Parnassos Press – Fonte Aretusa
Chapter Title: Mimēsis in Plato’s Meno
Chapter Author(s): Lidia Palumbo
Book Title: The Many Faces of Mimesis
Book Subtitle: Selected Essays from the 2017 Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of
Western Greece
Book Editor(s): Heather L. Reid, Jeremy C. DeLong
Published by: Parnassos Press – Fonte Aretusa. (2018)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvbj7g5b.11
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Lidia Palumbo1
Mimēsis in Plato’s Meno
In the eponymous dialogue, Meno—a Thessalian aristocrat and pupil of the sophist Gorgias on a visit to Athens—asks Socrates whether excellence (aretē) is teachable. In response to Meno’s question, Socrates initially claims that it is not possible to determine whether excellence is teachable without first defining what excellence is (71b).2 However, the reader quickly realizes that, despite Socrates’s claim, even in the absence of such a definition, he provides a demonstration—apparently for Meno’s sake, but in fact for the readers’—that excellence can in fact be taught. He accomplishes this through his typical dialectical method: a process of inquiry which leads his interlocuter—Meno, in this case— to recognize his own ignorance concerning the topic under discussion.
What makes the dialogue special, however, is the way Plato combines mimēsis with dialectical argumentation to support his thesis of learning through recollection. After Socrates allows Meno to offer definitions of excellence, all of which are refuted, he then turns to offer his own possible definitions for consideration. In the process, a careful reader will realize that Plato is not only using Socrates’s words, but also his actions, to not only suggest a method for recognizing excellence, but the conditions which are useful for its achievement. Paraphrasing Halperin’s comment on the Symposium, it can be said that Meno is not a dialogue about excellence, but rather a narrative structure aiming to contrast Socrates’s excellence with Meno’s lack of it.3 Plato employs the character of Meno to mimetically embody the sophistic conception of teaching/learning as “the transmission of information.” Socrates’s words and actions, meanwhile, not only refute this by revealing its difficulties, they show learning to be anamnēsis (“recollection”).
Representing the problem of aporia
In the first part of the dialogue, Meno offers a series of definitions of aretē, and Socrates outlines their inaccuracy, demonstrating that Meno doesn’t know what excellence is. At this point in the discussion, Socrates is compared to the torpedo-fish, which numbs anyone whom it touches.4 Specifically, Socrates is accused of numbing Meno and making him unable to adequately define virtue. This is not Meno’s first time discussing virtue: he had already spoken in public about excellence a thousand times. But now, faced with Socrates’s “numbing”
effect, he appears unable to explain what excellence is (79e-80d). Only when Meno can no longer uphold the façade of excellence—namely by revealing his ignorance of what it is—does Socrates invite him to search for its essence.5 Like anyone who is ignorant on a subject, Meno must begin the pursuit of knowledge which Socrates is demonstrating from a state of acknowledged ignorance.
Readers of Platonic dialogues know that the pursuit of the essence of a thing is properly a dialectical process; the experience of a discussion between interlocuters must shape the eidetic investigation. As Delcomminette writes, the supreme dialectical science cannot be described from the outside, but only from the inside of its practice.6 In the Meno Plato mimetically recreates this experience for his readers, by demonstrating the difficulties met in dialectical science when interlocutors are incapable of reaching an agreement because they are not at the same level of understanding.
The crucial difficulty demonstrated in the Meno is the so-called problem of inquiry—how can we look for something we know nothing about? Meno himself does not believe that someone who does not know something is capable of seeking and discovering that thing, and quotes the sophistic eristikos logos about the impossibility of continuing in the philosophical inquiry.7 After it has been formulated by Meno, the
eristikos logos is reformulated by Socrates.8 In order to overcome the
impasse of the eristikos logos, Socrates introduces the argument for anamnēsis (recollection). The argument explains that the soul can search for what it does not currently know because, at one time, it knew everything, and it will recognize and then recall what it formerly knew:
They are those priests and priestesses who’ve taken an interest in being able to give an account of their practices. […] They say that the human soul is immortal– that it periodically comes to an end (which is what is generally called “death”) and is born again, but that it never perishes. And that, they say, is why one should live as moral a life as possible […] Given, then, that the soul is immortal and has been incarnated many times, and has therefore seen things here on earth and things in the underworld too—everything, in fact—there’s nothing that it hasn’t learnt. Hence it isn’t at all surprising that it should be possible for the soul to recall what, after all, it also knew before about excellence and about everything else. For since all nature
is akin and the soul has learnt everything, there’s nothing to stop a man recovering everything else by himself, once he has remembered—or “learnt,” in common parlance—just one thing; all he needs is the fortitude not to give up the search. The point is that the search, the process of learning, is in fact nothing but recollection (Plat. Meno 81a-d).9
Socrates demonstrates in this passage that knowledge cannot be given by a teacher to a student, in the way that an apple is given to a teacher by a student. Rather, learning is a matter of anamnēsis, of remembering what is already there, buried in the soul.
