Education for Epiphany: The Case of Plato's Lysis · Socrates, ed. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana...

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EDUCATION FOR EPIPHANY: THE CASE OF PLATO’S LYSIS

Mark E. Jonas

Department of EducationWheaton College

Abstract. While a great deal has been written on Plato’s Lysis in philosophy and philology journalsover the last thirty years, nothing has been published on Lysis in the major Anglo-American philosophyof education journals during that time. Nevertheless, this dialogue deserves attention from educators.In this essay, Mark Jonas argues that Lysis can serve as a model for educators who want to move theirstudents beyond mere aporia, but also do not want to dictate answers to students. Although the dialogueends in Socrates’s affirmation of aporia, his affirmation is actually meant to persuade his interlocutorsto reflect on an epiphany they had previously experienced. In what follows, Jonas offers a close readingof relevant passages of Lysis, demonstrating the way that Socrates leads his interlocutors to an epiphanywithout forcing his answers upon them.

Introduction

As commentators point out, Socratic teaching in primary and secondaryeducation has enjoyed widespread praise over the last several decades.1 Theback-and-forth nature of Socratic questioning is commonly taken to be a beneficialmethod of assisting students in the learning process. Teachers who use Socraticdialogue are able to help students think through their hidden assumptions andprejudices and gain insights from the perspectives of others. In ideal situations,Socratic teaching not only develops critically minded individuals who are capableof testing their own and others’ hypotheses, but also creates individuals who havea sense of curiosity and wonder about difficult questions and are intrinsicallymotivated to seek answers to those questions.

Nevertheless, as commentators have also pointed out, Socratic teaching isnot without its dangers, especially when we look to Socrates’s own practice.While Socrates’s questions sometimes lead to the beneficial effects just listed, theymore often lead to detrimental effects. As some have rightly claimed, Socrates’sinterlocutors frequently end up confused and discouraged;2 sometimes they endup angry;3 and at other times they end up seemingly less curious and less willingto engage in the back-and-forth of dialogue.4 These effects are characteristic of

1. Avi Mintz, “From Grade School to Law School: Socrates’s Legacy in Education,” in A Companion toSocrates, ed. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); DanielPekarsky, “Socratic Teaching: A Critical Assessment,” Journal of Moral Education 23, no. 2 (1994):119–134; and Anthony G. Rud Jr., “The Use and Abuse of Socrates in Present Day Teaching,” EducationPolicy Analysis Archives 5, no. 20 (1997), http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/viewFile/621/743.

2. Pekarsky, “Socratic Teaching,” 129; and John Beversluis, Cross-Examining Socrates: A Defense of theInterlocutors in Plato’s Early Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9.

3. Richard Robinson, “Elenchus,” in The Philosophy of Socrates: A Collection of Critical Essays,ed. Gregory Vlastos (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), 91; and Beversluis,Cross-Examining Socrates, 9.

4. Robinson, “Elenchus,” 91; and Pekarsky, “Socratic Teaching,” 129.

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what are known as the aporetic dialogues, dialogues that end in confusion anddoubt about the correct answer to important questions. In these dialogues, Socratesseems to intentionally lead his interlocutors to intellectual disorientation in whichthey not only realize the inadequacy of their previous answers to questions, butalso experience extreme doubt about their ability to find answers that are moreadequate. Often, their level of confusion and doubt is so significant that they donot leave the conversation curious to discover answers, but seem rather to havegiven up hope of finding adequate answers.

This is not the only concern commentators have about Socratic questioning,however. While some of the Socratic dialogues end in confusion and doubt, othersend in Socrates’s own affirmation of a particular answer to the question at hand.In this mode of questioning, sometimes referred to as euporetic, Socrates seemsproblematically to “force his opinions on [his interlocutors],” who are usuallyconfused, immature, and unsuspecting.5 Even when he appears to be simply askinghis students questions, it is often clear to the reader that he is leading them toadopt his own points of view. On this reading, questions “are not so much requestsfor information as demands for an assent that cannot very well be withheld.”6 Atcertain points throughout the dialogues, Socrates takes advantage of the naïveté orconfusion of his interlocutors and gets them to agree to propositions that are man-ifestly false.7 It is true that his interlocutors verbally affirm the proposition thatSocrates puts forward and thus they have the freedom to disagree; but when thoseindividuals are especially impressionable, or are confused, as his interlocutors sooften are, Socrates indeed appears to be “forcing his opinions” on others.

These concerns over the aporetic and the euporetic modes of questioning arejustified. From a pedagogical perspective, these aforementioned dialogues raisedifficult questions. My concern is not that Socrates’s deception and irony areunethical, but that he often leads his interlocutors either to a state of confusionin which they become skeptical of all answers, or he leads them to unreflectivelycling to the answers he has provided.8 From my point of view, when they clingto his answers in this manner, they have not grown in their ability to reflectivelyanalyze arguments, but may have actually grown less reflective.

