C. J. Rowe

In terms of content this book lays out an apology for Plato's Lysis.

The Lysis is a troubling dialogue: it appears to present the positions that a) all love is egoistic, and b)that no true love is possible. The dialogue is further troubled by the fact that the Lysis is riddled with exceptionally bad arguments. Why does Plato/Socrates, in a dialogue with young boys about friendship, provide so many inadequate (malicious?) arguments? Many scholars agree that the Lysis is a subpar dialogue, or provides a subpar understanding of love.

Penner & Rowe (whom I have taken to calling Penn & Teller), argue that that the Lysis is not subpar on either account. They treat all aspects of the dialogue (including the "dramatic" elements), and in so doing demonstrate that the Lysis is an up-building dialogue between three people (who are variously lover, friend, beloved) about the nature of desire. The dialogue is thwarted by the limitations of his interlocutors' intelligence, but nevertheless Penn & Teller believe we can excavate Socrates' notion of philia (friendship) from the dialogue.

I will spare you the argument: it turns out that love (eros) and friendship are both species of desire for the ONE good. This "one good" is either wisdom, or happiness, or the Form of the Good, Penn and Teller aren't sure. What this means for love is that, according to Socrates, when we love someone, what we love is not them but the "one good" or "first friend". Interestingly, the first friend is not a person ever at all, but always a concept.

Let me turn to pettier quibbles. This is a co-authored book about friendship, which is nice enough, but it erupts sometimes in weird asides that began sounding to me like giggles between Penn & Teller ("Penn USED to think x, but he's come around to Teller's views." "Teller simply could not accept this interpretation for the LONGEST time!" "Penn & Teller humbly thank our wives for their patience and much needed glasses of iced tea!"). At some point the elation of their pairing exasperates me; it further draws out an already very long book (350 pages) about a pretty short dialogue (25 pages). ...Others might find it endearing. My patience runs low because I'm reading on a deadline.

In terms of structure this book is pretty much totally insane.

Penn & Teller go through the dialogue ALMOST, but not quite line by line. They not only quote the dialogue, and they provide commentary on it throughout, they also foreshadow ways everything will make sense by the end of their reading. It is also HEAVILY footnoted. [Their text is annotation! WHY ARE THERE SO MANY SUBSTANTIVE ANNOTATIONS OF THE ANNOTATIONS?!] This is how they lay out their general schema/understanding of the dialogue. It takes 9 chapters and 190 pages.

Next. (There is a next.) One might think that Penn & Teller have exhausted all they had to say in their treatment of the Lysis, but they have some additional comments to make. They want to return to the beginning again. This is chapter 10, called: "A Re-reading of the Lysis." "Okay, makes sense," I think, "we can refresh on the stuff we may have missed in the beginning." Oh wait, no, I'm sorry, chapter 10 was just the PRELIMINARIES to a re-reading of the Lysis. That re-rereading comes in chapter 11. Wherein is expounded...pretty much what was already said in pages 1-190. That goes on for about a hundred more pages.

Since I read this on a kindle, I consistently believed this book must be arriving at its conclusion in the Re-Reading. No. There is a chapter 12. It is called: "Unfinished Business." There's UNFINISHED BUSINESS, AFTER ALL THIS? But yes, there is. So we finish that business. Book over, as one might (for fuck's sake) reasonably expect? NO. No this thing is never going to end. There is an EPILOGUE (of course there is). There Penn & Teller do something naughty that they said they weren't going to do, and they go beyond the purview of Plato and the Lysis to talk about the Symposium, the Phaedrus and Aristotle. (They just couldn't help themselves they were having so much fun!).

I finish the last page of the epilogue, and expect to scroll through Bibliography, Index. What do I find instead? AN ENTIRE (clean) TRANSLATION OF THE LYSIS. No, fuck no. You put that shit up front, Penn & Teller. There are some things this reader just cannot abide.… (mehr)