Importantly, the argument is not just stated, but mimetically represented by example. The famous empirical test, during which a slave who is ignorant of geometry learns without any teaching that the length of the side of a square, which has twice the size of the given square, is equal to the length of the diagonal of the given square, methodically demonstrates “that the truth of things is always in our souls” (86b1-2), and that “something you happen not to remember at the moment…you can confidently try to search for it and recall it” (86b3-4).10 Readers of the dialogue experience this process of learning through Plato’s representation of it.
Representing a camouflaged solution
Next, Meno goes back to the issue of the teachability of aretē.11 He doesn’t realize that the discussion and, especially, the slave’s experience, have already suggested an answer to this question—an answer which is not argued, but mimetically represented in the scene itself, hidden by a kind of camouflage.12 Socrates agrees to reconsider the issue of teachability and asks Meno whether he can carry out the research hypothetically (ἐξ ὑποθέσεως):
Let us get away with making use of an assumption, as we consider whether it’s teachable or whatever. What do I mean by “making use of an assumption”? Think of how geometricians often go about their investigations. When someone asks them a question about an area, perhaps— whether a given area can be inscribed (ἐνταθῆναι) as a triangle inside a given circle (ἐς τόνδε τὸν κύκλον)—a typical geometrician’s reply might be: ‘I don’t yet know whether this is the sort of area that can do that, but I think I can come up
with an assumption, so to speak, which will prove useful in this context.13 If this figure is such that, when placed alongside its given line, the shortfall is a figure similar to the original figure that was placed alongside the line, then I think we will get one result, whereas if it is such that this cannot happen, we’ll get a different result.’14 So if I can make an assumption, I’m prepared to tell you what follows, in terms of whether or not it’s possible, for inscribing the area inside a circle. We should do the same where excellence is concerned (Plat. Meno 86e2-87b3).
Ironically, the geometric example employed by Socrates to “explain” the hypothetical method is even more complicated than the problem that it was supposed to clarify. I would like to try to explain the reason.
Scholars seem to find this passage unclear and there are many interpretations of it which cannot be discussed here.15 The crucial point is that Socrates, by using a method already suspected of unnecessary complication in antiquity, uses the geometric example as a kind of mimetically camouflaged suit. The lack of precision in Socrates’s presentation is hardly due to the unsettled character of mathematical terminology in Plato's time. The problem and its “indeterminate” solution are not presented for their own sake. Rather, they are meant to represent a pattern for the discussion of the problem of teaching human excellence.16
We should pay more attention to core issue of the dialogue if we want to understand why Plato chooses this geometrical example at this point of the discussion in Meno. It deals with an example of implicit comparison, on which I should cast light. At the beginning of the dialogue, Meno, with his sophistic concept of the teaching process, asked whether excellence was teachable (didakton, 70a).17 Socrates claimed that there is no teaching (didache), only recollection (anamnēsis, 82a), and that recollection consists in remembering or obtaining (analambanein, 85d) knowledge of things “in themselves” (ex hautou, 85d), which already exists in the depths of our souls.
The learning process does not require any “teaching,” in the sense of “transmission of knowledge”—Socrates has demonstrated this with the examination of the slave. There is nothing that comes from the outside and goes into the soul of the learner. This is the reason why, in order to explain whether excellence is teachable, Socrates presents an
image which, in its obscurity, is an implicit refutation—albeit not verbally asserted, but mimetically suggested —of the sophistic idea of teaching, according to which the truth comes to the soul from the outside.
The mimetic suggestion just is the problem of a geometric figure which requires being inscribed in a circumference. In that image, we can observe an implicit comparison that establishes an analogy between teaching (didaskein) and inscribing (enteinein). Such an analogy suggests that excellence is teachable—namely, that it can be inscribed in a soul, in the way that figure can be inscribed in a circumference—which is the view of teaching Plato seeks to reject.18
My point is that the dialogues generally show that Plato can be very clear, when he wants to. Consequently, if the geometrical problem exposed in the Meno has always appeared unclear to scholars, this suggests that Plato wants to be obscure in this instance, and that the obscurity of the example has a specific meaning. Namely, the sophisticated geometrical example points out how unclear the idea of a teaching process, seen as an inscription of a content (that of the excellence) in a container (namely the soul) is. This idea supposes total passivity on the part of the container, which corresponds to the pupil. It suggests a pupil who—rather than searching and recalling, investigating within himself—ought to assume precisely that lazy behaviour which is so heavily stigmatized in the dialogue (86b).
