remainder of the dialogue suggests that no human being has actually achieved this
wisdom; by elimination, it is therefore only the gods who could qualify as perfectly
knowledgeable and wise.
But this inference, which may be drawn from theLysis, has the form of a theoretical
postulate. As in theEuthyphro, Socrates’ starting point and end point is the human
being in its imperfection. It is the human goal that is named as the good, and,
coupled with a recognition that nobody can actually attain this end completely, this
perfection is attributed to the gods. But even so, the end for the human being has not
changed. It still is becoming good through knowledge of what is good.
TheLysis, however, goes further than this in providing a rational picture of the
position of man in the world. Discussion of the good as what is aimed for leads to a
positing of three classes of things in the world as good, bad, or neither-good-nor-bad
(216). In this scheme of things the neither-good-nor-bad is interpreted as being
somewhat good, but not perfectly so, and in this respect bad, rather than being
neither-good-nor-bad by being indifferent and not in any way good nor in any way
bad. It is the neither-good-nor-bad that desires and therefore and thereby loves
the good. As a principle, this can apply to many things in many contexts; but
in the context of friendship, a logical consequence would be that a philosophos,
someone not entirely ignorant but not perfect, loves asophos, someone perfectly
wise. But as no human being is perfectly wise, it should be the gods, who are wise,
that are loved; and as very few human beings are absolutely ignorant, almost every-
body qualifies to fulfill this definition ofphilosophos. Read in this way, theLysiscould
contain the kernel of Plato’s theory of motivation and at the same time of his
theology. But the dialogue itself does not exploit this possibility. Instead, Socrates,
having mentioned the gods (218), reverts to speaking of liking and loving ‘‘the
good.’’ Despite the aporetic ending and despite the apparent logical puzzles (which
led Aristotle to develop a perverse theory of friendship and love of god inEudemian
Ethics 7 and Nicomachean Ethics 8–9), the reader of the Lysis is left with
the impression that indeed only good people can be friends with each other,
that no one loves the bad, not even the bad himself. This corresponds with the
view of friendship advocated in thePhaedrus(255), a dialogue in which those souls
that are capable of it spend time in close association with the gods (247). In theLysis,
though, this notion of the good’s being friends only with the good is intimately
connected with the stability and immutability of the good (214). In this way, the
proverbial ‘‘friendship of similar with similar’’ has been more closely defined as
‘‘friendship of good with good’’; but the notion of friendship with what is similar
to oneself and in that respect akin has not been abandoned completely. At the same
time a gap is felt between the neither-good-nor-bad striving for the good and the
good striven for. The neither-good-nor-bad is constantly striving to close the gap
by becoming better. And while this predicament is not expressed in the Lysis
in so many words, the human being who is neither-good-nor-bad, by virtue of
beingphilosophos, is indeed trying to become as similar as possible to the good: in
that sense, the ideal of assimilation to god (which we have encountered atRepublic
10, 613,Theaetetus172–7,Phaedrus252–3,Timaeus89–90;Laws4, 716) is prefig-
ured in theLysis. But at the same time the good is said to be the beautiful (216).
The beautiful itself, however, is the highest goal of human striving and cognition
in theSymposiumjust as the good itself is the goal of everything and at the root
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