this was not the issue for the Socratics. Of greater concern to them was how said ideas could be woven into the wider structure of their work in a way that was both complementary to its literary telos and also consonant with the archetype of wisdom to which the figure of Socrates served as a conduit.
It is on the basis of this consideration that imminent Socratic scholars have since drawn their sceptical conclusions. Since all depictions of Socrates are mere logoi, it is all but impossible, by any other motivation than personal or historical bias, to favour the Socrates of any one of his testimonialists over any other, and any attempt to tease out a historically accurate reconstruction of Socrates from any one of these is therefore to be deemed pointless.[5] It is by using this sceptical conclusion as my premise that I shall carry out my examination of the question of Socratic metaphysical love. My point of departure, in other words, is the presupposition that the scholarly quest for absolute ‘Socraticity’ is a vain undertaking. Since the logoi sokratikoi cannot be seen as reflecting the historical Socrates in any overtly faithful way, the searching, among them, for an incontestable version of Socratic metaphysical love, i.e., a conception of metaphysical love attributable beyond doubt to the historical Socrates, is futile. Furthermore, to attempt to uncover one in this fashion is liable to lead us to insuperable and maddening impasses. More fruitful to our endeavours is, rather, the employment of the comparative approach proposed by Dorion and Kahn[6]. Here, the various representations of metaphysical love found in the Socratic canon – chiefly in Plato, but also in Xenophon and Aeschines – will be compared and contrasted, and ultimately treated as historical equals. No one treatment of it will be considered more inherently reflective of the historical Socrates’ own views than any other; if one is here given more exegetic space, it will rather be on account of the greater textual ‘meting out’ it enjoys in the original logos sokratikos, or alternatively, of the greater impact it has had on subsequent philosophy. It is, in fact, for both these reasons that the account provided by Plato’s Socrates of metaphysical love in the Symposium will remain the focus for much, though by no means all of what follows.
II. What is meant by ‘Socratic metaphysical love’
In order to be make space for the above methodological considerations, I have thus far neglected to provide a definition of a term I have nonetheless freely used. Now is the time to correct this omission. Metaphysical love, considered as a Socratic question, can be defined in two ways: the broad and the narrow. In the broad definition, it is quite simply that love whose nature, goal or object transcends the physical; the love of another’s soul, for instance, or the love that is expressed as a wish for the other’s improvement. In the narrower sense, metaphysical love is desire for that which one is spiritually lacking: specifically, for the ideally good or beautiful. In order to not get prematurely bogged down, I will for now limit myself to making only a few preliminary observations. First: it is true, yes, that this narrow form of metaphysical love can, for its evocation of the theory of forms, be seen as the more Platonic, and the broad, as the more ‘Socratic’, but since we are treating all logoi sokratoi as equals, this distinction will be considered merely for its hermeneutic, not historiographical usefulness. Second: though labelled with two different terms, the narrow and the broad forms are not distinct but rather overlapping entities. More precisely, the first fits snugly in the second, so that all instances of the narrow form are at the same time also metaphysical in the broader sense, but not necessarily vice-versa. Lastly: all forms of Socratic love will be treated here as metaphysical, irrespective of the original Greek word used to designate it (eros, philia), so long as they conform to the definitions above stated.
III. Metaphysical love in the logoi sokratikoi vs physical love
In order to make sense of metaphysical love as a Socratic question, we would do well to begin by contrasting it to its physical counterpart. We might initiate this enterprise by first seeing the question from a biographical perspective, that is, by exploring the question: what character traits reflecting metaphysical love and, by contrast, physical love are ascribed to Socrates, the ‘person’, by those who have taken him up as a logos in their writings? Here, we find important consistencies in the literature between, on the one hand, Socrates’[7] philosophical views on metaphysical and physical love, and his biographical experiences of them on the other. Let us now briefly examine these latter before moving onto the former.
