1 Introduction
Plato’s dialogue, Meno, is a useful text for introducing ourselves to philosophy, and for three reasons.
- All of (Western) philosophy, according to Alfred North Whitehead, consists of a series of “footnotes to Plato,” and Plato is seen as a foundational figure in the history of philosophy. He lived between 428 and 347 BCE (so nearly 2500 years ago) in Athens, which at the time was a sort of cultural crossroads of the Mediterranean. Plato did not invent philosophy; rather, he brought together various strands of Greek philosophy preceding him, and in a way that recognizably foregrounds reason and argument as critical to the cultivation of knowledge and understanding.
- Philosophical dialogues pose all sorts of difficulties for reading—difficulties we’ll be trying to learn to manage this semester. I’d mention two right away. First, if you don’t know what to look for, a dialogue—like a treatise—will just sort of take off without you, and you might not know what to look for, when, or how. This is especially so in the case of a ‘philosophical’ dialogue, where we’re not just watching for something to happen (hint: nothing really ‘happens’, in the ordinary sense); we’re also watching for questions of a philosophical sort to emerge and arguments and counterarguments to follow in their wake. Second, a dialogue presents a distinctive difficulty in the form of a question about authority. If you have four people disagreeing on some question, which view are you to take is the author’s? which view is the author lampooning? Is the fact that he has Meno saying this and that reason to believe Plato thinks we should accept the argument, or that we should reject it?
- Finally, the Meno features, centrally, the very question of learning. How is learning possible? How is teaching possible? How do you get from ignorance to knowledge? Can it be done? or are we always just hashing and rehashing beliefs we already have? But then where did these come from? and can they not change? All of these questions are at the heart of the Meno, and they are our guiding questions this semester.
2 How do you read a text?
I’m going to give you a piece of good advice, and then I’m going to give you bad advice about how to carry it out, but this isn’t going to be applicable to every reading in every class. We have the benefit that millions of people have read and continue to read Plato, so we have ample resources for getting acquainted in our reading.
The first thing you should know about reading is this: Reading is discerning architecture. When first approaching a text, figuring out the author’s ‘point’ is not the main thing you want to find out about. You want to find out how many parts there are in the text, and what they’re doing.
The second thing you should know about reading, when you’re reading someone like Plato, is this: Other people have done this, so Google it. Hell, ask ChatGPT. You’re looking for the structure of Plato’s Meno. Here is what ChatGPT told me when I asked it to give me a barebones outline of Plato’s Meno:
70a–71d: Can virtue be taught?
71e–79e: Meno’s failed definitions of virtue
80a–81e: Meno’s paradox and Socrates’ theory of recollection
82a–86c: The slave-boy geometry demonstration
86c–89c: If virtue is knowledge, it can be taught
89e–96d: Anytus and the absence of teachers of virtue
96d–98c: Knowledge versus true opinion
98c–100c: Tentative conclusion: virtue may come through divine inspiration rather than teaching
Although it was terrible advice of me to suggest you farm this out (we’ll discuss in the future ways of doing this on your own), that’s pretty useful, and it’s useful not because it tells me what’s in the Meno, but because it tells me where to stop and start in my reading.
It also gives me a sense of what’s happening in the dialogue. A question is raised: “Can virtue be taught?” and they reach some “tentative conclusion” about it. Again, the most useful thing here is we’re not just going to sit down and read from the beginning to the end; we have some places where we can stop, survey the situation, and then move on.
Let’s use this outline to guide our reading. We’re only going to get through a little more than half of the dialogue.
3 70A–71D: Can virtue be taught?
This seems a pretty bang-on description of what’s happening here because it is exactly what Meno asks in the opening. See p. 871.
Meno by the way is a wealthy citizen of Thessaly. As our editor points out in the brief introduction, he is “about to embark on an unscrupulous military and political career, leading to an early death at the hands of the Persian king” (870). This matters because Plato’s audience would likely be aware of this, meaning any allusion to Meno’s own ‘virtue’ should be taken with a grain of salt.
