Meno

There is not a great deal of context that is crucial to understanding the essential themes of the Meno, largely because the dialogue sits nearly at the beginning of western philosophy. Socrates and Plato are working not so much in the context of previous philosophies as in the context of the lack of them. Further, this is very probably one of Plato's earliest surviving dialogues, set in about 402 BCE (by extension, we might presume that it represents Socrates at a relatively early stage in his own thought). Nonetheless, in order to understand the aims and achievements of the dialogue, it helps to keep in mind some details about this lack of previous philosophies.

Since neither virtue nor any other concept has yet been defined in the way to which we are now accustomed, Socrates has to show that defining these things at all is a good idea. In this task, his primary foe is Greek cultural custom and the political aristocracy that most strongly embodies that custom. Meno, a prominent Thessalian who is visiting Athens, is a member of this class. Meno's semi-foreign status aids Socrates (and Plato) in the dialogue, allowing for eyewitness accounts that Socrates himself could not give. Thus, Meno is able to say with authority that the Thessalians do not have anyone who can clearly teach virtue, while Socrates (and Anytus, a prominent Athenian statesman) can vouch for the sorry state of affairs in Athens.

Meno is also a handy interlocutor for this dialogue because he is a follower of Gorgias, one of the most reputable of the Sophist teachers, and knows the Thessalian Sophist community to some extent. He therefore serves as a Sophist foil for Socrates' logical points. This is not quite a fair fight, of course, since Plato can put whatever words he wants in Meno's mouth, and because Meno is not himself an accomplished Sophist (like Gorgias, who is the central figure in a much lengthier Platonic dialogue).

Nonetheless, Socrates sets Meno up early on as a naive believer in the kind of pompous, elaborately rhetorical, but largely vacuous Sophist method of philosophy that had come to prominence some forty or fifty years earlier. Meno readily admits to being an enthusiastic follower of Gorgias and implicitly agrees to Socrates' characterization of Sophist arguments as bold, grand, and presumptuous. In this sense, Meno is something of a straw man set up by Plato to highl...

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...ue as straight knowledge or as a kind of mysterious wisdom revealed to us by the gods "without understanding." It is seen as likely that most virtuous men are so by holding "right opinions" rather than true knowledge. Right opinions lead us to the same ends as knowledge, but do not stay with us because they are not "tied down" by an account of why they are right. Thus, we can only depend on semi-divine inspiration to keep us focused on right opinions rather than wrong ones.

This dilemma brings us back to Socrates' (and Plato's) original purpose--the mode of dialogic analysis Socrates pursues with Meno is meant first of all to show up wrong opinions. Secondly, it is meant to clear the ground for an inversion of the whole sequence of right opinion and truth. If the requirements for a definition of virtue can be filled, we would no longer need to test out opinions blindly (as is done throughout the Meno). Rather, we would have an account of virtue first--an idea of virtue that is "tied down"--and could determine the details from there. The Meno only pursues the first part of this project, but it lays a great deal of groundwork for the second.