The Meno – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads Plato through the Lens of the History of Psychology

Psychoanalysis of Philosophy text, Contemporary interpretation of Plato, Socrates, Meno

The Meno is a reasonably short Platonic dialogue that was my initial exposure to Socrates in my first year of college.  I have used this dialogue to introduce various groups to Plato, including a book club I belonged to many years ago.  The Meno includes a classic demonstration of the Socratic method with Socrates helping Meno's slave boy to “recollect” the solution to a geometry problem.  The frustration of the Socratic method is vividly described by Meno himself who calls Socrates a stingray for paralyzing him with his unrelenting questioning – leaving him in a state of not knowing what he once thought he knew.

But it is not just Meno that can feel paralyzed, but the reader can too – at least this one did as a freshman and for a long time after that.  By the end of the dialogue, I had lost track of the argument – it just felt argumentative.  Having Anytus join the dialogue at the end seems appropriate, as Anytus was apparently the Athenian who recommended that Socrates be put to death – and while I was not frustrated enough to actually kill someone, it felt like I was.

The dialogue is ostensibly based on the question that Meno asks, “Is Virtue (and some translate this as excellence) teachable.”  And Socrates immediately begins the confusion by asking Meno how we can know if something can be taught before we know what it is, so he asks Meno to define Virtue – and we are off to the races when Meno begins to define a variety of virtues – the virtue of a woman (including to be submissive to her husband), a child, an elderly person, a free man and a slave and Socrates clarifies that he wants to know about virtue itself – as a unitary concept.

So, I assigned this dialogue to my History of Psychology course because it demonstrates that Philosophers in general, and Plato in particular, are attending to issues that are quite psychological in nature.  Among other things, Socrates talks about sensation and perception when he offers an analogy to Meno about how to define Virtue as a unitary concept in the way that you define the edges of a perceived object.  When pushed on this by Meno, he ties the boundaries of an object to color.  This feels, to me, like a proto- Gestalt Psychological approach to sensation and perception.  Defining the limits of something by where the color changes is, indeed, one of the principles that the Gestaltists used to determine how we distinguish different objects from each other.

More peripherally, there is a section of the dialogue that involves Socrates bulldozing Meno about people really only wanting the good.  In fact, of course, people sometimes want things that aren’t good.  They want power simply to exercise it.  They often desire things that they know are bad despite knowing they are bad.  And, as a clinical psychologist, I am aware of masochism as a phenomenon.  I think that Plato may have been helping us see something about Meno – that he wasn’t really very – what we would call today – psychologically minded or sophisticated.

Meno’s opening question is, centrally, a psychological one.  And I think it ends up being the central question of the dialogue – “How do we teach another person something.”  In this case, how do we teach Meno (and Anytus) what virtue is, and how do we teach Meno's slave boy geometry?

The drama of the dialogue, I think, hinges around Meno’s essential inability to learn.  We are frustrated by Socrates because his interlocutor is not playing along with him, so he can’t teach him.  And we end up feeling, along with Anytus, that he is unnecessarily goading him rather than genuinely engaging with him.  But I think that Socrates tries to teach Meno, but he doesn’t have a willing, awake and curious partner, so the dialogue goes off the rails.  Plato, then, is trying, in presenting a dialogue that doesn’t go anywhere, to teach the reader something important.

The slave boy, unlike his master, Meno, takes the suggestions that Socrates offers and answers him genuinely and directly – including telling him when he is confused.  Socrates helps him figure out the square root of four – not hard – we all know that two times two is four.  But then he teaches the slave boy to construct a line that is the length of the square root of eight.  This is difficult.  The number – and I think this is important – is irrational.  We could figure it until the end of time and not get to the last digit, just like pi.  But it can be constructed and the slave boy does it.  In the analogy virtue – like the square root of eight – is not rational and cannot be written down as a number – though it can be demonstrated – it can be shown.

Now Socrates also pulls a fast one here.  He claims that the slave boy figures out the solution on his own – or more precisely, that he “recollects” it from a previous life.  But that’s not quite what happens.  Socrates constructs the line – he actually draws it - or calls attention to it – and the slave boy acknowledges that it would make sense to pursue that as a hypothetical after two previous hypotheses have been proven wrong.  Then he and the slave boy prove that the proposed line is, in fact, the square root of eight. 

So the slave boy doesn’t really recollect anything.  He takes some cues, follows them, and then determines their veracity.  He engages in a dialogue and then uses reason to ascertain that this guess is accurate.  A nice piece of learning and teaching.  That Meno takes this as a proof of the theory of reincarnation is, I think, a clue to us, the readers, that Meno is not as engaged in this dialogue as the slave boy is.

