Plato's meno: Questions to be disputed

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PLATO'S MENO: QUESTIONS TO BE DISPUTED

GEORGE KIMBALL PLOCHMANN

Introductory The Meno is not one of Plato's most-noticed dialogues, although far

more has been written about it than about some of the short pieces such as the Ion and Lesser Hippias, or about the Critias and Cratylus, or even - this is certainly true in our own time - about the Laws. Perhaps the reason for this partial indifference is that the Meno is a trifle too concerned with mathematics and method to gain the undivided attention of the moralists and aestheticians who have given us so many valuable reflections upon the Symposium, Republic, Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Phaedo, but too discursive and loose to appeal to many of the recent writers who have feasted them- selves upon the logical analysis in the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Parmenides. At any rate the larger works on the Meno are modest in number - Bluck, Klein, Ovink, Laura Grimm, and Eckstein having been prominent among those authors of the past 30 years devoting all or most of full-dress books to this dialogue - and although chapters and sections as well as journal essays upon it are legion, still a large-scale treatment is something we rare!v come upon. We can even put aside temporarily the work by Laura Grimm, who deals almost entirely with definition, and that by Jerome Eckstein, who is brief to the point of cursoriness on all but one or two points. The time seems ready, therefore, to try to stimulate more comprehensive discussion by offering up a series of questions; difficulties which have nagged at one admirer of the Meno, if not more. Here and there one finds attempts to answer these questions, but I find no single study taking up more than a small handful in any systematic fashion, in which ultimate connections between the solutions to the problems are demonstrated. To be sure, a quite successful elucidation of the Meno could be accomplished without much conscious attention to the problems about to be raised; but because they appear to spring from the very fibre of the dialogue their solution would, it seems, be of considerable help in uncovering the real principles of the work. They are not questions beyond all hope of answering - indeed answers to a few have already been worked out in principle in certain quarters - but the solutions lie mainly beneath the dialogue's gleaming surface. No finite list of questions, of course, can be said to cover any work of art as a totality, providing clues to the full study of its form, yet these are possibly varied enough to bring the thoughts of the reader to focus on the Meno as a unity of all its parts. The project requires temporary abstention from the com- paring of propositions in the Meno with the treatment accorded them in the other dialogues where verbally similar statements show up. The abstention would be for the time being, for just as soon as reconstruction of

Plato's Meno: Questions to be Disputed 267

those other dialogues as philosophical and artistic wholes could take place, one would be able to work across their borders, eventually arriving at statements more likely to tie all the dialogues together and suggest, though not by any means exhaust, their collective meaning.

Some of the questions, especially those bearing upon what is now known as logic, could equally well be raised with reference to many other authentic dialogues, while many of the questions seem especially appropriate, peculiar in fact, to the unusual piece we are considering. Both kinds of queries seem preferable, however, to many of the stock ones regarding the historicity of Meno and Anytus, regarding Plato's immediate practical purpose in writing the dialogue, and regarding its relations to the teachings and organization of the Academy, questions which can be "solved" only upon the basis of very little evidence, none of which is in itself artistic or philosophical. At best these matters are of interest for the constructing of a chronology of Greek life and letters, but they help little or not at all in determining the structure and significance of the Meno or its closest companion dialogues, such as the Protagoras, Gorgias, and Apology.

If Gaul could suffer division into three parts, the task of reading a dialogue can be divided similarly, but with this difference: the portions of Gaul would exclude each other, whereas we trust that the three most important aspects of a Platonic dialogue, which I shall term the dramatic, the dialogic, and the dialectical, are in some degree interrelated. There is nothing new in distinguishing the dialectical aspects from the dramatic, but I shall take the latter in a rather narrow sense, signifying the gestures, setting, and movements of the participants, whatever would appeal in the scene to eye and ear, while the dialogic I take to be the simple distribution of opinions, responses, and insights between persons who enter this scene or who are referred to and quoted almost as if present. Dialectical and dialogic aspects prevail in all the dialogues of Plato, the dramatic being, of course, almost totally absent from the Philebus, Ion, Sophist, Cratylus, Timaeus, Lesser Hippias, and a few others.

I shall order the questions under these three closely co-ordinated aspects for the sake of a neatness which it is hoped will lead no one to think that Plato expected to isolate them one from another in the Meno.

Drama Perhaps the drama could better be called the spectacle, that which we

are supposed to perceive as setting, action, movement, or intended movement (such as an imminent departure to visit the chief archon, or take a bath, or whatever).

Drama and Dialogue. - A modern reader should welcome from commentators some probing into the reasons for the paucity of dramatic details in the Meno, details we almost feel we have a right to expect from Plato. Such a probing cannot profitably center upon so-called early, middle, or late manners in Plato's compositions, because these are determined by his purposes, not the other way round. Of drama in the Meno there is little.

