The Meno begins with Meno asking Socrates a question: Can virtue be taught, or is it only learnt through experience, or is one simply virtuous or not through their own human nature? Socrates pleads ignorance, claiming that he does not know what virtue is and therefore cannot answer the question. He asks Meno to define virtue, and Meno runs through a list of virtues. Socrates tries to get Meno to understand the difference between a definition and a list of examples. Socrates is unsatisfied; he wants to know what all these examples have in common. What constitutes virtue?
Meno suggests that virtue is “to desire beautiful things and have the power to acquire them,” but Socrates quickly dismantles this argument. Firstly, he gets Meno to agree that by “beautiful things” he just means “good things.” He then gets Meno to agree that nobody actually wants something that is bad, because bad things are harmful and so cause unhappiness. What Meno fails to realise is that Socrates is equivocating on the word “bad,” changing it from Meno’s intended meaning of “immoral” to the completely different type of badness meaning “harmful.” Meno, too foolish to notice this fallacy, claims to be “quite perplexed” and complains that he has “made thousands of speeches on virtue […] but now cannot even explain what it is.”
The two Greeks then move on from what virtue is to how they can know what virtue is, and subsequently how they can learn anything at all. Socrates poses the argument thus:
“One 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.”
The old philosopher has an answer to his own question: that “the soul is immortal, has been born often and has seen all things here and in the underworld, [and therefore] there is nothing which it has not learned.” He claims that everything humans “learn” is actually simply recollected, as the soul has learnt it all before. Of course, Socrates here just pushes the question a step backwards; for if humans can not learn new things but only recall things the soul has already learnt, how did the soul learn the new things?
Socrates tries to prove his point by calling over a slave boy and getting him to “recollect” a geometrical proof that he could not possibly have already known. He prompts the boy rather obviously, almost spelling the answer out for him to repeat it, and then – when the boy comes out with the answer – claims this is proof that he already knew it, and only needed reminding to remember it. The fallacies that Socrates uses and that Meno overlooks in this dialogue are rather obvious for so great a philosopher.
The conversation then turns to whether virtue is knowledge, for if knowledge can be taught (or “recollected”), then virtue can be taught. They decide that virtue cannot be taught, by going through a list of examples of virtuous men whose children were not virtuous, and therefore agree that virtue is not knowledge. At the end of the Meno, they have decided that virtue is something that the gods bestow upon a man, not something that can be taught or learnt, and not something that is innate either. Socrates and Meno still have not agreed upon what virtue actually is.
Philosophical questions raised in the Meno
What is the difference between knowledge and true belief?
How can one acquire knowledge? Is it innate? And what is the actual process of learning something? Can knowledge be taught?
Meno’s Paradox: How can one learn something one does not yet know, if one doesn’t know what to look for?
What is virtue? How is it to be defined? Must it be defined before it can be in any way discussed?
Is virtue in itself virtuous? Is virtuousness a property of virtue? Can something have a property? What is a property? Can something have or be a property of itself? Is red itself red? Or is redness a property which something can possess?