Hermes as Eros in Plato’s Lysis

Introduction

Friendship, while a moral practice that comes almost naturally to just about everyone, is also difficult for us moderns even to think about. Friendship is central for ancient philosophers including Plato and Aristotle, while it is almost overlooked among modern philosophers starting with Hobbes. ¹ Part of this oversight is due to the dominance of the modern subject that views reality, including relations with others, in terms of the subject–object dichotomy or ‘intersubjectivity’ which necessarily presupposes a prior autonomous subject alien to the thinking of the ancients. Modern solipsism and individualism seem to make friendship difficult even to think about. More recent efforts that consider what Aristotle calls ‘sunaisthesis’ or concurrent perception, which draws upon Aristotle’s insight that awareness of one’s own existence necessarily entails awareness and delight in the existence of one’s friend, is a constructive step toward retrieving an understanding of the consubstantiality of friendship while maintaining Aristotle’s insight (and that of the moderns) that friendship is between distinct individuals (Aristotle, 2002: 1170a28–1171b35; Agamben, 2004; Heyking, 2008b). Philosophers including Roger Scruton are partially correct to suggest that we cannot enter the horizon of another, or that we cannot reach beyond our own horizon to another’s point of view (Scruton, 2012: 33). Even so, the scholarship on sunaisthesis uncovers the ancient insight that, indeed, in living and loving our friends, our own self-understanding is enhanced and blends to a degree with theirs, as our beholding of the good is inseparable with our beholding of the good with and in them.

With Plato’s dialogues, we see an image of the practice of friendship instantiated in the form of the dialogue itself that shows, to varying degrees, the capacity of the characters, along with the reader and her or his response to the dialogue, to enter into the horizon of their friends, that is, to practise what Aristotle calls sunaisthesis. The dialogue form mimics the back-and-forth of friendly conversation, which is the essence of friendship. Form and content are united. As Mark Vernon remarks, ‘the Lysis offers a portrayal of friendship as a way of life in which, at its best, Socratic philosophy and becoming friends are one and the same thing’ (Vernon, 2007: 12–13).

Vernon rejects the dominant scholarly view of this dialogue that while it identifies certain problems about friendship, it is fundamentally flawed and fails to say anything insightful about friendship’s essence. He suggests the Lysis actually deals with friendship, especially sunaisthesis, at a deeper level than Aristotle does. A common criticism made of Plato’s ethics and political philosophy is that individuals get subsumed under metaphysical universals. Individuals are mere place-holders for impersonal ideas. Gregory Vlastos speaks for this perspective when he imputes to Plato the view that: ‘We are to love the persons so far, and only insofar, as they are good and beautiful [that is, useful, so that] the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality, will never be the object of our love’ (Vlastos, 1973: 31). The question of loving the individual is bound up in how best to assess Plato’s ethics and politics, but also his so-called metaphysical ideas, as well as the very nature of Socratic philosophizing.

This article examines how Plato uses mythological symbolisms in the Lysis, specifically those of Hermes, to show how our experience of the good makes possible our capacity to practise sunaisthesis and still love our friend as an individual, and in so doing overturns the static dualities usually associated with Plato’s ‘metaphysics’, which typically have hindered appreciation of this strange dialogue. Instead of appealing to allegedly impersonal ideas, Plato refigures Greek mythological understandings of Hermes to signal, first, that friendship is a movement of divine love in which human beings participate and to which they are reoriented so that they may behold their friend as an individual, as a person, and, second, that this reorientation is needed to place the dialectical inquiry into friendship upon proper pre-dialectical starting points. ² Instead of eclipsing the individual in the shadow of impersonal ideas, Plato appeals to Hermes, the most human, most creative, and thus most political, of Olympians, whose name means windfall [hermaion], to show how we must open ourselves up to the divine in order fully to love our friend as an individual person. ³ Hermes, the transgressor and yet preserver of boundaries and hence of our individuality, enables us to practise sunaisthesis, to enter into the horizon of our friend, because he simultaneously unsettles us and our own horizons by astonishing us with the gifts and thefts he enacts, and serves as a divine bridge between each friend’s unsettled horizons.

For the Greeks, to experience Hermes was to experience a ‘windfall’ or ‘godsend’ [hermaion]. ⁴ In the simplest and vulgar sense, the herms statue was a gift on the roadside for the traveler. Socrates would have walked by many herms statues on his ‘way from the Academy straight to the Lyceum’, as he describes his journey at the beginning of the dialogue (Lysis 203a). In Greek religion, Hermes was also a liminal (and possibly shamanistic) power that united the underworld with Olympus, which, as he was also the creative being who simultaneously maintains and disrupts boundaries, enabled him to be the patron of political societies. Of all the Olympians, Hermes was the only one to have created his own roles, to have made himself, instead of having his roles given to him. He was creative, and thus the god one might likely regard as a person. At its most sophisticated, but still compact and mythological meaning, to experience Hermes was to participate in the completion of the theological cosmogony of world creation and unity: Hermes ‘must once have struck the eye as a brilliant flash out of the depths, that it saw a world in the God, and the God in the whole world. This is the origin of the figure of Hermes, which Homer recognized and which later generations held fast to’ (Kerényi, 1986: 3, quoting Otto, 1954 [no p. given]). The Lysis constitutes a more differentiated account of the compact myth because now, in addition to seeing ‘a world in the God, and the God in the whole world’, Plato, through his refiguring of Hermetic symbolisms, enables us to see the person in the world and God, and the world and God in the person. The Hermes symbolism of the Lysis reminds the reader that instead of one’s friend being viewed as a passive place-holder for the impersonal ideas, friendship is best practised by those who also share the characteristics of creativity, personhood, music and wisdom, that is, the characteristics of Hermes. In beholding our friend, we behold ‘a brilliant flash out of the depths’. Loving the friend means recognizing he ‘is…an image of the divine’ (Rhodes, 2008: 46; original emphasis), where the divine, paradoxically, is the most personable of the gods; and of course, the most divine of persons is Socrates. ⁵ The creativity of Hermes–Socrates overturns static metaphysical dualities usually associated with Plato and reminds us that our friend is the intersection of the cosmos, which is to say, a person.

