The problem to be discussed is the paradox of inquiry in Plato’s Meno, 79-81[1]. We have, on the one side, Meno arguing for the impossibility and vanity of inquiry; on the other side, Socrates is, in response to Meno, recounting a myth which equates our concept “learning” with recollection, anamnesis. The following is an attempt to shed some light‑or alternatively, increase perplexity‑regarding the mentioned passage.
Meno can be seen as a dialogue regarding virtue: can you learn virtue, i.e. are there any teachers in virtue? Alternatively, it can be viewed as an attempt to summarise quite a few interesting notions, e.g. the concept of virtue; “is knowledge possible”; ignorance, aporia, being the beginning of all wisdom; Socrates confronting the power-hungry Meno, friend of Aristippus, Socrates’ hedonistic disciple. It is, though, the problem of knowledge that will concern us now.
Meno complains about Socrates being a cause more of perplexity than of knowledge. Meno likens Socrates to a torpedo, a seafish: whenever he is about to explain anything, the very argument creates ignorance. It seems almost as if this attack on Socrates is a last attempt to regain some of the lost ground when during the whole argument, Meno has been shown not to know anything‑not even his own ignorance! Socrates does not want to pursue the argument whether he is like a torpedo or not more than to say that he, Socrates, is as filled with ignorance as Meno. The main theme is virtue, human excellence, and Socrates tries to take up the lost thread again, but Meno suggests the futility of inquiry per se.
1) And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know?
2)What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry?
3)And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?[2]
These questions by Meno make the dialogue depart from the subject of virtue and Socrates devotes instead his energy to refute Meno’s indirect assertion that it is impossible to progress because there is no way by which we can gain knowledge of what we not already know. Since we are not interested in learning anew whatever we already know, and given the impossibility of making the unknown known, inquiry is an impossibility. Socrates, though, is not interested in accepting such a reasoning and applies the mathematical technique “by which what is sought, to zêtoumenon (the “unknown”), is taken as something agreed upon, as an homologoumenon (as if it were “given”), and then followed up through necessary consecutive steps until something previously agreed upon as true (something “given”) is reached.”[3] The way Socrates proceeds is by invoking the existence of divinity: “I will tell you why: I have heard from certain wise men and women who spoke of things divine that‑”[4] The very sentence does not end and from that might be guessed that Socrates looks within, which he so famously does in Symposion. The wise men spoke of, according to Socrates, the immortality of the soul, how the soul had experienced everything it was to experienced as, given the assumption of metempsychosis, the soul had wandered around on earth, as well as above and below, countless times. The soul had become omniscient by having experienced everything. By recollection, anamnesis, can whatever there is to know be known, i.e. “if a man is strenuous and does not faint.”[5] With this possibility to recollect anything, Socrates does not have any mercy for “the sophistical arguments about the impossibility of enquiry”[6]
Let us look at the arguments a bit closer: firstly, Socrates applies the mathematical analysis, referred to above, by taking something for granted at first and then, having proved it, take it for being true. The “taking for granted” part is the use of authorities (oracles and poets), and the proof is by working backwards in proving the inherent existence of all knowledge in the soul in 81 onwards; Socrates will there use geometry, for example.
It is interesting to note that Socrates assumes the soul once to have been able to learn, even though it nowadays only can recollect. This change from having learnt to being omniscient is not explained more than by saying that the soul has been re-incarnated very many times. Furthermore, the soul learnt by “having seen all things that exist”[7] Being a bit more speculative, we could argue that Plato here points to the active and passive aspects of the soul: the ever sustaining, never changing part, and the other part which partakes in phenomena; this would be supported by commentators like the Neoplatonist Proclus. Socrates’ earlier discussion about the necessity of knowing the whole, and not piecemeal, can help us here by thinking about knowledge being a whole and recollection being the process of particularisation whereby Knowledge (as a whole) is applied to a specific instance.
If recollection requires tireless effort, most of what we call knowledge would, probably, not be described as knowledge by Socrates. So what are we knowing, in day-to-day business? The paradox of inquiry depends very much upon what sort of knowledge that Socrates refers to. If Socrates means ordinary knowledge, deductive knowledge, we find ourselves at pain trying to explain how we daily acquire knowledge; on the other hand, Socrates mentions true opinions later on in Menon and they would provide a neat solution. Interpreting knowledge and the business of inquiry as a quest for self-knowledge and knowledge being the privilege of a chosen few, the questers, then we would more easily understand Meno’s criticism of inquiry as criticism of knowing first principles. Likewise, ordinary knowledge‑how to fix the car‑is a derivative and as such true opinion; true opinion because one knows the functioning of the car but not the nature, Eide, of the car.[8]
Quite often, the problems in Socratic dialogues can be solved by right definition. The paradox of inquiry is not really refuted by Socrates: instead, a different theory is presented. To underline that Socrates did not debunk Meno’s paradox is most important; not having done so, the solipsism in Meno’s argument is still valid. One might even spot solipsism in Socrates’ version of anamnesis! The impression left is that Meno subscribed to Socrates’ recollection-theory simply because he found it interesting‑not logically compelling. Meno giving up his paradox must not be seen as an invalidation of the paradox.
Before attempting a solution to Meno’s paradox, one must be clear whether to see it as an argument put there by Plato in order to let Socrates’ theory shine clearly or as a real paradox. The problem with the paradox is that it is static; its tautology says whatever is known is known and whatever is not known is not known.[9] If we were to subdivide the known into consciously known and subconsciously known, we would not have to care more about the unknown than remembering the tautology. In different terminology: we have actualised versus latent knowledge. In Plotinus we find the hypostases: the One, the Intellectual-Principle, the Soul, and the System of Nature. Here the Soul represents latent knowledge, and is as such omniscient, and the System of Nature is the particularisation of this knowledge of the soul.[10]
The very process of analysis of Meno, and any work of Plato, of course, might serve us as a help in anamnesis, so let this only be the first of several drafts to come!
[1] Benjamin Jowett’s translation has been used.
[2] The three sentences form Meno’s question to Socrates in steph. 80. My italics.
[3] Klein, Jacob A commentary on Plato’s Meno University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1965, p 91
[4] Meno, 81
[5] ibid.
[6] ibid.
[7] ibid.
[8] In economics we could talk about short-run versus long-run knowledge!
[9] We could remember Kipling saying “West is West and East is East and never the twain shalt meet” as opposed to Goethe claiming “Orient and Occident sind nicht mehr zu trennen”.
[10] “Plotinus describes each individual soul as omnipresent, indivisible in its unity; as indivisible, it manifests the entire heavenly system as a unit within itself” is Anthony Damiani’s interpretation of Plotinus:“...each separate life lives by the Soul entire, omnipresent in the likeness of the engendering father, entire in unity and entire in diffused variety.” [V.1.2] (Plotinus. the Enneads Larson Publ.: Burdett, NY, 1992)
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