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Is the discussion held indoors, outdoors, within the walls of a city or gym- nasium, where? To know this kind of thing would ordinarily give us a clue to the dialectical meanings. Are the participants sitting, reclining, standing, walking? Where is Anytus during the first two-thirds of the conversation? Where does he go, if he does leave? Have the speakers met by chance or by plan? These are all matters Plato supplies in some detail in the Euthydemus, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Lysis, a few of them even in the Laws; and the reasons for their absence in the Meno may be hidden in the very structure of the dialogue, but they are certainly not on the surface, ready to the eye. We have slaves in the Symposium, Protagoras (one of them with opinions of his own!), and Republic, but in the Meno, where a slave boy is made to speak at length and is for many readers virtually the center of gravity, he and all the others are dramatic ciphers who neither stand nor sit. Why? Do not bother to say simply that this was Plato's late style, because if you do that too will have to be explained, and even if the dialogue were indeed late, which nearly all historians deny, we are no nearer to a solution to the original question, which is now merely rephrased to ask why a class of dialogues differs from another class. (The same argument would hold if your answer happened to be that the Meno represented Plato's early style.)

Dialogue Let me repeat that by the expression "dialogue" I shall mean all those

features (sad to say, they are almost unique to Plato) whereby the develop- ment of thoughts and expressions is parcelled out among persons, present or mentioned and quoted.

Participants. - There are complex relations existing between the four actual participants in the dialogue. Questions, answers, aspirations, re- sentments, protestations of modesty, declarations, denunciations - all these are laid out by Plato in quite complicated ways. Thus in important respects Meno is the questioner of Socrates, in others Socrates questions Meno, a turnabout which one hardly finds in the Republic or the Philebus, for example. Socrates is unable to stimulate Meno to ask the right questions, and unable to calm Anytus enough to give the right answers. Why is it that Anytus, a second man of substance beside Meno, is brought in as a hostile participant, when it would be simple to import a man of similar community standing but gentler disposition? Why does Plato choose Meno, who for all his eagerness has a mind virtually as closed as that of Anytus, to discuss the teachability of virtue? Why not some respondent whose facility with definitions and flexibility of temper would, like Glaucon or Protarchus or Theaetetus, permit the dialogue to advance much farther? In a word, why are the cards so stacked against a successful outcome to this discussion? The answers to these questions would again lead us to consider the overall purpose of the dialogue, which is not to construct an ideal community in which the wisest man can exercise his just insights with utmost power, but rather to show how little can be done, given the rather similar circumstances of Thessaly and Athens (which begin and end the dialogue respectively), to


order one's own life and those about, unless one chooses to bully and threaten in an attempt to gain personal ends. Even the man of friendly argument (Socrates does not refer to himself here as a philosopher, but simply as a dialectician, who uses peaceable arguments rather than combat- ive ones - 75d) is unaware of how to proceed to a clear definition of virtue in such an atmosphere, and one thing of which he is certain is that knowledge and true opinion differ (98b), but the specific contents of the knowledge and of the true opinion he is at a loss to communicate, which is tanta- mount to saying that he has been stunned by his own discourse (80c).

Why Four Participants? - It would be of benefit if someone would show once and for all why there are four immediate participants in this dialogue, rather than the two of the Phaedrus, the three of the Philebus, or the indeterminate number of the Symposium (Aristodemus forgets several speeches and speakers). The fact that there are four suggests some kind of pairing off, and I venture that between Socrates and the slave a clear teacher-pupil relationship is set up, while between Meno and Anytus the former is meant to function as a persuader of the latter. These are not reversible relationships, but they are opposed by partly contrary relations elsewhere. Thus Meno does not teach the slave (this is clearly underlined), and Anytus naturally says nothing to teach or persuade him either. Socrates endeavors to persuade Anytus, but cannot because the latter has no control over his emotions, and tries to teach Meno, but again cannot, for Meno is unable to control his intellect. The slave makes several frank avowals of his own mistakes, Anytus makes none at all, and Meno, between the two, makes partial admissions of his errors but cannot seem to mend his ways. Socrates is in a peculiar situation, for although he makes no outright errors, still he admits to a kind of epistemic insufficiency. Such insufficiencies take the form of his being unable to bring Meno to a knowledge of the what, while with Anytus he is unable to convince him of the reason why certain defects of tradition show up. Jointly Anytus and the slave are ignorant of the how - how to pass virtue down from elder to younger, how to double a square. Again, Meno and the slave at first share a common ignorance of w h e t h e r - whether virtue is teachable, and whether the square is duplicable. Perhaps this sketch appears sufficient to show why there are four participants, but in truth much more remains to be done: What relation does this little quartet have to the subject matter of the dialogue, and secondly, why do most of the other dialogues not share the dialogic structure so conve- niently grounded in fours? Do the Four Reduce to One? - Even if we could answer these two questions satisfactorily, there remains a still deeper one which paradoxically obtrudes itself the more we attempt the distinctions of the last couple of sections. By way of drawing a very rough parallel, let us recall that in the Euthyde- mus (290b-d) the young Clinias is quoted by Socrates as if uttering a distinction which in the light of his previous blunders sounds unusually sophisticated and mature - as if there were a kind of mutual assimilation of personalities taking place, as in Henry James' The Sacred Fount. In passage

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after passage elsewhere in the dialogues Socrates actually enters into the minds of other persons deeply and long enough to help them formulate key arguments to support their positions. There is thus a need to ask whether in some very important sense all the respondents do not reduce to one man, Socrates, exemplifying in varying degrees the different sides of his complex nature.

