Letting Go: Imagery and Symbolic Naming in Plato's Lysis

Abstract

At the beginning of the Lysis, Socrates is walking from the Academy to the Lyceum (a good route for any Western philosopher), when he meets some young men who lure him into a new palaestra with the promise of logoi and kaloi. The dialogue which follows has been fairly generally felt to be charming, early, and not very well unified. Most scholars would call the subject of the discussion ‘Friendship’, but the inconclusive discussion of friendship does not apparently begin until the dialogue is almost half completed.I believe that the Lysis is unified, and that this unity can be most readily seen in two areas: (1) the role and character of the boy Lysis and (2) the simple and consistent use of repeated images or references drawn from three areas of life. These three categories of images, I think, are all related to each other and to the eponymous ‘hero’ of the dialogue, and an understanding of their use can help us to see that the subject of the dialogue is more complicated than ‘what is friendship?’, and that Plato's position is a good deal less inconclusive than the ending of the dialogue would lead us to believe.