On pages 60–65 above, I claimed that Plato draws an extremely vivid portrait of Meno's character throughout the work, and has Socrates attempt to reform it as the conversation goes on. One of his main stratagems is to use the slave boy and Anytus as object lessons from which Meno is supposed to learn. I now wish to examine the last section of the dialogue, 96d onwards, to see whether Socrates ultimately has any success.

Let us turn back to the point where Anytus leaves Socrates and Meno to continue the discussion as to whether virtue is teachable. After concluding that it is not (95b1–96c10), Socrates introduces the distinction between knowledge and true belief (96d1–98b6); finally they agree that virtue is true belief, not knowledge, and comes not by teaching but by divine dispensation (98b7–100c2). What I wish to show is that throughout this passage Meno's behaviour as an interlocutor undergoes a marked change, especially in comparison to the first ten pages of the dialogue.

He is much milder and more co-operative. There are certainly no abrupt or peremptory demands, nor any obstructions. At no point does Socrates need to comment on his failings, even light-heartedly. The third section (98b7–100c2) is a particularly striking contrast to Meno's behaviour in the first part of the dialogue: in all his answers he agrees straightforwardly with Socrates.

In the previous chapter, I went against the trend of many recent commentators who take the conclusion of the Meno to be largely ironic. In doing so, I concentrated solely on the evidence internal to the text. This, however, is to overlook what many of these commentators would see as crucial evidence: the trenchant critique of Athenian politicians in the Gorgias. If, as these sceptics assume, the Gorgias predates the Meno can we not assume that Plato's earlier views are in the background when he has Socrates revisit the question of what the Athenian politicians did for their city?

I wish to continue to go against this trend and argue for a different way of relating the two dialogues. I shall begin by rehearsing the essentials of the political critique of the Gorgias and then argue that, by comparison with the Meno, it operates at a greater level of sophistication where the analysis of political virtue is concerned. It is more likely that the Meno represents an earlier point in Plato's career as a political commentator. To support this claim, I shall attempt to undermine the reasons usually given for dating the Meno after the Gorgias. The upshot will be that there is no longer any reason at all to read the Meno in the shadow of the Gorgias; and any external evidence for finding the Meno's conclusion ironic fades away altogether.

Meno offers his third definition of virtue at 77b2–5:

Socrates' first move is to substitute the word ‘good’ (agathos) for ‘fine’ (kalos). Although he does this very swiftly, the move is not as straightforward as it is made to sound. The word kalos can mean ‘beautiful’, and is commonly applied to physical objects. But it can also apply to actions or characters in the sense of ‘noble’. (I have used the translation ‘fine’ in an attempt to cover both senses.) In Plato's works, the concept of the agathon is very closely connected with whatever is beneficial or useful – prima facie a different sense from that of kalon. Nevertheless, agathon and kalon draw very close together in other dialogues, and it is interesting that here Meno accepts the substitution without any complaint. This allows Socrates to proceed straight to the business of refutation, which he does by examining each of its two components in turn: that virtue involves (1) the desire for good things and (2) the ability to acquire them.

DESIRE AND THE GOOD (77b–78b)

The underlying assumption of this section is that, if something is to act as a mark of the virtuous, it cannot be common to all people, because not everyone is virtuous.

We have now reached a turning point in the dialogue. Meno's definitions have all been refuted and, in response to the demand to inquire into the nature of virtue, he is about to issue a notorious challenge to the possibility of inquiry and discovery (80d). En route to this point, Plato has revealed a number of details about his character, details that will turn out to be fundamental in two ways: first, and more immediately, they will help us understand exactly why Meno issues his challenge at 80d. Second, and more generally, throughout the dialogue Socrates not only discusses education as one of his central themes, but also shows it happening in practice by confronting some of Meno's failings and trying to change them. To appreciate this point, we first need to be aware of what exactly these failings are.

INTELLECTUAL LAZINESS

Right from the beginning, we have seen how Meno appears as someone imbued with the ethos of memorising answers to be recycled at a later date. I mentioned how this was anticipated in the very opening lines and in Socrates' immediate response – his snide comments about the Thessalians and the ‘wisdom’ they have just acquired from Gorgias. The implied criticism comes still closer to the surface at 71c8–d2 when Socrates asks Meno to recall what Gorgias said about virtue, hastily correcting this into a request for Meno to state his own view (which will of course coincide with Gorgias').

IS MENO 77B–78B COMPATIBLE WITH REPUBLIC IV?

