Lecture on
Plato’s Meno
[The following is the text of a lecture
delivered, in part, by Ian Johnston of Malaspina
University-College, Nanaimo, BC (now Vancouver Island University), for Liberal
Studies 111 students in November 2000. References in the text are to the
edition of Plato’s dialogues in Plato: Five Dialogues, trans. by G. M. A Grube, published by Hackett, 1981.
This document is in the public domain and may be used by anyone for any
purpose, provided the sources is acknowledged, released November 2000]
For comments or questions, please
contact Ian Johnston
INTRODUCTION
This lecture has a three-fold purpose.
To begin with I wish to summarize quickly what we have learned about Socrates
in the short dialogues we have read so far (Gorgias,
Apology, and Crito), so as to
set up a few modest claims I wish to make about how the Meno is, for all its obvious similarities, in
some ways also interestingly different or, rather, is taking us in something of
a new direction. Then I will be exploring some fairly obvious features of the Meno, striving in particular to bring out what is
new here in comparison to those previously mentioned works. And finally I will
be stepping back from all these dialogues in order to speculate rather
generally about the importance of Socrates, seeking to answer a question one
student put to me, “Why do we spend three weeks on this figure and only one
week on each of the other writers?”
One major point I will be making in
this lecture is the common observation that here in the Meno we begin to see something new about
Socrates, a sense that taking care of the soul by the pursuit of philosophy may
require us to pursue certain ways of thinking (rather than others) in order to
acquire the knowledge essential to our moral well being. This shift, which is
only suggested in this dialogue, may mark (as many have suggested) an
interesting difference between the methods of the historical Socrates (the
person who lived and died in Athens) and the Platonic Socrates, the participant
in the conversations written by Plato (more about this later).
First, for the quick summary. From the Gorgias, Apology,
and Crito we derive a clear sense of
Socrates as someone who likes to challenge people about what they believe by
engaging them in a conversation. Typically the conversation has Socrates
requesting clarification from someone about a particular claim, almost invariably
a moral claim (e.g., that orators are good or that to be an orator or to study
oratory is a good thing, or that the highest and best life is one of pleasure
or power, and so on). Socrates requests clarification about the meaning of the
words in which the response is framed and then, by repeated questions and
answers and the introduction of various analogies, Socrates proceeds to lead
his conversational partners to the realization that the original formulation of
the moral claim is inadequate, meaningless, or contradictory.
One purpose of this form of enquiry is
clear: Socrates wishes to help his listeners discover for themselves the inadequacy
of what they hold as true, those moral beliefs about themselves and the world
which they have never thought of challenging for themselves because everyone
around them shares the same beliefs or because that’s what the social and
political culture of Athens has always held.
Socrates, in other words, is taking
issue with the most common and most traditional ways in which people persuade
themselves that what they believe about life’s priorities is true, generally by
endorsing without serious question the value system of their parents or the
majority around them (which often amounts to much the same thing). Rather than
simply telling them they are wrong and giving them a long speech on the
subject, Socrates invites them to discover the inadequacy of these beliefs by
subjecting their statements to two criteria: precise definition and common
sense rational analysis. And Socrates makes it clear repeatedly that these are
the criteria that matter, rather than any majority opinion or any traditional
authority.
The revolutionary stance of Socrates
stems, first and foremost, from the nature of this challenge. For him the traditions
and common popular beliefs, even of the elite class in society, those with
power, status, and wealth, have no validity unless they can meet the criteria
he puts into the conversation. But it’s important to note that he is often
successful in driving his listeners into confusion (like a torpedo fish, as Meno says) because those listeners agree readily enough
with the criteria he uses (they think their beliefs are well defined and
reasonable, and thus get angry or confused or flustered when Socrates can lead
them gently and politely into a paradoxical corner).
The second revolutionary feature of
Socrates’ method so far is its conversational style. Discussions about the
truth or falsity of an opinion or the justness or injustice of an action are,
for Socrates, best conducted through question and answer in conversation. And
his reason for this is clear enough from the Gorgias—such
a method works far better than set speeches, because it does not rest, as
oratory does, on appealing directly and repeatedly to the emotions of the
audience (a tactic he repudiates in the Apology as well). Some
students protest energetically that Socrates, in challenging the orators, is
being an orator himself. Well, if we confine ourselves to the definition of
oratory that both Gorgias and Socrates share, it’s
clear that he is not an orator and is, in fact, trying to replace oratory with
a new form of verbal persuasion, something he calls philosophy, characterized
above all by conversations marked by questions and answers in a search for what
is reasonable, so that the listeners lead themselves to a conclusion they had not
anticipated at the outset. This style is so commonly associated with Plato’s
Socrates that it has come to be known as the Socratic method.
Looking at this technique, we might
well ask (and some students have already asked) the following question: All
right, I see that Socrates is successfully challenging many traditional beliefs
and I see the point he is making about oratory, but what exactly is he putting
in their place? What, if any, are the specific details Socrates is recommending
we should follow apart from a certain style of the enquiry and a concentration
on definitions and logical consistency in statements about what is true? Where’s
the beef? Or are we to conclude that his major purpose is to knock down
traditional opinions complacently held?
