Overview

Meno wants to know how virtue is learned (by teaching, practice).

Context

  1. Platonic: The Meno is an early-Middle Platonic dialogue. It’s question, how - if at all - virtue is learned, is also addressed in Protagoras, with opposite results.

  2. Contemporary: The Meno is also an important historical precedent with regard to the question of the Value of Knowledge. After all, if a true belief about the correct way to Larissa is surely of just as much practical use as knowledge of the way to Larissa — both will get us to our destination (7, below) — why do we find it so much more valuable?

    Plato’s thought seems to be that knowledge, unlike mere true belief, gives one a confidence that is not easily lost, and it is this property that accounts for the distinctive value of knowledge over mere true belief.

Outline

  1. Socrates suggests that we’d have to know what virtue is before we know how it can be learned. He asks Meno to explain to him what he thinks virtue is.
    1. Meno says:
      1. A man’s virtue is his duty to the state, to help his friends and himself, and harm his enemies.
      2. A woman’s virtue is her duty to the house, and to obey her husband.
      3. Virtues are limitless, and each is relative to who we are (”actions and ages”).
    2. Socrates notes that this is no kind of definition of what “virtue” is. It is just a list of virtues. (Bees, health, strength analogies) He prods Meno tell him “a common nature” which makes virtues virtues.
    3. Meno feels that virtue is a special case.
  2. Socrates lures Meno in with a plausible-sounding common denominator: “…can either house or state or anything be well ordered without temperance and without justice?”
    1. Forced into providing one definition, Meno suggests that, “virtue is the power of governing mankind.”
    2. Socrates: “Is virtue the same in a child and in a slave, Meno? Can the child govern his father, or the slave his master; and would he who governed be any longer a slave?”
    3. Socrates then suggests that perhaps “the power of governing justly” is the right track.
    4. Meno, ever thick, goes back to reciting virtues: Justice, temperance, magnanimity, which Socrates compares to (particular) shapes and colors: roundness, whiteness.
    5. Now, Socrates agrees to define his analogy (figure), if Meno will define virtue. He suggests that figure is “the limit of solid.”
    6. Meno now stalls; he demands Socrates define color before he (Meno) defines virtue.
      1. Socrates defines color as “colour is an effluence of form, commensurate with sight, and palpable to sense.” This is derivative from Gorgias and Empedocles, it is “orthodox”.
      2. Socrates finds it worse than his definition of a figure; Meno, inured to orthodox thinking, finds the opposite. (*Clarifying why may be instructive.)
  3. Mutatis mutandis, Meno offers a quote from “the poet”, “Virtue is the desire of things honourable and the power of attaining them.”
    1. Socrates notes that this implies that some men desire good, and some desire evil. He asks Meno whether all men don’t desire good. Meno replies in the negative.
    2. Meno admits that some men mistakenly desire evil, thinking it is good.
    3. Meno must also admit that those who desire evil unmistakenly seem to be desiring to be miserable and ill-fated. (Evils being “hurtful to the possessor of them”). He must admit it seems unlikely that anyone would desire to be miserable and ill-fated.
    4. Socrates now notes that, the desire of good being common to all, Meno’s definition of virtue is reduced to the power of attaining good.
    5. Socrates now seems to equivocate between “the good” and “goods”. He asks Meno if the power of acquisition of goods by unjust means is virtuous, to which Meno must reply again in the negative.
    6. Socrates can now say that if Meno wants to keep his definition of virtue, he’s going to require some additional criteria: justice, temperance, etc. And with that, we’re back where we started.
    7. Actually, though, Socrates takes the tack that since we’ve already understood these to be parts of virtue (figures, e.g.): “can any one who does not know virtue know a part of virtue?” (Can we understand the universal simply by means of appeal to the particulars?) To which again Meno must reply no.
    8. Meno is now exhausted, and Socrates is ready to begin his positive investigation. Before that though, Meno introduces a question to Socrates, which we call:
  4. Meno’s Paradox: “how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?”
    1. Socrates then notes that Meno is occluding all possibility of enquiry, as if one knows something, one has no need to enquire, and if one doesn’t know something, one can’t know the subject for enquiry. Meno, needled to the point of witlessness by Socrates, will take this. But of course, Socrates won’t let him.
    2. Socrates appeals to those who speak wisely of divine matters, and further of an immortal soul in which all knowledge is already immanent, if nascent - enquiry and learning then, for Socrates, are matters of recollection.
    3. Meno isn’t buying it, and asks Socrates to prove it. Socrates calls over one of Meno’s (unlearned) attendants, and goes over some geometry, prodding the boy to do some deductions and teaching him terminology, during which he claims the boy is remembering pre-learned geometry, and not learning it. “Without any one teaching him he will recover his knowledge for himself, if he is only asked questions?”
      Socrates' drawing
      This is the diagram Socrates draws and uses to get the boy to remember his geometrical theorems.
    4. Now, Socrates implicitly compares the intellectual enrichment the boy just underwent at Socrates’ puzzling him to Meno’s own, and presents his apology for the Socratic method:
      …that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know;- that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power.