It can at first appear, from a cursory reading of select passages of the Socratic literature, that Socrates was, in the romantic and sexual realm, a living contradicting of his spiritual principles. He is often depicted as an extreme sensualist; a man endowed with a robust sexual and romantic appetite. In Plato’s Charmides, for instance, he gleefully declares, “practically everyone of [a young] age strikes me as beautiful” [8]. In the Lysis, he insists on knowing who the best-looking boy in a palestra is before accepting Hippothales’ invitation to enter. And in Xenophon’s Symposium, Socrates proclaims, “…I cannot name a time in which I was not in love with someone[9].” He furthermore prides himself on his abilities to notice love when it is present in another[10], and on his skills as a match-maker[11], and even claims that there is nothing about which he’s more competent than about love[12]. In both Plato and Xenophon, he also appears to have considerable sexual charisma, and many of the most eligible young men in Athens – Antisthenes[13], Aeschines, Aristodemus[14] and Alcibiades[15], to name four – are reported by them to have fallen in love with him. Were it not for the concomitant self-restraint presented in his biographical depictions alongside his prominent appetites, one might be forgiven for seeing him as wantonly boy-crazy. And yet the picture of Socrates’ own sexuality that emerges, upon a close reading of the logoi sokratikoi, is almost as complex as the figure of the man taken as a whole. For, though the first to express his admiration for a taught physique and a beautiful countenance where it is warranted, Socrates is ironically also the first to pull back from acting on it, so that he comes across, at once, as the most appetitive and the most restrained of men. In various of his literary incarnations, Socrates is portrayed as capable of the most ego-devastating and cringe-inducing rejections of his admirers who, overwhelmed by erotic desire, throw themselves unreservedly at him. Alcibiades, Antisthenes, and Aeschines all suffer this fate in one manner of another. Alcibiades, who, in Plato’s Symposium, sets all sorts of cunning traps to lure him into his bed, sees his plotting thwarted at every turn. When, in Xenophon’s homonymic work, Aeschines declares his love for the elder philosopher, his effusions are brusquely, even unkindly brushed off: “Don’t pester me just now, I am engaged in other business...” (p. 615). Diogenes Laertius similarly tells of a pitiable Aeschines who, having nothing else to give, makes his Socrates the ultimate romantic offering – himself – only to find that not even this is sufficient to break his incorruptible amour’s will[16].
All in all, the picture is clear: though not entirely immune to physical love’s pernicious allure, Socrates is impossibly skilled at resisting it. We will leave aside secondary considerations this examination might give rise to – for instance, that Socrates is not so much virtuous as he is disingenuous, motivated not by ideal but by an undisclosed indifference to his particular wooer’s charms; or, as Alcibiades argues in Plato’s Symposium (216d-e), that his overactive libido is a masquerade, and that matters such as good-looks, wealth and fame are in fact contemptible to him. These are claims that, if one were to assert them, would remain necessarily interpretative in nature, or would be left open to equally sustainable counter-claims liable to efface them, like: “Alcibiades is himself being disingenuous; he is wilfully distorting the image of Socrates to ease his own cognitive dissonance and nurse his wounded ego”. The literary nature of the logoi sokratikoi is such that they lend themselves to this kind of interpretative game precisely – this is indisputable. However, a losing-oneself in this literary diversion, pleasant though it may be, is likely to prove an unnecessary and ultimately fruitless distraction from the main task at hand.
Our attention will therefore be kept, as much as possible, on those passages in the Socratic texts which speak of Socratic metaphysical love directly, i.e., without requiring elaborate interpretative interventions. Thus, I believe, falls firmly within our grasp the possibility of asserting that, in Socrates’ philosophy as in his ‘character’, his day-to-day modus operandi, we find a consistent privileging of the metaphysical form of love over the physical, and in Plato’s Symposium, we see its building-up into an elaborate philosophical edifice. In at least three works in the Socratic canon, love is categorised into two different types, a higher and a lower: in Plato’s Republic and the two Symposia, Plato’s and Xenophon’s. However, since in Plato’s Symposium, this distinction is assigned to Pausanias and not to Socrates, I shall for this specific purpose concentrate solely on that delineated in the other two works. In Xenophon’s Symposium, the distinction is outlined by Socrates most clearly. Here, the two kinds of love are named the spiritual and the carnal, and are said to correspond to two different manifestations of Aphrodite: the vulgar and the heavenly (p. 617). Spiritual love is superior to carnal, Socrates claims, because it is founded on a love for the soul and therefore grows with time, where carnal love, which is founded on physical beauty, necessarily fades. Besides this, spiritual love is altruistic, where carnal love is completely self-serving. By the by, this last statement is Socratically controversial. It begets a certain of intertextual contradiction, since in Plato and Aeschines, Socrates is the proponent of various forms of love that are, at once, spiritual – or at the very least metaphysical – and self-serving – but we shall return to this anon.