In these early dialogues we get a
partial answer to that question. One key idea which crops up in the dialogues
is the concept of the soul. What we should be doing, Socrates insists,
is taking care of our soul, worrying about its health or its harmony or its
justice (which means its proper alignment). And we should be doing this, he
points out, because we may live on after death and that afterlife may well
involve some judgment on the health of our souls during this life.
Socrates does not here provide any detailed analysis of the soul (which remains
a rather imprecise concept); he relies a good deal on analogies to medicine and
music. However, it’s a feature of these dialogues that his listeners
generally do not dispute the existence of the soul, something which underlines
the point that the doctrine of the soul is by no means original with Socrates
(or with the Classical Greeks, for that matter). Nor do they deny the importance
of caring for one’s soul.
But we are entitled to ask: Just what
does looking out for our soul amount to? If we are concerned about it, what
ought we to do? Here again, these early dialogues give us some general advice:
We need to turn our attention away from physical and material things,
especially physical and material pleasures, since whatever the soul is exactly,
it is quite different from these. And, in a much more potentially disturbing
vein, Socrates in the Apology urges us unequivocally to turn
away from politics, from making full participation in the public affairs of the
city a matter of the highest priority of our lives. For politics not only puts
the body in danger; it also corrupts the soul. Care of the soul can only come
about by a form of enquiry, by attention to what Socrates calls philosophy,
which emerges as an intensely private concern, even if it is carried out in a
public conversation.
[Parenthetically, if one wants to
understand why a majority of the Athenian jurors wanted Socrates punished in
some way, it strikes me that this last point is a particularly compelling
reason, since it amounts to attempting to persuade the sons of rich and
powerful families to drop out of the process which will make them civic
leaders. And few things can be better calculated to irritate socially successful
parents with high ambitions for their gifted children than a persuasive
campaign to reject the public world their parents have worked so hard to make
available to them and to urge them to substitute street-corner conversations as
the essential requirement for the morally good life.]
Now, this Socratic program of these
early dialogues, as quickly and inadequately outlined above, is still somewhat
thin on content, for while it is clear that it requires me to challenge my
traditions and prevailing public opinion and gives me some tools to do that, it
offers little in the way of a constructive theory of knowledge, that is, a program
or a direction for the enquiry I am supposed to undertake in my quest for the
truth so necessary for the health of the soul.
That’s one reason, I suppose, why many
students who read these early dialogues come to the conclusions that Socrates
is essentially a Romantic spirit, inviting us all to follow the unique personal
god within us and remain true to that spirit in the face of all obstacles, and
that the proper goal of Socratic philosophy is to have everyone following a
different and self-generated belief system. That belief about Socrates is, as I
say, understandable in the absence of any clear guiding principles as to what
we understand by knowledge and what we exclude. We should remain alert to the
fact, however, that, whatever the precise direction we should follow in our
philosophical enquiries, it seems to involve the pursuit
of something called knowledge through self-examination. So we should be
rather cautious before concluding that Socrates is saying we should all follow
our personal inner voices in whatever direction they happen to prompt us.
Let me illustrate this with one more
point before moving onto the Meno.
Socrates is by no means the first person to insist that human beings have a
soul, something which stands in contrast to the body, and that the important
point in life is to tend for the health of one’s soul. Such an emphasis is
common before Socrates and, as we see in his conversations, arouses no
particular objection from those discussing such matters with him. What’s remarkable
about Socrates’s position about the soul in these
early dialogues is that tending to its health seems to require the practice of
what he calls philosophy, and this activity seems to depend upon
sorting out various knowledge claims and constantly examining the basis of one’s
own beliefs.
Such an emphasis stands in significant
contrast to the traditional ways in which people tended to the health of the
soul, namely through well-established religious rituals of various kinds. Most
of us are familiar enough with the old idea that through some special religious
exercise one restores one’s spiritual qualities. Such exercises may be ecstatic
group activities, under the influence of narcotics or not, dancing, whirling,
group prayer, special pilgrimages, meditative exercises, self-flagellation or
mutilation, solitary trips into the wilderness, group chanting, and so on.
Nowadays, our culture offers a huge menu of such activities designed primarily
to bring us psychic equilibrium.
But what Socrates seems to be proposing
is something rather different, some form of continuing rational enquiry into
things like Truth and Justice. We see the intention clearly enough, but in
these early dialogues we get little assistance with the method, other than the
insistence on conversation, introspection, and critical examination of
traditional values. Nevertheless, the emphasis is clear enough here to
indicate that, a sense, Socrates is trying to put an old idea, the need to
purify one’s soul, on a new footing, by proposing that we follow the pursuit of
knowledge rather than religious ritual (or, if you like, that we make the
pursuit of knowledge through philosophy the privileged religious ritual for the
cleansing of our souls).
