Socrates replies that Meno’s definition is like a swarm of bees: each kind of virtue, like each bee, is different, but … Plato wrote Anytus was the main prosecutor in the court case that led to Socrates's death. The understanding requires active inquiry and discovery for oneself, based on innate mental resources and a genuine desire to learn. Socrates reduces Meno to a state of confusion in their dialogue, but … What sort of thing, among the things you don’t know, will you propose to look for? Their executions, expropriations, and expulsions earned them the hatred of most Athenians; later “the Thirty” became known as “the Thirty Tyrants.” The extremists among them first purged their more obvious enemies, then turned to the moderates who resisted their cruelty and wanted a broader oligarchy or restricted democracy that included the thousands in the middle class. The first part of the work is written in the Socratic dialectical style, and depicts Meno as being reduced to confusion or aporia. And it includes a tense confrontation with one of the men who will bring Socrates to trial on charges of corrupting young minds with dangerous teachings about morality and religion. Meno is one of Plato’s shortest but most influential dialogues. He couldn’t seek what he knows, because he knows it, and there’s no need for him to seek it. Here he seems more confident about the truth of his claims. But he does argue that the demonstration supports his fervent belief that we will live better lives if we believe that knowledge is worth pursuing as opposed to lazily assuming that there is no point in trying.Meno asks Socrates to return to their original question: Can virtue be taught?
Throughout the text, Meno suggests many varying definitions for virtue, all of which Socrates … As Socrates says to Anytus:For some time we have been examining … whether virtue is something that’s taught. So in a sense, Socrates’ conclusion that something of “the truth about reality” is “always in our minds” (86b) is even roughly compatible with modern science. The good men who fail to teach their sons virtue are like practical gardeners without theoretical knowledge. Later, he supported the moderate faction among the Thirty Tyrants, and was banished by the extremists. Proceeding with the conversation between Meno and Socrates, the answer as to what virtue is has yet to be found.And Meno at this point wishes to know if it is something that can be taught or attained by other means. Because of this, the strength of the dialogue and the points that are made with in seems weakened, as it is less of a dialogue and more of a lesson imparted by Socrates. We do not know what resulted from Meno’s mission to Athens, but we do know that he soon left Greece to serve as a commander of mercenary troops for Cyrus of Persia—in what turned out to be Cyrus’ attempt to overthrow his brother, King Artaxerxes II.Meno was young for such a position, about twenty years old, but he was a favorite of the powerful Aristippus, a fellow aristocrat who had borrowed thousands of troops from Cyrus for those power struggles in Thessaly, and was now returning many of them. In response to Socrates' wondering, rather tongue-in-cheek query whether sophists might not be teachers of virtue, Anytus contemptuously dismisses the sophists as people who, far from teaching virtue, corrupt those who listen to them. This whole lesson was conducted in order to encourage Meno to try learning what virtue is, when he does not have a teacher to tell him what it is (81e-82a, 86c).So why would Socrates use the faulty hypothesis that knowledge and only knowledge is taught, when it contradicts his notion of recollection and his model geometry lesson? Socrates replies by reformulating that objection as a paradoxical dilemma, then arguing that the dilemma is based on a false dichotomy. But to really be able to teach someone how to grow tomatoes, you need more than a bit of practical experience and a few rules of thumb; you need a genuine knowledge of horticulture, which includes an understanding of soils, climate, hydration, germination, and so on. Or is he just throwing up an abstract, defensive obstacle, so that he does not have to keep trying? So Socrates could be quite serious in his lengthy argument that virtue must be some kind of knowledge (87c-89a), while reluctantly making use of the unsupported hypothesis that knowledge must be taught because, in effect, Meno insists upon it. Ultimately, the knowledge in question is the knowledge of what truly is in one's best long-term interests. First, he argues, on the hypothesis that virtue is necessarily good, that it must be some kind of knowledge, and therefore must be something that is taught. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates and Meno discuss the concept of virtue, where they realize neither of them have all the answers to what virtue is. And Socrates finishes by emphasizing that real knowledge of the answer requires working out the explanation for oneself.
(80d)Is Meno here honestly identifying a practical difficulty with this particular kind of inquiry, where the participants now seem not to know even what they are looking for? If virtue could be taught there would be teachers of virtue. In fact, one main point of the theory of recollection and the geometry lesson was that real learning requires active inquiry and discovery from one’s own resources, which include some form of innate knowledge. The Meno asks the question what is virtue and can it be taught. While he criticized democracy generally for putting power in the hands of an unwise and fickle majority, he never advocated rule by the wealthy either, and certainly not any of the Thirty’s cruel deeds. But A surprising interpretation of knowledge occurs in the middle third of the But in what way will you look for it, Socrates, this thing that you don’t know at all what it is?
Meno’s moral education would call for all of that even if Socrates could tell him what the essence of virtue is, which he claims he cannot do.Active Socratic inquiry requires humble hard work on the part of all learners: practice in the sense of the personal effort and training that properly develops natural ability. Socrates tries to expose the false dichotomy by identifying states of cognition between complete knowledge and pure ignorance. And then he just wants to hear Socrates’ answers, and keeps resisting the hard work of definition that Socrates keeps encouraging.