I read many of the Platonic dialogues in college, and I read The Republic several times, but I’d never read Meno, known to be one of Plato’s most influential dialogues on the field of education. After several false starts over the last few years, I finally got around to reading the whole thing. It is, like all of Plato’s work, at once simple and commonsensical, and yet rich and complex.
The main idea is that Socrates and Meno are – in true Socratic fashion – attempting to understand what arete (often translated as “virtue” but in the version I read as “excellence”) really is. As usual, Socrates is ostensibly trying to learn about excellence from Meno, who claims that he knows much and has spoken to great crowds about it before, but through Socrates’s dialectic questioning, it quickly becomes apparent to the reader and to Meno that he has trouble defining excellence. Socrates contends that this is the best approach:
“And the more dialectical approach is probably not only to give truthful answers, but also to proceed via whatever the person being questioned admits that he knows. So I shall endeavour to talk with you in this way too.”
But when Socrates proposes that this inability to define excellence on both of their parts should motivate them to search together for the truth, Meno replies by asking a fascinating question about how he and Socrates will know when they arrive at the truth – the so-called-Meno’s Paradox:
“And in what way will you enquire into something when you do not know what it is at all? Yes, what sort of thing that you do not know will you put forward as an object of inquiry? And even if, at best, you do encounter it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?”
This is one of those moments – so common in Plato – where he puts forward such a deceptively-simple, almost childlike question – that it catches you off guard when you realize how important it is. Yes, it’s partly ridiculous – it reminds me of a joke / paradox someone used to repeat about an acquaintance who had a fear of new situations: “She never goes anywhere she hasn’t been before.” Meno’s question is, in a way, quite silly. After all, we embark on attempts to find things all the time without knowing what we’re looking for. Take, for instance, finding a job you like when you are starting out. Or finding a romantic partner. We don’t let our apparent ignorance get in our way.
And of course, Meno’s question is also extreme: It’s very rare that we have complete and total ignorance about a thing. Yes, if you asked me to identify the correct written answer to a multiple choice test – in Mandarin – then yes, I’d have no idea. But it’s rarely like that. First of all, with enough time and with a quick internet search, I could probably translate and figure out the answer. If I don’t know how to build a chair, I’ll look in a book, or ask an expert.
But I think what Meno is asking is – what if we have no expert source to consult? Again, it’s rare that we have total ignorance. When I was first looking for a career, I didn’t think I had much idea what I wanted – but deep down I certainly had some idea about the types of activities I like doing and those I don’t. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but I had a rough idea.
I find one interpretation of Meno that I read – “Nature and Teaching in Plato’s ‘Meno’” by Daniel T. Devereux – to be quite plausible in claiming that what Meno is really attacking is Socratic inquiry – the notion that it’s possible to learn without an instructor telling you what the answer is; Socrates responds by suggesting – perhaps purposely – the exact opposite (antithesis) – that learning *cannot* happen through teaching:
“The contrast between the two conceptions of teaching can be put very simply: according to the Socratic conception, what is taught comes from within the pupil; according to the narrow conception (which is apparently Meno’s), what is taught comes from without. The idea that teaching is essentially the transmission of knowledge from one individual to another . . .”
In his response, Socrates outlines a theory of innate knowledge – anamnesis – which is really a theory that we recollect innate knowledge which has survived in our souls from past lifetimes:
“Now since the soul is immortal and has come to birth many times, and has beheld everything there is, both here and in Hades, there is nothing it has not learned. So it is no wonder that it is able to recollect what it knew previously about excellence or about other things.”
Devereux’s interpretation – one that seems likely to me – is that Socrates is purposely, perhaps ironically, using Meno’s own (narrow) definition of “teaching” as he instructs the young boy on a geometrical problem in order to show Meno the fallacy of his own view. For instance, Socrates, as he leads the young boy through the proof, tells Meno to, “be on the lookout in case you find me, somehow, teaching him and expounding to him rather than asking for his opinions on this.”