Given that quick summary, what I wish
to argue about the Meno, as I have
mentioned earlier, is that it seems to take a step beyond the position I have
sketched out above and to indicate certain possibilities upon which we should
concentrate in caring for the health of our soul. As such, it is moving beyond
the Socrates we have met, who is primarily a strong critic of received
opinions, towards a Socrates who is going to provide a constructive theory of
knowledge (the Socrates we meet in the Republic, for example).
In making this case, I may well end up reading into the Meno more than is really there,
giving too much attention to how the dialogues which come next (especially the Phaedo and the Republic) are
anticipated in the Meno. But this
will serve, I hope, to address the issues I have mentioned above about the
specific content of Socrates’s notion of how we
should care for our souls.
Many writers about Socrates have seen
this shift in the conversations Socrates engages in (towards a more constructive
theory of knowledge) as the shift away from the historical Socrates towards a
more Platonic Socrates, that is, a Socrates who is advancing more comprehensive
theories of knowledge which Plato wishes to explore (theories which are not
part of what the historical Socrates talked about in the street). Whether that
is so or not, I am not competent to discuss, and the point is not particularly
relevant for our purposes. It is, however, interesting for anyone who wishes to
think about whether or not Plato’s picture of Socrates is an accurate portrayal
of the historical figure. The short and simple answer (perhaps reductively
simple) often given is that the Socrates we see in the early dialogues we have
read (and especially in the Apology) is probably quite close to the
historical Socrates, and that the Socrates we see in the later dialogues is a
more fictional creation designed to fit into Plato’s conversational arguments
about things Socrates may not have discussed.
This point is, as I say, irrelevant for
our purposes, because we are dealing here with the Socrates in the dialogues,
who is always a character created by Plato (which does not, it hardly needs to
be pointed out, amount to saying he is Plato’s mouthpiece or that we are always
supposed to see his views as obviously correct). How close this fictional
Socrates is to the real man in any particular dialogue is something for
historians to worry about. What this means here is that, when I use the
name Socrates, I am referring only to the character in Plato’s dialogue, not to
the historical character.
THE MENO:
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS
At first glance, the Meno is
in some respects a curious and at times frustrating dialogue. It begins with a
very clear, specific, and important question:
MENO: Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be
taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of
these, but men possess it by nature or in some other way? (59)
And it ends with what seems like an
unacceptably skeptical conclusion, that virtue exists in some people as an arbitrary
gift of the gods (not something they really know), for it cannot be taught, and
it does not come to us by our human nature. So, it would seem, there’s
nothing much we human beings individually or collectively can do about
it. Such a conclusion violates (deliberately so) what many of us believe
or would like to believe, namely, that there are some things we can do
effectively to encourage people, especially the young, to behave better than
they otherwise might, to make good choices leading to a better life than they
might without the education, training in good habits, and attention to moral
questions which society provides.
In between the opening question and the
skeptical conclusion, the dialogue seems to lurch from one subject to another—every
time Socrates and Meno seem to be getting somewhere
the conversation on that topic stops inconclusively and switches to something
apparently different, so that at times it’s difficult to figure out just what
any one section of the conversation has to do with the original question or
with what follows (e.g., the geometry demonstration with Meno’s
slave).
In order to provide a sense of this, let me
initially offer a brief outline of the content of this short dialogue:
Section 1: Meno’s
opening question and the discussion about the meaning of virtue, a
section which ends with Meno’s complaint about
Socrates merely leading him and others into confusion without providing a clear
answer (up to 80b, p. 69).
Section 2: The discussion of knowledge
as recollection and the experiment with Meno’s slave,
a section which ends with Socrates urging us to seek for the truth within our
own souls (which carry all knowledge) (from 80b to 86c, p. 69 to p. 76).
Section 3: The enquiry into whether
virtue is knowledge or comes by nature, whether there is any difference between
true opinion and knowledge, a section which ends with the apparently skeptical
conclusion that virtue comes neither by education nor by nature, so it must be
a gift from the gods (from 86c to the conclusion of the dialogue).
Above I mentioned that this general
framework to the conversation seems to be somewhat discontinuous, but I would
like to argue that there is an overall rhetorical purpose to this apparent
discontinuity. The first section, as we shall see, takes Meno’s opening question and refines it in a very particular
way, so as to define more precisely what any answer to that question will have
to do. Then, in the second section, Socrates, apparently abandoning the
pursuit of a definition of virtue, moves into consider
a particular view of knowledge. And finally, in the third section,
Socrates drives us to an uncomfortable conclusion about the nature of
virtue. The strategy here, I would maintain, is to leave us wondering
about how Socrates’s way of understanding knowledge
might be applied to get us out of the difficulties of accepting the
conclusion. The entire dialogue, then, is seeking to plant an intellectual
itch in our minds and to indicate how we might chart a path to easing the
irritation we feel at the sensation.
THE OPENING
SECTION: THE DEFINITION OF VIRTUE
The opening exchanges in the Meno place us on familiar territory: Meno is proposing a question, and Socrates is seeking to
clarify the meaning of the question with his typical question-and-answer technique,
assuming his characteristic stance of complete ignorance about what virtue
might be.