In Meno, the mimetic features of an obscure geometrical example are discussed in order to investigate whether excellence is teachable. Socrates employs the unclear example of the inscription of a triangle in a circumference to suggest that the learning process is not comparable— according to Plato—to writing an inscription inside of a soul. As the interrogation of the slave demonstrates, as far as learning is concerned, there is no inscription that a teacher can embed in a pupil’s soul. It is the pupil who, correctly questioned, reaches knowledge by himself (85b-e). “Learning” is thus properly understood to be anamnēsis, achieved via philosophical inquiry.19
It is fascinating that the representation of that implicit comparison, in which the circumference represents the soul and the triangle represents excellence, has the aim of showing the difficulties that such a concept of teaching can meet. Meno asks his question about the teachability of virtue starting from the cultural background to which he belongs;20 he sees teaching as a material process, as a trade, as a
transmission of knowledge made upon payment.21 Socrates responds in figurative terms, with an unclear geometrical analogy representing the sophistic concept and method of teaching.22 This response reveals—not to Meno, but to the reader of the dialogue—all the improbability, all the irrationality, all the falsity, implied by such a didactic process.23
Some concluding remarks
To sum up, I have tried to underline that: 1) At times, Plato’s dialogues contain analogies which track the mimetic unity of form and content; 2) the solutions to such problems are found in both the dialectical argumentation, and through mimetic representation; 3) in Meno, which is focused on the teachability of excellence, and a refutation of the sophistic conception of teaching, readers can also find a mimetically camouflaged Socratic lesson of excellence.
In conclusion, it seems to me very interesting to note that a representation of the teaching process as forced inscription of an idea in the soul appears in a passage of the first book of Republic, where the sophist Thrasymachus asks Socrates, who is not persuaded:
Maybe I have to put the discourse in your soul with force? ἢ εἰς τὴν ψυχὴν φέρων ἐνθῶ τὸν λόγον. (Rep. 345b)
In this case the verb used to express the inscription in the soul is ἐντίθημι—which means to place, to input, to insert—and it can be considered as a synonymous of ἐντείνω—which means to insert, to inscribe, to include—a technical term used to indicate the ἔνθασις, or the inscribing of a figure in a circumference.
1 Lidia Palumbo (lpalumbo@unina.it) is a professor specializing in the history of ancient philosophy at the University of Naples, “Federico II,” since 2001. She has also been a visiting professor at the University of the Chile, and the University of Brazil. Dr. Palumbo has published more than 30 works on Plato and the Platonic tradition, and is currently working on theatrical and protreptic dimension of Platonic texts.
2 Concerning the problems posed if one had to observe the priority of essence to quality, see: Thomas M. Tuozzo, “Knowing Meno Blindfolded: The Dialectic of Essence and Quality in Meno,” Gorgias-Menon: Selected Papers from the Seventh Symposium Platonicum, ed. Michael Erler and Luc Brisson (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2007), 244.
3 Meno—according to Xenophon (Anabasis II 6, 21-29)—was unscrupulous and felt in ruin though still young. By granting the reader more knowledge about what life has in store for the interlocutors, Plato imparts to their words a significance of which they themselves are unaware, thereby putting the reader in a position to judge, as David M. Halperin notes in “Plato and the Erotics of Narrativity,” in Methods of Interpreting Plato and his Dialogues, ed. James C. Klagge and Nicholas D. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 100.
4 See Plat. Meno 79e-80b. In this passage, Meno likens Socrates to a torpedo fish, both with respect both to appearance and his numbing effect on those who interact with him. Socrates accepts the analogy, with the proviso that the numbing shock of his questioning be understood as applying to himself as well.
5 See Tuozzo, “Knowing Meno Blindfolded,” 244.
6 S. Delcomminette, “Exemple, analogie et paradigme. Le paradigmatisme dialectique de Platon,”Philosophie antique, 13 (2013), 163.
7 See Plat. Meno 80e, 81d.“A man can make enquiry neither into what he knows, for he knows it already; nor into what he does not know, for he would not know when he found it.”
8 As Tuozzo, “Knowing Meno Blindfolded,” 244 underlines.
9 Translation by Robin Waterfield, Meno and Other Dialogues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
10 As Irwin notes that “the examination of the slave is a scale-model of a Socratic elenchos, with a commentary to explain and justify the procedure.” Terence Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory; The Early and Middle Dialogues, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 139.
11 “However, Socrates, above all I’d like to consider and hear what you have to say on the issue I raised right at the beginning. That is, as we attempt to find out what excellence is, are we taking it to be something teachable or a natural endowment? And if not, how do people come to have excellence?” (86c-d).
12 Concerning Meno’s unsuitability, and the importance of the intellectual and moral level of the characters for the determination of the theoretic level of discussion in the dialogues, see: Franco Ferrari, Platone, Menone (Milano: Bur, 2016), 16-19.