If we could arrive at some kind of agreement on this matter we would still be faced - were we to look beyond the boundaries of the M e n o - with the fact that there are five other men who most closely resemble Socrates in their capacity to develop a subject matter and conduct an argument: the Eleatic Stranger, the Athenian, Parmenides, Timaeus, and Critias. (Prota- goras is a small cut below them.) In the cases of each of the two Strangers and Timaeus, at least, Plato points to one very important item on which there is fundamental agreement between these men and Socrates, though there is not the slightest hint of any personal assimilation. The other two stand even more remote, in spite of some dovetailing of their interests and devices with those of Socrates. The pattern of assimilation, if it exists at all, is not a simple one of total absorption; and these respondents in the M e n o

can retain some individuality: the slave, his freedom to commit error, Meno, his freedom to use unsound methods, Anytus, his freedom to retain his self-righteousness.

Can we say that the other three participants are offshoots of Socrates, not fully-formed but emanations, as it were, of his life and mind, partial formulators of his basic convictions about the world and its values? Can we not also say, on the other side, that each of them, the slave boy included, would, without the guidance of Socrates, utter statements wholly at variance with what Socrates believes ought to be said? Estimating the proper degree of separation and impersonation is more than any other the real dialogic question in Plato's methodology - the distinction and approximation of temperaments in terms of their logoi - and this cannot be fully answered simply by merely supplying a few adverbs as stage directions for the speeches, as many studies have tried to do, indicating that Socrates is speaking "playfully," "irritatedly," or in any of the other ways that even if correctly imputed would be mere results rather than causes of the dialogic scheme. We must not attempt to sense the speakers' moods in disregard of their intellectual schemata.

Socra te s and Plato . - We may engage in a critical discussion of the frequency with which Plato simply recorded the views of some historical personage named Socrates (which may easily be a joint product of fact and invention), in those of the dialogues in which the latter is interlocutor. After this we ought to distinguish, if possible, between the Socrates of the dialogues and the author of these works - but only afterward. What problem or problems are left over for Plato, as inventor of what is said, to deal with that are not already handled by the strange, squat, bug-eyed character whom we all know? This Socrates is confronted by the problems of settling upon certain kinds of communications in order to form bridges between


his mind and others of many kinds, or he will fail to convince and instruct. This is also, of course, Plato's own problem, for in using Socrates he must establish a bridge between the mind of the writer and his reader - a task which Socrates is made to say (Phaedrus 275d-e) is more risky than when there is direct talking. Plato must consider the entrances and exits of a whole raft of other persons, not only to show Socrates' effectiveness but also to show his shortcomings, or else the shortcomings of the human condition.

This question is a broad one. Any thorough study of method in the Meno could only be carried out in light of the fact that this dialogue represents but one way of dealing with Socrates - in the Philebus, for example, a kind of depersonalization takes place, and in the Sophist and Statesman a de-emphasis of Socrates is chronicled. In effect, then, the dialogic problem in the Meno leads eventually to a contrast between this work and many or perhaps all of its litter-mates.

Dialectic

Here we consider the cognitive operations in which names, definitions, and verbally expressed images are combined, disjoined, then recombined to produce knowledge, or failing that, opinion or conjecture. We may further divide such questions under the heads of methodological inquiry into the substantive concepts of the dialogue (virtue, memory, learning, etc.), and again methodological inquiry into the procedures recommended or actually employed to connect these concepts - i.e. into the method itself.

First, then, the names or concepts. The Kinds o[ Goodness. - In Socrates' very first speech in the Meno he

details certain external goods, a few goods of the body, and some goods of the soul, and this for Plato is at least one kind of exhaustive classification cropping up over and over in the dialogues, each time with a little different emphasis and purpose. The kinds of goodness to which Meno himself looks when he is attempting to define virtue are drawn from among these, although he does not dream of classifying them in this fashion, nor indeed of sticking to any one classification at all. The goodness which Anytus sees masquer- ades as goodness of soul, but stripped of its purple cloak it is goodness of status, both political and personal, and is nothing more than something quite exterior to the virtue of man. Hence a full account of method in the Meno would need to show decisively why there are such distinctions, how many there are, and how disposed.

Prototypes of the Virtuous Man. - Along with changes in the conception of virtue as betrayed in the definitions vainly proposed by Meno and by the subsequent passage between Socrates and Anytus, it would be worthwhile to distinguish the prototypical virtuous men upon whom the four participants - or at any rate three of the four - draw for their images of the good. Thus Meno quite clearly thinks of Gorgias as a source of logoi about virtue, but at no point does he refer to the goodness of the man's character as a model upon which to found one's own behavior, or as an instance from


which with the help of good method one might make appropriate generali- zations. Quite the opposite of this is Anytus, to whom Themistocles, Aristi- des, Pericles, and Thucydides are evidently models whom Anytus wishes to emulate and whom he might undertake to succeed, in the minds of the people. The slave, it goes without saying, has no models, or at least there are none he mentions, and neither does Socrates mention any, although curiously the man he praises explicitly for his skill, by implication for his uprightness, is Protagoras (91d-92a). Now all this must have some bearing upon the definitions of virtue in the dialogue, and as a result we have a right to demand that the commentator put his attention to the individual relations of the men to their exemplars.