5. Nel Noddings, Philosophy of Education (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2007), 6.

6. Robinson, “Elenchus,” 78.

7. The number of times this occurs in the dialogues are too numerous to count, but a few examplesinclude Lysis 208a; Meno 94a–96e; and Republic 376a–c.

8. See Pekarsky, “Socratic Teaching,” 129–133; and Noddings, Philosophy of Education, 5–7.

MARK E. JONAS is Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Wheaton College, 501 CollegeAvenue, Wheaton, IL 60187–5593; e-mail<[email protected]>. His primary areas of scholarshipinclude the educational, political, and ethical philosophy of Nietzsche, Rousseau, and Plato.

Jonas Education for Epiphany 41

Ironically, as Avi Mintz points out, these criticisms seem to be lost on mostproponents of Socratic questioning, who often consider Socrates’s method as ahallmark of constructivist educational practice:

Socratic teaching in primary and secondary education has received almost unanimous praise.Engaging students through questioning is generally accepted as sound pedagogy. There havebeen many advocates for educational reform who have called for the incorporation of Socraticteaching into schooling, most of whom do not cite a particular educational theorist. Insteadthey refer directly to the Socrates of Plato, especially Plato’s aporetic Socratic dialogues (thedialogues which end with Socrates inducing some perplexity about an issue and which fail toarrive at any conclusion).9

What is ironic about the fact that constructivist educators seek inspiration fromthe Socratic dialogues is the fact that the model found there rarely yields knowl-edge construction in the students. Usually, as critics have indicated, the students’“knowledge” is either deconstructed through aporia or superficially constructedthrough seemingly mindless agreement with Socrates’s opinions. It is a relativelyrare occasion when the dialogues present us with an interlocutor who has gen-uinely constructed significant knowledge for himself.

Yet, there seems to be something of great value in the Socratic dialogues; tobe sure, countless commentators have eloquently and convincingly expressed thephilosophical and historical value of the dialogues. But what of the pedagogicalvalue? Can the Socratic dialogues offer educators pedagogical insights beyondwhat can be learned by examining Socrates’s failures in the aporetic or euporeticmode? While this essay does not make a case for all the dialogues, it presents onedialogue as a model of Socratic questioning that offers a form of dialogue that avoidsthe problems associated with the aporetic and euporetic modes. The dialogue inquestion is Lysis.10

While generally considered an aporetic dialogue,11 Lysis shares importantcharacteristics with the euporetic. I argue that although the dialogue ends inSocrates’s affirmation of aporia, his affirmation is actually meant to persuade his

9. Mintz, “From Grade School to Law School,” 477.

10. Plato, Lysis, trans. Stanley Lombardo, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis,IN: Hackett, 1997), 687–707. This work will be cited in the text as Lysis, followed by the Stephanusnumber(s), for all subsequent references.

11. Commentators who argue that it is an aporetic dialogue include Aristide Tessitore, “Plato’s Lysis:An Introduction to Philosophic Friendship,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 28, no. 1 (1990): 115–132;David Wolfsdorf, “Philia in Plato’s Lysis,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (February 2008):235–259; James Haden, “Friendship in Plato’s Lysis,” Review of Metaphysics 37, no. 2 (1983): 327–356;Laszlo Versenyi, “Plato’s Lysis,” Phronesis: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy 20, no. 3 (1975): 185–198;Frisbee Sheffield, “Beyond Eros: Friendship in the Phaedrus,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society111, no. 2 (2011): 251; George Grote, Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, vol. 1 (London: JohnMurray, 1865), 516–517; William K. C. Guthrie, Plato: The Man and His Dialogues, Earlier Period, vol.4 in A History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 143; Julia E. Annas,“Plato and Aristotle on Friendship and Altruism,” Mind 86, no. 344 (1977): 551; Robinson, “Elenchus,”79; and A. W. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press,1989). Commentators who suggest that it is only partially aporetic include Gary Allen Scott, Plato’sSocrates as Educator (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 51–80; David Bolotin,


interlocutors to reflect on an “epiphany” they had previously experienced.12 Byending with the affirmation that he is in doubt about the answer to the question“What is a friend?,” Socrates avoids dogmatically asserting his own answers. Heopens his interlocutors’ minds to the correct answer to the question withoutdemanding that his interlocutors agree. He merely asks them to “think overeverything that has been said” (Lysis 222e). I argue that in Lysis Plato’s Socratesoffers something of a middle way to educators who want to move their studentsbeyond mere aporia, but who also do not want to force answers on students.

