Plato: Meno. George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004.
Jacob Klein: A Commentary on Plato’s Meno. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965.
Usually, inquiring Socrates asks the questions. Not so, on this occasion, initially. A wealthy young aristocrat from Thessaly, Meno, wants to know if aretē (excellence, virtue) can be taught. If not, does it come into being by practice? Or by nature, at birth? Or in some other way? An aristocrat might prefer to suppose that excellence comes by nature, as an inherent, inherited birthright to rule. But Meno isn’t an ordinary aristocrat.
These questions open Meno to a salvo of characteristic Socratic irony. “Meno, it used to be that Thessalians were well-reputed among the Greeks” (70a); in fact, Greeks generally regarded them as disorderly and licentious. They “were admired both for horsemanship and for wealth” (70a); that is, the substance of their good name consisting of a type of physical virtuosity and of money. “Now,” however, “it seems to me, they are to be admired for wisdom [sophia] also” because Thessaly is the home of the rhetoricians and sophists (‘wise’ men), Gorgias being the man “responsible for this happening” (70a-b). Gorgias was a Sicilian, student of his fellow countryman, Empedocles, the poet-philosopher, a materialist who nonetheless taught that human souls are reincarnated. Socrates recalls that “When [Empedocles] came to the city, he captivated the foremost men among the Aleuadai”—the Thessalian ruling class, including Meno’s lover, Aristippus—proof that Gorgias’ rhetorical art worked, at least insofar as it permitted rhetorician-sophists to get paid for changing the character of regimes (70b). Gorgias taught Thessalians the habit or custom Meno may expect Socrates to exhibit: “answering both fearlessly and magnificently whenever anyone asks you anything, as is fitting for those who know” (70b-c). (Then again, it may be that he expects to ‘show Socrates up,’ to establish the superiority of his own art of rhetoric over Socratic philosophizing.) Rhetorician Gorgias always has the answer, presenting himself as a man of ready knowledge (epistēmē). Any Greek, any Hellene, “who wants to question him about whatever one might wish to ask, and there is no one whom he does not answer” (70c-71a). Gorgias is a democrat, or at least one who aims at instructing, and perhaps influencing, anyone and everyone, democrats and oligarchs alike. This leaves open another question, however: Was Gorgias’ answer the right answer? Aside from the art of rhetoric, what does a rhetorician know? How wise is a sophist?
And what of Meno’s name? Is it good? Klein observes, with his own touch of irony, that “Meno” resembles the Greek mnêmê, which means “mind,” and “we note that in the name ‘Meno’ the sequence of those two letters is somewhat deranged” (45). “Gorgias might well know what aretê is, while Meno might merely know what Gorgias said it is” (45)
Alas, here in Athens, Socrates explains, “the opposite condition prevails”; “it’s as if some sort of drought of wisdom has come about, and there seems to be a danger that wisdom has left these parts for yours” (71a). I, poor Socrates, don’t know if excellence can be taught and I don’t even know what it is. I blame myself for my ignorance. It will transpire that Athenians do assume that they know what excellence is, and how it can be taught, a circumstance that puts Socrates at odds with many citizens who assume that they are virtuous. For the moment, however, Socrates positions himself as just one of his fellow Athenians.
But Socrates, Meno asks, didn’t you meet Gorgias here in Athens? (That is, did you not learn how to have answers to such questions ready to hand?) Yes, but “I’m not a very good rememberer,” the philosopher who forgets nothing replies; “remind me,” and since, Meno, “you know what he used to say” and tell me what excellence is (71c). Gorgias’ student’s strength rejoices in the challenge. A man’s excellence, he replies, consists in “the ability to carry on the affair of the city and while carrying them on to do well by his friends and harm to his enemies and to take care that he not suffer any such thing himself” (71e). By contrast, a woman’s excellence consists in managing private business, managing the household, in keeping the things stored there safe, and in obeying her man. Boys, girls, freemen, slaves likewise have their excellences, as befits their condition. “According to each activity and each time of life to each task relative to each task for each of us there is an excellence, and in the same way I suppose, Socrates, there is also a vice” [kakia]” (72a). As it happened, young Meno would later become a leader of Greek mercenaries in an expedition launched by Cyrus the Younger against his brother, the King of Persia, Artaxerxes II. Xenophon, who went on that expedition, regarded him as treacherous and grasping—indeed “excellent” in managing public business after his own fashion, helping an ever-shifting constellation of friends and harming enemies who once were friends, all while keeping himself safe, at least for a while. Artaxerxes won the war, captured Meno, and eventually had him executed. In the event, the manly virtue of helping friends and harming enemies (both of them shifting categories) could not prevent Meno from being harmed in turn.