Considering the mythological symbolism and dialectical starting point of Hermes is necessary because the experience of Hermes, of windfall, illuminates (‘answers’ would be too strong a term) two key lacunae in the dialectics of the dialogue: (1) what friends are for (as opposed to what need they fulfill); and (2) whether the philosopher’s relationship with the good can in any way be considered friendship, whereby, as Paul Friedländer once suggested, ‘true philo-sophy, i.e. love of sophia…is returned by sophia’ (Friedländer, 1964: 96).

Lysis is a vexing dialogue because the interlocutors – Socrates, along with the two boys, Lysis and Menexenus – fail to arrive at a coherent understanding of friendship, perhaps because such a task is impossible on account of the limits of their characters as well as the nature of friendship. What they do come up with is odd because they frame the discussion in terms of the usefulness of the friend (Lysis 207c–211d), whose inadequacy as a starting point for dialectics is seen in some of the absurd conclusions and perplexities Socrates and the boys reach. They first consider whether friends are useful for the good, or for the bad, but they determine that friends who are both good or both bad provide no benefit for one another because the good, by definition, have no need of any benefit, and the bad, by definition, have no benefit to offer to another (ibid.: 211d–216b). The interlocutors lean towards agreeing that friends who are neither good nor bad provide benefits for one another, but the best they can do to describe the bond that unites such in-between friends is to suggest that they are ‘akin’ [oikeion] to one another, which, to say the least, fails to illuminate the manner in which friends are ‘akin’ to one another (ibid.: 221d–222e). In providing benefits to one another, friends are said to help each other escape evils (ibid.: 216c–218c). If friends are said to help one another escape the unease of existence, their good is defined as a negative, which makes it difficult to discern what good friends are for. It is as if Francis Bacon, who famously argued that friends help one another ease each other’s bodily humors, wrote this dialogue. However, when Socrates describes friends in terms of the good they serve, they appear to us as ‘phantoms’ or ‘idols’ [eidola] who stand beneath the ‘first friend’ [proton philia], a symbol that seems to suggest a metaphysical first principle of friendship (ibid.: 218c–d). The principle or idea overshadows individual friends. As this survey of the dialogue shows, no matter which way the dialectics cuts, friends seem to be phantoms. We have perhaps learned what friendship is not, but not what it is.

Reading the Lysis dramatically and mythologically

For these reasons, the Lysis has traditionally been taken to be one of Plato’s ‘aporetic’ dialogues. However, more recent scholarship attends to the dramatic setting of the dialogue to show how it supplements the discursive elements and helps explain the more perplexing, and even ridiculous, parts of the dialogue. This article supplements these more dramatic interpretations by demonstrating the crucial role the Hermetic elements play in symbolizing the person of the friend. My analysis of the text of the dialogue focuses on its references and allusions to Hermes, as well as on the points in the dialogue where the interlocutors draw inadequate or ridiculous conclusions that point us back to the starting points of the argument. I do not provide a comprehensive reading of the dialogue and all its dialectical turns, which has been done numerous times and quite capably by other scholars (discussed below). Rather, my interest resides in analysing the intersection between the starting points of those arguments and the Hermetic symbolisms because that intersection is the intersection between the discursive or dianoetic dimension of the dialogue and the visionary or noetic dimension that is about the movement of intellect or nous itself (see Voegelin, 2000: 259).

Various commentators have noticed the special importance of Hermes to the Lysis (Trivigno, 2011; Gonzalez, 2003, 1995; Planeaux, 2001; Haden, 1983). Gonzalez has gone furthest in explaining the importance of Hermes to the discursive dimension of the dialogue. He argues that the significance of Hermes consists in his being the preserver and transgressor of boundaries (Gonzalez, 2003: 39–40). There is a lot of transgressing and preserving of boundaries in the Lysis. Socrates’ presence in the palaestra, on a day when the intermingling of adults and youths is prohibited, is an obvious example of transgression. However, just as his ghostly ability enables him to enter the palaestra, so too does it mean that he will not stay with the boys. In being a midwife to the boys and to us, Socrates shows that ‘[t]he one is not indebted to the other for anything, but both are indebted to the god for everything’ (Kierkegaard, 1985: 66).

Gonzalez also states that Hermes as intermediary helps further the movement of the Lysis in mediating the opposites of good and good, bad and bad, and good and bad that characterize the attempts of the interlocutors to define friendship (Gonzalez, 2003: 4). Hermes ‘transforms love from a two-term relation to a three-term relation: a love triangle, as it were.…This characterization of love as a relation between what is neither good nor bad and the ultimate good also makes it a form of mediation between human beings and something more than human: a type of mediation of course represented by Hermes’ (ibid.). One might say that Hermes not only makes love between two (or more) individuals possible, but also makes dialectics possible. Gonzalez shows the profound role Plato has Hermes take in realizing friendship and philosophy.

Gonzalez’s point is not mere speculation, and is firmly rooted in Socrates’ understanding of dialectics, whereby something is known through its look or form; sensory perceptions are unintelligible without intellect (Republic 508e). A similar observation may be made of the individual sciences. Each has its first principles, which can be known only by a superior science. Thus, physics, the science of three-dimensional objects and motion, presupposes mathematics, which presupposes logic, and so forth (ibid.: 522a–534d). Finally, Socrates seems to think that an art can only fully be understood by those whom it serves because the advantage and thus completion of each is found in serving its object (ibid.: 341e–342d). To know something is to know its nature, which involves knowing its first principles. In the case of most things, this involves beholding it in its totality, but this is impossible in the case of human things and perhaps especially in the case of friendship because human things can never be beheld in the sense we behold objects – a fact which Lysis, in viewing friends as things to be possessed, does not understand. We simply cannot stand before other human beings in the mode of subject–object because we share the same ontological standing. We must go outside of ourselves to understand what unites us in friendship. Myth provides us with a participatory knowledge that, in the case of friendship, is operationalized through the experience of Hermes.