The conversation quickly moves into the
important notion that whatever virtue means, it must be
something single and common to all particular manifestations of virtue.
This is a key point. When Meno proposes as his
definition a multitude of virtuous actions, Socrates complains that such a list
is no use at arriving at a single, clear meaning for the key term. For
example, differentiations between male and female virtue, Socrates points out,
make as little sense as differentiations between male and female health or strength. In each case, the key term must refer to
something which applies equally to both (although the degree to which that key
term manifests itself in a particular case can obviously differ). Men and
women, for example, may differ in their strength, but the concept of strength which
we apply to both must be the same. And that term must include all possible
applications of the concept of strength. Otherwise the question becomes
absurd, because the various manifestations of strength are measuring
different things and comparisons between, say, men and women, are impossible.
Here the analogy with bees is
particularly important. Socrates points out that we use the term bee in
the singular to describe a host of different animals. Real living bees are
all different from each other, but we recognize that they are all bees. Hence
there must be some concept, some idea, or (to use a term Socrates introduces in
the discussion) some form in common,
which they all share and by virtue of which they are all bees and through which
we can classify a particular flying insect as a bee or not.
The biological analogy is useful
because it is one we recognize easily enough in the word species. We
acknowledge that that term is an idea which enables us to recognize and name
all the various members who fall under it, even though none of them is exactly
the same as any other one. There is no single living bee which defines the
species. The species bee is an idea or, to introduce a
term I shall be using now and then, it is a universal. We cannot see it
out there in the garden buzzing around the flowers, but we can apprehend it in
our minds.
What Socrates is demanding from Meno
in connection with virtue is some equivalent understanding of that term: we
need to know the universal definition of virtue, “the same form which makes
[all virtues] virtues, and it is right to look to this when one is asked to
make clear what virtue is” (72c, p. 61). Socrates is insisting that a
definition of virtue must have the same universal quality as
the term bee, a term which unifies our understanding of all the
various physical manifestations of bee or virtue in the world around us.
Socrates’s demand here makes a very important claim which
will shape the form our enquiries have to take if we are to seek an answer for
the problem he outlines. For by asking this question, Socrates would seem
to making two key assumptions: first, that such a universal exists (if not in
the real world around us, then in the intelligible world—if we cannot see it
with our eyes, we can perceive it with our minds) and, second, that a proper
answer to the question about virtue must focus on some way of reaching this
intelligible universal. Socrates doesn’t explicitly make either of those
two claims, but they are clearly implied by the question and by Socrates’s example of the definition of shape.
Furthermore, the insistence that our
understanding of virtue requires an understanding based upon a
universal idea is clearly directing our attention to the pre-eminent importance
of such an idea over any and all particular actions we see in the world around
us. Socrates here is not helping us reach an understanding of that idea,
but he is inviting us to realize that any real understanding of virtue must be
based upon knowledge of the ideal. Such a doctrine has come to be called realism—the
notion that what is true, what is necessary for knowledge (as opposed to
opinion or sense experience) is ideal rather than given to us immediately by
sense perception (a terminology which should remind us that using the terms real or realistic to
mean perceived through the sense invites immediate confusion in such
discussions).
[This form of Socrates’s
argument about universals, we might note in passing, has provided the justification
for the real existence of species. A species, according to this reasoning,
is a single real entity, but it is ideal. We cannot perceive a species, we can only observe individual living members whom
we define as members of that species because of our knowledge of the
idea. Furthermore, since the idea of the species is permanent and all-inclusive,
it defines reality. Individual living members of the species do not define
the reality of the species because they are all slightly different from each
other and because every individual member is always changing and impermanent. This
form of reasoning became the major philosophical defense for the permanence of
species and thus an important way to justify the story of the creation in
Genesis. Next semester we will be reading about the theory which, more
than anything else, set out to demolish this idea, one
of the oldest of our biological theories, which has its roots in the Platonic
doctrine of universals].
Socrates and Meno
then proceed to seek to define virtue on the basis of what
they have discussed. However, they run into another snag, Meno’s tendency to define virtue in terms of one or two
virtuous characteristics (like defining the species bee with
reference to one or two examples of living bees). One cannot say, Socrates
points out, that justice is a part of virtue and at the same time claim that
virtue is justice. Such a definition removes from the term virtue any
universal quality. And so that part of the conversation gets stymied, and Meno has to take refuge in his metaphor of Socrates as a
torpedo fish, a creature which reduces its victims to numbness (a point with
which many readers might initially agree).
The lack of firm conclusion to this
part of the conversation, however, must not lead us into thinking that some
important points have not been made. That initial question has been, as I
mentioned, refined considerably to a more sharply focused question: If we are
to define virtue, we must do so, not in terms of this or that
aspect of virtuous conduct, but in terms of some universal which stands over
all particular manifestations of virtue and whose form they all in some way or
another display. For the moment that challenge has defeated both Meno and Socrates, but the criterion remains.
