Meno

With Meno we're returning to the middle period dialogs that I started skipping over when I caught a glimpse of their complexity in Phaedo.  Of course, the separation of early from middle is also a bit fuzzy.  Officially, Gorgias and Clitophon are all early Socratic dialogs, but they are clear borderline cases either in terms of content or complexity.  Meno is also a borderline case, though from the opposite direction -- officially classified as a middle period dialog, it still features Socrates as the main character and still ends in an aporia of sorts.  Like Gorgias and Clitophon, it also foreshadows the trial of Socrates.  Here Anytus, one of Scorates' accusers in the Apology, issues a not-so-veiled warning that Socrates' habit of going around uncovering that nobody knows anything is earning him powerful enemies.  By ordering and comparing these dialogs I think we can venture a hypothesis about Plato's literary and philosophical development.  

A beginning point might be a classic early dialog like Laches.  There, as Plato's main character, Socrates' schtick is entirely that he only knows he knows nothing.  The dialog is supposedly searching for the definition of courage, but under Socrates relentless questioning we discover that to understand a part of virtue like courage we really have to define all of virtue as a whole.  Since Socrates does not claim to know what virtue itself is, the dialog ends with no firm conclusion.  We might situate Protagoras as the next step beyond Laches.  This is another aporetic dialog starring Socrates, but his interlocutor is much more sophisticated in this one.  It also introduces three central themes -- the importance of knowledge of what's good and bad for us, the question of whether virtue can be taught, and the problem of style in philosophy (long speeches versus short questions and answers) .  Socrates tries to argue that virtue is simply a matter of knowing what will bring us pleasure and pain now and in the future, since everyone wants the good, people only do themselves harm through ignorance of what's good for them, and particularly through ignorance of their ignorance.  Unfortunately, if virtue is a type of knowledge, then it should be teachable, which contradicts Socrates' earlier argument that there are no teachers of virtue.  We still end in confusion, but Socrates is offering a little more positive philosophical content.  Together, I think these two dialogs give us the best and most interesting look at 'early Socrates' as a character in Plato's development (though you could easily substitute Euthyphro or Charmides for Laches since they're built on the same model).

Clitophon might reflect the first short but sweet critique of 'early Socrates'.  Socrates eloquently convinces you that virtue is important and that you don't know what it is, but he doesn't really point you in any specific direction.  You leave him almost exactly where you began -- ignorant.  He inspires an urgent question without telling you how to find the answer. 

Gorgias would then be the next step, which begins to answer the charges brought in Clitophon and brings us to the hinge I'm imaging between early and middle period Plato.  Since it's nominally about oratory, this dialog more explicitly takes up the question of philosophical style we saw alluded to in Protagoras.  It also extends the question of knowing what's good for us by introducing an appearance versus reality distinction.  The good is no longer simply the (net) pleasurable, but is something qualitatively distinct from pleasure.  'Knowledge' will then be a term reserved for finding this deeper good, one which cannot be calculated, whereas we merely have a 'knack' for finding pleasure, without fully understanding what causes something to be pleasurable.  Socrates still insists that he doesn't know what the good is, nor does he claim to teach it, but now he seems more certain that it has something to do with understanding the causes of things.  Socrates' questions always aim for this underlying understanding; he doesn't give a damn if his speeches are pleasurable or not for the audience, and people who do are just shameless flatterers.  Cue the lynch mob.  Finally, Gorgias ends with a short version of the same myth of metempsychosis that appears in Phaedo.  By now we're seeing a lot of positive philosophical content, some direct meta-reflection on the method of philosophy and how this differs from oratory, and the first glimmer of the appearance reality distinction that Plato is so famous for.  

Meno is I think the last step in this transition in several ways.  First off, it makes clear that the Socratic method has pissed off a lot of people, especially famous and powerful people who are used to being respected for how much they know.  The trial and death are even more clearly foreshadowed by Anytus' threat.  So if we read the Apology followed by Phaedo (skipping over Euthyphro and Crito as contiguous in dramatic setting but not philosophical content) right after finishing Meno, we could easily get the impression that the character 'early Socrates' has been killed off only to be reborn in substantially different form as the Socrates of Phaedo.  I mean, we've known for a while it had to happen, right?  From Plato the author's point of view, this may be an appealing way to step into his own voice while preserving what's useful about the dialog format, as well as some nominal role for his franchise superhero.  Since it's clear Plato's already started having ideas that go beyond knowing that he knows nothing, the master's death may have been foreordained by his student's development.  Naturally, I'm just goofing, and have no reason to believe that this is the order they were written in.  But they make sense that way, and if you want an order selection of early dialogs, these are the ones I would choose.  Laches, Protagoras, Clitophon, Gorgias, Meno, Apology, Phaedo.