Rhetoricians would rule ‘the many’; rhetoricians thrive in democratic regimes like Athens, not only among Thessalian oligarchs. Socrates replies that he had sought one definition of excellence and instead received from Meno a “swarm” of excellences—a ‘many,’ a democratic mob of them (72a). But do bees differ from one another? No, they’re all bees, Meno admits. Then excellences must have something in common, too, something that makes them excellences, just a swarm of bees has something in common, namely, the species, ‘bee,’ the eidos, the idea, the definition. Moreover, health, size, and strength are the same in a man and a woman, are they not? True, men manage public business, women private, but it isn’t possible to rule anything well without phronēsis, practical wisdom, dikaisounē, justice. “Then all human beings are good in the same way,” Socrates urges (73c). Meno might have noticed, as Klein does, that Socrates has composed human goodness of two excellences, not one (Klein, 52), and that will require Socrates to refine his own definition, later. Meanwhile, Socrates asks (now appealing to Meno’s memory of his teacher’s teaching, not to Meno, who has proven himself unequal to the task), what does Gorgias say excellence is? It is “to be able to rule over human beings,” Meno replies (73c), exposing the nerve of Gorgias’ rhetoric, which deploys words at the service of decidedly material, Empedoclean, ambition; words are substitutes for force, the ultimate in ruling materially, but ruling in a cleverer way than force does.
But if excellence is the ability to rule human beings, how could children and slaves rule, since they too have excellence, according to Meno? Alternatively, if excellence is not the ability to rule, should children and slaves not be able to rule? Socrates’ listeners (if not Meno himself) and Plato’s readers see that the attempt to rule with words, with logoi, opens the rhetorician to the authority of logic, of logos, to the principle of non-contradiction. To rule with excellence, would one not then need to rule justly? And are there not excellences other than justice, such as courage, moderation, wisdom, and high-mindedness? Meno agrees, but Socrates then observes that we are back to many excellences, “but the one which exists throughout all of these we are not able to find out” (74a). What is excellence itself?
There is a still more preliminary question to consider. Reasoned or logical speech requires a definition of definition itself. Socrates therefore steers the dialogue into a consideration of “figures”—i.e., “shaped surfaces” such as round, straight, and the like (74b). He goes further, saying (as Meno sees) that “figure [schêma] always accompanies color” (75c). That is, a surface always has some color or colors on it; as Klein puts it, “we become aware of surfaces of whatever shape only by seeing color” (59). Meno calls this silly, since Socrates hasn’t defined color. Socrates has thus induced Meno to imitate Socrates, to demand a definition, to turn the tables; like a rhetorician-sophist, he picks up techniques in order to win. He wants to use words, not to define them.
Socrates begins his reply by distinguishing himself from sophists, those “wise men, with a bent for strife and contention” (75c-d), not a desire to arrive at the truth—exercising an art rhetoricians may well include in their repertoire of ruling abilities. Friends don’t do that, a point that recalls Meno’s claim that excellence entails helping one’s friends. Socrates knows how to win arguments by encirclement, rather as a general does, but it is encirclement by means of logic, the “more gentle and more dialectical way of answering” (75d), which wins arguments by disposing of falsehoods, exposing contradictions, illogic. Old Socrates may prove a better general, of this sort, than Meno will prove to be, of the more ordinary sort.
Every thing has a boundary, Socrates observes, “like those things in geometry”; “figure is the limit of a solid” (76a); it defines the solid. Yes, but I still want to know what color is, Meno insists, since you brought it up. Oh, Meno, you are hybristes—assertive, prideful. “You pose troublesome problems for an old man to answer, but you yourself are unwilling to recollect and say whatever Gorgias says virtue is” (76a-b)—this, on the ironic ‘assumption’ that Meno must have been kidding when he said the wise Gorgias called excellence the ability to rule men, when that definition is utterly inadequate and therefore could not possibly have been Gorgias’ opinion. In another attempt at tough-minded realism, Meno chooses to bargain: I’ll tell you the definition you want as soon as you tell me the definition I want. Socrates is up to the challenge. “Even someone who is blindfolded would know, Meno, from conversing with you that you are handsome and still have lovers” (76b). That is, Meno’s words alone reveal what he is, his ‘definition.’ It might be that Meno’s ‘looks,’ whether seen or inferred from his speech, are one source of his hybris. “Why, indeed?” befuddled Meno asks. “Because,” Socrates ripostes, springing the trap (he does have ready answers, at least to some questions), “you do nothing but impose commands in your arguments, the very thing that spoiled people do, so as to tyrannize as long as they are in their prime” (76b). The demand to be told, to be given the answer in the way a beauty expects gifts, suggests that Meno doesn’t want to work for what he wants. Like physically beautiful people, Gorgian rhetoricians get what they want without working. “It is likely that you’ve noticed about me,” Socrates flirts, as “that I have a weakness for beautiful people” (76c). In other dialogues, Socrates does indeed seek beauty, if not physical beauty, and his auditors learn from handsome Alcibiades that the old fellow is quite capable—excellent, even—of resisting physical beauty. Words, which rhetoricians and sophists take to be deceptive, agents of manipulation, can be made to reveal the inner man, his soul beneath the beautiful surface, if they are used ‘dialectically,’ in a procedure of question-and-answer in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction. But Meno’s boundaries amount to things he’s been told, a horizon consisting of mere memories, “the all-pervasive and habitually accepted opinions of mankind” (Klein, 72). Meno has a beautiful surface but an impoverished interior, which he seeks to fill with gifts, attractive opinions, to be acquired with little or no effort by him.
