Chapter 2
Friendship
Suppose we come to the conclusion that, on the evidence we have, the historical Socrates really did like doing philosophy with kids. And suppose we also conclude that, again, on the evidence we have, Plato, during much of his career, thought this might be a good thing to do. Does Plato ever use his dialogue character, Socrates, to give us a good example of how to do philosophy with kids?
I wouldn’t myself point to the dialogue, Charmides, as a good example of doing philosophy with kids. In that dialogue the character, Charmides, is certainly a kid, perhaps a very young boy. In my view, however, Socrates in that dialogue does not succeed in developing a philosophically fruitful conversation with his young interlocutor. To me that dialogue is much more about understanding Socrates than it is about how to have a good philosophical discussion with a child.
As I have already indicated, the dialogue, Lysis, is quite different. There Socrates has some really interesting discussions with two young kids, Menexenus and Lysis. In this dialogue, at least, we have a good model for how to do philosophy with children. The questions Socrates discusses with Menexenus and Lysis concern friendship, which is a topic that interests many kids even when there isn’t an adult philosopher around to ask sticky questions. And the way Socrates approaches his subject is quite likely to engage almost anyone of almost any age.
I have to admit at the outset, however, that a rather formidable linguistic roadblock stands in the way of our using the Lysis as a simple and direct basis for doing philosophy with kids. The Greek word we translate as ‘friendship’ is philia, which is a word that helps to make up many English words. One of them is “anglophile.’ An anglophile is someone who loves all things English, an “English-lover.” But what that example, and many others like it, suggests is that philia in Greek is a word for love, rather than a word for friendship. Perhaps the best thing to say, however, is that philia is simply used much more broadly, or much more loosely, than our English word ‘love’ is. In any case, what Menexenus, Lysis, and Socrates seem to be discussing in the Lysis is much closer to what we think of as friendship than love.
Why have I troubled you with all these thoughts about an ancient Greek word we are going to translate as ‘friendship’? Why didn’t I just keep my scholarly thoughts to myself and get on with my first example of doing Plato with kids? Well, the difficulty we need to address is this. We can say, tautologically, that a lover is someone who either loves someone else, or else is loved by someone else, or both. But we can’t make any similar move with the word, ‘friend.’ What I am going to have Socrates ask, in my English version of his Greek question, is whether my friend is somebody who likes me, or is instead someone I like, or perhaps is both. In a way, using ‘likes’ that way gets Socrates’s question right. But, in a way, it doesn’t. It preserves Socrates’s worry about the direction in which the affection runs, that is, the direction in which it must run to make someone count as a friend. We can call that the “Directionality Question.” But it raises another question that doesn’t really come up in the Greek text, at least not in the same way. That second question is whether liking or being liked by someone is all there is to friendship. We can call that the “Sufficiency Question.” Thus Socrates in the dialogue is fixated on the Directionality Question (‘Does my liking you make me count as your friend, or does it make you count as my friend, or both?’) But, before we are through with our discussion of friendship, we will also need to address the Sufficiency Question (‘Is liking someone a lot, or being liked a lot by someone, all there is to counting as someone’s friend?’)
I promised you that we are going to find in the discussion of friendship in Plato’s dialogue, Lysis, a good example of someone doing philosophy with kids, as well as good material for doing philosophy today with kids in school. But to help you appreciate what it means to say that the Lysis discussion is genuinely philosophical I need to say a little about what makes a discussion philosophical. In particular, I need to distinguish what is often called the “Socratic method” from Socratic inquiry that is genuinely philosophical.
I once heard a schoolteacher extol the virtues of the “Socratic method” he used in his science classes. When, for example, his pupils discovered a certain residue in the classroom fish tank he refused to tell them what caused it; instead he asked them questions that led them to discover for themselves what the cause was. Did his method of indirect questioning make the question, ‘What causes this residue to develop on the floor of the fish tank a philosophical question?’ The answer is ‘No.’