Meno also reads as a transition point in terms of its philosophical content.  On the one hand, you could read it as another aporetic dialog where Socrates again fails to give a definition of virtue, the ultimate question in all the Socratic dialogs.  On the other hand, the question itself is starting to shift a little bit and become more concrete.  Without any preamble Meno jumps right in with its namesakes' question.

MENO: Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess it by nature or in some other way? (70a)

Notice that Meno has not asked what virtue (or temperance or courage or piety or oratory or the fine) is, but whether it can be taught.  Now, Socrates will spend the first part of the dialog backing up from this question and arguing that we cannot know whether virture can be taught until we know what it is.  Meno tries to offer a quick definition to get the main conversation started, but we already know how this is going to go.  This first section reads exactly like all the early dialogs we've read and repeats the same arguments.  We cannot define virtue itself simply by talking about all the different virtues that different people have at different times of their lives.  We also cannot define virtue as simply the ability to rule justly, because while being just is a virtue, there are many other virtues like temperance and courage.  So saying that virtue is justice is like saying that shape is round; you're only giving an example, not a definition.  And if we say that virtue is the desire and ability to acquire good stuff, we also run into problems we've seen before.  The first criteria is empty -- everyone wants the things they think are good, no one actively desires the bad for themselves.  The second criteria is not specific enough -- only the ability to justly acquire good things would be a virtue.  But then we've again reduced virtue to justice, whole to part.  In which case, 

I think you must face the same question from the beginning, my dear Meno, namely, what is virtue, if every action performed with a part of virtue is virtue? (79c)

 Plato had obviously not heard of the concept of a fractal.  

As I said, we've seen all these arguments before.  In fact, this is the point where we would expect an early Socratic dialog to end.  Meno even gives a little speech about how confused he is, how Socrates has so numbed his mind that he has nothing more to say.

MENO: Socrates, before I even met you I used to hear that you are always in a state of perplexity and that you bring others to the same state, and now I think you are bewitching and beguiling me, simply putting me under a spell, so that I am quite perplexed. Indeed, if a joke is in order, you seem, in appearance and in every other way, to be like the broad torpedo fish, for it too makes anyone who comes close and touches it feel numb, and you now seem to have had that kind of effect on me, for both my mind and my tongue are numb, and I have no answer to give you. Yet I have made many speeches about virtue before large audiences on a thousand occasions, very good speeches as I thought, but now I cannot even say what it is. I think you are wise not to sail away from Athens to go and stay elsewhere, for if you were to behave like this as a stranger in another city, you would be driven away for practising sorcery. (80a)

Meno, however, is just getting started.  Because while Socrates still doesn't know what virtue is, he's now going to point us in the right direction of how to search for it.   Offering this more positive content is meant to overcome the objection we first saw in Clitophon, a version of which is repeated here.  Socrates has convinced us of the importance of virtue, but since he himself doesn't know what it is, how can he help us find it?  In fact, how can we ever find something if we don't know what we're looking for?  How can we ever learn something new?

SOCRATES: I know what you want to say, Meno. Do you realize what a debater's argument you are bringing up, that a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know? He cannot search for what he knows—since he knows it, there is no need to search—nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for. (80e)

This problem of learning about something you don't know is inherent to Socrates central claim.  We've seen that none of the early dialogs tackle this question of what to do after you urgently realize you know nothing.  Gorgias at least brought the question to a head by distinguishing the appearance of knowing -- a knack for producing effects -- from the reality of knowledge -- understanding of causes.  So at least we know what knowledge is not.  But Meno goes a step further and proposes the idea that the only way we acquire knowledge is through recollection.  The dialog illustrates this with a simple mathematical example.  Socrates 'teaches' one of Meno's slaves how to find the length of a side of a square with twice the area of a square with a given side length.  I won't bore you with the details (draw a diagonal) because the point is not the conclusion, but the way he goes about producing it.   He merely asks the slave questions and lets him come to his own conclusions, correcting his errors only by asking him more questions to verify that what he's said actually leads him to those conclusions.  Since the guy has never studied mathematics, and Socrates teaches him nothing but merely questions him, we conclude that he can only be remembering something he knew from before he was born.  Which takes us straight to the myth of metempsychosis that we have already seen in Gorgias and which will be expanded in Phaedo.  So while we still don't know what virtue is, we now at least know that searching for it will be like remembering something our soul had forgotten before it came to inhabit this body.