Most importantly, like Hermes, Socrates, who claims his knowledge of love derives from the god, is a mediator between gods and humans (Gonzalez, 2003: 42). Indeed, Socrates claims ‘it has been given [hermeta] to me from a god – to be able quickly to recognize both a lover and a beloved’ (Lysis 204c). Of course the capacity for this is of divine origin because it requires the ability to perceive and understand what goes on between, and thus above, human beings. Gonzalez outlines the allusions to Hermes but his analysis remains at the textual level, without advancing to the experiential core of Hermes and its relationship to friendship. The experiential core is that of ‘windfall’ [hermaion] which, in compact form, is the experience of the in-between of existence and the origin of that existence, where human beings recognize that everything they have, and conversely that can be taken away from them, is from the gods. The gift of the friend is the most vivid expression of this experience.

Plato’s use of Hermetic tropes is more than window dressing. It represents his way of recalling mystic, shamanic, daimonic, erotic, or participatory experiences that were previously symbolized by Greek poets and religious traditions, but that, in Plato’s hands, are expressed in noetic and discursive terms. They clarify the experience of being intermediary to which Socrates refers when he claims his knowledge of lover and beloved ‘has somehow been given to me [hermeta] from a god’ (and when this godsend knowledge enables him to perceive the in-between). Philosophy shares the concern of myth, which is humanity’s participation in a divine cosmos, and Plato frequently uses myth to articulate central philosophical, though non- or meta-discursive, experiences.

In the history of Greek religion, the withdrawal of the gods from the cosmos meant that ‘divine meaning is no longer experienced as part of the world, in its ceaseless and complete change of living and dying, and ascends to a realm beyond the world of immutable perfection, [an event which] is accompanied by the experience of the discovery of an individual soul, a little atom of immortality that must alone make the difficult passage to being, truth, plentitude, of meaning, the gods, however the terminus ad quem is symbolized’. (Cooper, 2001: 104)

Rethinking the starting points of the argument

The Lysis takes places during the festival of Hermes. This is indicated at the beginning of the dialogue, when we find the boys, Lysis and Menexenus, sacrificing to Hermes, and at the end of the dialogue, when the attendants of the boys return from making their sacrifices to Hermes (Gonzalez, 2003: 36–7). Socrates takes advantage of the departure of the boys’ attendants, who go to observe the Hermaea, to converse with Lysis and Menexenus (Lysis 206d). Indeed, Menexenus seems more observant of Hermes than Lysis because he leaves to worship Hermes during Socrates and Lysis’ conversation that both reveals Lysis’ libido dominandi and humiliates him (Lysis 207d and 211a). Perhaps Menexenus’ piety towards Hermes makes him a better learner and gives him a greater capacity for friendship, as evidenced by his presence at Socrates’ death in Phaedo and his role in the dialogue named after him. At the conclusion of the dialogue, the attendants, ‘like some daemons’, call the boys away from Socrates and back to their tasks (ibid.: 223a–b). The attendants had been drinking at the Hermaea, which would have been the third day of the Anthesteria festival (Planeaux, 2001). This three-day festival, which Jane Harrison and others have compared to All Souls’, was dedicated to the dead. During this festival, ghosts were permitted to wander the earth among the living. Socrates refers to the attendants as ‘daemons’, which reminds the reader of another reference to ghosts earlier in the dialogue when Socrates compares individual friends, who are mere ‘phantoms’ [eidola] (Lysis 219d), to the ontological ‘first friend’ [proton philia] for whom all friendships apparently serve.

The dialogue is rife with the dead and ghosts because the action takes place in the realm of Hermes. Indeed, Socrates’ appearance at the palaestra refigures this ghostly wandering, which makes its mark on the dialogue as a whole. As Planeaux observes:

Plato subtly paints a most intricate and elaborate image through the use of a single word: ‘Hermaea’. During a Dionysian celebration, when strangers were in Athens in large numbers, when revelers dressed up as satyrs frolicked about town in almost uncontrolled wantonness, Plato displays his own Silenus/Marsyas entering the wrestling school near Panops on one of the few days out of the year when he could do so unimpeded. Celebrating youths were initiated into the community on this day, while dangerous ghosts and demons coursed through the streets of Athens, and Plato’s own musical satyr engages these assembled young men in discussions of philia – a virtue that can turn excessive, intense, and even violent – in an attempt to initiate them into philosophy. (Planeaux, 2001: 66)

Additionally, the dramatic setting of the Anthesteria festival reminds the reader that festivals in general are times of civic gatherings where friendships, both personal and civic, are renewed (see Planeaux, 2001: 65). Moreover, festivals take place outside the rhythms of daily workaday life because they serve as reminders of the divine order in which the polis is situated:

Taking pity on this suffering that is natural to the human race, the gods have ordained the change of holidays as times of rest from labor. They have given as fellow celebrants the Muses, with their leader Apollo, and Dionysus – in order that these divinities might set humans right again. Thus men are sustained by their holidays in the company of the gods. (Laws 653d)

As noted above, the arguments of the interlocutors run into perplexities. Indeed, the very form of argumentation, where pairs of likes and opposites are presented, is a form of sophistry, as shown in the Euthydemus, a dialogue whose dramatic date possibly immediately precedes that of the Lysis. ⁸ Framing the argument in terms of opposites (e.g. good and good, bad and bad, or good and bad) makes it difficult to find the middle term (e.g. neither good nor bad) for which the interlocutors strive near the end of the dialogue. For this reason, Socrates points us to Hermes: ‘I say through divination that whatever is neither good nor bad is a friend of the beautiful and good’ (Lysis 216d). The attempt to find the middle term, which will be important when the interlocutors refer to the bond friends’ share as ‘akin’ [oikeion], is an attempt to discern the substance of friendship in a participatory or Hermetic mode, for the middle term participates in both terms between which it is said to be. But, as Rhodes has shown, the effort to discern this participatory mode is not a mere intellectual exercise, but must involve the taming of Lysis’ libido dominandi.