The Initial Purpose of the Socratic Method in LYSIS: Causing APORIA

While a great deal has been written on Plato’s Lysis in philosophy and philologyjournals over the last thirty years,13 nothing has been published on Lysis in themajor Anglo-American philosophy of education journals during that time. This isnot altogether surprising considering that Lysis is not regarded as one of Plato’smost important or well-written dialogues; nor does it directly address education asRepublic, Meno, and Apology do; nor does it have the cultural and literary capitalassociated with Symposium or Phaedrus, for example. Nevertheless, it deservesattention from educators because it offers an approach to dialogue that avoids theScylla of unmitigated aporia and the Charybdis of the uncritical acceptance ofanswers dictated by the teacher. Socrates uses moments of aporia as well as direct

Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship: An Interpretation of the “Lysis,” with a New Translation (Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 186–187; Francisco J. Gonzalez, “Plato’s Lysis: An Enactment ofPhilosophical Kinship,” Ancient Philosophy 15, no. 1 (1995): 69–90; Christopher W. Tindale, “Plato’sLysis: A Reconsideration,” Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 18, no. 2 (1984):102–109; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans.Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 1–20; Charles Kahn, Plato and theSocratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998), 281–291; and Jeremiah Conway, “Friendship and Philosophy: Teaching Plato’s Lysis,” TeachingPhilosophy 34, no. 4 (2011): 411–421.

12. As will be discussed in greater detail later, I use the word “epiphany” here to mean an awakeningor a spontaneous realization that occurs in Socrates’s interlocutors that is not entailed by the logicalargumentation Socrates employs. Lysis and Menexenus experience an epiphany that occurs after Socrateshas led them down a path that should not logically yield the epiphany. Their path is strewn with falseclaims, logical inconsistencies, and dubious conclusions, all of which cause aporia. Yet, at the end ofthe dialogue, they both seem to come to an important realization that changes their comportment. Whatmakes their realization an epiphany is that it does not follow logically from the argument that precedes it;indeed, Socrates admits to them that the logic is faulty. Yet, as we shall see, it seems that Socrates wantsthem to have the epiphany and that he wants them to act upon it. The significance of Socrates’s/Plato’sdecision to make this unusual rhetorical move is the subject of this essay.

13. A small sampling of article-length treatments of Lysis include Benjamin A. Rider, “A SocraticSeduction: Philosophical Protreptic in Plato’s Lysis,” Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy andScience 44, no. 1 (2011): 40–41; Tessitore, “Plato’s Lysis,” 115–132; Gonzalez, “Plato’s Lysis,” 69–90;Wolfsdorf, “Philia in Plato’s Lysis,” 327–356; Versenyl, “Plato’s Lysis,” 185–198; Tindale, “Plato’sLysis,” 102–109; Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic, 1–20; Haden, “Friendship in Plato’s Lysis,” 327–356;and Mary P. Nichols, Socrates on Friendship and Community: Reflections on Plato’s “Symposium,”“Phaedrus,” and “Lysis” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 152–194. In addition to theseand many other article-length treatments, there are two contemporary book-length interpretations:Bolotin, Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship, and Terry Penner and Christopher Rowe, Plato’s “Lysis”(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).


instruction in a carefully guided process that he believes will lead to an epiphanicexperience that brings clarity to the question at hand, even if that clarity cannotbe expressed in words.

After explaining his dialogical intentions to his interlocutors, Socrates attractsthe attention of Lysis and wastes no time moving him toward an initial aporia.Through dialogue, Socrates reveals to Lysis that people love him only to the degreethat Lysis has knowledge. In those areas where Lysis is deficient, people cannotlove or respect him and will try to limit his freedom. This means that his parentsdo not love him or respect him, the very thing Lysis originally thought (Lysis207a–210d). As commentators have long pointed out, the cogency of Socrates’sarguments in Lysis is highly suspect.14 For example, Socrates gets Lysis to agreethat his parents “trust a hired hand … to do whatever he likes with the[ir] horses”(Lysis 208a). This is obviously not the case. They hire a charioteer not to dowhatever he or she likes with the horses, but to take care of them, so that thehorses can be of use to Lysis’s parents. In encouraging Lysis to see the matter ashe framed it in the preceding quotation, Socrates convinces Lysis that his parentsmust care more about their hired hands than they do about him. Much of theconversation with Lysis runs this way. This fact is important, as it suggests thatSocrates’s goal in Lysis is not to teach students how to employ the rules of logicor how to make cogent arguments. Neither is it merely to use sophistry to causeaporia. His goal is to help his interlocutors discover what true friendship is andwhat they must do to enact it. Socrates is therefore, at crucial moments, willingto use specious arguments because he believes that they will better achieve hisgoal of helping his students come to the epiphany he seeks for them. As we shallsee, sometimes epiphanies can be better attained by avoiding logically consistentarguments. Thus, Socrates will use a variety of means necessary — some justified,some questionable — to help a student come to knowledge. His dialogical form ismerely expedient. In fact, he drops it when he thinks a speech will work better;15 or,at times he only nominally uses it, not really caring whether or not the interlocutorresponds, like he does with Thrasymachus in the closing pages of book 1 of theRepublic. The point is, in Lysis we see him using a very large number of speciousarguments, which, while logically untenable, help reduce Lysis to aporia morequickly than Socrates would have been able to without using such arguments. Thegoal is not primarily an intellectually honest, dialogical relationship with Lysis buta transformative epiphany and, as we shall see, subsequent action.16

14. Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic, 2; and Rider, “A Socratic Seduction,” 40–41.