Thus, this conversation in the opening
section of the Meno
should remind any of those who think from their reading of the Apology that
Socrates is advocating some do-your-own-thing and do it courageously that such
a reading of his mission is far too simple. He is demanding that we
respond to our questions about what we ought to do with references to some
universal, not to an infinite multitude of self-generated possibilities.
THE MIDDLE
SECTION: KNOWLEDGE AS RECOLLECTION
In the central section of the Meno, Socrates abruptly shifts the conversation to a
bold new idea, something considerably more substantial philosophically than
anything we have met in the earlier dialogues—the notion that knowledge is
recollection. His route into this idea may be rather fanciful, through the
established idea that the soul is immortal, but his demonstration with the
slave adds considerable meat to the idea and raises some issues about knowledge
much more profound and challenging than anything we have met so far.
It’s easy to get lost or frustrated by
the details of Socrates’s demonstration with the
slave and to challenge his claim that he’s merely asking questions and that the
slave is providing all the answers which matter. But we should not let
that overshadow the importance of what is going on here.
Briefly put, Socrates is making the
suggestion that we have within us the means to knowledge; our souls, as it
were, possess already everything we need to know. We are at present
unaware of the content of that knowledge, but we can come to recognize
it. It can be drawn out of us, so that we realize the truth of something
we possessed all along. If we focus on this task, we can discover the
truth and falsity of what we think we know. Learning is thus not a matter
of accepting as true the various opinions our culture hands over to us. It
is much more a matter of self-examination so that we unlock (or re-discover)
the knowledge within us.
Now, this doctrine of learning as
recollection has sparked much debate concerning how we are supposed to understand
it. I have no desire to enter that debate at this stage (even if I could
do so usefully), but it’s important to understand, I think, that we are meant
to take this as an analogy, not as a literal description of our minds. The
analogy is suggesting that we contain within our minds certain concepts,
certain innate ideas, if you will, which enable us to recognize the truth of
certain things, in a manner similar to the way we recognize something of which
we have a stored memory. According to this general interpretation, we
might say that Socrates
. . . holds
that the mind contains not only innate abilities such as the ability to reason
deductively, but also concepts such as those of geometry and valuation.
The term “innate” does not cause difficulties as long as it is used to
characterize abilities. We can contrast innate with acquired abilities by
stating that the latter are the result of training or conditioning. It may
seem, however, that the notion of an innate idea or concept is less
clear. It helps to point out that Plato’s claim is not about the slave boy
or Meno in particular, but about the humans species
of which Meno and the slave boy are only instances. To
say that a concept is given innately to humans is to say that, given proper
stimulation and a required stage of maturation, any human will utilize this
concept in the interpretation of experience, and that the concept can be shown
not to be acquired from experience by abstraction or by any other known
process. (Moravesik 61)
It is possible to debate many aspects
of Socrates’s demonstration with the slave, but we
must not overlook the general features of what is going on here. The mathematical
demonstration, Socrates argues, teaches the slave something true and exposes
his earlier belief as something false. With no specialized knowledge of
mathematics and no need to learn anything from outside, the slave can be led to
recognize the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem. This truth comes to him,
not by listening to the priests or the poets or by inspecting the world around
him or listening to what others believe or indeed by any experience acquired
through practice with mathematical problems, but by thinking his way through a
mathematical problem using abilities innate within him. The clear implication
is that anyone can go through the same process.
The fact that the demonstration is a
mathematical one is particularly important. For by implication Socrates is
suggesting that forms of enquiry into mathematical truths have a special
importance. We bring with us into this life a capability (a conceptual
knowledge) of mathematical truths, and these have nothing to do with our upbringing
or our education—they belong to us as part of our soul. If we base our
enquiry into problems on mathematical principles (especially geometry), then we
can discover the truth. Even if we’re not sure about the nature of Socrates’s treatment of the slave and even if Socrates does
not make that explicit claim about mathematics, that hope is clearly brought
out by the experiment.
This moment in the Meno introduces a powerful new idea—that
mathematical enquiries or enquiries based on similar methods are a specially privileged
route to knowledge. We can move beyond the welter of competing cultural
and social definitions of various things through mathematics, because
mathematics is not culturally determined. As the language of the soul, it
transcends the limitations of majority opinions or received traditions—all of
which are merely opinions. The Pythagorean Theorem is true whether one is
a slave or a wandering philosopher or from Athens or Thessaly or anywhere else.
Such a method is, of course, no proof
of the immortality of the soul, but it offers us this powerful idea that we
bring into life the capability to think our way through to the Truth (with a
capital T) without having to remain satisfied with a menu of cultural truths
(small t). Mathematics is the most obvious example of this capacity. We
must, Socrates insists, possess such a mathematical knowledge, or we would
never be persuaded by mathematical demonstrations (to put the matter into the
simplest terms: we could not ever discuss whether or not two things were equal
if we did not have some prior sense of what we mean by equality).