There is, I should point out, a famous example in the Platonic dialogues in which Socrates does something somewhat like what that schoolteacher told me he did. It is the “slaveboy example” in Plato’s dialogue, Meno, at 82a-85d. In that passage Socrates asks Meno to call an untutored house-boy over so that he can ask the boy a question. Socrates draws a square for the boy, perhaps in the sand. He makes sure that the boy understands what makes this figure a square. Socrates then asks the boy how to make a square “twice the size,” that is, with twice the area, of the square already drawn. When the boy suggests doubling the side, Socrates shows him that the resulting square would be four times, not merely twice, the size of the original one. Eventually, after further questioning, the boy discovers, for himself, that the way to double the area of the original square is to take its diagonal and construct a square with sides equal to the length of the diagonal.
To see the plausibility of the answer to this question, one can draw in the sand, or on the blackboard, or on a piece of paper, a figure like this:
[Figure]
It is easy to see, and actually not very difficult to prove, that the outer triangles, a’, b’, c’, and d’, exactly match the inner triangles, a, b, c, and d. By matching up these triangles in a rigorous way one can prove that the outer square has twice the area of the inner one.
For most of us, this question about doubling the area of a square is best answered with the help of diagrams. Moreover, drawing diagrams is a little like conducting experiments with a fish tank. Still, the kind of proof we can get is, of course, different in the two cases. To settle the fish-tank question we need to evaluate empirical evidence, whereas to settle the issue with the square we need only use our reasoning power.
There are, however, important respects in which the square-doubling case and the fish-tank-residue case are similar. In neither case is there anything conceptually problematic about the answer being sought. Moreover, and this is really the crucial point, in each of these two cases the teacher took himself to know the right answer in advance. The indirect method of asking questions so that a pupil could discover the right answer was, in both cases, simply a way of getting the learners to gain for themselves knowledge that the teacher already had at the beginning of the exercise.
The unproblematic nature of both the questions being asked and the answers being sought in these two cases rules out the possibility that either the science teacher or Socrates in his conversation with the slaveboy is pursuing a genuinely philosophical question. Moreover, the confidence of both questioners that they already had the answer they wanted their pupils to get rules out the possibility that the discussion was a genuinely philosophical one.
At the end of the dialogue, Lysis, Socrates makes a confession that will help us understand the difference between what he has been doing in this dialogue and both what the science teacher was doing in his discussions of the fish tank and also what Socrates did in discussing the geometrical problem with the slaveboy. Here Socrates is speaking:
Just as they were leaving, I managed to call out, “Well, Lysis and Menexenus, we have made ourselves rather ridiculous today, I, an old man, and you, children. For our hearers here will carry away the report that, though we conceive ourselves to be friends with each other – you see I class myself with you – we have not as yet been able to discover what we mean by ‘a friend’.” (Lysis 223b, Wright trans.)
This final speech from the dialogue, Lysis, is a characteristic expression of what is called “Socratic ignorance,” that is, Socrates’s insistence that he fails to know or understand things that others claim they know and understand. It is certainly not my claim that every genuinely philosophical conversation must end in Socratic ignorance. But I do claim that genuinely philosophical inquiries characteristically include the recognition that the topic being addressed is sufficiently problematic that we should not be surprised if even our best efforts to deal with the issue under discussion turn out to require re-examination another day.
This characteristically problematic aspect to philosophical questions doesn’t mean that the questions have no answers. Sometimes they have too many answers! Nor does it mean that philosophical questions are only pseudo-questions, or that they are unimportant questions. In fact, they are some of the most important questions we can ask. They are so important that the very effort to ignore them in itself makes us much more shallow human beings and leaves us much more naïve thinkers than we would be if we did our very best to think them through.
The passage from the Lysis I want to discuss now is one I have used to stimulate philosophical discussion in a wide variety of groups. The discussions I am going to report on here took place in two elementary schools in Germany. Why, you may well want to know, do I begin with two schools in Germany?
The short answer is that it was in Germany that I first tried using Plato texts with schoolchildren. My friend, Ekkehard Martens, Professor of Education at the University of Hamburg, had arranged for me to get a German Academic Exchange fellowship to come to Hamburg in May and June of 1989 and visit schools in Hamburg and Lübeck, where I would conduct philosophy discussions with fourth and fifth-graders and eleventh and twelfth-graders. Martens is himself a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy. He had already used a passage from Plato, in fact one from the dialogue, Lysis, in a philosophical discussion with kids. So he presented me with a challenge. Could I, too, use Plato to do philosophy with kids?