Irwin's view

On pages 46–53 I interpreted Socrates' conclusion in the argument of 77b–78b as being that all our self-interested desires are for good things and that no one ever desires anything they know to be bad for them. But in Plato's Ethics, Terence Irwin claims that the argument is susceptible of a very different interpretation, one that would make it compatible with the position of Republiciv. He interprets the negative thesis – that no one knowingly desires bad things – as meaning that no one desires something on the grounds that it is bad, or qua bad. Then he interprets the positive thesis – that everyone desires good things – to mean only that some of our desires are for good things qua good, not that they all are. This leaves open the possibility of our having non-rational desires, focused on objects other than the good, e.g. pleasure or honour. The function of the argument is merely to insist that we never desire something qua bad, which is compatible with the moral psychology of the Republic.

Irwin's reading of the negative thesis seems to me implausible for the following reason. Meno would have to be intent on defending the view that some people desire certain things qua bad. It is difficult to see why he would do this. If the explanation is that he wants to insist that there are people with self-destructive urges, why at 78a5 does he cave in immediately to the claim that no one desires to be wretched (or that everyone desires not to be wretched)? This would be the very thesis he is out to defend if Irwin's view were correct.

INTRODUCTION

By 86c, Socrates appears to have removed the obstacles put in his path at 80b–e. Meno approves of recollection, and certainly accepts that he has a duty to inquire. If Socrates were to have his way from now on, they would immediately resume their search for the definition of virtue.

Before we go any further, it is worth pausing to consider what this inquiry would be like in the light of the methodological and epistemological claims made between 81b and 86c. The problem of discovery required us to start with a known specification of the object of inquiry. In the case of a definitional inquiry, however, there is nothing we can know about virtue without knowing the definition itself. Socrates' solution is to say that we have knowledge unconsciously, but at the conscious level we have to start from mere conjecture. There will be no ‘hard rocks of certainty’ from which to work, and assumptions made at the outset or along the way will be subject to revision. But appearances aside, this inquiry is actually being guided by latent knowledge gradually returning to consciousness.

How in more detail will this process work? We can take our cue from a remark made at 81c9–d3:

Reality is structured, as was our prior awareness of it.

In 87c–89c, Socrates pursues the line of argument from the previous section to establish the conclusion that virtue is teachable. Since they have agreed that it is teachable if and only if it is knowledge, he spends most of this section arguing that it is indeed a form of knowledge (87d–89a). But before drawing the conclusion that it is teachable, he also pauses to reject the possibility that it comes by nature (89a–b), something suggested by Meno at the very beginning of the dialogue.

VIRTUE AS KNOWLEDGE (87d–89a)

Socrates begins by laying down the hypothesis that virtue is good. Since all good things are beneficial, virtue must be beneficial. He then turns to consider the sorts of things often considered beneficial, starting with bodily or material assets such as health, strength, beauty and wealth. Although these sometimes benefit us, they only do so when used correctly; otherwise they harm us. Next he considers qualities of the soul, e.g. temperance, justice, courage, mental agility and magnificence. If any one of these is not some sort of knowledge, it may be either beneficial or harmful. If courage, for example, is not actually knowledge, it amounts to some sort of ‘daring’ (tharros), which results in good or harm, depending on whether it is used wisely. In sum, all qualities of the soul apart from knowledge itself end in happiness when guided by knowledge, but in the opposite when guided by ignorance. On their own, they are neither beneficial nor harmful.

SYNOPSIS OF THE DIALOGUE

Meno, a young aristocrat from Thessaly, asks how virtue is acquired. In reply, Socrates professes himself unable to answer: since he does not even know what virtue is, how can he know how it is acquired? Meno agrees to tackle the nature of virtue first and offers Socrates a definition, or rather a list of different kinds of virtue. After some argument, he accepts that this is inadequate, and offers another definition – virtue as the power to rule – which is also rejected. In order to help the inquiry along, Socrates gives a short lesson in definition, after which Meno offers his third and final definition of virtue: the desire for fine things and ability to acquire them. When this is refuted, he despairs of ever making any progress in their inquiry: how, he demands, can you look for something of whose nature you are entirely ignorant? Even if you stumble upon the answer, how will you know that this is the thing you did not know before?

In the face of this challenge, Socrates changes tack (81a). Adopting a religious tone, he asserts that the soul is immortal and has had many previous lives; what we call learning is in fact the recollection of knowledge that the soul had before. At Meno's request, he offers to provide some support for these claims, and summons one of Meno's slave boys to join them.

INTRODUCTION

Having argued that virtue is knowledge and hence teachable, Socrates begins to express some doubts:

The assumption that there must actually be or have been teachers and learners of something if it is to be considered teachable is crucial for what follows: throughout 89e–96d, Socrates scours the scene to find teachers of virtue, first with the new character Anytus, then with Meno; and when the search proves to be unsuccessful, he concludes that virtue is not after all teachable (and hence not a form of knowledge). But this assumption is easily questioned: the fact that there happen to be no teachers of virtue does not rule out the possibility that it might in principle be taught.