Now, incidentally, tucked into this little fact about Meno is a lesson about texts, and especially texts that are nearly two and a half millenia old, which is that a lot can be going on in them that we might not notice by simply picking them up. In the same way that you and your friends probably have inside jokes, texts from a long time ago have their inside jokes too (Meno, ‘virtuous’! Imagine that, hahaha!); sometimes we can make these jokes out, but that’s not always the case. That’s one reason to be constantly suspicious of our claim to understand what’s going on in a text.
This is not just about the past; the same thing goes, too, for texts of our own time. For example, a recent article I found at random in Nature Communications by Ayaka Ueda et al. is titled “Atomic-precision π-driven peptide hydrogel nanofibers with ordered water channels.” I have no idea what that means. Here is the first line of the abstract:
Aromatic interactions organize molecules into ordered supramolecular architectures, while peptides form functional soft materials through hydrogen bonding and water-mediated assembly.
I definitely have no idea what that means (or why you would write an article about it). Apparently the thesis of the article is that
reinforced aromatic stacking, polar interactions, and cooperative water organization can be orchestrated to generate emergent electrostatics and mechanical resilience, bridging conjugated materials and biomolecular matter, enabling functional soft materials inaccessible to either domain alone.
If I wanted to figure out what‘s going on in that article, I’d have to do a lot of work just trying to enter into that discourse, make sense of the meaning of the words. What I certainly would not do is trust my intuitive understanding of, for example, ‘cooperative’ in trying to make sense of ‘cooperative water organization’. I’m certain they mean something by ‘aromatic’ that I don’t understand, even if I’m a native English speaker and everything. The same thing is going on for people coming to philosophy for the first time. It is as little responsible to assume we all have intuitive answers to questions like ‘is virtue teachable?’ as it is to assume we all have intuitive answers to questions like ‘can reinforced aromatic stacking, polar interactions, and cooperative water organization be orchestrated to generate emergent electrostatics and mechanical resilience?’ In fact, this is Meno’s first mistake.
Now, to get back to our text, one thing that immediately sticks out to me (because this isn’t about aromatic interactions, it’s Greek philosophy, which I do know about) is the expression ”virtue.” “Virtue” is well known for being a pretty bad translation of aretē, a word that is probably better translated “excellence.” The puritanical connotations of “virtue” are very misleading; aretē has the meaning instead of (to exaggerate slightly) Olympian, superhuman excellence. But, appearing as it does in this context, that is, in Plato, it is more like “talent.” If I weren’t aware of the Greek, and someone asked me if “virtue” could be taught, it would seem to me the answer is, obviously, yes, supposing “virtue” to mean acting in a way that exemplifies piety, modesty, and all that sort of thing. The answer is so obvious that the question is uninteresting. But if someone were to ask if talent is teachable, then I don’t know that I would have as easy a reply; and the teachability of talent is closer to the mark of what’s being asked here.
Meno is asking: Can you teach talent? or does talent come from practice? or is talent something you have naturally or not?
Students sometimes ask me: How could we ever be expected to do this work on our own? How could we be expected to pick up an assigned reading like the Meno, read the first line, and think: You know, “virtue” is a bad translation for aretē . . . .
And the maybe-disappointing answer is: You couldn’t do that. And the hopefully relieving side note is: You aren’t expected to do that. If you could do that, frankly, there would be no need for me, or for colleges or schools, or for education at all, for that matter. And it isn’t so much a matter of knowing answers to questions as it is a matter of knowing which questions are the ones to ask.
And Socrates’ maybe-disappointing answer to Meno is: I don’t know. I don’t know the first thing about virtue. See pp. 871–872.