Here now give an English translation of the slightly “jazzed-up” German text I used in those two schools:
Friendship
Socrates: Tell me, Menexenus, when one person likes another person, who is the friend?
Is it the one who likes the other, or is it the one who is liked by another. Or
does it make any difference?
Menexenus: I don’t think it makes any difference.
Socrates: How can that be? Can they both be friends when only one of the two likes the
other?
Menexenus: It seems so to me.
Socrates: Really? Could it happen that, for example, Anna likes Barbara, but Barbara
hates Anna?
Menexenus: That’s possible.
Socrates: Who is then the friend? Is it Anna, who likes Barbara, but is hated by her? Or is
it Barbara, who is liked by Anna, though she herself hates Anna. Or are both
friends? Or is neither one a friend?
Menexenus: I have changed my mind. In friendship liking the other person has to go both
ways. In the case of Anna and Barbara, neither one is a friend. One person
cannot be a friend of another unless each one likes the other.
Socrates: So now you are of the opinion that liking the other person has to go both ways.
Otherwise there would be no friendship. Is there, then, no such thing as a friend
of nature, or a friend of the environment? A person can like nature, or the
environment, but it isn’t really true that nature, or the environment likes us.
Plato, Lysis 212a-d (adapted somewhat)
The Hamburg class in which I used this passage was a fourth-grade class. I concentrated there on making the logic of the exchange between Socrates and Menexenus as clear as I could. Wanting the kids to focus on the directionality of liking, which is essential to the discussion. I wrote an arrow (Õ) on the blackboard to mark the direction the given case of liking takes.i With the issue of directionality firmly in mind, we can perhaps appreciate the force of Socrates’s question, when he asks Menexenus who the friend is when one person likes another. Do we want to say this:
- If A likesÕ B, then A is a friend of B.
According to (1), Anna’s liking Barbara is enough to make it true that Anna is Barbara’s friend. And If Adam likes Bernhard, then Adam is Bernhard’s friend. But Socrates, in the passage above, suggests that what may be true is rather this:
- If A likesÕ B, then B is a friend of A.
So, according to (2), Anna’s liking Barbara would make Barbara the friend, and Adam’s liking Bernhard would make Bernhard the friend.
Or perhaps what is true is this:
- If A likesÕ B, then they are both friends, that is, A is a friend of B and B is a friend of A.
In exploring with those Hamburg kids the plausibility of each of these claims, I encountered a cultural distinction, one I was certainly familiar enough with, but had not considered in the context of the Lysis passage. Germans tend to make a significant distinction between someone who counts fully as a friend (ein Freund) and someone who is merely an “acquaintance” (ein Bekannte). Americans, like me, tend not to make such a distinction, or, at least, not to give it much significance. Quite obviously, if one sets a high threshold for genuine friendship, merely liking someone will not begin to be adequate as an requirement for friendship. Here the Sufficiency Question I mentioned earlier on in this chapter arises.
We discussed the Sufficiency Question very briefly in connection with the distinction between a real friend and a mere acquaintance. But then we got back to the Directionality Question. If the fact that I like Nils were enough by itself to make me his friend [as (1) tells us it would be] and if it were also enough to make him my friend [as (2) tells us it would be], then, it seems, we could both be friends even though he didn’t like me at all. The Hamburg class rejected that result. They required mutual liking for friendship. Moreover, as soon became clear, they also ruled out the possibility, however arrived at, that I might be a friend of Nils while he is not a friend of mine. One way to guarantee the result that neither could be a friend of the other unless each was a friend of the other would be to make mutual liking both a necessary and also a sufficient condition for both his being my friend and my being his.ii
The Directionality Question may seem a bit of academic quibbling without real human interest. But that is, I think, not the case. Many of us have wanted to be a friend of someone who has made it clear that she or he is not interested in being our friend. But what about those who have not made it clear that they do not want to be our friend. Perhaps they have been too polite, or too worried about hurting our feelings to ever make clear to us that the direction of affection is one-way. Kids worry about this. Adults worry about it. But what exactly is the worry? Is it a worry that, say, Barbara may never have been my friend, because the friendly affection never went both ways? Or is it a worry I will no longer be able to be Barbara’s friend if, as I fear I might find out, Barbara has no real friendly affection for me?