13 See Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1998), 206: “Geometricians do often adopt the following kind of procedure. If, for example, one of them has to answer the question whether a certain amount of space (whatever its-rectilinear- boundaries) is capable of being fitted as a triangle into a given circular area (so that the three
vertices will touch the circumference of that circular area), he may say: while I do not know whether this particular amount of space has that capability I believe I have something of a supposition (hosper . . . tina hypothesin) at hand which might be useful for the purpose. It is this: if that amount of space (which can always be transformed into a triangular or rectangular area) were to be such that he who "stretches it along" (parateinanta) its (autou) given line "runs short" (elleipein) of a space like the very one which had been "stretched along" (the given line), then, it seems to me, one thing would be the result, and another again, if it were impossible for him to go through this experience. And so I am disposed to tell you what will happen with regard to the inscription of your amount of space (autou) into the circle, whether it is impossible or not impossible, by way of "hypothesizing" (hypothemenos).”
14 The straight line of the circumference is probably the diameter, and if it is given, the circumference is given too. According to Cattanei, ”The παρατείνειν is clearly profiled as a practice for which other areas are "applied" to a certain area, in order to build certain figures […] The passage seems rather to intertwine the generic reference to the geometric process "by hypothesis" with a reference to "initial" or elementary procedures destined to fall into obsolescence, which Plato in Republic considers explicitly contradictory with a theoretical and scientific geometry.” Elisabetta Cattanei, Due geometrie per il Menone, in Gorgias-Menon. Selected Papers from the Seventh Symposium Platonicum ed Michael Erler and Luc Brisson (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2007), 251. According to Bénatouil and El Murr, far from making it a model of rigor and certainty, Plato considered geometry a paradigm of constraints characterizing human knowledge, due to its distance from eternal objects and from the strategies it uses to understand them: hypothesis, figures, constructive operations. Thomas Bénatouil and Dimitri El Murr ‘L’Academie et les géomètres,’ Philosophie antique 10 (2010), 41-80.
15 See: Dominic Scott, Plato’s Meno, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 132-157. Cf. Ferrari, Platone, Menone, 234, n. 257; Mauro Bonazzi, Platone, Menone (Torino: Einaudi, 2010), 143-144.
16 Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno, 208.
17 Regarding the sophistic concept of the teaching process considered as data transmission, see: Ferrari, Platone, Menone, 19, 29, 66, 73, 93, 205.
18 The emphasis of the geometrical argumentation is posed on the similarity which must exist between two areas to make the inscription be possible; and, in the same way, the emphasis of the pedagogic argumentation is posed on the similarity which must exist between excellence and knowledge
to make the teaching happen (87b). Furthermore, the transformation of the surface, from a primitive form x to a triangular form, represents the transformation which some content would have to undergo in order to count as teachable content.
19 Of course, as has been long noted, if it is true that Socrates, by questioning the slave, did not transmit knowledge—i.e. if it is true that the slave would not learn anything from the question unless he had already been in contact with the truth—then it is also true that, as Nehamas says: “the text gives little warrant to identifying the slave's understanding with his sense of inner conviction." But what’s important for Plato is that episteme cannot and should not be achieved through the transmission of information (240). That is because the ability to explain what is learned is an integral part of episteme. A scholar (243) distinguishes knowledge from understanding.” A. Nehamas, “Meno’s Paradox and Socrates as a teacher,” Plato’s Meno in focus, ed. Jane M. Day, (London and New York: Routledge 1994), 235. Contra Richard Stanley Bluck, Plato’s Meno, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961) 12.
20 Significantly, Chappell replies to the question Can excellence be taught? with Men. 86c-90a, Prot. 318a-325c, 329b-333b, 349d- 351b. T. Chappell, The Plato Reader, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. Press, 1996), 61-88.
21 Concerning the sophistic concept of the teaching process as a trade, Cf: Protagoras 313c.-314b; Lidia Palumbo, “Socrate, Ippocrate e il vestibolo dell’anima,” Il Protagora di Platone: struttura e problematiche, ed. Giovanni Casertano (Napoli: Loffredo, 2004), 87-103.
22 See Giovanni Casertano, “La struttura del dialogo (o di quando la filosofia si fa teatro),” Il Protagora di Platone. Struttura e problematiche, ed. Giovanni Casertano (Napoli: Loffredo, 2004), 729-766.
23 In the dialogue Meno is presented as a Gorgias’s pupil and admirer (70b). He seems to be educated by his teacher in an art of asking and responding that consists of the enunciation of a sequence of possibilities (i.e. excellence can be taught, can be learned, can be learnt after training). Cf. 70a. That there is a difference between the excellence for a young male or a young female, as well for an old slave or a free one, see 71e- 72a. Both Meno’s questions and answers appear to be immediate and without substance, whereas Socrates focuses on the complexity of the art of asking, as well as on that of responding.