Clearly, metempsychosis and the idea that learning is just remembering sound a little kooky to the modern mind.  But you have to understand these in the context of the problem that Plato has posed.  Socrates never denies the fact that there are virtuous people.  But he never finds anyone who knows about virtue well enough to teach it.  In fact, even famously virtuous men can't manage to teach it to their own sons, which also suggests that you can't simply inherit it.  Nor are people randomly born with it, because it's impossible to predict which children will grow into wise and virtuous adults.  So virtue is the knowledge of what's good for us, but we have to learn it without having a teacher and without knowing exactly what it is we're looking for.  Kooky as it sounds, recalling a virtue you've inherently forgotten solves the problem pretty well.  

[Actually though, if you strip away the mythic element, I don't think the idea of learning as recollection should seem that unpalatable to us.  Mathematicians regularly claim to be discovering things, not inventing them.  This is a substantially similar idea.  The main difference would be that the mathematician doesn't claim to have forgotten the idea but to be learning about it for the first time.  Yet these ideas are still felt to have some sort of pre-existence, if not temporally, then metaphysically.  By learning about them mathematicians are in a sense reincarnating them in their minds.  And if these mathematical ideas don't live in an abstract realm beyond human experience, then where do they live?  I'm not endorsing this as a philosophy of mathematics.  I'm merely suggesting that if we take metempsychosis to be a metaphor for how abstract entities -- like ideas or souls -- circulate through concrete entities, it feels less silly.  In fact, if we push this metaphor further and ask how ideas or souls get individuated through reincarnation and whether learning could be a type of simulation, rather than a literal repetition of the same -- questions that Plato seems to leave implicit in his myths so far -- we are already treading close Difference & Repetition.]

I see the concept of remembering as a key bridge between the initial appearance-reality distinction we find in Gorgias, and the full blown theory of Forms as it appears in Phaedo.  Knowledge of reality is something we remember.  We don't possess this knowledge and so cannot give it to anyone else in the form of a teaching.  Nevertheless, it is still within us.  Socrates' knowing he knows nothing begins to take on a different sense in this light.  It is no longer merely critical.  Instead, his admission that he knows nothing, and his questions that demonstrate no one else does either, cohere into a method for producing knowledge.  His style is exactly the prompt we need for the first stage of remembering, to remember that we have forgotten.  

Meno perfectly illustrates this new perspective on the Socratic method.  Socrates' conversation with the slave reaches an impasse when his questions lead the man to understand that a square with double the side length (his first guess) will have four times the area, and one with 1.5 times the length (his second guess) will have 2.25 times the area.  Finally, the slave sees that he doesn't know how to find a square with exactly twice the area.  This is precisely the moment Socrates has been waiting for.  

SOCRATES: You realize, Meno, what point he has reached in his recollection. At first he did not know what the basic line of the eight-foot square was; even now he does not yet know, but then he thought he knew, and answered confidently as if he did know, and he did not think himself at a loss, but now he does think himself at a loss, and as he does not know, b neither does he think he knows.
MENO: That is true.
SOCRATES: So he is now in a better position with regard to the matter he does not know?
MENO: I agree with that too.
SOCRATES: Have we done him any harm by making him perplexed and numb as the torpedo fish does?
MENO: I do not think so.
SOCRATES: Indeed, we have probably achieved something relevant to finding out how matters stand, for now, as he does not know, he would be glad to find out, whereas before he thought he could easily make many fine speeches to large audiences about the square of double size and said that it must have a base twice as long. (84a)

Socrates's numbing questions bring about our confusion.  He torpedos all the things we thought we knew and were prepared to repeat out of unthinking habit.  Now we know that we don't know, we remember that we have forgotten.  Here the question of philosophical style, its distinction from oratory or others arts that involve speaking, is given a proper ground.  We saw Socrates' preference for short questions and answers over long speeches in many of the early dialogs and it was most clearly expressed in Gorgias.  But now we have a method to the madness.  Socrates' questions are meant to interrupt our train of thought (an idea which Eric Havelock fully develops here).  They enable confusion.  In fact, Socrates even admits that part of his reason for giving us the myth of metempsychosis and the theory of learning as remembering is because it bring us to that state of confusion where we actually ask questions of ourselves, while simultaneously suggesting to us that the answers are within.

SOCRATES: Then if the truth about reality is always in our soul, the soul would be immortal so that you should always confidently try to seek out and recollect what you do not know at present—that is, what you do not recollect?
MENO: Somehow, Socrates, I think that what you say is right.
SOCRATES: I think so too, Meno. I do not insist that my argument is right in all other respects, but I would contend at all costs both in word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it. (86b)

In other words there is an immanent reason for believing that we have forgotten these transcendental ideas.  It empowers our curiosity.  And the unfolding of our curiosity is meant to lead us in the direction of these ideas.

