Plato on Friendship The Lysis

Despite our usually casual interactions, we all value our friends. It's a very serious unserious relationship. But what exactly is friendship and can Plato help provide a definitive definition of a friend? Unfortunately no. Plato goes through many attempted definitions of friendship in his dialogue The Lysis, including but not limited to, a relationship between two similar people, a relationship between two dissimilar people, and a relationship between a neutral person and a good person in the presence of evil. Although none of these definitions succeed, perhaps the dialogue itself gives us a hint as to an essential element of friendship: the desire to converse. In the dialogue, Socrates considers his two partners as friends, but why is this? Perhaps it's because of their willingness and enjoyment to partake in the dialogue itself.

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