15. See, for example, Republic 614a–621d, Menexenus 236d–249c, and Gorgias 523a–527e, whereSocrates drops his questioning and lapses into long speeches.

16. This is not only the case for Lysis but for many of Plato’s dialogues. While it is true that Socratesdoes also want some type of relationship, it seems throughout the dialogues that this aim is secondary toknowledge and action. The fact is that Socrates uses a wide variety of pedagogical tools, many of whichare manipulative, embarrassing, and absurd. As a consequence, to read him as primarily interested incultivating a sense of dialogical community (in any morally legitimate sense) is problematic and requiressignificant explanation.


It is important to note that Socrates leads Lysis in the first half of the dialogueto something like an aporia, inasmuch as Lysis contradicts what he stated earlier.And yet Lysis does not seem to be touched by this moment. His response is aseemingly jovial, “You’ve got me there, Socrates!” (Lysis 210d). He even followsby whispering “with a good deal of boyish friendliness” (Lysis 211a) into Socrates’sear, that Socrates should make the same arguments with Menexenus. Interestingly,Socrates claims that he almost blurts out to Hippothales that he has shown himhow to cut boyfriends down to size rather than swelling them up (Lysis 210e). Thefact that Socrates continues after this humbling of Lysis further suggests that hisgoal is not merely to show how to humble students but how to lead them to knowl-edge and just action. Lysis’s response also reveals that aporia alone does not lead totransformation; there must be an attending epiphany regarding the implications.

Socrates refuses to make the same arguments with Menexenus and insteadstarts a new line of dialogue on friendship with both Lysis and Menexenus. Onceagain, we see Socrates using numerous specious arguments to reveal the poverty ofhis interlocutor’s understanding.17 Through these arguments, Socrates forces hisinterlocutors to contradict themselves time and time again. In his characteristicfashion, he starts over once he has arrived at one contradiction. Moreover, we findanother example of Socrates using some methods of dialogue that are antitheticalto the notion that he is trying to build an open-ended dialogical relationship withhis students: from the beginning of conversation to the end, Lysis and Menexenusnever once utter a substantive remark or question. Socrates never asks a trulyopen-ended question. Most of his questions are actually just statements thatrequire assent or dissent. It is hard to dismiss the conclusion that, if Socrates isconcerned about the well-being of the students, his concern cannot be to teachthem through dialectic but by dialectic. Put differently, the intended transforma-tive result is not found in the give-and-take of the dialogue, as some educationistsassume, but in the leading of the students to the effect of aporia. For Socrates,unlike Nel Noddings,18 for example, the dialogue is not an end itself, but is meantto function merely as a means to a different end: aporia, which is then followed bya correct understanding of true friendship. Having illustrated some of the salientfeatures of Socrates’s method of argumentation in Lysis, I will turn to its effects.

The Ultimate Purpose of the Socratic Method in LYSIS:Inducing Epiphany

As Pierre Hadot correctly points out, Socrates’s ultimate goal is to producestudents who live just lives:

17. For example, Socrates suggests that it is “impossible for those who do an injustice and those whosuffer it to be friends” (Lysis 214c). This is, of course, untrue. I, for one, have done injustices to myfriends, and they have suffered the injustices, without it diminishing our friendship at all. In fact, it hasoften deepened it.

18. Nel Noddings, Educating Moral People: A Caring Alternative to Character Education (New York:Teachers College Press, 2002), 16.


[Socrates] sought to demonstrate the limits of language.… Justice, like every authentic reality,is indefinable, and this is what Socrates sought to make his interlocutor understand in orderto “live” justice. The questioning of discourse leads to the questioning of the individual, whomust decide whether or not he will resolve to live according to his conscience and to reason.19

Socrates is not, in other words, trying to produce mere knowledge of justice. Theidea that Socrates (or Plato, for that matter) aims to produce contemplatives whomeditate all day long on the “Good” is untenable.20 Running throughout thedialogues is an undercurrent of activity. Socrates and his interlocutors almostalways pursue questions that have “live” implications. Lysis is a case in point.The themes are love and friendship, ideas that entail a relationship between oneperson and another. The relationships imply activity. Love and friendship withoutactivity are not love and friendship.