And then, with mockery cloaked lightly by courtly deference, “Do you want me to answer in the style of Gorgias, by which you might be as much as possible, able to follow?” (76c). Socrates then gives a none-too-definitive Empedoclean definition of color, decorating it with a Pindar quote and thereby winning Meno’s laughing affirmation of its excellence. Socrates suggests that Meno approves “perhaps because [the definition] was said in accordance with the way in which you have been habituated” (76d); that is, because it is familiar, a matter of memory, not the kind of knowledge achieved by thinking, by intellectual effort. “Because it is a tragic answer,” one consonant with impressive theatrics, rhetorical declamation, Socrates remarks, driving the nail into the coffin of Meno’s compliance, “it satisfies you more than the one about figure” I had given before, in prose. “But it is not better, son of Alexidemos”—fathers hand down ‘poeticized’ stories to sons— but I “am persuaded that the other [definition] is better”; I, Socrates, use words to inquire into custom, not to reaffirm it or to turn it for my own purposes with some form of rhetoric (76e). And you might agree with me, if you were not obliged to go off before the Mysteries, as you said yesterday; you have only to stay and be initiated in my philosophic ‘mysteries.’ Socrates invites Meno to abstain from traditional religious practices and instead become an initiate to Socrates’ reasoning prose, logos. Meno consents.
Very well then, how about that definition of excellence you owe me? Meno recurs to a poetic quotation, still preferring to remember what someone else said, rather than thinking for himself: excellence is “both to rejoice and to be capable in beautiful things,” to long for them and get hold of them (77b). Socrates immediately rephrases this: “Do you mean that he who desires beautiful things is someone who desires good things?” (77b). Of course, beautiful Meno readily says. This implies “that there are some people who desire bad things, and others who desire good things?” (77b-c). In distinguishing the “beautiful” from the “good,” Socrates suggests that one who is beautiful, accustomed to receiving gifts from lovers, might or might not be good. Some people desire what is bad, thinking it good; others know that something is bad but still desire it. For his part, Meno observes that some people “believe the bad things benefit,” while others “recognize that they injure” (77d), which Socrates explains as wanting the good but mistaking the bad for the good, a mistake that makes one “miserable” and thus “ill-fated” (78a). Eros or desire is universal, but “according to your argument,” as Socrates generously ascribes it, excellence is “a power of providing good things for oneself” (78c).
What are the good things? Health, wealth (especially gold and silver), public honor and appointments, Meno says. Here we learn that Meno is the “ancestral guest-friend of the Great King” of Persia, whom he will seemingly betray by joining Cyrus’ expedition, before betraying the Greeks (78d). Health, wealth, public honor and appointments are the good things Meno wants and wants more of. But what if one acquires these things unjustly? Socrates asks. You need to “add to this getting” some “piece of excellence,” “or else it will not be excellence, even though it were a thoroughgoing provision of the good things” (78e). The mere “power of providing good things for oneself” does not define excellence. But if one needs to “add” such excellences as moderation and justice to the soul in order to make its strivings virtuous, you, Meno, are yet again breaking excellence into “pieces,” failing to tell me what it is. “Pieces” are the result of analysis, but before you analyze you must know what it is that you are analyzing, the outline or border of it. We have reached an aporia, an impasse in the argument, what English philosophers often call a “puzzle.” We need to start over.
Meno resists. He does not lack spiritedness, but he directs it toward resisting reason, not toward following it to a conclusion. “You seem to me to be bewitching me and drugging me and simply subduing me with incantations so that I come to be full of perplexity [aporia]“ (80a), he complains. Socrates, you remind me of a stingray, whose touch makes one numb, numb in soul and in mouth; I can neither think nor speak. I am usually quite eloquent, having “made a great many speeches about virtue, and before many people, and done very well, in my own opinion anyway”; yet now “I’m altogether unable to say what it is” (80b). Unlike Gorgias, the traveling rhetorician, you, Socrates, should never “sail away or emigrate from here,” because as a foreigner you’d be arrested as a wizard (80b). “You are prudent” not to do so (80b). Socrates refuses to be brought to an aporia by Meno’s rhetorical imagery. You are only comparing me to the ugly, soul-numbing, speech-numbing stingray because, like “all beautiful people,” you “delight in having images” made of you,” as it “pays them” to have that done for them (80c). You say you are perplexed, but (unlike the supposedly wise Gorgias, one may recall), I am the one “unprovided” with answers and “perplexed” (80c) “Nevertheless, I am willing to look with you and seek together for whatever [excellence] is” (80d). Meno finally sees an opening, one that Socrates himself has provided. If answers to the question, ‘What is excellence?’ are inadequate when they consist of multiple examples instead of one general definition, and if, moreover, you profess to know only what you do not know, how will you seek the knowledge you desire? And even if “you should happen upon it how will you know it is that which you did not know?” (80d). You are no better than a sophist, yourself.
