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The Problem of Reported Speech: Friendship and Philosophy in Plato's Lysis and Symposium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Catherine Pickstock
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It is said that Plato’s discussions of love and friendship in the Lysis and Symposium, unlike those of Aristotle, allow little place for love or affection towards individuals. Scholars have arrived at this conclusion by several routes. It is thought that Aristotle more genuinely appreciates the specificity of human affections and friendships: friends for the Stagirite are considered ‘the greatest of external goods’; those who have regulated their passions to such a degree that they are unmoved by particular instances of beauty ‘are simply not human’.

Aristotle’s emphasis upon friendship itself as ‘the beautiful thing’ has been central to the recent burgeoning scholarly interest in the topic of friendship. Studies have appeared in many disciplinary areas and from many perspectives: historical, philosophical and sociological.

Alongside these, a number of theological reflections upon this theme have been produced, addressing friendship in its late antique context, or else examining mediaeval understandings of charity and its link with protocols of personal affiliation and friendship. More recently still, Jacques Derrida has produced his ambivalently- received Politiques de l’amitié? in which his deconstructive impulse applies itself variously from Plato and Aristotle all the way to Montaigne and the controversial political theorist Carl Schmitt. There has also been an increasing engagement with classical negotiations of the theme of friendship.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 82 , Issue 969 , November 2001 , pp. 525 - 540
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 I am grateful for conversations with Dr Thomas Harrison, Professor John Milbank, Archbishop Rowan Williams, Mgr Robert Sokolowski, and Professor David Burrell C.S.C.

2 Vlastos, G.. ‘The Individual as an object of love in Plato’, in Vlastos, G. (ed), Platonic Studies, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 3–42Google Scholar; see Catherine Osbome's excellent critique of Vlastos's position in Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)Google Scholar, Appendix 11. See also Ken, Fergus, ‘Chanty as Friendship’ in Davies, Brian OP (ed), Language, Meaning and God: Essays in Honour of Herbert McCabe OP (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), pp. 1–23Google Scholar; Ken cites Nicomachean Ethics 111 1119a; NEIX, 1169b; 1166a

3 NE 1169b; NE III, 1119a.

4 NE1155a

5 McGuire, B. P., Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience 350–1250 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications Inc., 1988)Google Scholar; Moss, David, ‘Friendship: St Anselm, theoria and the convolution of sense’ in Milbank, et al (eds), Radical orthodoxy: a new theology (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 127–142Google Scholar. See also Osborne, op.cit. Eros Unveiled.

6 Derrida, Jacques Politiques de l'amitié' (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1994)Google Scholar.

7 On the controversy surrounding Carl Schrnitt, see Ulmen, G. L., ‘Between the Weirnar Republic and the Third Reich: Continuity in Carl Schmitt's Thought’, Telos 119 (Spring 2001), pp. 17–42Google Scholar.

8 Gill, Christopher, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Milbank, John, ‘Can a Gift be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian metaphysic’Modern Theology 11.1 (January 1995), pp. 119–161CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nancy, Jean‐Luc in The Inoperative Community, Connor, Peter (ed), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Osborne, op. cit., Eros Unveiled.

9 F. Kerr, op cit., pp… 1–23.

10 Ibid. pp. 7–8.

11 Osborne, op.cit. p. 58; Mackenzie, M. M., ‘Impasse and Explanation: From the Lysis to the Phaedo’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 70 (1988), pp. 15–45;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bolotin, David, Pluto's Dialogue on Friendship (Ithaca: SUNY Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Vlastos op. cit. See, for example, Brian Carr's attempt to distil the dialogue into analytic formulae, in ‘Friendship in Plato's Lysis’, in Leaman, Oliver (ed), Friendship East and West: Philosophical Perspectives (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996), pp. 13–31.Google Scholar

12 See, for example, Brian Carr's attempt to distil the dialogue into analytic formulae, in ‘Friendship in Plato's Lysis’, in Leaman opxit., pp. 13–31.

13 Phaedrus and Symposium, though see Osborne op.cit., p.86.

14 Homer, Od. Xvii.218: ‘Yea, ever like and like together God doth draw.’

15 Hesiod, Works and Days, 25.

16 Hans‐Georg Gadamer, ‘Logos and Ergon in Plato's Lysis’ in idem., Dialogue and Dialectic, Smith, P. Christopher, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 1–20Google Scholar; p. 13 ff.

17 Cf. Phaedo, 73d, 74a.

18 See Republic, Book One, 328e.

19 Pickstock, C. J., A Short Guide to Plato, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar,

20 Morgan, K., Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Phaedo 114d; Morgan ibid., pp. 12, 199.

22 Gadamer, ‘Dialectic and Sophism in Plato's Seventh Letter’ in op.cit., Dialogue and Dialectic, pp.103–5

23 See especially Phaedo and Phaedrus.

24 Chrktien, Jean‐Louis, L'inouhliable et l'inespeéré (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1991), pp. 9–56Google Scholar.

25 Morgan op.cit., p. 181.

26 Morgan, op. cit. pp. 182–183.

27 See also Parmenides.

28 But see 174a. Diotima's speech, for a few pages, occupies narrative foreground. See Halperin, D., ‘Plato and the erotics of narrativity’ in Klagge, J C and Smith, N D (eds.), Methods of Interpreting Plato and his Dialogues OSAPh suppl. Vol 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 97Google Scholar.

29 Aristodemus's speech is reported in three styles: first, there is straightforward ‘reported speech’, as in ‘he said that…’; secondly, there is reported direct speech, where the ‘he said that…’ is elided but implied, sometimes introduced by the redundant ‘hoti’ or ‘that’; see 174a5. Thirdly, Apollodorus sometimes omits Aristodemus's mediation altogether, as in 174a8 and 174b3, and leaps straight over him to Socrates.

30 Theuetetus, 143b

31 Halperin, op.cit., p. 100–1

32 Phaedrus.

33 Symposium 208a ff.

34 Cratylus 408c; 432b‐d; 440. 439a‐b. See Morgan, op.cit., pp. 24–5, 3844, 5658, 116–9. 287–8.

35 E.E. VII 3 1238b 15–1239b NE 1158a31 ‐1159a9 Lysis 212e ff

36 Lysis 212e ff

37 Fergus Kerr, op.cit.

38 See Burrell, David, Friendship and Ways to Truth (South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 2000), pp. 74Google Scholar ff.

39 See Ernst, Cornelius OP, The Theology of Grace (Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1974)Google Scholar

40 Lacoste, Jean‐Yves, ‘Le désir et l'inexigible préambles h une lecture’, Les Études Philosophiques 2 (1995).Google Scholar

41 Lacoste, opcit.

42 Lacoste, op.cit.