Meno

Overview

The Meno is one of Plato's most important early-to-middle dialogues, probably written in the 380s BCE, at the turning point of his career. It opens with a deceptively simple question: can virtue be taught? The question is asked by Meno, a young Thessalian aristocrat visiting Athens, and it launches a conversation that ranges over the definition of virtue, the possibility of knowledge, and the very nature of inquiry. The dialogue is famous for three things: the paradox of inquiry (how can we seek what we do not know?), the doctrine of recollection (anamnesis), and the demonstration of that doctrine through the interrogation of an uneducated slave boy, who is led to discover a geometrical truth he never learned. It is also the dialogue in which Socrates first appears to answer the question he usually only asks: it ends with an account of right opinion as a kind of knowledge.

Author

Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) was the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, and the founder of the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He wrote in the form of dialogues, almost all of which feature Socrates as the central character. The Meno belongs to the period of transition in Plato's thought when he was moving from the purely critical Socratic dialogues to the constructive middle dialogues — the Phaedo, the Symposium, and the Republic — in which the theory of Forms, the immortality of the soul, and the doctrine of recollection come to the fore. The Meno is the earliest dialogue in which the theory of recollection is stated explicitly, which makes it a key text for understanding the development of Plato's philosophy.

Historical Background

The Meno reflects the intellectual and political atmosphere of Athens in the early fourth century BCE. The Sophists — traveling teachers of rhetoric and virtue, such as Gorgias, whose friend Meno is — had made a profession of teaching virtue and success in public life, and their claims had provoked the Socratic question: if virtue can be taught, what is it, and who teaches it? The historical Meno was a historical figure, a Thessalian nobleman who later served as a mercenary commander in the expedition of Cyrus the Younger described in Xenophon's Anabasis, where he appears as an unscrupulous and ambitious man — a fact that adds an ironic depth to the dialogue's treatment of virtue. The dialogue also reflects the political crisis of Athens after its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, when the question of how citizens acquire virtue had become urgent.

Key Ideas

The Paradox of Inquiry

Meno poses the paradox that gives the dialogue its philosophical engine: "How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know? And even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you have found is the thing you did not know?" The paradox threatens to make inquiry impossible: either we know what we seek, in which case inquiry is unnecessary, or we do not, in which case it is impossible. Socrates's response is the doctrine of recollection.

The Doctrine of Recollection

Socrates's answer to the paradox is that inquiry is possible because learning is recollection. The soul, he argues, has seen all things in a previous existence; knowledge is the recovery of what the soul already contains. To prove this, he interrogates an uneducated slave boy, leading him by questions to discover the solution to a problem in geometry — the construction of a square with double the area of a given square. The boy, who has never studied geometry, is led to the correct answer by his own reasoning; Socrates insists he has taught him nothing, only asked questions. The argument is not merely epistemological: it implies the immortality of the soul, since the soul must have existed before birth to have acquired the knowledge it recollects. The Meno thus introduces the themes that the Phaedo will develop at length.

Virtue as Knowledge

The surface question of the dialogue is whether virtue can be taught. The conversation first attempts to define virtue; each definition — the ability to rule, justice, the desire for fine things with the power to acquire them — is examined and found wanting. Socrates then argues that virtue would be teachable if it were knowledge, since knowledge is what is teachable. But the dialogue's end resists the simple conclusion: the good men of Athens were not teachers of virtue (their sons are not virtuous), and yet they were good — which suggests that virtue can be held without knowledge, as right opinion. The dialogue concludes that virtue comes "by divine dispensation" — a gift of the gods rather than a teachable art — unless it is, in fact, knowledge, in which case its teachers remain to be found. The unresolved ending is typical of Plato's aporetic dialogues and deliberately provocative.

Important Passages

The most famous passages of the Meno are the paradox of inquiry, the recollection demonstration, and the closing account of knowledge and true opinion. The paradox is stated by Meno in the passage beginning "How will you look for it, Socrates...?" The recollection doctrine is introduced by Socrates's claim that "there is no teaching but recollection," and it is demonstrated in the slave boy episode, in which Socrates emphasizes that the boy "will recover the knowledge himself, by himself" — "the knowledge he now has he either had at some earlier time or did not; if he had it, he must have learned it at some earlier time; if he did not, he is not recollecting but learning." The closing passage draws the famous distinction between knowledge and true opinion: "True opinions are a fine thing and do everything that is good while they are with us, but they do not want to stay; they escape from a man's mind. So they are not worth much until one ties them down by giving an account of the reason why."

Influence

The Meno has been influential in several directions. In epistemology, its paradox of inquiry is the classic statement of the problem of learning, and its answer — that learning is a form of recollection — shaped the entire tradition of innatism, from the rationalists of the seventeenth century (Descartes's innate ideas, Leibniz's monads) to the modern philosophy of mind. In the history of education, the slave boy episode became the paradigm of the Socratic method: the teacher as midwife who draws knowledge out of the student rather than pouring it in. In theology and the philosophy of religion, the doctrine of recollection — with its implication of the soul's pre-existence and immortality — made the Meno a key text in the Christian and Neoplatonic reception of Plato. And in the study of Plato himself, the dialogue is indispensable: it is the hinge between the Socratic and the middle dialogues, and it contains the earliest statement of the theory of recollection that defines Plato's mature epistemology.

Sources

• Plato. Meno. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Plato" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Plato" (iep.utm.edu/plato)
• Vlastos, Gregory. "Anamnesis in the Meno." In Platonic Studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.