I want to note two things. First, notice how I just said “virtue” and, in your head, you probably ‘corrected’ it to mean “excellence” or “talent,” so that you didn’t hear it as meaning “being chaste and prudish.” Now you’re “in on the joke,” so to speak. That is what learning is. Second, the point Socrates makes here is this: You ask me if virtue is \(x, y,\) and \(z\), but I don’t know what virtue is. If I’m ignorant of virtue, how could I know whether it has these or those attributes? Later in the dialogue, Meno will pose a version of this question (which we call “Meno’s paradox”), and I want us to recall that the question has, in a sense, already been asked here.
Okay, that’s our first chunk of the text. We have our question.
4 71E–79E: Meno’s failed definitions of virtue
An answer to the question, What is \(x\)? amounts to a definition of \(x\).
Our AI-produced outline from before didn’t give us enough fine grain in the outline of this section, so I’ve added a breakdown.
4.1 –73C: First definition: The list definition
Socrates says: I don’t know what virtue is. Do you? And Meno answers like this: See p. 872.
Meno’s failure here, as Socrates describes it, isn’t so much a failure to provide a definition of virtue as it is a failure to provide a definition at all. Socrates’ question is what makes something a virtue; not how many different sorts of virtue there are. Imagine asking what makes something an animal and being told zebras, gorillas, storks, etc. are all animals.
This move is very typical in Platonic dialogues, and making a guess about its repeated appearance, I think, may be usefully connected to making a guess what a Platonic dialogue is. A Platonic dialogue is, in point of substance, a dramatization of the investigation of philosophical questions, and in point of function a way of introducing, even enticing, outsiders to the study of philosophy. Correcting Meno’s error involves putting on the appropriate sort of glasses, as it were, for engaging in the study of philosophy.
For Socrates, posing questions about definitions involves adopting the philosophical perspective in the most straightforward way: In asking what ‘virtue’ is, we’re simultaneously attempting to discover similarity across the diverse manifestations of virtue (the different ways in which one can have talent, say, or be talented) and looking for claims that not only capture that diversity but explain what it is the many ‘virtues’ have in common, why they are the way they are. Crudely, we could say what we are attempting to do is to ‘ascend’ from the sensible particulars (different instances of virtue) to their intelligible form—whatever feature it is they have in common that makes them virtues.
Socrates clarifies his question on p. 873. He gets Meno to see that defining is a matter of finding commonality across a diverse range of phenomena, and he gets Meno to see how this works in other instances, but Meno resists, suggesting that virtue differs for different people. See the exchange toward the bottom of 873.
4.2 –74B: Second definition
Meno then defines virtue as the ability to rule over others. Socrates asks whether one should “add to this justly and not unjustly,” to which Meno says yes, and you should hear in this doom for Meno’s definition: If virtue is ruling justly, and justice is a virtue, then virtue is ruling virtuously. The problem, we would say, is that the definition is circular: It appeals to the thing it is attempting to define. It’s like being asked which animals at the zoo are penguins and answering that they are the animals that are penguins.
4.3 –77A: On definition
Socrates attempts to coach Meno in understanding what counts as a definition by using the example of shape. There are two definitions here, and at least two things interesting about the discussion of shape.
- The first is just the fact that there are two definitions: what ”always follows color” (75B) and “that which limits a solid” (76A). Evidently what count as good practices for definition include the possibility that we may discover multiple serviceable definitions for the same thing.
- The second is the difference between the first and second definitions, from Meno’s perspective, and from the perspective of the later question about how learning is possible. In the first case, Socrates simply states the definition, and Meno asks, reasonably enough, how that definition would answer the question for someone who didn’t know (didn’t have a definition of) what color is (75C). Socrates then constructs the second definition carefully, piece by piece, asking Meno instead if he understands this by a ‘boundary’, and that by a ‘plane’, and so on. See 75D–76A on the same page.
4.4 –78B: Third definition
Meno now gives a third definition: “to desire beautiful things and have the power to acquire them” (77B).
Who doesn’t want good or ‘beautiful’ things? See the exchange here at 77D–78B.
4.5 –79E: Fourth definition
We now take the second part of the third definition as its own separate definition: having the power to ‘secure’ good things.