Kinds of Ruling. - It seems incumbent upon the careful reader of the Meno to undertake a discrimination of kinds of rule - what, exactly, is meant by virtue as a ruling over men (the second definition which Meno offers, at 73c-d); what it means to say that knowledge rules over other types of cognition, and how, in a different sense, true opinion and conjecture rule over it. The reasons for rule are as varied as are its subjects, and critics would do well, I think, to inquire a little bit further into these. It would also be necessary to relate this to Themistocles and the others who loom large as actual rulers, and whose virtue is not much in question, though their ability to teach it is highly problematical.

Sources and Kinds of Cognition. - At various times Meno proposes teaching, nature, chance, the divine "and perhaps other things" as the sources of virtue. The one that is most promising, namely instruction, is most fully explored, and even illustrated in a remote sense by the fact that insight into mathematics (but not the teaching of mathematics) can be shown the slave, whereas Meno gains some insight of his own into the pursuit of knowledge of virtue, but very little into the essence of virtue itself. The divine is finally re-suggested as a kind of last refuge when other supposals have been proven to be beside the point. We might ask how it comes about that the daimonic, which I suppose might be the real answer to the question, since Socrates is the one eliciting true geometrical opinion from the slave and true political opinion from Meno - how it is that the daimonic is never seriously mentioned in the dialogue. The prime instance of superhumanly excellent instruction, descending upon a hitherto under- privileged youth, is here at hand, as is the prime example of the one dialectic able to straighten out Meno's impressionable thinking-by-hearsay and the one rhetoric able to counter the laughably unimpressionable Anytus. All this would point, were it divinely originated, to perfect learning for all three; but because it is distinctly not taken to be divine, Socrates can make no more than small dents in the armor of the three respondents.

The slave boy has gained an opinion, not a piece of knowledge, and Socrates remarks that if the boy were to be asked additional (and presumably closely-related) questions he would attain that knowledge. On the analogy with love, it is supposed by most of the commentators that such knowledge is some vague whole to which our fragmentary questions


eventually lead us. But much remains to be done before the connection between knowledge and opinion in the Meno can be fully explicated. The notion that further questioning marks the difference between knowledge and opinion should make it clear that the Republic, Theaetetus, or Timaeus could not be used to provide the key to this problem.

Recollection, Knowledge, Opinion. - Puzzles about anamn~sis arise in the Meno in a fashion different from that in the Phaedrus or Phaedo, indeed it is conceivable that despite a carrying-over of words from those dialogues we cannot hope to decide upon any meanings by making a literal cross- reference. The unravelling of recollection and its meaning or meanings in the dialogue we are examining is complicated by the fact that Socrates commences by telling Meno that it is not much more than an old wives' tale. Yet he treats the whole episode of the slave, which at bottom is merely used to illustrate this notion of anamn~sis, as a very serious matter. In conse- quence we may well ask whether it is only the source of the account of recollection that is to be taken lightly. And again, we ought to be able to judge precisely what difference the holding of "doctrines" in a lighthearted or a serious manner may dictate. Most commentators have appeared to assume that if one can prove that the enunciation of some proposition is serious, then Plato can be held responsible for it, otherwise it is space-filler, entertainment. But Plato, like Kierkegaard and unlike Aristotle or Hobbes, has a very complex interweaving of humor and sobriety, and the large number of games mentioned at crucial places in the dialogues underlines the fact that whatever demarcation there may be is not along one obvious line.

A great deal has been written about recollection, usually trying to find points of contact between the Meno and the other dialogues which have something to say on the subject, so it would be otiose to add much, beyond pointing out that the accounts that try to connect recollection with opinion rather than with some sort of rarified knowledge would seem to be on the fight track.

Sources of Truth. - The Meno can be read, of course, as a mere exercise in the Republic's Divided Line, wisdom, hypothesis, opinion, conjecture being its four important terms. If, however, we are to avoid the temptation to force meanings and terminal relationships upon the Meno, and thereby to contribute toward making Plato's closed system where one schema dominates all the dialogues, we must treat the kinds of knowledge and the sources of truth in the shorter dialogue as being in some degree independent of the longer. Thus in the Meno we might well look for a fresh appraisal of certain aspects of experience, of ability to speak a language and count on one's fingers, of hearsay, and of certain mixtures of these - as in Anytus, who combines a vivid memory, certainly, of his father Anthemion, with a seemingly total inability to learn directly from any other sources. I would thus suppose that Socrates' comments about them are virtually his only personal remarks in the Meno - and his effort to appraise the value of each one, would evince a combination of them all in his own psyche, transmuted

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though they might be. It is surely of some interest that in this dialogue the priest, the soothsayer, some poets, gentlemen, statesmen, sophists, and even Spartans and women are proposed as sources of true opinion, and that signally absent are philosophers and men of science. The reasons for the neglect are plain enough, and accord well with the general context of this discussion of virtue and knowledge.

There is, however, an unfortunate silence in the literature concerning one further question. If the Meno is not simply an application of the Republic, nor yet a dialogue written from a different and incompatible point of view (here I side with Shorey, but not for his reasons, against those promoting the developmental hypothesis), then just how, and by what invisible dialectical bonds, is it tied to the longer dialogue? The hypothesis of a system forces us to discard for the moment the developmental theory so carefully argued by Lutoslawski and his followers, while that of an open system militates against the idea of mere literal application of some schematism borrowed from the Republic or indeed from any other dialogues.