  5. Agreed to sally forth and enquire into the nature of virtue, Meno once again sets forth his initial question, and this time, Socrates reticently concedes to discuss it without knowing first the essence of virtue.
    1. Socrates hypothesizes here that knowledge alone is taught, so only if virture is knowledge will virtue be taught.
    2. The minor premise of Socrates’ syllogism here is that virtue is good. To which Meno agrees. This leads Socrates to the conclusion that “if knowledge embraces all good,” then virtue must be knowledge.
    3. Then by a piece of rather dubious argumentation, Socrates suggests a second syllogism: p1) that virtue makes us good, p2) that all good things are profitable, so c) virtue is profitable.
    4. Socrates notes that many of the things we think of as being profitable (health, strength, beauty and wealth) may also sometimes lead us to harm. Further the “goods of the soul” (temperance, justice, courage, quickness of apprehension, memory, magnanimity, etc.) can equally be both profitable and hurtful - depending on whether they are practiced under the guidance of wisdom or folly.
    5. “If then virtue is a quality of the soul, and is admitted to be profitable, it must be wisdom or prudence” (e.g. that thing that tempers the goods of the soul). “And thus we arrive at the conclusion that virtue is either wholly or partly wisdom”.
    6. Unfortunately for Meno, Socrates now suggests that a) the good are made good by instruction, and b) if “virtue is knowledge, there can be no doubt that virtue is taught”, and c) that to be taught something needs teachers. Socrates’ experience doesn’t suggest that these teachers exist.
  6. At which point, Socrates brings ANYTUS (whose father is a paragon of Greek virtue) into the conversation.
    1. Socrates asks Anytus whether it makes sense to send someone looking to learn a skill to one who professed to teach it (an apprenticeship). Anytus agrees that it does.
    2. Socrates now then reminds us that those who profess to teach virtue are called the Sophists. Anytus recoils: “By Heracles, Socrates, forbear!”
    3. Socrates here plants the idea that “Of all the people who profess that they know how to do men good, do you mean to say that these are the only ones who not only do them no good, but positively corrupt those who are entrusted to them, and in return for this disservice have the face to demand money?”
    4. Now Socrates and Anytus engage in a coversation about THEMISTOCLES, a man they agree was a virtuous man. They end up agreeing (in that Socratic way) that his son was not quite the man his father was, despite his apparent capacity. Other examples are cited. Particular note is made that while these good men teach their sons things like music, gymnastics and horseback riding, they don’t seem to be able to teach them virtue.
    5. Socrates concludes thus that virtue cannot be taught. But, paradoxically, virtuous men appear to have knowledge of right and good action. At any rate, they must /perform/ right and good action, definitionally.
  7. Socrates suggests that the answer to this problem is that “true opinion is as good a guide to correct action as knowledge.” (Example of the guides to Larissa). Further, he suggests that knowledge is just right opinion, but bound through recollection (anamnesis) - that is, giving an account of its truth. It is in this way that knowledge attains its “stabilizing” character (contra true belief).
    1. They now just agree (with no argument) that right opinion is not given by nature (is not innate).
    2. Now, all his arguments established, Socrates delivers his opinion:
      1. Virtue is not knowledge since it can’t be taught.
      2. Since it’s not knowledge, it must stem from right opinion.
      3. Right opinion doesn’t come from nature.
      4. Thus, virtue comes neither from nature nor is it acquired, rather, it seems to be “divined” - that is, given by God to the virtuous.