Socrates attempts, through a maze of arguments and sophistries, to purge Lysis’ soul of his libido dominandi. Lysis’ libido is most clearly on display in the series of exchanges between Socrates and him that begins with Socrates asking him whether his parents love him (Lysis 207d) and concludes with Lysis making apparent that he views rulers as those most happy because they are most free to do what they want (Lysis 210a–c). Rhodes explains: ‘Lysis is not wise or just. He wants to enslave and use other human beings for his own advantage, profit, and pleasure. This is strong evidence that his friendships fizzle because he is the selfish type of utilitarian who alienates people by trying to exploit them’ (Rhodes, 2008: 31). Socrates’ ironic questioning of Lysis is an attempt to bring him to perplexity, to neediness, because that is the opening of the soul to otherness and to love and friendship (Nichols, 2009: 160), though Socrates is probably aware the boy’s soul is too proud to open. Socrates’ mode of questioning is why either Plato or a later editor added a subtitle to the Lysis: ‘On Philia: Obstetric’. Socrates practises the art of the midwife with the boys, as someone who attempts to initiate them into the love of wisdom. Because Lysis never appears in any other Platonic dialogues, one may assume that Socrates’ attempt with Lysis brought forth nothing. Conversely, Menexenus and Ctessipus are both present at Socrates’ death in the Phaedo, while Ctessipus is Socrates’ ally against the sophists in the Euthydemus. Menexenus gets his own dialogue, whose dramatic date is actually later than that of the Phaedo, the dialogue in which Socrates dies. As a reminder of Socrates’ entrance to the palaestra at Anthesteria, the day of ghosts wandering the earth, Socrates appears to Menexenus in that last dialogue as a godsend to order Athens. Thus, the dialogue is meant to clear away misunderstandings and it points to the importance of purging libido dominandi as a prelude for understanding and practising friendship. Socrates suggests as much at the end of the dialogue when he ‘already had in mind to set in motion someone else among the older fellows’ who would presumably be a more mature interlocutor (Lysis 223a; Rhodes, 2008: 42). However, the entrance of the attendants, the daimons, prevents this conversation from occurring so we are left wondering what character it may have taken had it occurred. It is up to the reader to rethink the starting points of the conversation.

A closer examination of the Hermetic setting of the dialogue reveals the alternative starting point of Lysis, who, despite being or because he is ‘beautiful and good’ (Lysis 207a), is libidinous. Gonzalez argues that Hermes helps illuminate ‘in-between’ features of friendship that the speeches fail to grasp. Hermes is the god of boundaries and, thus, of intermediaries. He is also the god to whom Socrates refers when he tells his interlocutors that ‘this has somehow been given to me [hermeta] from a god – to be able quickly to recognize both a lover and a beloved’ (ibid.: 204c). As the god who oversees the dialogue and its dramatic setting, Hermes also oversees the practical choices the interlocutors make. Among these practical choices is their insistence that friendship is reciprocal and that friends are somehow between good and bad. Indeed, Socrates asserts, without explaining, that he and the boys are ‘in the middle of the bad and the good’ (ibid.: 220d) for whom the strange category of ‘akin’ [oikeion] appears to make some sense. The middle or ‘akin’ is a function of the gift of the god to Socrates: ‘that whatever is neither good nor bad is a friend of the beautiful and good’ (ibid.: 216d).

The experience of Hermes in the classical tradition

In order to understand the significance of Plato’s references to Hermes, it is necessary to consider the nature of the god according to the Greeks, and thus the experience of Hermes. Hermes undergoes a remarkable transformation in the history of Greek religion, which is evident in an examination of how Hermes appears in Greek folk religion and the ‘Homeric Hymn to Hermes’ (which was sung during the Anthesteria festival). ⁹ Using Eric Voegelin’s terminology, his meaning is differentiated from a compactly symbolized chthonic fertility god to a more differentiated Olympian spokesman for the justice of Zeus (as exemplified in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound where, indeed, he recognizes personal responsibility to a greater extent than does Zeus [see Aeschylus, 1975: 1443–1640; Voegelin, 1956b: 259; Swanson, 1994–5: 236]). As mediator between gods and men, and as guide to the souls of the dead, Hermes represents a shamanistic power who unites the two realms, and which, in Plato’s dialogues, gets refigured as erotic (Butterworth, 1966: 154; 1970: 64). Hermes is a liminal figure because he is a god of boundaries. He is also the god of transgressing those boundaries. But in transgressing those boundaries he also maintains them. Thus, he is also the patron of founders of political societies. ¹⁰ Hermes is the condition of human relations. He is also the ‘companion to the feast’ (Strauss, 1989: 140, citing the ‘Hymn to Hermes’, 436). His importance to the Lysis, and in Plato’s refiguring of him in the person of Socrates, is that, as godsend or windfall, he is the precondition to friendship. By accompanying Hermes–Socrates in this journey, we go outside of ourselves and thus glimpse, through myth and symbol, the ground of friendship.

Hermes was the god of herdsman, thieves, graves and heralds (Burkert, 1985: 158). He was also associated with fertility, as the famous phallic statues of the herms indicate. Hermes was ‘the patron god of the fundamental anthropological and sociological principle of reciprocity’ (Watkins, 1970: 345). His humble yet dubious beginning of fertility deity, along with his being the patron god of herdsmen and thieves, proves auspicious. Implicit in these meanings is his being the god of boundaries, indeed, of origins and becoming, as well as an erotic power (see, especially, Kerényi, 1986 and Butterworth, 1966: 154; Butterworth, 1970: 64). As Onians notes of the herms statue, whose head and genital organs were its outward essentials, the Greeks regarded the human head as to store the generative power and to be the psyche: ‘Hermes was the generative power in the world at large, as it were the universal fertilizing psyche…so giver of increase, wealth’ (Onians, 1988[1951]: 122).

The differentiation of Hermes from a cultic deity to an Olympian god has been noticed with some astonishment, but never fully understood (e.g. Burkert, 1985: 156). Haden summarizes the transformation of Hermes in the Greek mind:

He begins as an indistinct chthonic fertility deity, protector of flocks and herds, and ends as brother and virtual equal of Apollo, the deity most beloved by Socrates and Plato. Thus while by the fourth century he has important connections with logos, in his earliest, Arcadian chthonic manifestation he was symbolized merely by heaps of stones contributed by wayfarers, of whom he was the guardian. That particular aspect of Hermes develops into his role as conductor of souls to the Underworld, and he is a special link between the Olympian world of light and the chthonian darkness, moving with ease in either direction. His appearance alters radically, as shown by iconographic evidence; originally a strong, virile bearded man, his representation gradually melts into that of a supple youth, and eventually even into an androgynous form. He becomes the patron of commerce as well as of thieves. (Haden, 1983: 345)

Kerényi argues that the meaning of Hermes for the Greeks was stable at least since the time of Homer (1986: 1). According to Kerényi, Hermes was the most existential of the gods because the experience of him encompassed that of all others: ‘Hermes too, therefore, is more than merely the luminous idea of a world…[h]e is its source, through whom that world originated and through whom it becomes intelligible’ (ibid.: 55). Hermes is the in-between of existence who not only points to the divine source of existence, but, as god of commerce and communication, is the medium through which our knowledge of the human condition is conveyed. Hermes was the ‘basic image of living reality’ (ibid.: 4). No wonder, then, that he oversees so many disparate human activities: he is the condition for all.

