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Just as philosophy leads to friendship, so friendship leads to philosophy. In Plato’s Phædrus, which was written several years after the Lysis, Socrates and Phædrus go out into the idyllic countryside and share a long conversation about the anatomy of the soul, the nature of true love, the art of persuasion, and the merits of the spoken over the written word.
At the end of their exchange, Socrates offers a prayer to the local deities. This is the famous Socratic Prayer, which is notable also for the response that it elicits from Phædrus:
S: Beloved Pan, and all ye others gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry. —Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.
P: Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.
If only on the basis of his response to the Socratic Prayer, it is clear that Phædrus is as another self to Socrates, since he makes the same choices as Socrates and even justifies those choices on the grounds that their friendship requires it.
Plato may in the Lysis fail to define friendship, but in the Phædrus he gives us its living, breathing embodiment. Socrates and Phædrus spend their time together enjoying the numinous Attic countryside while engaging in earnest philosophical conversation. By exercising and building upon reason, they are furthering each other’s understanding, and transforming a life of friendship into a life of joint contemplation and enjoyment of those things that matter the most.
Whereas Aristotle tries to tell us what perfect friendship is, Plato lets us feel it in all its allure and transformative power.
Read more in The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.
