Plato on who really loves wisdom

The Philosophy Garden: Stoicism and Beyond

“‘That’s why we’d say that those who are already wise, whether they are gods or men, no longer love wisdom, and that those who are so ignorant that they are bad do not love wisdom either, because no bad or stupid man loves wisdom.

So, we’re left with those who possess that bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been rendered foolish or stupid by it, in that they still believe they don’t know what they don’t know.

Consequently those who are still neither good nor bad do, in fact, love wisdom; whereas all those who are bad, as well as all those who are good, do not, because, as we decided earlier in our discussion, neither is opposite the friend of opposite, nor like of like. Don’t your remember?’

‘Of course,’ they said.

‘So now, Lysis and Menexenus,’ I said, ‘we’ve done it! We’ve discovered what a friend is and what it is not. We say that in the soul, in the body and anywhere else, it is what is neither bad nor good that is the friend of the good because of the presence of bad.’

The two of them agreed wholeheartedly, admitting that it was so.”

(Lysis, 218a-218c)

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