If Meno’s slave boy is smarter than Meno – and the slave boy has no education while Meno has the best education of the day – is the message here that birth does not necessarily bestow intelligence?  In this case, it is a particular kind of intelligence – it is the intelligence of having curiosity – and the intelligence of having the ability to ascertain whether something that has been proposed is, indeed, the case.  This may be a modern reading, but I think Socrates is suggesting exactly the opposite of the recollection theory – he is proposing that we have not inherited something divine from a previous life – but that we are variably equipped, regardless of station – to learn.  And learning means acquiring new knowledge – not remembering anything.  Another and perhaps more sensible conclusion is that the teaching of the day has not helped Meno.  He would have been better off not to have had the stultifying teaching he had.  He should have been taught by Socrates when he was younger, before memorizing what others think stultified him.

So if we agree that Meno is not as smart as his slave boy – meaning that he is not as curious and not as willing a partner - can we agree that he is not as virtuous?  The end of the dialogue ends up being a kind of proof by counter example where many virtuous fathers don’t teach their children virtue and no one is offering to teach virtue, so it must not be teachable.  I think that virtue – like psychotherapy – may be best taught to a receptive audience. 

I snuck the psychotherapy piece in there.  The best predictor of therapeutic outcome has to do with variables related to the patient not the therapist.  As long as a therapist is competently providing a treatment that makes sense – the kind of therapy that is provided or the kind of therapist doesn’t have much impact.  What has an impact is that the client is prepared to make changes and has the ability to do so.  Plato may be trying to make this case, but I think it is actually mine.  I think it more likely that Plato is saying that the other teachers have dulled Meno’s capacity to think.

Meno demonstrates, over and over in this dialogue, that he does not have what it takes to learn from Socrates.  Unfortunately, when we simply follow along, reading the way that we would read a typical philosophical tract, we will be unteachable, too (It is embarrassing how long and how many readings it took me to figure this out about this dialogue – I must be just barely teachable…).  Plato is encouraging us to become active readers – to question what is being said in the dialogue – to read this as theater, not simply as a description of “things as they are”.  We need to be awake and aware to learn – it is not a passive process.

So, is virtue or excellence teachable?  This doesn’t prove things one way or the other.  What we know is that if someone is not teachable they won’t learn – whether that is virtue or something else.  At one point, Meno and Socrates agree that virtue is knowledge – but I’m not so sure that I agree with them about this.  I think that what they are asking is whether someone is able to muster what is needed for a particular situation at a particular moment – and I think that is a very interesting question – one that I don’t have a ready answer for.

Might psychotherapy help with that?  I think that we hope that a treatment like psychoanalysis would do that.  I think there is some evidence that people who have undergone psychoanalysis engage in their lives more deeply.  The data I have is a bit of a stretch, but people who have had a psychoanalysis have fewer absentee days than people treated using other types of treatment and those who have not been treated.

Closer to home, one of the advantages of my own psychoanalysis was that I was able to speak in a variety of settings with less anxiety.  It’s not that I was an overtly anxious thinker before – in a fact I used to act quite a bit on stage.  But when I was talking without a script, I would frequently become self-conscious in ways that would interfere with my being able to think clearly – to handle a given situation in the best way possible.

Don’t get me wrong – I still screw up, a lot!  So I’m not sure that I would qualify as one of Socrates’ or Meno’s virtuous guys.  Though I also think that, if Meno had been more cooperative, he might have discovered that Socrates disagreed with him about the virtue of the slave and the housewife, etc., on a very fundamental level.  I think that what Socrates may have been driving at – and again I’m not sure of it because it is such a modern reading – is that we are all first and foremost human and that our virtue is defined in relation to our being human – rather than in relation to our station or role in life.  We either are or are not virtuous human beings.  On the other hand, I think he could be saying that if we are open and have a good teacher, we can learn new things. 

I think that Plato crafted this dialogue to show the astute reader that Meno – and perhaps more importantly Anytus – are NOT virtuous people.  The two of them didn’t get or understand Socrates at all.  This dialogue, then, may have been a very critical description of Anytus – something that it was not safe to do unless it was highly coded (for obvious reasons - if Anytus could have Socrates killed, he could do the same with Plato).  So Plato is throwing some shade here – and the astute reader, I think, can decode it and recognize that the fault – dear Anytus – lies not in our teachers, but in our failure to appreciate them.  Unless, of course, we need to have teachers who keep us awake…

Perhaps I like the first message because it lets me off the hook.  If it’s the second, I am going to have to up my game – my students do occasionally drift off…

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