The Future, Present, and Past. - There are many kinds of past times in the Meno - the earlier days of the young hotblooded rich boy himself and his encounters such as they were with Gorgias, the alleged past of the slave boy (and by implication of us all) in a life before our birth, when our souls learned all things, the harking back to an age of stalwart-minded statesmen by Anytus, in a kind of patriot's dream, whose attractive romance is outdone only by its shallowness and falseness to fact. It would be encouraging to have more of the commentators pay attention to anamn~sis in the light of these divergent acceptations of the past and endeavor to show how a whole conception of times past, present, and even future throw light upon the main context of the dialogue, which is after all a very existential sort of discussion - what is virtue in our time, in our society, of what use is virtue here and now and to whom? How are we to acquire it, if not from the teachers who have recently been barnstorming through our cities, given the fleeting institutions, chance confrontations, and slender memories of our lives? These temporal strictures are not spoken by the participants, but the recurring references to persons and places makes it clear that this is what is meant; and standing over against this, not wholly applicable to these topics, unfortunately, is the perduring set of truths of geometry which we all know with a little prompting!

Kinds of Memory and Quasi-Memory. - Several writers have some scattered remarks upon the memories of the various participants in the dialogue - indeed, who can avoid saying something about Meno's and about the slave boy's? But more work needs to be done on the interrelations between what all these men keep handy in their memories, what they can be made to recall under the stress of instructive interrogation, and what matters they forget and the reasons for lapses of memory. Thus Socrates seems to know a good deal about the economic and intellectual life of Thessalian cities, but cannot recall what Gorgias has said about a matter exceedingly close to Socrates' own interests and formulations. It is tempting


to pass off such an admission as this with the remark that it is all part of the famous Socratic irony, but this leaves out the deeper question, why Socrates chooses to employ such evasive irony here, and whether the meaning of "I have not a very good memory" at this point (71c-d) is precisely the same as the meaning of similar phrases later on. The four men also show a pattern of different relationships to their own past and future lives: Meno, who through his wealth in his earlier history and present, his current ambitions, virtually promises a future in which political and perhaps military power are principal ends, to be taken quite for granted (note that he does not talk to Socrates about political rule directly, but only indirectly through his definitions of virtue, although Gorgias, from whom he presumably got his notions, is much occupied with this as a problem in the dialogue bearing his name); Anytus, who in future will presumably raise civic discord if he is not persuaded of the meanings of certain expressions, on the basis of a past life which gave him the gifts of fortune; and the slave boy, to whom life has given precious little except the speaking of Greek and counting on his fingers and the chance to see a little of the Hellenic world.

Kinds of Dementia. - Here and there in the dialogue, dementia (mania, aphronia) is mentioned, and the question is whether this is intended to be all of a kind or whether these are different sorts, new each time they are mentioned, by Socrates, for instance, and by Anytus. The solution to this little problem, trivial as it may seem, would throw considerable light upon the way in which related and opposite terms, such as ignorance (amathia) and knowledge (epist~m~) are also controlled; and this would in turn illuminate the more general and important methodological problem of just how all the chief terms of the dialogue are made to hold or to shift their meanings. The discovery of such a pattern would aid considerably in determining the exact status of the Meno in the corpus of dialogues - not its chronological order of composition, which may turn out to be a relativeIy unimportant question, but its dialectical relations to the Theaetetus and Laws (not to mention the Protagoras), where problems very similar to its own are taken up.

We are now in a position to turn to some of the questions of method as they are revealed in both the practice of method and the talk about method in this very subtle dialogue.

Questioning in the Meno. - The Platonic dialogues are by no means of a kind, in putting the first general philosophical question into the mouth of Socrates or one of the other great dialectician-interlocutors. The Republic is an attempt to answer a main question posed by Socrates, true enough, but the Meno finds the philosopher seeking to evade giving an outright answer to a query put to him directly - and rather dogmatically, if one may so say - by the young and abrupt Meno. Meno is hesitant about giving definitions - it is fairly obvious that most of his attempts may be rehashes of what Gorgias or some other sophist has said to him - and in this he differs markedly from Euthyphro, who hardly ever questions but is loaded with answers, or

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in another way from the vacillating Crito, who is a vessel transporting ill- formed wishes and plans and regrets. Meno never asks what something is

- which he should a s k - but always something about its traits or properties - which according to Socrates properly come later. The slave boy begins, in his blundering way, to inquire about the what of his bewildering geometrical figures, but definition is by no means the center of attention in the passage in which he comes forward, and he retires knowing - or rather, having right opinions about - only the equalities and inequalities of certain squares and of certain triangles. Anytus has no questions whatever, he is content to voice animadversions or encomia, and this in a context of hearsay, not direct experience. The real questions come from Socrates, and although these bear a close resemblance to the questions which he asks in many of the other dialogues, nevertheless it would be interesting to look into the reasons why at certain points he does not question Meno at all, but instead resorts to mythic explanations (his practice varies on this point), or why he turns from him to Anytus at a very critical juncture - possibly the most critical juncture - in the dialogue. So much of this seems to be taken for granted by the commentators that I deem it wasteful not to bring it into focus as evidence for certain combined strengths and shortcomings in the Socratic method.