One might think that Socrates has covertly changed the subject at issue. In discussing the opening of the work, I said that Meno's question could be read in three different ways.

MENO'S ATTACK ON THE ELENCHUS

After the third definition has collapsed Socrates asks for yet another, as if things are going to proceed exactly as before. But Meno has finally reached aporia:

Meno may be making at least three points here. The first and most obvious is that Socrates numbs his victims into intellectual inactivity.

OVERVIEW

To give a demonstration of his theory, Socrates questions a slave boy on a geometrical problem. The boy speaks Greek but, as Meno confirms later on, has never been taught geometry. Throughout, Socrates insists that he is merely asking questions and not teaching the boy, i.e. telling him what to think. So when the boy eventually gives the right answer, we are meant to conclude that he did not learn it from any source outside of himself.

Socrates starts the examination by drawing a square with two-foot sides in the sand and, after establishing that its area is four-feet, asks the boy to determine the side of the square whose area is double. The examination then falls into three stages. In the first, the boy confidently gives an answer, which he soon realises to be mistaken; in the second he gives another answer, also wrong, and eventually admits his ignorance; in the third, he moves towards the correct answer.

Although most of the passage is a dialogue between the slave boy and Socrates, Meno is also involved. At crucial points Socrates turns to him to ask about the progress the boy is making. This means that there are two dialogues: one about geometry between Socrates and the slave, and a meta-dialogue between Socrates and Meno about what is happening in the first dialogue.

THE UNITY OF THE DIALOGUE

Although much of this book has been devoted to examining the arguments of the Meno individually, it has also been concerned to read the dialogue as a whole. In the event, this has meant a number of things: sometimes a matter of ironing out inconsistencies between different claims made across the work, sometimes of showing how different passages interrelate or support each other. But one of the main challenges of reading the dialogue as a whole is the question I raised at the outset (p. 3 above): what is the Meno about? We are now in a position to address this explicitly. Faced with the large number of different topics covered in the dialogue, some commentators have sought to find a single underlying theme, claiming that is it ‘about’ virtue, inquiry or knowledge. But in the light of what we have said, it is a mistake to look for a unity of this kind. The fact is that the main protagonists cannot agree on what they should be discussing. Socrates wants to talk about the nature of virtue, Meno about its acquisition. His inability to define virtue leads to a protracted struggle, in the course of which certain methodological and epistemological concerns are aired. So what Plato actually offers us is a dramatised conflict of interests. In a sense, the Meno is a dialogue that cannot quite decide what it is about, and that conflict is essential to the work.

OVERVIEW

When Socrates tentatively concludes that virtue is not teachable, Meno replies:

In response, Socrates revisits the argument that virtue is knowledge to show that they overlooked an important distinction. They were correct to say that virtuous people are beneficial, and that to be beneficial one must guide one's affairs rightly. What they failed to notice was that there are two ways of giving the right guidance. One is by knowledge, the other by true belief. True belief, so long as one has it, is as useful as knowledge. The problem is that it is not stable, and people with mere true belief are apt to change their minds. Only by chaining belief down with explanatory reasoning will they achieve the stability of knowledge (97e2–98a8). Returning to the political context of the dialogue, Socrates claims that Pericles and the other virtuous men guided the city's affairs correctly by true belief. Because they lacked any knowledge, he compares them to prophets and soothsayers who, under the influence of divine dispensation, say much that is true without any understanding. Similarly, the virtue of the eminent Athenians comes not by teaching but by divine dispensation (99e6).

We now come to one of the most well-known passages in the dialogue. In response to the stingray speech, which concerns the psychological effects of the elenchus, Socrates has just proposed that they jointly inquire into what they do not know. Meno's counter-response is to pose an epistemological challenge to the very possibility of inquiry and discovery. This challenge has become known as ‘Meno's paradox’. One thing that has made it seem so important is that it prompts Socrates to introduce the theory of recollection and, with it, the examination of the slave boy. The challenge has also attracted a good deal of scholarly interest because of the interpretative issues it poses. First, it has proved very difficult for scholars to agree on what the problem behind the ‘paradox’ actually is. Second, there is the question of whether Meno uses the challenge merely as a dodge to evade further cross-examination, or whether he is motivated by a serious philosophical concern.

In dealing with the first issue, it is very important to recognise that Plato structures this phase of the dialogue in two stages: first, he has Meno challenge Socrates with a posse of three questions (80d5–8); then Socrates reformulates the challenge into what he calls ‘the eristic argument’, a dilemma about the impossibility of inquiry (80e1–5). In what follows, I shall call the first ‘Meno's challenge’ and the second the ‘eristic dilemma’.