Plato’s Meno

Week 4: What is virtue / excellence? — continued

For this class (and ideally, each subsequent session) please have the whole of the Meno read in advance. In particular, though, today we will be concentrating on 77a – 79e and 80a-81e..

Meno’s fourth attempt: is it substantively different from the third?

Another of Socrates’ suppositions

Can anyone ever desire and knowingly choose anything bad? Socrates argues that only if we don’t know what it is can we do so. Christian belief takes a darker view of the soul and its choices: Christian moralists from St. Paul down through St. Augustine and those into the twenty-first century argue that we do knowingly choose things we ought not, knowing that they are not good for us or in themselves. Is the fallen and sinful nature part and parcel of this, and if so, can we simply say "Yes"?

Meno’s confession of ignorance (80a-80d)

Aporia (accented on the third syllable) is one of the essential characteristics of most of the early Platonic dialogues. Its original sense denotes getting stuck — finding no way through the problem. (Aporia has the same root ultimately as our word “pore”, a way through something, whether a rock or our skin.) Many of the early dialogues concern asking questions that wind up with no clear answer.

Here Meno confesses that he’s stuck — lost — in the tangles of the question. It is a kind of formal admission of defeat. Some dialogues proceed beyond this point; some do not. Clearly this one does.

Can one ever search for something without knowing what it is? (80d-81a)

To some extent, this is a confusion between knowing the question and knowing the answer. Obviously it seems to muddle the question and the question-answering process, if we don’t distinguish identifying the question from identifying its answer. I'm here reminded of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s widely mocked but essentially correct distinction between what he called the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns”. In general (applied to military situations) he was trying to distinguish between those questions we have, but to which we don’t know the answer, and those other questions that haven’t even really occurred to us yet, which may be at least as important to address. Whatever your politics, the distinction is an entirely reasonable one.

I think we need to take some time here to unpack the different kinds of unknowing. It seems reasonably possible not to know what 24,896 ÷ 143 is, but to know a method for getting the right answer. We do therefore know at some level exactly what we're looking for, though we may not realize or recognize the complete or resolved answer until we have it in hand.

Introducing the essential Socratic notion that knowing is essentially recollection of a pre-existence.

This is one of the core concepts of Socratic/Platonic epistemology (the study of how we know what we know). It needs to be viewed in context here, but we will elaborate it more completely next week in one of the most memorable and celebrated passages of the dialogue, the geometrical analysis of a non-obvious problem by the untutored slave of Meno’s (79e-86c).