But of course Socrates is teaching the boy! It’s obvious that he knows how to do the proof ahead of time, and he’s leading the boy along, step by step, toward the correct answer. Socrates is purposely expounding an antithesis, in order to attain a true and valid synthesis between knowledge as recollection and knowledge as received. He hints at this to Meno:
“Therefore, if someone asks [the boy] questions without teaching him, he will come to know by recovering the knowledge himself, from himself. “
Devereux also explains that these contrasting conceptions of “teaching” are at the heart of Socrates’s often-misunderstood claim, toward the end of the dialogue, that virtue cannot be taught, even by the most virtuous men in society. Devereux quotes Socrates himself, before explaining what’s going on:
“And our inquiry into this question amounts to this: Did the good men of our own and of former times know how to transmit (‘nopaboivat) to another their virtue, or is it something which cannot be transmitted or taken over from one person to another. That is the question Meno and I have been discussing all this time.”
Devereux:
“By explaining the question whether virtue is teachable in terms of the notion of transmission, Socrates gives a signal that it is the sophistical conception of teaching which is operative throughout the argument.”
Thus Socrates is not foreclosing the idea that virtue can be taught Socratically, but that it can be simply transmitted.
In this sense, Socrates’s conception of learning can perhaps be said to represent the synthesis outlined above, as alluded to by Devereux: true learning cannot be done via simple transmission; it must come, in some sense, from within the person.
As to whether learning is truly “recollection,” if taken literally, it certainly seems implausible. This is the doctrine of “innatism” taken to its extreme. But I think it is meant to be another one of Plato’s myths or metaphors, done for illustration and illumination, rather than for scientific exactness. I take it to mean that human beings possess certain innate powers – such as reason and observation, a natural, human ability to remember and to classify, which allows us to learn, particularly when we are aided by a teacher. Transmission of knowledge is itself a metaphor (the old notion of pouring knowledge straight into someone’s head); learners are ultimately the ones who must make sense of and process new information. So although we don’t pour knowledge into someone’s head, and we don’t just “remember” how to read, say, Mandarin; the synthesis – dialectical learning – is what Socrates is after.
Toward the end of the essay, he also draws an interesting distinction between knowledge and true or right opinion – knowledge is the “tying down” of true opinion by understanding why it is true – what we later came to define as “justified true belief”:
“For true opinions too are a worthy possession for as long as they remain with us, and everything they accomplish is good, yet they are not inclined to stay in place for long, rather they run away out of a person’s soul, and so they are not very valuable until the person ties them down by working out the cause . . . Once they have been tied down, they become knowledge, and are stable. And that is why knowledge is valued more highly than right opinion, and knowledge differs from right opinion in being tied down.”
This is all part of the value of knowledge problem or “the Meno problem”: how is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Socrates is vague about this – does he mean that true belief must be tied down by recollection? I think it’s most likely that he means that true belief becomes knowledge through dialectic, self-directed learning – when one understands the “why” rather than just the “what” or the “how.” I take the ending of the dialogue – in which Socrates apparently concludes that excellence cannot be taught and that those men who have excellence received it as though from the gods – to be ironic, merely his attempt to continue showing Meno the (mistaken) outcome of his own definitions. Still, it’s open to interpretation.
Either way, the Socratic method is on display in Meno, in its key steps: First, the student must be brought into the process of inquiry via his interest. He must be “hooked.” Next, he must be brought into a state of aporia – a perplexity at not knowing the right answer, but a curiosity in wanting to find out. Afterward, the teacher helps “give birth” to innate knowledge within a learner through questions which lead the student to deriving the answer himself. Next, the student arrives at knowledge because what he knows can stand up to further questioning. Once Socrates and the servant boy have come up with the right answer, Socrates continues asking the boy questions, but the boy can answer them in the affirmative – his knowledge stands up to questioning.
So – is all knowledge true “recollection”? No, it’s not – but what I take Plato to be saying is that we have significant powers within ourselves – those of reasoning, of classification, of storing knowledge from past experience, of drawing logical conclusions – which allow us to figure things out if we just slow down (or are made to slow down) and think clearly. Moreover, good teachers are those who do not attempt to impart knowledge, but those who attempt to help “birth” knowledge – by asking us to – and showing us how to – think for ourselves.
I was taken aback once again at the depth, subtlety, and – especially – of the irony of Platonic dialogues. Meno is so rich and interesting, and Socrates’s method is amazingly compelling, fresh, and even risky all these thousands of years later.
As they say, after Plato – everything else is just a footnote.