What We Can Learn About Virtues From Plato's Meno
while failing to define virtue, we do learn about justice's and wisdom's priority
Many who have read the dialogue Meno in an Introduction to Philosophy class carry away from it a commonplace, partly-right, sum-up of it. The dialogue is supposed to be fundamentally about attempts to define virtue. The interlocutors fail in this project, though not without making a number of efforts and attempts. This interpretation is one of those matters that seemingly “everybody knows” about that text, a bullet-point, a blurb equally fit for inclusion in Wikipedia as an examination question, or on a Trivial Pursuit card.
To be sure, no useful definition of virtue does ever get worked out in the back-and-forth between Socrates and Meno. In its failures, the dialogue bears affinities with other aporetic dialogues where specific virtues are supposed to be — but turn out not to be — defined through dialectic: the Euthyphro, where it turns out nobody really knows what piety is; the Laches, where it’s courage that remains an enigma; the Lysias, with friendship; the Charmides with temperance.
An attentive reader might notice, however, throughout a number of these dialogues, two other virtues — justice and wisdom — also get brought up, but never entirely worked out.
Justice and Wisdom as Plato’s Architectonic Virtues.
Interestingly, those same proposed virtues keep coming up over and over again, and not just as idle, off-the-cuff examples, jumbled together however you like. Justice and wisdom seem to maintain a more or less constant constellation in relation to each other. Interlocutors keep on referencing them, floundering about, getting into similar dialectical dead ends, falling through the same trap-doors of argument, concerning these same virtues.
Of course, if one has read ahead in the Platonic corpus — and this makes it a bit difficult when one is coming back from the “greater” dialogues of Plato, where so much is not only getting examined, asked about, argued for and against, but actually (and fairly definitively) addressed, resolved, defined. Back to where? To these seemingly “minor” aporetic earlier dialogues where nothing much of anything gets settled, except for the fact that the interlocutors, and even the Socrates narrated there, don’t seem to understand moral matters as well as they assumed they had.
If one had to pick two virtues that assume the greatest roles in Plato’s moral theory — in some sense underlying the other virtues — and if one was going to draw these out of the Republic, the Phaedo, the Gorgias, perhaps even the Symposium and Phaedrus, what would those two virtues be? Those we have mentioned just earlier Justice — since after all, in the Republic, it is not just a matter of a part of the soul, but of the soul as an integrated entirety — and even more, Wisdom.
It just so happens that these two virtues take on the lion’s share of importance in the arguments and enquiries set down within the Meno. To be sure, neither justice nor wisdom are provided adequate philosophical definitions there, any more than is virtue successfully defined.
But these two key, desirable, praiseworthy traits get brought into the discussion in a particularly important and recurring way. In each case, it is Socrates who brings them in, by way of comment, question, suggestion. A process of hinting at something, of suggesting outlines is happening within the conversation. Meno fails to grasp it. And I think many readers do as well, so concerned as they are (or are taught to be) with the issue of definition.
What is Justice’s Function in the Meno?
Early on in the dialogue — before Meno good-naturedly complains about Socrates’ reputed resemblance to the stingray, which then leads into the geometric construction and the doctrine of recollection — Meno makes several decent attempts to provide Socrates with the definition of virtue that he keeps asking Meno for. Each of these proposed definitions, as Socrates handles them, ends up leading into the same line of reasoning. Let’s look at them each in turn.
First Meno scatters virtue all over. There’s a different virtue for each kind of person, every social or relational role which a person might occupy. Is there anything that can bring these back together, to provide a kind of unity across the many instances? There is, as it so happens. What is it? In each case, the person will fulfill or perform their role temperately and justly. Meno could have actually said at this point: “There you go, Socrates! Virtue is a matter of doing things in accordance with temperance and justice.”
But he doesn’t. Instead, he rises to a challenge on Socrates’ part, to take up another definition of virtue coming from one of the Sophists, Gorgias. And, Meno does take up that challenge, proposing “capacity to govern” or “rule” as a second definition of virtue. This is actually a plausible definition, at least if one has in mind the virtue of the typical Greek gentleman. But, again Socrates points out: ruling can be done well or poorly. So, what causes it to be done well? Now, it’s no longer two virtues, but just one which is again invoked — justice.
And, here, an important kind of shift in the conversation occurs. Meno is amenable to agreeing with Socrates: Sure, justice. . . after all, justice is a virtue. And now, Socrates has him — whether he realizes it or not — already loosely wrapped in his toils, light, not yet constrictive. But there won’t be any slackening in the argument until Socrates leads it and Meno inevitably to its conclusion.
Justice is a virtue. So . . . what is virtue itself, what all of the many virtues have in common? He won’t allow Meno to use a single part or mode of virtue — justice — in the act of defining what virtue as a whole should be understood to be.