We see this in Lysis. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates has reduced both Lysisand Menexenus to aporia by leading them from contradiction to contradictionregarding the nature of friendship. The aporia sets the stage for the epiphanyhe hopes for Lysis to achieve. As Socrates claimed earlier in the dialogue (Lysis216c), the interlocutors have been through a dizzying array of arguments that allturn out to be deficient. By the end, they have come around to the beginning onmore than one occasion. But all of a sudden, to consummate the aporia, Socratesliterally “screams” out, “Oh, no! … Lysis and Menexenus our wealth has all beena dream.… I am afraid we’ve fallen in with arguments about friendship that areno better than con artists” (Lysis 218c–d). Shortly after declaring so, he turns theargument in a brand new, hitherto unexplored direction, the direction that willlead to epiphany. It must be unexplored because Socrates only wants to reveal thetruth when the students are ready for it. He must wait, in other words, for the peakof aporia before he helps to reveal knowledge.

It is at this point that we see the transition from aporia to epiphany andaction. Having repeatedly reduced them to confusion by forcing them into circulararguments, the reader begins to sense Lysis and Menexenus’s inability to assimilateinformation. Lysis and Menexenus seem, to use Meno’s metaphor for his ownencounter with Socrates, to be stunned by the torpedo fish.21 At the peak of theiraporia, Socrates changes directions. In their confused state of no longer “knowing”which way is up, their ability to analyze arguments, to subject them to rigorousdialectical scrutiny, is spent. For Socrates, this seeming inability to think becomes

19. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. ArnoldDavidson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), 155.

20. For an in-depth treatment of this point of view, see Mark E. Jonas, Yoshiaki Nakazawa, andJames Braun, “Appetite, Reason, and Education in Socrates’s ‘City of Pigs,’” Phronesis: A Journalfor Ancient Philosophy 57, no. 4 (2013): 1–26. My coauthors and I argue that the philosopher-kings— the archetypical contemplatives — are a pedagogical invention to aid Glaucon in his realizationconcerning the nature of justice, a realization that is to be followed by a change in his behavior. Ontheir interpretation, the philosopher-king should not, in other words, be construed as an exemplar ofhuman flourishing, but as a metaphor for human reason.

21. Plato, Meno, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. Cooper, 879.


the moment when an epiphany can be achieved. As Socrates leads the conversationto this place of knowledge, we witness, albeit indirectly, the recognition of truth,first in Lysis and then Menexenus.

To make visible the moment of epiphany in Lysis and Menexenus, it willbe helpful to have the relevant text before us. Socrates has just recently changeddirection in the dialogue when he comments:

“Then it is what belongs to oneself, it seems, that passionate love and friendship and desireare 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 eachother.”

“Absolutely,” they said together.

“And if one person desires another, my boys, or loves him passionately, he would not desirehim or love him passionately or as a friend unless he somehow belonged to his beloved eitherin 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 mustlove.”

“It looks like it,” [Menexenus] said.

“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 [Lysis’s suitor] beamedevery color in the rainbow in his delight. (Lysis 221e–222b)

Lysis, who throughout the dialogue has been an eager participant, falls silentat the exact moment when Socrates has made his new, altogether unexploredassertion of what friendship is. “‘Certainly,’ said Menexenus, but Lysis was silent”(Lysis 222a). Lysis’s silence is telling, precisely because Plato contrasts it withMenexenus’s “certainly.”22 Up to this point, the two have been univocal intheir agreement or disagreement, but here their contrasting responses highlightan internal change. Lysis has recognized something that Menexenus has not.

22. Numerous commentators have highlighted the centrality of Lysis’s silence in the passage andin the interpretation of the dialogue as a whole (Gonzalez, “Plato’s Lysis,” 84; Gadamer, Dialogueand Dialectic, 19; Tindale, “Plato’s Lysis,” 106–107; and Bolotin, Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship,186–187). They all agree that his silence is an indication of some sort of understanding, but just whatthe understanding amounts to is debated. Gonzalez argues that it is the recognition of the fact thatMenexenus (and Hippothales) are false friends and only Socrates is the true friend (Gonzalez, “Plato’sLysis,” 84). Tindale contends that Lysis’s silence is his recognition that true friendship exists when onefriend is willing to humble and embarrass another friend — just as Socrates has done to Lysis — so as toas help him mature. According to Tindale, Lysis recognizes what Menexenus does not recognize, namelythat being humbled by Socrates is an instance of Socrates’s friendship because it teaches the pursuit ofphilosophy (Tindale, “Plato’s Lysis,” 106). My view, however, accords with the more straightforwardreading offered by Gadamer and Bolotin, who argue that Lysis’s silence represents the recognition thathe must befriend his true lover, Hippothales (Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic, 19; and Bolotin, Plato’sDialogue on Friendship, 186).