Kerényi notes there is no contradiction between Hermes as giver of ‘windfall’ and Hermes as god of thieves: ‘These were the windfalls for hungry travelers who stole them from the God in his own spirit, just as he would have done’ (1986: 59–60). This dual meaning of theft and grateful receiving is appropriate for Hermes as transitory. It is also appropriate for Socrates, whose characteristic act of piety was to set out to prove that the oracle was wrong to regard him as the wisest man in all of Greece.

The experience of Hermes was that of the unexpected arrival; one of the fragments of Heraclitus states, ‘Hermes has come in’, which Otto compares with the contemporary saying that an angel has entered the room: it is as if the nocturnal mysteries were stirring in daylight, ‘the remarkable silence that may intervene in the midst of the liveliest conversations; it was said, at such times, that Hermes had entered the room’ (Otto, 1954: 118; see also Plutarch, 1878: 2). In greeting Hermes, ‘we must be prepared not only for what is immediately intelligible, but also for what is strangely uncanny’ (Kerényi, 1986: 5). Instead of viewing this uncanny experience as a disruption to social intercourse, the Greeks tended to view it as its foundation. According to Strauss, ‘Hermes’ sudden, uncanny, one might also say, demonic, presence attests not only to his patronage of social institutions, but also to his power to mediate between the Olympians and mankind’ (Strauss, 1989: 126).

It may seem strange that the ‘windfall’ of Hermes should both be ‘quite natural’ and produce silence, especially when, in the case of the latter, Hermes is the god of communication and commerce. Yet, this is not so strange. Concerning the silence that ensues when Hermes enters the room, it is customary to think of miracles and gifts from the gods as astonishing and accompanied by divine signs that reinforce the recipients’ awareness that the gift they have received is indeed from the god. However, this customary view is inadequate and a misunderstanding of the nature of divine communication, as understood by numerous traditions. For instance, in his Confessions, Augustine describes the occasion of his conversion to God in almost naturalistic terms: he hears a child’s voice telling him to ‘pick up and read’, and he emphasizes that he does not know the origin of the voice. Could it be a god? Could it be a child? Either way, the voice tells him to pick up and read, and he picks up his copy of the Bible and is thunderstruck by the passage that speaks directly to his soul’s restlessness. The voice spoke to him. But, again, is it the voice of a natural being or that of a god? (See Heyking, 2008a: 122–5.)

Part of the mystery of the divine, which the Greeks saw in Hermes, is that natural causation and divine gifts are difficult to distinguish. Thus, Kerényi saw that the Greeks could describe the experience of Hermes both in terms of science and as something more, as gift: ‘impressions that are palpable and manifest, that in no way contradict the observations and conclusions of natural science, and yet extend beyond the attitude [of “scientifically evaluated sense impressions”]’ (Kerényi, 1986: 53). A Christian might see in this discussion a distinction between general providence and special providence, which are simply two separate modes of divine governance (see Aquinas, 1948: I.105.6). Whatever the equivalences of experience between compact Hermes and the differentiated Christian view of providence, it must be recalled that Hermes’ origins are chthonic while he brings the upper and lower worlds together. He is in-between while providing the conditions for in-betweenness, just as Socrates claims the god has given him the ability to identify lovers. As Kerényi shows, Hermes is like Eros (he suggests Socrates’ account of Eros in the Symposium refigures the older understanding of Hermes [Kerényi, 1986: 56]). Eros is between resource and poverty, which is to say between ‘windfall’ and death, between being and non-being. Understood this way, then, the silence of Hermes entering the room reflects the perplexity, or what Aristotle in his Poetics calls astonishment [ekplêxis], of confronting no ordinary being, but the condition for human communication (Aristotle, 2006: 1460b25). Hermes was seen as the patron god of founders of cities. Like them, Hermes has an ambiguous relationship with his beneficiaries. They are both of the city they found but the founders, as founders, are also beyond it – just like Socrates who transverses the walls of Athens to arrive at the palaestra.

The ‘Hymn to Hermes’

The ‘Homeric Hymn to Hermes’ shows him to be the great cosmic unifier, the shaman (on shamanism, see especially Butterworth, 1966: 154–9). It is also an existential hymn, a theological cosmogony, that shows Hermes creating his role as he discovers it: ‘As a swift thought darts through the heart of a man when thronging cares haunt him, or as bright glances flash from the eye, so glorious Hermes planned both thought and deed at once’ (Anonymous, 1914: 44–6). The hymn tells the story of Hermes’ struggle to make the transition from a chthonic entity to an Olympian. It tells of Hermes’ birth, his invention of the lyre, his theft of Apollo’s cattle, and his reconciliation and friendship with Apollo. The hymn would have been chanted at the festival of Hermes (Johnston, 2002). Butterworth notes that the hymn’s contents and the style of its recitation are both shamanistic (Butterworth, 1966: 418–27). The occasion of the Lysis, and this ritual function of the hymn, reflect the existential character of the hymn itself. Menexenus and the boys’ attendants may have chanted it when they departed the palaestra to attend the Hermetic rites.

The struggle to become an Olympian means that Hermes, unlike his brother Apollo whose Olympian roles are given him, must discover his proper place and role, which is nothing less than to ‘consort with all mortals and immortals’ (Anonymous, 1914: 576). Hermes must wrest and even steal his roles. He makes himself. Instead of undermining the Olympian order with his theft, he solidifies it because in stealing his roles he also recognizes the Olympian order: ‘Hermes, then, introduces dynamic movement and vitality into what might otherwise be a beautifully ordered but static cosmos’ (Strauss, 1989: 102). Unlike Dionysius who overturns order, Hermes passes through boundaries while leaving them intact. He is the model founder of civilization and basis of human communication.