Socrates might reply that his interlocutor was the one who asked about excellence in the first place, and justice requires that he give a coherent definition of his own term. But Socrates is more immediately concerned with Meno himself, not his dodgy speeches. Meno’s argument implies “that it is not possible for a human being to seek either what he knows or what he does not know,” since “he could not seek for what he knows because he knows it and there’s no need of any seeking for this sort of person; nor could he seek for what he does not know, because then he does not know what he is seeking” (80e). Meno is intellectually lazy, preferring to memorize and speak without bothering to know what he is talking about. But he imposes his own sort of aporia upon the argument, leaving Socrates to figure a way out of it, this time.
Unsurprisingly, Socrates is up to the challenge. Since Meno cares most, or at least professes to care most, about what pious authorities—poets, priests, and priestesses—tell him, Socrates will reason with him within the limits of pious opinion. Very well, then, what do the religious authorities, with their mastery of pious convention, say? Socrates cites priests and priestesses, whose “concern” it is “to be able to give an account [logos] about those things they have taken in hand” (81a). Excellence, virtue, is ‘their’ primary topic, their field of expertise. Can they, or such “divine poets” as Pindar, give such a logos, even as Meno admittedly cannot? (81b). They do indeed offer an account, which is the doctrine of reincarnation. “They declare the human soul to be immortal, and that at one time it comes to an end, which they indeed call dying, and again, at another time, it comes into being, but is never destroyed” (81b). For this reason, one should “live through one’s life as piously as possible” (81b). To this wholesome moral teaching they add an intellectual dimension. “Inasmuch as the soul is immortal and has been born many times and has seen all things both here and in the house of Hades, there is nothing which it has not learned, therefore “nothing wondrous about its also being able to recollect about excellence and about other things, which it already knew before” (81c).”Nothing wondrous”: Socrates gives Meno a sort of ‘revelation,’ a foundational religious belief, but in order to induce him to inquire further, to be “courageous” and untiring in learning (81d). There may be a problem with this priest-and-poet story: it gives an entirely ‘experiential’ account of virtue, an account or logos that leaves no place for logos as reason, no way to verify what the soul has seen on earth and in Hades by enabling it to find contradictions among the phenomena it has seen, if there are contradictions.
And how did souls begin to learn? There must have been a time when the soul had no store of memories, when it was young. The account may be an ‘infinite regress.’ Also, the account omits the heavens, as the soul never looks above the earth. That is not where Socrates takes the argument, however, because he is still interested in seeing what might be done with Meno’s soul, if only to exhibit its true nature to the onlookers.
Be this as it may, Socrates has channeled a religious “account” or myth into an invitation to philosophic inquiry. “All nature is akin,” on earth and in Hades, Socrates has said. (81c-d). Nature is a whole, a ‘one’ that consists of ‘many,’ many parts but all connected. This is an inquiry into nature by natural means, reducing the “memory” derived from reincarnation to one thing—to not accepting what you suppose you’ve learned from religious and poetic authorities and instead inquiring ‘on your own,’ or perhaps with the assistance of reasoning friends. If Meno were to accept the invitation, he would move away from rhetoric and sophistry.
To which Meno can only say, ‘What?’ How did remembering suddenly become learning? Ah, you “clever rogue,” Meno, you are trying to catch me in a contradiction (82a). But I can prove to you that learning is remembrance. Lend me one of your slaves, and “I’ll be able to exhibit things for you” (82b). After all, if nature is a whole, and all human nature is one, surely even a slave boy will be able to tell us something about that nature. Socrates then brings geometry back, recalling his definition of definition as a boundary line. He begins the conversation with a simple geometrical problem, drawing four squares within a square. If each square has a side of one foot, then two times two equals an ‘area’ of four square feet, as the boy readily answers when asked. See? I haven’t taught him anything. He got the answer out of himself and is therefore “remembering,” which indeed it is, if one accepts Socrates’ definition of remembering as seeking and learning. He then gives the boy a harder problem, showing that even a slave boy can learn that he knows that he does not know. This aporia, this numbness, about which Meno has complained, is an improvement in the soul of the boy. He now “does not think that he knows” (84b). In this bit of improvisational comedy, Socrates tacitly invites Meno to remember that the same has happened to him, but to see that it is good. Being stunned into a condition of aporia is not harmful, as Socrates-the-stingray is held to be, playfully by Meno and soon, with deadly seriousness by Socrates fellow citizens in Athens. Socrates, philosophic inquiry, is in danger not only if the philosopher travels abroad but just as much if he stays in his own polis. Philosophy is at risk in any polis. People don’t like to have their habits, their customary way of life, their regime questioned. But at least when it comes to the condition of an individual soul, not knowing it doesn’t know is the harmful thing.