The reader almost feels the epiphany happening.23 Lysis, who until this pointhad been almost overeager to blurt out his answers (Lysis 213d), but who neverfully understood the implications of the conversation, all of a sudden realizesthat Socrates’s new assertion about friendship holds implications for him, whileMenexenus does not yet understand (he will shortly, however). It is possible thatLysis could have inferred this knowledge from Socrates’s points early on, but hewas not in a place to have the epiphany; Socrates therefore had to guide him to it byconditioning his mind to receive the epiphany. Ironically, his conditioning for thisepiphanic insight includes the use of aporias — which on a propositional/linguisticlevel cause disorientation and doubt, but through the disorientation make possiblethe epiphanic insight. For Socrates, what a friend is, and how a friend should behavetoward others, cannot be captured in propositional categories. As ChristopherTindale correctly states,

To describe in words alone what friendship is would be to falsify it in some way, to preventthe necessary moment of encounter in the discovery of the idea.… What have been seenas defective arguments within a perplexing context emphasizes the inadequacy of definitionwithout an underlying experience.24

As such, in order for any person to genuinely understand what a friend is, they mustcease relying on linguistic, rationalist conceptualizations of friendship. They mustsimply see what a friend is — and this requires a kind of epiphany.

Chris Higgins suggests that in using such tactics Socrates performs a kind of“pedagogical jujitsu” that is reminiscent of the koan of Buddhist Zen masters. Zenmasters use koans — short transcriptions of dialogue — to help their studentsattain the right frame of mind to properly begin their apprenticeship. The koansare meant to help reveal the motivation of the student and to “[cast] doubton the student’s mode of seeking and [redirect] his attention.”25 Koans provideextralinguistic understanding for the student. It is expected that students will, ifproperly attuned, experience an insight that speaks directly to them, not througha direct proposition in language, but as a flash of understanding that goes isbeyond words. Words are the catalyst for the insight or epiphany, but they do notcontain it. That is not to say that the words do not matter or that they can bearbitrarily exchanged with other words; on the contrary, the words are necessaryto redirect the student’s thinking and therefore must be carefully chosen. The

23. The fact that Plato invites the reader to inhabit the drama — to sense the psychological changes inthe dialogue’s participants by their subtle, nonverbal responses — is what leads many commentators todisregard Socrates’s claim at the end of the dialogue that “but what a friend is we have not yet been ableto find out” (Lysis 223b). In this vein, Gadamer argues that the “live dramatic scene … [is] intended byPlato to show indirectly how the discussion now touches upon its actual subject matter, the word, uponthe deed” (Dialogue and Dialectic, 19).

24. Tindale, “Plato’s Lysis,” 107.

25. Chris Higgins, “Turnings: Toward an Agonistic Progressivism,” Philosophy of Education 2008, ed.Ronald David Glass (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 2009), 163.


case Higgins uses to demonstrate this point is the following koan recorded by athirteenth-century monk:

A monk said to Joshu, “I have just entered this monastery. Please teach me.” “Have you eatenyour rice porridge?” asked Joshu. “Yes I have,” replied the monk. “Then you had better washyour bowl,” said Joshu. With this the monk gained insight.26

Obviously, the words themselves do not reflect a direct, propositional account ofwhat is supposed to be taught. In an important sense, the content about eating riceporridge and washing one’s bowl is not what the koan is about — even if it is thecatalyst for it.

This is something akin to what is going on in Lysis. While it is tempting tosee Socrates as being exclusively interested in defining friendship using logical andpropositional statements, he uses these statements to lead his interlocutors towardan insight that is beyond the statements. The logical and propositional form of theargument is important to reduce Lysis to aporia, but the aporia is merely one stepin “redirecting his attention.” The confusion caused by the aporia is not accidentalor incidental — it is an essential precursor to epiphany because, as studieshave shown, epiphanies are often the result of internal conflict. Epiphanies arecharacterized by a “sudden, discontinuous change, leading to profound, positive,and enduring transformation through the reconfiguration of an individual’s mostdeeply held beliefs about self and world … [and are] preceded by a period of internalconflict.”27 Because of aporia, Lysis has been reduced to a condition in which heis able to understand what true friendship with a beloved is.

This knowledge is confirmed in Lysis (and is shared by Menexenus) a few lineslater when Socrates draws an inference that necessarily follows from his previousstatement that Lysis silently acknowledges. Socrates claims, “then the genuine[Hippothales] and not the pretended [Menexenus] lover must be befriended by hisboy [Lysis],” to which Lysis and Menexenus sheepishly nod their assent while“Hippothales beamed every color of the rainbow” (Lysis 222b). All three of themain interlocutors (Lysis, Menexenus, and Hippothales) recognize the truth ofSocrates’s point. Lysis has been a false friend to Hippothales by playing his littlegames with Menexenus, who, although a friend, is not his true lover.28

But Socrates, as I have already indicated, is not interested in merely revealingknowledge of a just friendship; he wants Lysis to act in response to that knowledge.