See the response implied by the exhange at 78D–79A. One part of the failure is familiar: Meno appeals to virtue to explain it. Another part of the failure is noel: That the part of the (amended) definition appealing to virtue captures virtue entirely, and virtue has nothing to do with what one has the ‘power’ to acquire.
5 80A–81E: Meno’s paradox and Socrates’ theory of recollection
Socrates tries to get Meno to see the error in these definitions, again, and asks him to try, again, to definition, but Meno deflects and wonders whether it is even possible to find out what something is if you don’t already know. See 80C–E.
Socrates calls this ”a debater’s argument,” that is, a merely contentious one. In other words, he doesn’t take it seriously. In reply he says the soul is immortal, so already, in some sense, ‘knows’ all things. See 81B–E.
Two things worth noting here, I think.
- The first is that he doesn’t present the view as a worked out philosophical theory or anything. It’s the view of poets and priests.
- The second though is the nature of the justification Socrates gives for believing what the poets and priests say. He doesn’t say: We should believe this because people of authority tell us. He says we should believe it because if we believed the merely ‘contentious’ argument that learning is impossible, “it would make us idle,” whereas the immortality story inclines one to be “energetic and keen on the search.” He says, moreover, that he merely “trusts” that it is true.
6 82A–86C: The slave-boy geometry demonstration
The theory states that we all have immortal souls, that our souls ‘know’ all things (in some to-be-specified sense of ‘know’), and that therefore learning (bringing knowledge into conscious awareness) is not a matter of adding knowledge to the soul but revealing it. And, second, Socrates then says: Here, I’ll show you, Meno, what I mean. And he has Meno, who is followed by any number of slaves and ‘attendants’, produce one of those slaves. And Socrates then shows that the slave, who has never been formally instructed in geometry (or, for that matter, anything other than how to perform domestic tasks), can pick it up very quickly—the implication being that he, like any of us, must possess knowledge in him that just needs prodding to the surface.
(Socrates teaches the slave-boy how to construct a square twice the size of another square.)
I’m of three minds about this ‘demonstration’.
- The first is that it speaks to an important fact about philosophy specifically in ancient Athens and about education generally, which is that it has the power to work on all of us, to some extent, equally. Geometry is the science of the leisure class, in Plato’s day. For Plato to have a slave-boy pick up some basic geometrical proofs in a few minutes shows how radical a force education can be in upending social order.
- But, secondly, and I say this as both a professor of some decades and a father: The boy’s progress is a little unbelievable. Teaching is most often frustratingly difficult, much more difficult than it appears to be here. The success of the demonstration is partly, perhaps, a reminder that Platonic dialogue is theater. But we could fold this point into the first by saying that the Meno is audacious in depicting education as a power capable of subverting social orders. Indeed, one of the important facts about the demonstration is that, although Socrates has to make a few corrections here and there, unlike Meno, who repeatedly made the same error in definition, the slave-boy actually learns.
- Finally, though, there is something of course true about the demonstration, and not just to the extent that it depicts education’s radical power. I mean: This is indeed how learning happens for all of us. We begin from things we know, and we progress toward knowledge of things we did not know. And what’s interesting, too, in this instance is how the performance serves as a further justification for believing the recollection theory, which now has the, let’s say, untypical, non-standard sort of justification that, although it is immediately incredible, 1. believing it is useful for encouraging us to try to learn and 2. it is borne out by what actually happens, say, in a classroom.
One of the crucial moments in the demonstration is a point at which Socrates leaves the boy confused. Meno had earlier complained that Socrates didn’t teach anything but only made people feel “number” with confusion (80B). But here Socrates points out the productive dimension of that numbness. See 84A–C. And note especially that learning is as much about taking on new knowledge as it is about developing a sort of alacrity or “gladness” for finding knowledge.
Socrates draws the lesson: The slave-boy must have had the knowledge within him, prior to the geometrical demonstration. See 85C–86C.