By continued questioning, Socrates has brought the boy the answer to the more complex problem. The boy has gone from mistaken opinion to “true opinions,” showing Socrates, and all the gathered witnesses, that “there are true opinions about the things which he does not know” (85c). Since no one taught him—Socrates has “only been asking questions”—he got the “knowledge out of himself,” from Memory 2.0 (85d). You, Meno, know that your slave boy has never been taught any of this, so my claim must be true, perhaps a “true opinion.” “True opinion” is a formula that begs the question of how one arrives at the truth. One way not to arrive at it is to become indignant or embarrassed when your opinion is proven wrong, as Meno inclines to do. In Klein’s words, “to submit oneself to refutation without feeling angry and feeling disgraced is the first and indispensable step in the process of ‘giving birth’ to something true, that is to say, in the process of learning” (105). When Meno goes so far as to admit that he knows that he doesn’t know something (“You seem to speak well, Socrates, I don’t know how.”) (86b), Socrates immediately concurs, while avoiding hybris by confessing that “I would not assert myself altogether confidently on behalf of my argument” (86b) while averring that “I would surely battle, so far as I am able, both in word and in deed,” in “supposing one ought to see what one does not know we would be able, more able to be brave and less lazy than if we supposed that which we do not know we are neither capable of discovering nor ought to seek” (86b-c)—a firm, implied rebuke of Meno, but one without the stingray’s sting, since Socrates has allowed Meno to see how beneficial aporia can be, without wounding the young man’s considerable pride, by making the slave-boy the example, not Meno himself. As Klein remarks, this “brings back the theme of excellence” (183). It is “the peculiar aretē of Socrates himself” to undertake this fight (183). [1]
Meno remains persistent in one way: he still wants to know if excellence can be taught, or if it comes to men by nature or in some other way. His memory for the things he wants is strong, even as it contradicts his assent to the learning-is-memory theory; he stubbornly wants to be told but is far from firm in his willingness to ‘remember’ in the sense of thinking. He has not really ‘remembered’ Socrates’ lesson. “His answers are not his answers, his judgments,” Klein observes, but merely reproduce opinions of others,” and “his questions are not really questions, since they do not stem from any desire to know” (188). Like some of the figures geometers draw, his soul has no depth, “no ‘inside'” (189). He is “a clever man totally incapable of learning,” perpetually stuck in amathia, ignorance because so weak in the distinctively human excellence (199). It has nothing of “the character of what is called in technical geometrical language a ‘solid” (190). But the soul and the polis both must be studied in this third dimension, “in depth” (191). [2]
No less persistent, Socrates ‘re-minds’ him: “Yet, Meno, if I were ruling not only myself, but you too”—rather as you are the master of the slave boy, who, unlike you, is willing to make the effort to learn—we “would not first look at whether excellence is something teachable or not teachable before we first sought what it itself is” (86d). Socrates suggests that Meno makes no attempt to master himself because he wants to be “free” (86d). Freedom, for Meno, is giving speeches and taking actions that will boost him into positions of ruling authority and the honor most men give to it, whether by consent or not. Like ‘the many’ as later described by Aristotle, he defines freedom badly, as ‘doing as one likes,’ and what he likes is to rule others by speeches, not so much to rule himself by reason. Socrates pretends to yield, at last, even as he eventually pretended to yield to the Athenian democracy’s jury—that is, yielding with a qualification. “Relax your rule a little bit for me,” Meno, by granting me a working hypothesis, even as geometricians propose when they offer a proof (86e). Without waiting for Meno’s consent, Socrates presses on: We don’t know what excellence is or even what it resembles, so let us posit that virtue is “some sort of thing among those things that have regard to the soul” (87b). Are such things teachable or not teachable? Socrates has not defined excellence, but he has defined the problem, drawing a boundary around it, the soul (which he does not define). Is excellence like or unlike knowledge, which is teachable? If so, it can be taught. (It is also true that falsehoods could also be taught, inasmuch as what Klein calls Meno’s “innumerable accepted opinions” (211) are indeed taught in the polis.)
“If there is something good, and it is something separated from knowledge, it may be that excellence would not be some sort of knowledge; but if there is nothing good which knowledge does not encompass, then we would be might in suspecting what we suspected, that it is some kind of knowledge” (87d). This recalls Socrates’ claim, and Meno’s concession, that eros ought to seek what is really good, that excellence is the ability to acquire what is genuinely good. If by virtue we are good, and all good things are beneficial, helpful, then virtue must be helpful. Conversely, bad things are harmful. By beneficial, Socrates means “whatever right usage directs,” by harmful, not so (88a). But who or what leads a soul to the good? Taking, then, the long list of virtues Meno has already identified, the thing they all have in common is phronêsis, practical wisdom or prudence. For example, courage is boldness, but with prudence. Without prudence, it will be not beneficial but harmful.” The same goes for the other things Meno admits to be good, such as health, strength, beauty, and wealth. All the things undertaken and endured by the soul when directed by prudence come to an end in happiness, but when controlled by thoughtlessness in the opposite?” (88c). If so, then excellence consists not, or not simply in knowledge, epistêmē, but phronêsis. Prudence is what guides the soul and its characteristics toward a good purpose, a right telos. The same goes for things external to the soul. Wealth and political office too are good if used prudently. As Klein writes, “all that the soul attempts or endures, when led by wise judgment (phronêsis) ends in happiness (eis eudamonian), when misled by lack of judgment (aphrosynē), in the opposite (eis toūnantion), in misery” (214). Excellence is the “exercise of wise judgment” (214). Plato’s reader recalls that near the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates lamented the lack of wisdom, of practical wisdom or wise judgment, in Athens, pretending it had all gone to Thessaly, thanks to Gorgias.
