Meno

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult

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The Nature of Virtue

Meno, a young and ambitious member of Thessaly’s ruling class, visits Socrates in Athens to hear his views on virtue. As a student of the Sophist philosopher Gorgias, Meno believes that virtue and leadership are synonymous in men, and that women, children, the elderly, and the enslaved have different types of virtue.

Socrates tries to suggest that virtue is essentially the same in all humans, in much the way that “health, and size, and strength” are, in essence, basically the same in each of us (5). Meno concedes that virtue has many attributes, including bravery, wisdom, moderation, and others, but his focus is on the manly virtues of leadership. Meno is born to rule, and he will see action as a ranking officer in an upcoming battle.

Socrates proposes that virtue’s many qualities point to an underlying fundamental that characterizes all instances of virtue. To Meno’s claim that “justice is virtue” (7), Socrates cites the example of someone who insists that an attribute of shapes, roundness, is form. Instead, roundness is a form, and there are others. Likewise, it’s incorrect to say that “whiteness is colour” (9), but it’s correct to assert that whiteness is an example of a color. In this sense, justice is one virtue out of many.

Meno changes the topic several times, with the result that he and Socrates never arrive at a full definition of virtue. In that respect, the discussion between Meno and Socrates seems to have failed because they reach no definitive resolution on the topic. Socrates, however, knew how to turn any conversation to his advantage so that it might further his purpose as a teacher. The dialog in Meno, strained as it is with an arrogant student on the one hand and an angry visitor on the other, nonetheless serves Socrates’s purpose of putting challenging questions to his audience.

Socrates famously refuses to assert that he knows anything; instead, he prefers to ask questions that lead students gently toward insights about the nature of reality. Thus, a discussion with Socrates needn’t arrive at a particular conclusion. Instead, a sincere dialog, regardless of topic, along with the interesting questions it raises, helps to improve a student’s perspective.

Thus, the “virtue” of talking about virtue isn’t the conclusion that’s reached but the improvement in the participants’ ability to think clearly on the issue. That is the real prize.

How to Recognize Truth, or Meno’s Paradox

Meno asks Socrates how he would look into a question on which he has no knowledge. Finding an answer, “how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?” (23). An unlearned person, having no idea what the answer might look like, might come upon an apparent solution and have no way to judge its veracity. This question, widely known as Meno’s Paradox, doesn’t stump Socrates, for he has a detailed metaphysical answer.

In Socrates’s view, all humans have immortal souls that get reborn, over and over, eternally. During this endless process, every soul becomes familiar with the basic truths of the universe. The result is that everyone already knows the answers to fundamental questions, but these answers lie hidden within the soul until coaxed out by well-formed questions.

To prove this, Socrates calls for an enslaved man accompanying Meno to participate in a demonstration. Socrates explains the basic principle of the area of a square: Its area is the product of its length times its width. In a square, these two sides happen to be equal; thus, one side times itself equals the square’s area. Though untutored in mathematics, the enslaved man immediately grasps this idea.

Socrates then asks the enslaved man to figure out the length of a side that would generate twice the area of the first square. Guessing, the enslaved man suggests a length twice that of the smaller square’s side. Socrates shows, with drawings, that such a length would create a square with four times the area, not two. Working together, he and the enslaved man quickly deduce that the correct length for the new square must be longer than the original but not twice as large.

Socrates then sketches a large square made up of four smaller squares; within these, he draws diagonal lines between the squares’ corners. These diagonals Socrates employs to prove to the enslaved man that the diagonal of a square, multiplied by itself, generates a square with twice the area of the original square. Intuitively, the enslaved man understands this.

In this way, Socrates elegantly demonstrates the human capacity for instant understanding of principles for which, a moment before, they had no concept. Socrates believes this ability comes from the soul’s vast collection of accumulated knowledge attained over eons of reincarnation.

Socrates’s answer to Meno’s Paradox, then, is simply that we already know the answers we seek, and that we’ll recognize them when we see them.

The Meno Problem and the Teachability of Virtue

Late in the dialog, Meno asks two main questions, whether virtue can be taught and whether knowledge is superior to “right opinion.” The second question has since become known as Meno’s Problem. The two queries are related: If virtue can, indeed, be taught, then there remains the problem of choosing the better information with which to impart virtue.

Socrates’s answer to the Meno Problem is that knowledge must be recollected from the soul’s experience during past lives, and that our opinions, even if correct, must be chained to that recollection. “Opinions”—in modern parlance, traditional beliefs—may very well be correct, but they need to be anchored by actual experience and the soul’s recollection of truths it already knows. Tradition, then, has its place, but when a real-world problem must be solved, tradition must bow to experience.

With this in mind, Socrates addresses the teachability of virtue. He asks Meno to name others who claim to teach virtue; Meno replies that his own instructor, the Sophist Gorgias, laughs at the very notion of teaching virtue. They conclude that there are no professionals who tutor students in the subject.

Throughout the dialog, Socrates tries to steer the conversation toward a definition of virtue—in Greece, it’s called “arete” and refers to quality in general—which might be applied to moral behavior. Meno, however, is more interested in learning how to appear virtuous than how to be virtuous.

Socrates invites Meno’s friend Anytus, a prominent Athenian leader, to join the conversation, and Socrates points out to him that many of Athens’s greatest public heroes sired sons who didn’t amount to much. This suggests that virtue can’t be taught, even by the best of men.

Anytus, irritated by the implicit insult contained in this line of thought, warns Socrates to be careful with his comments. Socrates persists, claiming that great leaders act, not from any knowledge of virtue, but from divine inspiration. This, he believes, explains how virtue appears in public life yet can’t be transmitted from one generation to the next.

Listening to this argument, Anytus grows even angrier because Socrates seems to imply that Anytus’s beloved Athenian democracy, which he has recently rescued from a dictatorship, may be unable to make the kind of virtuous decisions that an inspired monarch might achieve under influence of divine inspiration. (Anytus will later prosecute Socrates for immorality and impose on him a death sentence. Thus, while discussing these themes, the seeds of a lethal confrontation between the two men are sown.)

If virtue cannot be taught, then it’s not a field of knowledge; if it only appears as a result of divine intervention, then it’s possible that virtue may not exist at all as a concept that can be grasped. The dialog ends without answering definitively the nature of virtue, and that issue has hung in the air of philosophy, unresolved, ever after.