Plato’s Meno (or Menon): “Can Virtue Be Taught?”
“If the Phaedon and the Gorgias are noble statues, the Menon is a gem.” [1]
Meno’s, or the Learner’s Paradox:
[A] man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire. [2]
Plato is a master dramatist and portrayer of character. Plato invented and passed on to the Western world the genre of dialogue, or dramatic conversation, where the whole of it works like a drama, but represents mundane real life situations like a stroll by a river or a dinner party. The characters are what we could call ‘ordinary people conversing’ about complex topics.
The setting for the Meno is fictitious and simple, possibly in a gymnasium in Athens, a place for exercise, education, conversation, and camaraderie. By limiting the focus mainly to Socrates and Meno, Plato gives himself free range to develop the portrait of Socrates with particular vividness, while Meno, who plays a rather dull foil, is no match for Socrates’ conversational skills.
A striking feature of the dialogue is the way the actual words of the speakers are written to reflect the circumstances of the dialogue.
Meno is a Thessalian, young but not very young, rich and well-born. Thessaly in Plato’s time was looked upon as an uncivilized though well-populated place, and Thessalians were a proud people. “They were violent in the behaviour, eager in armed feud, but unaccustomed to political discussion or compromise; faithless as to obligations, yet at the same time, generous in their hospitalities, and much given to the enjoyment of the table. [3]
Meno was a student and follower of the sophist Gorgias of Leontini (c.483-376 BCE), when he spent the last years of his life in Thessaly. Sophists were traveling and popular educators, fee-paid, and tended to frequent the main public spaces in Athens attracting aspiring politically-motivated young men. They were the nemesis of Socrates (and thus of Plato) because they taught how to persuade and to make weaker arguments stronger, and let their proofs rely on appearances and belief rather than truths.
Thus Meno may speak as a product of fashionable or ‘sophistic’ education, but with little skill in dialectics, Socrates’ method of conversational interrogation by steps leading to a conclusion. Meno was also patrikos xenos (hereditary guest-friend) of the Persian King, ‘in a league of friendship with Xerxes’ (Meno, 78 D 28), not a favorable role at the time in which the dialogue is set, roughly 402 or 403 BCE.
Early on a slave from Meno’s entourage is called on to demonstrate ‘learning’ by means of geometry. The humor of this defuses the complexity of the geometric examples and lends a lighthearted tone.
You can read whichever text you like. Here are some translations available online for free:
English translations:
Plato: Meno. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Second Edition. Hackett Publishing, 1980. Available online as a PDF at McGraw Commons
Click to access Plato-Meno.pdf
Plato: Meno, translated by Benjamin Jowett, 1871, available at Project Gutenberg.
Plato: Protagoras and Meno. Translated by Adam Beresford and introduced by Lesley Brown. Penguin Classics, 2006.
Discussion will start and continue in the Forums, and we will meet via Zoom on September 24, 2024 at 11 a.m. EDT.
Happy reading!
[1]J.S. Mill. 1882. Dissertations III 350.
[2]Plato. Meno, line 80e: translated by Benjamin Jowett, 1871.
[3]George Grote. 1847. History of Greece Part. II ch. 3, Liv. xxxiv. 51.