No one is born prudent. If men were good by nature—that is, at birth—then we could, and should guard them on the Acropolis, “setting our seal of them much more than we do with gold, so that no one could corrupt them, and that when they should come of age, they could become useful to their cities” (89b); readers will recall that Meno covets gold, but the lesser kind. Since men are not good by nature, then they must somehow gain their excellence by “learning.” Meno agrees, but mistakenly, saying that “if excellence is knowledge, it is teachable” (89c). He has mistaken knowledge for prudence; he has heard from Socrates what he wants to hear, revealing the answer he wanted to hear from Socrates when he first asked the question. We have learned something—about Meno. His wishes are the fathers of his thoughts; he does not master himself, if right mastery is rule of reason over the desires for external good misconceived as whatever one may want. Rhetoricians and sophists encourage such assumptions, finding them lucrative.
Which turns out to be Socrates’ next point. “If anything whatever is teachable, and not only excellence, are there not necessarily also teachers and learners of it?” (89d). Gorgias’ prize student replies, “Does it seem to you that there are no teachers of virtue?” (89e). I can find none, Socrates confesses, leaving Meno to ponder the implication, with regard to his own supposed knowledge. And indeed to the status of knowledge itself, which only finds right use when guided by wise judgment. Needless to say, Meno does not so ponder. And neither do the ‘guardians’ or rulers of Athens, who listen more attentively to the itinerant rhetorician Gorgias than to its philosophic native son, Socrates.
At this point, Anytos sits beside them. Meno is his guest-friend, a status that was itself a longstanding custom among the Greeks. It is “fitting” to give him a share in the inquiry, Socrates announces: he has a wealthy and prudent father, whose wealth came not by fortune but by that very prudence and effort; his father has a good name generally in the polis, is “an orderly and well-mannered man” who “brought up our man here well, and educating him well, as the majority of the Athenians judge; they elect him, at any rate, to the highest offices” (90b). We understand that the arts, from medicine to shoemaking, can be learned, but what about excellence? Anytos quickly establishes his adherence to the gods of the polis, swearing “by Zeus” (90e). He seems to be a man who orients himself to the gods of his political community.
Can one learn the excellences from the sophists? “By Heracles, watch what you’re saying, Socrates”: the sophists “are the debasement and corruption of those who associate with them,” Anytos bluntly asserts in front of his guest friend, who may have some sympathy for such teachers (91c). It transpires that Anytos has no actual experience of sophists; he ‘knows’ they are bad, has an opinion (whether right or wrong) that they are. Stay away from them, he recommends, and learn excellence simply by consulting “any Athenian gentleman,” who will know all you need to know about the beautiful and the good (92e).
Socrates is less than impressed. How did the well-bred gentlemen learn excellence? Was it fortune? No, they “learned from those who were gentlemen before them,” or, Socrates, “don’t you think there have been many good men in this city?” (93a). No mean rhetorician himself, Anytos wants to win the argument by maneuvering Socrates into a choice between insulting the Athenian aristoi or conceding the point. Socrates replies with ironic measure, that “there are good men in politics here” (leaving aside their gentlemanliness), “but have they also been good teachers of this excellence of theirs?” (93a). Have they known “how to hand over to another the virtue in which they were good, or whether this is not something able to be handed over or to be received by any human being from another” (93b). The reader is left to recall that Anytos’ argument suffers from the same flaw as the reincarnation myth: infinite regress, but Socrates keeps things on a simpler level. Was the great Athenian statesman Themistocles a good man? “The best of all,” Anytos affirms (93c). Was he a good teacher of his own excellence? Anytos supposes so. Except that he wasn’t, Socrates is bold to say. His son, Cleophantos, was taught to be a good horseman—a skill, an art—but he did not learn excellence of character. Many of the most prominent gentlemen of Athens have similarly failed. Indeed, Anytos’ father was such a good man, who gave his son a good education, quite evidently to little effect. Anytos falls into an angry silence, after warning Socrates to watch his mouth. He will later become one of Socrates’ accusers at trial, rhetorically successful in winning a vote of ‘guilty’ from the jury. Klein comments, “Anytus’ anger is rooted in his firm reliance on the prevailing opinion (doxa) concerning the respectability or unworthiness of people, that is to say in his firm reliance on the good or ill repute of those people” (239). Like Meno, his soul is filled with the shadows on the wall of the cave, the Athenian polis, and so he too is a man of amathia, in this respect similar not only to Meno but to Athens itself, “where it is easy to do evil to people, or, for that matter, to do them good, as he himself says,” menacingly (239). The people of Athens have put their regime at risk precisely by assuming, with the foreign sophists and rhetoricians, that excellence is readily taught, passed down either from fathers to sons or from sophistical rhetoricians to rulers who are indeed ‘sophisticated.’ Anytos doesn’t like those foreigners, but in this respect, he thinks just like them.
