Meno

Meno is a man who was taught philosophy by a man named Gorgias, who many consider to be a very wise man. Socrates and Meno are talking, and Socrates talks up Gorgias and Meno as being very wise, as they give “sweeping and confident answers” to any question, while Socrates doesn’t even know how to define virtue.

Meno asks if Socrates is really that dumb, before Socrates says that he thinks no one can actually define what virtue is.

Given a burst of confidence at being able to prove he is a better philosopher than Socrates, Meno launches into a short speech on virtue.

if you want the virtue of a man, it is easy to say that a man’s virtue consists in being able to manage public affairs and thereby help his friends and harm his enemies – all the while being careful to come to no harm himself. If you want the virtue of a woman, it’s not difficult to describe: she must manage the home well, keep the household together, and be submissive to her husband; the virtue of a child, whether boy or girl, is another thing altogether…

Socrates responds by pointing out that all he did was list what virtue can be, not what it was

if I were to ask you what sort of being a bee is, and you said, ‘there are all sorts of different sorts of bees,’ what would you say if I went on to ask: ‘Do you mean that there are all sorts of different sorts of bees insofar as they are bees?

Meno replies

I would say that they do not differ from one another insofar as they are all bees.

saying that it is not important that they’re different from each other, as long as each of them is an example of virtue.

After pressuring him again to say what an actual definition of virtue is, in keeping with the last analogy, he wants to know what a bee is in it’s common form between all bees.

What’s important in the next quote isn’t the content, as it’s Meno slowly being proven wrong, but how Socrates keeps making him concede his point with the Socratic Method

S: I am asking whether you think it is only in the case of virtue that there is one for a man, another for a woman and so on. Does the same go for health and size and strength? Do you think that there is one health for a man and another for a woman? Or, if it is health, does it have the same form everywhere, whether in man or in anything else whatever?

M: The health of a man seems to me the same as that of a woman.

S: And the same goes for size and strength? If a woman is strong, her strength will be the same and have the same form; for by ‘the same’ I mean to indicate that strength is strength, whoever has it – man or woman. But maybe you think it makes a difference.

M: I don’t think it does.

S: So will there be any difference in the case of virtue, then, insofar as something’s being virtue is what is in question – whether in a child or an old person, a woman or a man?

M: I think, Socrates, that somehow this case is a bit different than the others.

S: How so? Didn’t you say the virtue of a man consists in being able to manage the city well, whereas that of a woman consists in managing the household well?

M: I did.

S: Is it possible to manage a city well, or a household, or anything for that matter, while not managing it moderately and justly?

M: Certainly not.

S: Then if they manage justly and moderately, they must do so with justice and moderation?

M: Necessarily.

S: So both the man and the woman, if they are to be good, need the same things: justice and moderation.

M: So it seems.

S: What about your child and your old man? Can they possibly be good if they are illtempered and unjust?

M: Certainly not.

S: But if they are moderate and just?

M: Yes.

S: So all people are good in the same way, since what makes them good is the fact that they exhibit the same qualities.

M: It seems so.

S: And they would not be good in the same way if they did not have the same virtue.

M: They certainly wouldn’t.

What Socrates has done here is target the weak point of Meno’s argument, the fact that instead of defining a common virtue, he gave a few examples. Socrates goes through the effort of his method to make Meno say himself that there are qualities that are common throughout each example that he gave. To be virtuous, no matter who you are, you must be temperate and just, whether you are a slave or a master.

Therefore, as there are virtues shared between people with different roles, there must be one common idea of virtue that has different aspects demonstrated by different people. This is what Socrates wanted Meno to realise.

However he is still stubborn in what he wanted to prove before

M: I think courage is a virtue, and moderation, wisdom, and nobility, and very many others.

S: We are running into the same problem again, Meno, but from a slightly different angle; we have found many virtues while looking for one, but we cannot find the one that covers all the others.

Meno is only concerned on finding the truth for his perspective, which is “to be able to rule over men”, in itself a view that is less virtuous than tyrannous, as he thinks that power is a virtue. By defining virtue for himself only, he uncovers only a tiny fraction of the truth, making what he says hold next to no significance in the grand scheme of truths that Socrates is trying to uncover here.