And, now we come to the third attempt, one that introduces some new issues and implications. Meno proposes that virtue is desiring good things and being able to get those things. Eventually he pares it down to just the power of acquiring good things. What’s wrong with this?
That actually leads off in the direction of two different virtues, one explicitly named, the other just implied. It is after all possible to go wrong in desiring things, to think that bad things are good things and to desire them as such, things that will actually make one unhappy when one successfully attains them. It’s wisdom that’s needed in order to understand these sorts of things rightly.
Put that worry aside for the moment — as Socrates and Meno in fact do — what about the acquisition of good things? Can that really, on its own, unqualified by any conditions, constitute virtue? What about a thief, or a tyrant, who takes good things, but wrongly? Meno is willing to grant that justice, temperance, piety, or some other part of virtue has to be present in the person engaged in acquisition — or perhaps even holding himself back from acquiring! — in order for it to constitute virtue. Which of these does he then settle upon? Justice. And, this lands them back in the position of using that portion of virtue in the process of defining the whole of it.
The Platonic Priority of Wisdom over Other Virtues
So far, we have seen wisdom come up several times, but the virtue that Socrates and Meno kept circling about in the early part of the dialogue was justice. Later on, they come back to the question of defining virtue, and Socrates — even though he thinks it methodologically a bad idea — works out what would have to be the case if we assume virtue to be some kind of knowledge (Socrates would rather keep hammering at the more basic question “What is Virtue?”, and only after arriving at some reasonable answer, start tackling other questions).
Virtue is a good — so that means it is something good, something we praise, desire, enjoy. But, it is also good in a deeper, more productive or contagious sense. Virtue makes the person who has it good. Virtue is also something advantageous or useful for the person who possesses it — and presumably also to others who are positively affected by its possessor’s actions. What other things are good, or advantageous to us?
Here Plato runs his interlocutors through a process of discovery that actually parallels a discussion appearing two millennia later in Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals — the question being about which goods are absolutely good, and which are only qualifiedly so. The categories of goods that Socrates and Meno discuss are readily recognizable as external goods — wealth, for instance — goods of the body — health, strength, good looks — and goods of the mind or the soul. The virtues fit into this last class, though they don’t exhaust it — there’s also goods like quickness of thinking, memory, and so on.
Now, any of these goods — and they are in fact good things — can turn bad, can go wrong, can become harmful. It just depends on the circumstances. Wealth can ruin a person. Good looks can land one into all sorts of trouble. Even the virtues can become problematic. Temperance, courage — even these can degenerate into something different, a facsimile of virtue, a potential for harm to self and others, when something is missing. And, what is that something in that passage? It isn’t justice. Now, it is wisdom.
There is a kind of chain of goods and conditions for their right, beneficial use being sketched out here in the Meno. The external goods and the goods of the body require something else to be present in order for their use to be good — and this can be any one of a number of different virtues, depending on the circumstances. Temperance helps us not overindulge in certain goods. Courage helps us work to attain them. Justice assists us as well in not overstepping certain bounds. But these virtues themselves, goods of the soul, still require in turn something else to guide them — and that is wisdom.
Definition, Knowledge, and the Dialogue
So if we have been paying close attention to what has been taking place in his dialogue with Socrates, can we say whether Meno has learned anything valuable about moral matters? He has figured out that he doesn’t know what he thought he did, what he, by his own admission, talked about in front of large crowds — what virtue is. He can’t provide a definition of virtue that can withstand the scrutiny dialectic brings to any formula he can think of. He also has to admit that he doesn’t actually know anyone who can teach another person to be virtuous. So, the dialogue seems to end in failure, doesn’t it?
But what about these two virtues — justice and wisdom — these two parts of virtue that turn out to be more integral to virtue as a whole and in its other parts? Shouldn’t Meno have walked away at least thinking that he now does know something useful — or rather three things? What would these be?
First, that justice and also wisdom are needed in order to make proper use of goods, to rightly acquire goods, to rule well, to fulfill one’s roles
Second, that the various virtues are what help us make good use, beneficial use, of good things
And third, that in order for one to use these other virtues well in that capacity, another master-virtue is required, namely wisdom
Socrates himself suggests at one point near the end of the dialogue that his own accounts of these matters might not even be knowledge, but something between genuine knowledge and the shifting, shadowy realm of true opinion.
But I don’t think that applies to what we might call a genuine Platonic doctrine that is clearly there within the dialogue, even if Meno himself or the inattentive reader misses this: the priority of wisdom. Of that, at least, Socrates does seem to be convinced. And in favor of that, Socrates also does provide arguments, reasoned accounts. It is simply up to the reader to gather them together, and to attend closely to them, as I’ve done here.
An earlier version of this article was published in my Medium blog Practical Rationality