Levels of Discussion. - Although Socrates clearly says a number of times that he is conjecturing (e.g. at 98b), commentators by and large have not taken him seriously, feeling that he has something up his sleeve, that "we all know" that he is really a very wise man who is perfectly sure of his exact knowledge, however much he may even protest his doubt or ignorance (at 71d this is implied; 80c, 86b, etc.). As a matter of fact, there are but two places at which he speaks forcibly of having secure knowledge of what he is saying: at 86b, where he remarks that we need conviction that we must inquire into what we do not know, and again at 98b, where he says that he at least knows that there must be a distinction between knowledge and true opinion. Now these are two epistemic matters, they are both comments upon what one kind of knower knows about knowing. Hence we have a kind of reflexive situation here, and in both cases knowledge is itself the subject of what is said. The upshot is that we are faced with a situation in the Meno in which most of the foundation is shaky, even on those topics which seem to be treated with considerable certainty elsewhere - I mean such topics as recollection in the Phaedo, or the levels of cognition in the Republic and Theaetetus, or the relations of the virtues to civic society in the Laws. The Meno is scarcely a superficial dialogue, even if it is true that the discussion is carried on in a framework of the passing scene in Greek society. Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine depicts a woman of surface beauty and probably quite ordinary mentality; but surely it is arguable that the painting is among his best, structurally at least as sound and successful as several of those more highly touted and having more impressive subject matter. The interrelationships of characters in the Meno and the concepts they entertain are worked out with extraordinary thoroughness, even if they


operate upon a level of transient opinion and everyday custom rather than wisdom gained from speculating upon laws or sciences or eternal forms. The three respondents are as commonplace and shallow as any whom Plato represented, and even a Socrates is stumped in his efforts to use their thin proposals to their own intellectual advantage, improving their smatter- ings and raising them even to the level of right opinion, let alone knowledge.

Kinds of Hypotheses. - It is usually assumed that once a hypothesis always a hypothesis in the Meno (though many writers have conceded, of course, that there are differences between the hypotheses in the Meno and those in the Parmenides, the Republic, etc.). But any serious account of the Meno's method (or methods) should take up the question of the tightness of certain analogies, for this has, I believe, some bearing upon the question. For instance, Socrates proposes some definitions of figure and color as analogous to what he wants to elicit from Meno regarding virtue. He also gives an analogy, on a much higher level of difficulty, in reference to, a triangle inscribed in a circle (86e-87a), which he wants to serve as a proto- type for the question of the teachability of virtue. This latter is labelled a hypothesis, the former is termed a matter of definition (logos). Are, then, these two prototypes of the same sort or are they not, and does the answer to this in turn throw any light upon the general character of hypothesis as it is explicitly described in the dialogue? The point I am driving at is this: We have hypotheses illustrated by analogies. Can hypotheses as they would be properly introduced into the discussion of virtue, and not merely for the sake of educating Meno, also be expected to contain analogies, or would they have to eschew all figurative expression? If there are discrepancies between Plato's devices as they would be described, as they would be employed, and as they are somewhat casually illustrated, then we need to know the reason. We find much dependence in the Phaedrus upon image and analogy, much in the Republic, very little in the Philebus. There is a range, and the locating of the Meno in this range would be of some little help in gaining the understanding that we need.

Logical Relations Between Terms. - The Meno does not openly discuss, as do some of the other dialogues such as the Symposium, the relations holding between pairs of terms, relations holding between two selected terms, or between such a pair on the one hand and another pair on the other, or between larger groups of terms, such as are found in Meno's first list, in which he asks whether virtue is acquired through teaching or practice or by nature "or in some other way." Such an account by a commentator would be worthwhile, for we see how in the Symposium the difficulties posed by the speech of Agathon are resolved by explicit recourse to the fact that some contraries have intermediates. Do all the characters of this dialogue use the same logical structure, then, and if not, why not?

As another sort of quasi-logical relation to be found, let us instance the fact that the Meno refers several times to the sources of virtue - instruction, nature, chance, a divine dispensation or fate (moira) - and each time in terms that fail to imply that there is a completeness to this list. The reason


for this may be simply historical, that is, Plato may have grown lazy; but the chances for this, considering the great care with which he formulated everything else in the dialogue, are very slender. Consequently it is up to the commentator to show why there is this difference in formulation, and why Plato makes Socrates so ready to accept even casual suggestions regarding the sources of human goodness.

Examples in the Meno. - There are certain peculiarities about the Meno that make it one of the dialogues most closely tied to particular examples, even though it is not quite like the Gorgias, in which two contrasting philosophies, two kinds of lives, and two individual persons (Socrates and Callicles) are pitted against each other, or the Critias, in which two distinct kinds of politics in their geographic and technological settings are played off. In the Meno the examples are for the most part individual men, and it is noteworthy that they are unquestioningly accepted as types, much as the slave boy's doubled square is a sample of a universal way of obtaining such a duplication, and his "education" a type of any that seems based upon the recovery of recollected knowledge. But why is this? Why are we treated to Pericles and Themistocles and not just to an account of fathers in general who are unsuccessful in handling their sons, or to Protagoras who is quickly taken as standing for all sophists?