According to Xenophon’s Socrates, carnal love is also ‘servile’, meaning it enslaves they who are afflicted by it, robbing them of their moral autonomy and rendering them weak and pathetic. This sentiment is empathically echoed in The Republic, where Plato’s Socrates paints a horrific picture of a hapless man who, having allowed himself to be corrupted and enslaved by the carnal passions, systemically destroys his life in the name of satisfying them (573c-574a). In the Memorabilia, Xenophon’s Socrates takes his reasoning down a similar route, suggesting that nothing but madness and profligacy could ensue from a kiss stolen from a beautiful person’s lips (1.3.8–15). Carnal love is thus a sort of malady, and in this sense it is hardly conceivable that any other Greek word but eros could be used to capture its intemperate and maddening essence. It is, in fact, that very eros which James Davidson colourfully speaks of as “a daemon that puts your life off-track, robs you of all your common sense, and of sleep at night…goading you with his whip, driving you mad.”[17] As a quick side observation, it is interesting to note that, in the Phaedrus (33), Plato’s Socrates numbers madness also among the effects of metaphysical love, but here it is a ‘divine madness’, the benign kind which inspires art and poetry. It is, in other words, the exact opposite in nature to the madness induced by physical love.
IV. Socratic metaphysical love in the broad sense
The right kind of love, for the Socrates both of Plato and of Xenophon, is perhaps not surprisingly of a more temperate kind, the kind that “has nothing mad or licentious about it”[18]. Taken in its broader definition, metaphysical love encompasses all those manifestations of love whose nature is ‘metaphysical’ in the mundane sense of the term; it possesses something which transcends the physical, either as its object (the beloved’s soul, beauty, goodness, truth), its purpose (the attainment of wisdom, education, creativity), or both. In Aeschines, eros is metaphysical in this second sense, as is philia in the Plato’s Lysis. In Aeschines – and specifically in the Aspasia and Alcibiades – we find an end-oriented form of metaphysical love that has, as its objective, the coaxing of the other to self-improvement, a didactic form of regard known as Socratic eros[19]. In the Lysis, which is similarly end-oriented, the objective is utilitarian; we love only those who are able to offer us some benefit, and we cannot therefore love anyone who is of no use to us.[20] If the reader finds this last conception of love cold and calculating, they are in good company; it sat very uncomfortably also with Vlastos (p. 7), who argues that it entirely misses the point of love, which should be purely altruistic. In this sense, Plato’s utilitarian philia might have been judged too egocentric for comfort also by Xenophon, who similarly insists that all spiritual love is selfless. And yet he could hardly have considered it physical either, which would presumably have prompted him either to adjust his definition of spiritual love so that it edged somewhat closer to my conception of ‘metaphysical love’, or side with Vlastos and disqualify utilitarian philia altogether. In any case, here we find proof that, by ‘metaphysical love’, is not necessarily meant ‘noble love’. Both Socratic eros and utilitarian philia are instrumental and therefore, at least to a degree, exploitative – except the first is so perhaps only indirectly. The Socratic eroticist encourages the other’s self-improvement, but the understanding is based on an implicitly contracted mutuality: “I will help you improve yourself, but only if you show me the same courtesy.” Socratic eros is, therefore, at least mildly self-oriented, so that Xenophon may have had an equally hard time with it. At first glance, utilitarian philia may appear far-removed from the high-minded grandeur of Diotima’s ideal in Plato’s Symposium, which we shall explore shortly, but the two are in reality much closer than it may at first appear, as Vlastos notes[21]. Both kinds of love have, as their endpoint, a telos that the beloved contains or promises but does not fully embody. The beloved serves as a means to an end, a conduit to something more precious, or at least more useful to the lover than they are themselves. They are not loved in the Aristotelian fashion, for the sake of their own good[22], but for the good they can provide.
The instrumentality proposed by Aeschines’ and Plato’s Socrates raises a number of general questions about love which, though not strictly relevant to our topic, are nonetheless interesting to ponder. One of the most salient of these is the question of unconditionality. When do we ever love the person merely for who they are? Can love ever be completely uninstrumental? For, even when there is no overt instrumentality to be noted, there is still a covert one that we always find in love and yet almost never treat as anything remarkable or worthy of our attention. This ‘baseline’ instrumentality can be defined thus: the ‘goal’ to feel fulfilled by the love we have for our beloved, by the companionship they afford, the happiness they provide when they are at our side, and the support they give that enables us to live full and successful lives. This low-level instrumentality seems to be built into the very structure of love, and a good thing it is too. For, imagine the horror and torment of a love that is truly unconditional, a love, in other words, that persists even when the beloved has nothing good to offer us at all, and instead inflicts upon us continued abuse and neglect. Baseline instrumentality, which involves the expectation to have one’s basic relational needs met, is not only desirable but necessary for healthy attachment. Where baseline instrumentality ends and exploitation begins is unclear and beyond the scope of this paper to explore at length, but a convincing argument could in theory be found to contend that any instrumentality, if it bypasses the individual dignity of the beloved on its way to some end goal, is exploitative, no matter how ‘noble’ the goal is, even, in other words, if the goal is ultimate beauty or goodness, as it is for Plato’s Socrates in the Symposium – as we shall now see.
