Wisdom moves as the sophists or professional teachers move-from city to city. In his evasion of Meno’s question, Socrates comically depicts wisdom as a commodity that can move from place to place, owner to owner, like material wealth (a recurring theme in the dialogue). He is also fairly intelligent and not uneducated: he has read the great writers of the day and can easily follow a mathematical demonstration. He is used to being obeyed and appears eager to rule Socrates. In the course of the dialogue we learn that Meno is young, wellborn, wealthy, handsome and spoiled. He observes that Meno is from Thessaly, a city that has apparently enjoyed a recent influx of wisdom, thanks to the arrival of Gorgias. Socrates gets personal, even referring at one point to Meno’s lover, Aristippus (70B). It becomes clear that Socrates means to turn the tables on Meno, put him in the hot seat of interrogation. Socrates’ reply sidesteps Meno’s question and redirects the conversation. Meno’s question is artfully constructed and has a nice ring to it-no doubt the influence of Gorgias, the famous rhetorician whom Meno greatly admires. Meno does not ask “How is virtue acquired?” but whether Socrates is able to tell him how virtue is acquired, whether Socrates has a speech or answer in him ready to hand. “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is something teachable? Or is it not teachable, but something that comes from practice? Or is it something neither from practice nor from learning, but something that comes to human beings by nature, or some other way?” The conversation begins with a question posed by Meno: Then there is the slave boy-the only one in the drama who does not resist Socrates and who manifestly learns something. In the Meno, Anytus warns Socrates that what he is doing, questioning the virtue of respected Athenian statesmen, is likely to get him into trouble (94E-95A). The dialogue is also about Anytus, who appears later in the drama and was one of Socrates’ principal accusers at the trial that led to Socrates’ conviction and death. The Meno is indeed about virtue, but it is more deeply about Meno: about his soul and the effect that contact with Socrates has on it. Why does Socrates present recollection in the context of a myth? Why, in order to illustrate the truth of the myth, does he appeal to mathematics, in particular geometry? What makes the problem of doubling the square especially fitting? And finally, what does recollection have to do with virtue, the ostensible topic of the dialogue? I will address these questions after taking us through the conversation that leads up to Socrates’ myth. The central role of recollection in the Meno raises many questions. Through a series of questions, he gets one of Meno’s slave boys to solve the geometrical problem of doubling the square. Socrates enlists the aid of mathematics to demonstrate the truth of this teaching. To learn, in the precise sense, is not to acquire but to recover. What we call learning is really recollection or calling back, anamnêsis. Meno, you recall, becomes frustrated by his inability to answer Socrates’ question about virtue and tries to sabotage the whole undertaking with a paradox: How can anyone learn, since, if he doesn’t already know what he’s looking for, he won’t know it when he finds it, and if he does know, why search? Socrates responds to the paradox with a myth, which tells us that learning is possible because our souls are immortal and have seen the truth of all things, truth that we have forgotten as a result of being born. I must acknowledge at the outset my debt to a former tutor and dean of our college-Jacob Klein, whose books on the Meno and on Greek mathematics have greatly influenced the reading of the Meno that you are about to hear.Īs its subtitle indicates, the Meno is about virtue, but roughly a third of the way through the conversation, the focus shifts to the theme of learning. As the first Platonic dialogue that our freshmen read, it is the gateway to all the philosophic works to come, both ancient and modern. The Meno holds a distinguished place in the St. “…by indirections find directions out…” ~ Hamlet, 2.1 To question is not merely to know that one lacks knowledge but to love knowledge passionately, to pursue it and never give up.
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