26. A. V. Grimstone, ed., Two Zen Classics: Mumonkan and Hekiganroku, trans. Katsuki Sekida (NewYork: Weatherhill, 1977), 44; cited in Higgins, “Turnings,” 163.

27. Arianna Nicole Jarvis, “Taking a Break: Preliminary Investigations into the Psychology of Epiphaniesas Discontinuous Change Experiences” (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, 1996), v–vi.

28. As we have seen, this conclusion is debated among scholars. While Gadamer and Bolotin agreethat the epiphany is related to the befriending of Hippothales, others disagree. As I will argue shortly,Socrates’s ultimate hope is not so much that Lysis will become Hippothales’s sexual lover but that hewill begin a pursuit of wisdom and virtue, which starts by developing mature friendships with othersand refusing to play the tease with Menexenus.


We see this in the moments immediately following Lysis’s initial recognition.Socrates states what must be done, what must be enacted. First, Socrates says,“what belongs to us by nature has shown itself to us as something we must love”(Lysis 222a). There are two things to note in this statement. The first is thatSocrates uses the words “shown itself to us.” In saying this, he illustrates theprimacy of epiphany. The knowledge of what true friendship is has been revealed;it is an epiphany that confronts the boys. The second point to note in this firststatement is that it leaves what we must do partially ambiguous. Socrates says we“must love,” but what does he mean by love? If we feel love, is that enough? Doesit actually imply that there is any other necessary action? Socrates, however, isnot through with his practical injunctions. Although the command for love couldbe idealized, his next statement cannot. He says that “the genuine and not thepretended lover must be befriended by his boy” (Lysis 222b). Socrates’s statement ismade in the abstract and is not directly addressed to Lysis. Nevertheless, it is clearthat Socrates, knowing from Lysis’s silence and comportment that he has had theepiphany Socrates planned for him, intends the statement to apply to Lysis. Whatis more, Socrates knows that Lysis will know it applies to him. As we saw with theBuddhist koan described previously, Lysis’s epiphany carries with it a call to action,which Socrates seeks to reinforce. The operative words are “must be befriended.”Socrates is making the point that loving from a distance is not enough. Lysis’sepiphany beckons him to live in the light of the truth that has been revealed. Itmust be embodied — otherwise, it would not be knowledge. For Plato, knowledgeis always a call to action. Lysis must befriend his true lover, Hippothales, and mustquit pretending with his false lover, Menexenus.

By arguing thus, I am not suggesting that Socrates thinks that Lysis shouldimmediately become the sexual lover (eromenos) of Hippothales — whetherHippothales would be a suitable lover (erastes) could be determined only after afriendship with him was initiated — but that he should quit acting the tease withMenexenus, which was driving Hippothales to distraction. Socrates is thus callingLysis to a place of growing maturity, wisdom, and virtue. Having shown himselfready for wisdom and maturity by virtue of being capable of having the epiphanyhe does, Lysis is now in a place to begin the pursuit of a virtuous life. Socrates’sultimate goal is to cultivate Lysis’s moral development, not to persuade him tobecome the sexual lover of Hippothales.

At this point, it could be argued that Socrates has moved into the euporeticmode and is dictating answers to the question “What is a friend?” in a way thatlimits Lysis’s agency. However, Socrates does not end here. Instead of insisting onthe epiphany he has just helped Lysis to attain, he renews his questioning as to itsvalidity and ultimately claims to be unable to satisfactorily answer the question. Inending the dialogue this way, Socrates leaves his interlocutors with nothing elsebut the injunction that “they should think over everything that has been said”(Lysis 222e). This does not mean that Socrates intends Lysis to start doubtingafresh the epiphany he has received. Rather, Socrates intends his statement ofaporia to compel Lysis to make his epiphany his own. He does not want to giveLysis the opportunity to pin his understanding of friendship on Socrates’s verbal


formulation of it. By verbally denying it, Lysis is left alone, as it were, with hisepiphany. It is this move that protects Socrates from forcing his ideas on Lysis. Hedemands that Lysis decide for himself whether the epiphany he experienced is true.Previously, when he provided Lysis with the suggested answer, Socrates could beaccused of leaving Lysis no option; but, in claiming ignorance again, Lysis is forcedto determine for himself whether his epiphany was true. Ultimately, it seemsthat Socrates hopes Lysis will act upon his epiphany and befriend Hippothales,but he leaves open the possibility that he may not. He preserves Lysis’s agencywhile also providing him with access to the knowledge that Lysis formerly did notcomprehend.

