Plato's Meno

Status
Not open for further replies.

RamistThomist

Puritanboard Clerk
Knowledge as Remembering.

If someone wanted to know where to start with Plato, I would point him to the dialogue Meno. The dialogical format makes for easy reading and it introduces the reader to key Platonic concepts. The downside is that Plato (and I am going to use Plato and Socrates interchangeably) never really explains what virtue is.

Interestingly, Meno is Xenophon’s enemy and a dirty traitor in Anabasis.

I.

Socrates wants Meno to tell him what virtue is. In a skillful cross-examination Meno is forced to accept that what we call virtue must be the same in all men, otherwise his original claim that it is to rule well means that women and slaves can’t be virtuous (73C-74E).

Meno’s problem is that his answer makes virtue that which makes any action virtuous. He says that “all action with justice” is virtue. Well, maybe, but that tells us nothing of what virtue is.

II.

The dialogue shifts to the nature of the soul and remembering. The soul is immortal (81B-82B). The second line of thought is “there is nothing known which is not learnt.” This would seem to rule out “innate ideas,” but that’s not Plato’s point. Rather, he says that “there is not such thing as teaching, only remembering.” His point is that you can't move from not-knowledge to knowledge. If you could, you would already know what you need to know. To prove it he employs the famous scene where Socrates shows that an illiterate slave boy already knows the principles of geometry. How does he know that? His soul is immortal and existed before his body.

The point is that we can’t learn virtue, nor can virtue be taught. Is virtue knowledge then? If it is knowledge, it can be taught. Yet Socrates seems to think he has shown that virtue can’t be taught.

III.

Socrates then moves to the distinction between right opinion and knowledge. He develops this more in The Republic. He has established, so he thinks, that virtue is not knowledge. Yet he wants to say it is something stronger than mere opinion, for virtuous men don’t seem to govern justly by mere opinion. So what is it? Here’s the kicker: virtue comes neither by nature nor by teaching, but by divine allotment (99B-100C).

Evaluation

Is “knowledge remembering?” I don’t think we need to take that literally, since it seems so manifestly false. It’s better to say that we learn analogically. The mind makes a proleptic jump from one mental pattern to another. Still, anamnesis is a crucial philosophical concept that needs to be explored more fully, which I won't do here.

Leaving aside the subtle assertion of reincarnation, I am not so sure that Plato established the claim that virtue cannot be taught. All he has shown is that the virtuous leaders of Athens failed to teach their sons, not that they were conceptually unable to teach.

Nonetheless, this was a delightful dialogue and an excellent introduction to Plato.
 
Comments:

You entitled your review, "knowledge as Remembering" but I always thought the slave-boy-learning-geometry example was only a small portion of the story and the main point was the unsuccessful search for virtue.

I thought Plato used Meno as the character because, despite Meno having taught on virtue, he was known to the readers not to be full of virtue. I thought Plato was casting Meno in the part ironically, sort of like casting Danny De Vito as a male model, etc.

After Socrates knocks Meno off his high horse, Anytus (?) tells Socrates he ought to be careful. I thought this was a way to foreshadow Socrates later death for corrupting the youth.

In the end I really didn't understand the Meno as a teen, nor when I reread it as an adult. They couldn't figure out what virtue was, but you could teach it (even without experiencing it), but there were no teachers of virtue. I ended up more confused.

My one big takeaway was that there is such a thing as a priori knowledge (knowledge attained without any experience, seemingly innate). I just figured we were being enlightened by God and that we know some things innately due to being made in the image of God with such thoughts already put into our programming. The world of the Forms existed in the mind of God from all eternity (the Logos, the True Light that lighteth every man), and He grants us our thoughts (or does that sound too much like Plotinus?).


...My other takeaway is that we can make even an uneducated youth understand geometry if we ask enough leading questions.
 
Last edited:
You entitled your review, "knowledge as Remembering" but I always thought the slave-boy-learning-geometry example was only a small portion of the story and the main point was the unsuccessful search for virtue.

That is correct, but I think Plato is dropping hints early on which will become huge points when we get to the Republic and Phaedo. The search for virtue is unsuccessful precisely given the nature of teaching and learning.
 
That is correct, but I think Plato is dropping hints early on which will become huge points when we get to the Republic and Phaedo. The search for virtue is unsuccessful precisely given the nature of teaching and learning.

So if we throw out the theory of remembering, how do we answer the seeming paradox, that a man can't search either (1) for what he knows nor can he search for (2) what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows--since he already knows it, there is no need to search. Nor can he search for what he don't know, because he doesn't know what to look for.

How do we get out of this seeming paradox without resorting to the theory of remembering?
 
So if we throw out the theory of remembering, how do we answer the seeming paradox, that a man can't search either (1) for what he knows nor can he search for (2) what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows--since he already knows it, there is no need to search. Nor can he search for what he don't know, because he doesn't know what to look for.

How do we get out of this seeming paradox without resorting to the theory of remembering?

The Hungarian chemist Michael Polanyi articulated what he called "tacit knowledge." All of our knowing is by analogy. We move from one system to another based on patterns inherent to both. The mind makes what is called a "proleptic leap" in the knowledge process.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top