V. Socratic love in Plato’s Symposium, or metaphysical love in the narrow sense
Socratic metaphysical love, intended in the narrow sense, might just as well be called ‘philosophical love’. It is that love expounded by Plato’s Socrates in the Symposium which, having desire as its initial thrust and happiness as its end goal, steers the nobly inquisitive mind away from the carnal and toward the spiritual, toward its final object: ideal goodness. It is the love of the philosopher thirsty for ultimate knowledge. I have called it ‘narrow’ because, while it also counts as metaphysical in the broad sense (both its goal and object are metaphysical), it must necessarily exclude other forms of metaphysical love, like Socratic eros and utilitarian philia, which do not overtly possess its defining characteristics: the desire for goodness, and the end goal of happiness. Let us now examine the implications of these initial considerations.
While reading the latter part of Plato’s Symposium, one understands that Socrates’ notion of philosophical love is modular in structure. It contains, in other words, several components that stand in relation to each other as do the various pieces of a complex puzzle. Desire, beauty, goodness, happiness and knowledge are all its essential ingredients. None can be excluded from a comprehensive definition of it without diminishing its completeness, and at the same, in order ensure this completeness, attention must be paid to the subtle nuances inherent in its modularity, so that in putting it all together, one avoids slotting any piece in an improper place.
We must necessarily begin this reconstruction of philosophical love with desire. Philosophical love, Socrates maintains, is a desire for that which one is lacking. In this basic sense, it is no different from physical love. This, too, is a desire for that which is lacking: for sexual gratification, for the comfort of the other’s embrace, for the bodily warmth of one’s beloved, for a passionate kiss. It is for this reason that Plato’s chooses to designate it ‘eros’. Of course, since here the lacking object one desires is metaphysical, one must search for it beyond the carnal. And one finds it in either absolute beauty or goodness – depending on which scholar you ask. The loving individual, who is suddenly left breathless by the discovery of a void inside him, a spiritual hole, finds they can fill it only by lifting their heart toward the heavens, whereupon it is showered upon by the pure essence of beauty and goodness, and finally sated[23]. The modular interconnectedness of these last two is subtle; is beauty the true object of philosophical love, or goodness? Many in the past have maintained the former[24], and according to White the answer is the latter: love may ‘act’ in arena of beauty, but is fundamentally directed toward goodness (p. 150). I personally feel Plato is unclear on the matter. On the one hand, Socrates, who has long believed the object of love to be the beautiful, is schooled by his shaman, Diotima, who insists it is goodness (206a). But rather vexingly, the very same erotic maestra will, shortly thereafter, describe the lover’s end goal as the attainment of a knowledge whose object is “that beauty”, a beauty that is all-attractive and eternal (210d-211b). For the sake of clarity, let us side with White while at the same time keeping in mind this apparent ambiguity.
Now that we’ve seen to desire, beauty and goodness, what of happiness and knowledge? How do these fit into the overall architecture of philosophical love? The answer to this question is likewise nuanced. Where absolute goodness is the object of love, knowledge is the result of its attainment, and happiness is the ultimate goal of the acquisition of this knowledge. For Plato’s Socrates then, philosophical love, which plays out in the arena of beauty, is the desire for the attainment of the knowledge of absolute goodness, for the purpose of achieving happiness.
VI. A word on desire
Of all its key ingredients, I submit that desire is the most definitive aspect of philosophical love. In the other two forms of metaphysical love we have examined, desire is present, yes, but its role remains implicit and secondary. In Socratic eros, for instance, desire may be identified as the wish to instruct the other so that they instruct you in turn. In utilitarian philia, it may be manifested as the drive to draw benefit from the other’s skills. But in neither of these two forms of love is desire focused on, let alone made foundational; it is, rather, an implicit presupposition that one must attempt to tease out, and even if one were to succeed, there would be a limit to the weight one could assign it. In philosophical love, on the other hand, it is the undoubtable engine that drives the lover toward their ultimate goal – happiness through knowledge of goodness – from its lowest to its highest manifestation. It is, for Diotima, the first, crucial step in her ascent to the ideal. Vlastos has suggested that desire is the ‘Socratic’ element of philosophical love, where the ascent to ultimate beauty or ultimate goodness is the Platonic element. However, for reasons having to do with the idiosyncratic challenges of the Socratic problem, which I outlined in the first section, I feel it safe to deem such distinctions historiographically fruitless. We can be no more certain that any view assigned to a logos sokratikos can have been Socratic in the strictest sense than we can affirm with certainty that it wasn’t, and any attempt to assert either the first or the second thesis is likely to fall into impasse.