The Mathematical Examples. - Three times in the dialogue geometry is invoked as a paradigm for the right method: the way to define figure (and thence color), the way for the slave boy to construct a figure simply related to another figure, and lastly the feasibility of constructing a figure inde- terminately related to another figure (74b-76b; 82b-85b; 86e-87b). In the first, help is proffered to Meno in his frustrated effort to define a totally different term, in the second there is an exhibition of a presumably necessary characteristic of the mind, and in the third the example is used to explicate a particular kind of reasoning. The several reasons for employing mathematical examples (rather than those drawn from art or biology or indeed more mythical material) are of no little importance in determining the peculiar, rather indirect method which Socrates employs. Eckstein makes a stab at discussing some of these questions, true enough, and so do Klein and Bluck (who carefully examine the strictly spatial and numerical aspects of the cases) and some others; but the discussion is chiefly devoted to deciding just what sort of figure should be drawn (Bluck) or what kind of formula should be used (Klein) rather than to the more important task of integrating the three examples into the dialectic. It is of interest that Socrates picked a problem taken from geometry rather than arithmetic by which to test the slave, even though the boy stumbles in almost everything but his ordinary counting, hence the obstetrics would no doubt be required (and perhaps able) to accomplish the same thing in arithmetic.

Whether the posing and solving of the slave's problem rests upon the earlier one, or whether the posing of the question about figures inscribed in a circle rests upon the slave's or upon that together with the one about color and figure, is another matter of some concern, for if we are to answer


this in the affirmative then Plato has set up a chain of mathematical statements, true and in considerable measure independent of the inquiry into virtue and its possible relations to knowledge; an almost unique procedure in the Platonic writings.

The Definitions. - A full study of the Meno ought to go very thoroughly into the actual relations in the putative objects used in each definiens, seeking to establish what is the defect in each of the three offered (together with the two amendments of the final one), and also its strong points. (Most of the commentators have been content with "narrower," "broader," and similar descriptions, or with simply repeating the objections entered by Socrates. Laura Grimm went deeper, but in so doing introduced a number of distinctions which carry us toward Quine, Tarski, and others of post- Russellian bent. This may not result in falsehood, but in effect it is somewhat unplatonic.) Then there is the question of why so few definitions are offered in the colloquy with the slave boy, and none at all in that with Anytus. In the scramble to connect the Meno with various parts of Euclid, readers have lost sight of the fact that Plato's sources evidently included a number of quite different texts, some of which no doubt used definitions and constructions diverging from those of our familiar Elements. He could have treated the whole instruction of the slave in many ways, so it is also up to us to ask why, for instance, he made nothing of the relation between an ideal square and a perceptible one, why he said nothing about the in- commensurability of the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle with its sides (this has been much discussed in connection with our dialogue, but is really not relevant), or similar matters.

Why the oddly truncated discussion with Anytus? A quite similar account of Pericles et al in the Gorgias, held with another irascible political man, is nevertheless followed by considerably more discussion, together with an eschatological myth. Are we to believe that the real story that ends the Meno is not the afterworld but the death of Socrates, as seen in the fact that Anytus and Athens are the last two names mentioned in the dialogue? If so, what has this to do with the definition of virtue and kinds of cognition?

Rubrics for the Definitions. - Many writers on the Meno, it must be owned, have expounded the definitions of virtue in the first long section of the dialogue as a mere succession with certain moral differences; but it seems to me that Plato is building them upon a rather more solid structure of types of object upon which virtue is exercised, kinds of impulses bringing it about, and frames of social reference (individual, family, city) in which this exercise is to be expected. A recovery of these might well lead to an enlarged comprehension of the reasons why Socrates even wishes to upset these definitions (which number three or five, according as you wish to count his two corrections of Meno's third definition as two new ones). Incidentally, it would pay to draw out such a study; this would reveal much about the order of proposals of the identity of the teachers of virtue in the colloquy with Anytus, a colloquy too long neglected for its logical structure because the commentators have been so worried about the relation of the


threat implied at its very end to the content of the Apology and to the "real" Socrates. I am suggesting, then, that the underlying rubrics of the definitions and of the talk with Anytus are, if not literally the same, at least related by a close analogy, and that this is something which any critic who merely emphasises the moods rather than the dialectics of the speakers, cannot touch upon with any firmness. It is in the loci where the search for virtue and for teachers of virtue goes on rather than in personal whim and touchiness that the real Platonic theory of values must be found. The personages of the dialogue are of importance; but we see in the end that at best they are images.

Method and Prescriptions for Method. - In nearly all the dialogues, the interlocutor (Socrates or the Eleatic Stranger, etc.) says something explicit about wrong method and its results, followed by a recommendation for improvement. Socrates has more to say than most of the others, and in the Meno he first inveighs against asking about the quality or what sort before settling the essence or what. Then he gives his samples of definitions of figure and color, and if we can ignore for the moment any possible weak- nesses in them we may still ask ourselves whether or not he actually practices what he has preached, and in either case why this might be so. Thus the colloquy with Anytus is mainly an attempt by Socrates to list various agents who might be teachers of virtue, but neither "teaching" nor "sophist," nor any other of the terms used at this juncture is defined. Do we simply shrug this off and say that Anytus is "hopeless" and could not possibly understand a request for a definition? Remember that even if the dialogue character is derived from the historical figure directly, it was Plato who put Anytus into the dialogue. Common sense tells us that he could have dropped him, even in face of a documentary proof that all this reported a historical conversation.