Hermes is the last-born of the Olympians, whereas Apollo, his brother, is the first-born. His realm is the in-between, and not any specific cosmic region including sky, sea and underworld. As Strauss observes, this gives the hymn its existential tone:

The abstract character of Hermes’ timai poses peculiar problems for the hymn-poet who works in what is essentially a narrative medium…Instead, [the hymn-poet] manifests and incorporates [Hermes’ function] into the dramatic movement of the narrative, in which Hermes becomes his function by enacting it…Unlike Apollo who can lay claim to his prerogatives moments after his birth, Hermes must invent them and, even before that, he must discover his proper place. For it is by no means immediately clear whether he belongs with the gods or among men. (Strauss, 1989: 102)

The most important part of the hymn is the theological cosmogony that Hermes sings while playing the lyre because it initiates the reconciliation between himself and Apollo, the last-born and the first-born, signified by Apollo’s ordination of Hermes as the keeper of herds (see ‘Hymn to Hermes’, Anonymous, 1914: 417–35, 497). Hermes teaches Apollo the nature of music: ‘for the sweet throb of the marvelous music went to his heart, and a soft longing took hold of his soul as he listened’ (ibid.: 419–20). Through music, Hermes knows how the soul can turn inward and thus be more sociable. By turning men inward, music enables friendship among them (Republic 397e, 411c–d, 424d–e, 443d).

Hermes is the first god to sing a theological cosmogony because none can be sung until the theogonic process has come to completion (Strauss, 1989: 139). It is Hermes who brings to completion the Olympian order by tying together the ‘deathless gods and dark earth’ (Anonymous, 1914: 427). As Strauss observes, ‘Hermes is the first to be able to sing a theogony, because only with his birth is the configuration of the divine cosmos complete. As hymn poetry is coterminous with, and a continuation of theogonic poetry, Hermes’ performance inevitably ends with a hymn to Hermes’ (Strauss, 1989: 139–40). Like Odysseus, who sings of his deeds while acting them out, Hermes’ act of singing is the theological cosmogony itself. Necessarily, then, Hermes teaches Apollo to play the lyre in a playful back-and-forth, dialogic, manner that mimics reciprocity found in friendship (ibid.: 143). Hermes is proficient in eros and music (see Kerényi, 1986: 53–9). After Hermes teaches Apollo how to play the lyre, Hermes and Apollo negotiate their respective roles and reach an agreement which they seal with a pact that becomes the paradigm of all agreements and pacts (Anonymous, 1914: 575). Apollo and Hermes become the model for friendship. The hymn concludes with their establishment of the pact and, the ‘existential’ character of Hermes notwithstanding, lacks narrative on the subsequent character of their friendship (ibid.: 506–7, 525, 574–5). This is unsurprising. The theogony of the hymn teaches that those who partake in Hermes can now make themselves as Hermes made himself. The Myth of Er, at Republic X, where souls choose themselves in choosing their lots, is perhaps the clearest expression of this insight. Friendship, as symbolized by Hermes and Apollo, expresses the existential condition of the soul capable of choosing itself when practising friendship.

Opening scene: ‘I was on my way’

The Lysis opens with Socrates narrating to an unnamed interlocutor. ¹¹ As Zuckert observes, the dialogue mimics actual conversation, perhaps between friends, with the reader taking the place of the unnamed interlocutor (Zuckert, 2009: 512). The Lysis compares in this way with the Republic, which also has Socrates narrating the action to an unnamed interlocutor who, as Zdravko Planinc (1991, 2003) has shown, is to be understood as Socrates’ friend because the reader stays with Socrates’ entire voyage. The length of the Lysis places fewer demands in terms of magnitude on the reader, but here too Socrates leads us toward an unspecified port.

Socrates states: ‘I was on my way from the Academy straight to the Lyceum, along the road outside the wall and close under the wall itself. When I came to the little gate near the spring of Panops’ (Lysis 203a). Socrates is ‘on my way’ [eporenomen]. Lysis begins with Socrates in transit, from the Academy to the Lyceum. The Platonic dialogues frequently start with Socrates in transit. ¹² The first word of the Republic is kateben, ‘I went down’, to the Piraeus which dramatically stands in for Hades (see Voegelin, 1956a: 52–61; Cooper, 2001: 104–14; Brann, 2004: 116–22). Also, the Phaedrus opens with Socrates asking Phaedrus where he is headed: ‘Phaedrus, my friend! Where to? And from where?’ (Phaedrus 227a). Socrates is a wayfarer. This fact alone introduces a perplexity to a dialogue in which the friend is the central theme. The wayfarer is a loner and never settles in one place. Socrates, while a homebody in the sense that he never liked to leave Athens, is a loner. While he displays friendship with various individuals in the dialogues (e.g. Crito), it is difficult to say that he was in fact friends with them. Perhaps this is why Socrates claims to be passionately in love with seeking a friend, which means that hitherto he has yet to find a friend (Lysis 211e). To the Greek mind, his wayfaring would have affinity with Hermes who is, among other things, god of travelers and guide to the dead [psychopompos]. As the Lysis takes place on the third day of Anthesteria where the ghosts are wandering the earth, Kerényi’s description of Hermes the wayfarer is pertinent to the presentation of Socrates in this dialogue: the journeyer ‘makes himself vanish (“volatizes himself”) to everyone, also to himself. Everything around him becomes to him ghostly and improbable, and even his own reality appears to him as ghostlike. He is completely absorbed by movement, but never by a human community that would tie him down’ (Kerényi, 1986: 13; original parentheses).