For Socrates, this fact about
mathematics (which he has just established in the demonstration with the slave)
has one important function: it offers us hope that we can indeed reach an
understanding of the universals he talked about earlier. Knowledge is
possible, and we do not have to remain frozen in the skepticism defined by the
opening of this section. With this hope, Socrates can reiterate his
central faith in philosophy:
. . . but I would contend at all costs
both in word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men, braver and
less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know,
rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not
know and that we must not look for it. (86b-c, p. 76)
We should note here that, although this
faith sounds very similar to things Socrates says in the Apology,
here the doctrine is beginning to acquire a theoretical foundation (however
rudimentary at this stage) lacking in that dialogue we read earlier and that
that theoretical foundation is not legitimizing any and all ways of addressing
the demands of our soul. Socrates has here clarified the goal of our
examination and is pointing towards a method.
It’s important, too, as my colleague
Dr. Anne Leavitt points out, to attend to the fact that Meno
has been watching this demonstration and has learned (even if the slave has
not, at least not to the same extent) the point of what Socrates has been
trying to show—Meno has discovered (or rediscovered)
the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem and, beyond that, the knowledge of universals. In
a sense, Socrates has taken an important first step in the process of educating
Meno in virtue. He has set him on the correct
path. Meno, of course, does not follow up on
what he has just been shown. He may agree readily enough with Socrates’s contention quoted above, but he lacks the
conviction and the courage to understand that in the light of what Socrates has
just demonstrated with the slave. But the implication of what that
demonstration means in the light of Socrates’s faith
in the moral value of enquiry is clear enough.
THE FINAL
SECTION: VIRTUE AS A GIFT FROM THE GODS
The last part of the Meno is, in many respects, the least
interesting. Having considered in the mathematical demonstration the
notion of knowledge as recollection (or of knowledge as resting on innate
abilities and concepts), Socrates and Meno move on to
consider whether virtue is knowledge in this sense or something else. The
discussion leads them to dismiss the notion that virtue comes to us from nature
and yet, at the same time, to deny that it can be taught. Both concede
that there have been many virtuous Athenians, people who have done correct actions. But
it does not seem entirely clear that these people have acted from knowledge—they
just happened to have right opinions at the time (just as a person with no true
knowledge of the route may lead a group of people to their destination based
upon his opinions about what is the correct road).
If it is the case that right opinion
and knowledge can both lead to virtuous actions, it is by no means correct to assert
they are the same thing. And for me the most interesting aspect of this
final discussion comes when Socrates tries to explain his sense of the
difference by referring to the statues of Daedalus,
the famous craftsman.
These statues are very fine, but,
Socrates points out, if one doesn’t tie them down, they fly away and thus are
not worth very much:
To acquire an untied work of Daedalus is not worth much, like acquiring a runaway slave,
for it does not remain, but it is worth much if tied down, for his works are
very beautiful. What am I think of when I say this? True opinions. For true opinions, as long as they
remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to
remain long, and they escape from a man’s mind, so that they are not worth much
until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why. And
that, Meno my friend, is recollection, as we
previously agreed. After they are tied down, in the first place they become
knowledge, and then they remain in place. That is why knowledge is prized
higher than correct opinion, and knowledge is different from correct opinion in
being tied down. (97e, p. 86)
Here, as so often, Plato’s Socrates
sums up a key point in a memorable image, and I would suggest that if you remember
nothing else of the Meno, you should make
a point of placing this picture where you can readily recollect it.
For Socrates wants to insist that
opinions are often like Daedalus’s statues: beautiful
and apparently very substantial, solid, and permanent. But unless they are
tied down, firmly attached to the earth (or, as we might now say, grounded),
they have no claim to the status of knowledge. And the implication is
clear that for an opinion to be grounded means providing reasons so clear, that
the truth of the opinion may be recalled in the same manner that Meno’s slave “recalled” the knowledge that the square on
the diagonal of a square is equivalent to the squares on the other two
sides. Without that form of certainty, the opinion, like the untied statue
will simply fly away.
The test of a grounded opinion, a true
opinion which qualifies as knowledge, is that it can be taught (in the same way
as Socrates taught Meno’s slave), since that process
of teaching rests on the permanent, innate powers of the human mind. If
that cannot be done, if the teaching, that is, rests on oratory or appeals to
external things, like our traditions, then the opinion, no matter how useful,
has no claim to be knowledge, and hence no claim to the truth.
In the remainder of the discussion
Socrates and Meno discuss whether virtue meets this
criterion of knowledge, and they come to the conclusion that virtue is not
being taught, since there are no teachers and no pupils. Even those men
most eminent for their virtue in Athens were unable to educate their
children. Hence, they arrive at the unacceptably paradoxical conclusion
that virtue is a gift from the gods and that those who possess it in this way
have no knowledge of virtue. And that, Socrates concludes, is all we can
say about the issue at the moment. But he sets down an agenda which may
be able to change this condition:
It follows from this reasoning, Meno, that
virtue appears to be present in those of us who may possess it as a gift from
the gods. We shall have clear knowledge of this when, before we investigate
how it comes to be present in men, we first try to find out what virtue in
itself is. (100b, p. 88)
This ending may be, as I say,
inconclusive and paradoxical, but the implications of where we ought to go from
here to address our residual doubts are clear enough. Socrates has made a
case for his faith in the search for universals as the basis for knowledge and
for the appropriate method for seeking them out. He has not proved anything
conclusively, but he has issued a challenge for those who want to base their
lives on more than simply received opinion and who do not wish to accept the
disagreeable consequence of cultural and moral relativism, and he has indicated
a direction we should follow. In so doing, he has considerably refined
what he has to say in earlier dialogues about the central purposes of the activity
he calls philosophy.