Interestingly, philosophical love doesn’t preclude its physical counterpart entirely. In order to achieve love in the most rarefied form, one must in fact begin on this lowest level, in the arena of carnal love. Here, the lover’s desire is at first roused by what is most obvious and immediate, their beloved’s physical beauty. Then, understanding that this cannot lead them to the celestial heights they aspire to, they move from the love of one physical body to all bodies, then beyond that to the love of the soul, then to love of societal institutions, and so on until they ascend to love’s uppermost circle, where they catch a glimpse of “a unique kind of knowledge”, of something of “unbelievable beauty” (210d). It is for this reason called philosophical love, for philosophy is nothing if not the love of wisdom and knowledge. The person who pursues this love, and pursues it to the heavenly endpoint Diotima describes, is that particular kind of lover, the philosopher[25].
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[1] This was, according to Dorion (p. 2), Schleiermacher’s view.
[2] This is, at least, the claim of Waterfield (p. 3): “However, everyone agrees that Plato also used Socrates to express his own opinions.”
[3] “After a considerable time, Schleiermacher’s essay eventually led to the full rejection of Xenophon’s account.” (Dorion, p. 5)
[4] Dorion (p. 7) attributes this development in Socratic scholarship to K. Joël; Waterfield (p. 4), to Gigon as well as Jöel.
[5] This was Kahn’s position (1992, p. 240; Dorion, p. 17): “Our evidence is such that […] the philosophy of Socrates himself, as distinct from his impact on his followers, does not fall within the reach of historical scholarship. In this sense the problem of Socrates must remain without a solution.”
[6] Dorion, p. 20: “I suggest that this comparative study of the Socratic literature can be a useful substitute for that old but ultimately fruitless attempt to define the relationship between the Platonic and the historical Socrates. The historical Socrates certainly existed, but to a very large extent the fifth-century figure escapes our grasp. What we have instead is the literary Socrates of the fourth century, in a diversity of portraits. (Kahn 1990, p. 287).”
[7] From this point forth, if I use the name, Socrates, it should be taken to mean the logos sokratikos. This is to avoid over-using the cumbersome Greek designation.
[8] 154b-c; Plato, Complete Works, loc. 16571
[9] P. 613
[10] Lysis, 204b-c: “I have this god-given ability to recognise quickly a lover and an object of love”
[11] When asked, by Callias in Xenophon’s Symposium, what he prides himself on, Socrates answers, “On my procuring” (3.10)
[12] Plato, Symposium, 177e: “The only thing I understand in love”
[13] Xenophon, Symposium, 8.3-6: “Are you the only person, Antisthenes,” [asked Socrates,] “who is not in love with anyone? ” “By the gods, no!” [Antisthenes] replied. “I’m very much in love with you.”
[14] Plato, Symposium, 173a-b
[15] Plato, Symposium, 216e-217a
[16] Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2.5: “Aeschines said to him, ‘I am a poor man and have nothing else to give, but I give you myself’, and Socrates answered, ‘Nay, don’t you see you’re offering me the greatest gift of all.’” (p. 165). It should be noted that elsewhere – precisely in Sececa’s de Beneficiis – it is claimed that Socrates accepted this offer, assuring Aeschines that he would return him to himself in better condition than he received him. (See Pentassuglio, 2021)
[17] Davidson, p. 14
[18] The Republic, 403a
[19] See Kahn (1994) and Pentassuglio, Paideutikos Eros (pp. 15-17)
[20] 210 c-d: “Well, then, are we going to be anyone’s friend, or is anyone going to love us as a friend in those areas in which we are good for nothing?”
“Not at all,” [Lysis] said.
“So it turns out that your father does not love you, nor does anyone love anyone else, so far as that person is useless.”
“It doesn’t look like it.” [d]
“But if you become wise, my boy, then everybody will be your friend, everybody will feel close to you, because you will be useful and good. If you don’t become wise, though, nobody will be your friend, not even your father or mother or your close relatives.”
[21] Footnote, p. 9: “This feature of the theory of philia”…[that is, its instrumentalism]… “in the Lysis is conserved and elaborated in what I take to be the Socratic component in the theory of eros expounded in the Symposium”
[22] See the Nicomachean Ethics; also, Vlastos (1981, p. 3)
[23] The figurative description is my own, not Plato’s
[24] See White (p. 151) for a list of scholars who have maintained this position
[25] A view Plato’s Socrates overtly states in The Republic (475e; loc. 27270): “And who are the true philosophers? Those who love the sight of truth.”