Unlike the Republic, in which Socrates explains his reason for being in the Piraeus with Glaucon, the reasons for his visiting the Academy and Lyceum in the Lysis are not stated. However, a glance at his route is suggestive. Christopher Planeaux has demonstrated that there is nothing ‘straight’ about the way from the Academy to the Lyceum (Planeaux, 2001). The Academy was north-west of Athens, and the Lyceum was likely to the east or south-east. Travelling directly through the city would have afforded a more direct route than the route Socrates actually took, which was around the city’s walls. Socrates’ interlocutors would have recognized this, and that Socrates repeats his claim that he has come ‘straight’ there (Lysis 203b) indicates that Plato wants us too to notice that his route was actually quite indirect. Moreover, Socrates’ route was entirely outside the walls of the city. In only one other dialogue, Phaedrus, do we see Socrates outside the walls of Athens. The dialogue on erotic love, the Phaedrus, shows Socrates well outside the walls. In the Lysis, on friendship, we see Socrates in that liminal area immediately outside the walls but not entirely outside the city, which Nichols takes as a reminder that friendship is neither completely inside nor completely outside the city (Nichols, 2009: 157).

Retracing Socrates’ route through modern Athens, Planeaux indicates that Socrates is saying, in effect, that ‘I went from the Kerameikos directly to Syntagma Square via Omonia Square’ (Planeaux, 2001: 60). Translated back onto a map of ancient Athens, Socrates would have started north-west of the city walls at the Kerameikos (‘Potters Quarter’) which also happened to be the site of the public cemetery and the site of Pericles’ Funeral Oration (see Hornblower, 1991: 294), as well as along the route that the Eleusian procession took from Athens to the Academy. The Academy to which Socrates refers, of course, is not yet Plato’s Academy, but the gymnasium that was sacred to Athena, Zeus, Prometheus, Hephaiestos, Hermes and Heracles, and contained an altar to Eros (Wycherley, 1978: 219).

On the day of Anthesteria, when the ghosts were about, Socrates’ sudden appearance on a trip that originates from the national cemetery would have seemed auspicious. Instead of heading directly back into Athens, he would have headed due east to what today is Omonia Square, which in ancient Athens would have likely been the location of the Cynosarges gymnasium. Meaning ‘swift’ or ‘white dog’, the Cynosarges, as Pausanias mentions, was known as a sanctuary for Heracles (Pausanias, 1964: I.19.3). It is possible that the wrestling school in which the Lysis takes place actually is the Cynosarges (though there are reasons, mentioned below, to doubt this). Ctesippus explains to Socrates that Lysis has a family connection to Heracles, as his grandfather on his mother’s side was the founder of the deme Aixone, in which Lysis’ family lived (Lysis 206d; Stroud, 1984: 357). Debra Nails suggests Lysis’ family held the hereditary priesthood of the cult of Heracles in Aixone (Nails, 2002: 196).

The Heracles connection, and perhaps the Cynosarges, is Hermetic, which is reinforced by the proximity of the palaestra to the spring of Panops, which is also associated with Hermes (Lysis 203a). As Haden observes:

‘Panoptes’ is the epithet of Argus, the all-seeing guardian whom Hermes killed in the process of stealing Io. This might seem an arbitrary association, except for the curious fact that the quotation from Homer which plays an important part in the dialogue comes from that episode in the Odyssey where Odysseus is at last nearing his home, disguised as a beggar, only to be recognized at the gate by his aged hound, also named Argus. (Haden, 1983: 346, referring to Homer, 1996: 17.290)

For its part, the Lyceum, whose location was somewhere between the north-east and south-east of the walls, was sacred to Apollo (Pausanias, 1964: I.19.3; see Lynch, 1972: 16). Taking a cue from Planeaux’s geographic reading of Socrates’ voyage, we might reread Socrates’ voyage in a mythical manner, from the Academy, with its associations with the Eleusian Mysteries and its proximity to the Kerameikos, Athens’ national cemetery, to the Lyceum, the home of Apollo, as a refiguring of the liminal quest of Hermes from the underworld to the Olympian heights. In keeping with our finding of Socrates as the exemplar of the individual psyche under divine nous, and as the fulfillment of the theological cosmogony, we might say that Socrates comes to the palaestra to solicit from the boys their choice of lots, themselves.

The Lyceum plays an important role in the Platonic dialogues and the treatment of friendship therein. The Euthydemus takes place there. It is thematically connected with the Lysis because it shares our concern with the nature of wisdom and the possibility of combining with others (further, Zuckert claims the Euthydemus takes place shortly before the Lysis [Zuckert, 2009: 484]). In Euthydemus, which takes the form of Socrates narrating the previous day’s action to his friend Crito, Socrates and Ctessipus (who also takes part in Lysis) face off against two sophist brothers, Dionysodorus and Euthydemus. The sophists’ style of argumentation is reminiscent of the one used by Socrates and Lysis whereby the two have difficulty determining how two opposites can share something between them. Socrates expresses his frustration with the brothers: ‘For it’s not easy to persuade them that human beings, like everything else that’s in the middle ground of any pair of things and manages to have a share in both, in those cases in which the pair consists of a bad thing and a good one, end up being better than the one and worse than the other’ (Euthydemus 306a). The two brothers claim knowledge of everything, which Lysis regards as most beneficial (ibid.: 294d), and which he himself also seeks. Dionysodorus and Euthydemus stick together, despite their discordant arguments (and the underlying disharmony between them and within themselves [see, for example, Euthydemus 296e–297b]). Even so, Socrates ironically sees something beautiful in their argument that one can have mastery over one’s own associates [oikeion] (ibid.: 301e). Like the Lysis, the Euthydemus raises the question of the conditions of philosophy and openness toward another, as displayed in the shallow unity of the brothers that is imperiled by their own souls. The dramatic setting and the possible date of the Euthydemus before the Lysis seem to suggest that Socrates had to find out something important at the Academy in order to return to the Lyceum. As a liminal figure, he had to go down before coming up again. The Gorgias, which concludes with Socrates’ myth of divine judgment, comes immediately after the Lysis, if indeed the Gorgias can be dated (Zuckert, 2009: 9, 509, 531–2). The Gorgias takes place in the agora. Socrates must have learned something in the Lysis to have gone down from its liminal setting to the agora to face those more formidable sophists.

