Meno - The Socratic Dialogue by Plato

This is a reading of Meno, a Socratic dialogue by Plato (translation by Benjamin Jowett) and one of the best philosophical dialogues ever written. In this dialogue, Socrates discusses the nature of virtue with a pupil of Gorgias, Meno. The audio, I believe, comes from ukemi.

#philosophy #plato #socrates

[carlatteniese]

Awesome. Imagine this were the nature of education in America.

[wes]

I'm so excited to listen to this! So far I've listened several times over Euthyphro and the Apologia. I'm a philosophical novice, and I'll be sure to post any thoughts that I come across my listen here :)

[longcastle]

The flirtatious nature of this is so entertaining.

[exaucemayunga]

Now I understand why they wanted him dead😂

[sauravrai]

I believe virtue is the ability or capacity to do something for others that brings good result and gives the heart pleasant feelings to the self and to the people effected by it.❤.

[amourdesoipittie]

Dude, Theatetus and Meno are my favorite dialogs. Also I was yesterday reading the Theatetus. I have seen something like this happen many times, I was reading Charles Taylor some time back and Po uploaded his lecture.

[KnowsNot]

PART I - How is “virtue” (aretê) is achieved.
- Is Virtue 1) taught, or 2) acquired through training, or 3) possessed by nature
- But what IS virtue?

3 Attempts to Define Virtue Arguments
against 3 attempts to define Virtue.,

Different virtues for different kinds of people (71e) incompatible with
Implicit belief that virtues cannot be different insofar as they are virtues.

And Meno’s definition of virtue as the ability to rule over others (73d) is incompatible with
Implicit belief that: successful definition of virtue must apply to
1. all cases of virtue (so including those of children and slaves)
2, AND only to cases of virtue (so excluding cases of unjust rule).

Meno accepts claims that contradict his definitions,
Does not know what he thought he knew about virtue.
three times inadequacies of his definitions are exposed,

Meno’s enthusiasm gives way to reluctance and frustration.
Meno blames Socrates for his trouble,
and insults Socrates by comparing him with the ugly, numbing stingray.

PART II, The Twofold objection: if someone does not already know what virtue is, how could he even look for it,
and how could he even recognize it if he were to happen upon it?
Socrates replies by reformulating that objection as a paradoxical dilemma,
then arguing that the dilemma is based on a false dichotomy.

The dilemma is that we cannot learn either what we know or what we do not know,
because there is no need to learn what we already know,
and we cannot recognize what we do not yet know.

Socrates exposes the false dichotomy by identifying states of cognition
between complete knowledge and pure ignorance.
- human soul has learned in previous lives,
- learning is possible by "remembering what has been known but forgotten."
is a state of cognition between "complete knowledge" and pure ignorance.)

Theory of recollection: geometry lesson, Socrates refutes a slave’s incorrect answers much as he had refuted Meno, and then leads
him to recognize that the correct answer is implied by his own prior true beliefs.
("Implicit true belief" is another state of cognition between complete knowledge and pure ignorance.)

Recollection” as the discovery of some kind of innate knowledge, or innate ideas or beliefs.
This encourages us to work hard at learning what we do not now know.
Circle back to definition of virtue.?

PART III Meno nonetheless resists, and asks Socrates instead to answer his initial question:
is virtue something that is taught, or is it acquired in some other way?
But we will not learn how virtue is acquired until we first figure out what virtue is.

virtue is something that is taught?
hypotheses” about what sorts of things are taught,
and about what sorts of things are good

Here Socrates leads Meno to two opposed conclusions.
Because Virtue is necessarily good, it must be some kind of knowledge,
Because it is some kind of knowlewdge, it must be something that is taught.
Because no one teaches virtue, virtue is not after all something that is taught,
virtue is not after all something that is taughtand therefore must not be knowledge.

Anytus Enters: he too objects to the sophists who claim to teach virtue for pay,
and claims any good person can teach other good people to be good in the normal course of life.
Anytus cannot explain Socrates’ long list of counterexamples:
Famous Athenians who were widely considered virtuous,
but who did not teach their virtue even to their own sons.

Anytus withdraws from the conversation in anger, Socrates reminds Meno that
sometimes people’s actions are guided not by knowledge
but by mere true belief, which has not been “tied down by working out the reason.”

When people act virtuously, it is not by knowledge but by true belief,
which they receive not by teaching but by some kind of divine gift.
Circle back to, we will not learn how virtue is acquired until we first figure out what virtue is.

[tongued]

A statement of ignorance on a topic is a self-defeating claim.

[eniopasalic]

Virtue cannot be defined positively; virtuous is the state of pure consciousness free of disorders such as anger, hatred, fear, jealousy, envy, greed and lust.

[S_Edward_Campbell]

After listening….it no longer perplexes me as to why they killed him lol

[futureman]

Would a slave that governed still be a slave?