Meno takes up the argument, observing that his teacher, Gorgias, does not claim to teach excellence of character, and so (he implies) is exempt from the criticism Socrates has leveled at the Athenian gentlemen-politicians. Gorgias the rhetorician claims to teach an art, the art of speaking well, but he laughs at Sophists, who claim to teach virtue, denying that virtue can be taught. Socrates cites another kind of artist, the poet Theognis, whose name sounds like ‘knower of God,’ who contradicts himself on the topic. But “could you declare that people who are so confused about any subject,” Socrates asks, “are, in any authoritative sense, teachers of it?” (96b). “No, by Zeus,” Meno swears, unwittingly raising the question of whether the gods themselves teach excellence. He has finally been brought to wonder, however: “I really wonder, Socrates, whether perhaps there are no good men, or what could be the way of generation for good men to come to be?” (96d).
In his answer, Socrates initially directs Meno to look not ‘up’ to the gods but ‘in,’ to his own nature. “Above all, we should apply our minds to our very selves,” undertake self-knowledge. and thereby to see “that has escaped us that it is not only when knowledge is directing that human beings act rightly and well in their affair” (96e). Since “right opinion” is as good a guide as knowledge (the man who knew how to get to the city of Larissa would get you there no better than the one who had the right opinion of how to get there), a guide who has walked every step of the way will do no better than the man of right opinion derived by perusing an accurate map (97b). The problem is that “true opinions” tend not to last; “they are not willing to stay put, but run away out of the human soul,” unless someone should bind them with causes by reasoning” (97a). “This is why knowledge is worth more than right opinion, and, by its binding, knowledge differs from and excels right opinion” (98a). If I know the reason for something, it becomes more than a mere impression on the mind, an impression that will fade. In this, Socrates is surprisingly certain; he knows that he knows this, he says.
It is nonetheless the case that the rightness of an opinion “presupposes the existence of truth which only epistêmē—or phronêsis—can reach” (Klein 250). Those eminent “political men,” the ones Anytus esteems, use right opinion “to straighten out their poleis,” but “they do not know what they say,” having failed to reason their way to the content of their speeches, their rhetoric (99b-c). (Is Gorgias any different? one might ask.) Like the oracle chanters and prophets and poets and artists, politicians are not rational or knowledgeable. They are radically dependent upon the Other, or others. If Anytos will be unhappy with such dependency, as Meno cautions, Socrates avers, “That doesn’t matter to me” (99e). We’ll have a talk with him, later. Socrates concludes on this note of piety: “But now, if we in this whole account both searched rightly and were speaking rightly, excellence would be neither by nature, nor something teachable, but has come by divine dispensation without intelligence in those to whom it might come, unless there should be that sort of man among the political men who could also make someone else politic” (99e-100a). That is, he now turns Meno to right, allegedly divinely inspired, pious right opinion, having shown that he is unlikely to philosophize.
But (once again) we still need to know “what excellence, itself in itself, is” (100b). That is, we will need to know whether the gods are actually dispensing excellence in two ways: are they really the origin of it? and is what they give us real excellence?
But “now it is time for me to go” (100b), Socrates announces, with abrupt prudence. In this, Socrates imitates the action of Anytos, but with the opposite effect. No reader is likely to regret Anytos’ departure from the conversation, but many readers may want to hear more from Socrates. As for Meno, Socrates tasks him with an action. Martial your rhetorical art and “persuade your guest-friend Anytos here too about those very same things that you yourself have been persuaded so that he may be more gentle; for if you do persuade him, you will also confer upon the Athenians a benefit” (100b-c). In the event, Meno was unable to persuade Anytos of any such thing. Either his persuasive skill, learned at the feet of Gorgias, lacked the power Meno supposed it had, or he didn’t make much of an effort. And so, Athens lost Socrates.
Plato’s readers have not necessarily lost him, however. Klein concludes, “we, the readers and witnesses of the dialogue, have to continue the search for human excellence on our own” (256). In doing so, one needs to be mindful of the inclination of most fellow-citizens, individually and collectively, to resist thinking.