Socrates quote sums up what happens for the rest of this first half of the dialogue, Socrates suggests a slightly different angle to try and coax Meno into accepting his view, but instead he gives a list of examples and has any claim of the definition of virtue promptly disproven by Socrates. After a few runs of the same conversation with different nouns, Socrates voices his frustration

although I begged you to tell me about virtue as a whole, you haven’t come close to doing so. Instead you say that every action that is virtuous in a particular sort of way is virtue, as if you had already told me all about virtue as a whole – so that I would already know all about that – even as you break it apart into bits.

This demonstrates an important role of staying critical to your own philosophy. Meno is a confidant speaker, who believes his speaking on virtue is very wise, and so he speaks confidently from a position of knowledge that makes everyone believe he is wise. However, his talk on what virtue is actually has the huge oversight of not defining virtue itself, instead letting virtue stay ambiguous enough that his point can always be determined as correct.

Not just that, but his wisdom is quite poor as well, as his great definition of virtue is just the responsibilities of each person’s place in Greek society, which Socrates easily makes him concede is wrong.

After being thoroughly proven to not know the first thing about what virtue actually is, Meno throws a bit of a hissy fit

…on the inside you’re like one of those stingrays that paralyses everything it touches; you look a bit like one, too – broad and flat. Anyway, now you’ve done it to me; both my mind and my tongue are completely numb. I’ve got no answer to give you.

Socrates was known for completely befuddling men who were known for being wise, as it is one thing to perform a convincing speech, but it is a completely different thing to defend a point from Dialectic interrogation.

At this point Meno has completely given up on arguing with Socrates and just wants to know what he thinks about his original question, can you teach virtue.

At this point the dialogue starts a new part where it is “proven” that humans never learn things, they just recollect things. This goes more into Plato’s Theory of the Forms, which is his spiritual theory that focuses on knowledge. We don’t need to know about this part, as it uses very flawed logic to present this spiritual theory as truth.

What we can learn from is the later part, when Socrates stops being vague and gives a very strong argument for virtue being mindfulness

S: Let us now look at the qualities of the soul. There is a thing you call moderation, and justice, courage, intelligence, memory, nobility, so on and so forth?

M: There is.

S: Consider any and all items on this list you believe not to be knowledge but something else instead; don’t they all at times harm us, at other times do us good? Courage, for example, when not based on forethought, is mere recklessness; when a man is thoughtlessly confident, he gets hurt; but when he is mindful of what he does, things go well.

M: Yes.

S: The same is true of patience or mental quickness. A brain like a sponge and an even temper are all very well in one who minds the proper use of such things; to anyone else, they may bring harm.

M: Very much so.

S: Therefore, in short, all the soul does, and has done to it, concludes happily – if directed mindfully. Otherwise, things may end badly?

M: That is likely.

S: If then virtue is something in the soul, and necessarily good, it must be a matter of mindfulness. For all other qualities of soul are in themselves neither good nor harmful. As accompanied by forethought or thoughtlessness, they become good or harmful. This argument shows that virtue, being good, must be a kind of mindfulness.

Finally we have come to the point where we have a valuable answer to what is virtue. It isn’t a perfect statement, as mindfulness is still a virtue in of itself, it’s just that it is a virtue of virtues. It is when you use mindfulness that your other virtues are directed to good, while exercising virtues without regard will cause more harm than good.

Mindfulness isn’t virtue, but it’s the closest thing we have to that truth. Socrates ends up leaving this idea on a technicality. He believes that if it is mindfulness then virtue is knowledge, and if it is knowledge then there should be teachers and students. The issue for him here is that him not being able to find any teachers of virtue proves this point as false.

However he doesn’t bring up the fact that there are clearly students of virtue. There exist many people in this world who want to become better people, and as they don’t know exactly what this virtue is, they seek experience and knowledge in their lives. Socrates himself was a teacher of virtue, as he instructed people how to live better lives, more virtuous lives.

As an exercise, it would be great for your learning if you could use this point on mindfulness as the foundation for a small philosophical theory surrounding what you think virtue, in its most general since, is.

If you want to understand the points covered at the depth that Plato intended, feel free to read through the dialogue here.