In a very skillful — if sophistical — manner, Socrates has led Lysis firstto aporia, then to an epiphany, and finally to the injunction to live justly, allthe while protecting Lysis’s agency. Without each of these steps, Lysis wouldnever be in a position to act with justice in his relationships with Hippothalesand Menexenus; he is simply too immature and obsessed with maintaining theaffections of two lovers to think through the implications of his actions. Toovercome Lysis’s immaturity, Socrates has to compel Lysis to quit thinking andbegin seeing. Once Lysis’s rational comprehension is overwhelmed, his moralcomprehension is opened through an epiphany and this allows him to understandwhat it means to be a true friend. By this means he is able to see what justice is,and what actions are required to fulfill that justice.

Conclusion

In spite of the fact that Lysis avoids ending in unmitigated aporia and alsoavoids ending in unreflective verbal assertions, it remains to be seen whether itcan serve as a model for contemporary educators. I argue that it can, if properlycontextualized. Like many of the other dialogues, Socrates leads his interlocutorsto aporia, causing them to recognize that they are unable to say what a friend is —they seem to have no understanding; but unlike most other dialogues, Socratesdoes not leave them there. At the moment when they had lost faith in theirprevious answers and were seemingly at a dead end, he changed the direction of theconversation and recommended a conception of friendship that went beyond theverbal formulation of it. This is a critical move, and one that distinguishes Lysisfrom most dialogues. Prior to this point in the dialogue, his interlocutors seemedprimarily engaged in a logical or verbal game; they did not seem emotionallyinvested in the outcome. Most of the aporetic dialogues conclude here: the gameplays out, ending without conclusions, and then the interlocutors move on. Butin the final pages of Lysis, Socrates finds a way to engage his interlocutors on adifferent level. They develop an emotional, existential stake in the conversation.In a certain sense, it is here that they start “seeing.”29

29. Importantly, while such moments are rare, this is not the only time Socrates moves past verbalrepartee and engages his interlocutors existentially. In Republic he performs a similar feat when he getsGlaucon to acknowledge his own need for moderation in a soul, even though Glaucon had previouslybeen unable to see the need for it. Rather than directly attack Glaucon’s immoderation, he uses a fiction,


The fact that in Lysis Socrates combines a call to act justly with the injunctionto “think over everything that has been said” is important. Socrates has not askedLysis and Menexenus to merely affirm a position that he had previously convincedthem was true, which is characteristic of most of the affirmations offered by hisinterlocutors. Instead, he leads them to see the truth and then he stops talking,as it were, and tells them to think about it themselves. This is not the verbalrepartee that characterizes so many of Socrates’s interactions. He becomes earnestand asks his interlocutors to take ownership of their own thoughts. In Lysis, afterleading Lysis to recognize what a friend is and how he must act in light of thatknowledge, Socrates doubles back and claims that the definition of friendship thathe and his interlocutors arrived at is not sufficient to answer the question.30 In sodoing, he demands that Lysis live according to his epiphany, and not according to aformal definition that cannot be relied upon or even obtained. In the end, Socrates’sinterlocutor must trust his personal epiphany of friendship rather than sometheoretical conception of it embodied in a definition.31 The approach modeledin Lysis offers contemporary educators a method of using Socratic questioningto lead students in a profitable direction toward knowledge while holding backfrom directly dictating that knowledge. Students are thus given the scaffoldingnecessary for the acquisition of truth, but then are expected to take ownership forconstructing a life lived in light of that truth.

a “city in speech,” to redirect Glaucon’s soul so as to make it moderate. Glaucon does not merely assentto what justice is, but he develops a genuine understanding that allows him “to distinguish the goodlife from the bad and always to make the best choice possible in every situation”; see Plato, Republic,trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. Cooper, 618c. A few lineslater Socrates further claims that Glaucon “will be able, by considering the nature of the soul, to reasonout which life is better and which life is worse and to choose accordingly” (Republic 619a). Tellingly, inbetween both these lines, Socrates offers the same refrain found in Lysis: he insists that Glaucon “shouldthink over all the things we have mentioned,” which is nearly identical to the advice he gives to Lysisand Menexenus, that they should “think over everything that has been said.”

30. It is much the same with Glaucon in the Republic. After leading Glaucon to construct his ownversion of a politically perfect social arrangement, Socrates, as he did in Lysis, doubles back and admitsthat the city that they had been so assiduously creating is a fiction, a city that exists nowhere except inthe mind of the individual who has the ability to see it.

31. In Republic, Socrates’s interlocutor develops a life-altering desire to embody justice and not merelya conceptual understanding of justice as it is embodied in a political organization.

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK the editor Chris Higgins as well as Avi Mintz and Yoshiaki Nakazawa fortheir invaluable editorial advice.

Education for Epiphany: The Case of Plato's Lysis · Socrates, ed. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana...

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