As I have mentioned a couple of times
already, it should be clear that, in setting out these matters, Socrates is not
proposing that we determine our own truths and live by them. The opposite
is here the case. If we are ever to understand virtue, we must see is as
something universal, something ideal which includes and helps to define all the
specific acts of virtue in the lives around us, something as convincing to each
and every one of us as a geometrical demonstration. Our understanding of
virtue must be grounded in that same certainty of knowledge. That is the
challenge he leaves us with at the conclusion of the dialogue.
The notion that we can arrive at such
knowledge is a powerful new idea. Some form of universal trans-cultural
ideas can be found. Such ideas will be grounded and therefore true and
teachable. Exploring for these ideas through philosophy—in other words
seeing philosophy as a continuing quest for what is true, what can be demonstrated
as true through reasoning—that emerges here in rudimentary form. We
witness here the birth of what has come to be called Plato’s Project, the quest
for certainty in our moral concerns (whether that is really Plato’s intention
here one might dispute, but it’s clear that this dialogue and the ones which
immediately follow have often been interpreted as the launch of such a
project).
SOME GENERAL
REFLECTIONS ON SOCRATES AND THE MENO
I hope that by this point some answers
to that student’s question I posed at the start of this lecture (“Why should we
spend so much time on Socrates when we spend only one week on other books?”)
will begin to suggest themselves, why, that is, we consider a thorough
introduction to Socrates an essential component of a course which calls itself
Introduction to Ways of Knowing. Let me list some of the possible reasons
for this stance, mentioning along the way some of the other books we have read
so far.
First, Plato’s Socrates is
revolutionary in his critical stance towards his community’s traditions.
Whether we know anything about the content of what he is proposing, he stands
as the most famous of all those who demand that long-standing traditions answer
to a new standard, something which exists above and beyond the values and habits
of the community, unless those values and habits can be justified by an appeal
to the Truth, a concept which they do not define but to which they must answer
if we are to accept them as a guide for the good life. Unlike Moses, whose
chief concern is to discipline his people into following a shared tradition
because it comes from God (and that’s all there is to it), and unlike Oedipus,
who defines his excellence in terms the community recognizes, or Gilgamesh, who
comes through to appreciate through experience the traditional values of his
community, Socrates is insisting on a new, rational standard. He thus
stands as the natural inspirer of all those who wish to challenge inherited
moralities in the name of reason.
At the heart of the new challenge is
the rational search for universal truths modeled on geometry. These
universal truths exist as a standard against which we measure truth claims and
differentiate them from opinions (no matter how useful such opinions might be),
because such universals are grounded. We do not create them for ourselves. Through
a process of conversational enquiry we discover them, and because they are
based on truths knowable by all human beings, they can be taught in a way that
transcends the variety of cultural traditions and beliefs. A major task of
our moral life becomes thinking our way through beliefs posing as knowledge
claims.
At this point one might legitimately
object that Socrates in these dialogues has not demonstrated the existence of
such universals and has not, in fact, come close to proving the truth of what
he is claiming. And one might point to any number of places in the various
conversations where we feel some logical skullduggery is going on or some
urgently necessary questions are not being asked. That may be true, but if
that is all one has to say, then one is rather missing the point.
For the importance of Plato’s Socrates,
like the importance of all great thinkers, is not that he gives us a neatly
worked out answer. His importance stems from the nature of his questions,
from the direction he points toward and the vocabulary he introduces into our
conversations. This point is crucial (that’s why I keep repeating
it). Anyone who is always ready to toss out a thinker’s efforts (including
his assumptions and his method) because of some perceived inadequacy in the
answer (or, in Socrates’s case, in the absence of a
firm answer) is not going to get very far in understanding any complex
thinker. Plato’s Socrates is inviting us to participate in a quest, not
to repose in the cozy certitude of a received answer. The last thing he
would want is for us to applaud him and believe that he has said all that needs
to be said.
But Plato’s Socrates dramatically
changes the nature of our enquiries. After Socrates, one cannot discuss
questions of virtue without raising the issue of knowledge, and one cannot put
that into the discussion without addressing the question of universals, innate
ideas, the appropriate method for discovering these ideas, and the language
appropriate to that enquiry. One doesn’t have to be a follower of Plato to
have to deal with these questions. For these issues and others which
appear in these pages have decisively reshaped how we frame the issues of
importance to us and the means we employ to arrive at a better understanding of
those issues.
