Meno

Overview

Forty pages, three characters, and one question that changes shape twice. Meno is a rich young Thessalian, a former student of the sophist Gorgias, and he opens the dialogue with no preliminaries at all: can virtue be taught, or is it acquired by practice, or does it come by nature? Socrates replies that he cannot say whether it can be taught because he does not know what it is.

What follows is a dialogue in three movements. First an attempt to define virtue, which fails three times. Then a crisis about whether inquiry is possible at all, answered by a geometry lesson with a slave boy. Then a return to the original question by a different route, with Anytus, one of the men who will later prosecute Socrates, arriving to be offended.

It is the most tightly built of the short dialogues and the easiest to follow, which is why it is usually read first or second.

The argument

Meno’s first answer is a list: a man’s virtue is managing the city, a woman’s is managing the house, and so on. Socrates wants the one thing they have in common, the way all bees are bees. Meno tries again: virtue is the power of ruling over people. Socrates asks whether that is virtue in a slave, or whether ruling unjustly counts. The third attempt defines virtue as desiring fine things and being able to get them, and collapses when Socrates asks whether anyone desires bad things knowingly.

At this point Meno gets annoyed and produces the paradox. You cannot look for what you do not know, because you would not recognise it if you found it; and you have no reason to look for what you already know. Inquiry is impossible either way.

Socrates answers with a demonstration rather than an argument. He calls over one of Meno’s slaves, a boy with no geometry, and asks him to double the area of a square. The boy confidently gives the wrong answer, doubling the side. Socrates shows him the result is four times too big, and the boy discovers he does not know. Then, by questions alone, he is brought to see that the correct side is the diagonal of the original square. Socrates claims he taught nothing and only asked, so the knowledge must have been in the boy, recollected rather than acquired. The soul is immortal and has learned everything already.

The last third returns to teachability. If virtue is knowledge it can be taught; if it can be taught, there are teachers. Socrates asks Anytus who the teachers of virtue are. Anytus will not say the sophists, and Socrates observes that Athens’ best men, Themistocles, Aristides, Pericles, gave their sons riding lessons and no virtue at all. Anytus leaves with a threat. The dialogue closes on a compromise: statesmen may guide the city rightly by true opinion, the way a soothsayer speaks truly without understanding, and virtue may come to them as a gift from the gods, since it is plainly not being taught. Socrates adds that none of this is settled until we know what virtue is.

How to read it

Read it in one sitting. It is short enough and the argument is continuous; breaking it up loses the momentum from definition to crisis to demonstration.

Do the geometry. Draw the square, draw the doubled side, see that it gives four times the area, then draw the diagonal. The scene is unreadable as prose and obvious as a picture, and if you do not work it through you will not be able to say what Socrates actually proved.

Watch the questions in that scene closely, because this is where the argument is won or lost. Count how many are genuinely open and how many contain their own answer. Socrates claims he only asked. Decide whether you believe him. Most readers conclude the boy is being led, and the interesting question then becomes what that shows: perhaps not that the soul remembers, but that a person can be brought to see a necessary truth by their own reasoning, which is a weaker and more defensible claim.

Notice the two questions are not the same. “Can virtue be taught” is about pedagogy; “what is virtue” is about definition. Socrates insists the second must come first, and the dialogue is partly an argument for that priority.

The common misreading is that the recollection theory is the dialogue’s conclusion. It is offered as a reason not to give up, explicitly as something Socrates would fight for less than he would fight for the claim that we are better off searching than assuming we cannot.

Keep an eye on Anytus. Plato’s readers knew what he did next, and the scene is written so that the man who cannot name a teacher of virtue is the man who will kill the one person in the room asking about it.

Questions it raises

• Does the slave boy learn geometry, or remember it? What would distinguish the two from the outside?
• Meno’s paradox assumes knowing is all-or-nothing. Is there a state between knowing and not knowing that dissolves the problem?
• Socrates says true opinion is as useful as knowledge for getting to Larissa. If the practical results are identical, what is knowledge for?
• If virtue cannot be taught and comes by divine gift, what follows for education, and for holding people responsible?
• The definitions of virtue fail because they list parts or import virtue into the definition. Is a single definition the right thing to be looking for?
• Anytus is offended by a true observation about Athenian fathers. What does the dialogue suggest about the cost of asking this question in public?