Notes
- At this point in the dialogue, Klein interrupts his commentary with an illuminating discussion of memory and cognition as presented in other Platonic dialogues in which they figure: the Republic, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Philebus, and the Theaetetus. The Republic features the image of the “divided line” which mark four “states of the soul” (112). The line divides the intelligible, which consists of two kinds of thought, opinions and the cognized, from the visible, which consists of two kinds of visible objects, the images or surfaces of things and the “originals” of those images. The images depend upon the originals, as opinions depend, or should be made to depend, upon the cognized. Typically, we can distinguish the images of things from the visible thing themselves; Plato calls “this faculty of ours, to see images as images” eikasia (114). “We see ‘through’ an image, as it were, its trustworthy original,” an act that bring pistis or trust to our soul (114). The prisoners in the Cave manifest eikasia when they turn their heads away from the shadows of the idols and look toward the cave’s opening, toward the sunlight. On the level of thought, doxa or opinion parallels the images, dianoia or thought parallels eikasia. Thinking or reasoning governed by the principle of non-contradiction enables human beings both to make discriminations and to draw connections among the objects of thought, as seen in arithmetic, inasmuch as “in the act of counting we both separate and combine the things we count” (117). “To begin thinking means—in any conceivable case and for any conceivable purpose—to begin searching for some clarity about the matter we are dealing with” (118). The kind of eikasia exhibited in thinking, leading to noesis or insight, understanding, “could be rightly called dianoetic eikasia” (119). “It is thus that our dianoia makes the visible things depend on their intelligible originals” and it is thus that our opinions can be improved in the ‘light’ of the things we tentatively cognize—tentatively, because “the power to clarify fully the suppositions of our dianoia may not be given to mortal men” (122). On the level of dianoetic eikasia, the human soul is ‘turned around’ or converted, “mark[ing] the beginning of a new life,” the philosophic life, “tolerable only to a few” (124). Meno is not among them; he prefers not to undertake the arduous “action of learning” (172). In the Phaedo, the dialogue presenting Socrates’ last hours before his execution, “recollection” means the rational ability to relate one thing to another, as when one relates images, “the apparently equal visible things,” to “an intelligible ‘original'” (129). Here, the claim of immortality for the human soul, the ‘reincarnation’ theme seen in the Meno, comes to be seen as a continuation of the distinctively human excellence, “the effort of dianoia” in following logos or reason through subsequent generations of thinkers (149). Those who continue Socrates’ quest ‘reincarnate,’ immortalize, Socrates. “The process of ‘recollecting’ would mean nothing but the very process of learning guided by Socrates’ prescriptions” (150). This process itself is ‘immortal’ in the sense that learning “is in no way concerned with any past moment of time but is uniquely interested in the content of the knowledge to be acquired” (150). Then, in the Phaedrus, Socrates shows that “human souls, unlike those of the gods, are not quite able to see all the truth”; their knowledge must “always be tainted with ignorance” and therefore “no man can be wise” but at best only a philosopher, a lover of wisdom (151). In this process of dianoetic eikasia memory has three aspects: it retains “our immediate experience, which is based on our outer and inner sensing”; it stores knowledge; and, in the incompleteness of that knowledge, it is “the source of our desires” for more knowledge and indeed for wisdom (156). Finally, the Theaetetus explores how human beings make mistakes, form mistaken opinions, by failing to “apply our thinking in earnest” and with sufficient logos (162). Still, a certain zetetic caution or skepticism is necessary, as insight into “the highest order of things” can never be fully conveyed by “the fragmenting medium of speech,” which “is not quite capable of coping with ‘wholeness'” (168). This is why efforts to tell people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—which is what Meno wants Socrates to do and what rhetoricians like Gorgias claim to do—are vain. A philosopher can only go so far as to tell myths better than the ones on offer from rhetoricians, better because more nearly in line with the moments of noesis they have experienced. Those myths are intended less to convey the whole truth than to “initiate an effort in the soul of men and to beget action,” as it is “in action that human excellence and its opposite reveal themselves” (171). This is what Socrates’ “myth of recollection” is for, and it conveys what Socrates does in word and deed, what he avers that he “fights” for.
- Thus, in the Meno, “the myth of recollection” has “fulfilled its function, not that it had any effect on Meno, but it has helped us to understand Meno’s soul” (209). This leads Klein to another valuable excursus, this time into the Republic and the Timaeus. In the Republic, the education of the guardians consists first of plane geometry, then the science of numbers followed by study of “solids,” of depth, and finally of heights and motion—astronomy. This education “binds the theme of the ‘solid to the theme of the polis” (192), one feature of Socrates’ ‘ideal’ polis or ‘city in speech,’ in logos. Genuine guardians guard the polis against one-dimensionality, against allowing the regime, the politeia of the polis, from “los[ing] its ‘depth,'” abandoning its telos or purpose, which is to seek justice. In the Timaeus, Plato addresses the question of three dimensionality more extensively. To understand the cosmos, one cannot look only to the “Father,” the model of all that is, “accessible only to intellect and thought” (193), or to the “Mother,” the receptacle or indeterminate space or “room” in which all change occurs (194), but also to their “offspring,” the “visible world around us, the domain of everything we sense” (194), including human beings, who however consist not only of visible bodies but of physically invisible souls, as does all of the cosmos. “The stretching of the Soul across the Whole, which stretching amounts to the very constitution of the Universe as a ‘whole,’ is achieved by means of numbers and rations of numbers,” which we study in arithmetic, logic, and harmonics (195-196). Here again one uncovers depth, ‘solidity’ of bodies and of souls, of the Whole and of Soul. The limitation of human knowledge may be seen in the fact that intellect perceives surfaces, geometric shapes, ‘definitions.’ Intellect can, however, perceive that bodies and souls have depth, are three dimensional; a soul has “capacity,” the ability to learn, “which is its capacity to grow on proper nourishment” (199). Intellect can ‘infer’ what the soul is, on the inside. Meno has cut himself off from that self-knowledge, preferring to fill himself with mere opinions. “Socrates and Meno counter-mage each other, Socrates putting the effort of learning above everything else, Meno never relenting in his unwillingness to make that effort, an unwillingness compensated by his readiness to rely on his memory” (201). While Meno’s outside, his body, is beautiful, his inside, his soul is “ugly”; while Socrates’ outside is ugly, his inside, his soul, is beautiful, as Alcibiades recognizes, in the Symposium.
Recent Comments