Nor is this simply a matter of ancient
history. Some of you have already stumbled against some of the issues Socrates
is talking about in the Meno in your
first-year research projects when you try to sort out how you can assert
universal claims in order to question the value of cruel practices sanctioned
by long traditions (e.g., female genital mutilation). And anyone who has even
a cursory sense of the methods and practices of modern science will recognize
that there is an obvious connection between it and the ideas Socrates is
putting on the table.
A universal, unambiguously employed,
signifies something or it does not. If it signifies anything, that
something is not an arbitrary fiction of my mind; if it signifies nothing,
there is an end of all science. Science stands or falls with “objective
reference.” In ethics the doctrine means that there really is one moral
standard for all of us, male or female, Greek or barbarian, bond or free. There
really is one “eternal and immutable” morality, not a variety of independent
moral standards, one perhaps for the “private man” and another for the “nation”
or its politicians, or one for “the herd” and another for the “superman.”
(Taylor 133)
Socrates is not answering here or
elsewhere our concerns about these complex issues. He is inviting us to a
life in which we join in an ongoing conversation to explore where such
considerations take us. The virtue lies in the process, not in the
destination—at least that is his hope. The search for truth is to be
valued above the search for material success.
And, what is most important of all, I
suspect, Socrates himself in these dialogues models the behaviour he is inviting
us to consider. He is concerned above all here to persuade us that a life
dedicated to philosophy is a good life, the best life, far better than the
traditional illusions of fame and power. As such, he is rightly seen as
the most persuasive figure from our past inviting us to a life of continued
enquiry, a life that will make us better with the acquisition of knowledge.
In a sense the most persuasive evidence
for this view in these dialogues is the figure of Socrates himself. Far
more impressive than any logical demonstration, Socrates shows us through the
nature of his relationship with other people, through his wit, stubbornness,
courage, and faith and through the friendship he inspires that what he is
encouraging us to consider works in action. A life of mind brings him
enormous rewards. We are invited to look at him and see the results.
That this was Plato’s major intention
here I have no doubt. Briefly put, he is trying to create a new sense of
heroism—the philosopher as hero. Of course, he had personal reasons for
paying tribute to his teacher and friend, but beyond that he had a larger
purpose. Plato knew that to catch people’s attention about the issues that
mattered to him, it was not enough to write lectures or sermons: he had to
provide a hero, someone to take the place of the traditional warrior heroes of
Greek culture. That becomes most evident in the explicit references to
Achilles in the Crito and the Apology and to Socrates’s
vision of the afterlife, where he sees himself mingling easily with all the
great people of the past. A conversation between Oedipus and Socrates is
perhaps hard to imagine, but Plato wants us to see that in terms of heroic
qualities, Socrates is every bit Oedipus’s equal, although his courage, self-assertion,
and excellence are very different. In effect, in the figure of Socrates
Plato is endorsing the traditional virtues but redefining them.
[The explicit reference to Achilles in
the Crito is particularly
interesting. Early in the dialogue, Socrates mentions a dream in which a
woman addressed him with the words, “Socrates, may you arrive at fertile Phthia on the third day,” a direct reference to Achilles’s speech in Book IX of the Iliad. In
the speech Achilles is indicating his desire to turn away from the heroic
warrior code, reject the traditional values of his community, and go
home. The reminder certainly carries the suggestion that Socrates sees
himself (or is inviting us to see him) as linked directly to the greatest
traditional hero of his audience’s culture.]
If we wished, we might explore some
contextual reasons for Plato’s desire to celebrate Socrates as a new form of
hero. If we did so, we might well see as significant the failure of the
traditional values in the prolonged and bitter civil wars throughout Greece and
Athens in the period before the trial and death of Socrates. Such a
failure of traditions is an obvious prelude to some revolutionary new doctrine
which asserts that we must find a new and better basis for the good life.
Whatever Plato’s immediate reason for
this portrayal of his old friend, however, we cannot doubt the long-lasting
effect of this portrait. Socrates has always stood as a very special
example of pagan (i.e., non-Christian) virtue, a reminder that heroic qualities
do not need to be associated with memorably heroic actions against nature or on
the battlefield or in witnessing the Christian faith (sometimes an embarrassing
example, of course, for those who wished to claim that without Christianity no
one could be fully virtuous).
In addition to these historical
examples, many students have testified (and continue to testify) to the way in
which their encounter with Plato’s Socrates in these dialogues first awakened
them to the value of a life dedicated to philosophy, not because of any
particular issue we might call philosophical (although there are enough here to
arouse a mind attuned to the issues) but because of the heroic qualities of
Socrates—his enormously rich life and his calm, brave, good-humoured, and
consistent commitment to his own integrity in the face of life’s ultimate challenges. So
no matter how we stand with respect to the issues raised in Socrates’s
conversations, we carry away the memory of a wonderful human being, a person
who gives us (in the words of my colleague Maureen Okun)
the warmth of a close encounter with profundity.
LIST OF WORKS
CITED
Moravesik, Julius. “Learning as
Recollection.” Plato: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Volume I: Metaphysics and Epistemology. Ed. Gregory Vlastos. NY:
Doubleday, 1971.
Taylor, A. E. Plato: The Man and His
Work. London: Methuen, 1960.