Hermetic ‘marvels’ in modern democracy: Concluding remarks

A mythological and dramatic reading of Plato’s Lysis, which focuses on Hermes, illuminates but also deepens the mysteries of the dialogue. The dialogue’s perplexities, most notably that of reciprocity and the foundations of friendship, are illuminated if we refer to the Greek understanding of Hermetic experience. Plato incorporates Hermes into Socratic philosophizing and Eros in his dialogues by identifying ‘godsend’ as the divine movement that prompts philosophizing and therefore friendship. As the transitory power that traverses and unites the opposite poles of reality, Hermes is also the creative force that creates and sustains human relationships, including friendships and political societies. Travelling with Hermes involves descending to the human depths as well as crossing all boundaries. Hermes gets us outside of ourselves, as it were, which in plainer language means he opens us up to the gift of otherness in the friend, expressed vividly by Socrates’ surprise and unsettling arrival at the Lyceum. The Hermes symbolisms provide one with a better sense of the astonishing pre-theoretical experiences of which friendship consists. The experiential core of ‘windfall’ [hermaion] is when human beings recognize that everything they have, and conversely that can be taken away from them, is from the gods. The gift of the friend is the most vivid expression of this experience. This Hermetic interpretation of the dialogue might also finally enable one to make sense of Paul Friedländer’s claim about ‘true philo-sophy, i.e. love of sophia that is returned by sophia’ (Friedländer, 1964: 96). Hermes as godsend symbolizes the turning-around of the soul that is both precondition and constituent of friendship in its existential openness and generosity. Instead of seeing one’s friend subsumed under a so-called metaphysical idea of friendship, Hermes, who is both above and below us, reminds us that our friend is a cosmos, an image of the divine. Who better to reveal the mystery of the other, than he who traverses boundaries? The Hermetic experience of friendship is a characteristically Platonic way of conceiving of personhood.

The Hermetic element of friendship seems a world removed from our own seemingly disenchanted one dominated by technology. Part of the aim of this article has been to show how a utilitarian logic of subject–object, seen in the libido dominandi of Lysis, can be transcended. I have also suggested some equivalences of experiences that Hermes shares with other religious outlooks, including the more differentiated Christian view of providence. The windfall of Hermes may indeed be the opening light of being, but it remains to be seen whether Hermes has any meaning in our modern, supposedly disenchanted, world.

Kerényi thought Hermes remained central to the modern world. His wife notes that his lecture on Hermes facilitated ‘permission to leave Hungary and then later to establish himself definitely in the free world’ (Kerényi, 1986: v). In a century marked by mass migrations, by dispossession and by refugees of totalitarian regimes, Hermes, the patron god of travelers, indeed of pilgrims, guides souls and teaches them that their lives and communities are both their own and not their own.

Recall the central experience that Hermes has entered the room: ‘in the remarkable silence that may intervene in the midst of the liveliest conversations; it was said, at such times, that Hermes had entered the room’ (Otto, 1954: 115, 118). Plato’s appeal to Hermes reminds us that friendship transcends our capacity fully to understand it. Friendship practises us as much as we practise friendship.

One contemporary who understood this, though without as much perspicacity as that of Plato, is Alexis de Tocqueville, a fact that is manifest both in his writings and in his personal life. ¹³ Tocqueville thought that the central problem of democracy was that individuals get eclipsed under the rubric of humanity, which leads to the erosion of self-government and freedom because individuals, sensing they are the same everywhere, find it in their interest to submit to a centralized authority that takes care of their needs. The problem of democracy is not unlike the common view of Plato eclipsing the individual under the impersonal idea. ¹⁴

Tocqueville had a small but close network of friends who regarded themselves as politically isolated and out of step with the revolutionary times, but yet their political activities consisted of forging together elements in an attempt both to moderate and restrain the democratic revolution: ‘In these friendships, Tocqueville made the comparison, for himself and his friends, to “the Jews of the Middle Ages, who needed to live together in order to recover a homeland”’ (Jardin, 1988: 469 [no citation given]). Tocqueville’s reference is to the Jews in the Middle Ages, but his point is one that Socrates–Hermes would recognize as his own. In his personal, political and philosophical life, Tocqueville continually practised the Hermetic art of forging together dissimilars.

In a well-known and key passage of Democracy in America, Tocqueville observes of the miracle of political freedom, by which he means practices of self-government and the art of association, that ‘sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another’ (Tocqueville, 2000: 2.2.5, 491). Because democracy inclines human beings toward individualism, and thus loneliness, Tocqueville felt that ‘the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one’ (ibid.: 2.2.5, 492). In democracy, ‘the notion of intermediate power is obscured and effaced’ (ibid.: 2.4.2, 642). Democracy corrodes the spirit of association, and so there is something counter-cultural in the activity of association. Democracy demands the political and social state be democratic, but freedom depends on pluralism in the social state. The moral, intellectual and spiritual capacity for self-government must draw from a tradition and set of habits beyond the democratic regime itself. In short, saving democracy from itself depends on combining democratic elements with non-democratic elements, the goods brought about by equality with the good brought about by the aristocratic desire for greatness; the science of association involves combining dissimilars within a regime that either resists their combination or inclines us to combine similars. Tocqueville’s own practice of virtue-friendship, upon which he frequently reflected, sustained his insights and enabled him also to sustain his own political isolation. ¹⁵

The ‘holy enterprise’ of political freedom is hard work and Tocqueville is not shy to characterize its work as divine or alchemic: ‘There is nothing more prolific in marvels [merveilles] than the art of being free; but there is nothing harder than the apprenticeship of freedom’ (Tocqueville, 2000: 1.2.6, 229). We should take Tocqueville’s reference to ‘marvels’ seriously because ‘the art of being free’ entails forging dissimilar elements. The ‘hand of the legislator’ (ibid.: 1.1.5, 89–90) must be proficient in these marvels not only because political institutions must be designed to enlarge the hearts of citizens as they act reciprocally upon one another, but also because Tocqueville, like Plato, understands that no theory can properly capture that insight.

Tocqueville’s ‘holy enterprise’, as he called his intellectual and political activities, is Hermetic because it attempts to bring dissimilars together, and because it is predicated on his own practice of the highest form, friendship. Democratic citizenship, as well as statesmanship, is predicated on the practice of friendship in one’s personal life. Through Hermes, Plato shows us the way of going outside of ourselves so that we can both find ourselves and practise friendship with others. Tocqueville diagnoses the failure of friendship in democracy and points to Hermetic paths of opening up our potential for friendship.