The Nexus Archive
Platonism · Dialogue
Meno
by Plato · The Architect of Ideals · Classical Greece, c. 428-348 BC
- Intermediate
- ~55 min read
- 7 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the The Swarm of Virtues guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
The Question Before the Question
Meno wants a useful answer: can virtue be taught, practiced or acquired in some other way? Socrates asks a prior question—what is virtue? The interruption exposes a familiar difficulty in education: deciding how to impart something while remaining unsure what it is.
Meno’s confidence has been cultivated in the company of polished speakers. Socrates brings it into contact with ordinary examples, a boy enslaved in Meno’s household and the civic authority of Anytus. The question concerns who may claim to know, who is able to learn and what counts as evidence that teaching has occurred.
The dialogue experiments with more than one way of finding an answer. Definitions, religious testimony, geometrical reasoning and examples from public life do different kinds of work. Its shifts of method give uncertainty an active role: difficulty can become a reason to investigate rather than merely a reason to stop.
The opening pages
The Swarm of Virtues
PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Meno, Socrates, A Slave of Meno (Boy), Anytus.
MENO: Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor by practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?
SOCRATES: O Meno, there was a time when the Thessalians were famous among the other Hellenes only for their riches and their riding; but now, if I am not mistaken, they are equally famous for their wisdom, especially at Larisa, which is the native city of your friend Aristippus. And this is Gorgias' doing; for when he came there, the flower of the Aleuadae, among them your admirer Aristippus, and the other chiefs of the Thessalians, fell in love with his wisdom. And he has taught you the habit of answering questions in a grand and bold style, which becomes those who know, and is the style in which he himself answers all comers; and any Hellene who likes may ask him anything. How different is our lot! my dear Meno. Here at Athens there is a dearth of the commodity, and all wisdom seems to have emigrated from us to you. I am certain that if you were to ask any Athenian whether virtue was natural or acquired, he would laugh in your face, and say: 'Stranger, you have far too good an opinion of me, if you think that I can answer your question. For I literally do not know what virtue is, and much less whether it is acquired by teaching or not.' And I myself, Meno, living as I do in this region of poverty, am as poor as the rest of the world; and I confess with shame that I know literally nothing about virtue; and when I do not know the 'quid' of anything how can I know the 'quale'? How, if I knew nothing at all of Meno, could I tell if he was fair, or the opposite of fair; rich and noble, or the reverse of rich and noble? Do you think that I could?
MENO: No, indeed. But are you in earnest, Socrates, in saying that you do not know what virtue is? And am I to carry back this report of you to Thessaly?
SOCRATES: Not only that, my dear boy, but you may say further that I have never known of any one else who did, in my judgment.
Chapter guides · 7
The Swarm of Virtues
A Swarm Is Not an Essence
Meno can name many virtues, but Socrates wants the single character that makes every one of them virtue.
The opening question is postponed
Meno asks how virtue is acquired. Socrates first asks what virtue is, because he cannot say what qualities a thing has while not knowing what it is. His professed ignorance interrupts Meno’s expectation of an authoritative answer and puts Meno’s own confidence under examination.
A list does not explain the unity
Meno assigns different virtues to men, women, children, rulers, servants, and the elderly. Socrates compares the list to a swarm of bees: differences in role do not answer what makes every bee a bee. Courage, temperance, justice, and command are candidates only if Meno can show the shared form that makes them virtues.
A definition needs shared terms
Socrates’s examples of figure and color distinguish a common nature from one of its instances. When Meno challenges an explanation of figure through color, Socrates turns to terms Meno admits: the end or boundary of a solid. The method depends on agreement about the words used to explain the thing in question.
Color, Desire, and Power
Desire, Power and the Missing Definition
Meno's polished formula collapses when desire, power, and justice are examined separately.
The borrowed definition sounds better than it works
Meno admires the Gorgian formula for color because it is grand and familiar, while Socrates prefers the plainer account of figure. That contrast matters: Meno is skilled at recognizing rhetorical finish, but the dialogue keeps asking whether a formula survives examination.
Desire cannot divide the virtuous from the vicious
Meno defines virtue as desiring good things and having the power to obtain them. Socrates argues that people who pursue bad things generally mistake them for goods; no one knowingly desires misery as misery. The moral difference must therefore lie in how things are obtained, not in a supposedly special desire for the good.
The whole reappears inside its definition
If wealth and office must be acquired justly, then justice—a part of virtue—has been used to define virtue itself. Refusing an unjust acquisition can be virtuous too, so possession alone cannot distinguish virtue. Socrates returns to the demand for a definition that does not assume an unexplained part of the very thing being sought.
Meno's Paradox
Inquiry Survives the Paradox
Meno turns his perplexity into an argument that inquiry is impossible; Socrates answers by changing what learning means.
The Geometry Inquiry
The Boy Learns What He Does Not Know
A failed answer, carefully exposed, becomes the beginning of a more honest and durable inquiry.
Hypothesis and Anytus
A Hypothesis Meets the City
Socrates temporarily brackets virtue's definition and asks what would follow if virtue were a kind of knowledge.
Teachers and Statesmen
No Teachers, No Easy Conclusion
Sophists, statesmen, poets, and fathers all fail to supply the stable transmission that teachable knowledge should produce.
Knowledge and Right Opinion
True Opinion Can Guide Without Staying
Correct belief can lead action as well as knowledge, but only knowledge remains tied down by an account of why it is true.
Questions readers ask
- How long does it take to read Meno?
- About 55 min in total.
- How difficult is Meno?
- Intermediate. A short dialogue; about 55 minutes of reading.
- Which translation is this?
- The Benjamin Jowett translation from the Greek. The text follows Meno, Benjamin Jowett translation.
- Can I read Meno for free?
- Meno is part of Nexus Premium, so reading it needs an account and a Premium subscription. The opening above and two chapter guides on this page are free to read.
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 7 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. Two open in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About Plato
Born into an Athenian family during political upheaval, Plato became a student of Socrates and later founded the Academy. His dialogues transformed his teacher's public questioning into a vast investigation of justice, knowledge, education, politics, and reality.
“What is justice?”
Plato gives Western thought one of its central temptations: the belief that politics, education, beauty, and the soul can be judged by a reality higher than opinion.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. Meno is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.