With the class in Lübeck I decided to focus immediately on the Sufficiency Question, and take up the Directionality Question only later. So, instead of beginning with the Plato passage, I began by asking each of the kids to write down what would be required for them to be a friend of Chris, as well as what would be required for Chris to be their friend. (In contemporary German, as in contemporary English, ‘Chris’ can be either a girl’s or a boy’s name.) I wrote (the German form of) these sentence frames on the board:
- If . . . . . . ., then I am Chris’s friend.
- If . . . . . . ., then Chris is my friend.
After the Lübeck kids had each filled in (4) and (5) for themselves, we checked to see if the resulting conditional statements would guarantee either of these results:
- If I am Chris’s friend, then Chris is my friend.
- If Chris is my friend, then I am Chris’s friend.
These Lübeck kids, like the kids in Hamburg, had already made clear, many of them, that, in their view, there could be no such thing as one-way friendship. But one very quick-thinking girl in the Lübeck class, let’s call her “Ilsa,” checked the way she had filled in (4) and (5) and announced that, despite what most people had agreed to, mutuality was not required for friendship after all. She had filled out her sufficiency conditionals for friendship this way:
(4a) If I like Chris and we spend a lot of time together, then Chris is my friend.
(5a) If Chris likes me and we spend a lot of time together, then I am Chris’s friend.
Ilsa pointed out, quite correctly, that the fact that I like Chris is no guarantee that Chris likes me, even though we spend a lot of time together. Perhaps the fact that we spend a lot of time together, she went on, is at least some reason to think that we also like each other. But there might well be some quite different reason why we hang out together, quite different, that is, from our both liking each other. For example, Chris might be hanging out with me to make some third party jealous.
Although Ilsa herself seemed quite content to allow that she could be a friend of Chris without Chris being a friend of hers (and vice versa), the other kids still seemed to want to reject that result. But they couldn’t figure out how to complete (4) and (5) in such a way as to guarantee that one-way friendships are not perfectly possible. I think that was an important result. It fits in quite well with what I previously identified as “Socratic ignorance.”
This preliminary discussion of friendship was a good warm-up for discussing the Lysis passage with the Lübeck class. These kids were immediately dissatisfied with Socrates’s efforts to analyze friendship simply in terms of the “liking” relationship. Much more belongs to friendship, they insisted, than simply liking someone. Even if we add that the “liking” must be mutual, there would have to be a requirement that the parties to the friendship enjoy spending time together and doing things with each other.
The Lübeck class also got into the issue of whether it is possible to be a friend of animals, perhaps even plants, or to be friends of the environment. They seemed quite certain that the right kind of mutuality could arise between a human being and a dog for one to be a friend of the dog and for the dog to be one’s own friend as well. But they were less sure about cats, and about horses. One suggestion they discussed was that friendship with, say, a horse might be friendship of a different kind from friendship between people. Or perhaps it would be in a different sense of the word, ‘friend,’ that one could be a horse’s friend.
As for the environment, despite all the talk, in Germany as well as in the States, about being friends of nature, there seemed to be a consensus in this class that friendship with the environment would have to be unidirectional. Still, even though there was a consensus, there was not complete agreement. One member of the class explained that, in a certain way, the environment, perhaps the eco-system in which we live, can be seen as a living being. If we don’t pollute the environment, she declared earnestly, we can be friends of the environment, and, furthermore, by being friends of the environment we enable the environment to be friendly toward us and so our friend as well. The other kids seemed to reflect positively on this girl’s suggestion. They seemed to find it attractive, even if they were not entirely sure it was defensible.
Sometimes people speak disparagingly of philosophy as mere quibbling about words. But that sells philosophy short. Philosophers do argue about the correct application of words. But words give form to our attitudes and direct our actions. Thinking about what ‘friendship’ means, or should mean, is partly a way of thinking about what is important in our lives, and why it is important. Those kids in Hamburg and Lübeck did a good job of reflecting on some of the importantly puzzling issues that, according to Plato’s dialogue, Socrates badgered Lysis and Menexenus about so long ago.