Finally, Meno sets up the theory of Forms in Phaedo in one more way.  Where Gorgias distinguished the knack for producing pleasure from the knowledge of causes that led to being good, Meno again goes a step further.  At the very end Socrates introduces a distinction between knowledge and correct opinion.  Of course we'd like to truly know what virtue is.   But in fact, Socrates observes that as long as we happen to a correct opinion about it, we will achieve exactly the same results.  He likens it to asking for directions.  If I'm from Seattle and have been there many times, I know exactly how to get there.  However, I could also form an opinion about the best route by looking at a map or hearing someone else talk about it.  In that case I wouldn't know how to get there, but I could still give you directions that will get you there.  The image may conjure a distinction between first-hand knowledge and hearsay or inference, but this is not quite what Plato has in mind.  Opinions are not distinguished so much by a lack of direct experience as by the fact that they are variable, changeable, ephemeral.  After all, the abstract questions we're interested in aren't approachable by experience at all, direct or otherwise.  Philosophical and mathematical ideas lie outside of experience by their very nature; no one has experience with virtue itself or a perfect circle.  Knowledge of these ideas is less about a first hand subjective empiricism than about finding something which would keep us in touch with them on a permanent and ongoing basis.  In modern language we'd say that we want our beliefs to track the truth.  Socrates illustrates the distinction by referring to the statues sculpted by Daedalus, which were so lifelike that they had to be tied down lest they run off!

SOCRATES: To acquire an untied work of Daedalus is not worth much, like acquiring a runaway slave, for it does not remain, but it is worth much if tied down, for his works are very beautiful. What am I thinking of when I say this? True opinions. For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man's mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why. And that, Meno, my friend, is recollection, as we previously agreed. After they are tied down, in the first place they become knowledge, and then they remain in place. That is why knowledge is prized higher than correct opinion, and knowledge differs from correct opinion in being tied down. (97e)

In other words, to know is precisely to remember that we've forgotten the reasons why we have certain opinions.  If we can recollect the causes of things, we can use these as a steadfast guide to judging actions.  These causes are like the underlying reality to which we can tie our opinions of appearances.  And they are things we can try to learn and know through recollection, but cannot be taught.   Again, it bears mentioning that these aren't the physical and empirical causes we tend to think of today, but the things which cause some act to possess virtue or courage or wisdom.  At this point we've elaborated the appearance-reality distinction in Gorgias and we're a stone's throw from the two part explanation of the theory of Forms as laid out in Phaedo.  

In this context, I think it's significant that Socrates goes on to say that maybe the only thing he really knows is that opinion and knowledge are distinct.  

SOCRATES: Indeed, I too speak as one who does not have knowledge but is guessing. However, I certainly do not think I am guessing that right opinion is a different thing from knowledge. If I claim to know anything else—and I would make that claim about few things—I would put this down as one of the things I know. (98b)

This comment is particularly interesting given the way Meno ends.  Socrates claims that correct opinion, insofar as it is correct, is just as useful as knowledge as a guide to action.  Which turns out to explain why people like statesmen can learn virtue but be unable to teach it.  They have acquired correct opinions about what is virtuous, but they don't really understand the causes of virtue.  Socrates says they are divinely inspired in this respect.  

... virtue would be neither an inborn quality nor taught, but comes to those who possess it as a gift from the gods which is not accompanied by understanding, unless there is someone among our statesmen who can make another into a statesman. If there were one, he could be said to be among the living as Homer said Tiresias was among the dead, namely, that "he alone retained his wits while the others flitted about like shadows." In the same manner such a man would, as far as virtue is concerned, here also be the only true reality compared, as it were, with shadows. (100a)

With this foreshadowing of the cave allegory, I think we see the Socratic method reach its apotheosis.  It's almost as if the method of inquiry directly gives birth to the theory that would satisfy it, as if the medium were the message.  Socrates does not know what virtue is.  But he does know (and not merely opine) that correct opinion differs from knowledge.  He knows that because he can teach you to see this distinction for yourself by employing his method of inquiry.  He has even found the cause of why we do not know -- we forgot.  All our opinions try to cover over this forgetting.  Socrates can't teach us about virtue, but he can teach us to see our ignorance for what it is.   He can teach us questions but not answers.  He can make us a lover of wisdom but he cannot makes us wise.  That, we have to remember for ourselves.  Now we have a whole theory of why the Socratic method actually succeeds just exactly when Clitophon and Meno think it is failing.  Plato himself perhaps forgot this idea on his way to the cave.