It is easy enough to say that Meno himself deals in qualities rather than essences, but to attribute this to his money or his horsemanship or to the low cultural level of the Thessalians is not enough; the explanation involves either irrelevancies or else some form of circular reasoning. Does Plato (not Socrates) try, by making the young plutocrat Meno so obtuse, to indicate something about Meno's deficiencies as a learner that cannot be explained simply by Meno's own efforts to account for the transmission of knowledge?

There are other, slightly more inclusive questions: (1) Are the hints which Socrates gives us sufficient to carry us through each dialogue, one such hint or set of hints being appropriate to that dialogue? (2) Are we supposed rather to add these hints together, in order to make some sort of greater organon out of them, and then plunge into the dialogues? (3) Or should we look elsewhere for the method or methods of the dialogues, dismissing the hints as being of passing interest but relying mainly upon actual practices? (In point of fact, these practices are extremely subtle, for when we look closely enough we see that even the works that seem out- wardly to resemble each other - e.g. the Lysis, Euthyphro, Meno, Gorgias,


etc. all look for definitions - are internally different, and, turn about, there is much in the Sophist that is like the Protagoras.) Or (4) are we to take every last one of Socrates' remarks as being about method, as well as an application of it? This might be a good path to follow, for the studies of dialectic which take as their subject matter merely what Plato says about method have not, I feel, quite caught the complexities and successes of the dialogues.

Platonic and Socratic Method. - There are several possibilities which have been explored by scholars piecemeal but which should be brought together and carefully studied, regarding the degrees of authenticity of the Platonic and Socratic methods: (a). The reports of Socrates in the dialogues - and especially, if you like, in the M e n o - are authentic, and not only that, the dialogues present Plato's own views, methods, aims. On the face of it this seems unlikely to the point of virtual impossibility. Plato would not only be a slavish reporter, but would simply be quoting with approval everything said. But a method of biography and a method of philosophy could hardly be the same. (b). The method of Socrates, as reported, is what he actually thought, held, and said, but Plato does not reveal himself in the dialogues, and if he had a philosophy he either kept it to himself or else his writings of this have been lost. Disregarding the fact that there is no evidence from antiquity of such a body of writings, we may raise the issue of why Plato would choose so elaborately to conceal his own thoughts, making the dialogues a historical exercise in which some of the characters are pretty obviously distortions, slight or radical, of known figures, while others are anonymous "strangers" and other ciphers, historically speaking. The other philosophers who have written in dialogue form, men such as Augustine, Hobbes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer, etc., apparently contradicted very little of their more conventionally-written material, and indeed often paralleled or even repeated what they had to say there. What would be Plato's motive? (c). The methods of the various participants are all imaginary, but we see Plato's own method functioning everywhere. This again seems improbable, though there can hardly, at this late date, be a positive disproof of it. It would mean that whatever Socrates and all the others are made to say was unfamiliar and doubtless uncongenial to all the persons who read the dialogues in Plato's lifetime, and that the personages were mere puppets set up to deliver a sham battle, which nevertheless somehow represented the real thoughts of another person. But the people who are able to extract a fixed "doctrine" from the dialogues have usually done so at tremendous cost, e.g. that of ignoring or treating as inspired foolishness all the utterances that do not corroborate some preconceived "platonism." (Shorey is one of the worst offenders here, though I do not recall passages where he specifi- cally rules out all possible historical accuracy of the reports.) (d). Neither the personages represented nor Plato himself are accurately represented in their philosophies in the dialogues. There are many degrees of departure from historical truth which one might suppose within this


heading. For my part, I incline to think that there are systematic distortions of all or at least the preponderance of the characters and doctrines, but this is in the interest of greater truth, not less, only it is a truth of portraits corresponding not to historical facts but to real forms. In the same way the philosophy of Plato is not really present in the dialogues, but all its names, definitions, and images are there, creating a superb mixture from which we, the readers, can elicit his philosophy which is true but beyond the truths Socrates and the others are made to utter, which is beautiful but beyond the cold beauty of argument or the warm beauty of incandescent rhetoric, good but beyond the virtue of Socrates who comprises all the virtues, including that of readiness to learn at all times, and real but beyond the individual realities of language, thought, and the things of our cosmos.

The Platonic method could not possibly be identical with the Socratic, if only because Meno, the slave boy, and Anytus are presented by Plato to Socrates and Socrates can only question them or answer them. Plato knows that his Socrates cannot achieve miracles: the boy attains right opinion but not knowledge, Meno continues to dally about with qualities and not essences, and as for Anytus, he is worse off, in the sense of now being more obdurate, after his encounter with Socrates than he was before. Socrates cannot offer this as a lesson to us, but Plato can.

These are only first hints of what should be done in a concerted effort to find the unity of the many parts - infinitely many, we suppose - of the Meno. Several worthwhile studies have, as I suggested earlier, touched upon some of these, but not systematically enough, I fear, to throw light upon the least details as well as upon the general schema. If there is a proper goal in the reading of Plato or any of the other great philosophers, it seems that this aim to relate whole and parts should be included in it.

Southern Illinois University

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Plato's meno: Questions to be disputed