[TS-]

... "" Beard's... Again.... ""

[willieluncheonette]

" Plato is simply a record-keeper — he has not a single idea of his own! He is a devoted lover of Socrates, and whatever Socrates says, he goes on recording it, writing it. Socrates has not written anything — just as no great master has ever written anything. And Plato is certainly a great writer; perhaps Socrates may not have been able to write so beautifully. Plato has made Socrates’ teachings as beautiful as possible, but he himself is no one. Now the same work can be done by a tape recorder. And Aristotle is merely an intellectual, with no understanding of being, or even a desire to search for it. These people are taught in the universities. I was constantly in a fight with my professors. When they started teaching Plato, I said, “This is absolute nonsense, because Plato has nothing to say of his own. It is better to teach about Socrates. Plato can be referred to — he has compiled it all. But Socrates’ name has become almost a fiction, and Plato has become the reality”


Plato’s allegory is of slaves who, working in a cave, see only their shadows on the walls and believe that what is happening on the walls is the only reality. They don’t know of any other reality except those shadows… they don’t even know that those shadows are their own. They know nothing about the outside world, outside their cave; it doesn’t exist for them. This is one of the most beautiful allegories — of tremendous importance. It is our allegory. Translated into our life, it means we are living in a certain cave and we are seeing shadows on a certain screen and we know nothing else about the screen. We know nothing about there being a world beyond the screen; we know nothing about these shadows on the screen, even that they are our own. Looked at rightly, it is the allegory of our mind.

What do you know of the world? Just a small skull is your cave; and just the screen of your mind… and the things which you call thoughts, emotions, sentiments, feelings, are all shadows — they don’t have any substance in them. And you get angry, you get depressed, you are in anguish — because you have learned to be identified with those shadows. You are projecting them; they are your own shadows. It is your own anger that is projected on the screen of the mind. And then it becomes a vicious circle: that anger makes you more angry, more anger projects more anger, and so on and so forth. And

we go on living our whole life without ever thinking that there is a world of reality beyond the mind, on the outside, and there is also a world of reality beyond all these sentiments, feelings, emotions — beyond your ego. That is your awareness.

The whole art of meditation is to bring you out of the cave so that you can become aware that you are not those shadows but that you are a watcher. And the moment you become a watcher, a miracle happens: those shadows start disappearing. They feed on your identity; if you feel identified with them, then they are there. The more you identify with them, the more nourished they are.

When you are just a watcher — just seeing, not judging, not condemning — slowly, slowly those shadows disappear, because now they don’t have any food. And then there is such a tremendous clarity, perceptivity, that you can see the world beyond — the world of sunrise and the world of clouds and the world of the stars; that is your outside. And you can become aware of your inside, which is far more mysterious.

The outside world is so beautiful, but the inside world is a thousand fold more beautiful.

Once you are somehow capable of getting out of the cave you become part of a universal consciousness.

Inside, you have the whole eternity; you have been here forever and you will be here forever. Death has never happened and cannot happen. And outside there is a tremendously beautiful existence. And now to call them `outside’ and `inside’ is not right; those are the old words when the skull was dividing them in two. Now it is one. Your consciousness and the beauty of a sunset and the beauty of a starry night, your consciousness and the freshness of a rose — they are no longer separate because the principle of separation is no longer there. It is all one cosmic whole. And I call this experience the only holy experience.

To experience the whole is the only holy experience. It has nothing to do with churches, temples, synagogues; it has something to do with you coming out, slipping out of the clutches of the mind. And it is not difficult, it is just that you have not tried it.


Plato’s allegory rightly depicts the situation which we are in. But Plato never went further than that. Plato himself was never a meditator; the allegory remained a philosophical idea. If he had interpreted this allegory and had given it a turn towards meditation, the whole Western mind would have been different. This allegory would have changed the whole Western mind and the history that followed Plato — because Plato is the founder of the whole Western mind.

Socrates never wrote anything; he was Plato’s master. Whatever we have about Socrates is from Plato’s notes of him talking with others — the famous Socratic dialogues. As a student he was just taking notes on them. Those notes have survived. In those notes is this allegory. It is difficult to know for what purpose Socrates was using the allegory, but it is certain that Plato misused it — he was not a man who was in search of truth, he was a man who wanted to think about truth. But to search for truth is one thing and to think about truth is totally different: thinking keeps you within the cave. It is only non-thinking that can take you out of the cave."

[fogpimp]

Can you upload a version of w.k.c. guthrie?

[brograb]

Socratic logic fails immediately when human behavior fails. Gorgias was right because he didn’t trust human actions.

[sauravrai]

Man and woman are of different nature both mentally and physically and also spiritually. What makes a woman good will not make a man good and vice versa. ( here good means ability to do their duty.)
So a kind, gentle, understanding, and beautiful woman and a woman able to make her children grow into great persons, is the strong women. But a strong man is the man who is tough, couragous, wise, know what is the right think to do and does it.❤

[terrygibson]

Unfortunately the reader of Socrates has such a flippant, trivializing manner, like a fop, musical comedy second banana or butler with an attitude that this valuable passage from Socrates and Plato is maligned. These were serious questions to the Greeks not cheap entertainment. Sophists and Aristophanes provided plenty of that. It’s unlistenable.

[alejandromadrid]

Sorry to say this, but Socrates was a bad philosopher, just one another sophist of his day. Define "color", so Socrates ...just because I dont have a definition of color does it mean i dont know what color is? Etc..etc...sort of childish word play

[Vaughan]

Ahh Plato, Christianity for the few, as they say